Cold War Anxieties, Patriotism, and Religious Antinuclearism in the Texas Panhandle

Abstract

In June 2000, at the public meeting of the Workers’ Compensation Initiative in Amarillo, Texas, several employees of the Pantex nuclear plant voiced their concerns about their jobs, their health, and the environment. For decades, their work had been shrouded in secrecy. They had to lie about what they did for a living. By the time the veil was lifted on the actual role of the assembly and disassembly plant and employees began to fall ill, they also felt they had been lied to. Pantex epitomizes some of the most fundamental aspects of the Cold War: the manipulation of truth and fear, the patriotic pride of participating in national security, and the moral dilemma posed by weapons of mass destruction—especially in an area such as the Texas Panhandle, which is part of the Bible Belt. This paper addresses the role played by secrecy and the concealment of truth in relations between the local populations who live in the vicinity of, and work at, nuclear installations and the politics of the nuclear military complex during the Cold War. By analyzing the reactions and discourses of both anonymous and well-known protagonists, including Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, who became nationally famous for speaking out against Pantex in the 1980s, who expressed their views on this particular and largely overlooked cog in the nuclearist machine, the objective is to demonstrate how Pantex thrived while being tangled in a web of various lies and half-truths: those political leaders told to perpetuate the armament race, those employers such as the Atomic Energy Commission or the Department of Energy told workers on radioactive contamination, and those employees and residents told themselves to cope with the moral qualms of assembling the most dangerous weapons on earth.