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US Air Force, in response to an exclusive report published by Truthout
in late July, has withdrawn materials used in a training session that
relied upon passages from the New and Old Testament and a quote from an
ex-Nazi SS officer to teach missile officers about the morals and ethics
of launching nuclear weapons.
The nuclear ethics and nuclear warfare training “has
been taken out of the curriculum and is being reviewed,” said David
Smith, chief of public affairs of Air Education and Training Command at
Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. “The commander reviewed it and decided
we needed to have a good hard look at it and make sure it reflected
views of modern society.”
Smith said the ethics training has been in place for
“20-plus years” and the decision to remove it was made on July 27 after
Truthout’s report was published. He added that it will now be “given
thorough scrutiny” and “folks will be appointed to look at what we have
and determine its utility and if they think it’s useful to continue
having an ethics course, they will develop a new course.”
The course was led by air force chaplains and took place
during a missile officer’s first week in training at Vandenberg Air
Force Base in California. Officers who train to be missileers were
required to attend the ethics course, which included a PowerPoint
presentation on St Augustine’s ‘Christian Just War Theory’ as well as
numerous examples of characters from the New and Old Testament, the
training materials asserted, engaged in war-fighting in a “righteous
way”.
St Augustine’s ‘Qualifications for Just War’, according
to the way the air force characterised it in slides used in the ethics
training, are: “to avenge or to avert evil; to protect the innocent and
restore moral social order (just cause)” and “to restore moral order;
not expand power, not for pride or revenge (just intent)”.
One of the PowerPoint slides also contained a passage
from the Book of Revelations that claims Jesus Christ, as the “mighty
warrior”, believed some wars to be just.
At the conclusion of the ethics training session,
missile officers were asked to sign a legal document stating they will
not hesitate to launch the nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBM) “if lawfully ordered to do so by the president of the
United States or his lawful successor”.
The documents’ blatant use of religious imagery and its
numerous references to the New and Old Testament would appear to
constitute a violation of the first amendment establishing a wall of
separation between church and state.
The 43-page PowerPoint was included with more than 500
pages of other documents pertaining to a missile officer’s first week in
training that was released by the air force under the Freedom of
Information Act and provided to Truthout by the Military Religious
Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights organisation.
Another PowerPoint slide quoted Wernher von Braun, a
former member of the Nazi Party and SS officer who is regarded as the
father of the US space programme. Von Braun was not cited in the
PowerPoint as a scientific expert, rather, he was specifically being
referenced as a moral authority, which is remarkable considering that
the Nazi scientist used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured
French anti-Nazi partisans, civilians and others to help build the V-2,
a weapon responsible for the death of thousands of British civilians.
MRFF president, Mikey Weinstein said more than 30
missile officers contacted his organisation over the past week to
complain about the Christian imagery and biblical passages in the ethics
training. He said the decision by the air force to pull the ethics
course material is a “great victory for the Constitution”. [Full
disclosure: Weinstein is a member of Truthout’s board of advisers.]
“We are not going to commend the air force for doing
something they should have done a quarter century ago,” Weinstein said.
“It’s an outrage and a deliberate attempt to torture and distort our
Constitution when the US Air Force mandatorily teaches its nuclear
missile launch officers that fundamentalist Christian theology is
inextricably intertwined with the ‘correct’ decision to launch nukes.”