I think the worry (although no one seems to have expressed it explicitly) is that there might be a religious nut who thinks he can bring on Armageddon and the Second Coming by launching a nuclear attack.
But that’s equally true of an atheist nut that has some other equally insane justification for doing so. Being a Christian doesn’t necessarily make you a nut, regardless of what the militant atheists say.
If the captain of a nuclear missile sub is wearing rouge I’d be a little worried myself.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I’m certainly not about to say that all Christians are insane, or that all atheists are sane. But there are a bunch of Christians out there who want to hasten the End Times, and most of them are probably quite sane (unlike the guy who tried to bring on the end times by setting fire to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem). All I’m saying is I think this is the concern behind this discussion, even if this concern hasn’t been made explicit.
Then you’re saying that agnostics can’t be as patriotic as the devout- or at least that they have less of a natural inclination to obey their oaths?
Not equally true. The Christian nut can be a “bring on the day of reckoning” nut, or just a regular nut - ie. “I’m going to press this big red button and send these giant candy canes to children all over the world!”.
The atheist can only be a regular nut.
[Moderating]
I would remind everyone that the question in hand is what the military policy is on the issue.
This thread is not about the degrees of nuttiness to be found in theists vs. atheists. Please start a thread in GD if you want to discuss that.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I was raised Catholic, not gung-ho but more of the bred, wed and dead crowd.
Back in the bad ol’ days of the Cold War under Ronny Ray-gun I was in the Army working with Pershing missiles. I was proud of my 30 foot erection!
When I joined they asked me if I would have any problem launching a missile. I figured that if it got to the point where I was responsible for turning the key that most of the world would be crispy critters already and I would soon be joining them. I said sure, I could do it. Hey, misery loves company.
It doesn’t take a religious fanatic or a psychopath to launch. Whenever we would have a missile drill we would all run to the pads and prep the missiles (running the generators, hooking up the cabling, getting the programming tapes in, etc.). We never knew if it was a drill or not until the officer ran out with the keys. If it was a set of baby teething keys (yup, that’s what we used) we knew it was a drill and that we’d be back to the barracks that night. If it was the brass keys, we knew that we were fucked. The rule was that the missiles could never be erected unless the launch order came in because it could be considered an act of war.
One time we had some NATO bigwigs visiting our base. We were a joint US-German facility where the Germans controlled the missiles and we controlled the warheads (military thinking at its best). Our platoon captain wanted to impress the generals so he initiated a missile drill. We grabbed our gear and ran out to do our jobs.
Then we saw the captain run on to the pad with the brass keys. :eek:
I almost crapped myself. The captain ran into the launch vehicle, put in the keys and turned them. All three of the missiles on our pad erected.
The US general who was visiting turned to the platoon XO (lieutenant) and said, “You! Get those fucking things down, now!” He then turned to the captain and said, “You! Get the fuck off this pad and go directly to your quarters!”
The captain was out of Germany within 24 hours and I heard from a friend in the IG office that he was out of the Army within a week with a dishonorable.
So no, you don’t have to be religious or crazy to launch. All you have to do is want to impress people.
The OP asked how these things were judged by the military, which necessarily requires some sort of agreement as to whether the military made or makes a theist/atheist comparative nuttiness value judgment.
That’s humorous, but in the strictest GQ sense, though, a nut’s a nut. If a nut is Christian, there may be something in his ideology that he’s able to fixate his delusions upon. If he’s atheist (or any religion), there’s likewise something he encounters in his life upon which he will fixate. If we say that 1% of the population is nutty, 60% is Christian, 25% is atheist, and 15% is other, then for a population of 10,000 we’ll have 60 religious nuts, 25 atheist nuts, and 15 other types of nuts. That’s a lot of nuts, but in all cases they’ll use their exposure to their own lives to fixate upon. Unless (and there may be such studies), can you come up with some stats that indicates a higher degree of nuttiness in Christian versus atheist populations? That would imply that Christianity causes nuttiness (and do be sure to distinguish between nuttiness and ignorance; they’re not one and the same).
Upon review, I’m going to argue that the above is relevant to the OP, and not just a nutty tangent into nuttiness. Consider that we’re a Christian country, and you’ll see that the chances are the people doing the background investigations are probably some type of Christian. The people doing their performance reviews are probably Christian. Despite the high exposure to atheism on the internet, don’t believe for a second that the US is an atheist country, there are Christians everywhere. It’s just a fact of life in the United States. So, the military is not likely to judge you on your religion alone. What they will do those is see with whom you associate during background checks. If you’re a white supremacist, or a Branch Davidian, or an ex-leader of the Michigan Militia, you’re likely to be flagged in a negative manner one way or the other. It doesn’t matter that Branch Davidians are Christian per se, what matters is their record and stated public goals, in the same manner as the neo-nazis and the militiamen. (I’m using all three as examples, I actually have no idea of their stated public goals and real records, but they’re diverse enough to make my point.)
It’s ugly to assume that a Christian is crazy just because he has faith. Not all Christians literally believe every word in the bible, nor are they all creationists. It’s akin to believing that because an atheist believes in no after life, then if everyone is going to die, why does it even matter if it’s everybody today versus in the future? Net outcome’s the same, right? Crazy is crazy.
While I don’t dispute that nuttiness and ignorance are different things, there is definitely a huge overlap, and something more as well. I think the most ‘unstable’ everyday religious types are those who are ignorant, and whose ignorance allows nutty beliefs to find purchase in their heads and entrench themselves. I don’t think that requires intrinsic nuttiness; what it seems to be to me is that in such cases ignorance directly leads to nuttiness.
You hear about this sort of thing in native populations all the time: Not having access to an advanced science, otherwise perfectly reasonable naked jungle people become convinced that an airplane is some kind of sky god. If Cargo-Cults aren’t evidence that ignorance leads to crazy, I don’t know what is.
I would think that a religious person’s ignorance-fostered ‘nutty’ beliefs are much more difficult to identify as ‘nutty’ when the person who has to do the identification is from the same religion, since cultural norms dictate that a lot of otherwise crazy stuff gets a pass.
I see where you’re coming from, but in making personnel decisions I would probably (personally) tend to be more wary of the very devout, than I would an atheist. Although, in fairness in terms of the larger sociological perspective, being an atheist is a somewhat non-conformist, anti-authoritarian position relative to the predominant theist-centric societal mores. In this context even if atheists aren’t prone to being believers in the supernatural, being strongly convinced of the correctness of your empirical world view might have it’s own negative implications in terms of the ability to follow orders without question.
I see where you’re coming from too. But what if it was a “devout” atheist, you know, one of that evangelical atheists? Now we’re back to having two different people that won’t mind their own business because either one is always trying to tell you how wrong or stupid you are. I’d say that we’re using “devout” wrongly, though, as being devoted isn’t necessarily the same as being an evangelical. Hell, I don’t know what most of the people I work with are, unless it comes up in casual conversation. I can bet that on simple averages, though, that a not insignificant portion are devoted Christians. Do you really you’d avoid the devout, or would you only assume they were devout due to trying to convert you during the interview? 
“Tend” would be the operative word, I’d hope. I mean, who would you rather have manning The Button—Mother Teresa, or Pol Pot?
Yeah, maybe the former is nutty for devoutly believing in the utterly supernatural—but if it’s the right kind of nutty, she’s less than harmless (or more harmful, depending on your point of view—someone who curls up into a ball crying and muttering the lord’s prayer when you give them a launch order might be just as bad, militarily, as someone who’s chomping at the bit to nuke everyone so they can get to Valhalla, just in a different way).
Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t launch those missiles just yet!
I am deeply interested to find out what you believed your mission was to be, in the event things went hot… care to share?
My guess would be strategic bombardment of Cuba.
Ok, I tried. Off to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
What is a thread on nuclear weapon policy without a few Dr. Strangelove quotes?
Muffley: I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexiy. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack?
DeSadeski: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to to trigger itself automatically.
General “Buck” Turgidson: Ahem… The Duty Officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact that he had issued the go code, and he said, uh, “Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them. Otherwise, we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. Uh, my boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now, uhuh. Uh, so let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural… fluids. God bless you all” and he hung up.
[beat]
General “Buck” Turgidson: Uh, we’re, still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
President Merkin Muffley: There’s nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
General “Buck” Turgidson: We-he-ell, uh, I’d like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
General “Buck” Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
Nothing about nuclear war policy really makes sense in any conventional way of thinking. As the titular character of Kubrick’s masterful satire notes: “Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.” This isn’t just humor on the part of screenwriter Terry Southern; Kubrick actually pulled a lot of the more absurd concepts from Herman Kahn’s treatise On Thermonuclear War, almost to the point of direct quotes. (The “Doomsday Device” was a game theory thought experiment introduced by Kahn, which he used to highlight the problem with a strictly nuclear deterrent.) The fear on both sides of suffering from a lack of weapons, or an attack that might wipe out retaliatory capability, led to the development of arsenals far too large for any real need, and the lack of proportionality in the use of such weapons, even in a tactical sense, would almost certainly lead to wider and eventually strategic use against non-military targets in “total war” fashion. As Robert McNamara puts it in The Fog of War: “They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”
Regarding Bricker’s question about launch simulations and testing the will of troops to follow launch orders, I’m morally certain that nothing like the events portrayed in WarGames ever occured, at least not deliberately. When engaging in combat or strategic warfare simulations great pains are taken to clearly identify that the equipment used is a simulator. It is assumed that, in the case of an actual attack, officers will do their duty as instructed, and this is a credible assumption. For this reason, there is a very clear and robust system of procedures and communications involved in the transmission of launch orders. If an incomplete or incoherently garbled set of instructions is received, it simply isn’t acted on. (So much for Crimson Tide.) This isn’t to say that some accident can’t occur–famously, in November 1979 a technician accidentially loaded a training tape into the display system which made it appear that a full-scale nuclear attack was occuring, and Soviet fears over the NATO exercise Able Archer 83 caused Soviet systems to be placed on high alert–but it is not done intentionally as a test.
Regarding the o.p.'s question I think GomiBoy has provided the definitive word on the subject: a combination of pschological screening; critical handling and activation operations requiring a multiple person crew; and weapon designs, safety interlocks, and modern Permissable Action Links that prevent unintended or unauthorized activation. Of course, it is also now well known that the original 8-digit combination PALs on the Minuteman system were originally all set to the same combination–00000000–by a general more afraid of launch officers not being able to activate the systems rather than a cabal of rogue officers or airmen performing an unauthorized launch. Ultimately, the safety of nuclear weapons depends on people doing their jobs right, and when enough things fail in order–as happened with the mislocated ‘special’ armed cruise missiles–then any safety system can be subverted. This usually happens (at least in my experience with other types of operations) when someone is trying to cut corners because of a lack of budget or trained crew, and I suspect it was the case here (and a serious concern with regard to Russian and newly emergent nuclear powers).
Stranger
My own background is similar to slypork’s, though I worked on Nike-Hercules missiles, not Pershings. And, in accordance with my oath I will state that it has always been the policy of the US Army to neither confirm nor deny the presence of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and that I have no way of knowing whether the warheads we operated upon were actually live.
That said, when I went through special weapons training and was confirmed in the personnel reliability program (as it was known then - O have no idea what it is called now) much more concern was placed upon my use of antihystemines for hay fever than my religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Perhaps it is different for the folks in the deep silos, but from my conversations with submariners I believe that they, like the Army, did not specifically weed out from the program based upon religiouis devotion.