How Do You Build a Moral Missile?

    How do you convince yourself that building something capable of wiping out an entire city in minutes is not just necessary, but moral? That is the question at the center of this project.

    The Minuteman III was not just a missile system. It became part of the way Americans saw themselves during the Cold War. From around 1965 to 1975, it came to represent more than firepower. It stood for control, readiness, and the idea that peace came through strength. But the roots of that system run deeper. Right after World War II, the U.S. decided to bring over a group of German scientists. This effort, later called Operation Paperclip, gave these men a second life in American labs and military programs.

Many of them had worked under the Nazi regime.

    They knew how to build rockets. They had experience we wanted. And so, in exchange for their knowledge, their pasts were largely set aside. I am tracking what they worked on once they got here, and how those contributions shaped programs like the Minuteman III. The ethical questions are hard to avoid. What did it mean to build our defense strategy on knowledge that came from a system we had just fought to defeat?

I     am also looking at how American leaders explained the Minuteman III to the public. The way Nixon and others talked about the missile mattered. They used words like peace, stability, and leadership. They did not describe it as a weapon first. They framed it as something that kept the world from falling apart. This kind of language helped people see the missile as a necessary part of national identity rather than a threat.

    But not everyone agreed. From 1970 through the mid-1980s, religious leaders in Protestant and Catholic communities spoke out. Some tried to support deterrence as a last resort. Others rejected it entirely. Their letters, conference papers, and sermons reveal a deeper conversation about what it meant to be moral in an age of nuclear weapons. These sources are not just responses to policy. They show how faith traditions tried to speak into one of the most dangerous parts of modern life.

    Another part of the story is how nuclear weapons became ordinary. Most people never saw a missile silo, but they heard about them in school, watched safety films, and read government pamphlets. The Minuteman III was worked into everyday life. I am looking at how these materials taught people to live with the constant possibility of nuclear war, and what that did to how Americans understood fear, safety, and responsibility.

    My last research question focuses on the way people used language to turn the Minuteman III into something more than a weapon. Presidents, church leaders, and writers began to talk about it as if it were a symbol of American leadership or even moral strength. It stopped being just a tool. It became part of a story about who we were and what we believed.

    I am using presidential records, church archives, civil defense materials, and educational sources to piece this together. I am not doing data analysis or charts. I am reading and listening, paying close attention to how people explained what they were building and why it made sense to them.

    This project matters to me because I have seen these systems up close. I served in the military and worked around the legacy of the very missiles I am studying. I trained young airmen who grew up in the world these weapons created. That experience taught me how abstract policies become real, lived things. It also showed me how easy it is to accept something when you are trained to see it as normal.

    At its core, this is a story about how a democracy made peace with the idea of mass destruction. The Minuteman III was never just hardware. It was a reflection of the values, fears, and ambitions that defined a generation. I am not trying to tell people what to think about that. I am trying to understand how we got there.