Citizens against the MX

In late 1979 President Jimmy Carter approved the deployment of the MX weapons system, dubbed "man's largest project," across millions of acres of Great Basin land in Nevada and Utah. Officials sought to enlist citizen support with offers of jobs and calls for patriotic sacrifice. A coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, Western Shoshones, and Mormons battled with words and protest for two years to keep the weapons system out of their homelands. Drawing on interviews and records of involved organizations, Matthew Glass recounts the story of the citizens' struggle against the national security bureaucracy. He applies the critical social theory of Jurgen Habermas to show how the coalition's discourse differed from that of other antinuclear groups, undercutting in the process the role nuclear weapons have often played within the civil religion of American nationalism, a fact that may have contributed to the movement's success.