Are you Ready for the Great Atomic Power?(The Louvin Brothers Imagine the End)

Over thirty years before Ronald Reagan thought he discerned the signs of the impending Armageddon, with the Soviet Union cast as the great Red Dragon, the Louvin Brothers taped into a global anxiety opened up by the destruction caused by the United States' use of atomic weapons. 

 The Louvin Brothers, a quasi-evangelical mid 20th century country music duo, released "The Great Atomic Power," a meditation on the relationship between the atomic bomb and the end times, in 1952. Despite being a fan of their music for years, and having previous noted their ability to combine cheery music with the macabre, I share this song as a recent discovery.

At the end of the first verse, Ira Louvin (ch)eerily sings, "Are we all in great confusion?/Do we know the time or hour/when a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land/Leaving horrible destruction, blotting out the works of Man?" The vision is not established on a hypothetical: there is no "if" regarding the possibility of nuclear annihilation. This conviction can easily be connected to the Louvin Brothers' evangelical commitment: a prophesy of the end to implore belief in the present.

The second verse offers this religious path around destruction, but only by re-troding embattled ground. Giving "heart and soul to Jesus" becomes the "one way to escape" the impending doom of atomic power. However, as the verse's final line explains, Christ will "surely stay beside you" while "your soul flies to safety and eternal peace and rest." It is easy to ignore the theological battles that have been waged over the question: How does the Resurrection, or the Second Coming, reflect particular visions of Christian identity? To articulate just one such position, in the mid-17th century, John Milton wrote in his extensive meditations the Bible:

"The idea that the spirit of man is separate from his body, so that it may exist somewhere in isolation, complete and intelligent, is nowhere to be found in scripture, and is plainly at odds with nature and reason." (1206, from Christian Doctrine in Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton)

This quote is only intended to point out that the particular dualist vision contained in the song is one of several theological positions on the relationship between the body and soul. I'd also note: the song's construction of a soul-less body that remains as the apocalypse proceeds is strangely similar to ready-to-hand descriptions of zombies: animated corpses without "souls" or "minds." 

In closing, I would argue that the song's assurance of being saved possesses less conviction than its assurance of destruction. For example, the closing lines of the song: "When the mushrooms of destruction fall in all its fury great/God will surely save his children from that awful, awful fate." If the Lord's ability to protect the believers were as certain as the arrival of "mushrooms of destruction," shouldn't their fate be described as something other than "awful." The use of the word "surely" to describe the redeeming acts of Christ in the second verse and God in the last verse rings with a hollow hopefulness better suited to describing the arrival of Godot who "won't come this evening but surely tomorrow."

In less than three minutes, the Louvin Brothers capture the mid-century anxiety about the impending doom of nuclear power by asking, "Are you ready?" While the question surely is intended to provoke the audience into considering the Savior's return, it just as easily captures a secular sentiment of uncertainty regarding an inescapable man-made End.