If George Kennan's theology of containment informed the beginning of the Cold War, then it seems fitting to return to Kennan at the end of this book. Kennan again assumed the pulpit to survey his world at the end of the 1950s, as he had near the start of the decade. In a 1959 sermon, reprinted in the Atlantic Monthly, he made clear that he still saw communist totalitarianism as an apocalyptic threat and an “abomination to God.” But the Kennan of 1959 was much more chastened and much less certain of how to define the spiritual stakes of the Cold War. With the passing of Stalin and an apparent amelioration of Soviet depredations, the old dichotomies between faith and atheism, good and evil, no longer came so easily.

The world still faced an apocalyptic threat, however. It no longer emanated from the walls of the Kremlin but from laboratories and military installations the world over – even in the United States. Kennan's only Christian certainty came when he viewed nuclear weapons and the burgeoning arms race. And this certainty terrified him, as he concluded that