At Minot Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota, a wife kisses her husband goodbye, knowing that he will be spending the night alone in close quarters with a fit, talented, professional woman officer. He will dress next to her, sleep where she slept, smell how she smells. Although their job can sometimes be tense, for the most part it is boring, and so they talk. Over several days each week, month after month, they've built up a relationship that it would be fair to call friendly. He is a devoted husband, yet he is a man, and weak as all men are weak. So as his wife kisses him goodbye, she worries, not that his hands will wander, but that his heart might, just a little bit. She wants to trust him, but it can be hard, and she fears she's growing jealous, against her will, of that colleague of her husband. She knows she is supposed to think of her as just another officer in the armed forces, but when she looks she sees, and fears her husband sees, another woman.

Minot may be small and remote, but it is the scene of something dramatic: a man's struggle to defend his faith and marriage against the cultural forces of our day. This particular mini-drama is repeated daily in the households of Air Force officers assigned to the two-person crews whose job is to maintain and, if necessary, launch the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles stored in silos under the North Dakota soil. They do this from one of fifteen Launch Control Centers (LCC), bunkers located at least an hour away from Minot and sixty feet underground. The bunker is the shape of two Tylenol capsules stuck end to end, in its entirety and with all the electronic equipment no more than twelve yards long by five feet wide—about the length and width of a school ...