Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals
Author(s): Carol Cohn
Source: Signs , Summer, 1987, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and
Theory (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209
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SEX AND DEATH IN THE
RATIONAL WORLD OF
DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
CAROL COHN
"I can't believe that," said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw
long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't
believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why
sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things befor
breakfast." [LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass]
My close encounter with nuclear strategic analysis started in the sum
1984. I was one of forty-eight college teachers (one often women) att
a summer workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrin
arms control, taught by distinguished "defense intellectuals." D
intellectuals are men (and indeed, they are virtually all men) "who us
concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a ki
number it is not safe to use."' They are civilians who move in and
1 Thomas Powers, "How Nuclear War Could Start," New York Review of Books (J
17, 1985), 33.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1987, vol. 12, no. 4]
? 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/87/1204-0013$01.00
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
government, working sometimes as administrative officials or consultants,
sometimes at universities and think tanks. They formulate what they call
"rational" systems for dealing with the problems created by nuclear
weapons: how to manage the arms race; how to deter the use of nuclear
weapons; how to fight a nuclear war if deterrence fails. It is their calculations
that are used to explain the necessity of having nuclear destructive
capability at what George Kennan has called "levels of such grotesque
dimensions as to defy rational understanding. "2 At the same time, it is their
reasoning that is used to explain why it is not safe to live without nuclear
weapons.3 In short, they create the theory that informs and legitimates
American nuclear strategic practice.
For two weeks, I listened to men engage in dispassionate discussion of
nuclear war. I found myself aghast, but morbidly fascinated-not by
nuclear weaponry, or by images of nuclear destruction, but by the extraordinary
abstraction and removal from what I knew as reality that characterized
the professional discourse. I became obsessed by the question, How
can they think this way? At the end of the summer program, when I was
offered the opportunity to stay on at the university's center on defense
technology and arms control (hereafter known as "the Center"), I jumped
at the chance to find out how they could think "this" way.
I spent the next year of my life immersed in the world of defense
intellectuals. As a participant observer, I attended lectures, listened to
arguments, conversed with defense analysts, and interviewed graduate
students at the beginning, middle, and end of their training. I learned their
specialized language, and I tried to understand what they thought and how
they thought. I sifted through their logic for its internal inconsistencies and
its unspoken assumptions. But as I learned their language, as I became
more and more engaged with their information and their arguments, I
found that my own thinking was changing. Soon, I could no longer cling to
the comfort of studying an external and objectified "them." I had to
confront a new question: How can I think this way? How can any of us?
Throughout my time in the world of strategic analysis, it was hard not to
notice the ubiquitous weight of gender, both in social relations and in the
language itself; it is an almost entirely male world (with the exception of the
secretaries), and the language contains many rather arresting metaphors.
2 George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," New York Review of Books (July 16,
1981), 14.
3 It is unusual for defense intellectuals to write for the public, rather than for their
colleagues, but a recent, interesting exception has been made by a group of defense analysts
from Harvard. Their two books provide a clear expression of the stance that living with nuclear
weapons is not so much a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed rationally.
Albert Carnesale and the Harvard Nuclear Study Group, Living with Nuclear Weapons
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale,
and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear
War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985).
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
There is, of course, an important and growing body of feminist theory
about gender and language.4 In addition, there is a rich and increasingly
vast body of theoretical work exploring the gendered aspects of war and
militarism, which examines such issues as men's and women's different
relations to militarism and pacifism, and the ways in which gender ideology
is used in the service of militarization. Some of the feminist work on gender
and war is also part of an emerging, powerful feminist critique of ideas of
rationality as they have developed in Western culture.5 While I am indebted
to all of these bodies of work, my own project is most closely linked
to the development of feminist critiques of dominant Western concepts of
reason. My goal is to discuss the nature of nuclear stragetic thinking; in
4 For useful introductions to feminist work on gender and language, see Barrie Thorne,
Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender and Society (Rowley, Mass.:
Newbury Publishing House, 1983); and Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
5 For feminist critiques of dominant Western conceptions of rationality, see Nancy Hartsock,
Money, Sex, and Power (New York: Longman, 1983); Sandra Harding and Merrill
Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics,
Methodology and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983);
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1985); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Woman in Social and
Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Genevieve Lloyd, The
Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), which contains a particularly useful bibliographic essay; Sara Ruddick,
"Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason," in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva
Kittay and Diana Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, in press). Some of the growing
feminist work on gender and war is explicitly connected to critiques of rationality. See Virginia
Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966); Nancy C. M. Hartsock,
"The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Grounds for a Specifically Feminist Historical
Materialism," in Harding and Hintikka, eds., 283-310, and "The Barracks Community in
Western Political Thought: Prologomena to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics," in
Women and Men's Wars, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983); Jean
Bethke Elshtain, "Reflections on War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War and Feminism
in a Nuclear Age," Political Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1985): 39-57; Sara Ruddick,
"Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace," in
Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman &
Allanheld, 1984), 231-62; Genevieve Lloyd, "Selfhood, War, and Masculinity," in Feminist
Challenges, ed. E. Gross and C. Pateman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).
There is a vast and valuable literature on gender and war that indirectly informs my work. See,
e.g., Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives (Boston:
South End Press, 1984); Stiehm, ed.; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "On Beautiful Souls, Just
Warriors, and Feminist Consciousness," in Stiehm, ed., 341-48; Sara Ruddick, "Pacifying the
Forces: Drafting Women in the Interests of Peace," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 471-89, and "Drafting Women: Pieces of a Puzzle," in
Conscripts and Volunteers: Military Requirements, Social Values, and the All-Volunteer
Force, ed. Robert K. Fullinwider (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983); Amy Swerdlow,
"Women's Strike for Peace versus HUAC," Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982):
493-520; Mary C. Segers, "The Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace: A
Feminist Perspective," Feminist Studies 11, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 619-47.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
particular, my emphasis is on the role of its specialized language, a language
that I call "technostrategic."6 I have come to believe that this
language both reflects and shapes the nature of the American nuclear
strategic project, that it plays a central role in allowing defense intellectuals
to think and act as they do, and that feminists who are concerned about
nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to the
language we choose to use-whom it allows us to communicate with and
what it allows us to think as well as say.
State I: Listening
Clean bombs and clean language
Entering the world of defense intellectuals was a bizarre experiencebizarre
because it is a world where men spend their days calmly and matterof-factly
discussing nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear war.
The discussions are carefully and intricately reasoned, occurring seemingly
without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage-in fact, there
seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of "first
strikes," "counterforce exchanges," and "limited nuclear war," or as they
debate the comparative values of a "minimum deterrent posture" versus a
"nuclear war-fighting capability."
Yet what is striking about the men themselves is not, as the content of
their conversations might suggest, their cold-bloodedness. Rather, it is
that they are a group of men unusually endowed with charm, humor,
intelligence, concern, and decency. Reader, I liked them. At least, I liked
many of them. The attempt to understand how such men could contribute
to an endeavor that I see as so fundamentally destructive became a continuing
obsession for me, a lens through which I came to examine all of my
experiences in their world.
In this early stage, I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to
discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction
and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or
enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay
behind the words.
6 I have coined the term "technostrategic" to represent the intertwined, inextricable
nature of technological and nuclear strategic thinking. The first reason is that strategic
thinking seems to change in direct response to technological changes, rather than political
thinking, or some independent paradigms that might be isolated as "strategic." (On this point,
see Lord Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusions and Reality [New York: Viking Press, 1982]).
Even more important, strategic theory not only depends on and changes in response to
technological objects, it is also based on a kind of thinking, a way of looking at problemsformal,
mathematical modeling, systems analysis, game theory, linear programming-that
are part of technology itself. So I use the term "technostrategic" to indicate the degree to
which nuclear strategic language and thinking are imbued with, indeed constructed out of,
modes of thinking that are associated with technology.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
Anyone who has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims or tried to
imagine the pain of hundreds of glass shards blasted into flesh may find it
perverse beyond imagination to hear a class of nuclear devices matter-offactly
referred to as "clean bombs." "Clean bombs" are nuclear devices that
are largely fusion rather than fission and that therefore release a higher
quantity of energy, not as radiation, but as blast, as destructive explosive
power.7
"Clean bombs" may provide the perfect metaphor for the language of
defense analysts and arms controllers. This language has enormous destructive
power, but without emotional fallout, without the emotional
fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass
murder, mangled bodies, and unspeakable human suffering. Defense
analysts talk about "countervalue attacks" rather than about incinerating
cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred to as
"collateral damage"; for, as one defense analyst said wryly, "The Air Force
doesn't target people, it targets shoe factories."8
Some phrases carry this cleaning-up to the point of inverting meaning.
The MX missile will carry ten warheads, each with the explosure power of
300-475 kilotons of TNT: one missile the bearer of destruction approximately
250-400 times that of the Hiroshima bombing.9 Ronald Reagan has
7 Fusion weapons' proportionally smaller yield of radioactive fallout led Atomic Energy
Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss to announce in 1956 that hydrogen bomb tests were
important "not only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian aspect." Although
the bombs being tested were 1,000 times more powerful than those that devastated Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the proportional reduction of fallout apparently qualified them as not
only clean but also humanitarian. Lewis Strauss is quoted in Ralph Lapp, "The 'Humanitarian'
H-Bomb," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 12, no. 7 (September 1956): 263.
8 I must point out that we cannot know whether to take this particular example literally:
America's list of nuclear targets is, of course, classified. The defense analyst quoted, however,
is a man who has had access to that list for at ]east two decades. He is also a man whose thinking
and speaking is careful and precise, so I think it is reasonable to assume that his statement is
not a distortion, that "shoe factories," even if not themselves literally targeted, accurately
represent a category of target. Shoe factories would be one among many "military targets"
other than weapons systems themselves; they would be military targets because an army
needs boots. The likelihood of a nuclear war lasting long enough for foot soldiers to wear out
their boots might seem to stretch the limits of credibility, but that is an insufficient reason to
assume that they are not nuclear targets. Nuclear targeting and nuclear strategic planning in
general frequently suffer from "conventionalization"-the tendency of planners to think in
the old, familiar terms of "conventional" warfare rather than fully assimilating the ways in
which nuclear weaponry has changed warfare. In avoiding talking about murder, the defense
community has long been ahead of the State Department. It was not until 1984 that the State
Department announced it will no longer use the word "killing," much less "murder," in
official reports on the status of human rights in allied countries. The new term is "unlawful or
arbitrary deprivation of life" (New York Times, February 15, 1984, as cited in Quarterly
Review of Doublespeak 11, no. 1 [October 1984]: 3).
9 "Kiloton" (or kt) is a measure of explosive power, measured by the number of thousands
of tons of TNT required to release an equivalent amount of energy. The atomic bomb dropped
on Hiroshima is estimated to have been approximately 12 kt. An MX missile is designed to
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
dubbed the MX missile "the Peacekeeper." While this renaming was the
object of considerable scorn in the community of defense analysts, these
very same analysts refer to the MX as a "damage limitation weapon."'?
These phrases, only a few of the hundreds that could be discussed,
exemplify the astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes
technostrategic language. They also hint at the terrifying way in which
the existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined
the world. "Clean bombs" tells us that radiation is the only "dirty"
part of killing people.
To take this one step further, such phrases can even seem healthful/
curative/corrective. So that we not only have "clean bombs" but also
"surgically clean strikes" ("counterforce" attacks that can purportedly "take
out"-i. e., accurately destroy-an opponent's weapons or command centers
without causing significant injury to anything else). The image of
excision of the offending weapon is unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical
tool is not a delicately controlled scalpel but a nuclear warhead. And
somehow it seems to be forgotten that even scalpels spill blood."
White men in ties discussing missile size
Feminists have often suggested that an important aspect of the arms race is
phallic worship, that "missile envy" is a significant motivating force in the
nuclear build-up.12 I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist
explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would yield a more
complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might
find a sexual subtext in the defense professionals' discourse. I was not
prepared for what I found.
carry up to ten Mk 21 reentry vehicles, each with a W-87 warhead. The yield of W-87
warheads is 300 kt, but they are "upgradable" to 475 kt.
"0 Since the MX would theoretically be able to "take out" Soviet land-based ICBMs in a
"disarming first strike," the Soviets would have few ICBMs left for a retaliatory attack, and
thus damage to the United States theoretically would be limited. However, to consider the
damage that could be inflicted on the United States by the remaining ICBMs, not to mention
Soviet bombers and submarine-based missiles as "limited" is to act as though words have no
meaning.
" Conservative government assessments of the number of deaths resulting from a "surgically
clean" counterforce attack vary widely. The Office of Technology Assessment projects 2
million to 20 million immediate deaths. (See James Fallows, National Defense [New York:
Random House, 1981], 159.) A 1975 Defense Department study estimated 18.3 million
fatalities, while the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, using different assumptions,
arrived at a figure of 50 million (cited by Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be
Controlled?" Adelphi Paper no. 169 [London: International Institute for Strategic Studies,
1981]).
12 The phrase is Helen Caldicott's in Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War
(Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986).
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
I think I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the house of
death-that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said
in unguarded moments, using all my subtlety and cunning to unearth
whatever sexual imagery might be underneath how they thought and
spoke. I had naively believed that these men, at least in public, would
appear to be aware of feminist critiques. If they had not changed their
language, I thought that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration
aids," someone would suddenly look up, slightly embarrassed to be
caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses of What's Going
On Here.'3
Of course, I was wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist
critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men.
American military dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as
"irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck." Another lecturer
solemnly and scientifically announced "to disarm is to get rid of all your
stuff." (This may, in turn, explain why they see serious talk of nuclear
disarmament as perfectly resistable, not to mention foolish. If disarmament
is emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?) A professor's
explanation of why the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the newest
Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate ones, was
"because they're in the nicest hole-you're not going to take the nicest
missile you have and put it in a crummy hole." Other lectures were filled
with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft
lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted
versus spasm attacks-or what one military adviser to the National
Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage
in one orgasmic whump."14 There was serious concern about the need to
harden our missiles and the need to "face it, the Russians are a little harder
than we are." Disbelieving glances would occasionally pass between me
and my one ally in the summer progtam, another woman, but no one else
seemed to notice.
If the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. The
temptation is to draw some conclusions about the defense intellectuals
themselves-about what they are really talking about, or their motivations;
but the temptation is worth resisting. Individual motivations cannot necessarily
be read directly from imagery; the imagery itself does not originate in
these particular individuals but in a broader cultural context.
Sexual imagery has, of course, been a part of the world of warfare since
13 For the uninitiated, "penetration aids" refers to devices that help bombers or missiles
get past the "enemy's" defensive systems; e.g., stealth technology, chaff, or decoys. Within
the defense intellectual community, they are also familiarly known as "penaids."
14 General William Odom, "C3I and Telecommunications at the Policy Level," Incidental
Paper, Seminar on C31: Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Information Policy Research, Spring 1980), 5.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
long before nuclear weapons were even a gleam in a physicist's eye. The
history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of
competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists,
strategists, and SAC commanders.'5 Both the military itself and the
arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and
promise of sexual domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest.
A quick glance at the publications that constitute some of the research
sources for defense intellectuals makes the depth and pervasiveness of the
imagery evident.
Air Force Magazine's advertisements for new weapons, for example,
rival Playboy as a catalog of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies. Consider
the following, from the June 1985 issue: emblazoned in bold letters across
the top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II-"Speak
Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below boasts "an exceptional thrust
to weight ratio" and "vectored thrust capability that makes the . .. unique
rapid response possible." Then, just in case we've failed to get the message,
the last line reminds us, "Just the sort of'Big Stick' Teddy Roosevelt
had in mind way back in 1901. "16
An ad for the BKEP (BLU-106/B) reads:
The Only Way to Solve Some Problems is to Dig Deep.
THE BOMB, KINETIC ENERGY
PENETRATOR
"Will provide the tactical air commander with efficient power
deny or significantly delay enemy airfield operations."
"Designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration
dynamics and utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed."17
(In case the symbolism of "cratering" seems far-fetched, I must point
that I am not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in
South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman's name to eac
the craters they gouge out of the earth.)
Another, truly extraordinary, source of phallic imagery is to be fou
descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves. Here, for example, is o
journalist William Laurence, who was brought to Nagasaki by th
Force to witness the bombing. "Then, just when it appeared as though
thing had settled down in to a state of permanence, there came sh
out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to
of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the p
seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward
"5 This point has been amply documented by Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthink
Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race (London: Pluto Press, 1983).
" Air Force Magazine 68, no. 6 (June 1985): 77-78.
17 Ibid.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept
struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the
bonds that held it down."'8
Given the degree to which it suffuses their world, that defense intellectuals
themselves use a lot of sexual imagery does not seem especially
surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation.
For me, the interesting issue is not so much the imagery's psychodynamic
origins, as how it functions. How does it serve to make it possible for
strategic planners and other defense intellectuals to do their macabre
work? How does it function in their construction of a work world that feels
tenable? Several stories illustrate the complexity.
During the summer program, a group of us visited the New London
Navy base where nuclear submarines are homeported and the General
Dynamics Electric Boat boatyards where a new Trident submarine was
being constructed. At one point during the trip we took a tour of a nuclear
powered submarine. When we reached the part of the sub where the
missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and
asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to "pat the missile."
Pat the missile?
The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully
declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing II
missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some
months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North
American Aerospace Defense Command). On the way back, our plane
went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters
near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing
would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane
became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our
holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the
B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and
hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man
who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got to pat a
B-I."
What is all this "patting"? What are men doing when they "pat" these
high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession,
affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is
the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating
it as one's own.
But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates something of
the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language, it also has another
side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one
does to babies, small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small,
18 William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Study of the Atomic Bomb (London:
Museum Press, 1974), 198-99.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
cute, and harmless-not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality
disappears.
Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity
suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be construed as a
deadly serious display of the connections between masculine sexuality and
the arms race. At the same time, it can also be heard as a way of minimizing
the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences.
A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought
plans for "limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta
understand that it's a pissing contest-you gotta expect them to use everything
they've got." What does this image say? Most obviously, that this is
all about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger.
But at the same time, the image diminishes the contest and its outcomes,
by representing it as an act of boyish mischief.
Fathers, sons, and virgins
"Virginity" also made frequent, arresting, appearances in nuclear discourse.
In the summer program, one professor spoke of India's explosion of
a nuclear bomb as "losing her virginity"; the question of how the United
States should react was posed as whether or not we should "throw her
away." It is a complicated use of metaphor. Initiation into the nuclear
world involves being deflowered, losing one's innocence, knowing sin, all
wrapped up into one. Although the manly United States is no virgin, and
proud of it, the double standard raises its head in the question of whether
or not a woman is still worth anything to a man once she has lost her
virginity.
New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered
warships into its ports prompted similar reflections on virginity. A good
example is provided by Retired U.S. Air Force General Ross Milton's angry
column in Air Force Magazine, entitled, "Nuclear Virginity." His tone is
that of a man whose advances have been spurned. He is contemptuous of
the woman's protestation that she wants to remain pure, innocent of
nuclear weapons; her moral reluctance is a quaint and ridiculous throwback.
But beyond contempt, he also feels outraged-after all, this is a
woman we have paid for, who still will not come across. He suggests that
we withdraw our goods and services-and then we will see just how long
she tries to hold onto her virtue. 19 The patriarchal bargain could not be laid
out more clearly.
Another striking metaphor of patriarchal power came early in the
summer program, when one of the faculty was giving a lecture on deter"9
U.S.A.F. Retired General T. R. Milton, "Nuclear Virginity," Air Force Magazine 68,
no. 5 (May 1985): 44.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
rence. To give us a concrete example from outside the world of military
strategy, he described having a seventeen-year-old son of whose TVwatching
habits he disapproves. He deals with the situation by threatening
to break his son's arm if he turns on the TV again. "That's deterrence!"
he said triumphantly.
What is so striking about this analogy is that at first it seems so
inappropriate. After all, we have been taught to believe that nuclear
deterrence is a relation between two countries of more or less equal
strength, in which one is only able to deter the other from doing it great
harm by threatening to do the same in return. But in this case, the partners
are unequal, and the stronger one is using his superior force not to protect
himself or others from grave injury but to coerce.
But if the analogy seems to be a flawed expression of deterrence as we
have been taught to view it, it is nonetheless extremely revealing about
U.S. nuclear deterrence as an operational, rather than rhetorical or declaratory
policy. What it suggests is the speciousness of the defensive
rhetoric that surrounds deterrence-of the idea that we face an implacable
enemy and that we stockpile nuclear weapons only in an attempt to defend
ourselves. Instead, what we see is the drive to superior power as a means to
exercise one's will and a readiness to threaten the disproportionate use of
force in order to achieve one's own ends. There is no question here of
recognizing competing but legitimate needs, no desire to negotiate, discuss,
or compromise, and most important, no necessity for that recognition
or desire, since the father carries the bigger stick.20
The United States frequently appeared in discussions about international
politics as "father," sometimes coercive, sometimes benevolent, but
always knowing best. The single time that any mention was made of
countries other than the United States, our NATO allies, or the USSR was
in a lecture on nuclear proliferation. The point was made that younger
countries simply could not be trusted to know what was good for them, nor
were they yet fully responsible, so nuclear weapons in their hands would
be much more dangerous than in ours. The metaphor used was that of
parents needing to set limits for their children.
Domestic bliss
Sanitized abstraction and sexual and patriarchal imagery, even if disturbing,
seemed to fit easily into the masculinist world of nuclear war planning.
What did not fit, what surprised and puzzled me most when I first heard it,
was the set of metaphors that evoked images that can only be called
domestic.
20 I am grateful to Margaret Cerullo, a participant in the first summer program, for
reporting the use of this analogy to me and sharing her thoughts about this and other events in
the program. The interpretation I give here draws strongly on hers.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
Nuclear missiles are based in "silos." On a Trident submarine, which
carries twenty-four multiple warhead nuclear missiles, crew members call
the part of the submarine where the missiles are lined up in their silos
ready for launching "the Christmas tree farm." What could be more
bucolic-farms, silos, Christmas trees?
In the ever-friendly, even romantic world of nuclear weaponry, enemies
"exchange" warheads; one missile "takes out" another; weapons
systems can "marry up"; "coupling" is sometimes used to refer to the
wiring between mechanisms of warning and response, or to the psychopolitical
links between strategic (intercontinental) and theater (Europeanbased)
weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile's nuclear warheads
land is known as a "footprint."21 These nuclear explosives are not
dropped; a "bus" "delivers" them. In addition, nuclear bombs are not
referred to as bombs or even warheads; they are referred to as "reentry
vehicles," a term far more bland and benign, which is then shortened to
"RVs," a term not only totally abstract and removed from the reality of a
bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the
ideal family vacation.
These domestic images must be more than simply one more form of
distancing, one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality behind
the words; ordinary abstraction is adequate to that task. Something else,
something very peculiar, is going on here. Calling the pattern in which
bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful,
perverse refusal of accountability-because to be accountable to reality is
to be unable to do this work.
These words may also serve to domesticate, to tame the wild and
uncontrollable forces of nuclear destruction. The metaphors minimize;
they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond what the mind can
encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery
over the unmasterable. The fire-breathing dragon under the bed, the one
who threatens to incinerate your family, your town, your planet, becomes a
pet you can pat.
Using language evocative of everyday experiences also may simply
serve to make the nuclear strategic community more comfortable with
what they are doing. "PAL" (permissive action links) is the carefully
constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to prevent
the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. "BAMBI" was the
acronym developed for an early version of an antiballistic missile system
(for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). The president's Annual Nuclear
Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, which outlines both short- and longrange
plans for production of new nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to
a1 MIRV stands for "multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles." A MIRVed
missile not only carries more than one warhead; its warheads can be aimed at different targets.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
as "the shopping list." The National Command Authorities choose from a
"menu of options" when deciding among different targeting plans. The
"cookie cutter" is a phrase used to describe a particular model of nuclear
attack. Apparently it is also used at the Department of Defense to refer to
the neutron bomb.a2
The imagery that domesticates, that humanizes insentient weapons,
may also serve, paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore sentient human
bodies, human lives.2' Perhaps it is possible to spend one's time thinking
about scenarios for the use of destructive technology and to have human
bodies remain invisible in that technological world precisely because that
world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm, and playful-the
Christmas trees, the RVs, the affectionate pats. It is a world that is
in some sense complete unto itself; it even includes death and loss. But it is
weapons, not humans, that get "killed." "Fratricide" occurs when one of
your warheads "kills" another of your own warheads. There is much
discussion of "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about the vulnerability
and survival of weapons systems, not people.
Male birth and creation
There is one set of domestic images that demands separate attentionimages
that suggest men's desire to appropriate from women the power of
giving life and that conflate creation and destruction. The bomb project is
rife with images of male birth.a4 In December 1942, Ernest Lawrence's
22 Henry T. Nash, "The Bureaucratization of Homicide," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
(April 1980), reprinted in E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith, eds., Protest and Survive (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 159. The neutron bomb is notable for the active political
contention that has occurred over its use and naming. It is a small warhead that produces six
times the prompt radiation but slightly less blast and heat than typical fission warheads of the
same yield. Pentagon planners see neutron bombs as useful in killing Soviet tank crews while
theoretically leaving the buildings near the tanks intact. Of course, the civilians in the nearby
buildings, however, would be killed by the same "enhanced radiation" as the tank crews. It is
this design for protecting property while killing civilians along with soldiers that has led
people in the antinuclear movement to call the neutron bomb "the ultimate capitalist
weapon." However, in official parlance the neutron bomb is not called a weapon at all; it is an
"enhanced radiation device." It is worth noting, however, that the designer of the neutron
bomb did not conceive of it as an anti-tank personnel weapon to be used against the Russians.
Instead, he thought it would be useful in an area where the enemy did not have nuclear
weapons to use. (Samuel T. Cohen, in an interview on National Public Radio, as reported in
Fred Kaplan, "The Neutron Bomb: What It Is, the Way It Works," Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists [October 1981], 6.)
2 For a discussion of the functions of imagery that reverses sentient and insentient matter,
that "exchange[s] . .. idioms between weapons and bodies," see Elaine Scarry, The Body in
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
60-157, esp. 67.
24 For further discussion of men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving
life and death, and its implications for men's war-making activities, see Dorothy Dinnerstein,
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
telegram to the physicists at Chicago read, "Congratulations to the new
parents. Can hardly wait to see the new arrival. "a At Los Alamos, the atom
bomb was referred to as "Oppenheimer's baby." One of the physicists
working at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman, writes that when he was
temporarily on leave after his wife's death, he received a telegram saying,
"The baby is expected on such and such a day. "6 At Lawrence Livermore,
the hydrogen bomb was referred to as "Teller's baby," although those who
wanted to disparage Edward Teller's contribution claimed he was not the
bomb's father but its mother. They claimed that Stanislaw Ulam was the
real father; he had the all important idea and inseminated Teller with it.
Teller only "carried it" after that.27
Forty years later, this idea of male birth and its accompanying belittling
of maternity-the denial of women's role in the process of creation and the
reduction of "motherhood" to the provision of nurturance (apparently
Teller did not need to provide an egg, only a womb)-seems thoroughly
incorporated into the nuclear mentality, as I learned on a subsequent visit
to U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs. One of the briefings I
attended included discussion of a new satellite system, the not yet "on line"
MILSTAR system.2 The officer doing the briefing gave an excited recitation
of its technical capabilities and then an explanation of the new Unified
Space Command's role in the system. Self-effacingly he said, "We'll do the
motherhood role-telemetry, tracking, and control-the maintenance."
The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). For further analysis of male
birth imagery in the atomic bomb project, see Evelyn Fox Keller, "From Secrets of Life to
Secrets of Death" (paper delivered at the Kansas Seminar, Yale University, New Haven,
Conn., November 1986); and Easlea (n. 15 above), 81-116.
a Lawrence is quoted by Herbert Childs in An American Genius: The Life of Ernest
Orlando Lawrence (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 340.
ai Feynman writes about the telegram in Richard P. Feynman, "Los Alamos from Below,"
in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945, ed. Lawrence Badash, Joseph 0. Hirshfelder,
and Herbert P. Broida (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980), 130.
27 Hans Bethe is quoted as saying that "Ulam was the father of the hydrogen bomb and
Edward was the mother, because he carried the baby for quite a while" (J. Bernstein, Hans
Bethe: Prophet of Energy [New York: Basic Books, 1980], 95).
8 The MILSTAR system is a communications satellite system that is jam resistant, as well
as having an "EMP-hardened capability." (This means that the electromagnetic pulse set off
by a nuclear explosion would theoretically not destroy the satellites' electronic systems.)
There are, of course, many things to say about the sanity and morality of the idea of the
MILSTAR system and of spending the millions of dollars necessary to EMP-harden it. The
most obvious point is that this is a system designed to enable the United States to fight a
"protracted" nuclear war-the EMP-hardening is to allow it to act as a conduit for command
and control of successive nuclear shots, long after the initial exchange. The practicality of the
idea would also appear to merit some discussion-who and what is going to be communicating
to and from after the initial exchange? And why bother to harden it against EMP when all an
opponent has to do to prevent the system from functioning is to blow it up, a feat certain to
become technologically feasible in a short time? But, needless to say, exploration of these
questions was not part of the briefing.
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Summer 1987 / SCGNS
In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to
the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble"Little
Boy" and "Fat Man"-at last become intelligible. These ultimate
destroyers were the progeny of the atomic scientists-and emphatically
not just any progeny but male progeny. In early tests, before they were
certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern
by saying that they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl-that is, not a
dud.29 General Grove's triumphant cable to Secretary of War Henry Stimson
at the Potsdam conference, informing him that the first atomic bomb
test was successful read, after decoding: "Doctor has just returned most
enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother.
The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have
heard his screams from here to my farm."30 Stimson, in turn, informed
Churchill by writing him a note that read, "Babies satisfactorily born."31 In
1952, Teller's exultant telegram to Los Alamos announcing the successful
test of the hydrogen bomb, "Mike," at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall
Islands, read, "It's a boy."32 The nuclear scientists gave birth to male
progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female Nature.
The defense intellectuals' project is the creation of abstract formulations
to control the forces the scientists created-and to participate thereby
in their world-creating/destroying power.
The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with
imagery that confounds man's overwhelming technological power to destroy
nature with the power to create-imagery that inverts men's destruction
and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world. It
converts men's destruction into their rebirth.
William L. Laurence witnessed the Trinity test of the first atomic
bomb and wrote: "The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the
great flash-the first cry of a new-born world.... They clapped their hands
as they leaped from the ground-earthbound man symbolising the birth of
a new force. "33 Watching "Fat Man" being assembled the day before it was
dropped on Nagasaki, he described seeing the bomb as "being fashioned
into a living thing. "34 Decades later, General Bruce K. Holloway, the
commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972,
29 The concern about having a boy, not a girl, is written about by Robert Jungk, Brighter
Than a Thousand Suns, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1956), 197.
30 Richard E. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, The New World, 1939/46: A History of the
United States Atomic Energy Commission, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1962), 1:386.
31 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6., Triumph and Tragedy (London:
Cassell, 1954), 551.
32 Quoted by Easlea, 130.
33 Laurence (n. 18 above), 10.
34 Ibid., 188.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of the
universe. "I
God and the nuclear priesthood
The possibility that the language reveals an attempt to appropriate ultimate
creative power is evident in another striking aspect of the language of
nuclear weaponry and doctrine-the religious imagery. In a subculture of
hard-nosed realism and hyper-rationality, in a world that claims as a sign of
its superiority its vigilant purging of all nonrational elements, and in which
people carefully excise from their discourse every possible trace of soft
sentimentality, as though purging dangerous nonsterile elements from a
lab, the last thing one might expect to find is religious imagery-imagery of
the forces that science has been defined in opposition to. For surely, given
that science's identity was forged by its separation from, by its struggle for
freedom from, the constraints of religion, the only thing as unscientific as
the female, the subjective, the emotional, would be the religious. And yet,
religious imagery permeates the nuclear past and present. The first atomic
bomb test was called Trinity-the unity of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, the male forces of Creation. The imagery is echoed in the
language of the physicists who worked on the bomb and witnessed the test:
"It was as though we stood at the first day of creation." Robert Oppenheimer
thought of Krishna's words to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am
become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds."3f
Perhaps most astonishing of all is the fact that the creators of strategic
doctrine actually refer to members of their community as "the nuclear
priesthood." It is hard to decide what is most extraordinary about this: the
easy arrogance of their claim to the virtues and supernatural power of the
priesthood; the tacit admission (never spoken directly) that rather than
being unflinching, hard-nosed, objective, empirically minded scientific
describers of reality, they are really the creators of dogma; or the extraordinary
implicit statement about who, or rather what, has become god. If
this new priesthood attains its status through an inspired knowledge of
nuclear weapons, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "a mighty
fortress is our God."
35 From a 1985 interview in which Holloway was explaining the logic of a "decapitating"
strike against the Soviet leadership and command and control systems-and thus how nuclear
war would be different from World War II, which was a "war of attrition," in which
transportation, supply depots, and other targets were hit, rather than being a "big bang"
(Daniel Ford, "The Button," New Yorker Magazine 61, no. 7 [April 8, 1985], 49).
36 Jungk, 201.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
Stage 2: Learning to speak the language
Although I was startled by the combination of dry abstraction and counter-intuitive
imagery that characterizes the language of defense intellectuals,
my attention and energy were quickly focused on decoding and learning
to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the articulation of
acronyms.
Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy
had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations,
nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought
of them mainly as utilitarian. They allow you to write or speak faster. They
act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the reality behind the
words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving all others both
uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate.
But, being at the Center, hearing the defense analysts use the
acronyms, and then watching as I and others in the group started to fling
acronyms around in our conversation revealed some additional, unexpected
dimensions.
First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms can be very sexy. A
small supersonic rocket "designed to penetrate any Soviet air defense" is
called a SRAM (for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise
missiles are not referred to as SLCMs, but "slick'ems." Ground-launched
cruise missiles are "glick'ems." Air-launched cruise missiles are not sexy
but magical-"alchems" (ALCMs) replete with the illusion of turning base
metals into gold.
TACAMO, the acronym used to refer to the planes designed to provide
communications links to submarines, stands for "take charge and move
out." The image seems closely related to the nicknames given to the new
guidance systems for "smart weapons"-"shoot and scoot" or "fire and
forget."
Other acronyms work in other ways. The plane in which the president
supposedly will be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving
intelligence and issuing commands for the next bombing, is referred to as
"kneecap" (for NEACP-National Emergency Airborne Command Post).
The edge of derision suggested in referring to it as "kneecap" mirrors the
edge of derision implied when it is talked about at all, since few believe that
the president really would have the time to get into it, or that the communications
systems would be working if he were in it, and some might go
so far as to question the usefulness of his being able to direct an extended
nuclear war from his kneecap even if it were feasible. (I never heard the
morality of this idea addressed.) But it seems to me that speaking about it
with that edge of derision is exactly what allows it to be spoken about and
seriously discussed at all. It is the very ability to make fun of a concept that
makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about
nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are
racy, sexy, snappy. You can throw them around in rapid-fire succession.
They are quick, clean, light; they trip off the tongue. You can reel off
dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might just interfere
with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them.
I am not describing a phenomenon experienced only by the perverse,
although the phenomenon itself may be perverse indeed. Nearly everyone
I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words. It mattered little
whether we were lecturers or students, hawks or doves, men or womenwe
all learned it, and we all spoke it. Some of us may have spoken with a
self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless.
Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane
language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the
know. It is a glow that is a significant part of learning about nuclear
weaponry. Few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows
with them, perhaps even be one yourself.
That feeling, of course, does not come solely from the language. The
whole set-up of the summer program itself, for example, communicated
the allures of power and the benefits of white male privileges. We were
provided with luxurious accommodations, complete with young black
women who came in to clean up after us each day; generous funding paid
not only our transportation and food but also a large honorarium for
attending; we met in lavishly appointed classrooms and lounges. Access to
excellent athletic facilities was guaranteed by a "Temporary Privilege
Card," which seemed to me to sum up the essence of the experience.
Perhaps most important of all were the endless allusions by our lecturers to
"what I told John [Kennedy]" and "and then Henry [Kissinger] said," or
the lunches where we could sit next to a prominent political figure and
listen to Washington gossip.
A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of learning the
language is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. The experience of
mastering the words infuses your relation to the material. You can get so
good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as though the whole
thing is under control. Learning the language gives a sense of what I would
call cognitive mastery; the feeling of mastery of technology that is finally
not controllable but is instead powerful beyond human comprehension,
powerful in a way that stretches and even thrills the imagination.
The more conversations I participated in using this language, the less
frightened I was of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have
such a powerful effect? One answer, I believe, is that the process of
learning the language is itself a part of what removes you from the reality of
nuclear war.
I entered a world where people spoke what amounted to a foreign
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
language, a language I had to learn if we were to communicate with one
another. So I became engaged in the challenge of it-of decoding the
acronyms and figuring out which were the proper verbs to use. My focus
was on the task of solving the puzzles, developing language competencynot
on the weapons and wars behind the words. Although my interest was
in thinking about nuclear war and its prevention, my energy was else-
where.
By the time I was through, I had learned far more than a set of abstract
words that refers to grisly subjects, for even when the subjects of a standard
English and nukespeak description seem to be the same, they are, in fact,
about utterly different phenomena. Consider the following descriptions, in
each of which the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack:
Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed.
Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up
had any color. From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to
loom up, black, hairless, faceless. They screamed with voices that
were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans
rising everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from
the very earth itself.37
[You have to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear
environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute
force damage to systems, a heavy jamming environment, and so
on.38
There are no ways to describe the phenomena represented in the first
with the language of the second. Learning to speak the language of defense
analysts is not a conscious, cold-blooded decision to ignore the effects of
nuclear weapons on real live human beings, to ignore the sensory, the
emotional experience, the human impact. It is simply learning a new
language, but by the time you are through, the content of what you can talk
about is monumentally different, as is the perspective from which you
speak.
In the example above, the differences in the two descriptions of a
"nuclear environment" stem partly from a difference in the vividness of the
words themselves-the words of the first intensely immediate and evoca-
37 Hisako Matsubara, Cranes at Dusk (Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985). The author
was a child in Kyoto at the time the atomic bomb was dropped. Her description is based on the
memories of survivors.
8 General Robert Rosenberg (formerly on the National Security Council staff during the
Carter Administration), "The Influence of Policymaking on C31," Incidental Paper, Seminar
on C3I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Information Policy Research,
Spring 1980), 59.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
tive, the words of the second abstract and distancing. The passages also
differ in their content; the first describes the effects of a nuclear blast on
human beings, the second describes the impact of a nuclear blast on
technical systems designed to assure the "command and control" of nuclear
weapons. Both of these differences may stem from the difference of perspective:
the speaker in the first is a victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker
in the second is a user. The speaker in the first is using words to try to name
and contain the horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the
second is using words to ensure the possibility of launching the next
nuclear attack. Technostrategic language can be used only to articulate the
perspective of the users of nuclear weapons, not that of the victims.39
Thus, speaking the expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of
control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escapeescape
from thinking of oneself as a victim of nuclear war. I do not mean
this on the level of individual consciousness; it is not that defense analysts
somehow convince themselves that they would not be among the victims of
nuclear war, should it occur. But I do mean it in terms of the structural
position the speakers of the language occupy and the perspective they get
from that position. Structurally, speaking technostrategic language removes
them from the position of victim and puts them in the position of the
planner, the user, the actor. From that position, there is neither need nor
way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes
about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or
despair the knowledge of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers
of technostrategic language are positionally allowed, even forced, to escape
that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the
victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of
nuclear weaponry.
Finally, then, I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear
39 Two other writers who have remarked on this division of languages between the
"victims" and the professionals (variously named) are Freeman Dyson and Glenn D. Hook.
Dyson, in Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), notes that there are two
languages in the current discussion of nuclear weapons, which he calls the language of "the
victims"and the language of "the warriors." He sees the resulting problem as being the
difficulty the two groups have in communicating with each other and, thus, in appreciating
each other's valid concerns. His project, then, is the search for a common language, and a good
portion of the rest of the book is directed toward that end. Hook, in "Making Nuclear
Weapons Easier to Live With: The Political Role of Language in Nuclearization," Journal of
Peace Research 22, no. 1 (1985): 67-77, follows Camus in naming the two groups "the victims"
and "the executioners." He is more explicit than Dyson about naming these as perspectives,
as coming from positions of greater or lesser power, and points out that those with the most
power are able to dominate and define the terms in which we speak about nuclear issues, so
that no matter who we are, we find ourselves speaking as though we were the users, rather
than the victims of nuclear weapons. Although my analysis of perspectives and the ways in
which language inscribes relations of power is similar to his, I differ from Hook in finding in
this fact one of the sources of the experts' relative lack of fear of nuclear war.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and
long-time experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the
distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of control afforded by mastering
it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users rather
than the victims of nuclear weapons. In learning the language, one goes
from being the passive, powerless victim to the competent, wily, powerful
purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous
destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the
self, rather than threats to it.
Stage 3: Dialogue
It did not take very long to learn the language of nuclear war and much of
the specialized information it contained. My focus quickly changed from
mastering technical information and doctrinal arcana to attempting to
understand more about how the dogma was rationalized. Instead of trying,
for example, to find out why submarines are so hard to detect or why, prior
to the Trident II, submarine-based ballistic missiles were not considered
counterforce weapons, I now wanted to know why we really "need" a
strategic triad, given submarines' "invulnerability. "40 I also wanted to know
why it is considered reasonable to base U.S. military planning on the
Soviet Union's military capabilities rather than seriously attempting to
gauge what their intentions might be. This standard practice is one I found
particularly troubling. Military analysts say that since we cannot know for
certain what Soviet intentions are, we must plan our military forces and
strategies as if we knew that the Soviets planned to use all of their weapons.
While this might appear to have the benefit of prudence, it leads to a major
problem. When we ask only what the Soviets can do, we quickly come to
assume that that is what they intend to do. We base our planning on
"worst-case scenarios" and then come to believe that we live in a world
where vast resources must be committed to "prevent" them from hap-
pening.
Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business
of defense planning, I had to start asking more questions. At first,
40 The "strategic triad" refers to the three different modes of basing nuclear warheads: at
land, on intercontinental ballistic missiles; at sea, on missiles in submarines; and "in the air,"
on the Strategic Air Command's bombers. Given that nuclear weapons based on submarines
are "invulnerable" (i.e., not subject to attack), since there is not now nor likely to be in the
future any reliable way to find and target submarines, many commentators (mostly from
outside the community of defense intellectuals) have suggested that the Navy's leg of the triad
is all we need to ensure a capacity to retaliate against a nuclear attack. This suggestion that
submarine-based missiles are an adequate deterrent becomes especially appealing when it is
remembered that the other basing modes-ICBMs and bombers-act as targets that would
draw thousands of nuclear attacks to the American mainland in time of war.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
although I was tempted to use my newly acquired proficiency in technostrategic
jargon, I vowed to speak English. I had long believed that one of
the most important functions of an expert language is exclusion-the denial
of a voice to those outside the professional community.4' I wanted to see
whether a well-informed person could speak English and still carry on a
knowledgeable conversation.
What I found was that no matter how well-informed or complex my
questions were, if I spoke English rather than expert jargon, the men
responded to me as though I were ignorant, simpleminded, or both. It did
not appear to occur to anyone that I might actually be choosing not to speak
their language.
A strong distaste for being patronized and dismissed made my experiment
in English short-lived. I adapted my everyday speech to the vocabulary
of strategic analysis. I spoke of "escalation dominance," "preemptive
strikes," and, one of my favorites, "subholocaust engagements." Using the
right phrases opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught
me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it.
I found, however, that the better I got at engaging in this discourse, the
more impossible it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values.
I could adopt the language and gain a wealth of new concepts and reasoning
strategies-but at the same time as the language gave me access to things I
had been unable to speak about before, it radically excluded others. I could
not use the language to express my concerns because it was physically
impossible. This language does not allow certain questions to be asked or
certain values to be expressed.
To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse.
As close as one can come is "strategic stability," a term that refers to a
balance of numbers and types of weapons systems-not the political,
social, economic, and psychological conditions implied by the word
"peace." Not only is there no word signifying peace in this discourse, but
the word "peace" itself cannot be used. To speak it is immediately to brand
oneself as a soft-headed activist instead of an expert, a professional to be
taken seriously.
If I was unable to speak my concerns in this language, more disturbing
still was that I found it hard even to keep them in my own head. I had begun
my research expecting abstract and sanitized discussions of nuclear war and
had readied myself to replace my words for theirs, to be ever vigilant
against slipping into the never-never land of abstraction. But no matter
how prepared I was, no matter how firm my commitment to staying aware
of the reality behind the words, over and over I found that I could not stay
41 For an interesting recent discussion of the role of language in the creation of professional
power, see JoAnne Brown, "Professional Language: Words That Succeed," Radical History
Review, no. 34 (1986), 33-51.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
connected, could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found I
could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons without once thinking
about the people who would be incinerated by them.
It is tempting to attribute this problem to qualities of the language, the
words themselves-the abstractness, the euphemisms, the sanitized,
friendly, sexy acronyms. Then all we would need to do is change the words,
make them more vivid; get the military planners to say "mass murder"
instead of "collateral damage" and their thinking would change.
The problem, however, is not only that defense intellectuals use abstract
terminology that removes them from the realities of which they
speak. There is no reality of which they speak. Or, rather, the "reality" of
which they speak is itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and
much of strategic doctrine altogether, was invented largely by mathematicians,
economists, and a few political scientists. It was invented to hold
together abstractly, its validity judged by its internal logic. Questions of
the correspondence to observable reality were not the issue. These abstract
systems were developed as a way to make it possible to "think about
the unthinkable"-not as a way to describe or codify relations on the
ground.42
So the greatest problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for
example, is not that it is grotesque to refer to the death and suffering caused
by any use of nuclear weapons as "limited" or that "limited nuclear war" is
an abstraction that is disconnected from human reality but, rather, that
"limited nuclear war" is itself an abstract conceptual system, designed,
embodied, achieved by computer modeling. It is an abstract world in
which hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to
know exactly what size nuclear weapon the opponent has used against
which targets, and in which they have adequate command and control to
make sure that their response is precisely equilibrated to the attack. In this
scenario, no field commander would use the tactical "mini-nukes" at his
disposal in the height of a losing battle; no EMP-generated electronic
failures, or direct attacks on command., and control centers, or human
errors would destroy communications networks. Our rational actors would
be free of emotional response to being attacked, free of political pressures
from the populace, free from madness or despair or any of the myriad other
factors that regularly affect human actions and decision making. They
would act solely on the basis of a perfectly informed mathematical calculus
of megatonnage.
So to refer to "limited nuclear war" is already to enter into a system that
is de facto abstract and removed from reality. To use more descriptive
2 For fascinating, detailed accounts of the development of strategic doctrine, see Fred
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); and Gregg F.
Herken, The Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
language would not, by itself, change that. In fact, I am tempted to say that
the abstractness of the entire conceptual system makes descriptive language
nearly beside the point. In a discussion of "limited nuclear war," for
example, it might make some difference if in place of saying "In a counterforce
attack against hard targets collateral damage could be limited," a
strategic analyst had to use words that were less abstract-if he had to say,
for instance, "If we launch the missiles we have aimed at their missile silos,
the explosions would cause the immediate mass murder of 10 million
women, men, and children, as well as the extended illness, suffering, and
eventual death of many millions more." It is true that the second sentence
does not roll off the tongue or slide across one's consciousness quite as
easily. But it is also true, I believe, that the ability to speak about "limited
nuclear war" stems as much, if not more, from the fact that the term
"limited nuclear war" refers to an abstract conceptual system rather than to
events that might take place in the real world. As such, there is no need to
think about the concrete human realities behind the model; what counts is
the internal logic of the system.43
This realization that the abstraction was not just in the words but also
characterized the entire conceptual system itself helped me make sense of
my difficulty in staying connected to human lives. But there was still a
piece missing. How is it possible, for example, to make sense of the
following paragraph? It is taken from a discussion of a scenario ("regime A")
in which the United States and the USSR have revised their offensive
weaponry, banned MIRVs, and gone to a regime of single warhead
(Midgetman) missiles, with no "defensive shield" (or what is familiarly
known as "Star Wars" or SDI):
The strategic stability of regime A is based on the fact that both sides
are deprived of any incentive ever to strike first. Since it takes
roughly two warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must
expend two of his missiles to destroy one of the enemy's. A first
strike disarms the attacker. The aggressor ends up worse off than
the aggressed.44
"The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed"? The homeland of
"the aggressed" has just been devastated by the explosions of, say, a
thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be ten to one hundred times more
43 Steven Kull's interviews with nuclear strategists can be read to show that on some level,
some of the time, some of these men are aware that there is a serious disjunction between their
models and the real world. Their justification for continuing to use these models is that "other
people" (unnamed, and on asking, unnameable) believe in them and that they therefore have
an important reality ("Nuclear Nonsense," Foreign Policy, no. 58 [Spring 1985], 28-52).
44 Charles Krauthammer, "Will Star Wars Kill Arms Control?" New Republic, no. 3,653
(January 21, 1985), 12-16.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor, whose
homeland is still untouched, "ends up worse off"? How is it possible to
think this? Even abstract language and abstract thinking do not seem to be
a sufficient explanation.
I was only able to "make sense of it" when I finally asked myself the
question that feminists have been asking about theories in every discipline:
What is the reference point? Who (or what) is the subject here?
In other disciplines, we have frequently found that the reference point
for theories about "universal human phenomena" has actually been white
men. In technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not white men, it
is not human beings at all; it is the weapons themselves. The aggressor thus
ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left;
human factors are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss.
In "regime A" and throughout strategic discourse, the concept of
"incentive" is similarly distorted by the fact that weapons are the subjects
of strategic paradigms. Incentive to strike first is present or absent according
to a mathematical calculus of numbers of "surviving" weapons. That is,
incentive to start a nuclear war is discussed not in terms of what possible
military or political ends it might serve but, instead, in terms of numbers of
weapons, with the goal being to make sure that you are the guy who still has
the most left at the end. Hence, it is frequently stated that MIRVed
missiles create strategic instability because they "give you the incentive to
strike first." Calculating that two warheads must be targeted on each
enemy missile, one MIRVed missile with ten warheads would, in theory,
be able to destroy five enemy missiles in their silos; you destroy more of
theirs than you have expended of your own. You win the numbers game. In
addition, if you do not strike first, it would theoretically take relatively few
of their MIRVed missiles to destroy a larger number of your own-so you
must, as they say in the business, "use 'em or lose 'em." Many strategic
analysts fear that in a period of escalating political tensions, when it begins
to look as though war may be inevitable, this combination makes "the
incentive to strike first" well nigh irresistible.
Incentive to launch a nuclear war arises from a particular configuration
of weapons and their hypothetical mathematical interaction. Incentive can
only be so narrowly defined because the referents of technostrategic
paradigms are weapons-not human lives, not even states and state power.
The fact that the subjects of strategic paradigms are weapons has
several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there
simply is no way to talk about human death or human societies when you
are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death simply
is "collateral damage"-collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons
themselves.
Second, if human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only
impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Hence,
questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis
and raise issues in human terms can be dismissed easily. No one will claim
that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional,
irrelevant to the business at hand to ask. The discourse among the experts
remains hermetically sealed.
The problem, then, is not only that the language is narrow but also that
it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself-as representing a
body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge.
The isolation of this technical knowledge from social or psychological or
moral thought, or feelings, is all seen as legitimate and necessary. The
outcome is that defense intellectuals can talk about the weapons that are
supposed to protect particular political entities, particular peoples and
their way of life, without actually asking if weapons can do it, or if they are
the best way to do it, or whether they may even damage the entities you are
supposedly protecting. It is not that the men I spoke with would say that
these are invalid questions. They would, however, simply say that they are
separate questions, questions that are outside what they do, outside their
realm of expertise. So their deliberations go on quite independently, as
though with a life of their own, disconnected from the functions and values
they are supposedly to serve.
Finally, the third problem is that this discourse has become virtually
the only legitimate form of response to the question of how to achieve
security. If the language of weaponry was one competing voice in the
discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the fact that the referents
of strategic paradigms are only weapons would be of little note. But
when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those
interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits
become staggering, and its entrapping qualities-the way in which, once
you adopt it, it becomes so hard to stay connected to human concernsbecome
more comprehensible.
Stage 4: The terror
As a newcomer to the world of defense analysts, I was continually startled
by likeable and admirable men, by their gallows humor, by the bloodcurdling
casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing
and chatting over the coffee pot. I also heard the language they spokeheard
the acronyms and euphemisms, and abstractions, heard the imagery,
heard the pleasure with which they used it.
Within a few weeks, what had once been remarkable became unnoticeable.
As I learned to speak, my perspective changed. I no longer stood
outside the impermeable wall of technostrategic language and, once in-
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
side, I could no longer see it. Speaking the language, I could no longer
really hear it. And once inside its protective walls, I began to find it difficult
to get out. The impermeability worked both ways.
I had not only learned to speak a language: I had started to think in it. Its
questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new
ideas. Its definitions of the parameters of reality became mine. Like the
White Queen, I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Not because I consciously believed, for instance, that a "surgically clean
counterforce strike" was really possible, but instead because some elaborate
piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the
possibility of those strikes, as well as on a host of other impossible things.45
My grasp on what I knew as reality seemed to slip. I might get very
excited, for example, about a new strategic justification for a "no first use"
policy and spend time discussing the ways in which its implications for our
force structure in Western Europe were superior to the older version.46
And after a day or two I would suddenly step back, aghast that I was so
involved with the military justifications for not using nuclear weapons-as
though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking
about-the mass incineration caused by a nuclear attack-was no longer in
my head.
Or I might hear some proposals that seemed to me infinitely superior to
the usual arms control fare. First I would work out how and why these
proposals were better and then work out all the ways to counter the
arguments against them. But then, it might dawn on me that even though
these two proposals sounded so different, they still shared a host of assumptions
that I was not willing to make (e.g., about the inevitable, eternal
conflict of interests between the United States and the USSR, or the
desirability of having some form of nuclear deterrent, or the goal of
"managing," rather than ending, the nuclear arms race). After struggling to
this point of seeing what united both positions, I would first feel as though I
had really accomplished something. And then all of a sudden, I would
realize that these new insights were things I actually knew before I ever
entered this community. Apparently, I had since forgotten them, at least
functionally, if not absolutely.
I began to feel that I had fallen down the rabbit hole-and it was a
struggle to climb back out.
45 For an excellent discussion of the myriad uncertainties that make it ludicrous to assume
the targeting accuracies posited in the notion of "surgically clean counterforce strikes," see
Fallows (n. 11 above), chap. 6.
46 "No first use" refers to the commitment not to be the first side to introduce nuclear
weapons into a "conventional" war. The Soviet Union has a. "no first use" policy, but the
United States does not. In fact, it is NATO doctrine to use nuclear weapons in a conventional
war in Western Europe, as a way of overcoming the Warsaw Pact's supposed superiority in
conventional weaponry and troop strength.
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
Conclusions
Suffice it to say that the issues about language do not disappear after you
have mastered technostrategic discourse. The seductions remain great.
You can find all sorts of ways to seemingly beat the boys at their own game;
you can show how even within their own definitions of rationality, most of
what is happening in the development and deployment of nuclear forces is
wildly irrational. You can also impress your friends and colleagues with
sickly humorous stories about the way things really happen on the inside.
There is tremendous pleasure in it, especially for those of us who have been
closed out, who have been told that it is really all beyond us and we should
just leave it to the benevolently paternal men in charge.
But as the pleasures deepen, so do the dangers. The activity of trying to
out-reason defense intellectuals in their own games gets you thinking
inside their rules, tacitly accepting all the unspoken assumptions of their
paradigms. You become subject to the tyranny of concepts. The language
shapes your categories of thought (e.g., here it becomes "good nukes" or
"bad nukes," not, nukes or no nukes) and defines the boundaries of
imagination (as you try to imagine a "minimally destabilizing basing mode"
rather than a way to prevent the weapon from being deployed at all).
Yet, the issues of language have now become somewhat less vivid and
central to me. Some of the questions raised by the experiences described
here remain important, but others have faded and been superseded by
new questions. These, while still not precisely the questions of an "insider,"
are questions I could not have had without being inside, without
having access to the knowledge and perspective the inside position affords.
Many of my questions now are more practical-which individuals and
institutions are actually responsible for the endless "modernization" and
proliferation of nuclear weaponry? What role does technostrategic rationality
actually play in their thinking? What would a reasonable, genuinely
defensive "defense" policy look like? Others are more philosophical. What
is the nature of the rationality and "realism" claimed by defense intellectuals
for their mode of thinking? What are the many different grounds on
which their claims to rationality can be shown to be spurious?
My own move away from a focus on the language is quite typical. Other
recent entrants into this world have commented to me that, while it is the
cold-blooded, abstract discussions that are most striking at first, within a
short time "you get past it-you stop hearing it, it stops bothering you, it
becomes normal-and you come to see that the language, itself, is not the
problem."
However, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss these early impressions.
They can help us learn something about the militarization of the
mind, and they have, I believe, important implications for feminist scholars
and activists who seek to create a more just and peaceful world.
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
Mechanisms of the mind's militarization are revealed through both
listening to the language and learning to speak it. Listening, it becomes
clear that participation in the world of nuclear strategic analysis does not
necessarily require confrontation with the central fact about military activity-that
the purpose of all weaponry and all strategy is to injure human
bodies.47 In fact, as Elaine Scarry points out, participation in military
thinking does not require confrontation with, and actually demands the
elision of, this reality.48
Listening to the discourse of nuclear experts reveals a series of culturally
grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that serve this purpose
and that make it possible to "think about the unthinkable," to work in
institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass
incinerations of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is
abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use;
paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and
deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and
nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation-all
of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed
from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is
creating through the discourse.49
Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking
can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their
context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of
human beings. That is, it reveals something about the process of militarization-and
the way in which that process may be undergone by man or
woman, hawk or dove.
Most often, the act of learning technostrategic language is conceived of
as an additive process: you add a new set of vocabulary words; you add the
reflex ability to decode and use endless numbers of acronyms; you add
some new information that the specialized language contains; you add the
conceptual tools that will allow you to "think strategically." This additive
view appears to be held by defense intellectuals themselves; as one said to
47 For an eloquent and graphic exploration of this point, see Scarry (n. 23 above), 73.
48 Scarry catalogs a variety of mechanisms that serve this purpose (ibid., 60-157). The
point is further developed by Sara Ruddick, "The Rationality of Care," in Thinking about
Women, War, and the Military, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Totowa, N.J.:
Rowman & Allanheld, in press).
49 My discussion of the specific ways in which this discourse creates new realities is in the
next part of this project, entitled, "The Emperor's New Armor." I, like many other social
scientists, have been influenced by poststructuralist literary theory's discussion of deconstructing
texts, point of view, and narrative authority within texts, and I take the language and
social practice of the defense intellectuals as a text to be read in this way. For a classic
introduction to this literature, see Josue Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
me, "Much of the debate is in technical terms-learn it, and decide
whether it's relevant later." This view also appears to be held by many who
think of themselves as antinuclear, be they scholars and professionals
attempting to change the field from within, or public interest lobbyists and
educational organizations, or some feminist antimilitarists.5 Some believe
that our nuclear policies are so riddled with irrationality that there is a lot of
room for well-reasoned, well-informed arguments to make a difference;
others, even if they do not believe that the technical information is very
important, see it as necessary to master the language simply because it is
too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. In either case, the idea is
that you add the expert language and information and proceed from there.
However, I have been arguing throughout this paper that learning the
language is a transformative, rather than an additive, process. When you
choose to learn it you enter a new mode of thinking-a mode of thinking
not only about nuclear weapons but also, de facto, about military and
political power and about the relationship between human ends and technological
means.
Thus, those of us who find U.S. nuclear policy desperately misguided
appear to face a serious quandary. If we refuse to learn the language, we are
virtually guaranteed that our voices will remain outside the "politically
relevant" spectrum of opinion. Yet, if we do learn and speak it, we not only
severely limit what we can say but we also invite the transformation, the
militarization, of our own thinking.
I have no solutions to this dilemma, but I would like to offer a few
thoughts in an effort to reformulate its terms. First, it is important to
recognize an assumption implicit in adopting the strategy of learning the
language. When we assume that learning and speaking the language will
give us a voice recognized as legitimate and will give us greater political
influence, we are assuming that the language itself actually articulates the
criteria and reasoning strategies upon which nuclear weapons development
and deployment decisions are made. I believe that this is largely an
illusion. Instead, I want to suggest that technostrategic discourse functions
more as a gloss, as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons
for these decisions hide. That rather than informing and shaping decisions,
it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have
occurred for utterly different reasons. If this is true, it raises some serious
questions about the extent of the political returns we might get from using
technostrategic discourse, and whether they can ever balance out the
potential problems and inherent costs.
50 Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this strategy is Sheila Tobias. See, e.g.,
"Demystifying Defense: Closing the Knowledge Gap," Social Policy 13, no. 3 (1983): 29-32;
and Sheila Tobias, Peter Goudinoff, Stefan Leader, and Shelah Leader, What Kinds of Guns
Are They Buying for Your Butter? (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1982).
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Summer 1987 / SIGNS
I do not, however, want to suggest that none of us should learn the
language. I do not believe that this language is well suited to achieving the
goals desired by antimilitarists, yet at the same time, I, for one, have found
the experience of learning the language useful and worthwhile (even if at
times traumatic). The question for those of us who do choose to learn it, I
think, is what use are we going to make of that knowledge?
One of the most intriguing options opened by learning the language is
that it suggests a basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of the
defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When
defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the
scenarios they plan, their response is to claim the high ground of rationality;
they are the only ones whose response to the existence of nuclear
weapons is objective and realistic. They portray those who are radically
opposed to the nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional.
"Idealistic activists" is the pejorative they set against their own hard-nosed
professionalism.
Much of their claim to legitimacy, then, is a claim to objectivity born of
technical expertise and to the disciplined purging of the emotional valences
that might threaten their objectivity. But if the surface of their discourseits
abstraction and technical jargon-appears at first to support these
claims, a look just below the surface does not. There we find currents of
homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive toward competency
and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and privileged
group, the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the
priesthood, and the thrilling power of becoming Death, shatterer of
worlds. How is it possible to hold this up as a paragon of cool-headed
objectivity?
I do not wish here to discuss or judge the holding of "objectivity" as an
epistemological goal. I would simply point out that, as defense intellectuals
rest their claims to legitimacy on the untainted rationality of their discourse,
their project fails according to its own criteria. Deconstructing
strategic discourse's claims to rationality is, then, in and of itself, an
important way to challenge its hegemony as the sole legitimate language
for public debate about nuclear policy.
I believe that feminists, and others who seek a more just and peaceful
world, have a dual task before us-a deconstructive project and a reconstructive
project that are intimately linked.51 Our deconstructive task
requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse.
The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized
rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for
any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to
51 Harding and Hintikka, eds. (n. 5 above), ix-xix, esp. x.
717
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Cohn / DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS
define what we hear and how we name the world-until that voice is
delegitimated.
Our reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative
visions of possible futures, a task of recognizing and developing alternative
conceptions of rationality, a task of creating rich and imaginative alternative
voices-diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent
those futures.
Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age
Harvard University Medical School
718
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