Nuclear discourse in a community of defense intellectuals: The effects of technostrategic language and rationality, and their role in American political culture

This paper is an examination of the discourse of nuclear defense intellectuals, exploring its effects both within the professional community and in the wider political culture. Feminist critiques of dominant Western concepts of reason, as well as post-structuralist work in discourse analysis, provide the intellectual frame.;Taking a lecture on C;Finally, I argue that the criteria and arguments of techno-strategic discourse do not actually have the formative role in decisions about nuclear weapons and strategy that we assume. But the discourse functions, nonetheless, in multiple ways that are crucial to making the perpetuation of nuclear arms race possible. It mobilizes a set of cultural associations with science and technology, including beliefs in objectivity, neutrality, and the "technological imperative." These resonances enable it to perform what I call its multiple "deterrent" and "legitimation" functions, deterring political thought and action, rather than nuclear war.;I conclude by addressing the implications of this analysis for anti-nuclear politics.;A narrative of my experience as a participant observer at a prominent defense studies center is used to analyze the ways in which "techno-strategic" language abstracts, regularizes and domesticates nuclear weapons and war. The language has so many assumptions built in, and is so hermetically sealed in the kinds of questioning and thinking it permits and excludes, that in speaking it, it becomes very hard to pose certain kinds of problems, or to express certain values. I identify and explore some of the particular characteristics of the language that enable it to function in this way, and argue that learning and speaking the language is a transformative, rather than an additive, process.