The Long Goodbye: Beyond an Essentialist Construction of WMD

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This article responds to an earlier article by Christian Enemark to reassess the concept of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). How is the concept defined and can it be removed from policy and academic discourse? Firstly, this paper contests the reduction of WMD to mean a fixed set of armaments (nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons). In contrast to this essentialist approach, it uses American archival and policy examples to demonstrate that the concept has been defined in a wide variety of ways, choices that reflect the strategic and contextualized intent of the actors. Secondly, this article questions the assertion that the quality of strategic thought and security policy would be improved if the concept were abandoned. While the conflation of diverse weapons under the umbrella of WMD is problematic, the political nature of the concept's construction means its elimination is not straightforward. Conceptual change cannot be imposed independently of the way meaning is politically constructed. While not disputing the serious problems associated with allowing the WMD concept to survive, this article concludes that the real question here is one of context. Failing to address why and how it is used leads to underestimation of how likely removal is within the current discursive climate. As long as that value remains – as long as WMD is an effective resource for policymakers to shape security policy – there is little chance of being able to abandon the WMD concept in the foreseeable future.