Nuclear Discourse Research Articles

Discerning nuclear proliferation intentions: some lessons from nature

Discerning the nuclear proliferation intentions of nation-states is a challenge faced by strategic policy decision makers worldwide. Typical nuclear proliferation discourses revolve around the intentions and capabilities of nation-states, as also the events and conditions furthering the cause of nuclear proliferation. Various international relations theories try to explain a state's motivations for proliferation. However, policy makers are often confronted with strategic decision-making situations that are complex, nonlinear and evolving. In order to provide them with any meaningful support under such circumstances, a Decision Support System (DSS) model is required that can provide a complex, emergent insight into the proliferation intentions of nation-states. This paper presents such a computationally intelligent model (Discerning Nuclear Intentions or DiNI) based on the sociobiological phenomenon of altruism. A hypothetical case study is used to demonstrate the model. The results show the potential of this model as a strategic nuclear policy DSS for containing nuclear proliferation. Further research directions are discussed.

Grounding Postmodernism

Grounding Postmodernism Tony Hilfer Our reader for Adam Katz's essay on the late Ronald Sukenick observed "I think the article is hugely valuable for the growing number of . . . graduate students who work within post-structuralist premises but are fascinated by writing that, while conscious of matters that we call post-structuralist, exceeds the entailments—aesthetic, political, ideological—of those premises." I would expand this to young critics and add that there is much postmodernist writing that resists orthodox post-structuralist prescriptions by pushing toward transcendence, even to the archangelic figures of Nabokov and Pynchon. Katz sees Sukenick as being as self-reflective as anyone around, but as grounding his metaleptic razzle-dazzle in the forbidden category of experience interpreted by Katz through the sobering perspective of Hannah Arendt. Timothy Gray's "A World without Gravity" shows the logic of the counterintuitive pairing of Jim Carroll, poet, memoirist, rock performer, and former basketball star with Kathleen Norris, poet, memoirist, religious writer, and former Virgin of Bennington. Both sought to escape gravity into a postmodernist lightness of being as they circled in the Warhol orbit. Both wrote about angels but eventually rejected what Carroll called "these shifting platforms of artifice and quick change" to come back to ground, a spiritually vitalized ground. Gray grounds his essay as much in their life experiences as their writings, powerfully relating the two and, not incidentally, revealing the limitations of "nihilist chic" of a post-structuralist ethos that at first enabled but finally threatened to destroy their "expanding angelic energy." Finally, Ken Millard analyzes Rick Moody's Purple America as a novel that grounds its metafictional self-reflectiveness in its attempt to "historicize its own postmodernist aesthetic" via an examination of the corrupting effect of what might be termed nuclear discourse, with the characters and their language fissionating in the foreground while a reactor leak causes perturbation in the background. These three essays remind us, to cite two Jim Carroll band songs, that while we may respond to the power of angelic dreams—"I want the angel / Whose dreams are fatal"—the outcome may be "People That Die." Copyright © 2005 University of Texas Press

Chapter Three: One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication

Chapter Three: One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication

B2. Victor Gilinsky, ““Israel's Bomb,”” Letter to the Editor N.Y.Review of Books) concerning Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb, New York, 13 May 2004.

Gilinsky's letter to the editor was published in the New York Review of Books on 4 May. Notes have been deleted for space. Walid Khalidi wrote the following introduction for JPS:When Avner Cohen, an Israeli living in the United States, published his Israel and the Bomb in 1998, a Ha'Aretz reviewer described the book as a ““bombshell,”” while the Israeli historian Tom Segev declared that it would necessitate ““the rewriting of Israeli history.”” Although the book was based on documents mostly in the public domain in the United States, Israeli intelligence was so angered by Cohen's defiance of its taboo on matters nuclear that it subjected him to fifty hours of interrogation upon his first visit to Israel following publication. Cohen's book has now come out in a paperback edition, reviewed by Israeli writer Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books (15 January 2004). This review elicited, in its turn, the letter published here by Victor Gilinsky, formerly both a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and head of the physical sciences department at Rand Corporation.Those who have not read Cohen's book may want to know what it contained, despite the significant omissions pointed out in Gilinsky's letter. Basically, Israel and the Bomb tells how, with the exception of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Israel was able to win the acquiescence of successive U.S. administrations to Israel's introduction into the Middle East of nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which according to recent estimates now comprise up to two hundred nuclear bombs and thirty-five tactical thermonuclear devices with the long-range missiles to deliver them.Already by 1960 (thanks to French help, in retaliation for Egyptian president Gamal `Abd al-Nasser's support of the Algerian revolution) Israel was well on its way to nuclear weapons capacity. Christian Herter, secretary of state in the outgoing Eisenhower administration, briefed John Kennedy on the subject on his first day in office in 1961. An interesting tidbit in Cohen's book is that Israel's nuclear program in the 1960s was common knowledge in Israeli and American Jewish business circles——Israeli businessmen having been solicited for funds for the Dimona reactor, with American Jews led by Abe Feinberg, a Democratic activist (chairman of the America Bank and Trust Co. and a trustee of the Weizmann Institute of Science), lending a hand. For the first two years after Kennedy was inaugurated, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion successfully stalled increasingly persistent U.S. demands that Dimona undergo twice yearly inspections——then deemed the minimum for meaningful inspection. By May 1963, Kennedy's patience was running out, and he sent Ben-Gurion a sharp letter warning that U.S. commitment to Israel would be ““seriously jeopardized”” unless Israel was more forthcoming on the nuclear issue. One month later, Ben-Gurion resigned his premiership, handing it over to the more pliant Levi Eshkol whom he despised and expected to give in to Kennedy. In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. Ironically, it was Kennedy who authorized the first U.S. delivery of heavy weapons——the Hawk missiles——to Israel, and these ended up deployed around the Dimona reactor.Thenceforth, it was plain sailing for Israel——Lyndon Johnson not being too particular about nuclear (especially Israeli) proliferation. Presently the regulating doctrine in U.S.-Israeli nuclear discourse became that of ““ambiguity”” or ““opacity,”” whereby Israel declares it will not be the ““first”” to introduce nuclear WMDs in the Middle East, even though both Tel Aviv and Washington know only too well that it has already done so. In return for this Israeli stance, the United States provides Israel with massive infusions of conventional weapons to ““dissuade”” it from resorting to its nuclear arsenal——an idyllic case for Israel of having its cake and eating it too. This charade continues to this day, even as the United States went into Iraq to prevent its acquisition of WMDs and is breathing fire and brimstone against Iran's nuclear intentions——themselves a response to Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Nuclear safety discourse in the European Arctic

The article outlines discourses surrounding the emergence and implementation of the Norwegian Plan of Action for nuclear safety in northwestern Russia. The launching of the Plan of Action was facilitated by the ‘Barents euphoria discourse,’ which held optimistic views of a general clean-up in northwestern Russia with the help of infrastructure financed by the Nordic side, and the ‘nuclear disaster discourse,’ hinging on the idea of a ‘ticking time bomb’ in Norway's immediate vicinity to the east. The latter discourse clashes with the prevalent Russian ‘nuclear complex discourse,’ the main assumption of which is that issues of nuclear safety should be left to the experts, not to the general public. Criticism of the Plan of Action mounted around the turn of the century, eventually causing the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to designate it as largely unsuccessful. The ‘environmental blackmail discourse’ took over in Norway, with its story line that ‘the Russians are taking advantage of us.’ The ‘cold peace discourse’ in Russia has primarily served to obscure Norwegian motivations for the Russians.

"Our Bruised Arms Hung Up as Monuments": Nuclear Iconography in Post-Cold War Culture

Traditionally, communication scholars have examined nuclear discourse at the expense of nuclear images. This essay compensates by developing a nuclear-critical iconology, one sensitive to the role of images in creating and disrupting popular consent to the production of nuclear weapons. As such, this essay contributes to larger critical projects concerned with visual rhetoric and post-Cold War culture. Following a review of Cold War nuclear iconography and the changing post-Cold War nuclear condition, I examine three aesthetics in post-Cold War nuclear iconography for their signi.cance and potential consequences.

Limits of dissent: A comparative study of dissident voices in the nuclear discourse of Pakistan and India

The recent nuclear detonations on the subcontinent have been the ultimate stage of dominant security discourses in India and Pakistan. With nationalist tempers at an all‐time high, the widespread belief that there is a consensus within the two countries on the nuclear issue has been further consolidated and little attention has been paid to the dissenting voices that have deviated from official positions. This paper attempts to comparatively analyse the nature and direction of this dissent and explore its potentials and limits in affecting the nuclear discourse in the subcontinent. The first section shows the salience of the discourse methodology to analyse the counter‐narratives, while the second outlines the main features of the dominant discourse against which the dissenting voices have to compete. This is followed by an overview of various strands of dissenting voices on the nuclear issue in Pakistan and India and a comparative analysis of these voices.

Home zero: Images of home and field in nuclear‐cultural studies

Images of “home” and “field” pervade discourse about nuclear weapons. These images create inter‐related symbolic realms in which nuclear operations are variously promoted, accomodated, and resisted. In analyzing a series of personal and fieldwork narratives, this essay explores various configurations of these images in both official and critical nuclear discourses. It argues that the discursive fields of national‐strategic and critical‐ethnographic operations are mapped and conducted over domestic sites. The existence and oppositional power of these sites are typically repressed, however, in order to maintain the authority of professional nuclear discourses. Revising the relationship between Home and Field potentially transforms the existing practices of both nuclear hegemony and progressive nuclear criticism.

Silence and Awkwardness in Nuclear Discourse

Journal Article Silence and Awkwardness in Nuclear Discourse Get access Antony Rowland Antony Rowland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 43, Issue 176, Summer 1994, Pages 151–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/43.176.151 Published: 01 July 1994

Nuclear Discourse in the 1980s: The Unravelling Conventions of the Cold War

The power and importance of discourse conventions in the cold war are revealed through their breach. The Reagan Administration talked publicly about nuclear weapons as a way to win a nuclear war. This new mode of representing nuclear weapons breached the deterrence convention, i.e. the purpose of nuclear weapons is to avoid war, not fight war. Humanists fearful of nuclear destruction, moralists condemning the sinful nature of nuclear war, and peace activists demanding a freeze on the production of nuclear weapons challenged this discourse move and struggled to reset the parameters of the nuclear conversation. To repair this breach, the Reagan Administration advocated a strategic defense and considered abolishing nuclear weapons entirely. SDI countered the moral phrasings of the bishops and silenced the peace movement, but only by further undermining cold war conventions. Reagan's abolitionist moves breached the convention of relying on nuclear weapons to counter the threat of Soviet expansion. In this newly opened discourse space, Gorbachev challenged the most basic convention of cold war discourse, the Soviet threat, by denying the US an enemy. It is more difficult for the US to use the Soviet Union as a rationale for its policies when the Soviet threat is removed from US strategic discourse. Our analysis suggests Gorbachev was led to an alternative security vision for the superpowers by the West's loss of discursive control over nuclear weapons, which occurred when the Reagan Administration breached the conventions that tied cold war discourse together.

"Three Quarks for Muster Mark": Quantum Wordplay and Nuclear Discourse in Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker"

In Physics and Philosophy (1958), Werner Heisenberg raised a deceptively simple question about the role of language in modern science. Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum theory, asked, How might we understand nuclear physics when we cannot speak about the atom in ordinary language? As Heisenberg explained it, this was a new riddle. In the past, when the conventions of language and the conditions of science had always matched, no such problem existed. The scientific concepts of the last century, for instance, were perfectly congruous with the normal use of language, which worked equally well for the scientist, engineer, and layperson alike as a medium of understanding. This use of language may have been founded upon incorrect notions of space and time, as it turns out, but these categories guaranteed the presumed objectivity of ordinary discourse. In return, ordinary language seemed to provide science with a reliable degree of efficacy in describing nature and calculating the results of experiments. Science and language, in short, enjoyed a reciprocity which appeared to assure the normal function of both.

Author’s style and world-view in nuclear discourse: A quantitative analysis

Author’s style and world-view in nuclear discourse: A quantitative analysis