Nuclear Weapons

The material power of nuclear weapons is universally recognized, but their communicative power is equally extraordinary. The strategist Carl von Clausewitz argued that war is fundamentally a social activity, a form of persuasion guided by rules of grammar more than by strict logic. He also took pains to distinguish between the abstract concept of “absolute” or “ideal” war and the inevitable particularity of “real” war. Both of those insights apply to nuclear weapons viewed as devices of communication; that is, both products and instruments of communication.

Nuclear weapons could not have arisen without two kinds of organized communication: the organized inquiry of Big Science and the organized production of 20th-century industry. Those two institutions emerged at a historical moment that led to their application, at an unprecedented scale, to the invention of the most destructive weapons ever created. The threat of a Nazi nuclear weapon that motivated this invention had disappeared by the time it came to fruition, but it was nonetheless used on Japan. Some historians argue that the primary reason for that use was communicative: to make a statement to the Soviet Union about U.S. military power. Other commentators, such as the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, have noted that the use of such “technically sweet” inventions seems inevitable once they become possible.

Irrespective of these controversial claims, the subsequent history of the cold war is largely one of intentional and accidental communication though the medium of nuclear weapons. The U.S.–Soviet arms race operated through a grammar of threats, responses, and counterresponses and through a vocabulary of weapons systems, force deployments, and strategic postures. The highly rationalized models of defense strategists, which guided this dangerous conversation, may represent the closest approximation yet to Clausewitz's ideal war. Meanwhile, the horrific scenarios and moral objections offered by critics and protesters sought to capture the implications of a real nuclear war. The “nuclear criticism” movement that emerged in the 1980s was founded on the principle that nuclear extinction is the ultimate symbol, a “transcendental signifier” that organized all other aspects of society and culture. Accordingly, the literary critic Alan Nadel argues that the cold war principle of “containment” extended beyond the U.S. policy directed at the Soviet Union to a parallel containment of social norms, roles, values, and practices in the name of national security.

Many scholars of the cold war argue that it persisted for four decades without another use of nuclear weapons because the conversation was relatively simple, with two principal actors who shared an understanding of its grammar and vocabulary. Throughout that period, the number of players in the “nuclear club” stayed small, with their roles subordinated to those of the two superpowers. Nuclear communication played out within that framework around topics including arms control, nuclear testing, civil defense measures, and missile defense systems. Across those areas, communication scholars have examined practical and theoretical questions from a range of perspectives, including presidential rhetoric, negotiation and conflict management, public discourse, and the rhetoric of science and technology.

The grammar, vocabulary, and scope of the nuclear conversation changed with the end of the cold war. New nations have now joined the nuclear club, while others threaten to do so, seeking to communicate their status as modern [Page 527]players on the world stage. New concerns have emerged about nonstate actors' access to nuclear technologies, as nuclear commerce becomes globalized and nuclear knowledge disseminates. Meanwhile, the material and communicative legacies of the superpowers' commitment to nuclear weapons have become more evident, from environmental and public health damages to compromises of democracy made under the umbrella of nuclear secrecy.

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