Record: 1

Title: Nuclear weapons and communication studies: A review essay.

Author(s): Taylor, Bryan C.
Source: Western Journal of Communication; Summer98, Vol. 62 Issue 3, p300, 16p
Document Type: Article
Subject(s): COLD War
COMMUNICATION
NUCLEAR weapons
Abstract: Presents information on the nuclear weapons which became a compelling
object for communication scholars during the late Cold War period. Relevance
of the motives and claims of nuclear criticism to the discipline of
communication; Critics' view on nuclear weapons.
Full Text Word Count: 6876
ISSN: 1057-0314
Accession Number: 1244780
Database: Communication & Mass Media Complete

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES: A REVIEW

ESSAY

Contents During the late Cold War period, nuclear weapons briefly became a
compelling object for communication scholars. This essay reviews that body
Introduction: of work and considers the prospects for nuclear communication scholarship
Nuclear Criticism in post-Cold War culture.

The Bomb in FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, international politics and literary theory conspired
Communication to create an ambitious project known as "nuclear criticism." This project--
REFERENCES originally a loose confederation of scholars in philosophy, languages, and
literature--arose partly in response to renewed Cold War tensions during the
NOTES first Reagan administration. These tensions emerged around events such as
the collapse of detente and arms control, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
aggressive rhetoric by U.S. officials about successful--given "enough shovels"--warfighting with the
"evil empire," and U.S. deployment of advanced missiles in Europe. These events produced a flood of
popular discourse that confronted the politics, strategy, and morality through which nuclear weapons
had become institutionalized. Organized protest increased worldwide, and condensed around a
movement to "Freeze" the development of nuclear weapons. A variety of popular-cultural texts
provided wrenching images of nuclear war as environmental and social catastrophe. This rising panic
anti resentment in turn elicited counter-insurgently President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative
captured the popular imagination and weakened the Freeze movement. Nuclear culture, arguably, had
never been so agonistic.

Introduction: Nuclear Criticism

In a conference held at Cornell University in April 1984, these scholars assembled to develop a
uniquely nuclear criticism, one that would "demonstrate how the forms of the current nuclear
discussion are being shaped by literary or critical assumptions whose implications are often, perhaps
systematically, distorted" ("Proposal," 1984, p. 2). In his keynote address, Derrida (1984) delivered a
mixed prognosis for the project from the vantage of deconstruction. The good news, he offered, was
that since nuclear war had not (yet) happened and yet was the hotly-contested object of simulations
(such as computer war-games), its ontological status was "fabulously textual"-- and thus uniquely
suited for criticism. The bad news was that--for the very same reasons-critics had no more authority to
make definitive claims about the nuclear "referent" than the speakers they were critiquing. This
condition meant that critics could "speak" to nuclear "power"--but not with certainty of unproblematic
"Truth" (see Ruthven, 1993).

Confounded at launch, nuclear criticism fractured but still ignited. As a method for confronting the limits
of knowledge, deconstruction seemed uniquely suited for the imagined catastrophe of nuclear war,
which threatened to destroy the very grounds of speech--self, world, and other. In turn, the high stakes
of this project offered to redeem deconstruction's alleged relativism (Chaloupka, 1992). Two genres of
scholarship emerged in subsequent studies of public-policy, media journalism, and popular-cultural
texts. One genre was metatheoretical, and embraced Derridean textualism to critique the possibilities
of valid nuclear-critical discourse. The other was more pragmatic, and analyzed texts with the goal of
ethical intervention in public deliberation. Generally, scholars of both genres agreed that
"nuclearism"(n1) was intertextually configured by potent cultural discourses such as militarism,
nationalism, bureaucracy, and technical-rationality. This hybrid discourse, they argued, suppressed its
contingencies, normalized the presence and use of nuclear weapons, deferred the accountability of
nuclear professionals, and inhibited ethical reflection about the risks and consequences of nuclear war
(Aubrey, 1985; Chilton, 1986; Cohn, 1987). Beyond this initial spate of activity, however, scholarly
interest in nuclear criticism per se proved temporary.

Ten years after the Cornell conference, one observer paused to wonder "Whatever happened to
nuclear criticism?" (Norris, 1994, p. 130). His post-mortem offered several explanations for the
movement's transience. Whether due to affinity or contamination, nuclear criticism had internalized
problematic elements of Cold War discourse, including a presumption of permanent crisis that offered
little sense of hope, cycles, or tactics. Some critics displayed a pompous theoretical abstraction. Caputi
(1995) criticized the project's Eurocentric reliance on White, male philosophers to the exclusion of
organic and inductive critical wisdom developed by feminists and indigenous peoples. Perhaps most
egregiously, Derrida's assertion of "fabulous textuality" ignored the reality of nuclear weapons for the
wartime residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their descendents. It further ignored the global
populations affected by radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons production and testing. These
omissions had important consequences for Derrida's claim about the alleged crisis faced by critics
attempting to resolve the "undecidability" of thermonuclear war. Through contrast, these neglected
topics indicated that the narratively-shaped prospects of superpower conflict were not the only valid
object of' nuclear criticism. The historical development of nuclear weapons, alternatively, has had
enormous consequences which, while highly contested, are not necessarily undecidable--at least not
equally, not permanently, and not all in the same way. To these reasons, finally, we might add the
daunting technical complexity, mind-bending paradoxes, and despair-inducing quality of nuclear
discourse to explain why scholars during this period may have balked at joining the project;. Seemingly
wedded to crisis, nuclear criticism began to dissolve in the late 1980's along with the apparatus that
had produced that crisis. Publication of the group's newsletter ceased. Its members moved on to other
interests.

Recent attempts to rejuvenate nuclear criticism have emphasized its relevance for the post-Cold War
environment. With characteristic wordplay, Luckhurst (1993) argues that the seeming anachronism of
nuclear criticism can be redeemed by engaging the geographical displacement -- or anachorism--of
nuclear weapons caused by the implosion of the former Soviet Union. This proliferation has
confounded the binary, ethnocentric geographies of the Cold War that viewed the world primarily in
'terms of East and West. In a vivid analogy, Ruthven (1993) urges nuclear criticism to adapt to the
evolving conditions of risk:

What [has been] bequeathed to us ... is not the 'end' of nuclearism but rather a displacement of it. best
imagined in terms of what geomorphologists call... an 'avulsion' ... the sudden abandonment of a
substantial length of river channel for a new course somewhere else on the flood plain [T]he process of
nuclear catastrophe is merely deferred in [this] process of dispersal; sooner or later a flood-plain is
going to flood, no matter' where the main channel happens to be. (pp. 88-89)

Other scholars (Mann, 1996; Sproule, 1997) suggest that nuclear criticism may yet be subsumed by an
emerging, interdisciplinary field. of "war studies" inspired by the technological spectacle of the Gulf
War. In its real-time conflation of war-event and media-story, that conflict displayed several elements
traditionally associated with the nuclear condition speed, disembodiment, hyper-reality, panoptical
surveillance, and relentless devastation caused by cybernetic munitions.

Whatever its future, the legacy of nuclear criticism includes its sophisticated and comprehensive attack
on the general illogic of "deterrence" strategy (in which the reason for nuclear weapons is nuclear
weapons, and all murders are also suicides). This attack emphasized a unique paradox in deterrence
discourse, in which the genres of constative and performative speech acts are hopelessly fused
(Norris, 1994). This discursive condition emerges from an imperative in which nuclear opponents seek
valid knowledge about, each others' capabilities, motives, and intentions as a means of gaining
strategic advantage, while simultaneously seeking to deny this advantage to the other. Secrecy and
the threat of deception, however, make this information virtually impossible to obtain and verify. As a
result, each side gazes intensively and suspiciously at the other, and acts knowing that it is gazed
upon. Under this mutual scrutiny, all aspects of opponents' societies are potentially semiotic and are
harnessed to their logics of national (in)security. These logics constrain officials from authentically
representing nuclear conditions because they cannot control the appropriation of these statements
within economies of espionage, paranoia, and aggression, or prevent--once launched--their potential
consequences. This desperate struggle between the felt need for control and feared loss of control
encourages strategic distortion and heated dispute

The corrosive effects of this distortion on nuclear democracy are richly captured in an exchange (Rubin
& Cummings, 1989, p. 53) between a television news reporter and the commander of the U.S.
Strategic Air Command. When the reporter suggests that--contrary to official doctrine -- actual U.S.
nuclear targeting policy is likely to incite and escalate Soviet attack, the commander is curtly
dismissive: "Your words." What is important about this utterance, for our purposes, is its pejorative
marginalization of oppositional discourse as discourse--that is, as-if merely 'semantic.' In this twilight of
logic, it is apparently not necessary to reflectively engage contradictions. Instead, through the (il)logic
encoded in the commander's dismissal, the relationship between official policy and targeting
operations (the referent of his words) -- and by extension, nuclear weapons themselves--is located
prior to and beyond discourse.(n2) That relationship is mystified, and the weapons are reified as if
'natural' conditions. In this way, the discourse-defying quality of nuclear weapons is appropriated by the
State as a hegemonic means of suppressing resistance.(n3) Under this paradox, historically, public
dissent has been further constrained as cultural subjects internalized official fear of its expression as
potentially signifying a lack of resolve to annihilate one's enemy that would--presumably--invite attack.
As a result of this paradox, nuclear hegemony seals itself through the willful misreading of popular self-
silencing as active endorsement.

The Bomb in Communication

The motives and claims of nuclear criticism were exceedingly relevant to the discipline of
Communication. These elements spoke directly to its central concerns discursive construction of social
realities, ideological productivity of the mass media, interaction between rhetors and. audiences, and
logical dispute among groups regarding the appropriateness of warrants and evidence for policy
claims. It is not surprising, then, that several communication scholars published studies of nuclear
weapons phenomena during this period. These projects do not appear to have been directly "caused"
by nuclear criticism. Instead, its influence was partial, and indirectly shaped a unique disciplinary
response to the developments that had inspired nuclear criticism itself. This response was manifest in
specific investments of professional resources. In November 1986, Goodnight and Williams organized
a seminar on nuclear criticism at the Speech Communication Association conference in Chicago.
Conference papers and dissertations with nuclear themes appeared with increased frequency. Two
journals in the field--Journal of Communication (1989) and Journal of the American Forensic
Association (1988)-- devoted special issues to nuclear topics. It is worth noting that in the latter, five of
the six "questions of theoretical interest" addressed by its essays seem durable for the post-Cold War
era: "the hardening of historical interpretation, the fragmentation of public discourse ... the strategic
options of counter-movements, the search for alternative sources of reason, and the power of critique
to undermine the legitimacy of a specialized language" (Goodnight, 1988, p. 142). Reviewing this body
of literature creates a particular "archaeology" of how disciplines engage potential research topics
according to their existing logics, competencies, and preferences, How, then, was resurgent interest in
nuclear weapons registered within Communication Studies?

One answer is that it was appropriated within existing fields of scholarship on nuclear communication.
One principal field was rhetorical criticism, whose practicioners have frequently addressed Cold War
politics (Medhurst, Ivie, Wander, & Scott, 1987), and science and technology (Campbell, 1975;
Wander, 1976). Within this field, we can identify at least five inter-related conversations about nuclear
phenomena. First, are the foundational studies of communication surrounding nuclear power (Farrell &
Goodnight, 1981; Vickery, 1990). These studies have clarified the influence of modernist mythologies
such as progress and empiricism on technical reasoning, and the failure of that dominant rationality to
adequately inform public deliberation about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy. Secondly, we can
identify a subculture of argumentation scholars (Dauber, 1988; Hynes, 1988) bearing technical
concerns about the adequacy of deliberative resources and processes (we may also note here the
number of nuclear communication scholars with a background in forensics). These scholars have
engaged directly the paradoxes and dysfunctions of speech genres such as arms control and strategic
doctrine. Their work models these (ir)rationalities in order to diagnose and improve their elements (e.g.,
evidentiary criteria).

Thirdly, some critics have implicitly viewed nuclear weapons as a context for reactionary Cold War
rhetoric characterized by a "righteous, inflexible, proselytizing, paranoid vision" (Bormann, Cragan, &
Shields, 1996, p. 25). Within this vision, some rhetors have been obsessed with detecting and
containing the communist Other, and ensuring the security and loyalty of the capitalist-democratic Self.
This realist and nationalist rhetoric has often employed patriotic, de-civilizing metaphors (Ivie,
1987)and Manichean dualism (e.g., between the qualities of freedom/oppression; individualism/
totalitarianism; cooperation/ intransigence) to frame 'the enemy' as a legitimate target--and illegitimate
possessor--of nuclear weapons.

A fourth group of public address scholars has examined the rhetorical management of nuclear
weapons by U.S. Presidents and other administration officials. These rhetors, critics reveal, have been
uniquely challenged in moments of international crisis by the paradox of credibly wielding weapons that
are, in effect, militarily useless. They have also been challenged by the conflicting (perceived) needs of
multiple nuclear audiences (for example, of domestic citizens and allies for the reassurance of stability,
of enemies for threats and warnings, and of commercial nuclear power interests for promotion). These
exigencies have created schizophrenic nuclear personae and dangerous opportunities for skillful
propaganda (Medhurst, 1994). Bill Clinton forms a unique case for these critics because he is the first
nuclear-age President unable to draw on the authority of the traditional, Cold War meta-narrative to
define and engage crises (Kuypers, 1997).
A final group of rhetorical critics has been generally concerned with the interaction of nuclear interests
in the public sphere, and the specific fates of social movements that challenge nuclear hegemony. In a
series of skillful analyses, the Mechlings (Mechling & Mechling, 1991; 1992) have demonstrated how
Cold War texts embody a complex, historical 'war of position' between normalizing and oppositional
discourses. Their work suggests that the very gaps and contradictions in official rhetoric (such as the
embrace of war as a solution to war) which incite anti-nuclear groups to discourse can also diffuse and
undermine their success. For this group of critics, the struggle between the Nuclear Freeze and SDI
campaigns is a compelling topic, and it has been punctuated in various ways. For example, Hogan and
Dorsey (1991.) focused exclusively on deliberation of the Freeze resolution in the House of
Representatives as a case-study of rhetorical invention of "the people." Other critics (Goodnight, 1986;
Manoff, 1989; Mosco, 1987; Rushing, 1986) have focused on SDI as a paradoxical vision that drew for
its legitimation on compelling cultural myths (e.g., about the restorative powers of Science and the
Frontier), that disguised its limited function as a missile--not population--defense, that encouraged the
misrecognition of technological possibilities as actualities, that perpetuated the strategic conditions it
claimed to transcend, and that indirectly restructured relationships among economic, political, and
military spheres. While the relationship between SDI and the Freeze is implicit in all of these studies,
two studies have emphasized their interaction (King & Petress, 1990), although they focus more
broadly on official de-legitimation of the Freeze, examining the counter insurgency rhetoric that
contributed to SDI and that undermined the-in theory-superior universalism of Freeze claims. Bjork's
(1992) study systematically evaluates the tropes and strategies of each side to demonstrate how SDI
successfully trumped the moral grounds of the Freeze critique (see also Schiappa, 1989).

Rhetorical-critical studies also have depicted the different theoretical resources which communication
scholars bring to bear on nuclear weapons discourse. One related tension in these studies is that
between formalist and post-formalist orientations to criticism. One group of scholars has been
concerned with characterizing the unique structural properties (such as metaphor and fantasy themes)
and strategies (such as domestication and bureaucratization) of nuclear discourse (Ausmus, 1998;
Foss & Littlejohn, 1986; Kauffman, 1989; Schiappa, 1989). Drawing on Burke, Brummet (1989) made
an argument that is foundational for this orientation: that nuclear weapons reflect and exacerbate
pernicious qualities of language such as reification, hierarchy; and an "entelechical" compulsion to
perfect technological possibilities. Potentially, however, this synchronic focus can limit critical
appreciation of history and culture as contexts for nuclear discourse (Krug, 1995). It also elides a
dilemma in which--as a professionalized activity--criticism may be contaminated with the very qualities
of nuclearist language that it opposes: abstraction, objectivity, dualism, literalism, hierarchy, and
patriarchy (Bjork, 1996).

Alternately, another group of studies has drawn on post-structuralist theories of deconstruction and
intertextuality as well as Bakhtinian theories of dialogism to emphasize the constitutive and relational
properties of linguistic and iconic "utterances" (Benson & Anderson, 1990; Mehan, Nathanson, &
Skelly, 1990; Mechling & Mechling, 1995; Taylor, 1992, 1996, 1997b, 1997d; Wertsch, 1987; Williams,
1988) In this model, culture is a "noisy" site, "aswarm" with the multiple and conflicting voices of
nuclear interests. A partial list of these interests includes pacifists, environmentalists, scientists, arms-
control negotiators, federal regulators, military officials and veterans, industrial-contractors, legislators,
artists and entertainers, historians, feminists, and the community residents surrounding production and
testing facilities. In this polarized and agitated climate, discourses simultaneously affiliate with, diverge
from, interanimate, and transform each other. No nuclear utterance, in this view, is wholly original and
there is no assumption that cultural communication will progress dialectically towards Truth. As the
available resources for sensemaking and expression, these discourses ventriloquate their speakers,
who produce "statements" in an evolving cultural conversation that exceeds particular texts and
situations. The configurations of these statements may subsequently be read as "formations" of
discourse defining particular historical periods. In this view, critical tasks include: 1) clarifying the
schizophrenic, multi-voiced qualities of nuclear discourse (especially official discourse which pretends
to monologic, objective authority), 2) accountably preserving the concrete, subjective, and embodied
dimensions of nuclear discourse as it is produced between real persons; 3) historicizing this broad
sphere of activity and its complex shaping of nuclear identity and community (for example, by
examining the ideological productivity of contested narratives and icons); and 4) proliferating ethical
discourse about nuclear weapons that challenges their existing institutional control by encouraging
popular reflection and action.

Rhetorical criticism is not the only--or necessarily most important genre of nuclear communication
scholarship. There is, for example, a body of media criticism that focuses on the complicity of media
industries and program genres (such as television news and docudramas, and Hollywood film) in
naturalizing nuclear weapons for postwar audiences by shaping the cultural experience of science and
technology, history, organizational politics, and international, conflict (Jowett, 1988; Rubin, 1989;
Taylor, 1993b; Wise, 1997, pp. 85-112). An additional, genre, involves studies of nuclear weapons as
phenomena of organizational communication (Duffield, 1996; Goldzwig & Cheney, 1984; Goodall,
1989, pp. 40-52; Metzler, 1995; Ratliff, 1997; Taylor, 1990, 1993a, 1997a, 1997c). These organizational
studies adopt a variety of functionalist, interpretive, and critical (Putnam, 1983) orientations to nuclear
weapons as 1) complex organizational "products" requiring the effective management of human labor,
material resources, and technology (e.g., in work teams) in order to achieve "quality" operations
(Hammond, 1994); 2) "risky" technologies whose manufacture, testing, and deployment create fateful
but ambiguous consequences (e.g., the contamination of groundwater by radioactive and toxic wastes)
that incite conflict between organizational stakeholders holding incompatible frames for "safe" and
"legitimate" operations(n4); and 3) organizing principles for unique professional cultures characterized
by patriotism, pride, obsession, denial, suspicion, elitism, rationalization, compartmentalization, and
mystification.

Importantly, these organizational studies return communication scholars to the, mundane industrial
contexts in which the end.of the world has been routinely manufactured for the past fifty years. Due to
secrecy, denial, and coercive security restrictions, most Cold War citizens (scholars included) have not
wanted to engage the existence or consequences of these sites. Despite prevailing wisdom that
nuclear weapons have not been "used" since 1945 (and thus, by implication, have not had material
effects), the activities at these laboratories, factories, and test sites have been enormously "costly" for
the environment, worker safety, and public health. One "fallout" from the end of the Cold War has been
a legitimation crisis for these organizations which, deprived of traditional missions, customers, and
funding, must now find new narratives of purpose (e.g., ironically, in "environmental restoration").
Additionally, U.S. citizens have recently been scandalized by media revelations of problems with the
operation and oversight of these facilities, including physical decrepitude, mismanagement and fraud,
deliberate and accidental release of radioactive materials, short-sighted privileging of production
activities over waste-management, and an intransigent commitment to Cold War frames that "require"
the preservation of technologies, budgets, and jobs for ongoing weapons production. These
developments constitute a rich set of opportunities for organizational communication scholars. The
Communication Department at the University of Cincinnati, for example, recently leveraged its
proximity to a former nuclear materials production facility to revise its identity and curriculum. Students
and faculty in this program now can pursue a variety of projects in environmental, risk, health, and
organizational communication involving this facility and its surrounding community (Eadie, 1997).

"After You ... ": Potential Futures for Nuclear Communication Study

A cursory review of news headlines from the past decade confirms that changes in the international
scene have been sufficiently dramatic to complicate--if not completely destabilize--nuclear
communication scholarship. The monolithic Soviet enemy is no longer (but is now something else,
awkwardly poised). Nuclear weapons have effectively been renounced as valid instruments of foreign
policy (Delmas, 1995, pp. 31-41). Whole classes of nuclear weapons and their "delivery systems" have
been deactivated and slated for dismantlement. In this process, the vast (and perhaps absurd) scale of
the Cold War apparatus-previously cloaked in secrecy and denial--is made visible, and is greeted with
reactions ranging from shock to nostalgia. In what amounts to an unofficial museum exhibit, for
example, 5,000 B-52 bombers bake silently under the Arizona sun in a vast Air Force "boneyard." Arms
control agreements--if ratified--will reduce the number of strategic warheads possessed by each side
to the low thousands. Activists, in conjunction with some prominent retired military officers and
scientists, now press for complete nuclear "abolition." A comprehensive ban against nuclear testing
largely has eliminated the destabilizing consequences created by that particular "communications
system" for animal-like "threat display" (Rhodes, 1994, p. 38).(n5) Furthermore, in a surprising
development, scientists and officials from the former rival superpowers now collaborate to reduce and
secure stockpiles of nuclear materials in the former Soviet republics (including through the U.S.
purchase of those materials).

All nuclear professionals have a moment in which these changes can no longer be denied. That
moment came for me during a recent session of fieldwork in Los Alamos, New Mexico. I was drinking
coffee in a local bakery near the site of the wartime buildings where the first atomic bombs were
constructed. Gradually, I became aware of an animated conversation between two young men seated
at a nearby table ... speaking in Russian. Looking on, the angel of history rustled its wings ironically,
and the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

Not surprisingly, many of the communication scholars whose work is reviewed here have reoriented
themselves to nuclear matters. A recent e-mail survey of this group generated a variety of reports
about the status of their interests. One was leaving the field to study law in the hope of more directly
affecting policy. Another viewed studying nuclear weapons, in retrospect, as a temporary "fling" but not
a durable professional identity. Several had pursued the larger topics (e.g., technology, Presidential
rhetoric, intractable moral conflict) that were implicated in their nuclear research. One remained
haunted by nuclear weapons glimpsed allegorically through the apocalyptic imagery of popular culture.
Two co-authors noted a seeming contradiction between anti-nuclear activists' historical opposition to
the arms race and current opposition to the opening of waste repositories housing the remains of
decommissioned weapons. And one, finally, noted the growing articulation of nuclear weapons with
their chemical and biological counterparts as "totalizing" threats to national security and public health.

A few communication scholars, however, have displayed a persistence of nuclear vision. Goodnight
(1997), for example, argues that despite the decline of Cold War frames, international crises remain
available for prosecution by weapon-possessing states as 'problems' requiring nuclearist 'solutions.' As
a result, the, Cold War may yet be read as simply the opening chapter in the evolving nuclear age. The
condition of horizontal proliferation among "rogue" states provides an enduring opportunity for
examination of the post-Cold War construction of strategic threat. Iraq is a spectacular case in point (as
is North Korea.). Bjork (1995) argues that Orientalist "word politics" pervade U.S. discourse in these
contexts, and solidify U.S. dominance of international affairs by demonizing emerging nuclear nations
through racist and sexist language that perpetuates colonialist ideologies.(n6) Others (Mehan, 1997;
Slayden, 1994) argue that the divisive, fearmongering logics of the Cold War are so powerful and
habitual that, despite being deprived of their Soviet object, they have, now been compulsively turned
inward by domestic rhetors to demonize marginalized groups (e.g., liberals, homosexuals, and
immigrants). Aesthetics and history, as a result, have been charged with violent energy as generic
crucibles for the clash of cultural narratives about truth, power, and beauty.

The two essays which follow this review depict these recent trends in nuclear-cultural debate, and
illustrate the forms of scholarship which take their measure. As studies of nuclear history, they follow in
the wake of others which have established three important claims. The first is that nuclear history is the
site of fierce struggle between ideological narratives seeking to establish their authority by asserting
and confirming the truth of exceedingly complex institutional events (Newman, 1995). The second is
that significant events in nuclear history from case-studies of how powerful rhetoric potentially
constrains official decision-making (Hikins, 1983). The third claim is that these events, following their
occurrence, are appropriated as "rhetorical artifacts" by nuclear interests, and refashioned as
"composites" that advance their ideological narratives. Sedimented with viscerally-defended common-
sense, these composites subsequently stand for and obscure the complexities of these events, and the
contingencies of their representation (Kane, 1988). Viewed critically, their referents are not only events
per se, but also how, for whom, and to what effect these events may be made to mean. Both essays,
additionally, spring from cultural activity surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II,
and of the atomic bombings.

Bryan Hubbard's essay "Reassessing Truman, the Bomb and Revisionism" questions the
appropriateness of stances taken by critics towards nuclear history and its representation. Finding fault
with both orthodox and progressive narratives of the decision to drop the Bomb, Hubbard advances the
Burkean concept of "burlesque" as a critical tool for diagnosing the constraints surrounding this event.
In the process, he renews critical debate about the agency of nuclear actors and the ideological
saturation of their organizational milieux. Indirectly, he raises a critical question involving the relative
effects of tragic, comedic, and ironic frames for representations of nuclear history. As the Mechlings
(1992) argue, these narrative frames create fateful interpretations of the relationships between nuclear
actors, actions, and their consequences. None, it would seem, is unproblematic for political purposes.

Theodore Prosise's essay, "The Collective Memory of the Atomic Bombings as Public 'History,'"
involves a further layer of textualization. Its topic involves a bitter struggle conducted among curators,
World War II veterans, military-industrial lobbyists, academics, and politicians over a planned exhibit of
the Enola Gay fuselage in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington,
D.C. In tracing the censorship of that planned exhibit, and its replacement with another deemed more
politically correct, Prosise is concerned with the possibilities of nuclear deliberation in the public
sphere. His account of populist-orthodox miscrecognition of nuclear history as fixed, objective Truth
raises troubling questions for academics and other custodians of culture. What criteria should be used
to evaluate the validity and legitimacy of historical narratives? How should conflict among and between
popular memories and professional histories be conducted and resolved? How is nuclear culture
served by the histories it produces?

As a scholar of nuclear communication, I am pleased at the appearance of these essays and hope that
they will spark further disciplinary debate. At the same time, I hope that communication scholars can
collectively maintain a comprehensive focus on the nuclear weapons apparatus. That apparatus is
exceedingly complex and dispersed, and its continuing evolution is marked by both progressive and
regressive tendencies. Within this process, a variety of topics remain understudied, including: the logic
of technical arguments over nuclear waste-disposal (Shrader-Freshette, 1992); the ambiguous
consequences of multi-functional "research" technologies at nuclear laboratories for existing treaties
(Gusterson, 1995; Cabasso & Burroughs, 1995); Byzantine, inter-organizational conflict over control of
nuclear strategy, and subsequent contradictions between declared doctrine and actual operations
(Nolan, 1989); rhetorical resurrection of SDI following the Gulf War as a ballistic missile defense
system for forward-based troops, and ongoing attempts by its proponents to expand the system
discursively evading the constraints of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (see Mailloux, 1990);
rhetorical invention by the U.S. nuclear weapons complex of the "Science Based Stockpile
Stewardship Program," which involves certifying the (strategically-defined) "safety" and "reliability" of
existing nuclear weapons (Zerriffi & Makhijani, 1996) and ambiguous activities that may or may not
constitute design and production of "new" weapons (Mello, 1997); and the broad reframing of nuclear
weapons and nuclear power as "green" problems of environmental, health, and risk communication.

In pursuing these topics, communication scholars may find motivation within the U.S. Department of
Energy's own warning about the consequences of post-Cold War public apathy (Rothstein, 1995):

With the advantage of hindsight, it is both easy and popular to critique the bomb builders' mistakes,
and deplore their production practices. But... it should be remembered that, if the present generation
does not ask the right questions or press for carefully formulated decisions . . . it will make its own set
of mistakes. (p. 41)

Clearly, communication scholars are uniquely qualified to contribute to this process. Those who wish
may find additional encouragement in this statement by Stuart Hall:

I am committed to the ongoing relationship between going on thinking and going on explaining the
enormously rich complexity of the concrete and contradictory historical formation . . . [This] is the
critical enterprise, and I invite you to join it. (1989,p. 52)

NOTES
(n1) "Nuclearism" encompasses the institutional advocacy and popular assimilation of the Bomb as a
"solution" to various national security "problems." In this second genre, critics assumed that "the power
of the Bomb is ruled by the power of the Word, and only by continual deconstruction of the Word will
we avoid the destruction of the world." (Dowling, 1987, p. 268).

(n2) Indeed, deferring the resolution of these contradictions (in their statements and to conditions to
which they refer), while inherently risky, is a discursive component of strategy.

(n3) The dependence of nuclear strategy is, ironically, effaced in its dismissal.

(n4) The turbulent contexts of post-cold war restructuring and ambiguous communication among
fragmented, transient and distrustful employees constitute an orientation related to both (1) and (2).

(n5) As this article goes to press, however, the fragility of this arrangement has been revealed by
India's and Pakistan's decisions to test (and thus advertise) their nuclear capabilities, creating
unpredictable and potentially dire effects for security in South Asia.

(n6) This discourse also obscures the superpowers' failure to abide by binding articles in anti-
proliferation agreements requiring nuclear arms reduction.

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~~~~~~~~

By Bryan C. Taylor

Bryan C. Taylor (Ph.D., University of Utah, 1991) is Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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