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Abstract
This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bomb-wielding “rogue states” can function as inventions that rationalize America's claim to nuclear hegemony. Through a critical account of the “competent” gestures of the state-sanctioned nuclear operator at the interface, and the “incompetent” gestures of the state-repudiated nuclear terrorist, we argue that that the rationalization of nuclear weapons, in a psychoanalytic sense, has depended on rationalization in the Weberian sense.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this essay was presented at the Visual Democracy conference at Northwestern University in 2007. Thanks to Robert Hariman for the opportunity to present there, and for his early encouragement. We'd also like to thank Ian Hill and Rohini Singh for excellent research help, as well as Cara Finnegan and the graduate students of her 2010 Visual Rhetoric class for the opportunity to share this work and receive feedback. Finally, thanks to Greg Wise, Bryan Taylor, and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments in the review process; and to Sohinee Roy for helping fine tune our prose in the editorial process.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 155–6.
2. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 155–6, 156.
3. See Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The US Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
4. Our reference to “post-Cold War studies” is tentative but important, for “post-Cold War studies” does not (yet) have disciplinary status, but at best represents a mode of inquiry concerned with legacies, memories, ruins, hauntings, afterimages, perdurance, hegemony, reification, structure, and structuration relative to the Cold War—where the “Cold War” is understood variously as an extended and extensive geopolitical conflict; a global project of intervention, engineering, and disciplinization; a political, social, and existential crisis; a set of institutions; and a culture, ideology, and rhetoric. We are not necessarily proponents of “post-Cold War studies” achieving some sort of disciplinary status, but do think it represents a very important mode of inquiry. Bryan C. Taylor and Stephen J. Hartnett have presented an agenda for what they denote as “(Post-)Cold War communication studies” in “National Security and All That It Implies: (Post-)Cold War Culture and Communication Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 465–87. They aim, with others concerned with post-Cold War studies, to “problematize this alleged successor [the “post-Cold War”] by emphasizing how the active residues of its predecessor [the “Cold War”] “contaminate” its ontological bid for distinctiveness and closure” (465).
5. With respect to the end of the Cold War, one way in which the claim that major historical events demarcate major historical changes clearly applies is with regard to US military policy. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that decades of institutional, budgetary, political, technological, and cultural assumptions among elites in US politics and governance were put in crisis. As such, the “end” of the Cold War suggested the imperative of a new major global threat, one sufficient in scope and risk to sustain a massive military–industrial–scientific complex. For many in the early 1990s, “rogue” or “outlaw” states and “international terrorism” (concentrated in the southern hemisphere) could represent this new threat. See Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America's Search for a New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), especially 24–8.
6. Derrida, Rogues, 156.
7. Michèle Bertrand, “Rationalization,” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. Alain de Mijolla (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomas Gale, 2005), ebook.
8. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Rebecca S. Bjork, “Public Policy Argumentation and Colonialist Ideology in the Post-Cold War Era,” in Warranting Assent: Case Studies in Argument Evaluation, ed. Edward Schiappa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 211–36; Hugh Gusterson, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14 (1999), 111–43 [also available in Hugh Gusterson, People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 21–47]; and Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 8–13, 219. While our study corroborates arguments about the power of Orientalism, and indeed Orientalism is necessary to our argument, we do not think it quite sufficient. The binaries we note, as we will show, operate outside of colonial and post-colonial discourses, and indeed are endemic to the production of nuclear legitimacy as such, whether in “domestic” or “international” contexts.
9. Derrida claims in the post-Cold War world “there is essentially no longer any such thing that can be called in all rigor ‘war’” (Rogues, 156). What then, we ask, are we to make of cold war? Do vast state-private networks, state-sponsored guerrilla wars, coups designed by foreign spy-agencies, spy satellites, fallout shelters, and so on constitute a mere iteration of the old form of “classical, international war, that is, a war between nation-states” (156)?
10. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 159.
11. Brian C. Taylor, “Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures,” American Literary History 9 (1997), 572, emphasis in original. See also Taylor's “‘A Hedge against the Future’: The Post-Cold War Rhetoric of Nuclear Weapons Modernization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010), 1–24.
12. We do not mean to suggest that legitimation depends solely on a positive belief. As Jürgen Habermas reminds us: “It is also based on fear of, and submission to, indirectly threatened sanctions, as well as on simple compliance engendered by the individual's perception of his own powerlessness and the lack of alternatives open to him (that is, by his own fettered imagination).” Moreover, as Max Weber notes (and Habermas quotes): “Loyalty may be hypocritically simulated by individuals or by whole groups on purely opportunistic grounds.” See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 96.
13. S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2 (Boston: Brill, 2003), 523.
14. See, for example, Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 113.
15. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 101.
16. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, ed. Guether Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff and others (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 24–6.
17. No one has more provocatively explored the deep structural and philosophical connections between a transcendental belief in human agency and nuclear weapons than Oliver O'Donovan in Peace and Certainty: A Theological Essay on Deterrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004).
18. In the period we focus on initially here, the 1950s, nuclear operators were universally male, and gendered as masculine. Over time, this changed, such that by the 1980s women were included in Strategic Air Command operations. For reasons of economy, however, we do not extensively address in this essay issues of sex and gender, although they are everywhere present and critical. We would concur with Judy Wajcman in her conception of “a mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both source and a consequence of gender relations. … [G]ender relations can be thought of as materialized in technology, and masculinity and femininity in turn acquire their meaning and character through their enrollment and embeddedness in working machines” [Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), 107]. In the case of the production of nuclear weaponry, a strong gender relation was constituted between “masculine” scientists, engineers, and operators and a “feminine” support structure, where the feminine most often functioned in the role of “witness” or “plant worker.” Furthermore, in the testing films of Lookout Mountain Laboratory that we examine in this essay, an intra-masculine (even homo-erotic) dynamic is present, as men—often sweaty and shirtless—are depicted collaborating at remote Pacific sites to detonate what cannot help but be seen as a massive phallic event. And then there is the feminization of the bomb itself—as an object of male desire, care, and/or domination, depending on the particular narrative.
19. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 167–8.
20. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 168.
21. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 183–4.
22. See Manovich, The Language, 167–8.
23. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), 36.
24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1978), 141, passim.
25. Weber himself was not directly concerned with the aesthetic and performative dimensions of rationalization, but an excellent analysis of this dimension can be found in Robert Hariman's chapter on the “bureaucratic style” in Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 141–76.
26. See “O. R. Frisch, Eyewitness Account of ‘Trinity’ Test, July 1945,” Document #16, The American Atom, 50.
27. “Leslie R. Groves to George C. Marshall, 30 July 1945,” Document #18, The American Atom, 59.
28. “General Groves’ Report on ‘Trinity,’ July 18, 1945,” Document #17, The American Atom, 55.
29. “General Groves’ Report on ‘Trinity,’ July 18, 1945,” Document #17, The American Atom, 55.
30. This aesthetic range—from the sublime to the mundane—denotes a critical as well rhetorical continuum. As Bryan C. Taylor, William J. Kinsella, Stephen P. Depoe, and Maribeth S. Metzler write: “Commonly, nuclear weapons are depicted in the discourse of foreign policy and military elites as a powerful, threatening, and perversely glamorous technology. As noted above, communication scholars have traditionally engaged this particular genre of nuclear discourse. By emphasizing their prestige, however, this discourse effaces the contingency of nuclear weapons as mundane, organizational products. These weapons always come from somewhere, in other words, and this journey involves a concrete system of materials, locales, personnel, technologies, belief systems, and social practices.” [“Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Production Complex,” in Communication Yearbook, vol. 29, ed. Pamela J. Kalbfleisch (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 363–409]. Our argument suggests that the “mundane” is integral not only to the (organizational) production of nuclear weapons, but to their public, rhetorical legitimation, and to their “normalization” or “naturalization.”
31. Hugh Gusterson discusses the aesthetic fascination nuclear scientists have with their machines—as means of power over nature; as extensions of their own bodies; and as metaphors for comprehending their work, the world, and themselves. See Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 119–24.
32. See David Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7–8, 252–6. For alternate considerations of the “nuclear sublime” see Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist 31 (2004): 349–73; and Ned O'Gorman “Eisenhower and the American Sublime,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (February 2008): 44–72.
33. Thus, when members of the Truman administration at the end of World War II debated about whether or not to share atomic information with the Soviet Union, Truman's Secretary of Agriculture, Clinton Anderson of New Mexico (the home state of Los Alamos), who opposed sharing, wrote to the President: “It isn't just a question of turning over to them a mechanical formula; there needs to be certain types of evidence that they possess the genius to apply these laws in a manufacturing process before they can ever make from the knowledge of atomic energy a proper atomic bomb.” The language itself—“possess the genius” and “proper atomic bomb”—suggests the entrenchment of an ideology of technical control within the debate. For this letter, see Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman, PSF: General File, 1940–1953, Box 96.
34. Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 10; Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, New York City,” December 8, 1953, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9774 (accessed November 19, 2010).
35. See “Staff Study: Public Information Plan, Operation Greenhouse,” February 26, 1951 in Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman, PSF: Subject File, 1940–1953, National Security Council-Atomic File, Box 175. See also Box 176, wherein records concerning the “Psychological Exploitation of Certain Thermonuclear Developments” show that the administration lacked consensus on how exactly to approach publicity around nuclear tests.
36. Fact Sheet, “The Nevada Test Site's Secret Film Studio: Lookout Mountain,” US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, Office of Public Affairs, http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1142.pdf(accessed July 17, 2009). A number of the films produced by Lookout Mountain Laboratory can be found at the Department of Energy's Nevada Site Office website: http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/films/testfilms.aspx. The Internet Archive Database is also a good source, featuring Greenhouse (1951, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationGreenhouse1951), Tumbler through Snapper (1952, http://www.archive.org/details/TumblerSnapper1952), Trinity through Buster-Jangle (1952, http://www.archive.org/details/AtomicWeaponsTestsTrinitythroughBusterJangle), Ivy (1952, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationIVY1952), Upshot through Knothole (1953, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationUPSHOT_KNOTHOLE1953), The 280 mm Gun at the Nevada Proving Ground (1953, http://www.archive.org/details/The280mmGunattheNevadaProvingGround1953), Castle “Military Effects” (1954, http://www.archive.org/details/MilitaryEffectsStudiesonOperationCastle1954), Castle “Commander's Report” (1954, http://www.archive.org/details/CastleCommandersReport1954), Teapot (1955, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationTEAPOT_MilitaryEffectsStudies1955), Redwing (1956, http://www.archive.org/details/MilitaryEffectsonOperationRedwing1956), Hardtack “High Altitude” (1958, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationHARDTACK_HighAltitudeTests1958), Hardtack “Underwater” (1958, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationHARDTACK_UnderwaterTests1958), Hardtack “Basic Effects,” (1958, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationHARDTACK_BasicEffectsStructuresandMateriel195, Argus (1958, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationARGUS1958), and Dominic (1962, http://www.archive.org/details/OperationDOMINICNuclearTests1962).
37. Larry May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 180.
38. Quoted in Martin J. Medhurst, “Atoms for Peace and Nuclear Hegemony: The Rhetorical Structure of a Cold War Campaign,” Armed Forces & Society 23 (1997): 576–7. The quotation is from a memo by Stefan T. Possony, who had also served as an advisor to the Truman administration, and was a major early advocate for a kind of “atoms for peace” initiative.
39. Michael Ledeen, “Understanding Iran,” Imprimis, 37, no. 10 (October 2008): 1.
40. Xeni Jardin, “Iran: You Suck at Photoshop (updated),” Boing Boing, July 10, 2008 10:29 am, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html (accessed July 29, 2009).
41. Ledeen, “Understanding Iran,” 7.
42. Our argument is consistent with that of Foad Izadi and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, who, in a study of newspaper editorials about Iran's nuclear program in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post spanning 1984–2004, conclude that all three publications “define the Iranian nuclear problem in terms of the two premises of Oriental untrustworthiness and Islam as a threat,” and thus “that such a government cannot be trusted with nuclear technology” (150). Therefore, in the papers’ editorial positions, “the issue of trust plays a more central role than the actual existence of evidence for Iran's possession of a clandestine nuclear weapons program” (161). Although Izadi and Saghaye-Biria do not explore the issue in depth, they are right to suggest that the culture of national security in the nuclear age is as much dependent on trust as it is on fear: trust in the competence of politicians to exercise restraint and prudence in wielding power over nuclear weaponry, and, just as importantly, trust in the ability of a technological class—engineers, scientists, and operators—to competently control nuclear power. On one level, this trust is merely an extension of the trust necessary to the social order of liberal societies: whenever we grant power to others to shape and govern society, we grant them at least a modicum of our trust. However, the trust integral to nuclear order goes beyond such political trust—it entails a trust in the claims of Western modernity itself to harness natural and social power to create an efficient, peaceable, and prosperous social order. See Foad Izadi and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, “A Discourse Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials: The Case of Iran's Nuclear Program,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (2007): 140–65.
43. “Another Aaron,” #4 comment on “Iran: You Suck at Photoshop (updated),” Boing Boing, July 10, 2008 10:42 am, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html (accessed July 29, 2009).
44. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 204.
45. Karl Marx, “Details of Theory” (from Grundisse), in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 219–20.
46. Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, “About,” http://www.preventwmd.gov/about/ (accessed April 2, 2010).
47. Bob Graham, Jim Talent et al., World At Risk: The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), xii.
48. Harry S. Truman, “White House Press Release on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945,” Document #21, The American Atom, 2nd ed., ed. Philip L. Cantelon, Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 65.
49. CNN, “Al Qaeda Nuclear and Conventional Explosive Documents: CNN—ISIS Collaboration,” January 17, 2002, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/terrorism/intro.html (accessed August 17, 2009).
50. Bob Orr, “Detecting Nuclear Terrorism,” CBS News, August 25, 2008, http://atlantis2.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4378549n (accessed August 17, 2009).
51. Jonathan Tirone, “Nuclear Terrorism is No. 1 Threat, ElBaradei Says,” Bloomberg Press, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ae.wPfK0oXfM&refer=home (accessed July 20, 2009). See Gusterson, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other,” 117–21 for an analysis of the common argument that deterrence will not work against “rogue states” and “international terrorists.”