The troubling anodyne language of ‘Nukespeak’
The first nuclear explosion, in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, came from a massive spherical bomb with radioactive plutonium at its core. It was playfully called “The Gadget.”
Can you think of a more innocuous word for a machine that could eradicate a city in seconds, incinerating humans and buildings for miles?
From that explosion onward, the ways that Americans have talked about nuclear war have been more “Gadget” than “destroyer of worlds.” We’ve adopted a language that is detached and sterilized from the reality of what a nuclear bomb actually does. Our nuclear linguistics allows us to consider “winning” nuclear wars and other impossibilities.
Phrases like “nuclear exchange” dehumanized what could be the death of millions. Terms like “BAMBI” were coined to describe weapons in the nuclear world; BAMBI was a “Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept” system that envisioned using giant nets deployed from missiles to foil Soviet attacks. (Never mind that it didn’t work.)
We should consider whether the way we talk about nuclear bombs makes us more likely to launch one.
Originally, this coded language was part of the secrecy of the Cold War. There was the policy called “containment,” by which communism would be sort of “fenced in” by nuclear threats. Later there was “deterrence,” whereby the pain we would inflict on an adversary if they did something we didn’t like was assurance that they wouldn’t do said thing.
Once nuclear-armed missiles and later nuclear-armed submarines joined the mix, there was no defense against nuclear attack. The approaches to avoid the very catastrophe these weapons were built to unleash were described and conveyed in language that often had dark, absurdist undertones. Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, is the most famous, and perhaps most honest.
While nuclear weapons inspired widespread public concern, psychologists also discovered that people could at once be terrified about nukes and mollified into a weird acceptance of them. Nuclear war is so terrible and awesome that the very thought of it stymies people from doing anything about it. That dynamic was aided by the generation of phrases that distanced people even further from reality — nuclear bombs were “stockpiles” and nuclear became “ladder of escalation” or “proportionate response.”
This phenomenon was given a name in an article by Professor Edward Schiappa in 1989 —“Nukespeak.”
Schiappa wrote: “The moral and practical implications of nuclear war are ignored or underestimated by Nukespeak users, and nuclear policy issues are rendered trivial or less accessible to the public.”
The language surrounding nuclear weapons and war has not changed, despite the advent of instantaneous communications and massive social media platforms. If anything, it now combines the worst elements of trivializing the realities of nuclear war with the hubris and testosterone-laden schoolyard taunts that almost dare us to use them.
Consider our own National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). (Notice the word “security” rather than “weapons”?) The NNSA has an ongoing program to upgrade and prolong the operation of U.S. nuclear weapons. It’s called the “Life Extension Programs.” How’s that for Orwellian doublespeak? The first bomb to get this facelift is a gravity bomb carried on aircraft. Known as the B-61, it is categorized as a “tactical nuclear weapon. But this bomb has a “yield” of up to 170 kilotons, roughly 15 times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.
President Donald Trump’s imminent “Nuclear Posture Review” is expected to have elements that would support building so-called “mininukes.” These are said to be more “usable” in a conflict. But the very idea of a usable nuke undermines the entire premise of nuclear deterrence and the special status of nuclear weapons that is supposed to draw a bright line between them and all other weapons.
Lest you think that this is just Trump being Trump, the fact is that our current military and national security leaders have been gaming out a military attack on North Korea. The belief is that we can attack them in such a way that they understand it’s just a “bloody nose” — not a full-scale war. What could possibly go wrong?
We needn’t succumb to this Nukespeak. While we do not yet have the access or policies to dismantle the nuclear bombs ourselves, we can dismantle the language that has made them possible.
Social media is one place to fight with memes and words. There we can reveal the lie that turned the “destroyer of worlds,” into “proportionate responses.” And we can explain loud and clear that there is no ice pack big enough for a nuclear bloody nose.
Paul Carroll is a senior adviser at N Square, an initiative to reduce and eliminate the threats from nuclear weapons and materials. Distributed by Zocalo Public Square.