Missile Envy: Nuclear War and Man’s Theology Part 1

(I grew up a war nerd, but now I’m in my last semester of graduate studies in theology. For this last semester, I decided to go on a little journey of discovery of sorts. I want to try to think theologically about how the development and existence of nuclear weapons have shaped American culture, and specifically, American conceptions of masculinity — and what that all might mean for thinking about the Trinity (pun intended). To get up to speed, check out my introductory blog post to this series, where I try to tell the story of why this feels, to me, like something worth exploring.)

For some, the idea that nuclear weapons strategy is driven by and perpetuates sexism might seem like a theory coming out of left field. I acknowledged as much in my previous reflection. To help you begin to see why I might think nuclear weapons and gender have important connections, I want to take you along with me as I peak behind the curtains of the world of nuclear strategy, with particular attention to how understandings of gender are at play in that world.

Here is an assumption that I started with as I began this project: if the nuclear order was built by white men like me who used to be boys like me,¹ then it is likely that the nuclear order has been normalized in such a way that it appears most reasonable, justified, and innocuous to someone just like me. Any system seems most justified from the perspective of those who built and benefit from that system, and I have no reason to think the world of nuclear weapons is any different. Often, the flaws or vulnerabilities of a system only come to light when seen through different eyes.

Today, I am going to try to see the world of nuclear strategy through eyes different than my own: specifically, through the eyes of someone qualified to approach the world of nuclear policy from an explicitly gender critical frame.

The best thinker I’ve found to help me see the world of nuclear weapons in a different way is Dr. Carol Cohn, who is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Dr. Cohn built her career in the world of nuclear security policy, having worked at the prestigious RAND Corporation, long the United State’s preeminent institution for nuclear strategy. Having walked the halls and rubbed shoulders with the people who actually make policy around weapons that can destroy the world, Dr. Cohn has written a number of groundbreaking papers² that together offer some fascinating and revealing accounts of the internal culture of the nuclear research and strategy world. Dr. Cohn’s work is immensely helpful, and helps situate a number of key concepts and methods that will be foundational to this project moving forward.

If you stick with me here, you’ll see that Dr. Cohn discovered two things in her research: that nuclear strategic discourse is weirdly sexualized in a dominantly masculine way, and that the technical jargon of nuclear strategic discourse is a gendered discourse that leverages masculinized and feminized concepts to police what can be thought in nuclear policy. Both of these facts have disturbing implications.

In one of her articles, Cohn shares a fascinating and revealing anecdote told to her by a white male physicist:

Several colleagues and I were working on modeling counterforce attacks,³ trying to get realistic estimates of the number of immediate fatalities that would result from different deployments. At one point, we modeled a particular attack, using slightly different assumptions, and found that instead of there being thirty-six million immediate fatalities, there would only be thirty million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying, “Oh yeah, that’s great, only thirty million,” when all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, “Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking — Only thirty million! Only thirty million human beings killed instantly?” Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman.⁴

Cohn notes that this physicist was subsequently “careful to never blurt out anything like that again.”

What Cohn draws our attention to through this story is vitally important: she is showing us that the language we use to talk about nuclear weapons shapes how willing we are to ignore their horror. Further, what surfaces here is how gender norms and expectations are socially used to police people into stomaching of the idea of nuclear warfare without critical questioning.

This physicist never again challenged the notion that it could be acceptable to burn 30 million people alive because he didn’t want to seem like a woman.

That’s a discourse with power.

The story above is a really helpful example of the specific phenomena that Dr. Cohn’s research is focused on: the use and effects of gendered discourse in the world of nuclear policy. To understand what Cohn brings to the table for our exploration of the nuclear order, it is important for us to have a working definition of both aspects at play: gender, and discourse.

For the purposes of Cohn’s work, gender is the complex range of social actions, meanings, and expectations which are assigned by a culture to biological sex differences.⁵ A discourse is the complex system of languages, meanings, patterns of thought, and activities that that are employed in a culture to shape our understanding of reality around a particular subject.

Take discourse around nuclear weapons as an example of a discourse. In one sense, nuclear discourse is dependent on the individuals in that world who, with their speech, writing, and policy making, contribute to the conversation around nuclear weapons. However, in another sense, nuclear discourse is now an independent reality; when someone enters the world of nuclear policy, nuclear discourse is already there and immediately begins to shape the entrant’s consciousness and dictate the borders of what can be thought.

Take, for example, the story above. A feature of nuclear discourse is its use of innocuous sounding jargon, like “counterforce attacks,” that stand in as a kind of code for something like, “a massive nuclear exchange where over 30 million humans will die.” The fact that language is used in this way facilitates the thinking of this kind of unthinkable atrocity as a kind of innocuous “day in the boardroom.” This function is a feature of nuclear discourse which shapes the thinkers who enter it to begin to forget or bracket how horrifying nuclear war really is.

Discourses overlap all the time. This is precisely what Dr. Cohn is interested in: understanding how nuclear discourse overlaps with gender discourse. And she argues that nuclear discourse is gendered in a number of significant ways. One way has to do with how the male/female gender binary is mapped onto dichotomies in nuclear discourse. Here are some that Cohn lists:⁶

thought versus feeling

logic versus intuition

reason versus emotion

objectivity versus subjectivity

aggression versus passivity

confrontation versus accommodation

Within nuclear discourse, masculinity is associated with the first term of the above, and femininity with the second. And in each dichotomy, the first term is seen as meritorious and valuable, and the second as inferior and weak. The crucial point that Cohn makes is that this gender association also functions in reverse: within the nuclear policy world that she observed, men were seen as thoughtful, logical, objective, and aggressive by virtue of their masculinity, while femininity was seen in the reverse. This can be observed, again, in the discourse that exists in the story above: when the man who feels disgusted by the flippant consideration of a 30 million human holocaust expresses his intuition that the terms of discussion are horrifying, he is shamed. In this shaming, he recognizes that he has transgressed the norms of the discourse — he is not exemplifying the traits that are valued in the nuclear world, the traits that keep it running. Further — and this is key — he instinctively recognizes the gendered nature of the shaming. The way he articulates his shame and failure is to say that “It was awful. I felt like a woman.”

This is the nature of discourse — it can inculcate into our psyche so much more than what is explicitly said. Discourse shapes how we see reality not only through what is said, but in the connections that are made in the spaces between what is said, and in what is unsaid. Discourse is more than what happens in the official policy presentation — it is also being generated in the hallways, over after work drinks, and in “locker room talk.” And most critically, discourses are most shaped by those who hold the most power within a discourse. Find who a discourse privileges, and you’ve likely found who holds real power in that culture.

So who is privileged in nuclear discourse? What we will find has already been foreshadowed, but the evidence Dr Cohn presents us with is fascinating and striking, and worth sifting through, because it will give us a more compelling picture of just how gendered the world of nuclear weapons really is.

(Trigger Warning: This next section will be somewhat sexually graphic. The material Dr. Cohn examines is important because of its explicit and jarring nature, but I wouldn’t want anyone to be forced to read it. If you’d rather skip ahead, scroll to the next section divide. I’ll non-graphically recap at that point.)

At this point, the gendered nature of nuclear strategy, with its sexist dichotomies and use of femininity as a marker of shame, might be a bit more clear. However, I would understand if some might still wonder how significant or pervasive this issue really is. If this is you, you’ll be comforted to know that Dr. Cohn was right there with you. At the time when she was conducting her research, it was quite common for feminists to mount a kind of Freudian critique the nuclear establishment, pointing out the phallic subtexts that existed in the arms race for bigger and more missiles (dubbed “missile envy” in a callback to Freud’s “penis envy”) and more towering mushroom clouds. Of this style of critique, Dr. Cohn says,

I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would yield a more complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense professionals’ discourse. I was not prepared for what I found. I think I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the house of death — that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments, using all my subtlety and cunning to unearth whatever sexual imagery might be underneath how they thought and spoke. I had naively believed that these men, at least in public, would appear to be aware of feminist critiques…Of course, I was wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men.⁷

Cohn tells the story of her research with the morbid shock of someone who didn’t really think things could be this bad. What she found was that sexualization of nuclear discourse was pervasive and routine. Here is a list of some of what she heard:

• One lecturer opined that “to disarm is to get rid of all your stuff.” Nuclear disarmament was seen as emasculation; how could any real man even consider it?⁸
• “Lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust to weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks — or what one military advisor to the National Security Council called ‘releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.’”⁹
• Strategists expressed concern about “hardening our missiles” and the need to “face it, the Russians are a little harder than we are.”¹⁰
• An add for a special bunker busting bomb, called a Kinetic Energy Penetrator, included statements like “designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration dynamics and utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed.” Of this, Cohn says, “In case the symbolism of ‘cratering; seems far fetched, I must point out that I am not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman’s name to each of the craters they gouge out of the earth.”¹¹
• Dr. Cohn notes the phallic imagery used to describe nuclear blasts (this one was made about the destruction of Nagasaki): “Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down to a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam…struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down.”¹²
• Dr. Cohn relays a story in which she tours a nuclear missile submarine. At one point, the officer giving the tour grinned at her and asked her if she wanted to stick her hand “through a hole to ‘pat the missile.’” This ended up occurring multiple times during her career with various weapon systems. Of this, Dr. Cohn asks, “What is all this ‘patting’? What are men doing when they ‘pat’ these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination.”¹³
• “A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for “limited nuclear war” were ridiculous, said, “Look, you gotta understand that it’s a pissing contest — you gotta expect them to use everything they’ve got.”

Dr. Cohn is careful to be very specific about what she thinks this type of discourse signifies. She isn’t interested in analyzing the personal motives of any one speaker, and she is fully aware that some of these terms also have non-sexual meanings in the defense world. Dr. Cohn is interested in how this sexualized discourse functions within the overall culture to glorify a dominating and competitive form of masculine sexuality as the desirable orientation to the world. There is something disturbing about all the connections between the practice of nuclear war and the practice of an aggressively sexual masculinity.

This sexualized and aggressive outlook on the world isn’t just latent in the imagination of nuclear strategy — it is also explicitly at work in how international relations within the nuclear order are understood. Dr. Cohn discusses how concepts of virginity and fatherhood operate within nuclear discourse; countries with nuclear weapons are imagined as male protectors (the United States “protects” many countries with its nuclear arsenal through international treaties like NATO), while countries without nuclear weapons are imagined as virgins and female.

In one example, non-nuclear New Zealand (a country protected by a U.S. nuclear treaty) declared itself a non-nuclear zone and refused to allow U.S. nuclear warships into its ports. In reaction, retired U.S. Air Force General Ross Milton angrily denounced the decision in an Air Force Magazine column entitled “Nuclear Virginity.” With a tone that Cohn describes as “that of a man whose advances have been spurned,” the General was contemptuous of New Zealand’s “womanly” desire to remain “pure and innocent of nuclear weapons.”¹⁴ As Dr. Cohn points out, this general conceptualizes New Zealand as a woman “paid for” and suggests that the U.S. withdraw its protection “and then we will see just how long she tries to hold onto her virtue.”¹⁵ Of this Dr. Cohn notes, “the patriarchal bargain could not be laid out more clearly.”¹⁶

One strategist, in defining of nuclear deterrence, compared the concept to encountering undesirable behavior in a child, and threatening to break the child’s arm if they continue. “‘Now that’s deterrence’ he said triumphantly.”¹⁷ This example is revealing. Nuclear discourse leads us to believe, because of the bipolar terms of the Cold War, that nuclear strategy and deterrence are primarily concepts operative in struggles between equally matched competitors. Nuclear weapons are framed as exclusively defensive weapons by formal nuclear discourse — but the sexualized substrate of that discourse tells a different story. In reality, nuclear deterrence is used far more often as the coercive means of superior powers to dominate and abuse weaker parties. This exertion of will is accompanied, as in the New Zealand example, by an entitled assumption that, for the nuclear power, borders should no longer matter. If your nation is a “nuclear virgin” under U.S. protection…her ports should be open to receive the U.S. Navy’s missiles.

If this is what nuclear discourse is like, how is the world of nuclear strategy not a rape culture?

(Summary: Above we discussed the overt sexualized imagination that surrounds nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear discourse. Dr. Cohn finds that a sexualized imagination surrounding nuclear war is ubiquitous in the nuclear policy world. Foreign relations within the nuclear order are filtered through concepts of virginity and fatherhood operate within nuclear discourse; countries with nuclear weapons are imagined as male protectors (the United States “protects” many countries with its nuclear arsenal through international treaties like NATO), while countries without nuclear weapons are imagined as virgins and female. As such, nuclearized countries are able to use this power coercively and imagined to have the right to transgress the boundaries of non-nuclear nations at will. I conclude by posing the question of whether nuclear discourse constitutes a kind of rape culture.)

The sexualized nature of nuclear discourse is important and disturbing, but fascinatingly, it isn’t the only aspect that Dr. Cohn studies. She also attends to the much more subtle way in which the technical language of the nuclear strategy world is encoded in masculine terms, and the effects that those patterns of language have on what is deemed possible in nuclear policy.

I grew up memorizing all of the acronyms, designations, and arcane language of the defense world like they were bible verses. I can tell you what the difference is between the F-16 and the F/A-18, and why the F/A-18E/F is different, and what an APFSDS round is, and what MIRV’s do. I can tell the difference between a “slick’em (SLCM), a “glick’em (GLCM), and an “alchem” (ALCM). I know what “shoot and scoot” means and what the “kneecap” (NEACP) is. When you are interested in this kind of thing, there is a thrill that comes along with the exclusivity of being able to rattle off all of the code words that constitute the language of the U.S. military industrial complex.

Dr. Cohn, who has the kind of direct and insider experience I will never have, corroborates this feature of nuclear strategic discourse. She says,

I learned at the program that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy…part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the know…few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows with them, perhaps even be one yourself.¹⁸

Learn the terms of a discourse…and you grow in power.

Dr. Cohn develops a definition for this kind of specialized language that exists in the nuclear security establishment, which she terms “technostrategic language.” Technostrategic language is a system of jargon that, intentionally or not, functions to obscure the horror of the reality of nuclear war. Why should you be interested in such a boring sounding phrase? Let’s give it another name: mass murder cloaking device. You might not guess from such jargon that a “clean bomb” can still kill five million people in one flash of light.

Dr. Cohn uses the “clean” hydrogen bomb as both an example and an analogy for why technostrategic language is so dangerous. Hydrogen bombs were dubbed “clean bombs” because they release significantly lower amounts of deadly radiation than previous versions of atomic weaponry. One scientist went so far as to claim that these new warheads were “humanitarian.”¹⁹ Never mind that the blast of a single hydrogen bomb is a thousand times more powerful than the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and would consequently incinerate exponentially more people in a single strike.²⁰ The absurdity of this kind of technostrategic language emerges in its imagination “that radiation is the only ‘dirty’ part of killing people.”²¹ And what Cohn shows us is that just as hydrogen bombs pack terrible destruction without dirty fallout, so to does technostrategic discourse deliver destructive meanings in a package devoid of the emotional “fallout” of having to include the mangled, burned, and cancer riddled bodies in our imagination of what nuclear bombs are.²²

The bloodless and sterile nature of technostrategic discourse doesn’t just obscure the horror of nuclear carnage, it also begins to change how those who use it think. Dr. Cohn says of this process, “I had not only learned to speak a language: I had started to think in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new ideas.”²³ She found herself going on “for days speaking about nuclear weapons without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them.”²⁴ Disturbed, she resolved to resist such influence, but found that “attempting to use plain english to bring up questions not allowed in the discourse is condescended to as “ignorant, simple minded, or both.”²⁵ In other words, if you don’t submit to the rules of technostrategic discourse, and agree to ignore what it rules out (consideration of actual human cost), the discourse has ways of policing you.

This brings us back to a question that keeps echoing through this work: so how is this gendered? Do you remember when I spoke about how masculinity is often mapped onto polar concepts (reason versus emotion, logic versus intuition, aggression versus passivity, confrontation versus accommodation, etc) with femininity construed as its negative foil? This occurs in technostrategic discourse. And we can know this by observing how technostrategic discourse polices itself — how it shames its participants into following the rules.

Remember the story of the nuclear strategist who “felt like a woman” when he expressed horror about the destruction of nuclear war? That story contained another great example of technostrategic language: the idea of a “counterforce attack,” which actually refers to 30 million deaths. How do we account for the distinctly gendered nature of his experience of shame? Given that he was “careful to never blurt out anything like that again,” Dr. Cohn notes that “you might say that gender discourse becomes a ‘preemptive deterrent’ to certain kinds of thought”²⁶

There is one story that Dr. Cohn recounts from the 1980’s that, for me, ties all of these threads — rape culture, technostrategic language, gendered discourse — together into something real. When she was participating in the development of nuclear strategy at the RAND corporation, Cohn, two other women, and fifty-five men were divided up into teams to war-game various nuclear war scenarios. All three women were placed on a “Red” team, playing as the Soviets.²⁷

As the three women war-gamed their assigned scenario, they made a number of carefully rationalized decisions, such as unilaterally withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, with both tactical and principled justifications in mind. When the war-game escalated to a Blue team tactical nuclear strike, their team decided to refrain from using nuclear weapons in retaliation, in an effort to ensure that no nuclear strikes occured in the Soviet homeland. At the end of the war-game, their Red team was deemed the “loser” because it held less territory than it did at the beginning of the game.

After the war game there was a debriefing session, where the various teams were able to discuss their strategies. Her opponent commented on their team’s approach, saying, “Well when he²⁸ took his troops out of Afghanistan, I knew he was weak and I could push him around. And then, when we nuked him and he didn’t nuke us back, I knew he was just such a wimp, I could take him for everything he’s got and I nuked him again. He just wimped out.”²⁹

I think it is vital at this point to listen directly to how Dr. Cohn experienced this environment:

I felt silenced. My reality, the careful reasoning that had gone into my strategic and tactical choices, the intelligence, the politics, the morality — all of it just disappeared, completely invalidated. I could not protest, ‘Wait you idiot, I didn’t do it because I was weak, I did it because it made sense to do it that way, given my understandings of strategy and tactics, history and politics, my goals and my values.’ The protestation would be met with knowing sneers. In this discourse, the coding of an act as wimpish is hegemonic. Its emotional heat and resonance is like a bath of sulfuric acid: it erases everything else.”³⁰

After the game, it was deemed by the expert referees that the decision by Dr. Cohn’s team to voluntarily withdraw troops from Afghanistan was “wildly unrealistic” and “utterly absurd.”³¹

In the real world, the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan just six months after Dr. Cohn’s war-game experience. At this time in history, Soviet Premier Gorbachev was being influenced by a new and younger wave of Soviet strategic intellectuals who were rethinking Soviet nuclear strategy. He would eventually go on to make a proposal to Ronald Reagan (which Reagan eventually denied) to eliminate the entirety of both the U.S. and Soviet nuclear missile arsenals. And yet, when Dr. Cohn was working in the nuclear strategy world, she reports what American nuclear strategists thought of these new Soviet thinkers behind closed doors. She quotes one who says “I’ve met these Soviet ‘new thinkers’ and they’re a bunch of pussies.”³²

When I read this statement, it kind of took my breath away for a moment. It’s nakedly sexualized aggression and instinctive will to cynically dominate mirrors that of Dr. Cohn’s war-game opponent who reasoned, “when we nuked him and he didn’t nuke us back, I knew he was just such a wimp, I could take him for everything he’s got and I nuked him again.” There is a consistent coercively sexualized logic that runs as a through line through all of this — now flippantly directed at a real nuclear superpower, with deadly geopolitical implications.

The nuclear policy world would like you to think that nuclear strategy is only determined through mathematical objectivity and cold, calm rationality — that its work is what guards the peace of your sleep and the goodness of the world. In reality, its logic is a different one: that of toxic masculinity, coercive virility, and cynical dominance. More than that, it is not actually rational at all — is much more determinitively guided by a kind of flippant, emotive, and impulsive machismo. Dr. Cohn’s conclusion is worth reading at length on this point:

In a world where professionals pride themselves on their ability to engage in cool, rational, objective calculation while others around them are letting their thinking be sullied by emotion, the unacknowledged interweaving of gender discourse in security discourse allows men to not acknowledge that their pristine rational thought is in fact riddled with emotional response. In an ‘objective’ ‘universal’ discourse that valorizes the ‘masculine’ and deauthorizes the ‘feminine,’ it is only the “feminine” emotions that are noticed and labeled as emotions, and thus in need of banning from the analytic process. “Masculine emotions — such as feelings of aggression, competition, macho pride and swagger, or the sense of identity resting on carefully defended borders — are not so easily noticed and identified as emotions, and are instead invisibly folded into “self-evident,” so called realist paradigms and analyses. It is both the interweaving of gender discourse in national security thinking and the blindness to its presence and impact that have deleterious effects.³³

When I questioned whether nuclear strategic discourse constitutes a kind of geopolitical rape culture, I was gesturing toward the reality that a very sexualized drive to dominate seemed more determinative of decisions in nuclear strategy than actual rationality. Stan Goff (whose work we will explore in detail soon), defines rape culture as “a culture that associates sex with hostility, control, aggression, and vengeance.” It is worth carefully pondering the implications of intertwining descriptions of weapons systems, military tactics, and mushroom clouds with the language of sexual arousal. It is worth questioning whether this discourse conceptualizes the power granted by nuclear deterrence as permissive of a sexualized transgression of boundaries and the utilization of coercion and dominance to enact one’s will. It is worth attending to how these facets of nuclear discourse are legitimated and cast as desirable precisely because of their association with an aggressive masculinity, as well as to how the feminine is deployed as an enforcement of these terms through shaming and ridicule. It is worth closely attending to how “reason” and “objectivity” are applied as an obscuring veneer to the inner workings of this system, and how those qualities are so implicitly associated in cohesion with masculinity and in opposition to femininity. Discourse like this shapes what one is willing or able to think, and maybe more importantly, what one desires. I think that when nuclear dominance is routinely thought of in the terms of sexual dominance, that should profoundly disturb us.

It disturbs me at least.

Footnotes

(Because I am a graduate student. Also, its my blog, so deal with it)

1. Spoiler alert: We’ll be working through the work of a lot of these core founding figures in nuclear strategy soon — people like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Gen. Leslie Groves, Dean Acheson, David Lilienthal, Gen. Henry Arnold, Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, among others.
2. The papers I will be drawing from are “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” and “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.”
3. Paraphrasing Cohn’s words, a “counterforce attack” refers to a nuclear missile or bomber attack that targets the opponent’s weapons systems (the bombers or missiles that they would use to launch a nuclear attack) as well as their command centers and military leadership. However, due to the destructive power of the nuclear warheads in use today, even a counterforce attack would murder tens of millions of people. There also exists something called a “countervalue attack” which is “the benign term for targeting and incinerating cities — what the United States did to Hiroshima, except that the bombs used today would be several hundred times more powerful.” She notes that this type of attack is also sometimes casually referred to as a “all-out city-busting exchange.”
4. Cohn, Carol. “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 227.
5. This is, of course, not an uncontested definition of gender. We will be revisiting gender in depth in an upcoming reflection, but for now, I am merely clarifying how Dr. Cohn understands gender for the purposes of her research. Even if this definition of gender is controversial on some level for you, I think Dr. Cohn’s conclusions still carry validity, even if you only superficially admit that gender is, in some sense, learned as one develops by observing adult examples of one’s own gender identity to understand what male-ness or female-ness means in American culture.
6. Cohn, Wars Wimps and Women, 229.
7. Cohn, Carol. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. Signs, Vol. 12, №4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687–718. 692–693.
8. Cohn, Sex and Death, 693.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 694.
12. Ibid., 695.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 697.
18. Ibid., 704.
19. Ibid., 691.
20. For a modeling of the 15kt “Little Boy” Hiroshima blast over present day Manhattan, click here. By comparison, click here for a modeling of the destruction that would be caused over Manhattan by a detonation of the 9 Mt W-53 hydrogen bomb, the largest nuclear warhead operationally deployed in U.S. military history. (And click here to see what a blast from Tsar Bomba would do).
21. Cohn, Sex and Death, 692.
22. Ibid., 691
23. Ibid., 713
24. Ibid., 709.
25. Ibid., 706.
26. Cohn, Wars Wimps and Women, 232.
27. Ibid., 233–234.
28. Don’t ignore the assumption contained in this pronoun!
29. Cohn, Wars Wimps and Women, 234.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 233.
32. Ibid., 235.
33. Ibid., 242.
34. Goff, Stanley, and Amy Laura Hall. Borderline: Reflections on War, Sex, and Church. Cascade Books, 2015.