Reading Carol Cohn in Tehran

(Again, technically in Doha)

Yes, this is chatGPT art, but, like, come on.

As in earlier installments (see below), I have been taking my reading notes for my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics course and turning them into Substack essays. This week, in light of President Trump balancing nuclear strategy and attending the ur-macho UFC event in Florida, it seems apposite to share today’s notes on Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”.

Today we are talking about Carol Cohn’s landmark article, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” This piece is now almost forty years old, which is staggering to think about.

It’s startling to notice that, temporally, Cohn’s article is now closer to the world of Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn and all the other defense intellectuals we’ve read about than her article is to us. Another way to think about this is that we are as far from this piece as Cohn was from the bombing of Hiroshima. She is talking about an era in which all those ideas were still fresh, in which you would go to a seminar and Tom Schelling himself might be leading the discussion.

At times, as we’ll discuss below, this makes the piece feel almost vintage. At other times, it remains startlingly fresh because the tendencies and structures she describes remain present. One of the things that really stood out to me is how venerable the language of privilege is. Cohn is using the terms in exactly the same way that we would use them now. Her discussion of how her membership in the summer workshop entitled her to the Temporary Privilege Card is just one of those moments of astonishing irony and insight.

Carol Cohn is still around, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As the New York Times essay I sent around shows, she is still active, still writing. Her goal is not only to dismantle weapons systems, but to dismantle what she sees as a strictly patriarchal and oppressive system of international relations that makes militarism not only a part of the world but the dominant discourse through which people see the world. For Cohn, the emphasis on language and socialization is not accidental. It comes from how she views the world. It comes from her academic and political project of trying to change it.

For somebody like Carol Cohn to be in this world really must have been jarring — and also scintillating for her as an observer.

What Kind of Article Is This?

I want to situate this piece by thinking about what kind of article it is, because it is different from the other genres we have read. We have read books of history. We have read synoptic guides about how nuclear politics operates. We have read forceful works of theory like Thomas Schelling. We have read pieces that sought to bring us up to date about specific developments or to survey the academic literature. What we’re reading here is something that lies in between autoethnography, ethnography, and critique.

I define this article as a mix of ethnography and autoethnography because it is about trying to understand the habits, the relations, the worldviews, the codes, and the desires of a particular group of people. That’s clearly ethnography. It’s autoethnography because Cohn is narrating her own introduction to and enculturation into — literally her assimilation into — the mores, the worldviews, the habits, and the language of that group. But it is also critique, because all of this academic labor is done in the service of what she delivers throughout, but especially in the last few pages: a discussion of how she and others can use her observations to combat what she sees in these circles.

That is why this is not just any one particular genre of article. It mixes description and observation with her own experiences, but in the service ultimately of not just describing or theorizing the world, but using her descriptions and theories to change how the world is made. That should make you think about how her approach will complement and challenge the other voices we have heard from, and how it makes her stand out.

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A Radical Voice in Context

You should be thinking about this article not only on its own terms but in the context of all that has gone before — not just in history, but in this course.

I hope this feels like a change from what we have discussed previously in the semester. I want to note at the beginning that this piece is not being given to you at this point in the term accidentally. This is about the moment where I think it should hit with maximum impact, because you now have some understanding of the context in which Cohn was thinking.

I tried to arrange the syllabus so that Carol Cohn was not the first female voice we heard from in this class. You might remember that we’ve heard from, among others, Caitlin Talmadge and Rose McDermott. But Cohn is the first stridently radical voice that we have encountered.

Cohn describes her own experience as being somebody who walked in fervently anti-nuclear and anti-militarist, interested in how bombs have effects on bodies, how the physical properties of these weapons make their use — to her — unthinkable. She wanted to understand how it could become thinkable. Not just for any given set of defense intellectuals, but for the people who decide whether or not these weapons will be used: how they are acquired, how they are designed, how they are employed, how plans for their use are drawn up.

Some will say, loosely, that the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, but clearly that is false. People do think about using them. For ordinary folks, we think about them as a kind of lingering background fear — a fear that can come to the forefront during moments like this past week, or during moments of persistently elevated crisis like the 1980s or the 1950s. But for others, nuclear weapons are thinkable all the time. If you work for a nuclear missile command, if you are actually one of the people in the silos, if you are a B-2 bomber pilot, if you work in command and control in Islamabad, in New Delhi, in Washington, in Omaha, in Beijing — nuclear weapons are thinkable.

And they are thinkable more generally. Every country has at least some kind of nuclear policy. Every country has to decide whether or not to pursue nuclear weapons, and what stance to take regarding their status in world politics. Not everyone has reacted to the advent of nuclear weapons by developing them. North Korea has them, but Vietnam, as far as I know, doesn’t have an active program. Iran has the rudiments of what could come together for a nuclear program, but Saudi Arabia is not yet as far along. Whether you have weapons or not, everybody’s thought about how they relate to them, at least to some extent. These weapons are not unthinkable.

The question is: what does it mean to be thinkable? What terms are thinkable? Who gets to think about them and how? Those are Cohn’s questions.

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Language, Discourse, and the Power to Exclude

What Cohn does on one level of this essay is to discuss how language and discursive markers are related to power — power to exclude certain perspectives, and power to control what is legitimate and therefore, if not thinkable, at least sayable in the rooms where decisions are made.

Cohn moves from and contrasts her life thinking about and discussing nuclear weapons for their effects on people, putting herself in the role of a potential victim of nuclear use. When we think about nuclear weapons and ourselves, I think it’s more natural to view ourselves as victims. For many of us, it is easier to identify with the hibakusha, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than with the aircrew who dropped the bombs or the scientists who made them. We may think of ourselves as potential survivors; we may think of ourselves as potential non-survivors, as straight victims. We almost certainly think of how nuclear weapons can be used to change our bodies and the bodies of people we know, of people we love, even the people we hate — because that is our immediate and most likely relationship to a nuclear weapon should it be used.

Cohn contrasts the description of the Hiroshima weapon left us by survivors with the sterile, clinical ways in which strategic discourse makes thinkable the use of nuclear weapons. And she notes how that language entails a shift in positionality — in who the language invites you to associate yourself with, in what view you take regarding the weapons and their effects. With the strategic discourse, our perspective is shifted from the people who would be victims to identifying with the people who would use the weapons, and in a sense, the weapons themselves. Even in language, the relationship of weapons to other weapons—fratricide, footprints—take center stage. In this language, there is no way to make prominent the effects on human bodies — to center those effects in nuclear discourse. If you use discourses of pain, of hurt, of grieving, of carnage, of bodily harm, you are excluded from the discourses that are hegemonic within the rooms where decisions are made.

The discourses of those rooms tend to be, as she says, domestic. You have shopping lists and Christmas tree farms. These all have to do with nuclear weapons—a shopping list is the president’s directive for stockpile management; Christmas tree farms are the forest of SLBMs on a ballistic missile submarine—but they become ordinary, domesticated, tame through language. And that, to me — even more than the occasionally puerile and sometimes exaggerated way in which gendered imagery is prevalent in nuclear discourse — is a real shift in habitus, in how your body and mind react to the existence of nuclear weapons. Not only does strategic discourse render nuclear use thinkable, but it becomes natural.

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Seductions of Power

This is not the only way of thinking about nuclear weapons. Different discourses inhabit different rooms. As Cohn moves from being somebody who is feminist and anti-militarist to somebody who is invited to be part of this world of privilege and hegemonic discourse, she finds herself attracted by the power of the privilege.

She gets a kick out of using terms like SLCMs and ALCMs — sea-launched cruise missiles, air-launched cruise missiles — of being in the know and being able to decode the hidden texts of, in a sense, joining the nuclear priesthood, of being somebody able to understand the mysteries of deterrence. She calls the acronyms sexy.

It’s at this point that the gatekeeping aspect of nuclear discourse becomes most prominent. There are people who are on the inside and people who are on the outside. If you want the privileges of the inside, you adopt a certain code — but that code will reflect how you are socialized, with whom you identify, from what vantage point you see the world.

For what it’s worth, I think that it is not the language that is controlling. I think it is the socialization and the desire for power — the desire to be part of an in-group — that changes how language is used. You transform, and then your language follows. You could use any language you chose, but doing so would mean being kicked out of the club. And the club is great.

(You can imagine similar dynamics taking place among people who want to abolish nuclear weapons, because they too must have some insight into nuclear mysteries. They too might find themselves using particular jargons, particular ways of meaning, in an effort to naturalize and privilege certain forms of discourse that elevate their own stature. Using that for the purpose of saving lives rather than threatening them is morally better, but I think we can see that this is a behavior meant to shape, discipline, and control not just thought itself, but how thoughts can be expressed.)

That’s why I’ve been using the term “discourse” rather than “language.” Discourse is how we communicate, but it’s shaped within and shapes the power relations about what language can communicate. You can think for yourself all you want, but as long as those thoughts are kept private, they have no public meaning — or at the very least, their public meaning is kept domiciled, domesticated.

So that’s why I think you can read Cohn and realize it’s not just who uses what language, but who uses what language to whom.

Sex, Death, and the Drives Beneath

On another level, this is not an article about language. It is an article about how language relates to fundamental drives. This is, in many ways, an article about psychology — different from how McDermott used psychology, because this is, if anything, Pop Freudianism, in which our deepest desires as humans, as animals, are made manifest in our social relations.

Cohn mentions at different points how the sterility of language is used to obfuscate, to hide from the participants themselves what they are really feeling. She identifies those feelings as basically the sex drive — which is not a drive for reproduction, but a drive for power — and the death drive. Dealing with our mortality, dealing with how we have the power to cause others’ mortality, and reacting, in the case of the men in the room, to the fact that men cannot create life, but want to, feel cheated of the ability. And so the men in the nuclear discourse have adopted a perspective in which they are fathers of the bomb, and therefore fathers of death.

This is, I think, a little more speculative. You have to buy into a lot of Freudian — maybe Jungian — archetypes about the world. But the notion that there is more going on in nuclear use, threatening, and behavior than simply relating to nuclear weapons themselves is quite likely valid. The way people relate to nuclear weapons isn’t just about the bomb; it is about what possessing, taming, or controlling the bomb means for you.

There’s a great novel from the early 1960s called Fail-Safe, which birthed not just the movie Fail-Safe but also Dr. Strangelove, which is kind of an unofficial adaptation. In Fail-Safe, one of the characters is a political science professor — I should mention that Fail-Safe was co-written by a political science professor — and there’s an erotic element that the book deals with in terms of how having control over the life and death of humanity plays out in people’s self-conception and their relations to others.

Cohn at the end — and one great way to read this article is to read it back to front, to read the conclusion and then everything else — mentions how there’s a homoerotic element, but also a heterosexual dynamic and, of course, a mortality dynamic. You can see all of this coming together. This is an article about gender. This is an article about sex. This is an article about death. But it is also an article about how all of those motivations are laundered into a scientific, or if you like, pseudoscientific, language about deterrence and nuclear use. How dealing with these fundamental properties of the bomb and being in touch with our deepest desires — but trying to hide those because they are, in a sense, shameful — plays out into the highest levels of national strategy.

This is a very different way of accounting for how nuclear deterrence, compellence, threat, and possession come about. Again, this is one person’s experience of one sliver of nuclear life. It is not a large-scale investigation — Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist, has a very good book about this. But it leads us to many different points about how, for instance, nuclear possession and use are gendered, about how countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are seen as less than, as immature, not able to understand these drives or cope with them. You can see that in how countries relate to aspiring nuclear states and in the dismissive attitudes that some adopt toward countries that choose not to pursue nuclear weapons.

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Limitations and Extensions

Cohn’s article isn’t perfect. Most clearly, this is an American article about Americans. It might be interesting to see how these sorts of discourses are naturalized and perpetuated in other spaces. You can imagine a transnational effect here, not just because of the dominance of the United States in strategic language, but because if you’re talking about arms control — accepting the existence of nuclear weapons but, in a very Schelling-esque way, trying to put limits on how they can be threatened — then a global or at least more-than-American shared discourse becomes necessary. People on all sides of a negotiating table have to be able to understand what’s going on.

You can imagine that different national discourses exist. The Israeli discourse is different from the Russian discourse, is different from the Pakistani discourse. In the Russian discourse, priests bless nuclear weapons. That strikes Americans as a little funny, but I reckon it wouldn’t necessarily strike others as strange in the least. For some, these weapons represent national power and manhood. Why wouldn’t they be celebrated, even to the point of being gifts from the divine?

I think you want to be thinking about this in a complicated way and unpacking these elements of Cohn’s arguments in ways that bring up potentially different answers. Cohn might be right that language is important, but language might be a result of how countries and people define their interests. I want to warn you against a naturalization of interests — especially countries’ own reports of their interests — in which strategic interests are taken as given. Cohn invites us instead to think about what interests are really in play, what motivations, what desires are really shaping how we define our interests. Is it about specific military or political logics, or is it about a feeling of power, of dominance, and how those feelings are refracted through culturally specific scripts?

In doing that, we should remember that not every country has chosen to pursue nuclear weapons — and not just because of technical possibilities, not just because of overriding strategic interests, but because of how different cultures and individuals react to the possibilities of possessing or not possessing them. I also want to guard against a technological determinism in which simply having or potentially having the bomb determines how we view our interests. Everybody has to react to the fact of the bomb and its potential, but you can react in different ways. We see this within the article itself, where even though the men in the rooms of power are reacting in one way, there are people outside reacting in very different ways. Alternative discourses are possible. The question is whether people in the rooms that matter are always going to have a particular view and discourse and habit, or whether others can amend that.

Something I also think is worth considering is that Cohn, as an academic — somebody whose life is governed by words, by the printed word, by the spoken word — is very interested in words. But discourses and imaginaries are also constructed out of visual elements. Does our world right now invoke nuclear weapons through visual or textual elements? And does that affect how we experience and imagine nuclear war? If we think about nuclear war visually, we immediately think of photos or videos of a mushroom cloud. But that means you are already positioning yourself as a survivor or a user. Because if you are a victim, you aren’t going to see the mushroom cloud from a distance. You might not see it at all, or you might see it unfolding over your head. Hiroshima witnesses talk about seeing the fires, seeing the black rain, seeing the cloud towering over them — but that’s not the perspective we see most of the time in media, because you can’t tell a story about somebody who’s dead. Most nuclear stories are post-apocalyptic, because otherwise you couldn’t get past the first minute.

This matters for us right now, because last week we talked about whether deterrence is eroding, whether fear of nuclear weapons is eroding. In our discussion today, we’ve talked about how we have moved from the sterility of Cohn’s world into a cruder, blunter world — a world in which presidents make threats about ending civilization on social media. It’s hard to avoid noticing that the crudity of social media compared to the erudition and wit—albeit paternalistic and patriarchal—of the defense intellectuals makes it much easier to see what Cohn assumed would be hidden. If you think about the Trumpian relationship to nuclear weapons—which is complex; he is a Cold War kid from New York—then it’s pretty clear that some psychosexual discourses are at play. This isn’t exactly defense intellectualism: it’s more like defense id.

I want to invite you to think about how you can think with Cohn in addition to thinking alongside Cohn — and what insights you can come up with here, in the Global South. How might you amend, challenge, and refine her thinking? Because I think there is much more to be said about the varieties of reactions, of discourses, of ways of relating to the bomb, and possibly how those could lead to alternative discourses—in power, or ready to take it.