“The Means to Match Their Hatred”: Nuclear Weapons, Rhetorical Democracy, and Presidential Discourse

Abstract

The persistence of nuclear weapons evokes four critical issues: they continue to pose significant risk in the absence of compelling security needs; they embody technological autonomy and institutional indifference to democratic deliberation; they are represented in mythic and religious presidential rhetoric that hypocritically celebrates American virtue while unproductively demonizing nuclear opponents; and they remain understudied by rhetorical scholars. This essay responds by conceptualizing the challenges posed by nuclear weapons to the ideal of a rhetorical democracy, and historicizes the related role of presidential rhetoric. It concludes with a tentative vision of presidential rhetoric and rhetorical criticism consistent with a nuclear‐rhetorical democracy.

Avoiding “A Chain Reaction of Disaster”: A Reappraisal of the Eisenhower White House’s Handling of the 1954–1955 Quemoy Crisis

“…A Communist attack on Quemoy or Formosa would not lead to the United States retaliating by launching World War III but to its initiating precision strikes with small, now “conventional” atomic warheads, with the genocidal big ones waiting in the wings for worst‐case scenarios. Bryan C. Taylor () has noted how through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations Americans learned to live with “the excruciating tension fostered by presidential rhetoric depicting nuclear weapons as both an apocalyptic threat and a political necessity” (681; see also Lifton and Falk ). That characterization is apt, particularly regarding the Americans’ perspectives vis‐à‐vis possible war with the Soviets, yet here we see Dulles, Eisenhower, and Nixon moving the discourse away from the sense of atomic‐weapons‐as‐apocalypse by normalizing WMD as “conventional” tools, not means to mutually assured destruction.…”