At the dawn of the nuclear age, strategist Bernard Brodie
recognized our predicament when he said, "Nuclear weapons exist and
they are incredibly destructive." Despite the end of the Cold War,
thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert on both
sides of the Atlantic. Plans to develop, deploy, and detonate
nuclear weapons (for purposes of war prevention or war fighting)
are informed by the ambiguous notion that nuclear war can be
avoided by maintaining a balance of power. Policy-makers and
decision-makers believe that once the balance of power is
destroyed, a crisis will ensue, and if this crisis cannot be
resolved with words, it is somehow necessary to use weapons. This
idea is held as an historic inevitability, but the nuclear
subculture is unaware of the highly problematic nature of their
fundamental assumptions. Hirschbein entertains the possibility that
the theory and practice of these policy-makers and decision-makers
are informed by concepts at once ancient and metaphorical. He
analyzes the primary and secondary metaphors invoked to
conceptualize and manage nuclear weaponry. Hirschbein draws a
striking parallel between dramatic changes in the ancient Greek
account of conflict and the American conceptualization of nuclear
weapons. Facing harrowing times, Thucydides avoided supernatural,
Homeric imagery in favor of naturalistic metaphors to account for
conflict--an account regarded as "eternal wisdom" by today's
realist. Likewise, facing the Soviet challenge, American
strategists abandoned supernatural Judeo-Christian accounts of
nuclear weapons in favor of Thucydides' naturalistic tropes.
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