"I started thinking about this over three decades ago, when I was working among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists and arms controllers. What struck me was how removed they were from the human realities behind the weapons they discussed. This distancing occurred in part through a professional discourse characterized by stunningly abstract and euphemistic language — and in part through a set of lively sexual metaphors.
The human bodies evoked were not those of the victims; instead, there were conversations about 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 adviser to the National Security Council called “releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.”...
They work in deeper, more subtle ways too. The culturally pervasive associations of masculinity with dispassion, distance, abstraction, toughness and risk-taking, and of femininity with emotion, empathy, bodily vulnerability, fear and caution, are embedded within the professional discourse...
embedded ideas about gender in nuclear strategic discourse go beyond questions of whether a button is more than just a button. They act as a deterrent to more holistic, and therefore truly realistic, thinking about nuclear weapons and the holocaust that would result from their use."
FB: "Even more disturbing was how [gender] shaped what could be said, or even thought, within the confines of these male-dominated spaces. “What are you, some kind of wimp?” was an insult readily lobbed at anyone who urged restraint in responding to a provocation or attack. Discussion of whether political leaders “had the stones for war” suggested that the desire to solve a conflict through nonmilitary measures would mean you were less than fully manly."
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