Building More Bombs: The Discursive Emergence of US Nuclear Weapons Policy

This dissertation investigates the social construction and discursive emergence of US nuclear weapons policy against the backdrop of the nuclear taboo and its associated anti-nuclear discourse. The analysis is drawn from poststructuralism with a focus on the discourses that construct the social world and its attendant “common sense,” and makes possible certain policies and courses of action while foreclosing others. This methodology helps overcome the overdetermined nature of foreign policy, or its tendency to be driven simultaneously by the international strategic environment, the domestic political environment, and powerful domestic organizations, and while being shaped and delimited by the discourses associated with the nuclear taboo. I apply this method to three different cases of presidential administration policymaking: Eisenhower, Reagan, and George W. Bush. In each, the analysis illuminates the coherent discourses that emerged, crystallized, and either became policy, or were usurped by competing discourses and their associated policies. I follow the actions of key actors as they stitched together existing discourses in new ways to create meaning for nuclear weapons and the US arsenal, as well as to limit what could and should be done with that arsenal. The case studies reveal the content of the strategic international, domestic political, organizational, and normative bases of US nuclear weapons policy. These results suggest that most challenges to the nuclear policy status quo emerge from new presidents whose own discourse is built upon personal conviction and critiques of their predecessors. Upon taking office, these sources compete with discourses emerging from organizations, especially the nuclear weapons complex, and anti-nuclear forces including: activists, the scientific community, the international public, US allied governments, and the US public. It was this political conflict and confrontation that made possible the pattern of nuclear weapons policy that characterized each administration. This work points to the strength of the nuclear taboo, and the effort that must be expended for its associated discourses to impact presidential policymaking. This insight provides an opening for managing the nuclear threat posed by the Trump administration’s new nuclear weapons policy