"Patting" the bomb

I absolutely love reading about and studying linguistics; since taking Sociolinguistics last year, I can't stop analyzing peoples' language and how differently we all communicate with one another. I think I freak people out sometimes because I tend to blatantly watch, listen to, and analyze their interactions (a goal of mine is to develop a more inconspicuous method...)

Anyway, this background info explains why I was instantly intrigued by the title of Carol Cohn's article about "Nuclear Language." I thought it was a very interesting article, but must admit that I was a little bit disappointed because it was all about nuclear science and bombs and things (which goes a bit over my head). At any rate, there were a few laugh-out-loud moments for me...especially the cartoon of the man "patting" the bomb like a pet made me laugh.The sexual imagery involved in nuclear science was outrageous to consider, but I thought it was taken a little bit too far...I couldn't make the parallel between nuclear science and sex in some of her examples. 

I give Carol Cohn a hell of a lot of credit for immersing herself in the male-dominated filed of nuclear developments/defense. It was very interesting to read about how she primarily thought "how can they think that way" (regarding the male scientists' jargon that distances them from the death and destruction they produce and research), but within weeks of being exposed to the jargon necessarily picked it up and began to think in an identical way to her male counterparts.

To think about the strength of language is a bit scary...Cohn illustrates how easy it was for her to adopt the language and thus distance herself from the seriousness of the field. The language used by nuclear scientists and researches helps distance the workers from the reality of destruction and death associated with nuclear bombs, which removes the heaviness of what they're actually researching/producing. Some of the vocabulary worth mentioning includes:

• "countervalue attacks" means incinerating cities
• "collateral damage" means number of dead humans
• a "bus" "delivers" the bombs to the target instead of them being "dropped" on the target.
• Nuclear missiles are based in "silos," and when they're ready to be launched, the weapons are in the "Christmas tree farm."

These are just a few of the phrases that remove the workers from their reality and (perhaps) make them more comfortable with the jobs they have. I think it's absolutely ridiculous how simply the nuclear scientists and researches can diminish the seriousness of their work...I feel like it's almost unfair to do so. Nuclear development has killed hundreds of thousands of people (!), and I feel like the makers/researchers/supporters of nuclear weapons use their specific language as a way of shifting and/or removing the blame of (or altogether ignoring) human death (er...collateral damage) as a result of nuclear weapons.

Cohn explains, "no matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point" (Cohn, 1987). Cohn says that no matter how educated she was or how much insight she provided, her co-workers treated her as if she were uneducated/ignorant if she failed to speak to them in their "Nuclear Language."  Cohn and her colleagues were able to work in such a field and talk about nuclear weapons day after day (and maintain their sanity) solely because the language/jargon skewed their perception of the reality of nuclear weaponry. That's so powerful!

A sentence toward the end generated a "?!" thought: "The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; any other factors, such as what happened where the weapons landed, are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss" (Cohn, 1987). That sentence made me shake my head and think "WHAT?!" Ok, so you've all removed yourselves SO far from the reality of what your weapons do to people just like you that you can't even consider human death (er..."collateral damage") as something significant in calculating the wins/losses of war??

Speechless!