10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
THE THIRD WORLD POSSESSION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS DESCRIBED
Download 1.23 Mb. View original pdf
|
| THE THIRD WORLD POSSESSION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS DESCRIBED IN PATRIARCHAL TERMS. Hugh Gusterson MIT, ʻ99] Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb, 1999), pp. 111-143 Third World nations acquiring nuclear weapons are also described in terms of passions escaping control. In Western discourse the passionate, or instinctual, has long been identified with women and animals and implicitly contrasted with male human rationality (Haraway 1990; Merchant 1980; Rosaldo 1974). Thus certain recurrent figures of speech in the Western discourse on proliferation cast proliferant nations in the Third World in imagery that carries a subtle feminine or subhuman connotation. Whereas the United States is spoken of as having "vital interests" and "legitimate security needs" Third World nations have "passions" "longings" and "yearnings" for nuclear weapons which must be controlled and contained by the strong male and adult hand of America. Pakistan has "an evident ardor for the Bomb" says a New York Tinzes editorial (1987a:A34). Peter Rosenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, worries that the United States cannot forever "stifle [Pakistan's] nuclear longings" (A. Representative Ed Markey Democrat, Massachusetts, agreeing, warns in a letter to the Washington Post that America's weakness in its relationship with Pakistan means that the Pakistanis "can feed nuclear passions at home and still receive massive military aid from America" (A. The image is of the unfaithful wife sponging off her cuckolded husband. But throwing the woman out may cause even more disorder the Washington Post editorial page, having described Pakistan's nuclear weapons program-in an allusion to the ultimate symbol of Muslim femininity as concealed "behind a veil of secrecy" goes onto warn that there are "advantages to . . . having Pakistan stay in a close and constraining security relationship with the United States rather than be cast out by an aid cutoff into a loneliness in which its passion could only grow" (A. Thus, even though American intelligence had by 1986 concluded that the Pakistani uranium-enrichment plant at Kahuta "had gone all the way" (Smith 1988:104), and even though the president can no longer, as he is required bylaw, "certify Pakistan's nuclear purity" (Molander 1986), the disobedient, emotive femininity of Pakistanis likely to be less disruptive if it is kept within the bounds of its uneasy relationship with the United States. Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
|