Very excited to get to go to Japan for the first time soon for this conference that has an awesome lineup!
Kate Storrs
@katestorrs.bsky.social
1.5K followers 304 following 114 posts
Vision scientist in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Enthusiastic dabbler in the arts and crafts. British-Australian.
![Listening
She points out that specialists have "clean" words to talk about strategy: "first strikes", "counterforce exchanges", "limited nuclear war", or say "minimum deterrent posture". She points out the abstractions and euphemisms used by very normal men doing their job, where they create a distance between the speaker and listeners and the reality of an actual nuclear holocaust:
Defense analysts talk about "countervalue attacks" rather than about incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred to as "collateral damage"; for, as one defense analyst said wryly, "The Air Force doesn't target people, it targets shoe factories."
She points out the ironies of using "clean bombs" when these bombs are 1,000 times more powerful than those that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima and how they are discussed almost as if they were humanitarian efforts. As she states, there is an "astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes technostrategic language."
nuclear bombs are not referred to as bombs or even warheads; they are referred to as "reentry vehicles," a term far more bland and benign, which is then shortened to "RVs," a term not only totally abstract and removed from the reality of a bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation.
[...]
Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful, perverse refusal of accountability—because to be accountable to reality is to be unable to do this work.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qvywnipfiyrd6v4qdf4x27wy/bafkreig5bnqeftecilkgsm7tdqriityik6o52il4zkyc3gazz6uxyntpxi)
