What follows the Cold War? Even the fact that the question can be asked isastounding. Shall the sequel be "peaceful competition" (Gorbachev), "cold peace and peaceful competition" (The New York Times editorial of August 10, 1987), "stable coexistence" (the American Committee on U. S.-Soviet Relations, including Arthur Macy Cox, William Colby, and George Ball)- or, grudgingly, "steps ... to reconcile vital U. S. and Soviet interests" (Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance)? There is dispute and confusion in both camps over what the new relationship is, what to call it. As the American establishment reorganizes its understanding of the world, theAmerican right is not silent. It is therefore useful to monitor the right's reactions to East-West rapprochement. In these notes, I look at the American right's responses to the East-West relaxation marked by the Washington and Moscow summits and the signing of the INF treaty. The discourse of the right in the first half of 1988 offers a preview of how it may be expected to react during the years to come.
This study suggests the value of a "multi-feature/multi-dimension" method of discourse analysis (Biber in press) to the study of nuclear discourse by reporting some of the results of a pilot study of four different written texts about the nuclear dilemma. The quantitative results showthe texts to differ in their uses of groups of concurring linguistic features and motivate a microanalysis of the texts seeking to discern the author's underlying assumptions about the relations of the United States and the Soviet Union to each other and to their nuclear weapons. The results also extend the work of James Wertsch (1987) in constructing a typology of modes ofnuclear discourse by (1) describing concrete lexical and syntactic variation between nuclear discourse texts and between nuclear discourse, as a subgenre, and other written and spoken genres of English, (2) ascribing general rhetorical strategies to different authors' "styles" of nuclear discourse identified by the quantitative analysis, and (3) associating these "styles" of nuclear discourse with some aspects of the authors' world-views which form their cognitive foundations.
"The Soviet threat" has provided a frame of reference for American politics since shortlyafter the end of World War II. Demonstrating, measuring, and responding to "the threat" have been subjects of intense concern and debate. The reality of "the threat" has been taken for granted. The paper examines the origins and reproduction of the Soviet threat" in American politics. This is not an analysis of whether or not the threat is or has been "real." Rather, it is a study of how Americans have come to regard it as real. The distinction is crucial: we are dealing with the sociology of knowledge and the politics of representation. We are interested in seeing how and why a society constructs an enemy.
If we need a new language of national and international politics in order to think differently so as to cope with the dangers of a nuclear world, we also need a new language of policy analysis to examine the structures and processes by which defense policy in general, and nuclear policy in particular, is made. What is needed, as a start, is a new lexicon of basic terms derived from language and discourse but applied to the policy process. We might then begin to develop this new vocabulary into an effective critique of defense decision making in the modern or indeed, the post-modern state.
On February 5-7, 1987, the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation sponsored a conference on "Historical Perspectives on Global Conflict and Cooperation." The aim of the conference was two-fold: to identify promising new areas for historical scholarship in the field of global conflict and cooperation, and to generate new ideas for specific research proposals that University of California historians might later present to IGCC for funding.
This paper is the beginning of an analysis of the nature of nuclear strategic thinking; its emphasis is on the role of a specialized language that I call "technostrategic." I have come to believe that this language both reflects and shapes the nature ofthe American nuclear strategic project; that it plays a central role in allowing defenseintellectuals to think and act as they do; and that all of us who are concerned about nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to the role of language we and others choose to use -- who it allows us to communicate with, and what it allows us to think as well as say.
This paper discusses how the British popular press (tabloids) covered the visit of the British Prime Minister to Moscow for talks with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, about arms control and other matters of mutual interest. It concentrates on the geopolitical significance of the visit and the coverage--their relevance to the prospects for nuclear arms reductions on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
This document examines the fundamental changes in negotiating techniques and posturing by the United States and USSR that appeared in the days following the Reykjavik conference on nuclear arms. Predictions and prospects follow.
One aim of this paper is to begin to face the problem of how to relate an ethical, polltical, and critical perspective to the rational-technical means of analysis and description that have been developed by modern linguists.
The second (and principal) question that this paper seeks to pursue is the following. Given that any utterance is a highly complex event in which wording, phrasing, and text-organisation fulfill multiple and simultaneous functions, what details is it possible to pin down in a text in such a way that it is rational to make claims about and critiques of ideological or distorted communication?
