University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation

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.