The 1AC’s technostrategic discourse invests in nuclear weapons as an object of fantasy instead of horror. Feminist criticism is key to understanding IR as constituted by subject formation and not merely “rational strategy.”

According to the first criticism, the prevalence of sexual metaphors and phallic images in public discourse about nuclear weapons provide a means “to create excitement about, support for and identification with both the weapons and the political regime possessing them” (Duncanson and Eschle 2008, 548). For instance, feminist scholars Cohn and Ruddick (2004, 415, 418) argue that nuclear “weapons (and their use) are theorized and legitimated” with alluring and exciting sexual metaphors, which “breed the idea that nuclear explosions give ‘virility’ to the nation.” Keep in mind that feminists make this argument about societies and national security discourses, this is not a point targeted at Dr. Strangelove. However, it certainly reflects a strange love. One standard popular and well-known reference about phallic imagery is antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott’s (1986, 238) notion of “missile envy” and “the psychosexual overtones” of nuclear weapons terminology. However, the empirical and theoretical work of feminist scholar Carol Cohn is especially important on this theme. Cohn (1987, 688) spent 1984 “immersed in the world of defense intellectuals” as a “participant observer” in workshops and lectures focused on nuclear strategy, weapons, and arms control. Since that time, she has also devoted much of her career to studying nuclear weapons, strategy, and gender. Cohn (1987, 687, 696) found that the men, “and indeed, they are virtually all men,” who work as “defense intellectuals” typically employ language filled with “sexual imagery.” In a lengthy and much-cited article about her experiences among defense intellectuals, Cohn points out numerous examples of sexual images and language, including standard references to penetration, throw-weight, and spasm attacks (see also Sylvester 1994, 176). Additionally, Cohn (1987, 694) noted that “The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists, strategists, and SAC commanders.” Based on his extensive personal experience in the field, nuclear physicist Brian Easlea (1987, 146) likewise acknowledged that military scientists and nuclear strategists employ “frightening” and even “obscene” sexual metaphors in an effort to “demonstrate indisputable masculine status.”

As demonstrated in the prior section, Dr. Strangelove is certainly filled with sexual metaphors and phallic images. Again, “all of the major characters have names which are either explicitly or subtly sexually denotative” (Linden 1977, 76). In addition to the phallic images already noted, General Ripper’s scenes often include this imagery. Notably, Ripper smokes a large phallic cigar in his meeting with Group Captain Mandrake, which Kubrick made much more prominent by use of another low-angled camera shot. Later, Ripper fires a long cylindrical machine gun, another phallic symbol, when his base comes under attack from American forces trying to learn the codes to recall the bombers and stop the war he has initiated. In the ending, as Starck (2010, 61) notes, Major Kong’s “positioning on the rocket [he straddles] and the camera angle produce the impression of a giant penis.” Film scholar M. Keith Booker (2007, 103–4) echoes the feminist critique when he argues that Kubrick’s repeated use of sexual images and metaphors work to characterize “the Cold War as a phallic competition” as the military leaders attempt to demonstrate that they “have the bigger and more effective weapons.”

The second strand of the feminist critique of nuclear weapons focuses on the “technostrategic” (Cohn 1987, 690n) abstractions employed by specialists working in the field. The language of defense intellectuals is peppered with euphemisms and acronyms that leave out “the emotional, the concrete, the particular, human bodies and their vulnerability, human lives and their subjectivity—all of which are marked feminine” (Cohn, Hill and Ruddick 2005, 5). In Dr. Strangelove, this is most apparent in the language of General Turgidson, who speaks almost nonchalantly to President Muffley about the potential death of “ten to twenty million killed, tops.” In this passage, Turgidson speaks obliquely about the number of American lives that would be lost after Soviet retaliation to a US first strike. His additional description of the nuclear attack on the Soviet Union is just as abstract, not at all focused on the mass murder that would be committed:

Mr. President, about thirty-five minutes ago, General Jack Ripper, the commanding General of Burpleson Air Force Base, issued an order to the 34 B-52’s of his wing which were airborne at the time as part of a special exercise we were holding called Operation Dropkick. Now, it appears that the order called for the planes to attack their targets inside Russia. The planes are fully armed with nuclear weapons with an average load of 40 megatons each. . . . The aircraft will begin penetrating Russian radar cover within 25 minutes.

In response, President Muffley, an effeminate male character, does describe such an attack as mass murder and reminds Turgidson that the United States had “avowed . . . never to strike first with nuclear weapons.”8 Turgidson notes technocratically that “General Ripper has already invalidated that policy.” In addition to these exchanges, much of the military dialogue in the film is filled with mysterious and abstract acronyms, including the scene on the B-52 when Major Kong and his crew review the nuclear attack profile.9 They discuss the CRM114, the ICBM complex at Laputa, and a secondary target at “November Bravo X-Ray One Zero Eight.”

The third strand of the feminist critique is that nuclear language relies upon gendered, specifically masculine, axioms about security. Nuclear deterrence is a purposeful strategy, reflecting the retaliatory destruction states threaten when facing certain situations. According to a standard feminist understanding of IR, this is a “stereotypically masculine” (Wright 2010, 206) perspective. By viewing ideas such as rationality, autonomy, and power as socially constructed masculine stereotypes rather than as characteristics of human nature, feminist critics suggest that IR concepts that are long taken-for-granted, like deterrence, are actually gendered. Echoing these ideas from Tickner’s (1988) work discussed above, Cohn et al. (2005, 4) explain how the use of masculine language frames debates about nuclear weapons and strategy:

Ideas about gender also shape, limit and distort the national and international political processes through which decisions about WMD [weapons of mass destruction] are made. Ideas about strength, protection, rationality, security and control have a critical impact on governmental and intergovernmental policy, as well as functioning at a large-scale societal level, where a certain notion of aggressive masculinity is equated with human nature.

These concepts are apparent in the film, as IR scholars like Kuzma and Haney (2001), Lindley (2001), and Valeriano (2013) emphasize. Strategist Dr. Strangelove certainly describes and criticizes the Soviet doomsday device in these terms: “Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy . . . the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It’s simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing.” A few moments later, Strangelove notes that the “whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” He asks Ambassador de Sadeski, “Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” For feminist critics, the practical and pedagogical value that analysts and scholars have traditionally derived from discussing and teaching Dr. Strangelove, which emphasize the alleged requirements of nuclear deterrence, may well reinforce the gender stereotypes embedded in the concepts.

Despite many decades of important feminist critiques of national security policies, nuclear armaments, military life, war, and even the definition of security itself, a large schism continues to divide most IR academics and the field’s feminist scholars (Cohn 2018). Whereas Sjoberg (2010, 2) finds that feminist theories have paved the way for meaningful and even pragmatic changes in the policy world, and gender is now a “salient concern of global governance,” she emphasizes that feminists and mainstream security studies scholars rarely communicate. The result is that national security curriculum, scholarship, and practice remain reified as masculine spheres (Zalewski and Parpart 1998). Charli Carpenter (2007, 341) contends that a good starting point for addressing this fissure is for scholars to provide material that allows students learning about the discipline to recognize the importance of masculinity in IR. Dr. Strangelove is precisely such a text—and it is already widely used. However, IR and security scholars would need to acknowledge and discuss sexual and gender-related themes and images that have long been apparent to film critics and scholars from other disciplines, even as they incorporate feminist criticisms from the discipline.

Conclusions

The IR analysts and scholars who continue to discuss the classic film Dr. Strangelove publicly, and/or utilize it in their classes, typically reference or use the film to emphasize traditional points about deterrence and national security. Indeed, as demonstrated, these experts do not typically grapple with the film’s gender themes or “sexual subtext,” though these ideas have long been highlighted by scholars from other disciplines and film critics. IR experts recognize that Stanley Kubrick’s decision to employ satire allowed him to critique nuclear deterrence and high-level decision-making, but they typically overlook Dr. Strangelove’s overt comparison of the logic of nuclear deterrence strategy to absurd male sexual fantasies and exaggerated notions of masculinity. While Dr. Strangelove obviously depicts a male-dominated world, the story does not follow established masculine tropes of war narratives. It is neither a tragedy nor a heroic romance. The film is not a straight-forward and serious story about autonomous states and the men who lead them making rational calculations and decisions about how to use military power. Those allegedly masculine traits are referenced in the film, but many of the men are shown to be irrational, and the autonomy and power of every man and nation is ultimately challenged by the existence of a doomsday device that is triggered automatically. The film satirizes and thereby ridicules top-level male national security elites by revealing them to be buffoonish characters whose sexual fantasies and behaviors cannot readily be separated from their outlandish ideas about nuclear weapons, deterrence strategy, and war.

The field’s failure to emphasize the sexual subtext of Dr. Strangelove parallels more broadly the lack of scholarly engagement with feminist contributions to IR and security studies. As both opinion and literature surveys reveal, IR and security studies scholars do not normally discuss feminist perspectives in their courses and generally overlook feminist literature in their research. By acknowledging Dr. Strangelove’s numerous sexual metaphors and images and linking them to feminist arguments about nuclear weapons and strategy, IR scholars and policy experts could effectively grapple with the film’s wargasm and start to narrow divisions in the field. Because Dr. Strangelove is such an important IR text, changing the way it is discussed and taught could effectively provide a bridge to feminist scholarship about militarized masculinity, nuclear weapons, and deterrence strategy. Artifacts of popular culture increasingly influence the field of IR (Daniel and Musgrave 2017). Scholars should take seriously the wider culture’s understanding of those artifacts— especially when they so neatly align with an important and critical subfield in the discipline (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 156).

Finally, as feminists like Cohn have demonstrated, real-world contemporary depictions of nuclear weapons and strategy reveal an ongoing need to identify and critique the sexual images and metaphors still at work in public debates. If a wider range of scholars understood and embraced the feminist interpretation of Dr. Strangelove, scholars could publicly confront such depictions and extend the feminist critique well beyond the academic IR classroom. For example, Cohn and Ruddick (2004, 422–23) reference an Indian newspaper’s political cartoon published after five 1998 nuclear tests. It featured the caption “Made with Viagra.” They likewise quote a Hindu nationalist leader saying that the bomb helped “to prove that we are not eunuchs.” Beyond these examples related to nuclear proliferation, defense intellectuals, military leaders, and prominent politicians continue to talk brazenly about the links between sexual urges, macho competition, nuclear weapons systems, and war. Tom Christie, “the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester” during the George W. Bush presidency (2001 to 2005), made sexually tinged remarks about the latest F-35 stealth aircraft, which is expected to be fitted with nuclear bombs by 2024: “There’s always this sexual drive for a new airplane on the part of each [armed] service . . . Persistent, urgent and natural” (quoted in Thompson 2013). Identifying the same theme, retired General Lee Butler (quoted in Kazel 2015), who served in 1991 as the final commander of the US Strategic Air Command, recently told an interviewer that nations amass nuclear weapons for “testosterone-driven” reasons. Similarly, General Stanley McChrystal (quoted in Rose 2013, 8) provocatively declared, “If you look at the role I had in Iraq, it is sexy, it is satisfying, it is manly, it scratches an itch in the American culture that people like.” Notoriously, of course, the second Iraq war was initially and primarily justified by the Bush administration because of fears that Saddam Hussein would acquire nuclear weapons.

Most recently, President Donald Trump prominently taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by calling him “little rocket man” and warning that America would unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea should it make any new threats against the United States. On January 2, 2018, Trump tweeted (quoted in Ditum 2018) that Kim Jong-un “stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone . . . please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” As Cohn (2018) opined, this “nuclear saber-rattling . . . sounded a lot like, well, penismeasuring.” Beatrice Fihn (Miles 2018), executive director of the policy-oriented International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, criticized Trump for “threatening to mass murder a whole country” and claimed that Trump’s “politics were imbued with ‘toxic masculinity.’” Columnist Sarah Ditum used the same “toxic masculinity” phrasing to describe Trump’s threats but pointed out that his reference to a nuclear button was “not the most impressive penis euphemism ever.” These examples reveal that the lessons about gender and nuclear weapons that can be learned from Dr. Strangelove remain relevant today, and ongoing public debates provide ample opportunity for security analysts and IR scholars to take the feminist criticisms seriously.