“He’s Fucking Crazy and We Need to Nuke Him First”: Kim Jong Un, North Korea, and Nuclear Deterrence

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or "North Korea") has shown impressive progress in their nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs. Currently the DPRK has a demonstrated ICBM capability and, if not now then soon, will most likely be able to deliver nuclear weapons to continental US targets on (at least) the West coast. Over the last six weeks, while volunteering at the “Nuclear Institute,” visitors and fellow volunteers have regularly disparaged North Korean technical abilities and described Kim Jong Un in terms such as “crazy,” “insane,” and “unpredictable.” These statements resemble those made by some political and military elites in the United States and cannot therefore be written off as solely the result of low-information assessments or "ignorance. In this post I interrogate underlying social processes and logics that enable, and encourage, both viewing Kim Jong Un as "crazy" (and therefore unable to be incorporated into US strategies of nuclear deterrence) and denying North Korean missile and nuclear weapon capabilities.

“Our Product Is Not For Sale”: Selling The Bomb to 1950s America

This post discusses nuclear weapon laboratory advertising in Physics Today and Scientific American 1950-1964. I focus on Sandia National Laboratories and a series of ads published 1956-1959; these advertisements are distinctive because of their explicit engagement with ideologies justifying nuclear weapon projects. I show that these advertisements often drew on tropes of the history and violence of the “American West” to justify, represent, and recruit for nuclear weapons work. This discussion, drawing on historical examples, offers a lens for examining contemporary discourses about US nuclear weapons.