History of Global Arms Transfer, 10 (2020), pp. 121-144‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’:Historicizing the Concept†
By IDO OREN* AND TY SOLOMON**The danger posed by 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) was the Bushadministration’s chief justification for invading Iraq in 2003. Amid the ceaselessrepetition of this phrase during the run-up to the invasion, hardly anyone stopped
to ask: what is 'WMD' anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than atimeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsche’s view of the truth as a'mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms . . . which have been enhanced,
transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically', we present a history of
the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of
Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was ‘transposed’ and‘enhanced’ throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up
to the Iraq war, 'WMD' did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather'embellished poetically and rhetorically' in ways that created the threat. After the
Iraq fiasco, ‘WMD’ became the object of satire and its rhetorical power
diminished. Still, other, equally-ambiguous phrases such as ‘failed states’ remain
available to be embellished rhetorically for the purpose of producing foreign
threats.
The danger posed by ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (‘WMD’) was the George W. Bushadministration’s chief justification for invading Iraq. In the run-up to the March 2003
invasion, administration officials repeatedly told the American public that, as President
Bush put it in a speech he delivered in Fort Hood, Texas,
The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons ofmass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass
destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own
people. That’s why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat.1
In the invasion’s aftermath, however, a massive search for these weapons failed to findthem.2 The failure generated a heated debate between defenders (or mild critics) of theBush administration, who characterized the fiasco as an unintentional ‘intelligence† This article is a modified and updated version of the following article. Oren and Solomon, ‘WMD: thecareer’.
* Author’s Affiliation: Ido Oren, Associate Professor of Political Science, the University of Florida.
** Author’s Affiliation: Ty Solomon, Senior Lecturer, Politics & International Relations, School of Social andPolitical Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK.
1 “President rallies troops at Fort Hood,” 3 Jan. 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/
releases/2003/01/20030103.html .
2 Woodward, Plan of attack, p. 418; Packer, Assassins’ gate, p. 298.

121

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
failure’,3 and harsh critics, who charged that the administration deliberately ‘misrepresented
the intelligence’ about Iraq’s WMD and presented a ‘fraudulent’ case for war.4
We seek not to adjudicate this debate but to expose its limits. Debaters of all stripes,
including those who charged that the Bush administration lied to the American people,
have treated ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as if it were a self-evident, fixed concept. Bothdefenders and critics of the administration have implicitly presupposed, furthermore, thatthe truth about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ consisted in correspondence between thisconcept and a factual reality independent of the concept.
Not even the harshest critics of the administration’s campaign to sell the war to theAmerican people 5 stopped to ask: what does ‘WMD’ mean anyway? Is ‘WMD’ not acontestable, changeable social construct more than a stable, timeless concept? Did therepeated uttering of this phrase during the run-up to war not rhetorically construct a grave
Iraqi threat rather than merely describe it? By failing to pose these questions, critics of theBush administration overlooked something important about the way in which the Iraq War
was sold to the American people.
The administration’s campaign to sell the war to the public should not be understood as
an effort to communicate facts about the realities of the Iraqi threat, facts whose inaccuracy
the press failed to expose. The campaign, we argue, rhetorically constructed a reality of an
Iraqi danger as much as it (mis)represented such a reality. More specifically, the incessant
incantation of the phrase weapons of mass destruction—initially by administration officials
and subsequently by the media and the public—successfully obscured the historicallyvariable, ambiguous, and contested meanings of the concept, creating the illusion that
WMD was a firm, stable, and self-evident signifier of a preexisting danger.
Seen in this light, the problem with the US press was not that it failed to call theadministration’s lies about WMD so much as that it reflexively echoed and amplified thisvague phrase, thus partaking in its reification. Indeed, inasmuch as they, too, reflexively
repeated the term WMD without raising questions about its meaning, even the sharpest
critics of the Iraq war contributed unwittingly to the firming-up of this term, thus
reinforcing the rhetorical construction of the Iraqi threat.
In this essay, then, rather than search for the essence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’,
we historicize the concept and dispel the illusion that it has a stable, unambiguous
meaning.6 Our exploration is guided by Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that the truth isA mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of
human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically andrhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people;
truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphorswhich are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictureand now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.7
Following Nietzsche’s formulation, we analyze the metonym weapons of mass
3 The notion of ‘a major intelligence failure’ was the key conclusion of the Silberman-Robb Commission, apanel appointed by President Bush to investigate US intelligence capabilities regarding Iraq’s WMD; see Isikoff
and Corn, Hubris, p. 382.
4 Ibid, pp. 398, 19.
5 For example, Isikoff and Corn, Hubris; Rich, Greatest story.
6 One scholar who has challenged the essentialist understanding of WMD is Michelle Bentley, whose work
nicely dovetails with our analysis. See her ‘Long goodbye’ and Weapons.
7 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, pp. 46-7; emphasis added.

122

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
destruction as a ‘sum’ of past political and social ‘human relations’.8 We describe how thisfigure of speech was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, how it was‘transposed’ by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush in 1945, how it was‘transposed’ again and ‘enhanced’ in UN disarmament negotiations in 1946–48, how theWMD coin subsequently ‘lost [its] picture’, how in the 1980s—in contrast with the Bushadministration’s later declarations that Iraq ‘used weapons of mass destruction’— the US
government and media did not use this metonym to describe Iraq’s chemical attacks, how
the concept experienced a revival in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, andhow it was ‘transposed’ once more in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
of 1994. We then analyze how ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was ‘embellished poeticallyand rhetorically’ in 2002–03: how its condensation of diverse meanings into a single
phrase, its reinforcement by other ominous expressions such as ‘mushroom cloud’, its
transposition into an acronym, and especially its ceaseless repetition made the term ‘seem
firm, canonical and obligatory’ to the American people, creating the ‘illusion’ that it was astraightforward referent of a factual truth about Iraq.

I The Emergence, “Enhancement,” and “Transposition” of WMD, 1937–1945‘Weapons of mass destruction’ was apparently coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In
his 1937 Christmas day radio broadcast, he stated
Who can think without dismay of the fears, jealousies, and suspicions which havecompelled nations, our own among them, to pile up their armament. Who can think at
this present time without a sickening of the heart of the appalling slaughter, thesuffering, the manifold misery brought by war to Spain and to China? Who can think
without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be withall the new weapons of mass destruction? 9
The Archbishop’s allusions to Spain and China—where the Nazi and Japanese air forces
attacked population centers—suggest that he probably meant to include aerial bombs
among the ‘new weapons of mass destruction’.
In the US press the term WMD would not be printed until November 1945, but its
metonymical component, ‘mass destruction’, did appear, rarely, even before theArchbishop’s address. In the 1930s ‘mass destruction’ was not primarily associated withweapons—12 of the 21 New York Times articles that contained this term during the decade
did not place it in the context of modern warfare. 10 During World War II the frequency of‘mass destruction’ in the press increased somewhat and the term became predominantly
associated with warfare. Initially, most of the New York Times articles that alluded to ‘mass
destruction’ did not tie it to particular weapons, but gradually a growing proportion of thereferences to this expression came to denote the effect of allied aerial bombing. For
example, in November 1943 the New York Times reported on an air raid resulting in the
8 Chandler, Semiotics, p. 233, defines a metonym as ‘a figure of speech that involves using one signified tostand for another signified which is directly related to it or closely associated with it in some way, notably thesubstitution of effect [purported mass destruction] for cause [e.g., nuclear explosion; chemical reaction]’.
9 ‘Archbishop’s appeal’ in London Times, 28 Dec. 1937.
10 We use ‘article’ as a generic category aggregating news reports, editorials, opinion pieces, readers’ lettersand advertisements.

123

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON‘mass destruction’ of an Austrian factory.11 Immediately after the US dropped two atomic
bombs on Japan in August 1945 commentators and critics of the new weapon began toassociate it with ‘mass destruction’. For example, 34 clergymen publicly appealed to
President Truman to halt production of the atomic bomb, which they characterized as ‘thetechnology of mass destruction’.12
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading atomic scientists advocated thecreation of an international authority for the control of atomic energy, which they hoped
would avert a US-Soviet arms race. Their position was supported by senior officials,
including Vannevar Bush, the government’s chief scientific advisor. President Truman
endorsed the idea of the international control of atomic energy but he declined to
immediately approach the Soviet Union, preferring to discuss the idea with Britain andCanada first.13
On 16 November 1945 the press reported on a meeting of President Truman with Prime
Ministers Clement Attlee of Britain and W. L. Mackenzie King of Canada. The New YorkTimes printed the text of the declaration issued by the conferees while the paper’s columnist
Arthur Krock paraphrased the declaration’s crux as follows:
We propose that a special commission of the United Nations shall begin at once to planinternational means for [controlling atomic energy]. The Commission should proceed infour steps: first, to set up an organization for the international exchange [of scientificinformation]; second, to devise workable controls that will insure the peaceful use ofthis information; third, to draw up a protocol by which all nations will agree toeliminate the atomic bomb and other weapons of mass destruction from their armament
for all times; and, fourth, to suggest inspection and other safeguards which will reallyprotect the states that comply from those which, if unpoliced, might not.14

Image 1: New York Times journalist Arthur Krock
Source: United States Library of Congress.
11 ‘Plant in Austria bombed to ruins’ in NY Times, 4 Nov. 1943.
12 ‘Truman is urged to bar atom bomb’ in NY Times, 20 Aug. 1945.
13 Gaddis, United States, pp. 247–53; Bernstein, ‘Quest’.
14 ‘In the Nation: “In Other Words”—Truman, Attlee, King’ in New York Times, 16 Nov. 1945; emphasis

added.

124

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the ConceptThis was the first time the New York Times (and probably the US press) printed themetonym weapons of mass destruction. Notably, this term did not appear in the originaltext of the tripartite declaration; it was Krock’s adaptation of the longer phrase ‘atomic
weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’.15
How did ‘all other major weapons’ crop up in the declaration even though the purpose of
the conference was to coordinate atomic policy alone? In early November 1945, when
Vannevar Bush complained to Secretary of State James Byrnes about the lack of adequate
planning for the upcoming tripartite meeting, Byrnes asked Bush to draft a plan. Bush did
so and he subsequently co-drafted the declaration signed by President Truman and the twoprime ministers.16 According to his autobiography, Bush suggested inserting the words ‘andall other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’ into the declaration, and his British
counterpart promptly agreed. ‘We both thought that, while we were attempting to bringreason to bear on one terrible weapon, we might as well include another that could beequally terrible’.17
The ‘equally terrible’ weapon type that Bush had in mind was biological.18 Bush helped
oversee secret research into germ warfare during World War II, and in 1944 he tried
unsuccessfully to promote within the government the idea of placing biological weapons
under international control.19 His fortuitous participation in the tripartite conference thus
allowed him to turn this concern into official policy. Had the State Department engaged inmethodical planning for the conference, it is unlikely that Bush would have had theopportunity to draft the US policy position, let alone slip into the tripartite declaration thewords ‘all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’.
With the exception of Marquis Childs of the Washington Post—who noted that the newphrase was ‘particularly significant. It would surely cover the [B-29] super-bomber’—commentators paid little attention to the debut of ‘other major weapons adaptable to mass
destruction’.20 Still, by inserting these words into a major official document Bush made itprobable that the phrase would later be recycled in diplomatic negotiations. In Nietzsche’s
terms, Bush ‘enhanced’ this figure of speech by introducing it into diplomatic discourseand ‘transposed’ it from a term that might have become associated exclusively with atomic
weapons into a more open-ended expression. The New York Times, too, may be creditedwith ‘transposing’ the phrase into the more graceful locution weapons of mass destruction.

II Continued “Transposition” and “Enhancement,” 1946–1948
In December 1945, at a conference of the ‘big three’ (the US, Britain, and Soviet) foreign
ministers held in Moscow, the Soviets accepted the plan—outlined in the Truman-AttleeKing declaration—to call on the UN to establish a commission that would work towardeliminating ‘atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’.
The conferees apparently did not discuss the meaning of this phrase, and it wasincorporated into the declaration issued at the conclusion of the meeting.21
15 Gaddis, United States, p. 271.
16 Ibid., p. 270; Bush, Pieces, p. 296.
17 Bush, Pieces, p. 297.
18 Ibid, p. 297; Tannenwald, Nuclear taboo, p. 103.
19 Guillemin, Biological weapons, pp. 53, 58, 74.
20 ‘Washington calling: freedom of science’ in Washington Post, 17 Nov. 1945.
21 ‘Text of communiqué issued by big three after the Moscow conference’ in NY Times, 27 Dec. 1945;

Bernstein, ‘Quest’, pp. 1028–9; Gaddis, United States, p. 279.

125

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
On 24 January 1946 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to establish acommission to plan for international control of atomic energy.22 Secretary of State Byrnes
appointed Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson to chair a committee to guide the US
delegates to the nascent commission. Although its terms of reference alluded to ‘control of
atomic energy and other weapons of possible mass destruction’, the final report submitted
by Acheson’s committee in March 1946—the Acheson-Lilienthal report—focused
exclusively on atomic energy. Its single mention of ‘mass destruction’ referred strictly toatomic weapons.23
Bernard Baruch, who was named by President Truman as ambassador to the UN Atomic
Energy Commission (UNAEC), was reluctant to be a ‘messenger boy’ for the AchesonLilienthal blueprint, and proceeded to formulate his own plan. 24 The Baruch Plan
incorporated the US military’s concern, conveyed to Baruch by General Dwight
Eisenhower, that ‘To control atomic weapons, in which field we are pre-eminent, without
provision for equally adequate controls of other weapons of mass destruction can seriously
endanger national security’.25 In presenting his plan to the UNAEC in June 1946, Baruchdeclared that
before a country is ready to relinquish any winning weapons it must have more thanwords to reassure it. It must have a guarantee of safety, not only against the offenders in
the atomic area but against the illegal users of other weapons—bacteriological,
biological, gas . . . If we succeed in finding a suitable way to control atomic weapons, it
is reasonable to hope that we may also preclude the use of other weapons adaptable tomass destruction.26
The Soviet ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, countered with an alternative plan that also
contained references to ‘atomic weapons and all other similar weapons of mass
destruction’.27 But whereas Baruch associated such ‘other’ weapons with ‘bacteriological,
biological, gas’ warfare, Gromyko left this category undefined.
In subsequent months negotiation sessions in the UN over atomic energy became
increasingly acrimonious.28 In one of these sessions, held at the UN Political and Security
Committee on 2 December 1946, the issue of ‘other weapons of mass destruction’ came tothe fore after it had been ‘ignored’ in previous months. 29 The US delegate, Senator Tom
Connally, ‘insisted that any scheme for international control must include such weapons as
jet planes, biological warfare, and poison gas, which, he pointed out, were not included in
the Russian resolution30’. Connally remarked that ‘the victims of poison gas or biologicalgerms were just as dead as those killed by the bomb’31. The British delegate, Sir Hartley
Shawcross, supported Connally’s view that the scope of international control must be
22 UN Doc. A/RES/1(I), Establishment of a Commission to Deal with the Problems Raised by the Discovery ofAtomic Energy.
23 Gaddis, United States, p. 332; Bernstein, ‘Quest’, pp. 1029–32. The full report is posted at http://www.
learnworld.com/ZNW/LWText.Acheson-Lilienthal.html.
24 Bernstein, ‘Quest’ pp. 1032–5.
25 Ibid., p. 1036. See also Bentley, Weapons, pp. 36–7.
26 ‘Baruch’s speech at opening session of U.N. Atomic Energy Commission’ in NY Times, 15 June 1946.
27 ‘The texts of the principal speeches on the proposals to control atomic energy’ in NY Times, 20 June 1946.
28 Herken, Winning weapon, p. 189.
29 Hamilton, T., ‘Molotov says veto could not be used in arms inspection’ in NY Times, 5 Dec. 1946.
30 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
31 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.

126

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
extended to non-atomic weapons32. Noting that 20 million people died in the war even
before the atomic bombing of Japan, Shawcross said it was ‘essential that we should havegeneral reduction of all armaments and prohibition of the most terrible . . . There is nolonger safe ground for being sure that the atom bomb is the most terrible’.33
The Soviet delegate, Andrei Vishinsky, responded that Connally’s position was but a ployto prolong America’s atomic monopoly. According to the New York Times Vishinsky said
that ‘the most dangerous weapons [must be] taken up first. . . . But he added that Senator
Connally obviously misunderstood the Russians when he said the Soviet proposal spoke
only of the atomic bomb’34. Vishinsky went on to state that ‘gas and bacteriological warfare
had already been prohibited by international agreements . . . He said rockets, jet planes andother weapons of mass destruction were specifically covered’ in the UN General Assembly
resolution of 24 January 1946, which established the UNAEC (in fact, the resolution
referred to ‘other weapons adaptable to mass destruction’ without naming specificweapons) 35. Vishinsky added that his government favored ‘a general reduction ofarmaments . . . applying to all kinds, types and categories of weapons’.36
The discussion of other ‘weapons of mass destruction’ continued in subsequent days. On
4 December 1946 Shawcross reiterated Britain’s position that the ‘actual abolition of theatomic bomb must not take place prior to an effective ban on other “weapons of mass
destruction”’.37 New York Times correspondent Thomas Hamilton commented that this
British proposal may have been attributable to the fact that not ‘merely the atomic bomb,
bacteriological warfare and long-distance rockets, but other and more fearsome weapons
are thought to be on the offing . . . One particularly horrible possibility, it is thought, is thatof using long-distance rockets to carry a ton of more of the particularly virulent bombs thatscientists are now developing’.38 Although the following day Baruch distanced himself
from the British demand, his counterpart in the UN Political and Security Committee,
Senator Connally, continued to insist, much like Shawcross, that ‘the actual abolition of theatomic bomb must go “hand in hand” with that of long-range rockets, bacteriological
warfare, etc.’.39 Connally stated that when the US forgoes its atomic weapon, ‘we wantother nations to forego the use of other weapons of mass destruction—rockets, jet planes,
etc.’.40 Surprisingly, Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov accepted the proposal torender the abolition of atomic weapons conditional upon the elimination of ‘other weaponsof mass destruction’, but the scope of this category remained undefined.41
Molotov’s concession fell short of bridging the gulf separating the US and Soviet
positions.42 On 30 December 1946, the UNAEC adopted the Baruch plan by a 10-0 vote,with the Soviet Union and Poland abstaining.43 Although Baruch regarded the vote as apersonal victory, for his Plan it portended defeat since the dispute was merely transferred to
the Security Council, where the Soviets could veto the Baruch Plan. 44 After Baruch’s
32 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
33 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
34 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
35 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
36 Adams, F., ‘U.S. wants all weapons brought under arms control’ in NY Times, 3 Dec. 1946.
37 Hamilton, T., ‘Molotov says veto could not be used in arms inspection’ in NY Times, 5 Dec. 1946
38 Hamilton, ‘Molotov says veto’.
39 Hamilton T., ‘Molotov accepts curbs on all arms’ in NY Times, 7 Dec. 1946.
40 Hamilton T., ‘Molotov accepts curbs on all arms’ in NY Times, 7 Dec. 1946.
41 Hamilton T., ‘Molotov accepts curbs on all arms’ in NY Times, 7 Dec. 1946.
42 Ibid.
43 Gaddis, United States, p. 334
44 Gaddis, United States, p. 334; Bernstein, ‘Quest for security’, pp. 1043–4.

127

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON‘victory’, UN disarmament talks continued for another two years.45 Although these talks
were largely fruitless, they are of considerable interest from our perspective because thedelegates continued to wrestle, from time to time, with the meaning of ‘weapons of mass
destruction’.
In early 1947 the Soviet Union proposed that, in accordance with a December 1946
General Assembly resolution calling for general disarmament, the Security Council appoint
a commission to formulate plans for ‘the prohibition of atomic weapons and other weaponsof mass destruction, as well as a reduction in the numerical strength and materiel ofnational armed forces’.46 The United States, however, objected to folding the talks over‘weapons of mass destruction’ into a general disarmament framework. American diplomats
insisted that the UNAEC ‘retain complete jurisdiction over control of all weapons of mass
destruction’, and that the issue of general disarmament be taken up by a separate
commission.47
As the New York Times pointed out on 1 February 1947, it was widely understood that‘apart from atomic bombs, weapons of mass destruction include bacteriological warfare
and guided missiles’, but ‘a more precise definition [was] required’ in order to demarcate
the jurisdiction of the UNAEC from that of the disarmament commission.48 The following
day, the New York Times reported that
The lack of such a definition has come up repeatedly in [US delegate Warren] Austin’s
conferences with other Council members. The B-29 plane, used to drop the two atomic
bombs on Japan, inflicted much greater loss of life with non-atomic bombs, it wasnoted. These talks have raised the further question whether carriers and battleships, andperhaps other components of the armed forces of the world, should be consideredweapons of mass destruction.49
On 12 February 1947 the Security Council adopted a Soviet proposal for ‘a newcommission to study arms reductions but with the American proviso that it should deal onlywith conventional arms and not with those already being dealt with by the Atomic Energy
Commission’.50 The New York Times explained that ‘In view of the assignment by the
Assembly of all matters dealing with atomic and other major weapons of mass destruction
to the Atomic Energy Commission, this second commission could naturally deal only withwhat the assembly resolution designates as ‘minor’ or conventional weapons of the preatomic age’.51 The Council, however, defined neither ‘minor’ weapons nor ‘weapons ofmass destruction’.
In summer 1947 the US submitted to the new United Nations Commission forConventional Armaments a proposed definition of ‘weapons of mass destruction’: ‘Any
instrument or invention capable of destroying life and property on the scale of a plague, aflood, a famine, or an earthquake’.52 The US delegate, Franklin Lindsey, explained that thisdefinition applied to the atomic bomb, radioactive materials, and deadly chemical and
45 Herken, Winning weapon, p. 190.
46 Hamilton, T., ‘U.S. revising stand for atom primacy’ in NY Times, 1 Feb. 1947.
47 Hamilton, T., ‘U.S. Facing rebuff on atom priority’ in NY Times, 2 Feb. 1947.
48 Hamilton, ‘U.S. revising stand’.
49 Hamilton, “U.S. facing rebuff.”
50 ‘Disarmament meets a test’ in NY Times, 13 Feb. 1947; see Tannenwald, Nuclear taboo, p. 104.
51 ‘Disarmament meets a test’ in NY Times, 13 Feb. 1947; see Tannenwald, Nuclear taboo, p. 104.
52 Rosenthal, A. M., ‘U.S. asks one body curb worst arms’ in NY Times, 21 Aug. 1947.

128

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
biological mixtures.53 He excluded airplanes and warships from the WMD category because
they were merely ‘carriers’ of destructive weapons, not ‘producers’ of destruction.54
Lindsey added that, if future weapon technologies become capable of causing destruction
on the scale of the above-mentioned natural disasters, these weapons too should comeunder the UNAEC’s jurisdiction.55
A few weeks later, the US pressed for a resolution to be adopted by the Commission,
which states ‘whereby the Commission on Conventional Armament would eliminate fromits consideration not only atomic weapons but all weapons of mass destruction, equivalentin effect to famine or earthquake’,56 including ‘radioactive material, lethal chemical andbiological weapons and “any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics
comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned
above”.57’ The Soviets opposed the resolution ‘on the ground that disarmament involving
atomic weapons cannot be divorced from the scrapping of more conventional weapons suchas battleships and rifles’.58
The Soviets got their wish of linking atomic and conventional disarmament in early 1952,
when the moribund UNAEC was fused with the Commission for Conventional Armaments
into the ‘UN Disarmament Commission’.59 Still, it is notable that, before its dissolution, theCommission for Conventional Armaments voted to adopt the American definition of WMD.
In August 1948 the Commission resolved that ‘weapons of mass destruction should be
defined to include atomic explosive weapons, radio-active material weapons, lethal
chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which havecharacteristics comparable in destructive effects to those of the atomic bomb or otherweapons mentioned above’. 60 Although this resolution had no immediate practicalconsequences—the Soviets blocked its submission to the Security Council—its passage
marked a closure, however fleeting and arbitrary, of the fitful UN debate concerning themeaning of ‘WMD’.
In recapitulation, after the atomic bombing of Japan Vannevar Bush ‘transposed’ the term
mass destruction by associating it with ‘other’, non-atomic weapons and ‘enhanced’ it byslipping the term into the Truman-Attlee-King declaration. But the meaning of ‘otherweapons adaptable to mass destruction’ remained contested in the ensuing disarmament
negotiations in the UN. To the extent that the participants or commentators bothered todefine it, they associated it variously with ‘bacteriological, biological, gas’ (Baruch),‘rockets, jet planes’ (Vishinsky), ‘bacteriological warfare and long-distance rockets, [and]. . . particularly virulent bombs’ (Thomas Hamilton, NY Times), ‘long-range rockets,bacteriological warfare, etc.’ (Shawcross), ‘rockets, jet planes, etc.’ (Connally),‘bacteriological warfare and guided missiles’ (NY Times), and ‘the B-29 plane . . . carriers
and battleships” (NY Times). Finally, the Commission on Conventional Armament resolvedthat the WMD category included atomic, radioactive, biological, and chemical weapons, aswell as future weapons capable of comparable destruction. This resolution constituted a
53 Rosenthal, A. M., ‘U.S. asks one body curb worst arms’ in NY Times, 21 Aug. 1947.
54 Rosenthal, A. M., ‘U.S. asks one body curb worst arms’ in NY Times, 21 Aug. 1947.
55 Rosenthal, A. M., ‘U.S. asks one body curb worst arms’ in NY Times, 21 Aug. 1947.
56 Jones, G. E., ‘Soviet balks vote on U.S. arms plan’, in NY Times, 6 Sept. 1947.
57 Jones, G. E., ‘Soviet balks vote on U.S. arms plan’, in NY Times, 6 Sept. 1947.
58 Jones, G. E., ‘Soviet balks vote on U.S. arms plan’, in NY Times, 6 Sept. 1947.
59 Un Doc. A/RES/502(VI), Regulation, Limitation and Balanced Reduction of All Armed Forces and All

Armaments; International Control of Atomic Energy.
60 UN Doc. S/C.3/32/Rev.1, Commission for Conventional Armaments, Resolutions Adopted by theCommission at Its Thirteenth Meeting, 12 August 1948, and a Second Progress Report on the Commission, p. 2;
Price, Chemical weapons taboo, p. 144; Carus, Defining, p. 20; Tannenwald, Nuclear taboo, p. 104.

129

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
significant ‘transposition’ and (re-) ‘enhancement’ of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ for it
made it likely that, should arms reduction talks be revived, the resulting draft treaties would
reproduce this metonym.

III How the Coin Lost its Picture: “WMD” During the Cold War
The term WMD was indeed replicated in several arms treaties concluded during the Cold
War, including the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America;
the 1967 Outer Space Treaty; the 1971 Seabed Treaty; the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention; and the 1979 SALT II Treaty.61 Moreover, as Michelle Bentley demonstrates,
the term was employed frequently by US defense and arms control officials during the1950s and 1960s.62 But even as ‘WMD’ remained in circulation within the bureaucracy,
government officials sometimes deliberately sought to blur the ‘picture’ emblazoned on thiscoin of speech by the UN in 1948. For example, at a high-level 1963 meeting dedicated to
the Outer Space Treaty, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze ‘indicated that DOD did
not want a clear definition of WMD’ included in the treaty because such a definition would
foreclose the option of placing in orbit small anti-satellite nuclear weapons.63 At othertimes, when US officials were publicly pressed to define ‘WMD’, they fell short ofreproducing the definition adopted by the UN. During the 1967 Senate hearing on the Outer
Space Treaty, when chief US negotiator Arthur Goldberg was asked to specify ‘the otherweapons of mass destruction’, he replied: ‘Bacteriological, any type of weapons which
could lead to the same type of catastrophe that a nuclear weapon could lead to’.64 Goldberg
thus omitted three elements of the UN’s 1948 definition: radioactive material weapons,
lethal chemical weapons, and future weapons capable of causing comparable destruction.
If US foreign policy specialists were sometimes reluctant or unable to portray the precise
contours of the picture inscribed on ‘WMD’ by the UN, it should not be surprising that for
the general public the picture, indeed the very coin itself, was being ‘lost’ altogether. As
Figure 1 shows, the frequency of New York Times articles mentioning ‘weapons of mass
destruction’ fell markedly during the Cold War.65
Not only had the use of ‘WMD’ by the press become increasingly infrequent, but on thoseoccasions in which it had appeared, the phrase was only rarely associated with specificweapons other than nuclear arms. Consider, for example, the nine articles in which the New
York Times printed ‘WMD’ in 1958. Only one of them contained an explicit reference tochemical and biological weapons. The other articles either mentioned no specific weapon
systems or placed ‘WMD’ in the context of nuclear weapons alone. Similarly, all four New
York Times articles that mentioned ‘WMD’ in 1975 did so in the context of the nuclear arms
race; only one of these articles made a passing reference to chemical and bacteriologicalweapons.
As Michelle Foucault explained in his commentary on Nietzsche, the genealogical
61 The full texts of these treaties (in the order in which they are mentioned above) are available at http://www.
fas.org/nuke/control/opanal/text/index.html; https://www.state.gov/t/isn/5181.htm; https://www.state.gov/t/
isn/5187.htm; https://www.state.gov/t/isn/4718.htm; and https://www.state.gov/t/isn/5195.htm.
62 Bentley, Weapons, chap. 3.
63 Carus, Defining, pp. 22–3.
64 Ibid., p. 24.
65 The data were generated from the archives of the NY Times online at http://www.nytimes.com. In the 1970s
and 1980s ‘WMD’ was rarely used not only in the press but also within the foreign policy bureaucracy—see
Bentley, Weapons, p. 72.

130

‘Weaponsof ofMass
Destruction’:Historicizing
theConcept
Frequency"Weaponsof Mass Destruction"in the NY Times,
1946-1989
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

YEAR

Figure 1: Frequency of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in the New York Times 1946-1989
Source: http://nytimes.com

investigation of concepts requires not only the excavation of ‘the different scenes where
they engaged in different roles’; genealogy ‘must define even those instances when [theseconcepts] are absent’.66 During the Cold War, the concept WMD was absent, first, fromdiscussions of America’s own armaments. US officials almost never referred to America’s
weapons as ‘WMD’. In those years the phrase ‘American (or US, or America’s) weapons ofmass destruction’ never appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street
Journal.
Second, during the Cold War the concept WMD was absent from reporting on, and public
discussions of, instances in which gas was undoubtedly used in warfare, including thewidespread use of riot control agents and herbicides by the United States in Vietnam.67
Although the US government insisted that tear gases and defoliants were not true chemical
weapons, critics of the war charged that the usage of such chemical agents violated
international law.68 Judging from the coverage of the controversy by the New York Times,
Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, the phrase WMD was entirely absent not only
from the official discourse of the US government but also from the pronouncements of its
critics. Even Soviet diplomats—who frequently accused the US of ‘using poison gas’ or‘violat[ing] international law by using chemicals’—were never reported to have charged
that the US employed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Vietnam.69
Similarly, the concept WMD was absent from reporting on the use of poison gas by the
Egyptian air force in the Yemen, which resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths.70 Between
66 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, p. 76.
67 Tucker, War of nerves, p. 223.
68 Graham, Disarmament sketches, pp. 22–5.
69 First quotation: ‘Washington rebuts poison gas charge’ in NY Times, 10 March 1963; second quotation:‘Soviet assails U.S. on war chemicals’ in NY Times, 14 Aug. 1968.
70 Tucker, War of nerves, pp. 190–2.

131

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
1962 and 1968 the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal together
published more than two dozen reports on Egypt’s chemical warfare in the Yemen. None ofthem mentioned ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Most strikingly, in contrast with the Bush administration’s statements in 2002–03 that the
Iraqis ‘used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons ofmass destruction on their own people’, the phrase WMD was entirely absent fromcontemporaneous reporting on Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas against Iran and theKurds in the 1980s. From 1982 through the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 Iraqi
forces launched repeated chemical attacks against Iranian combatants. In late 1987 the Iraqi
army began a chemical warfare campaign against civilians in the Kurdish region of
Northern Iraq; the most devastating of these attacks targeted the town of Halabja, killing
several thousand people.71 The Iraqi use of poison gas received substantial press coverage.
In 1988 alone the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal
published 53 articles that mentioned or discussed Iraqi chemical attacks in Kurdistan. Noneof these articles, much like earlier press reporting on the Iraqi use of gas against the Iranian
military, mentioned ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
In sum, during the Cold War ‘weapons of mass destruction’ became increasingly scarce
in US public discourse and, to the extent that this metonym was mentioned in the press, it
was associated with nuclear weapons more than biological, chemical, or radioactive ones.
The phrase was absent from media accounts of chemical warfare in Vietnam, Yemen, and,remarkably, Iraq. Thus, during the Cold War it was unlikely that even a highly attentive US
citizen could have given a specific description of ‘WMD’ consistent with the UN’s official
definition of the term. By the 1980s, as it became rare and as the ‘picture’ emblazoned on it
by the UN had faded, ‘WMD’ came to ‘matter only as metal’, if it mattered at all, ‘nolonger as [a] coin’.72

IV “WMD” After the Cold War: Simultaneous Re-Enhancement and Transposition
In the 1990s the incidence of ‘WMD’ in US discourse on foreign affairs rose appreciably.
The metonym became increasingly associated with efforts to enforce UN Security Council
Resolution 687 adopted in 1991, 73 which prohibited Iraq from possessing nuclear,biological, and chemical arms. But even as this association re-‘enhanced’ the meaning
attached to ‘WMD’ by the UN in 1948, and even as the circulation of this coin in foreign
policy talk was growing, ‘WMD’ had seeped into the discourse of domestic US law, where
its meaning was ‘transposed’ again.
Re-Enhancement
The perception that ‘WMD’ proliferation critically endangered the United States was notinvented by the George W. Bush administration. This threat assessment actually emerged
during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, when the winding down of the US-Soviet
nuclear competition gave the US arms control community an opportunity to pursue a more
expansive agenda of chemical and biological disarmament throughout the developing
71 Ibid., pp. 249–59, 268–72, 279–82.
72 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, p. 47.
73 UN Doc. S/RES/687, Resolution 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991.

132

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
world. The arms controllers began to use the term WMD interchangeably with biologicaland especially chemical weapons.74 The adoption of this locution had the rhetorical effectof dramatizing the menace posed by chemical weapons and de-legitimizing these weapons.
Ironically, in their quest to delegitimize the possession of chemical weapons by
developing countries arms controllers were able to seize on the rhetoric of Third World
leaders themselves, especially Saddam Hussein.75 During the Iran-Iraq war Iraqi officials
made veiled analogies between chemical weapons and the atomic bomb. In 1982, forexample, an Iraqi diplomat threatened that ‘Iraq will use a new secret weapon of mass
destruction if the Iranians launch a major offensive on the border’.76 When the war ended,
Hussein re-directed this rhetoric against Israel, warning that ‘Whoever threatens us withthe atomic bomb, we will annihilate him with the dual [binary] chemical’, and that Iraq
‘would respond to any Israeli use of weapons of mass destruction . . . by using comparable
weapons against Israel’.77 After invading Kuwait in August 1990 Iraqi leaders employedsimilar language to deter the US from attacking Iraq.78
US leaders replied in kind, reinforcing the rhetorical conflation of chemical and nuclear
weapons. In August 1990 President George H.W. Bush declared that ‘the use of chemical
weapons . . . would be intolerable and would be dealt with very, very severely’, while
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney later warned that ‘were Saddam Hussein foolish enough to
use weapons of mass destruction, the US response would be absolutely overwhelming andit would be devastating’.79 Interestingly, although George H.W. Bush, unlike his son in
2002–03, did not cite the danger of Iraq’s ‘WMD’ as the chief justification for the Gulf
War, the elder Bush nonetheless created the language that would later be adopted by theBill Clinton administration and be used with a vengeance by the George W. Bushadministration. In November 1990 President George H.W. Bush, glossing over the past
reluctance of his administration to denounce Iraq’s use of poison gas, depicted Hussein as a
‘Dictator who has gassed his own people, innocent women and children, unleashingchemical weapons of mass destruction . . . those who measure the timetable for Saddam’s
atomic program in years, may be seriously underestimating the reality of that situation andthe gravity of the threat’.80 Several days later Bush said that Hussein was ‘a dangerous
dictator all too willing to use force, who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking
new ones’.81
The US and Iraqi rhetoric combined with the adoption of the locution WMD by advocatesof biological and chemical disarmament to constitute a revival and, in Nietzsche’s terms, are-‘enhancement’ of the picture of WMD painted by the UN in 1948. UN Security Council
Resolution 687 of 3 April 1991, which set the terms of the Gulf War ceasefire, firmed up
the re-enhanced picture when its preamble stated that the Security Council was consciousof ‘the threat all weapons of mass destruction pose to peace and security in the area and of
the need to work towards the establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of such
weapons’. The resolution mandated the unconditional destruction of Iraq’s chemical andbiological weapons and it banned Iraq from possessing such weapons, as well as nuclear
74 Hymans, ‘Roots’, p. 38.
75 Price, Chemical weapons taboo, chap. 6.
76 Ibid., p. 137.
77 First quotation: Cowell, A., ‘Iraq chief, boasting of poison gas, warns of disaster if Israelis strike’ in NY

Times, 3 April 1990. Second quotation: Cowell, A., ‘Iraqi takes harsh line at meeting’ in NY Times, 29 May 1990.
78 Price, Chemical weapons taboo, p. 148.
79 Ibid.
80 ‘Excerpts from speech by Bush at Marine post’ in NY Times, 23 Nov. 1990.
81 ‘Excerpts from President’s news conference on crisis in Gulf’ in NY Times, 1 Dec. 1990.

133

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, in the future. Resolution 687 also provided forthe creation of a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to ‘carry out on-site inspection of
Iraq’s biological, chemical, and missile capabilities’.82
The emergence of the metonym WMD in the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf War and theinsertion of the phrase into resolution 687 made it likely that this revived coin would
continue to circulate in media coverage of foreign affairs should the process of disarming
Iraq drag on. And indeed, as figure 2 illustrates, the incidence of the term in the US pressrose significantly in the 1990s.83 Furthermore, most references to ‘WMD’ were in thecontext of Iraq—that country was mentioned in 895 of the 1271 New York Times articles
that referred to ‘WMD’ in the 1990s. The presence of ‘WMD’ in the media and the phrase’s
association with Iraq became especially intense in 1998, when repeated confrontations
between the Iraqi regime and UNSCOM’s inspectors culminated in a massive bombing
campaign by the US and UK against Iraq. 84 In that year alone, the New York Timespublished 346 articles that contained ‘WMD’, 282 (81%) of which referred to Iraq.
Moreover, in his 1998 State of the Union Address President Clinton dusted off therhetorical practice initiated by his predecessor of substituting ‘WMD’ for ‘chemical
weapons’ to describe Iraq’s past use of poison gas. Addressing Saddam Hussein, Clinton
said that ‘you have used weapons of mass destruction before. We are determined to deny
you the capacity to use them again’. 85 Defense Secretary William Cohen similarly
denounced Hussein for having “use[d] weapons of mass destruction against his own

Frequency of “WMD” in the Wall Street Journal,
1980 - 2003

Figure 2: Frequency of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in the Wall Street Journal, 19802003
Source: Factiva.com

82 UN Doc. S/RES/687, Resolution 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991.
83 The data for figure 2 were generated by using the Factiva.com search engine.
84 Tucker, War of nerves, p. 357.
85 ‘Transcript of the State of the Union message from President Clinton’ in NY Times, 28 Jan. 1998.

134

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
people’.86
It is clear, then, that in the 1990s foreign policy professionals, though they were notnecessarily aware of the UN Commission for Conventional Armaments’ 1948 resolution
defining ‘weapons of mass destruction’,87 have had a picture of ‘WMD’ in their heads that
more or less mirrored the UN’s definition. To the extent that it has registered in the mind of
the general public, however, the resolution of the picture has been far lower than that of theimage harbored by experts. In November 1997 Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter
admitted that ‘until recently’ he ‘didn’t know’ the meaning of ‘weapons of mass
destruction’. He wrote that this ‘bureaucratic shorthand’ was ‘widely known inside thegovernment, but right now it’s barely a blip in the public consciousness’.88 A few months
later in April 1998 New York Times columnist William Safire, too, felt compelled to explain
this shorthand. Safire was prompted by a reader who observed that ‘Weapons of mass
destruction has become the stock phrase in describing Saddam Hussein’s threat’. ‘Is thissome sort of shorthand’, the reader asked, ‘for ‘chemical and biological agents’? Does it
include ‘delivery systems’ like missiles, or exclude weapons everyone else has, likeconventional bombs? And where does this infectious phrase come from?’89 The reader’squestion suggests that, as the tensions surrounding UNSCOM’s inspections were mounting
in 1998, ‘WMD’ was becoming increasingly present in the consciousness of the US public(if not nearly as ever-present as it would become in 2003—in that year the frequency of thephrase in the New York Times almost matched its cumulative frequency during the entire
decade of the 1990s).
At the same time, however, the reader’s question, and Safire’s choice to address it in hiscolumn, indicated that the meaning of the phrase remained fuzzy and that ‘WMD’ may
have entered the American mind as a ‘stock phrase’ depicting a general perception of Iraqi
menace more than a detailed description of specific military hardware. The fact that as lateas July 2003, after months in which the term WMD ceaselessly reverberated through themedia, an editor in the Washington Post still saw fit to include the question ‘what are“weapons of mass destruction?”’ in an ‘update’ on Iraq, is another indication that the minds
of many Americans contained no high-resolution image of the concept.90
Transposition
Perhaps one reason why even a seasoned commentator like Jonathan Alter ‘didn’t know’
the meaning of ‘WMD’ was that, even as the UN’s definition of the phrase became
embedded in the minds of foreign policy bureaucrats, other parts of the federal government
borrowed this metonym and stretched its definition considerably. This ‘transposition’occurred in the context of the passage by Congress of the ‘Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994’.91 President Clinton campaigned successfully for including inthis law a ban on manufacture, transfer, and possession of semi-automatic assault rifles,
86 ‘Standoff with Iraq; war of words’ in NY Times, 19 Feb. 1998. See also Hymans, ‘Roots of the Washington
threat consensus’, p. 39.
87 According to William Safire, ‘Most arms control buffs think [WMD] is probably a Russian term’. See ‘Onlanguage: weapons of mass destruction’ in NY Times, 19 April 1998.
88 ‘Why this is not a drill’ in Newsweek, 17 Nov. 1997.
89 ‘On language: weapons of mass destruction’.
90 ‘Fighting in Iraq; the big story’ in Washington Post, 8 July 2003.
91 The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Public Law 103–322, 13 September 1994;
Clymer, A., ‘Decision in the Senate: the overview’ in NY Times, 26 Aug. 1994.

135

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
which Clinton repeatedly dubbed ‘weapons of mass destruction’.92
Notwithstanding Clinton’s rhetoric, the crime act did not refer to the banned rifles as‘WMD’. Still, this phrase did somehow enter another section of the vast bill. Section
60023, subsequently inserted as section 2332a into Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 113B of the US
Criminal Code, outlawed the use, attempt, or conspiracy to use ‘weapons of mass
destruction’ against any person or federal property in the US, as well as against US
nationals or federal property overseas. 93 Curiously, the definition of ‘WMD’ in thislegislation was far broader than the common meaning of the term in national security
discourse. According to Section 2332a, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ means not only
chemical, biological, and radioactive weapons (the words ‘nuclear’ or ‘atomic’ arecuriously absent), but also ‘any destructive device as defined by section 921 of this title’.94
Section 921, in turn, defines ‘destructive devices’ as ‘any explosive, incendiary or poison
gas—bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile
having an explosive charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or device similar to anyof the devices described in the preceding clauses’.95 Additionally, the category ‘destructive
device’ includes any weapon which may ‘expel a projectile . . . and which has any barrel
with a bore of more than one half-inch in diameter’. Thus, whereas the common
understanding of ‘WMD’ in foreign policy officialdom distinguished between ‘WMD’ and‘conventional’ armament, the violent crime act of 1994 obliterated this distinction.
Soon federal prosecutors began pressing ‘WMD’ charges against terrorists suspected ofusing conventional ‘destructive devices’. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who in
1995 detonated a fertilizer bomb in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City, werecharged with the use of ‘WMD’.96 Richard Reid, who tried in 2001 to detonate a ‘shoe
bomb’ on a commercial airliner, pled guilty to a ‘WMD’ charge.97 And, as Attorney General
John Ashcroft announced in 2004, two suspects were indicted by US prosecutors on‘WMD’ charges for hurling hand grenades into two Bogota restaurants, resulting in the
injury of five Americans.98 Thus, by inserting an expansive definition of ’WMD’ into US
criminal law, Congress made it possible for the Attorney General to discover ‘WMD’ in
Colombia at the same time that other federal agencies were despairing of finding thebanned weapons in Iraq.
The ‘extensive reliance’ of federal prosecutors on the WMD section of the anti-crime
legislation was not confined to terrorism cases.99 In 2006, for example, a federal judge
sentenced a Pennsylvania man to a lengthy prison term after he pleaded guilty to charges
that included the ‘use of a weapon of mass destruction’.100 As the Philadelphia Inquirer
reported, the man was unhappy with a surgery he underwent in Chicago. He built a ‘bombout of black gunpowder, a carbon dioxide cartridge, a nine-volt battery, a model rocket
92 Wines, M., ‘Clinton renewing push for assault rifle ban’ in NY Times, 26 April 1994; ‘Clinton campaigns forweapons ban in letter to hunters’ in NY Times, 1 May 1994.
93 The text of the law is posted at https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355/text.
94 The United States Code, Title 18 Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Part I Crimes, Chapter 113B Terrorism,
Section 2332a Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
95 The United States Code, Title 18 Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Part I Crimes, Chapter 44 Firearms,
Section 921 Definitions.
96 ‘Indictment against Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’, at http://newsok.com/article/2510970.
97 Belluck, P., ‘Unrepentant shoe bomber sentenced to life’, NY Times, 31 Jan. 2003.
98 ‘Second FARC terrorist Indicted for 2003 grenade attack on Americans in Colombia’, US Department ofJustice news release, at http://justice.gov/opa/pr/2004/October/04_crm_724.htm.
99 Carus, Defining, p. 10.
100 ‘Botched penis surgery ends in mail-bomb to doc’, Associated Press, 22 Nov. 2006, at http://www.msnbc.
msn.com/id/15849599/.

136

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
igniter, and dental floss’. Shortly after mailing the bomb to the surgeon the man confessed
his crime to the police, which intercepted the package and disarmed it with a water cannon.
As the man’s attorney complained, because the prosecutors pressed WMD charges against
his client, he faced a harsher sentence than he would had he been charged with mailing a
letter bomb. ‘You shouldn’t group this guy’, the lawyer protested, ‘with people who drive
trunk loads of explosives to buildings or gather anthrax’.101
Foucault argued that investigating the ‘descent’ of a concept entails the discovery of ‘themyriad events through which’ this concept was formed and transformed, including thehistorical ‘accidents, the minute deviations’ that shaped the concept.102 If the slipping of‘WMD’ into federal law in 1994 appears to have been an ‘accident’—the law enforcement
community did not offer a rationale for the term’s definition and no discussion of it took
place103—the subsequent adoption of this concept by state legislatures resulted in ‘minutedeviations’ that sometimes extended the concept beyond its federal definition. In recent
years many states have passed legislation criminalizing ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
While some of these state laws duplicated the language of the US Criminal Code, otherstates adopted definitions that deviated from it in minute but significant ways. For example,
Florida Statute 790.166 broadens the federal definition of chemical weapons. If Title 18 of
the US Criminal Code describes a WMD as ‘any weapon that is designed or intended tocause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic
or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors’,104 the Florida statute stretches the definition to
include ‘any device or object that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily
injury to any human or animal, or severe emotional or mental harm to any human, throughthe release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or theirprecursors’.105
Minute though this textual deviation might have been, it apparently touched the life of
one hapless Floridian, who was arrested in 2006 and ‘accused of rigging a ”weapon ofmass destruction” to spew hazardous substances’ into a sex shop. The man ‘had set two
gallon-sized jugs of what appeared to be a corrosive material on the business’ air
conditioner. A water hose was set up to push water into the jugs, and another hose fed thesubstance into the building’. According to the suspect, ‘the substance was a mixture ofswamp water, yeast, laundry soap and rotten eggs’.106
The wide discrepancy between ‘WMD’ qua an existential national security threat and theconcurrent association of the term with a primitive mail bomb, or with a ‘mixture of swamp
water, yeast, laundry soap and rotten eggs’, attests to the historically-contingent, legallyfuzzy, and politically- contestable meaning of this concept.

V How “WMD” Was “Embellished Poetically and Rhetorically” in 2002–2003
This section focuses on the run-up to the Iraq War, when ‘WMD’ became the staple of thecampaign to sell the war to the American people. We argue that the Bush administration’s
101 Shiffman, J., ‘Unhappy over surgery, he now faces prison’ in Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 April 2006.
102 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, p. 81.
103 Carus, Defining, p. 32.
104 The United States Code, Title 18 Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Part I Crimes, Chapter 113B Terrorism,

Section 2332a Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
105 Ibid., appendix D; emphases added.
106 ‘Arrest made over rigged device at Waldo sex shop’, in Gainesville Sun, 6 Dec. 2006.

137

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
claim that Iraq had (or used) WMD should be understood not as a factual description of an
Iraqi threat but rather as a rhetorical mode of constructing and inflating such a threat. Morespecifically, the employment of the metonym weapons of mass destruction by theadministration and the press ‘embellished’ the Iraqi threat ‘poetically and rhetorically’ infour ways: condensation, reinforcement, abbreviation, and, most significantly, repetition.
Embellished by these rhetorical practices ‘WMD’ produced a generalized sense of a grave
Iraqi threat that many Americans readily came to see as ‘firm, canonical, and obligatory’.107
Condensation
To highlight the dangerous character of the Iraqi regime, US officials frequently referred to
the Iraqi chemical attacks in the 1980s. These officials alternated between stating that Iraq
used ‘poison gas’ and declaring that, to quote President Bush again, the Iraqis ‘usedweapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass
destruction on their own people’.
As discussed earlier, ‘mass destruction’ became identified with atomic weapons
immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In subsequent decades, thisidentification remained constant and unchallenged even as the association between ‘mass
destruction’ and other weapon types has been fluid, contested, and often tenuous. The Bushadministration’s practice of interchanging chemical weapons and ‘WMD’ can beinterpreted, then, as an attempt to fix in the public’s mind a heretofore unstable association
between two disparate things or images: nuclear weapons and gas; Hiroshima and Halabja.
The administration, in other words, has practiced rhetorical condensation: employing asingle verbal symbol (WMD) to unify a diversity of meanings (nukes; gas). 108
As Nietzsche observed, however, ‘the unity of the word does not guarantee the unity ofthe thing’.109 Indeed, the disparate nature of chemical and nuclear weapons has been notedby prominent experts and observers. For example, two prominent scientists pointed out that
nuclear and chemical weapons ‘are fundamentally different in terms of lethality, in the area
they cover’ and in the availability of protective measures against them. Whereas a single
nuclear weapon ‘can physically destroy an entire city instantaneously’, chemical weapons‘do not destroy property’ and they ‘may cause hundreds, but probably not thousands, ofdeaths’.110
Alas, these experts’ voices have been drowned out by the chorus of war rhetoric
conducted by the administration. By repeatedly declaring that the Iraqis used/possessed‘WMD’ the Bush administration effectively associated the Iraqi threat with nuclear
weapons even as administration officials stopped short of claiming that Iraq actually hadthese terrible weapons. The condensation of chemical and nuclear weapons into a single
phrase thus rhetorically magnified the Iraqi threat.
Reinforcement
Nietzsche’s characterization of the truth as ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, andanthropomorphisms’ suggests that no single figure of speech can win a campaign to
107 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, p. 47.
108 Kertzer, Ritual, p. 11.
109 Nietzsche, Human, p. 19.
110 Morrison and Tsipis, ‘Rightful names’, p. 77. See also Enemark, ‘Farewell’.

138

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept
construct reality without rhetorical reinforcements. 111 The Bush administration indeed
reinforced ‘WMD’ with other ominous figures of speech, the most graphic of which was a
double metaphor debuted by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice on 8 September
2002. Speaking on CNN, Rice warned that although the status of Iraq’s nuclear program
was not known with certainty, ‘we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’.112
A month later, President Bush repeated this portentous phrase in a televised speech in
Cincinnati.113 Other administration officials, too, incorporated the ‘mushroom cloud’ image
into their rhetoric. The reinforcement of the metonym WMD by this dramatic image, as
well as other powerful metaphors such as ‘axis of evil’ and ‘outlaw regimes’, helped firm
up the public’s fear that Iraq posed an existential threat to US national security.
Abbreviation
The third rhetorical practice that served to embellish ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in
2002–03 was the transposition of this flabby phrase into a trim acronym.114 As figure 3
indicates, whereas the acronym WMD almost never appeared in major US newspapers in
the 1990s, during the lead-up to the Iraq War the same publications printed it hundreds oftimes. 115 Furthermore, as the war approached, the acronym became so ubiquitous thatreporters and commentators no longer felt compelled to spell it out.
As Herbert Marcuse explained, abbreviations perform a rhetorical function of ‘help[ing]to repress undesired questions’.116 For example, substituting NATO for North Atlantic
Figure‘questions
3: Frequency
Acronym WMD
in and Turkey’
Treaty Organization represses
aboutofthethemembershipof Greece
117 Similarly, by dispensing withwhile ‘UN dispenses with un due emphasis
MajoronUS“united”’.
Publications

1200
All articles referring to
WMD

1000
800
600

Articles referring to
WMD without
mentioning the full
term

400
200
0

1992 1995 1998 2001 2004

Figure 3: Frequency of the Acronym WMD in Major US Publications
Source: Factiva.com
111 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, p. 47; emphasis added.
112 See http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/.
113 ‘President Bush outlines Iraqi threat’, at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/

releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html.
114 Although, for convenience, we used it in this essay in reference to earlier periods, the acronym WMD wascreated by UNSCOM in the early 1990s, then migrated to US political discourse. See Bentley, Weapons, pp. 91–
2.
115 The data for figures 3-5 were generated by searching the ‘major news and business publications–US’ database at the Factiva.com search engine.
116 Marcuse, One-dimensional man, p. 94.
117 Ibid.

139

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
the words ‘mass destruction’ the acronym ‘WMD’ helped ‘repress undesired questions’such as: can poison gas cause mass destruction even as gas cannot destroy property? Did
Iraq’s chemical attacks against ‘its own people’ actually cause mass destruction? Could theuse of chemical weapons by Iraq truly pose a grave danger to US security? To borrow
Marcuse’s words again, ‘Once [WMD] has become an official vocable, constantly repeatedin general usage, “sanctioned” by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves
merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact’.118
Repetition
The incessant repetition of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (or ‘WMD’) by the Bushadministration and the unremitting bouncing of the phrase off the walls of the media’s echochamber constituted the most important way in which this metonym was ‘embellishedpoetically and rhetorically’ in 2002–03. Beginning in January 2002, the president andsenior administration officials uttered this figure of speech multiple times in most of their
public appearances.119 In the CNN appearance in which she introduced the ‘mushroom
cloud’ metaphor, National Security Advisor Rice uttered ‘weapons of mass destruction’ 13
times. President Bush’s Fort Hood speech contained eight utterances of this expression,
including five packed into the short paragraph quoted at the beginning of this essay. And
Secretary of State Colin Powell alluded to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ 17 times in his
widely-watched February 2003 address to the UN Security Council.120
The press echoed and amplified the administration’s WMD rhetoric. As figure 2
illustrates, the frequency with which the Wall Street Journal printed this phrase spiked
dramatically in 2002 and 2003. Similarly, in the New York Times the frequency of articles
containing this phrase jumped from 60 in 2000 to 524 in 2002 and 853 in 2003. And, as
figure 4 shows, in the 12 months preceding the invasion of Iraq, the frequency of ‘weaponsof mass destruction’ in the US press has increased tenfold. The newfound popularity of thisphrase was evidenced by its selection by the American Dialect Society as the 2002 ‘Wordof the Year’.121
Sigmund Freud wrote that ‘Repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, isclearly in itself a source of pleasure’.122 Perhaps because of the innate pleasure associatedwith it, repetition is a common feature of multiple cultural forms. The ‘repetition of asound, syllable, word, phrase, stanza, or metrical pattern is a basic unifying device of all
poetry’.123 In advertising, repetition is ‘so obvious’ that its significance is ‘sometimes
neglected. A regular TV watcher may see the same ad tens of times or more, a magazine
reader will see the same print again and again’. 124 Similarly, ‘repetition, repetition,
repetition’ is a cardinal rule of effective political campaigning.125
Repetition is also central to religious ritual and liturgy. Modes of repetition incontemporary songwriting may have their roots in ‘primitive religious chants from all
cultures’, which ‘develop[ed] into cadence and song’.126 Repetition remains ‘one of the
118 Ibid.
119 Gershkoff and Kushner, ‘Shaping’, p. 531.
120 ‘Full text of Colin Powell’s speech’, Guardian, 5 Feb. 2003.
121 Barber, Fear’s empire, p. 29.
122 Quoted in Tannen, Talking voices, p. 94.
123 Fogle, ‘Repetition’, p. 228.
124 Cook, Discourse, p. 227.
125 Luntz, Words, p. 11.
126 Fogle, ‘Repetition’, p. 228.

140

Monthly Frequencies of “WMD” in Major U.S.
News Publications During the Run-Up to War‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept

Figure 4: Monthly Frequencies of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in Major US Publications
During the Run-Up to War
Source: Factiva.com

outstanding features of the liturgies of religious ritual, as witnessed by the Bible . . ., theBook of Common Prayer, and the Talmud . . . All rely on repetition to create incantatory
rhythms that render their meaning accessible to the widest possible range of readers andlisteners’.127 The texts of prayers regularly recited by adherents of various religions featuresuch incantatory rhythms. The centrality of repetitive patterns in religious ritual ‘mayderive from the ancient belief that repeating the name of an object captures the essence ofthe thing.’ ‘The repetition of liturgical texts reifies’ that which is being repeated.128
Amid the ‘WMD’ din that pervaded the US public arena at the time of the invasion of
Iraq, there was but one perceptive commentator who saw the reverberation of the phrase
through the media for the liturgical, reifying practice that it was. Shortly after the invasion
began, political journalist Michael Kinsley observed that
By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn’t play much of a part.
The phrase itself—‘weapons of mass destruction’—is more like an incantation than adescription of anything in particular. The term is a new one to almost everybody, andthe concern it officially embodies was on almost no one’s radar screen until recently.
Unofficially, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ are to George W. Bush what fairies were toPeter Pan. He wants us to say, ‘We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO
believe. We DO.’ If we all believe hard enough, they will be there. And it's working.129
With Kinsley, we argue that the incessant incantation of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by
the Bush administration, and the ricocheting of the phrase through the echo chamber of the127 Bamford, You can say that again, pp. 77–79.
128 Bamford, You can say that again, pp. 77–79.
129 Kinsley, M., ‘Low opinion: did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? It doesn’t matter’ in Slate, 19 June

2003, http://www.slate.com/id/2084602/.

141

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
mass media, emptied it of any specific meaning. Just as the repetitive structure of liturgicaltexts serves to divert the worshipper’s mind from his worldly situation and affirm theaxioms of his belief, so did the incantation of ‘WMD’ make Americans take the existenceof these weapons as an article of faith, distracting the American mind from the realities ofthe Middle East. And just as the chanting of a mantra lifts the chanter above material reality
and promotes the actualization of the idea being uttered, so did the collective chant‘weapons of mass destruction’ rhetorically create the Iraqi threat as much as it referred tosuch a threat.130

VI Conclusion
Figures of speech do not merely describe the truth, they constitute it. As Nietzsche taught
us, when metaphors and metonyms experience ‘long use’, they become ‘worn out’; they‘lose’ specific meanings, or ‘pictures’, which used to be attached to them. The people whohear or speak them ‘forget’ the unstable, variable history of these expressions, succumbing
to the ‘illusion’ that they are ‘firm, canonical’ mirrors of factual truths.131
Guided by Nietzsche’s formulation, we showed that ‘weapons of mass destruction’—
whose possession by Iraq was the chief justification for the Iraq War—lacked a selfevident, fixed meaning. The history of this metonym was marked by twists and‘transpositions’, periodic ‘enhancements’ punctuated by curious absences and ‘losses’, andeven accidents such as the fortuitous participation of Vannevar Bush in drafting the 1945
Truman-Attlee-King declaration, which resulted in the introduction of ‘all other major
weapons adaptable to mass destruction’ into the diplomatic lexicon. To understand theBush administration’s campaign to sell the Iraq War to American people, we ought to view
it not as an attempt to communicate facts about the threat of Iraq’s WMD. The campaign
rather consisted in ‘embellishing’ this metonym ‘poetically and rhetorically’. By using‘weapons of mass destruction’ to unify chemical and nuclear weapons, by abbreviating thephrase to repress undesired questions about the unity of these disparate weapons, by mixing
it with other ominous figures of speech, and by incessantly repeating it, the Bushadministration and the US press glossed over the erratic history of ‘weapons of mass
destruction’, stabilized this metonym, and created the ‘illusion’ that it was a ‘firm’representation of unquestionable Iraqi facts.132
The failure to discover ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq did not banish the termfrom national security discourse. The national security strategies of the Barack Obama andDonald Trump administrations both depicted ‘WMD’ proliferation as a major threat to US
security.133 Nevertheless, as figure 5 illustrates, after peaking in 2003 the incidence of thephrase in the US press has fallen back to roughly its level in the 1990s. This trend mirroreda decline in the official usage of ‘WMD’. The Bush administration used the concept far
more sparingly during its second term (2005-2009) than before. President Obama, though
he repeatedly referred to North Korea’s nuclear weapons as ‘WMD’, only rarely included
this phrase in his rhetoric surrounding the lethal use of chemical weapons by Syria’s Bashar
130 We present a theoretical elaboration of this claim in Oren and Solomon, ‘WMD, WMD, WMD’.
131 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, pp. 46–7.
132 Ibid.
133 Bentley, Weapons, pp. 111–12; ‘National Security Strategy of the USA’, Dec. 2017, at https://www.

whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf

142‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: Historicizing the Concept

Figure 5. Frequency of 'weapons of mass
destruction' in major US publications, 1991‐2017

8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017

0

Figure 5. Frequency of 'weapons of mass destruction' in major US publications, 1991-2017
Source: Factiva.com

al-Assad regime in 2012 and 2013.134 Similarly, in April 2017 President Trump avoided
referring to ‘WMD’ even as he publicly condemned the Assad regime’s ‘horrible chemical
attack on innocent civilians’ and authorized a punitive airstrike on a Syrian airfield.135
The Iraq WMD fiasco did not only reduce the incidence of WMD talk, it ‘lessened thepolitical weight of the concept as a rhetorical resource’.136 In significant part the rhetorical
power of the phrase has been undercut by its entry into the realm of popular culture. Afterthe invasion ‘WMD’ has become the object of satire (as evidenced by Kinsley’s abovequoted essay) and the butt of jokes. The 2004 Hollywood comedy Team America: World
Police parodied a US-led police force pursuing terrorists armed with North Korean‘WMD’.137 A March 2004 episode of the TV mob drama The Sopranos featured a character
who, when asked by the authorities to open his garage, wisecracked: ‘That’s where I makemy weapons of mass destruction’.138 And the plot of a 2006 episode of The Simpsonsfeatured aliens who used the claim that humans were manufacturing ‘weapons of massdisintegration’ as an excuse to invade Earth.139
So long as the memory of the Iraq WMD debacle does not vanish, and so long as thephrase WMD remains the object of satire and comedy, its potential as a rhetorical rallying
cry in the context of US national security policy remains greatly diminished. The discourseof US foreign policy, however, contains other equally ambiguous and potentially-infectious
phrases that, unlike ‘WMD’, have not been discredited yet and thus remain available to be‘embellished poetically and rhetorically’: rogue states, failed states, ethnic cleansing,134 Bentley, Weapons, pp. 110–12; Bentley, Syria, p. 90.
135 National Public Radio, ‘Trump orders Syria airstrikes after ‘Assad choked out the lives’ of civilians’, 6

April 2017, at https://www.npr.org/2017/04/06/522948481/u-s-launches-airstrikes-against-syria-after-chemicalattack
136 Bentley, Weapons, p. 111.
137 Ibid., p. 95.
138 ‘All Happy Families...’, The Sopranos, Season 5 Episode 4, March 28, 2004.
139 ‘Treehouse of Horror XVII’, The Simpsons, Season 18 Episode 4, November 5, 2006.

143

IDO OREN AND TY SOLOMON
border security, and regime change come to mind. Should the current or futureadministrations begin spouting off one of these phrases (or adopt new ones) to drum up
support for military action, one would hope that the ensuing policy debate would focus on
the meaning, history, and rhetorical function of the phrase as much as on its factual
accuracy.
References
Bamford, J., You can say that again: repetition in discourse (Bologna, 2000).
Barber, B., Fear’s empire: war, terrorism, and democracy (New York, 2003).
Bentley, M., ‘The long goodbye: beyond an essentialist construction of WMD’, Contemporary Security
Policy, 33 (2012), pp. 384–406.
Bentley, M., Weapons of mass destruction and US foreign policy: the strategic use of a concept (2014).
Bentley, M., Syria and the chemical weapons taboo: exploiting the forbidden (Manchester, 2016).
Bernstein, B., ‘Quest for security: American foreign policy and international control of atomic energy,
1942-1946’, Journal of American History, 60 (1974), pp. 1103–44.
Bush, V., Pieces of the action (New York, 1970).
Carus, S. W., Defining ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (Washington DC, 2006).
Chandler, D., Semiotics: the basics (2002).
Cook, G., The Discourse of advertising (1992).
Enemark, C., ‘Farewell to WMD: the language and science of mass destruction’, Contemporary Security
Policy, 32 (2011), pp. 382–400.
Fogle, S. F. ‘Repetition’ in A., Preminger, ed., The Princeton handbook of poetic terms (Princeton, 1986).
Foucault, M. ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (New York, 1984).
Gaddis, J. L., The United States and the origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York, 1972).
Gershkoff, A., and Kushner, S., ‘Shaping public opinion: the 9/11-Iraq connection in the Bushadministration’s rhetoric’, Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005), pp. 525-37.
Graham, T., Disarmament sketches: three decades of arms control and international law. (Seattle, 2002).
Guillemin, J., Biological weapons: from the invention of state-sponsored programs to contemporary
bioterrorism (New York, 2005).
Herken, G., The winning weapon: the atomic bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York, 1982).
Hymans, J. E. C., ‘The roots of the Washington threat consensus’, in B. Glad and C. J. Dolan, eds., Striking
first: the preventive war doctrine and the reshaping of U.S. foreign policy (New York, 2004), pp. 33-45.
Isikoff, M., and Corn, D., Hubris: the inside story of spin, scandal, and the selling of the Iraq War (NewYork, 2006).
Kertzer, D. I., Ritual, politics, and power (New Haven, 1988).
Luntz, F., Words that work: it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear (New York, 2007).
Marcuse, H., One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964).
Morrison, P., and Tsipis, K., ‘Rightful names’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 59:3 (2003), p. 77.
Nietzsche, F., The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1954).
Nietzsche, F., Human, all too human: a book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1996).
Oren, I. and Solomon, T. ‘WMD: the career of a concept’, New Political Science, 35:1 (2013), pp. 109-35.
Oren, I. and Solomon, T., ‘WMD, WMD, WMD: securitization through ritualized incantation of ambiguous
phrases’, Review of International Studies, 41 (2015), pp. 313-36.
Packer, G., The assassins’ gate: America in Iraq (New York, 2006).
Price, R. M., The chemical weapons taboo (Ithaca, 1997).
Rich, F., The greatest story ever sold: the decline and fall of truth from 9/11 to Katrina (New York, 2006).
Tannen, D., Talking voices: repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse (New York,1989).
Tannenwald, N., The nuclear taboo: the United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945
(Cambridge, 2007).
Tucker, J. B., 2006. War of nerves: chemical warfare from world war I to Al-Qaeda (New York, 2006).
Woodward, B., Plan of attack (New York, 2004).

144