"The Means to Match Their Hatred": Nuclear Weapons, Rhetorical Democracy, and Presidential Discourse

In the summer of 1987, the American poet Donald Hall published a poem in the Paris Review. Entitled "Prophecy," Hall offered in this work a grimly lyrical vision of the nuclear apocalypse. Hall's poem expressed an ache that had been steadily building in the U.S. body politic as nuclear officials and protestors struggled for control over the nation's nuclear story (Mehan, Nathanson, and Skelly 1990). "Prophecy" channeled this tension through a familiar strategy of anti-nuclear aesthetics, in which the destruction of cherished, mundane scenes is prospectively mourned in order to stimulate preemptive action in the present: "Where shopping / malls spread plywood and plaster out, and roadhouses / serve steak and potatoskins beside Alaska King Crab ... weeds and ashes will drowse in continual twilight." This elegiac inventory also depicted suffering figures: "Unlettered dwarves will burrow for warmth and / shelter / in the caves of dynamos and Plymouths, dying / of old age at seventeen." Had the poem operated only at this level, it would still serve our purposes as an entree to consider the relationship between nuclear weapons, rhetoric, and democracy. That is, "Prophecy" establishes how--if democracy embodies the principle that government decisions should represent the voices of those affected by them--the line of speakers auditioning for consideration in nuclear matters is long indeed. Justly composed, that list leaps scales of time and space to include groups, regions, nations, species, and generations. Here, the genres of census and testimony converge to assert the integrity of diversity as a measure of the criminality of wanton destruction. What is arguably most useful about this poem, however, is that its point of view is not the abstract third person. Instead, it is the voice of the bomb itself, speaking an uncanny mixture of vengeful condemnation, methodical attention to detail, and lonely responsibility. It is, in short, quite mad: "I reject the old house and the new car ... I reject Waterford / I reject the five and dime ... I reject leaded panes ... I reject the appointment made at the tennis net or on the seventeenth green." Because the revelation of even that which is frightening may come as a relief for audiences, there is pleasure here in recognizing the chilling voice of uninhibited nuclear agency: "I will strike from the ocean with waves afire; / I will strike from the hill with rainclouds of lava; / I will strike from darkened air with melanoma in the shape of decorative hexagonals." As the poem climaxes, its narrator adopts mystical imagery: "And the full moon grow red with blood swollen inside it / and stars fall from the sky like wind-blown apples, / while Babylon's managers burn in the rage of the Lamb." Clearly, this poem invokes the ancient tradition of apocalyptic rhetoric to serve the political needs of late modernity. I suggest, however, that it also offers us unexpected insight into a different genre, one that is the focus of this essay: nuclear-presidential rhetoric. This connection may seem perverse: the elite voice of the presidency operates very far in cultural space from the realm of poetry. And for the nation's elected leader, nuclear weapons are typically a matter of grave importance and thus (one would expect) rational voice. Nonetheless, there are at least three connections to be made. First, although there is scholarly disagreement surrounding the utility of "the rhetorical presidency" as an analytic concept (Ivie 2005; Medhurst 1996), it is largely uncontested that presidents use the full power of language at their command to interpret the interests of the nation and to advocate policies that serve them. Here, politics, poetry, and rhetoric may intersect as nuclear presidents draw on formal literary devices such as metaphor and ideological narratives establishing what is true, beautiful, and good for the nation in order to justify America's historical development of nuclear weapons. …