The Bomb is Turning the Kids Gay!!

Or how I learned to stop worrying and f**k the bomb

and

Aug 31, 2024

In today’s edition of intentionally left blank, we’ve been joined by the incredible Nika Scothorne. Together we tackled a new controversy from our pals in the White House. Catch more of Nika’s work at Inheritance of a Thousand Generations, it’s really good.

Well, the Biden/Harris (Harris/Biden?) administration is doing something supremely gay and probably retarded. The delightful Sneha Nair was recently hired as Special Assistant to the National Nuclear Security Administration (hereafter NNSA). Nair has written such technically obtuse articles as “Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament”. Much like uranium-235, this is extremely fissile material for memes.

The Queer critiques of our devices of armageddon run deep. Starting at the very basic. Dear reader, what the hell is a queer hydrogen bomb? One can already imagine the phone call between Secretary Blinken and his Russian counter part.

Perhaps this is an indication of a new type of warhead. That might actually be a genius strategy. Imagine the fear in the eyes of the famously tolerant and accepting Iranians and North Koreans when they realize we could trans all their youths in a single femininomebomb. Imagine announcing on the world stage that we have found a uranium isotope that would turn kids into an army of genderqueer enby mullet heads. It’s enough to make Alex Jones loud and proud.

As awesome as that would be, the only nuke Nair wants to drop is pointed at the destruction of our atomic arsenal. She doesn’t seem to be interesting in exploring the intersection between fusion bombs and their queer identities. In a piece published by Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, Nair argues:

“Queer identity is also relevant for the nuclear field because it informs theories that aim to change how officials, experts, and the public think about nuclear weapons… It shines a light on the harm done by nuclear weapons through uranium mining, nuclear tests, and the tax money spent on nuclear weapons ($60 billion annually in the United States) instead of on education, infrastructure, and welfare. The queer lens prioritizes the rights and well-being of people over the abstract idea of national security, and it challenges the mainstream understanding of nuclear weapons—questioning whether they truly deter nuclear war, stabilize geopolitics, and reduce the likelihood of conventional war.”

Noticeably absent from harms revealed by Nair’s T-light is the miles-wide firestorm that ignites everything that isn’t first vaporized by a burst of gamma radiation.

Words are only useful so far as they describe real things. “National security” may indeed be an abstract concept, but that makes it no more arbitrary, less important, or stubbornly non-fungible.

I guess the missiles won’t be vogueing out of siloes to be their true selves any time soon. This may be a good thing. I don’t want my Little Boy and the Fat Man joining an ethically non-monogamous polycule with Iranian and Pakistani payloads.

There is also the flip side of missile defense. What could possibly be a better deterrence to nuclear strike than a lavender dome of previously unemployable purple-haired queer studies majors repelling any hypersonic missiles with the sheer might of their roar?

3…2…1 Thrust off!

She makes the case that the NNSA is too heteronormative and dominated by white men, an argument that does have a strong thrust. Have you looked at an ICBM recently? Real phallic vibes radiating off those. The paunchy, middle-aged administrators of Old NNSA, who can’t but feel threatened by queer joy, might march out trite explanations such as “aerodynamics”, whatever that is, but we all know the design inspiration was nothing more exotic than their own failing marriages, limp willies, and a congenital need to overcompensate for something.

All of this goes away with queer speak. Men have penises? OLD NEWS, blasé even. Have you not heard of girl dick? Explosive, angry outbursts are no longer just the domain of the male-coded nuclear warhead. Queer rage is here to stay. The new slogan for the NNSA should be “Nuclear Armageddon, but make it slay.”

War Games

The fairer-minded of you may be wondering “why bother criticizing someone who, though foolish perhaps, is well meaning and directionally correct?” If you strip out all the absurdity and give the most charitable interpretation, you can just about discern the outline of an argument which I could readily endorse. People with the technical competence to work on the most powerful weapons ever invented should not be prevented from doing so on account of their incidental identity characteristics. Healthy, robust, work environments that welcome a diversity of people and viewpoints are a worthy goal that we should be striving for.

However, she never cites numbers quantifying the problem she alleges exists - she merely takes it as a given. This is not the robust, empirical approach that I would hope for from someone dealing with such serious matters. I’m certain there are some problems, but I’d like to know exactly what is being alleged. Likewise, while she readily endorses a remedy to this unspecified problem, she utterly fails to make an argument explaining why this is the most effective remedy. For someone who correctly identifies the opportunity cost of supporting a nuclear arsenal, she could stand to be more critical of the agency spending money on unproven HR boondoggles. If there are staffing issues at the NNSA, LGBT officials would be better served by Nair writing directly and plainly about that.

There are consequences for being overly permissive with people who are wrong in the right direction. We all benefit from stronger ideas and should oppose “saving” the young and idealistic from the sort of combative intellectual environment that generates them. The younger progressive sorts that I know have mostly treated national security as “the den of all evil” and would never consider a career in that field. It is good that people such as Nair are taking an interest in our nuclear policy and more people should commit themselves to our national security. However, these are serious ideas that deserve a serious approach.

Mad Libs

Though you may be mislead by the title, “Queering nuclear weapons” is a paper on Human Resources matters, not “strengthening security” or “reshaping disarmament”. For a field which places so much emphasis on word choice, one wonders who the actual audience is. It is certainly not the millions of Americans who read the headline “queering nuclear missiles” and think “What the hell is this? Are weapons of mass destruction going by boom / kablooey now?” No, this article is not for the lowly plebs who want to avoid incineration in a nuclear holocaust. This article, and all others in the same vein, are more concerned with signaling to other academics that the authors are familiar with the in-vogue theory du jour than technical competence and effective communication.

Nair’s article is about as serious as a game of academic Mad Libs where all the bingo-square words have already been filled out and all that remains is to slot in the most absurd possible application, in this case “strengthening United States security through military application of nuclear energy and by reducing the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” Nair is shoehorning in the language of The Current Thing in what amounts to an exercise in discoverability more than it is of enhancing security either for the nation or LGBT NNSA officials.

In this game, everything is interchangeable and nothing means anything. A person playing “Pictionary” has more of an interest in utilizing commonly accepted definitions. This loose cannon approach to language does everybody a disservice except those who inexplicably manage to rise through the ranks, buffeted by a resumé that amounts to nothing more than hot air.

The Hunt for Gay October

What, rigorously applied, might a “queer theory” approach to nuclear policy look like? Perhaps her approach to disarmament is announcing that our bombs now identify as nuclear reactors. Back to Dimitri again.

“Secretary Blinken, vy did you nuke Tehran?”
“Well we actually were trying help support their sporadic energy grid by hand delivering one of our new proton type clean energy generators.”

Nair’s entire thesis is predicated on a valid argument mangled by a distorted definition and, presumably a mistaken belief that the Enola Gay was a queer party bus. In fact, group diversity is correlated with positive outcomes, however the diversity that matters is of the intellectual variety: different ideas, articulately presented in a rigorous debate will tend to weed out flabby arguments and elevate better ones.

I am rather skeptical that this environment is one that Nair would advocate for. In fact, her choice of closing arguments makes me rather certain that she wouldn’t.

“Decision makers should look to LGBTQ+ inclusion for better nuclear policy outcomes, and build environments in which queer people can bring their specific skills and lived experiences to bear without fear. Arguments to the contrary are as stagnant and outdated as those who voice them.”

All of us write a few doozies and it is possible that the articles lambasted here are not representative of her larger body of work. Hopefully, the bulk of Nair’s corpus is serious and will be an asset to our national security. However, in “Queering nuclear weapons”, Nair has demonstrated that she is capable of mangling an argument so badly as to wind up in diametric opposition to where she started. In the face of rhetorical acrobatics, we mustn’t lose sight of the limitations of such extraordinary workmanship. Though academics of her sort may be able to wordsmith a Möbius strip, a nuclear bomb by any other name will always go