ABSTRACT
But even now a nuclear war is being waged. The mode of this war is textual. It involves a continual exchange of words, where battles are fought, subjects are enlisted, and the grounds of meaning and power are contested. An exchange of bombs would mark only the culmination and the end of such a conflict. But emphasis on the awful reality of nuclear weapons deflects from discussions of how nuclear power, the power to terrify and threaten, is discursive.1
