ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the systematic, unselfconscious appeal to tropes of gender, pathology and race to justify the denial of nuclear weapons to nuclear have-nots by United States policymakers and their Western European partners. It is argued that the lens provided by contrasting the rational and responsible “us” with the emotive and unpredictable “them” was a subterranean resource drawn upon at times of “psychic crisis” to stabilise a world order threatened by the proliferation of independent nuclear weapons programs out of the control of the Global North. By demeaning aspirant nuclear powers as “uncivilised,” the language used and the policies invoked had exactly the opposite effect to that intended: it provoked the proliferation it wanted to curb. If having nuclear weapons is defined as a marker of “civilisation” and a condition for being “respected” by nuclear weapons states, it is but a short step for non-nuclear weapons states to seek them.
