Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

Carol Cohn’s article is a classic entry point into feminist security studies. Rather than only criticizing nuclear weapons as objects, she enters the language world of U.S. defense intellectuals and analyzes how terms such as “clean bombs,” “exchange ratios,” and “limited nuclear war” turn mass death into something calculable, manageable, and intellectually playable.

The article matters because it shows that military rationality is not gender-neutral. Cohn demonstrates how nuclear strategy discourse encourages emotional distancing, disembodiment, and masculinized intellectual competition. The more fluently one speaks this language, the harder it becomes to name civilian death, vulnerable bodies, and ethical fear.

For FemRes, this paper belongs with militarism, technology critique, and war and peace. It helps readers see that feminist antiwar analysis is not simply the claim that women are more peaceful; it is an effort to dismantle how war machines produce acceptable violence through language, expertise, and technical rationality.