‘Nuclear weapons are our best friends’: A Discourse-Historical Analysis of the Cold War Era Rhetoric of Nuclear Militarism

This contribution focuses on a case study involving two prominent conservative activists – Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward – who authored an extended election brochure, The Gravediggers (1964), in a bid to boost the 1964 election campaign of the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. The main author of The Gravediggers, Schlafly was concerned with what she saw as the erosion of American nuclear capacity and the weakening of the nation’s security in the Cold War era of the 1960s. As a religious, anti-Communist and (later) anti-feminist activist, Schlafly was adamant that the Democratic Kennedy-Johnson Administration’s defence policy and its disarmament mindset were making America vulnerable to nuclear attack and complete annihilation by the Soviet Union. She sought to protect America’s nuclear superiority by producing campaign literature that exhorted her conservative readers to vote for Barry Goldwater, who stood for the policy of nuclear superiority and strong strategic defence. Schlafly’s powerful rhetorical style has been described as “militaristic” (Calahane 2022) and “bellicose” (Critchlow 2015). Using the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak 2015), the study combines linguistic analyses with historical and sociological methodologies in a bid to shed light on The Gravediggers as a pro-nuclear text representative of a sample of larger conservative defence literature of the period under investigation. The main focus of the investigation is on the role of argumentation strategies realised mainly as topoi of danger/threat, history, evil and (impeded access to) the people’s democratic participation, that Schlafly and Ward made use of to argue against the policy of nuclear disarmament and in favour of maintaining a confrontational attitude towards the USSR.