‘Queering Nuclear Weapons’

By Luther Ray Abel

Monday, June 26, 2023

 

When nuclear Armageddon arrives, a multi-chromatic manicured talon, attached to a man convinced that he’s a woman, will press the button.

 

The world’s end will play on screens behind him as he lectures the unfortunate survivors in that North Dakotan bunker on the importance of inclusion when selecting targets for maximum casualties while controlling for equitable outcomes. The ashen outlines of the missile’s victims will no doubt be found with fists raised in solidarity with that brave and empathetic sender.

 

Slay, queen.

 

Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, Louis Reitmann and Sneha Nair offer the strongest argument for preventing the “queering of nuclear weapons” by arguing in favor of such a policy:

 

Exclusion creates nuclear security risks. Exclusion and unfair treatment of queer individuals and other minorities by a homogenous, cis-heteronormative community of practitioners also creates vulnerabilities in nuclear decision making. Cis-heteronormativity is the automatic assumption that someone is heterosexual and identifies with the sex assigned to them at birth. It creates the idea that being heterosexual and cisgender is normal and natural, whereas being queer or trans is a deviation.

 

You can read the rest here.

 

The best argument one can pull from this piece is that women and minorities have a tough time in the nuclear field for reasons other than intelligence. Not good, if true.

 

But nuclear engineering, with which I have some familiarity as a washout of the Navy’s nuke program, is fairly hostile to everyone. There is no room for the subjectivity that other scholarly pursuits allow.

 

I wasn’t good enough, and everyone is better for there being one less bespectacled, tall guy working on our nation’s reactors — for academic, psychological, or physical reasons.

 

Progressives have long detested the hard sciences because they are the least susceptible to manipulation. Merit is revealed in every mass defect solved for — and unsuitability in every failure — no matter how hard progressives try.

 

We have a solid history, “heteronormative” as it may be, of handling one of the most amazing and terrifying technologies ever conceived. Whether someone feels warm and fuzzy about how his sexual identity is viewed when handling a miniature sun should be priority No. 92 at most.