Description
For decades, nuclear futures have been–implicitly or explicitly–conceived and predicted through imageries of dominoes, cascades, snowballs, waves. Betting on the ‘when’, instead of discussing the ‘if’, remarked a central belief: nuclear proliferation as an inevitable historical process impervious to alteration. Metaphorical representations emerged as natural conceptual images for encapsulating this underlying logic, consistently accompanying scholarly and policymaker predictions concerning future proliferation dynamics. The nuclear domino metaphor, while serving as a quintessential example, is part of a larger constellation of analogous metaphors that have been consistently and comprehensively integrated into discourse over time. More specifically, it showed that this metaphor’s influence extends across a diverse spectrum of actors, including governments, international bodies, academics, non-governmental analysts, and media commentators. Furthermore, it has demonstrated remarkable resilience, persisting as a prominent conceptual tool for over seven decades. This might suggest that the metaphor in question is not merely isolated linguistic verbiage, but rather a systemic metaphor that may be infusing and shaping policymakers’ thinking and approach to certain issues.
Systemic metaphors, those that have become firmly entrenched in both academic and non-academic discourse, hold particular significance due to their enduring constitutive functions, which are poised to impact the formulation of policies. The nuclear domino metaphor introduced a new conceptual lens through which nuclear trajectories could be predicted and nuclear policies enacted. Throughout the years, the nuclear domino metaphor has been consistently scrutinised and criticised as a formal theory. Nevertheless, its linguistic and cognitive dimensions have remained largely unexplored. While its empirical validity has been widely challenged and its theoretical assumptions extensively criticised, it remains a contemporary metaphorical exercise whose ‘problem-framing’ function continues to potentially mould perceptions and thought processes.
Having identified these metaphorical constructs as systemic ones, given the particular temporal (resilience) and spatial (ubiquity) boundaries that define them, this study explores what role they might have had in a particular case of nuclear diplomacy: Egypt.
