Description
This paper grapples with the myth of Western, and particularly, US guardian-ism, as a way to justify the possession of nuclear weapons. This paper draws upon the stories told by US officials in conversations around the possession of nuclear weapons, and in response to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It argues that in response to this treaty, which seeks to make the possession of nuclear weapons illegal and illegitimate, The United States has crafted narratives that serve to create and uphold a world in which their possession is legitimate, necessary, and wise. This paper show that these narratives are underpinned with colonial and gendered myths. Hence, the state attempt to resist a world in which its reliance on an ability to cause mass destruction is challenged, with simplistic, cohesive myths. This paper shows that these myths are built through the rhetoric of government officials, and in the architecture of Washington DC, hence showing how states’ myths are made and sustained. This paper also looks affectively at these myths in order to understand what these narratives are doing. It draws on empirical interviews with US government officials, as part of the scholar’s PhD empirical research.
