Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism

Technology that could annihilate humanity might also preserve it. Ian Hill calls this belief Technē's Paradox, and he traces it through the rhetoric used to promote some of the deadliest weapons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The case studies range widely: Malthus's essay on population, the courtroom address of accused Haymarket bomber August Spies, an army textbook on chemical warfare by Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, the letters of Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard, and the writings of Ted Kaczynski.

Hill pairs close reading of these texts with a harder question: whether weapons persuade on their own, as objects, apart from anyone speaking for them. This is a serious academic study for students of rhetoric, the history of science and the study of war, and for anyone uneasy about how readily we talk ourselves into destruction.