Antinuclear

North Korea’s problem – nuclear missiles as phallic symbols

North Korea’s Performance Anxiety, NYT, By WILLIAM J. BROAD, May 5, 2012 “IT’S a boy,” Edward Teller exulted after the world’s first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

From the start, the nuclear era seethed with sexual allusions. Military officers joked about the phallic symbolism of their big missiles and warheads — and of emasculating the enemy. “Dr. Strangelove” mocked the idea with big cigars and an excited man riding into the thermonuclear sunset with a bomb tucked between his legs.

Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear activist, argued in the 1980s that male insecurity accounted for the cold war’s perilous spiral of arms. Her book? “Missile Envy.” Today, the psychosexual lens helps explain why North Korea, in addition to dire poverty and other crippling woes, faces international giggles over its inability to “get it up” — a popular turn of phrase among bloggers and some headline writers.

“Things like this never go away,” Spencer R. Weart, an atomic historian and director emeritus of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, said in an interview. “There’s little doubt that missiles are phallic symbols. Everybody agrees on that.”

On Friday, April 13, North Korea fired a big rocket on a mission to loft the nation’s first satellite into orbit. But it fell back to Earth with a splash……. The phallic symbolism once centered on success. Nowadays, at least with North Korea, it seems as if it’s more about dysfunction. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/sunday-review/north-koreas-fizzling-missiles.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

May 7, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized