A WALK THROUGH POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: EXHUMING LOGOGENETIC PATTERNS IN NUCLEAR WEAPONRY DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article examined the logogenetic patterning of nuclear discourse through a systemic functional and critical discourse-analytic perspective. While scholarship on nuclear rhetoric has frequently addressed euphemism, deterrence, strategic metaphor, and the political normalization of nuclear violence, less attention has been paid to the way nuclear meanings unfold sequentially across texts. The article therefore proposed logogenesis as a productive analytic category for studying nuclear discourse as a dynamic process of meaning accumulation. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, nuclear rhetoric studies, and illustrative readings of selected public texts, including NATO’s nuclear deterrence policy, the 2022 United States Nuclear Posture Review, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the study identified recurrent semantic trajectories through which nuclear weapons are variously normalized, rationalized, contested, and delegitimized. The analysis found that deterrence discourse often proceeds through phased movements of technical abstraction, agency dilution, conditional futurity, strategic inevitability, and positive appraisal of credibility and assurance. In contrast, humanitarian and prohibition-oriented discourse rekeys nuclear language through consequences, victims, law, ecology, intergenerational ethics, and public conscience. The article argued that nuclear discourse is not only a vocabulary of security but also an unfolding semiotic architecture that positions readers toward particular moral and political conclusions. A logogenetic approach contributes to discourse studies by showing how nuclear meanings are built temporally, clause by clause and phase by phase, and it contributes to peace and security studies by clarifying the linguistic mechanisms through which nuclear arsenals are made thinkable, governable, or unacceptable.