Nathan Levine
In 2024 a Biden Administration appointee at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) briefly went viral online for co-authoring an article, published by the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, titled “Queering Nuclear Weapons: How LGBTQ+ Inclusion Strengthens Security and Reshapes Disarmament.”REF The article, which attacked “the common belief that queer identity has no relevance for nuclear policy” and argued that “queer theory informs the struggle for nuclear justice and disarmament,” became the subject of incredulous mockery by conservative media.REF
The article, and the broader proliferation of far-left ideological dogmas within the nuclear policy field that it helped to illuminate, deserve significantly more serious scrutiny, however. Doubtless, few areas demand more level-headed and responsible governance than nuclear security and deterrence, subjects of literally existential importance. Yet investigation reveals that the ideology of “woke” identity politics (the sacralization of victimhood; extreme obsession with racial, gender, and sexual identity categories; and the idealization of revolutionary liberation from society’s alleged “structural oppression”) has become widespread in the field—particularly within an influential complex of related think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but even inside government agencies like the NNSA.
To outsiders not inducted into the language of this ideology, talk of “queering nuclear weapons” likely appears profoundly disconnected from reality, and therefore something rather silly and easily dismissible. This response misunderstands the true nature, purpose, and threat of identity politics, however. As detailed below, the ideology—and, in particular, its manifestation in demands for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—functions simultaneously as a powerful bureaucratic and political weapon, a tool for siphoning resources, and a means of subverting and capturing the mission of institutions in favor of an alternative agenda. In fact, the nuclear policy field represents a potent and timely case study in how far-left forces often work to hollow out institutions and secure material and political advantages, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/how-the-nukes-were-queered-case-study-dei-political-and-bureaucratic-weapon
