The colloquium on "Boundaries of Power, Boundaries of Communication" held at the University of Chicago on April 28, was the third in an experimental project to broaden the discussion of nuclear policy within a university curriculum. The first two colloquia, "Nuclear Policy, Culture and History" and "Gender, Reason, and Nuclear Policy," were held on March 13 and 14, 1987, and March 4, 1989, respectively....

The agenda for each colloquium and the syllabus of readings and lectures for each workshop were usually selected by the three or four conveners of each occasion. The original source of suggestion, however, for the entire series of meetings, and for the first colloquium was Freeman Dyson's book Weapons and Hope (1984), which posed two questions of great concern to everyone--whether the discussion of nuclear policy issues could be extended beyond the realm of "experts" on weapons and nuclear physicists, to include the perspectives of history, political science, culture and ethics. A corollary question was whether the mathematical, objective language of technical calculations, "the language of the warriors," Dyson called it, could be reconciled with the subjective, emotional "language of the victims." Professor Dyson's affirmative answers to both these questions in his book and his willingness to participate in the first colloquium along with Professors S. Chandrasekhas and John Simpson, encouraged a group of social scientists and humanists to join in the 1987 colloquium.

Although the language of nuclear policy discourse received some attention in Freeman Dyson's book and in Carol Cohn's article on "sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals," it did not become an important issue until Russell Hardin and Greg Urban asked, toward the end of the 1989 Gender colloquium, whether adding a feminist voice to discourse about nuclear war would make any policy difference. Attempts to answer this question in the Gender colloquium were abortive and did not satisfy Hardin. Accordingly, the conveners--Hardin, Singer, Stephens, and Urban--decided to make this issue a central focus of the 1990 coloquium and workshop. It was formulated in somewhat more general form--for the workshop as "Professional Dialogue and Colloquial Discourse about International Relations," and for the colloquium, at James Fernandez's suggestion, as "Boundaries of Power, Boundaries of Communication." The present report of the 1990 colloquium documents the discussion of how discourse about nuclear policy may be related to nuclear policy decisions. A second issue that emerged in 1990 is whether the end of the cold war marks the end of "a special relationship" between the United States and the Soviet Union, and is being replaced by a new special relationship or simply by resurgent nationalisms.

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