Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism: Technological and Rhetorical Paradox

Technē’s Paradox—a frequent theme in science fiction—is the commonplace belief that technology has both the potential to annihilate humanity and to preserve it. Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism looks at how this paradox applies to some of the most dangerous of technologies: population bombs, dynamite bombs, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and improvised explosive devices.

Hill’s study analyzes the rhetoric used to promote such weapons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By ex...