Wargasm (Word)
Wargasm (Word) is a word which means the abrupt outbreak of total war. It was used by former United States Defense Secretary Dean Rusk in a description of a total war exchange. The term has also been applied to describe a crisis scenario in which total war might occur.[1]
Writing in the The New Yorker issue of January 9, 1971, Daniel Lang elaborated regarding Rusk's description in an article entitled A Reporter At Large (Atomic Bombs). Rusk stated that if an all-out exchange, wargasm, happened, it would conclude with a handful of miserable survivors contemplating the folly of man.[2]
The word wargasms has been applied to the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Paul Goodman (writer). In reference to the existential and Reichian aspects of the orgasm put forward by Norman Mailer in The White Negro, Goodman used intellectual jugglery to connect the two distinct usages, i.e. wargasm and orgasm.[3]
References
- ↑ Wargasm, The Barnhart Dictionary of New English Since 1963, Clarence L. Barnhart, Sol Steinmetz, and Robert K. Barnhart, Barnhart/Harper & Row, 1963, 497.
- ↑ A Reporter At Large (Atomic Bombs), Daniel Lang, The New Yorker, January 9, 1971, 54.
- ↑ The White Negro, Norman Mailer, The Steps of the Pentagon, Harper's Magazine, March 1968, 55.