Chilton has a wide knowledge of contemporary theories of metaphor in semantics from Lakoff and Johnson to Brown and Levinson, Schank and Abelson, and Schonberg. He spends considerable time working out an aesthetic formulation of the logic of militarization metaphors, and then discusses the role this sort of metaphoric reasoning plays in legitimizing nuclear policy. The writing is sometimes dense and theoretically daunting, but he begins to expose the systemacity of nuclear language. (Tim Rohrer)