Check Out My Moves

Building on earlier assessments of visual representation in air and missile defenses, and on investigations of the role of representation and perception in warfare more generally, this article offers a semiotic analysis of the signifying practices and processes that are a necessary part of America's Ballistic Missile Defense systems. The argument is made that missile defense – a range of projects aimed at protecting the United States by intercepting enemy missiles in flight – provides a recurrent site of contestation of the image. To illustrate this, examples of the use and testing of missile defense technology to date are analysed from a broadly social semiotic perspective, with specific emphasis on the concepts of signs, codes and modality. Taking this approach indicates that, in the supposedly routine process of representing “threats” in a visual format, even the most sophisticated missile defense systems in use today still encounter severe difficulties, with potentially deadly consequences. This potential for misperception is itself an inherent part of the process of coding and decoding spatial data, represented in a visual format involved herein, which raises significant questions about the vision of nuclear security promised by ballistic missile defense.