A Corpus-Assisted Investigation into Joe Biden’s Nuclear Policy Discourse

Evidence from Congressional Hearings

Abstract

This paper takes Biden’s nuclear-related speeches at U.S. Congressional hearings during his tenure as a senator as the corpus, and uses corpus tools such as AntConc and LancsBox to analyze the subject words. With the mutual information value as a reference, it obtains the high-frequency collocations of words, identifies the main topics of concern in Biden's speeches, and analyzes the characteristics of Biden's speeches. It is found that Biden pays more attention to five aspects: major nuclear-related countries, nuclear weapons development, nuclear arms control treaties, international organizations, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and diplomatic relations. This study also finds that Biden’s speeches exhibited three distinct characteristics: a strong emphasis on the development of nuclear weapons capabilities, significant attention to nuclear arms control, and close focus on "Countries of Concern". Biden’s rhetoric reflected a dual strategy of deterrence and containment. While reaffirming the United States' commitment to bolstering its nuclear deterrence capabilities, his statements simultaneously revealed efforts to undermine the nuclear arsenals of other nations and curb their nuclear development.  This study can provide a foundation for comparative research with President Trump.