Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge: 

A. Interpretation -~--

1. Nuclear energy production is measured by installed capacity

IAEA 8 International Atomic Energy Agency, “A Newsletter of the Division of Nuclear Power,” Nuclear Power Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 3, September, http:~/~/www.iaea.org/Resources/Women/pdf/pdf(%%)

Energy production of nuclear power plants is a result of an installed capacity and effectiveness of its utilization. In 2007 there was no permanent shutdown, compared to eight in 2006, therefore the installed capacity was driven by investment into construction of new NPPs and into power uprating of existing reactor units. Three new reactors were connected to the grid and one long-term shutdown reactor was reconnected. The total installed capacity of the nuclear industry has risen from 369.8 to 372.2 GW(e) during 2007. Utilization of installed capacity can be measured by the energy availability factor (EAF). It is the percentage of maximum energy generation the plant is ready to supply to the electrical grid to meet its demand.

2. Production incentives are used to stimulate output -~-- distinct from RandD

Suranovic 10 Steve, associate professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University, PhD in economics from Cornell, International Trade: Theory and Policy, v. 1.0, “8.2 Domestic Production Subsidies,” http:~/~/catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/28?e=fwk-61960-ch08_com/bookhub/reader/28?e=fwk-61960-ch08_s02

Domestic production subsidies are generally used for two main reasons. First, subsidies provide a way of raising the incomes of producers in a particular industry. This is in part why many countries apply production subsidies on agricultural commodities: it raises the incomes of farmers. The second reason to use production subsidies is to stimulate output of a particular good. This might be done because the product is assumed to be critical for national security. This argument is sometimes used to justify subsidies to agricultural goods, as well as steel, motor vehicles, the aerospace industry, and many other products. Countries might also wish to subsidize certain industries if it is believed that the industries are important in stimulating growth of the economy. This is the reason many companies receive research and development (RandD) subsidies. Although RandD subsidies are not strictly production subsidies, they can have similar effects.

3. For is exclusive

Clegg, 95 - J.D., 1981 Yale Law School; the author is vice president and general counsel of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest. (Roger, “Reclaiming The Text of The Takings Clause,” 46 S.C. L. Rev. 531, Summer, lexis)

Even if it made no sense to limit the clause to takings "for public use"--and, as discussed below, it might make very good sense--that is the way the clause reads. It is not at all ambiguous. The prepositional phrase simply cannot be read as broadening rather than narrowing the clause's scope. Indeed, a prepositional phrase beginning with "for" appears twice more in the Fifth Amendment, and in both cases there is no doubt that the phrase is narrowing the scope of the Amendment. n20

B. Violation -~-- the plan is an incentive for RandD

C. Vote neg -~--

1. LIMITS – allowing research and development of random energy sources expands the topic to a theoretical number of energy sources – impossible to predict.

2.  GROUND – the only unified neg ground is energy production – futuristic sources guarantee the aff AT WORSE a massive delay before they link to the only ground on the topic.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge: 

Power in the federal government is divided into three branches—the affirmative does not specify

Rotunda 1 (18 Const. Commentary 319, “THE COMMERCE CLAUSE, THE POLITCAL QUESTION DOCTRINE, AND MORRISON,” lexis)

The Framers of our Constitution anticipated that a self-interested "federal majority" would consistently seek to impose more federal control over the people and the states. n10 Hence, they created a federal structure designed to protect freedom by dispersing and limiting federal power. They instituted federalism  *321  chiefly to protect individuals, that is, the people, not the "states qua states." n11 The Framers sought to protect liberty by creating a central government of enumerated powers. They divided power between the state and federal governments, and they further divided power within the federal government by splitting it among the three branches of government, and they further divided the legislative power (the power that the Framers most feared) by splitting it between two Houses of Congress.

Voting Issue

One—negative ground—specification is key to generate specific uniqueness and link magnitude so generic energy production now doesn’t non-unique our disads. Gives us textual competition for counterplans and key to high tech solvency arguments

Two—education—specification is a prerequisite to energy policy.

Tomain 90—Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law Tomain, Joseph P., “The Dominant Model of United States Energy Policy” (1990), Faculty Articles and Other Publications, Paper 130, http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/130

IV. CONCLUSION

The direct message of the dominant model is that United States energy policy is market driven. The implication of this message is equally clear. Given the structural setting of a complex policymaking process that is woven throughout government and is directly affected by the tensions created by separation of powers and federalism, no comprehensive national energy policy of any detail is likely to develop despite executive, legislative, or administrative desires to do so.

There are ideological and pragmatic reasons behind this conclusion. The first reason, grounded in the liberal tradition, is that the country is "generally suspicious" of central planning. Rather than have an imitation Japanese or European industrial policy, the United States economy continues to run on private competition. Granted, the government will attempt to halt large accumulations of corporate power through antitrust enforcement. Still, though, countervailing government control of the economy through heavy central planning is simply not an accepted way of doing business.

A second and corollary reason is that although government is used as a backstop to prevent large aggregations of corporate power, government will also promote and support competitive businesses. The New Deal was not so much an experiment in social policythough it was clearly that-as it was an example of the federal government stimulating the economy by getting business on its feet again.

Third, there is a commitment to the hard energy path of largescale, high-technology, capital intensive energy production. This commitment finds its roots in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. This history makes it difficult for policy makers and decision makers to design and implement alternative energy policies, thus putting the burden of change on proponents 'of alternatives.

Fourth, also echoing the liberal tradition, there is an underlying faith in the market. The country's efforts to achieve the virtues of the market-color blindness, individual liberty, eqmility, and technological innovations-may not reach a Utopian plateau, but government controls are worse approximations. The country's faith in the market forms the baseline, and government will only intervene if cracks in the baseline are perceived.

Thus the dominant model of U.S. energy policy is firmly based in the tenets of democratic capitalism: private ownership and production; competition; no overt central planning; wariness of monopoly; and government support of each of the other elements. The hope is that our national economy and our quality of life can flourish if (1) markets are relatively clear, (2) entry and exits are relatively inexpensive, and (3) corporate power is relatively dispersed. Indeed, the ideology of domestic energy policy rests upon the idea that inter-industry and intra-industry competition are highly desirable~' Moreover, such industrial pluralism ultimately serves the public interest by providing relatively abundant energy at relatively stable prices. Economic efficiency, economic growth, economies of scale, and a cautious eye on market power thus define the public interest in energy. So says the dominant model. What remains to be seen is whether the dominant model has significant longevity given contemporary concerns about the continued use of fossil fuels and environmental degradation. Before the environmental consequences of hard path energy production can be adequately addressed, however, the dominant structure of domestic energy policymaking and policy must be acknowledged. Hopefully, this article has provided that acknowledgement.

2AC clarifications are too late—the 1AC plan is used to generate counterplan competition—2AC or CX clarification justifies aff conditionality and kills any neg predictability

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge: 

Electricity demand is driving Natgas to a price equilibrium that is sustainable for producers

Santos 4/24/12—Independent trader, analyst and algorithmic trading expert w/16 years of experience Pauol Santos, Natural Gas In 2012: Electric Generation Switch Implications, Seeking Alfa, April 24, 2012, pg. http://seekingalpha.com/article/524061-natural-gas-in-2012-electric-generation-switch-implications

There are several important observations to be made from this table:

The increased demand from dispatch switching in electricity generation really eats up the increased production from the shale revolution. Not only does it do so, but it might be underestimated in this analysis, because of the distortion the unfavorable weather creates (the growth rate in natural gas usage would probably have been even greater under normal weather).

The natural gas production increase year-over-year is now disappearing because of the drop in rig counts. This happens against a backdrop of increased usage and thus hastens equilibrium in the market. Equilibrium will naturally be found at a higher price, because the rigs started going away at a higher price as well, and will require a higher price to come back.

The impact of lower or stagnated production against increasing demand is such that excluding the net imports, it's even likely that net withdrawals would result under a regular summer. With a hot summer—not modeled here—it would be likely that we'd see net withdrawals considering imports. Indeed, given the week-to-week variation in all the variables, such might happen even under a regular summer.

Finally, this model, optimistic in its production projections and somewhat pessimistic in demand, still sees only a 1267 bcf net injection taking inventories to around 3800-3850 bcf at the peak of the injection cycle, far from the 4100-4400 that are considered the demonstrated and theoretical storage capacities. So there's not only a good chance that storage capacity won't be exhausted, but also a chance that the market will be surprised by how little gas will be injected (though at the start of the cycle there can still be a good deal of injection).

Conclusion

Due to the incredible impact the dispatch switching of coal-fired generation for natural gas generation is having on increased natural gas usage, as well as the impact the low prices are having on drilling for natural gas, the market might come into equilibrium sooner than previously expected, so natural gas prices recognizing this reality might have significant upside even before the end of 2012. 2013 now seems certain to have higher prices as well, something I had already speculated on before. Obviously higher prices will alleviate both of these developments, leading to less coal substitution and to a resumption in drilling—but still this implies an equilibrium at higher prices.

Given this conclusion, I took a small long position in natural gas October 2012 call options at the $2.50 strike.

The implications for coal stocks such as Peabody Energy (com/symbol/btu(% style="font-size:8.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria" %)), Alpha Natural Resources (com/symbol/anr(%%)), CONSOL Energy (com/symbol/cnx(%%)), Arch Coal (com/symbol/aci(%%)) and James River Coal (com/symbol/jrcc(%%)) depend on how much natural gas moves. The rise in natural gas prices might not be enough to impact coal substitution or prices significantly (anything less than a 40% pop doesn't change the equation much). Still, if a coal panic doesn't happen in the next two months, the sector should be broadly safer from there on.

The implications for natural gas producers are on the whole more directly positive as natural gas prices are predicted to move up, though natural gas producers heavily reliant on shale gas, such as Chesapeake (com/symbol/chk(% style="font-size:8.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria" %)), might have trouble with the depletion rates.

Nuclear incentives discourage nat-gas investments—utilities will pursue fuel diversity if the price is right.

C2ES 12 Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “NATURAL GAS IN THE U.S. ELECTRIC POWER SECTOR,” May 2012

According to the latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy gov/forecasts/aeo/er/(% style="font-size:8.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria" %) (AEO), natural gas-fired generation is expected to be just over 25 percent of the total generation mix in 2020, rising to 27 percent in 2035.

Fuel diversity is an important consideration for utilities looking to reduce their reliance on any particular energy source. The trend away from coal toward greater reliance on natural gas creates a potential fuel diversity risk, especially considering the volatile price history of natural gas. Coal will continue to be a significant source of electricity in some regions and for some utilities, but other utilities look increasingly likely to be getting nearly all of their baseload generation from only two sources: natural gas and nuclear power.

Levelized cost (Figure 4) cfm(%%) the present value of the total cost of building and operating a generating plant over an assumed financial life and duty cycle, converted to equal annual payments and expressed in terms of real dollars to remove the impact of inflation. It reflects overnight capital cost, fuel cost, fixed and variable OandM cost, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate for each plant type. The availability of various incentives including state or federal tax cfm(%%) can also impact the calculation of levelized cost. The values cfm(%%) in the figure below do not incorporate any such incentives. Natural gas-fired combined-cycle generation technologies are projected to be the least expensive options in the coming years. Utilities looking at their bottom lines and public utility commissions looking for low-cost investment decisions will favor the construction of natural gas-fired technologies, leading to a greater reliance on natural gas in the coming years.

A nat gas equilibrium price is critical to manufacturing

Magill 8/22/12 Jim Magill, “Manufacturers, producers see different futures for US natural gas supplies,” Platts, 22 Aug 2012, http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/NaturalGas/6582012

The rapid development of US shale natural gas resources has created an opportunity for the nation to establish a new energy paradigm, provided that the proper energy policies are put into place, speakers at the North American Prospect Expo said in Houston said Wednesday.

Jim Tramuto, vice president of Southwestern Energy, pointed to his company's success at tapping into the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas, as an example of what shale gas producers in basins across the country have been able to accomplish in a few years.

"We have finally cracked the code," he said. "We are now up over 2 Bcf/d in the Fayetteville Shale. We've already produced over 2 Tcf of gas and this year alone we have drilled 450 wells in the Fayetteville Shale."

But he said the exploration-and-production industry's success in boosting US gas production has cut gas prices to a level that is unsustainable.

"We can produce it, but if we can't sell it and it's not used, we won't realize the return we all are expecting," he said. State and local politicians need to implement policies that serve to encourage the production of and foster the creation of markets for shale gas, he added.

The increase in US gas production has also led to the rebirth of the domestic chemical and manufacturing sectors, Ken Bromfield, North American commercial director with Dow Chemical, said.

"We have an unprecedented opportunity with shale gas to push the reset button on the US energy economy," he Psaid.
 "Manufacturing is back," he added, saying industry has announced plans to build about $80 billion of projects in the next five years, as a result reasonably priced natural gas. Dow alone has announced $4 billion of new manufacturing projects, Bromfield said.

But he warned that this rosy scenario could be ruined by a rush to build new terminals for the export of liquefied natural gas. He said he favors policies that would encourage the use of gas to produce manufactured goods, which then could be exported at eight times the value than exporting the gas alone would bring.

On the sidelines of the conference, he told Platts that an effort to begin exporting large volumes of LNG could slow down the manufacturing renaissance.

Bromfield said Dow doesn't think that restricting LNG exports will hurt producers' profits. "We think that there's a demand from manufacturing that is already in progress and more is coming; that there can be an equilibrium point and we can have it all."

Cheap gas is key to tackle the deficit.

Kohler 3/2/12 Alan Kohler, “The death of peak oil,” Business Spectator, Published 7:17 AM, 29 Feb 2012 Last update 6:38 PM, 2 Mar 2012, pg. http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/peak-oil-shale-gas-fracking-energy-nuclear-budget-pd20120229-RWR7C?opendocumentandsrc=rss

The importance of this for the world is hard to exaggerate. The distribution of energy on the planet is shifting: the stranglehold that Middle Eastern dictatorships have over the world’s energy supply is loosening and just as the rise of manufacturing in China shifted the world’s economic axis, so will the rise of shale energy in North America.

There will be a rapid substitution of coal by cleaner gas, especially as (or perhaps if) emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes spread.

It means renewable energy and nuclear will become less and less economic as the supply of gas increases, whether it’s from coal seams or shale. Gas is less carbon intensive than coal, but it still produces greenhouse gases, so it may be that the policy response to reduce global warming will actually have to increase if the world moves too far towards gas and away from renewables and nuclear.

If the United States could become self-sufficient in energy, its current account deficit would disappear and the US dollar would start rising again.

In fact, shale energy could be responsible for the resurgence of the United States as an economic superpower, with cheap local energy underpinning the second coming of its manufacturing industry as well as helping to balance its twin deficits—the current account and federal budget.

The impact is US isolationism—perception of decline risks war.

Lieberthal and O'Hanlon 7/3/12—Foreign policy scholars @ Brookings Institution Dr. Kenneth Lieberthal (Professor of Poli Sci @ University of org/wiki/University_of_Michigan||title="University of Michigan") and Dr. Michael O'Hanlon (Lecturer of Poli Sci @ Princeton org/wiki/Princeton_University||title="Princeton University"), “The real national security threat: America's debt,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2012, pg. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ohanlon-fiscal-reform-20120703,0,1409615.story

Drones, kill lists, computer topic||title="Viral Diseases and Infections" and administration leaks are all the rage in the current political debate. They indeed merit serious scrutiny at a time when the rules of war, and technologies available for war, are changing fast. That said, these issues are not the foreign policy centerpiece of the 2012 presidential race.

Economic renewal and fiscal reform have become the preeminent issues, not only for domestic and economic policy but for foreign policy as well. As the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm.Michael G. Mullen, was fond of saying, national debt has become perhaps our top national security threat. And neither major presidential candidate is doing enough about it. This issue needs to be framed as crucial not just for our future prosperity but for international stability as well.

The United States has been running trillion-dollar deficits, resulting in a huge explosion in the country's indebtedness. Publicly held debt now equals 70% of Gross Domestic Product, a threshold many economists consider significant and highly worrisome. Making matters worse, half of our current deficit financing is being provided by foreigners. We are getting by with low interest rates and tolerable levels of domestic investment only because they find U.S. debt attractive, which may not last.

According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, President Obama's long-term budget plan would allow publicly held debt as a fraction of GDP to rise further, up to 75%, within a decade. Mitt Romney's proposal, featuring tax cuts and defense spending increases and as-yet-unspecified (and thus less than fully credible) entitlement reform, appears worse. It would probably drive publicly held debt to 95% of GDP over the same period. Put differently, though both are serious and pragmatic men, neither major party's presidential candidate is adequately stepping up to the plate, with Romney's plan the more troubling of the two.

Why is this situation so serious? First, we are headed for a level of debt that within a decade could require us to spend the first trillion dollars of every year's federal budget servicing that debt. Much less money will be left for other things. That is a prescription for a vicious cycle of underfinancing for our infrastructure, national education efforts, science research and all the other functions of government that are crucial to long-term economic growth. Robust defense spending will be unsustainable too. Once we get in this rut, getting out will be very hard.

Second, such a chronic economic decline would undercut what has been 70 years of strong national political consensus in favor of an activist and engaged American foreign policy. One reason the United States was so engaged through the Cold War and the first 20 years of the post-Cold War world was fear of threats. But the other reason was that the strategy was associated with improvements in our quality of life as well. America became even more prosperous, and all major segments of society benefited.

Alas, globalization and automation trends of the last generation have increasingly called the American dream into question for the working classes. Another decade of underinvestment in what is required to remedy this situation will make an isolationist or populist president far more likely because much of the country will question whether an internationalist role makes sense for America — especially if it costs us well over half a trillion dollars in defense spending annually yet seems correlated with more job losses.

Lastly, American economic weakness undercuts U.S. leadership abroad. Other countries sense our weakness and wonder about our purported decline. If this perception becomes more widespread, and the case that we are in decline becomes more persuasive, countries will begin to take actions that reflect their skepticism about America's future. Allies and friends will doubt our commitment and may pursue nuclear weapons for their own security, for example; adversaries will sense opportunity and be less restrained in throwing around their weight in their own neighborhoods. The crucial Persian Gulf and Western Pacific regions will likely become less stable. Major war will become more likely.

When running for president last time, Obama eloquently articulated big foreign policy visions: healing America's breach with the Muslim world, controlling global climate change, dramatically curbing global poverty through development aid, moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. These were, and remain, worthy if elusive goals. However, for Obama or his successor, there is now a much more urgent big-picture issue: restoring U.S. economic strength. Nothing else is really possible if that fundamental prerequisite to effective foreign policy is not reestablished.

Extinction

Burford 12—PhD candidate in Poli Sci @ University of Auckland Lyndon Burford (New Zealand representatives on the Study Group on Countering the Proliferation of WMD in the Asia-Pacific region. This study group is hosted by the ASEAN Regional Forum.,) “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch,” The Nonproliferation Review, Volume 19, Issue 2, 2012, pg. 229-239

Nuclear activities create inherent security risks. Threats arising from military nuclear activities include, among other things, the further dissemination or use of nuclear weapons—including limited or full-scale nuclear war, whether accidental, miscalculated, or intentional—and nuclear or radiological accidents or terrorism, which in extreme cases may lead to nuclear war.7 In the civilian sector, the 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima disasters demonstrated that severe nuclear accidents might also threaten international security. Today, nuclear risks are increasing due to a range of factors: the threat of further nuclear dissemination, the development of a nuclear arms race in South Asia, the growth of dual-use industries and strategic trade flows, and the potential horizontal and vertical expansion of nuclear energy programs. The nature of these risks transcends national borders. As a result, nuclear risks cannot be addressed effectively by a single powerful state, or even a coalition of committed states. The weakest link in the chain undermines the security of all countries, so maintaining international security requires all countries to support nuclear control efforts.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge: 

Focus on energy production produces chronic failure.  Energy becomes an end-in-itself with no social or ethical guidance.

Byrne and Toly 6—*John Byrne, Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Public Policy at Delaware and **Noah Toly, Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, and Glover p. 20-21 Gender paraphrased

The Technique of Modern Energy Governance While moderns usually declare strong preferences for democratic governance, their preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the achievement of such ambitions, or require changes in the meaning of democracy that are so extensive as to raise doubts about its coherence. A veneration of technical monuments typifies both conventional and sustainable energy strategies and reflects a shared belief in technological advance as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern proclivity to search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery has led some to warn of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in which social values are sublimated by the objective norms of technical success (e.g., the celebration of efficiency in all things). In this politics, technology and its use become the end of society and members have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu what should be valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133- 146) replaces critical thinking about modern life with an awed sense and acceptance of its inevitable reality. From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant Power, to the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers modernist energy transitions. Refinement of technical accomplishments and/or technological revolutions are conceived to drive social transformation, despite the unending inequality that has accompanied two centuries of modern energy's social project. As one observer has noted (Roszak, 1972: 479), the "great paradox of the technological mystique is its remarkable ability to grow strong by chronic failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical expertise." Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by the magnetism of technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace a strain of technological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to authoritative status vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and systems. Such a governance structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain described by Mumford ( 1964). Governance "by the people" consists of authorizing qualified experts to assist political leaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In the narratives of both conventional and sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of the energy regime while largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations. Indeed, systems of the sort envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies are not governable in a democratic manner. Mumford suggests ( 1964: I) that the classical idea of democracy includes "a group of related ideas and practices ... including communal self-government ... unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community." Modern conventional and sustainable energy strategies invest in external controls, authorize abstract, depersonalized interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate economic growth and technical excellence without end. Their social consequences are relegated in both paradigms to the status of problems-to-be-solved, rather than being recognized as the emblems of modernist politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality, which "deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, and overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over humanity himself, the chief purpose of existence" (Mumford, 1964: 5). Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regarded as scientifically and technologically unassailable.

Appeal to specific nuclear technology magnifies the problem of authoritarian expertise.  They depoliticize social choice about the purpose of technology.

Wynne 11—Brian Wynne Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change @ Lancaster (UK) Rationality and Ritual 2^nd Edition p. 8-11 Gender Paraphrased

Such detachment of ambitious technological commitment from organized fantasy has to be a hope; but this hope also has to be interrogated, cold-bloodedly, carefully, and openly. As I tried to assert in this book, nuclear proponents including its scientists belied their own claims to objective hard-factual discipline, with their intense and unbridled emotional commitments clearly evident. These scientistic emotions (and their denial) manifested profound insecurities on the part of their agents, combined with an effective assumption of almost superhuman powers. Thus the mutual identification and reinforcement of nuclear technology with a culture of exaggeration is no less real and no less dangerous just because other technologies have also suffered from similar such idolatry in the past (Ezrahi, 1990) as well as since the 1980s. Although it was Lewis Strauss - a non-scientist head of the scientific body for both weapons and civil nuclear power, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) - who voiced in 1954 the infamous promise that his generation's children would enjoy 'electrical energy too cheap to meter' (Strauss, 1954; Weart, 1988, p166), what is notable is the refusal of any nuclear expert to refute such fatuous promises made in the public name of their science (Laurence, 1959, p251).10 If science claims the credit for the putative benefits from such technologies, as it does, then it cannot easily distance itself from the related discredits - nor from the arguments over which is which. Paradoxically, as nuclear energy prepares to return, society still has not come to terms with the cultural significance of its mass-destructive and apocalyptic military origins and consequences. With the failure of the Atoms for Peace programme and its global institutional UN 'safeguards' supposedly to arrest nuclear weapons proliferation (granted that it must have slowed it down), the systematic and sustained social unrealism of this 60-year commitment cannot but encourage a continuing sense of public unease and distrust of nuclear energy technologies, even if the reprocessing option is forestalled. The imagery of Figure 1 is referred to in Chapter 2 of the original book, but was not printed there. Looking back now, I realize I did not do justice to the issues it raised. Thanks to various theoretical, technological and public developments since then, it deserves fuller treatment now. The image is from a supplement on 'The Atomic Age' published by the Financial Times in 1956, at the birth of both the UK civil nuclear power programme (claimed to be the first in the world) and the UN global Atoms for Peace programme.11 This 50-page publication celebrated the Queen's forthcoming opening of the Calder Hall (Windscale) nuclear electricity (and weapons plutonium) reactors.12 This imagery did not just project nuclear technology as human perfection. It portrayed much more about the nuclear imagination and its mode of public communication and self-promotion, thus of nuclear technology's material social being. This includes its normative characterization (and performance, as explained below) of 'the public' which it imagined as part of the nuclear era. It emphasized the religious forces and feelings animating this science-inspired technology, the epitome of modern scientific rationality as public authority. The technology is shown not just as precise, pure, pristine and clinical. It is also hovering in its own superhuman realm, above the Earth and beyond mere human life, even surrounded by a glowing celestial halo. The text indicates an imagined (and desired) awestruck public: 'Millions of people 'mankind' stand amazed at the prospect of heat light and power from a source that cannot even be seen.' There is not the slightest sense of a technology and its embodied science that envisages any hint of public engagement: indeed quite the opposite, only distant awe, exclusion and admiration. These extra-terrestrial, extra-social experts 'know best', not only about nuclear power, but about what is best for 'humankind'. Public exclusion, subordination, passivization and alienation are here actively cultivated, through symbolic action. The Windscale book is about how this same kind of symbolic imagination of 'the public' was, through a participatory public inquiry, its report and parliamentary and media uptake, enacted into material performance in later policy culture and commitments. These processes, their forms of reason and discourse, can be said to have performed a particular imagination of their public, and encouraged the material enactment of that imagination into society. If we also refer back here to the practices of pollution management at the Windscale-Sellafield site, as reflected in Dunster's 1958 description earlier of how routine marine radioactive discharges were set, we can see in this account, and in the ensuing environmental contamination and human exposures from this, a performance of nuclear technology's imagined publics. We can see from not only the typical symbolism but also in corresponding material practices that as democratic participants, worthy of respectful recognition and to be given standing as part of the moral --community in which nuclear technology exists, effectively there is no public. It has been one of the most significant shifts of collective understanding amongst many - contributed by the late twentieth century social sciences and humanities, that symbolic actions carry corresponding changes in material social relations. Thus the normatively imposed social relations of technoscience here are not just symbolically projected, but also materially performed. In addition to the instances noted above, a further routinized example of the latter was the sustained extreme secrecy and misinformation that was practised by the UK nuclear authorities behind the scenes of this 1956 flood of positive publicity, and in imposed assumptions-in-practice about what people's concerns, needs and capacities are and should be. These were in no need of co ll ective negotiation; they were subsumed into the dominant assumed ontology. Inquiry inspector Mr Justice Parker's later empiricist framing and interpretation of the Windscale inquiry's conflicting ontological commitments, as these were embodied in the irreconcilable arguments of the parties but represented by him as measurable - and measured by him - against an empirically discoverable standard, did the same. Despite all the noise and fury of public debate and controversy, his discrete translations of expressed public concerns into his own terms were not subjected to any direct accountable scrutiny. Of course, his rational arguments in favour of THORP's approval were, but that is not what I am referring to here. This book still stands as a sole, modest and utterly marginal witness to this.

Technocratic management makes extinction inevitable—no aff proposal can solve.

Crist 7 Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech University, 2007, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos, Volume 141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 49-51

If mainstream environmentalism is catching up with the solution promoted by Teller, and perhaps harbored all along by the Bush administration, it would certainly be ironic. But the irony is deeper than incidental politics. The projected rationality of a geoengineering solution, stoked by apocalyptic fears surrounding climate change, promises consequences (both physical and ideological) that will only quicken the real ending of wild nature: "here we encounter," notes Murray Bookchin, "the ironic perversity of a 'pragmatism' that is no different, in principle, from the problems it hopes to resolve."58 Even if they work exactly as hoped, geoengineering solutions are far more similar to anthropogenic climate change than they are a counterforce to it: their implementation constitutes an experiment with the biosphere underpinned by technological arrogance, unwillingness to question or limit consumer society, and a sense of entitlement to transmogrifying the planet that boggles the mind. It is indeed these elements of techno-arrogance, unwillingness to advocate radical change, and unlimited entitlement, together with the profound erosion of awe toward the planet that evolved life (and birthed us), that constitute the apocalypse underway—if that is the word of choice, though the words humanization, colonization, or occupation of the biosphere are far more descriptively accurate. Once we grasp the ecological crisis as the escalating conversion of the planet into "a shoddy way station,"59 it becomes evident that inducing "global dimming" in order to offset "global warming" is not a corrective action but another chapter in the project of colonizing the Earth, of what critical theorists called world domination.

Domination comes at a huge cost for the human spirit, a cost that may or may not include the scale of physical imperilment and suffering that apocalyptic fears conjure. Human beings pay for the domination of the biosphere—a domination they are either bent upon or resigned to—with alienation from the living Earth.60 This alienation manifests, first and end page 50 foremost, in the invisibility of the biodiversity crisis: the steadfast denial and repression, in the public arena, of the epochal event of mass extinction and accelerating depletion of the Earth's biological treasures. It has taken the threat of climate change (to people and civilization) to allow the tip of the biodepletion iceberg to surface into public discourse, but even that has been woefully inadequate in failing to acknowledge two crucial facts: first, the biodiversity crisis has been occurring independently of climate change, and will hardly be stopped by windmills, nuclear power plants, and carbon sequestering, in any amount or combination thereof; and second, the devastation that species and ecosystems have already experienced is what largely will enable more climate-change-driven damage to occur.

Human alienation from the biosphere further manifests in the recalcitrance of instrumental rationality, which reduces all challenges and problems to variables that can be controlled, fixed, managed, or manipulated by technical means. Instrumental rationality is rarely questioned substantively, except in the flagging of potential "unintended consequences" (for example, of implementing geoengineering technologies). The idea that instrumental rationality (in the form of technological fixes for global warming) might save the day hovers between misrepresentation and delusion: firstly, because instrumental rationality has itself been the planet's nemesis by mediating the biosphere's constitution as resource and by condoning the transformation of Homo sapiens into a user species; and secondly, because instrumental rationality tends to invent, adjust, and tweak technical means to work within given contexts—when it is the given, i.e., human civilization as presently configured economically and culturally, that needs to be changed.

Critique is a prior question—starting with incentives dodges issues of social and environmental sustainability.

Byrne and Toly 6—*John Byrne, Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Public Policy at Delaware and **Noah Toly, Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, and Glover p. 22-24

Transition without Change: A Failing Discourse After more than thirty years of contested discourse, the major 'energy futures' under consideration appear committed to the prevailing systems of governance and political economy that animate late modernity. The new technologies-conventional or sustainable-that will govern the energy sector and accumulate capital mjght be described as centaurian technics21 in which the crude efficiency of the fossil energy era is bestowed a new sheen by high . technologies and modernized ecosystems: capitalism without smoky cities, contaminated industrial landscapes, or an excessively carbonized atmosphere. Emerging energy solutions are poised to realize a postmodern transition (Roosevelt, 2002), but their shared commitment to capitalist political economy and the democratic-authoritarian bargain lend credence to Jameson's assessment (1991) of postmodernism as the "cultural logic of late capitalism." Differences in ecological commitments between conventional and sustainable energy strategies still demarcate a battleground that, we agree, is important-even fundamental. But so also are the common aspirations of the two camps. Each sublimates social considerations in favor of a politics of more-is-better, and each regards the advance of energy capitalism with a sense of inevitability and triumph. Conventional and sustainable energy visions equally presume that a social order governed by a 'democratic' ideal of cornucopia, marked by economic plenty, and delivered by technological marvels will eventually lance the wounds of poverty and inequality and start the healing process. Consequently, silence on questions of governance and social justice is studiously observed by both·proposals. Likewise, both agree to, or demur on, the question of capitalism's sustainability.22 Nothing is said on these questions because, apparently, nothing needs to be. If the above assessment of the contemporary energy discourse is correct, then the enterprise is not at a crossroad; rather, it has reached a point of acquiescence to things as they are. Building an inquiry into energy as a social project will require the recovery of a critical voice that can interrogate, rather than concede, the discourse's current moorings in technological politics and capitalist political economy. A fertile direction in this regard is to investigate an energy-society order in which energy systems evolve in response to social values and goals, and not simply according to the dictates of technique, prices, or capital. Initial interest in renewable energy by the sustainability camp no doubt emanated, at least in part, from the fact that its fuel price is non-existent and that capitalization of systems to collect renewable sources need not involve the extravagant, convoluted corporate forms that manage the conventional energy regime. But forgotten, or misunderstood, in the attraction of renewable energy have been the social origins of such emergent possibilities. Communities exist today who address energy needs outside the global marketplace: they are often rural in character and organize energy services that are immune to oil price spikes and do not require water heated to between 550Q and 900Q Fahrenheit (300Q and 500Q Celsius) (the typical temperatures in nuclear reactors). No energy bills are sent or paid and governance of the serving infrastructure is based on local (rather than distantly developed professional) knowledge. Needless to say, sustainability is embodied in the lifeworld of these communities, unlike the modern strategy that hopes to design sustainability into its technology and economics so as not to seriously change its otherwise unsustainable way of life . Predictably, modern society will underscore its wealth and technical acumen as evidence of its superiority over alternatives. But smugness cannot overcome the fact that energy-society relations are evident in which the bribe of democratic-authoritarianism and the unsustainability of energy capitalism are successfully declined. In L 928, Mahatma Gandhi (cited in Gandhi, 1965: 52) explained why the democratic-authoritarian bargain and Western capitalism should be rejected: God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. Unless the capitalists of India help to avert that tragedy by becoming trustees of the welfare of the masses and by devoting their talents not to amassing wealth for themselves but to the service of the masses in an altruistic spirit, they will end either by destroying the masses or being destroyed by them. As Gandhi's remark reveals, social inequality resides not in access to electric light and other accoutrements of modernity, but in a world order that places efficiency and wealth above life-affirming ways of life. This is our social problem, our energy problem, our ecological problem, and, generally, our political-economic problem. The challenge of a social inquiry into energy-society relations awaits.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge: 

NRC restrictions are the single biggest roadblock for SMRs—delays, lack of human and technical capacity, and zoning restrictions.

Nick Cunningham, October 2012. Policy Analyst for Energy and Climate at the American Security Project. “Small Modular Reactors: A Possible Path Forward for Nuclear Power,” American Security Project, http:~/~/americansecurityproject.org/ASP%20Reports/Ref%200087%20-%20Small%20Modular%20Reactors.pdf(%%).

The most difficult challenge currently facing SMRs is the institutional barriers. Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not certified a single SMR design. Despite the variety of SMR designs from several nuclear vendors, the NRC has lacked sufficient human and technical capacity to license small modular reactors in the past.33 Even as policymakers have expressed greater interest in SMRs in recent years, the licensing process for a new design takes several years at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.34¶ Also, many regulations create a difficult environment for small reactors and favor large reactors. For example, the NRC requires 10 mile emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants,¶ making it difficult to site a small reactor near urban centers where it could be used for energy applications other than centralized electricity generation.35¶ SMRs will need to overcome this long history of institutional bias towards large reactors. As the most prominent licensing body for the nuclear industry worldwide, the NRC to a certain degree, shapes the global future for nuclear power. If the NRC does not lead on small modular reactors, it may be an uphill battle for the SMR industry.

Can’t globalize—export restricitons

Platts, 10/1/2012. “Export reform needed to increase US nuclear market share: NEI,” http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/ElectricPower/6666149.

Export controls on technology related to nuclear power should be reformed to allow US companies to capture a larger share of growing international markets, the Nuclear Energy Institute said Monday. The US Department of Commerce estimates the world market for nuclear power technology, fuel and related services and equipment at "upwards of" $750 billion over the next 10 years, Richard Myers, vice president for policy development, planning and supplier programs at NEI, said at a press conference Monday in Washington to release a report the US nuclear power industry commissioned on the topic. "It is a myth that the US nuclear supply chain has disappeared," Myers said. Most manufacturing of large "heavy metal" components for nuclear power plants, such as reactor vessels, is now done in Asia, but many US firms manufacture "precision components" for the nuclear industry and would stand to benefit from increased ability to compete with other countries, Myers said. US licensing and regulatory reviews of nuclear exports, however, are "unduly burdensome," have confusing "layers of jurisdiction" shared by at least four federal agencies, and typically take at least a year to complete, "months longer" than reviews in other exporter countries, he said. As a result, the US export control regime is "far more complex and more difficult to navigate ... than comparable regimes in other nations," Myers said. The report prepared by the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for NEI said that "US agencies should be able to increase the efficiency of their license processing through stronger executive branch procedures. By signaling to potential customers that US exports may be licensed on a schedule comparable to those of foreign export control regimes, such an improvement could significantly 'level the playing field' for US exporters in the near term." Many such reforms can be accomplished "administratively," without the need for legislation, James Glasgow, a partner at Pillsbury who specializes in nuclear export law, said during the press conference. The US Department of Energy is currently amending some of its export regulations, known as the Part 810 rule, and reforming that rule could provide significant opportunities to US exporters, Glasgow said. Unfortunately, some of DOE's proposed revisions to the rule go in the wrong direction, adding regulatory requirements and hurdles, Myers said. Some potential customers for US nuclear exports see DOE's Part 810 review as "the choke point" for an order, and "sometimes that's an evaluation criterion" for deciding whether to buy from a US firm, Glasgow said. In such situations, delay in the review can be "the functional equivalence of denial" of permission for the export because the buyer looks elsewhere, he said.

***Burdensome U.S. export regulations are the critical obstacle to nuclear leadership—the U.S. actually still has the supply chain, but massive delays in processing push countries away from the U.S.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Wake LM | Judge:
1NC

No widespread prolif

Hymans 12—Jacques E. C. Hymans is Associate Professor of IR at USC April 16, 2012, “North Korea's Lessons for (Not) Building an Atomic Bomb,” Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137408/jacques-e-c-hymans/north-koreas-lessons-for-not-building-an-atomic-bomb?page=show

Washington's miscalculation is not just a product of the difficulties of seeing inside the Hermit Kingdom. It is also a result of the broader tendency to overestimate the pace of global proliferation. For decades, Very Serious People have predicted that strategic weapons are about to spread to every corner of the earth. Such warnings have routinely proved wrong -- for instance, the intelligence assessments that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- but they continue to be issued. In reality, despite the diffusion of the relevant technology and the knowledge for building nuclear weapons, the world has been experiencing a great proliferation slowdown. Nuclear weapons programs around the world are taking much longer to get off the ground -- and their failure rate is much higher -- than they did during the first 25 years of the nuclear age.

As I explain in my article "Botching the Bomb" in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, the key reason for the great proliferation slowdown is the absence of strong cultures of scientific professionalism in most of the recent crop of would-be nuclear states, which in turn is a consequence of their poorly built political institutions. In such dysfunctional states, the quality of technical workmanship is low, there is little coordination across different technical teams, and technical mistakes lead not to productive learning but instead to finger-pointing and recrimination. These problems are debilitating, and they cannot be fixed simply by bringing in more imported parts through illicit supply networks. In short, as a struggling proliferator, North Korea has a lot of company.

Prolif is super slow—empirics disprove their fear mongering.

Hymans 12—Jacques E. C. Hymans is Associate Professor of IR at USC May/June 2012, “Botching the Bomb,” Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137403/jacques-e-c-hymans/botching-the-bomb?page=show

The chronic problem of nuclear proliferation is once again dominating the news. A fierce debate has developed over how to respond to the threat posed by Iran's nuclear activities, which most experts believe are aimed at producing a nuclear weapon or at least the capacity to assemble one. In this debate, one side is pushing for a near-term military attack to damage or destroy Iran's nuclear program, and the other side is hoping that strict sanctions against the Islamic Republic will soften it up for a diplomatic solution. Both sides, however, share the underlying assumption that unless outside powers intervene in a dramatic fashion, it is inevitable that Iran will achieve its supposed nuclear goals very soon.

Yet there is another possibility. The Iranians had to work for 25 years just to start accumulating uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is not even weapons grade. The slow pace of Iranian nuclear progress to date strongly suggests that Iran could still need a very long time to actually build a bomb -- or could even ultimately fail to do so. Indeed, global trends in proliferation suggest that either of those outcomes might be more likely than Iranian success in the near future. Despite regular warnings that proliferation is spinning out of control, the fact is that since the 1970s, there has been a persistent slowdown in the pace of technical progress on nuclear weapons projects and an equally dramatic decline in their ultimate success rate.

The great proliferation slowdown can be attributed in part to U.S. and international nonproliferation efforts. But it is mostly the result of the dysfunctional management tendencies of the states that have sought the bomb in recent decades. Weak institutions in those states have permitted political leaders to unintentionally undermine the performance of their nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians. The harder politicians have pushed to achieve their nuclear ambitions, the less productive their nuclear programs have become. Meanwhile, military attacks by foreign powers have tended to unite politicians and scientists in a common cause to build the bomb. Therefore, taking radical steps to rein in Iran would be not only risky but also potentially counterproductive, and much less likely to succeed than the simplest policy of all: getting out of the way and allowing the Iranian nuclear program's worst enemies -- Iran's political leaders -- to hinder the country's nuclear progress all by themselves.

NUCLEAR DOGS THAT HAVE NOT BARKED

"Today, almost any industrialized country can produce a nuclear weapon in four to five years," a former chief of Israeli military intelligence recently wrote in The New York Times, echoing a widely held belief. Indeed, the more nuclear technology and know-how have diffused around the world, the more the timeline for building a bomb should have shrunk. But in fact, rather than speeding up over the past four decades, proliferation has gone into slow motion.

Seven countries launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects before 1970, and all seven succeeded in relatively short order. By contrast, of the ten countries that have launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects since 1970, only three have achieved a bomb. And only one of the six states that failed -- Iraq -- had made much progress toward its ultimate goal by the time it gave up trying. (The jury is still out on Iran's program.) What is more, even the successful projects of recent decades have needed a long time to achieve their ends. The average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched before 1970 was about seven years; the average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched after 1970 has been about 17 years.

Prolif decreases the risk of war—robust statistical, empirical evidence proves.

Asal and Beardsley 7 (Victor, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—SUNY Albany, and Kyle, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—Emory U., Journal of Peace Research, “Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior,” 44:2, Sage)

As Model 1 in Table IV illustrates, all of our variables are statistically significant except for the protracted conflict variable. Our primary independent variable, the number of nuclear actors involved in the crisis, has a negative relationship with the severity of violence and is significant. This lends preliminary support to the argument that nuclear weapons have a restraining affect on crisis behavior, as stated in H1. It should be noted that, of the crises that involved four nuclear actors—Suez Nationalization War (1956), Berlin Wall (1961), October Yom Kippur War (1973), and Iraq No-Fly Zone (1992)—and five nuclear actors—Gulf War (1990)—only two are not full-scale wars. While this demonstrates that the pacifying effect of more nuclear actors is not strong enough to prevent war in all situations, it does not necessarily weaken the argument that there is actually a pacifying effect. The positive and statistically significant coefficient on the variable that counts the number of crisis actors has a magnitude greater than that on the variable that counts the number of nuclear actors. Since increases in the number of overall actors in a crisis are strongly associated with higher levels of violence, it should be no surprise that many of the conflicts with many nuclear actors—by extension, many general actors as well—experienced war. Therefore, the results can only suggest that, keeping the number of crisis actors fixed, increasing the proportion of nuclear actors has a pacifying effect. They do not suggest that adding nuclear actors to a crisis will decrease the risk of high levels violence; but rather, adding more actors of any type to a crisis can have a destabilizing effect. Also in Table IV, Model 2 demonstrates that the effect of a nuclear dyad is only approaching statistical significance, but does have a sign that indicates higher levels of violence are less likely in crises with opponents that have nuclear weapons than other crises. This lukewarm result suggests that it might not be necessary for nuclear actors to face each other in order to get the effect of decreased propensity for violence. All actors should tend to be more cautious in escalation when there is a nuclear opponent, regardless of their own capabilities. While this might weaken support for focusing on specifically a ‘balance of terror’ as a source of stability (see Gaddis, 1986; Waltz, 1990; Sagan and Waltz, 2003; Mearsheimer, 1990), it supports the logic in this article that nuclear weapons can serve as a deterrent of aggression from both nuclear and non-nuclear opponents.6 Model 3 transforms the violence variable to a binary indicator of war and demonstrates that the principal relationship between the number of nuclear actors and violence holds for the most crucial outcome of full-scale war. Model 4 demonstrates that accounting for the presence of new nuclear actors does not greatly change the results. The coefficient on the new nuclear actor variable is statistically insignificant, which lends credence to the optimists’ view that new nuclear-weapon states should not be presupposed to behave less responsibly than the USA, USSR, UK, France, and China did during the Cold War. Finally, Model 5 similarly illustrates that crises involving superpowers are not more or less prone to violence than others. Superpower activity appears to not be driving the observed relationships between the number of nuclear-crisis actors and restraint toward violence. It is important to establish more specifically what the change in the probability of full-scale war is when nuclear actors are involved. Table V presents the probability of different levels of violence as the number of nuclear actors increases in the Clarify simulations. The control variables are held at their modes or means, with the exception of the variable that counts the number of crisis actors. Because it would be impossible to have, say, five nuclear-crisis actors and only two crisis actors, the number of crisis actors is held constant at five. As we can see, the impact of an increase in the number of nuclear actors is substantial. Starting from a crisis situation without any nuclear actors, including one nuclear actor (out of five) reduces the likelihood of fullscale war by nine percentage points. As we continue to add nuclear actors, the likelihood of full-scale war declines sharply, so that the probability of a war with the maximum number of nuclear actors is about three times less than the probability with no nuclear actors. In addition, the probabilities of no violence and only minor clashes increase substantially as the number of nuclear actors increases. The probability of serious clashes is relatively constant. Overall, the analysis lends significant support to the more optimistic proliferation argument related to the expectation of violent conflict when nuclear actors are involved. While the presence of nuclear powers does not prevent war, it significantly reduces the probability of full-scale war, with more reduction as the number of nuclear powers involved in the conflict increases. As mentioned, concerns about selection effects in deterrence models, as raised by Fearon (2002), should be taken seriously. While we control for the strategic selection of serious threats within crises, we are unable to control for the non-random initial initiation of a crisis in which the actors may choose to enter a crisis based on some ex ante assessment of the outcomes. To account for possible selection bias caused by the use of a truncated sample that does not include any non-crisis cases, one would need to use another dataset in which the crisis cases are a subset and then run Heckman type selection models (see Lemke and Reed, 2001). It would, however, be difficult to think of a different unit of analysis that might be employed, such that the set of crises is a subset of a larger category of interaction. While dyadyear datasets have often been employed to similar ends, the key independent variable here, which is specific to crises as the unit of analysis, does not lend itself to a dyadic setup. Moreover, selection bias concerns are likely not valid in disputing the claims of this analysis. If selection bias were present, it would tend to bias the effect of nuclear weapons downward, because the set of observed crises with nuclear actors likely has a disproportionate share of resolved actors that have chosen to take their chances against a nuclear opponent. Despite this potential mitigating bias, the results are statistically significant, which strengthens the case for the explanations provided in this study.

Deterrence failure is very unlikely. Proliferation saves more lives than it costs.

Preston 7 (Thomas, Associate Prof. IR—Washington State U. and Faculty Research Associate—Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, “From Lambs to Lions: Future Security relationships in a World of Biological and Nuclear Weapons”, p. 31-32)

1.) The Cost of Deterrence Failure Is Too Great Advocates of deterrence seldom take the position that it will always work or that it cannot fail. Rather, they take the position that if one can achieve the requisite elements required to achieve a stable deterrent relationship between parties, it vastly decreases the chances of miscalculation and resorting to war—even in contexts where it might otherwise be expected to occur (George and Smoke 1974; Harvey 1997a; Powell 1990, 2003; Goldstein 2000). Unfortunately, critics of deterrence take the understandable, if unrealistic, position that if deterrence cannot be 100 percent effective under all circumstances, then it is an unsound strategic approach for states to rely upon, especially considering the immense destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Feaver (1993, 162), for example, criticizes reliance on nuclear deterrence because it can fail and that rational deterrence theory can only predict that peace should occur most of the time (e.g., Lebow and Stein 1989). Yet, were we to apply this standard of perfection to most other policy approaches concerning security matters — whether it be arms control or proliferation regime efforts, military procurement policies, alliance formation strategies, diplomacy, or sanctions —none could be argued with any more certainty to completely remove the threat of equally devastating wars either. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that these alternative means have shown themselves historically to be far less effective than nuclear arms in preventing wars. Certainly, the twentieth century was replete with examples of devastating conventional conflicts which were not deterred through nonnuclear measures. Although the potential costs of a nuclear exchange between small states would indeed cause a frightful loss of life, it would be no more costly (and likely far less so) than large-scale conventional conflicts have been for combatants. Moreover, if nuclear deterrence raises the potential costs of war high enough for policy makers to want to avoid (rather than risk) conflict, it is just as legitimate (if not more so) for optimists to argue in favor of nuclear deterrence in terms of the lives saved through the avoidance of far more likely recourses to conventional wars, as it is for pessimists to warn of the potential costs of deterrence failure. And, while some accounts describing the "immense weaknesses" of deterrence theory (Lebow and Stein 1989, 1990) would lead one to believe deterrence was almost impossible to either obtain or maintain, since 1945 there has not been one single historical instance of nuclear deterrence failure (especially when this notion is limited to threats to key central state interests like survival, and not to minor probing of peripheral interests). Moreover, the actual costs of twentieth-century conventional conflicts have been staggeringly immense, especially when compared to the actual costs of nuclear conflicts (for example, 210,000 fatalities in the combined 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings compared to 62 million killed overall during World War II, over three million dead in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, etc.) (McKinzie et al. 2001, 28).3 Further, as Gray (1999, 158-59) observes, "it is improbable that policymakers anywhere need to be educated as to the extraordinary qualities and quantities of nuclear armaments." Indeed, the high costs and uncontestable, immense levels of destruction that would be caused by nuclear weapons have been shown historically to be facts that have not only been readily apparent and salient to a wide range of policy makers, but ones that have clearly been demonstrated to moderate extreme policy or risk-taking behavior (Blight 1992; Preston 2001) Could it go wrong? Of course. There is always that potential with human beings in the loop. Nevertheless, it has also been shown to be effective at moderating policy maker behavior and introducing an element of constraint into situations that otherwise would likely have resulted in war (Hagerty 1998).

New proliferators will build small arsenals which are uniquely stable.

Seng 98 (Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci.—U. Chicago, Dissertation, “STRATEGY FOR PANDORA'S CHILDREN: STABLE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AMONG MINOR STATES,” p. 203-206)

However, this "state of affairs" is not as dangerous as it might seem. The nuclear arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will be small and, consequently, the command and control organizations that manage chose arsenals will be small as well. The small arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will mitigate against many of the dangers of the highly delegative, 'non-centralized' launch procedures Third World states are likely to use. This will happen in two main ways. First, only a small number of people need be involved in Third World command and control. The superpowers had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and thousands of nuclear weapons personnel in a variety of deployments organized around numerous nuclear delivery platforms. A state that has, say, fifty nuclear weapons needs at most fifty launch operators and only a handful of group commanders. This has both quantitative and qualitative repercussions. Quantitatively, the very small number of people 'in the loop' greatly diminishes the statistical probability that accidents or human error will result in inappropriate nuclear launches. All else being equal, the chances of finding some guard asleep at some post increases with the number of guards and posts one has to cover. Qualitatively, small numbers makes it possible to centrally train operators, to screen and choose them with exceeding care, 7 and to keep each of them in direct contact with central authorities in times of crises. With very small control communities, there is no need for intermediary commanders. Important information and instructions can get out quickly and directly. Quality control of launch operators and operations is easier. In some part, at least, Third World states can compensate for their lack of sophisticated use-control technology with a more controlled selection of, and more extensive communication with, human operators. Secondly, and relatedly, Third World proliferators will not need to rely on cumbersome standard operating procedures to manage and launch their nuclear weapons. This is because the number of weapons will be so small, and also because the arsenals will be very simple in composition. Third World stares simply will not have that many weapons to keep track of. Third World states will not have the great variety of delivery platforms that the superpowers had (various ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, long range bombers, fighter bombers, missile submarines, nuclear armed ships, nuclear mortars, etc., etc.), or the great number and variety of basing options, and they will not employ the complicated strategies of international basing that the superpowers used. The small and simple arsenals of Third World proliferators will not require highly complex systems to coordinate nuclear activities. This creates two specific organizational advantages. One, small organizations, even if they do rely to some extent of standard operating procedures, can be flexible in times of crisis. As we have discussed, the essential problem of standard operating procedures in nuclear launch processes is that the full range if possible strategic developments cannot be predicted and specified before the fact, and thus responses to them cannot be standardized fully. An unexpected event can lead to 'mismatched' and inappropriate organizational reactions. In complex and extensive command and control organizations, standard operating procedures coordinate great numbers of people at numerous levels of command structure in a great multiplicity of places. If an unexpected event triggers operating procedures leading to what would be an inappropriate nuclear launch, it would be very difficult for central commanders to “get the word out' to everyone involved. The coordination needed to stop launch activity would be at least as complicated as the coordination needed to initiate it, and, depending on the speed of launch processes, there may be less time to accomplish it. However, the small numbers of people involved in nuclear launches and the simplicity of arsenals will make it far easier for Third World leaders to 'get the word out' and reverse launch procedures if necessary. Again, so few will be the numbers of weapons that all launch operators could be contacted directly by central leaders. The programmed triggers of standard operating procedures can be passed over in favor of unscripted, flexible responses based on a limited number of human-to-human communications and confirmations. Two, the smallness and simplicity of Third World command and control organizations will make it easier for leaders to keep track of everything that is going on at any given moment. One of the great dangers of complex organizational procedures is that once one organizational event is triggered—once an alarm is sounded and a programmed response is made—other branches of the organization are likely to be affected as well. This is what Charles Perrow refers to as interactive complexity, 8 and it has been a mainstay in organizational critiques of nuclear command and control s ystems.9 The more complex the organization is, the more likely these secondary effects are, and the less likely they are to be foreseen, noticed, and well-managed. So, for instance, an American commander that gives the order to scramble nuclear bombers over the U.S. as a defensive measure may find that he has unwittingly given the order to scramble bombers in Europe as well. A recall order to the American bombers may overlook the European theater, and nuclear misuse could result. However, when numbers of nuclear weapons can be measured in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and when deployment of those weapons does not involve multiple theaters and forward based delivery vehicles of numerous types, tight coupling is unlikely to cause unforeseen and unnoticeable organizational events. Other things being equal, it is just a lot easier to know all of what is going on. In short, while Third World states may nor have the electronic use-control devices that help ensure that peripheral commanders do nor 'get out of control,' they have other advantages that make the challenge of centralized control easier than it was for the superpowers. The small numbers of personnel and organizational simplicity of launch bureaucracies means that even if a few more people have their fingers on the button than in the case of the superpowers, there will be less of a chance that weapons will be launched without a definite, informed and unambiguous decision to press that button.

2NC—No Prolif

No widespread prolif—

Proliferating states have dysfunctional management of nuclear programs due to weak political institutions.  The quality of technical workmanship is low; there is no coordination among technical teams, and mistakes cause finger pointing and delays—that’s Hymans.

Prefer our evidence—

First—it takes into account globalization which has spread nuclear know-how and tech.  Prolif has still slowed proving the problems listed above can’t be fixed.

Second—people have been predicting a prolif breakout for 50 years and it has never manifested—prefer empirics which are objective and untainted by ideology.

Prolif is slow and stable—their ev is hysteria.

Mueller 9—John Mueller is a professor of political science and Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University October 23, 2009, “The Rise of Nuclear Alarmism,” Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/23/the_rise_of_nuclear_alarmism?page=full

We have also endured decades of hysteria over the potential for nuclear proliferation, even though the proliferation that has actually taken place has been both modest and substantially inconsequential. When the quintessential rogue state, communist China, obtained them in 1964, CIA Director John McCone sternly proclaimed that nuclear war was "almost inevitable." But far from engaging in the "nuclear blackmail" expected at the time by almost everyone (except Johnson, then working at the State Department), China built its weapons quietly and has never made a nuclear threat.

Still, the proliferation fixation continues to flourish. For more than a decade, U.S. policy obsessed over the possibility that Saddam Hussein's pathetic and technologically dysfunctional regime in Iraq could in time obtain nuclear weapons (it took the more advanced Pakistan 28 years), which it might then suicidally lob, or threaten to lob, at somebody. To prevent this imagined and highly unlikely calamity, a war has been waged that has probably resulted in more deaths than were suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Today, alarm is focused on the even more pathetic regime in North Korea, which has now tested devices that if detonated in the middle of New York's Central Park would be unable to destroy buildings on its periphery. There is even more hysteria about Iran, which has repeatedly insisted that it has no intention of developing the weapons. If that regime changes its mind or is lying, it is likely to find that, except for stoking the national ego for a while, the bombs are substantially valueless, a very considerable waste of money and effort, and "absolute" primarily in their irrelevance.

As for the rest of the world, the nuclear age is clearly on the wane. Although it may not be entirely fair to characterize disarmament as an effort to cure a fever by destroying the thermometer, the analogy is instructive when it is reversed: When a fever subsides, the instrument designed to measure it loses its usefulness and is often soon misplaced. Thus far the former contestants in the Cold War have reduced their nuclear warheads by more than 50,000 to around 18,000. Other countries, like France, have also substantially cut their nuclear arsenals, while China and others have maintained them in far lower numbers than expected.

Total nuclear disarmament hardly seems to be in the offing -- nuclear metaphysicians still have their skill sets in order. But a continued decline seems likely, and experience suggests that formal disarmament agreements are scarcely necessary in all this -- though they may help the signatories obtain Nobel Peace Prizes. With the demise of fears of another major war, many of the fantastically impressive, if useless, arms that struck such deep anxiety into so many for so long are quietly being allowed to rust in peace.

2NC Framing Cards

The framing question of the debate is not whether there is a risk prolif breaks down—it’s whether or not a world of prolif is more peaceful—default neg on the record of nuclear peace.

Sechser 5 (Todd, Assistant Prof. Politics specializing in International Security—Stanford U., “How Organizational Pathologies Could Make Nuclear Proliferation Safer”, Presented at the annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, 4-7, *I had to ILL this. I don’t think it’s available online)

A second counterargument to the optimist position is the claim that even if proliferation optimism enjoys greater theoretical tenability than previously thought, this does not make its position practically viable. Betts (1999: 65-66) writes that policy makers “do not marvel at all the cases where nuclear weapons will make the world safer, but worry about the exceptions where things will go wrong. . . one exception to the rule may be too many.”13 Likewise, Feaver (1993: 162) argues that even 99.5% prognostic accuracy would be insufficient for proliferation optimism to mount a persuasive case: “At best, rational deterrence theory can predict that nuclear deterrence should assure peace most of the time. Most is not all.” And Sagan (2003b: 184) contends that until military organizations are “perfect,” there is sufficient reason to be pessimistic about the effects of proliferation.14 As long as there is a chance that proliferation might entail some negative effects, the argument holds, then why not play it safe? This staggering burden of proof is flawed for two reasons. First, obscures the cost-benefit analysis inherent in any policy deliberation. The appropriate question is not whether the spread of nuclear weapons will result in any nuclear disasters, but whether a world with proliferation would on balance be more peaceful and more stable than a world without it. The issue is whether the benefits are likely to outweigh the costs. If one believes, for example, that nuclear proliferation would eventually result in a preventive war somewhere but that it would also deter numerous conventional wars, then the net overall benefit might justify a more relaxed nonproliferation policy. Second, the argument obscures the fact that proliferation pessimism to date does not possess a “99.5%” record of accuracy—rather, its record stands at 100%. Of course, the absence of nuclear catastrophe in the past does not assure its absence in the future. But theories ultimately aim to predict outcomes, and despite unearthing a trove of nuclear near-misses, the theory of proliferation pessimism has not succeeded in accomplishing this task. Existing research has successfully shown that the theory’s predicted causal mechanisms have operated in organizations that handle nu-clear weapons, but this is not the same as showing that these mechanisms generate the theory’s predicted outcomes. Even a major counterforce strike against a new nuclear power would not immediately vindicate pessimism—at least not until case study researchers were able to show that the causal mechanisms they specified (that is, preventive war pressures triggered by military biases) were indeed in operation.

History must underwrite your policy choices—default to empirics.

Graham 94—professor emeritus of history, California Otis, Losing Time, p 4

Yet the status quo, defended by no one, prevailed. Years of vigorous dis­cussion led only to policy paralysis. Many explanations for this outcome arise in the recounting. But a major agent of mischief was misuse of history, in many forms. Distorted versions of history inflated the important potential of industrial policies; onslaughts of counter-history lessons equally distorted what Industrial Policy was about. Together, these played a large role in preventing the de­gree of policy rationalization that was intellectually within reach. Our policy system might perhaps have done worse, and people who think so might wish to leave well enough alone. I write front a more hopeful persuasion that if history was allowed its limited but invaluable uses, and if misuses of it were curbed, our policy system could improve upon this outcome. Hence this effort to build on and extend the growing body of research and thought that would discourage the policy misuses while charting the way to judicious policy uses of the past. The debate over these matters did not end in 1990. This book is written in that hazard-filled zone between the beginning and the end of things. I was encouraged in this risk by an observation by two commentators on Britain in the early stages of Thatcherism, that "books generally come to an end before the problems they describe." Historians usually reverse that dictum to read: "problems had best come to an end before books are written to describe them," but this book is directed less to historians than to the policy community—from voting periphery to the presidential cen­ter—who must make history-based judgments with or without expert advice. The past misunderstood guarantees future intellectual trouble. Policymakers are fated soon to reengage the Industrial Policy issue. This time error and delay may well exact a much higher price than the first time around, in the 1980-1990 indian summer of America's economic leadership. 

And a consensus of experts vote neg

Seliktar 11—Ofira Seliktar, Political Science Professor at Gratz 2011, “Assessing Iran’s Nuclear Rationality,” The ‘Eye of the Beholder’ Problem,” J. of the ME and Africa, v. 2, issue 2, p. Taylor and Francis

Nuclear optimists have outranked nuclear pessimists both numerically and in most discursive venues. A majority of noted IR professors (such as John Mearsheimer, Steven Walt, Robert Jervis, Robert Betts, and Francis Gavin) are in the former category. Most top-ranking Iran experts (such as Ray Takeyh, Karim Sadjapour, Abbas Milani, Kenneth Pollack, and Daniel Byman) have also embraced nuclear optimism. Prestigious think tanks—such as the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and the International Crisis Group)—have published reports based on the assumption that Iran has the required nuclear rationality. Foreign Affairs (published by CFR), Foreign Policy (published by Carnegie), Middle East Journal (published by the Middle East Institute), and the Middle East Policy Journal (published by Middle East Policy Center) have likewise embraced nuclear optimism. 57 Invoking the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, the intelligence community seems inclined to adopt nuclear optimism. The NIE regards Tehran as a rational actor, whose “decisions are guided by a cost/benefit approach rather than a rush to weapons.” 58

Aff ev is biased

Betts 2k—Prof and the Dir., Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia Richard, The Coming Crisis, ed Utgoff, 64-5

The Waltz argument cannot be brushed off, but surprisingly few academic strategists besides Scott Sagan have refuted it in detail. Although most intellectuals as well as normal people oppose proliferation, writings arguing the benefits are more obtrusive in the literature of international relations theory. Why this difference between conventional wisdom and some currents of academic fashion? One reason is that outside of political science departments, people in the United States do not approach the question as detached analysts shorn of national identity.  They do not abstract themselves from the policy interests of the United States, and do not care nearly as much about resolving the security anxieties of non-nuclear countries as they do about minimizing the chances that nuclear weapons will ever be used anywhere. The world is an uncertain place, where parsimonious theories about stability may or may not prove correct, but where our own country would have less to worry about if we were the only ones to have weapons of mass destruction. It is easier for officials than for analysts to apply shameless double standards and recommend policies that are better for the United States than for other countries that want strategic independence.

2NC Conventional War

Conventional wars outweigh:

Prolif reduces the frequency and impact of conventional war.  Even if conflicts occur they are carefully limited—as soon as you start adding nuclear states into a crisis scenario the likelihood of escalation drastically decreases.  Prefer this impact to nebulous “conflict” scenarios.  Asal and Beardsly is the only evidence that uses statistical, empirical and predictive studies.

Default to deterrence—other strategies empirically fail more—arms control and diplomacy have horrible records—that’s Preston.

Prefer our evidence—it’s grounded in history, which should be your guide because it’s not tainted by ideology.

The benefits far outweigh the costs. Even if some deterrence failure happens it is VERY unlikely because powers quickly learn the consequences of weapons and moderate the own behavior. That’s Preston.

Conventional war outweighs—

Conventional conflicts are inevitable and deadly. 62 million died in World War II vs. only 200,000 from nuclear weapons. Only a nuclear deterrent can deescalate these conflicts. Vietnam-Cambodia, Iran-Iraq, Iraq-Kuwait, Eretria-Ethiopia, Vietnam-China and El Salvador-Honduras all killed millions.

Benefits outweigh the costs 40 to 1.

de Mesquita and Riker 82 (Bruce Bueno and William, Dept. Pol. Sci.—Rochester, Journal of Conflict Resolution, “An Assessment of the Merits of Selective Nuclear Proliferation”, Vol. 26, No. 2, p. 302-303)

One might object further. Conceding that the likelihood of miscalculation does diminish as proliferation occurs, one might still contend that the costs of such a miscalculation are so large that they cannot conceivably justify even the diminished risk of war. If the expected costs from nuclear wars arising out of miscalculation or irrational acts exceed the expected costs from wars that could be prevented by proliferation, then, indeed, proliferation is a very dangerous thing. There is, of course, no precise way to measure these expected costs, but we do have some basis for estimating them. Using expected utility calculations similar to the one suggested here, one of us (Bueno de Mesquita 1981b) found that 65 of approximately 70,000 opportunities to initiate war rationally were seized in the period 1816 to 1974, with hundreds of other opportunities being used to threaten war. In that same study it was also found that only 11 of nearly 500,000 opportunities to initiate war were seized in violation of the expectations arising from the expected utility framework. In other words, the ratio of seemingly rational and correct calculations to either irrational calculations or miscalculations that have led to war is over 40 to 1. This implies that through symmetry-producing nuclear proliferation, we may expect to prevent approximately 40 conventional or one-sided nuclear wars for every one miscalculated or irrational bilateral nuclear exchange. Using the 40 most recent wars as a crude indicator, this analysis implies that a single miscalculated or irrational nuclear exchange in the third world would have to kill several tens of millions of people before some proliferation would be unjustified by yielding a higher expected loss of life. It seems to us unlikely that one such miscalculated or irrational act among third world countries, each with a very few warheads, could produce this level of loss. Still, we do not rule it out, but rather note that it is exactly such estimates that must be made in calculating the trade-offs between gains and losses from nuclear proliferation. One might expect, for instance, that selection of candidates for proliferation might be based partially on the calculation of the marginal effect on expected costs in life and property from not standing in the way of the candidate in question. Thus, proliferation would be resisted where the expected marginal effect would be an increase in loss of life and property over nonproliferation, but would be encouraged where the marginal effect was otherwise.

Same effect as nuclear war

Jianguo 95—Major General, frmr assoc. prof and Dean of the Antichemical Warfare Academy Wu, Nuclear Shadows on High-Tech Warfare, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/jianguo.htm

What merits our attention is that in a high-tech conventional war, a nuclear environment may still emerge even if nuclear weapons are not used. The more society advances, the greater the demands for energy will be. In order to satisfy the demands for energy, nuclear power stations were built. According to the data released by the International Atomic Energy Agency in March 1994, at the end of 1993 there were 430 nuclear power plants with a total installed capacity of approximately 345 million kw operating in various places throughout the world; these accounted for more than 17 percent of the world's gross power generation. It is predicted that by 2001, there will be 558 nuclear power generating units with a total installed capacity of approximately 460 million kw all worldwide, which will account for 24 percent of the world's gross power generation. The peaceful utilization of nuclear energy is a piece of joyous news to mankind. Meanwhile, the extensive use of nuclear energy also constitutes a latent threat to peace and the existence of human beings. The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant that occurred in April 1986 inflicted air pollution on 16 Russian oblasts and victimized 250,000 people. In Ukraine, 370,000 people suffered injuries in varying degrees as land covering 40,000 square meters was polluted, and more than 2,000 residential areas were evacuated. In future high-tech warfare, if an enemy intentionally or unintentionally attacks nuclear power plants or other facilities using nuclear energy with high-tech conventional weapons, the secondary nuclear radiation produced and the nuclear environment brought about would likewise do harm. In June 1981, Israel dispatched four aircraft to launch a sudden attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor southeast of the capital Baghdad, dropping 16 tons of bombs in two minutes and hitting all the targets. Fortunately, the reactor was not yet operational; otherwise the attack would have resulted in very serious consequences.

Nuclear war wouldn’t cause extinction—their claims are exaggerations and ignore 90% of the world.

Martin 82—Brian Martin is an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at University of Wollongong “Critique of nuclear extinction,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1982, pp. 287-300, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html

To summarise the above points, a major global nuclear war in which population centres in the US, Soviet Union, Europe and China ware targeted, with no effective civil defence measures taken, could kill directly perhaps 400 to 450 million people. Induced effects, in particular starvation or epidemics following agricultural failure or economic breakdown, might add up to several hundred million deaths to the total, though this is most uncertain.

Such an eventuality would be a catastrophe of enormous proportions, but it is far from extinction. Even in the most extreme case there would remain alive some 4000 million people, about nine-tenths of the world's population, most of them unaffected physically by the nuclear war. The following areas would be relatively unscathed, unless nuclear attacks were made in these regions: South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Oceania and large parts of China. Even in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere where most of the nuclear weapons would be exploded, areas upwind of nuclear attacks would remain free of heavy radioactive contamination, such as Portugal, Ireland and British Columbia.

Many people, perhaps especially in the peace movement, believe that global nuclear war will lead to the death of most or all of the world's population.12 Yet the available scientific evidence provides no basis for this belief. Furthermore, there seem to be no convincing scientific arguments that nuclear war could cause human extinction.13 In particular, the idea of 'overkill', if taken to imply the capacity to kill everyone on earth, is highly misleading.14

In the absence of any positive evidence, statements that nuclear war will lead to the death of all or most people on earth should be considered exaggerations. In most cases the exaggeration is unintended, since people holding or stating a belief in nuclear extinction are quite sincere.15

Another major point to be made in relation to statements about nuclear war is that almost exclusive attention has been focussed on the 'worst case' of a major global nuclear war, as indeed has been done in the previous paragraphs. A major global nuclear war is a possibility, but not the only one. In the case of 'limited' nuclear war, anywhere from hundreds of people to many tens of millions of people might die.16 This is a real possibility, but peace movement theory and practice have developed almost as if this possibility does not exist.

AT: Conventional War Unlikely

Any reason conventional war won’t happen applies to nuclear war as well. Deterrence, economic interdependence and global norms apply are costs that are MAGNIFIED by the destructive potential of nuclear weapons.

This argument is a reason to vote negative. History shows conventional conflicts are RARE in the recent era but nuclear conflicts are NONEXISTENT.

Conventional war is probable. Sound deterrent strategies should guide policy analysis.

Horowitz and Shalmon 9 (Michael, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—U. Pennsylvania, Dan, Senior Analyst—Lincoln Group and Graduate Student—Georgetown U., Orbis, “The Future of War and American Military Strategy,” 53:2, ScienceDirect)

Some scholars question the notion that state-on-state warfare has become unlikely. Army Colonel Gian Gentile argues that the COIN community's analysis “more than anything else… stakes a claim on the future,” concluding that Iraq does not provide a “model” for America's future wars.15 U.S. Air Force (USAF) Major General Charles Dunlap has argued that land forces “will be of little strategic import in the next war.”16 Gentile disagrees with Dunlap but also with the COIN community, writing that “‘legacy’ large-scale battles… might, in fact, still be looming on the horizon.” Citing Iranian, North Korean and Chinese threats, he argues that planners “could (and should) imagine many types of conflict in the near-to-medium term, not all or even most of them counterinsurgencies.” 17 Michael Mazarr assails the “naïve… assumption that the world has been rendered immune from the requirement for deterrence of major conventional war,” referencing possible threats from rogue states, Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC).18 Referencing similar threats, Dunlap attacks the COIN community for believing that “human nature will change, that peer competitors will not arise and that the rest of the world will not attempt to challenge U.S. air power.”19 Metz calls for defense thinkers to “jettison the concept of counterinsurgency,” which he describes as having “outlived its usefulness,” and rethink how they understand irregular threats, since “not all armed conflict is war.”20 This is similar to Mazarr's argument that the use of military force is not the most effective way of winning COIN operations. Whereas COIN advocates argue for minimizing the costs of irregular warfare commitments by dedicating units to enhancing the capabilities of friendly regimes—especially those facing Islamic radicalism—Posen and Metz oppose most capacity-building efforts because twenty first century insurgency is “not simply a variant of war” but is rather “part of systemic failure and pathology,” requiring comprehensive social re-engineering.21 Consequently, host nation governments and the United States have inherently conflicting interests. Mazarr makes an even broader argument, claiming that given the character of twenty first century irregular warfare, militaries should de-emphasize COIN and focus on conventional warfighting.22 Reversing McMaster's argument, the essential traditionalist claim is that focusing on irregular war, for which violent tools are ill-suited, will undermine the U.S. military's role in doing what it does best—preventing and winning full-scale interstate wars.

2NC War Defense

Small arsenals check the impact, that’s Seng—

Fewer weapons mean fewer people “in the loop”. This creates better training of operators and increases contact with central authorities preventing accidents. It also reduces standardization of operation procedure which increases crisis flexibility preventing miscalculation.

And proliferators won’t be aggressive—

Shen 11—Simon Shen, IR prof @ Hong Kong Inst of Ed. 2011, “Have Nuclear Weapons Made the DPRK a Rogue State?” J. of Comparative Asian Development, v. 10, iss. 2, tandf

In our traditional mentality, the determination to denuclearize the DPRK quite explicitly assumes that nuclear weapons are evil; as Scott Sagan (2003, p. 49) puts it, “Nuclear weapons have been given a bad name.” This negative perception of nuclear weapons is built upon the basis of the huge devastation that would result in the world if a nuclear war, of whatever scale, broke out. Coupled with the peculiar nature of the DPRK's autocratic regime, a nuclear-armed DPRK is then perceived as too hostile and destructive to its neighbours. However, applying the analogy of “more may be better”, an alternative discourse with respect to nuclear proliferation maintained by Waltz could well pinpoint a far more optimistic scenario. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Waltz asserts that nuclear proliferation not only reduces the possibility of going to war, but also encourages new nuclear states, which used to rule in a radical manner domestically, to behave in an increasingly rational manner diplomatically. At the extreme, Waltz suggests that nuclear proliferation may maintain peace rather than threaten global security. Surprisingly, the application of his theory to the DPRK is rather limited; and is confined only to media reports (Swami, 2010). In his classic study Waltz (1995) proposes five fundamental assumptions to illustrate his argument. First, he argues that the international system is anarchical, i.e., no global authority protects security, provides public goods or controls domestic affairs above the state level. As a result, states have to ensure their own security by preventing attack from other states themselves. In other words, the anarchical system drives states to self-help. The absence of a world government then prompts individual states to gain access to weapons to compensate for a sense of insecurity. Acquisition of nuclear weapons and inducement of an arms race between states show the self-help system at work. Second, as “states coexist in a condition of anarchy”, they try hard to advance the sophistication of weapons and enhance military capability as much as possible to avoid aggression from adversaries (Waltz, 1995, p. 4). This self-strengthening process is what Waltz calls “security maximization”. What do states do with their weapons throughout this process? Waltz thinks that states mainly possess the weapons for a defensive purpose. When a state enhances its military capability (the relevant gain), its neighbouring states immediately face relevant loss to the military equilibrium. In consequence, the latter have to strengthen their military power in response to the relevant loss in order to maintain a balance of power. Waltz (1995, p. 5) explains the defensive intention of security maximization as follows: One way to counter an intended attack is to build fortifications and to muster forces that look forbiddingly strong. To build defenses so patently strong that no one will try to destroy or overcome them would make international life perfectly tranquil, I call this the defensive ideal. However, this statement does not imply that these states will not use weapons to attack others. In the event that a state perceives gains from aggression to outweigh the cost of war, battle might break out. Waltz argues that this scenario is unlikely to happen between nuclear powers. Since Waltz, different schools deriving from neo-realism have offered different assumptions on the likeliness of conflicts owing to different assessments of uncertainty and risk, such as offensive realism or defensive realism. Some might put the defensive rationale by indicating that states tend to keep the nuclear weapons as an “existential deterrent” so as to deter others from military actions (Naval Studies Board and US Research Council, 1997). Third, Waltz (1995, pp. 7, 9) maintains that nuclear weapons, unlike conventional weapons, give “an easy clarity” for states to predict the action of other states and thereby “makes war less likely”. This is because all states realize that nuclear weapons have the potential to cause unlimited and devastating suffering. At the extreme, the concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD) sends a very clear message to both sides should two nuclear powers go to war. In contrast, as the suffering from conventional weapons can be to some extent contained, states might deem the cost of such war affordable and recklessly wage war and suffer the results of miscalculation. Waltz (1995, p. 9) defines the fundamental essence of nuclear weapons thus: In a nuclear world, prediction is easy to make because it does not require close estimates of opposing forces. … In a conventional world, deterrent threats are ineffective because the damage threatened is distant, limited, and problematic. Fourth, Waltz (1995, p. 7) assumes state actors are rational and are able to predict scenarios as well as calculate their self-interests, so that states will not take the risk of going to war when they predict the battle could only “win much and might lose everything”. Waltz offers the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate this point. As nuclear weapons can wreak unlimited damage to states, the strategy of MAD further makes states cautious. This deterrent effect in a nuclear world consequently avoids any miscalculation of gains and losses. Regardless of the regime type, historical context and the political spectrum, nuclear weapons and nuclear wars constantly imply a massive relevant loss to states, thus preventing them from going to war. Even if the historical context might determine a nuclear pair, such as the US and the Soviet Union, China and the Soviet Union, India and Pakistan, many realists argues that rational calculation is more fundamental than bitterness (Rajain, 2005). As Waltz (1995, p. 12) puts it: “Those who believe that bitterness causes wars assume a close association that is seldom found between bitterness among nations and their willingness to run high risks.” In short, states will not go to nuclear war as they are rational actors in international relations. Fifth, when calculation of the prospects makes nuclear states reluctant to go to war, Waltz suggests horizontal nuclear proliferation is encouraged in world politics while vertical proliferation is made redundant. “Vertical proliferation” of nuclear weapons, according to Waltz, was demonstrated during the Cold War, especially between the US and the Soviet Union, when the number of nuclear warheads and their technological quality rapidly increased. Waltz (1995, p. 7) argues that further vertical proliferation is unnecessary since only a few nuclear weapons and a “second strike” capability may be a sufficient deterrent to other would-be attackers. Rather, “horizontal proliferation”, which means the spread of nuclear weapons to different countries, is seen by Waltz as more crucial in preserving peace in the world. When more states possess nuclear weapons, calculations about using them become complicated (Waltz, 1995, p. 15). States will thus be reluctant to take the risk of starting a nuclear war because of the uncertainty of the response from other states and the certainty of unlimited nuclear destruction to both sides should a nuclear response be elicited. This helps exclude the option of using nuclear weapons for the mere purpose of interest maximization.

Deterrence breakdowns don’t cause full-scale nuclear war

Waltz 3 Kenneth, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, p. 34-35

States are deterred by the prospect of suffering severe damage and by their inability to do much to limit it. Deterrence works because nuclear weapons enable one state to punish another state severely without first defeating it. "Victory," in Thomas Schelling's words, "is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy." 37 Countries armed only with conventional weapons can hope that their military forces will be able to limit the damage an attacker can do. Among countries armed with strategic nuclear forces, the hope of avoiding heavy damage depends mainly on the attacker's restraint and little on one's own efforts. Those who compared expected deaths through strategic exchanges of nuclear warheads with casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in World War II overlooked the fundamental difference between conventional and nuclear worlds. 38

Deterrence rests on what countries can do to each other with strategic nuclear weapons. From this statement, one can easily leap to the wrong conclusion: that deterrent strategies, if they have to be carried through, will produce a catastrophe. That countries are able to annihilate each other means neither that deterrence depends on their threatening to do so nor that they will necessarily do so if deterrence fails. Because countries heavily armed with strategic nuclear weapons can carry war to its ultimate intensity, the control of force becomes the primary objective. If deterrence fails, leaders will have the strongest incentives to keep force under control and limit damage rather than launching genocidal attacks. If the Soviet Union had attacked Western Europe, NATO's objectives would have been to halt the attack and end the war. The United States had the ability to place thousands of warheads precisely on targets in the Soviet Union. Surely we would have struck military targets before striking industrial targets and industrial targets before striking cities. The intent to hit military targets first was sometimes confused with a war-fighting strategy, but it was not one. It would not have significantly reduced the Soviet Union's ability to hurt us. Whatever American military leaders thought, our strategy rested on the threat to punish. The threat, if it failed to deter, would have been followed not by spasms of violence but by punishment administered in ways that conveyed threats of more to come.

A war between the United States and the Soviet Union that got out of control would have been catastrophic. If they had set out to destroy each other, they would have greatly reduced the world's store of developed resources while killing millions outside of their own borders through fallout. Even while destroying themselves, states with few weapons would do less damage to others. As ever, the biggest international dangers come from the strongest states. Fearing the world's destruction, one may prefer a world of conventional great powers having a higher probability of fighting less- destructive wars to a world of nuclear great powers having a lower probability of fighting more-destructive wars. But that choice effectively disappeared with the production of atomic bombs by the United States during World War II.

2NC Preventive Strikes

1. No preventive war—the risk of escalation and backlash is too high. Any uncertainty is an absolute deterrent in the world of nukes. That’s Shen.

Empirics prove preventive wars either don’t happen or don’t escalate

Rousseau 2k (David, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—Penn, "Proliferation Module," http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~rousseau/archived_web/psci150/modules/pro/lecture1.htm)

Second, opponents of proliferation claim that states acquiring nuclear weapons have enduring rivals. These critics argue that injecting nuclear weapons into these already volatile relationships will result in violence. New nuclear power could launch preemptive or preventative strikes. These people argue that the existence of a rivalry greatly increases the probability the nuclear weapons will be used. History has demonstrated that only states facing a hostile external environment will be willing to spend the billions and billions of dollars necessary to acquire nuclear weapons. However, the existence of a enduring and hostile rival does not pose a real danger for two reasons. First, history shows that injecting nuclear weapons into long term hostile situations does not result in war. The United States allowed the Soviets to get nuclear weapons in 1949 without initiating violence. The Soviets allowed the British to get nuclear weapons in 1952 without initiating violence. The Soviets allowed France to get nuclear weapons in 1960 without initiating violence. The United States and Soviet Union allowed the Chinese to get nuclear weapons in 1964 without initiating violence. The Chinese allowed India to get nuclear weapons in 1974 without initiating violence. The Indians allow Pakistan to get nuclear weapons in the 1990's without initiating violence. Nuclear proliferation has not lead to either conventional or nuclear war. Second, if an existing nuclear power engages in a preventative strike, it will not be the end of the world. Israel's preventative strike against the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 did not result in the use of nuclear weapons. While the attack was personal tragedy for those killed in the raid, it would not lead me to conclude that proliferation is very dangerous.

2NC Crisis Instability

Crisis decision-making is stable and MORE SO under nuclear crises than conventional crises, turning their arguments.

Preston 7 (Thomas, Associate Prof. IR—Washington State U. and Faculty Research Associate—Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, “From Lambs to Lions: Future Security relationships in a World of Biological and Nuclear Weapons”, p. 55-57)

What are the implications of policy maker sensitivity to context for deterrence? Firstly, it clearly relates to how receptive policy makers will be to threats made by opponents. For example, De Rivera (1968, 53) suggests that the signal-to-noise ratio (the strength of the signal relative to the strength of confusing background stimuli), the rewards and costs associated with recognizing (or not) the signals, and the general expectations of the observer play a role in whether initiator or defender threats are heard by the other. Secondly, for sensitive leaders (those high in complexity), they are highly unlikely to make rapid, impulsive decisions in even a conventional crisis, let alone a nuclear one. Such leaders are known for having extremely slow, deliberative, and cautious decision processes that seek out tremendous amounts of information for consideration prior to making decisions (Preston 2001). As a result, such policy makers would be exceedingly unlikely to "rush to judgment" and misperceive the relatively simple cost/loss equation created by nuclear weapons. They also would be highly attentive to signaling from potential adversaries in such a nuclear deterrence environment. In contrast, for insensitive leaders (those low in complexity), they would be far more likely to "rush to judgment," miss warning signals from potential adversaries, and pay little attention to information or feedback from the external environment. Such leaders would be far more vulnerable to the psychological malfunctions of selective perception, use of stereotypes and faulty analogies, and groupthinktype malfunctions (see Janis 1972; Janis and Mann 1977; 't Hart 1994; 't Hart, Stern, and Sundelius 1997). Hence, the risk of miscalculation or challenges to deterrence from such leaders would undoubtedly be greater than would be the case for sensitive leaders. At the same time, the fact that such leaders also view the world in simple, black-and-white terms and do not necessarily tune into nuances suggests they would be far more likely to accept the quite simplistic, black-and-white cost/loss benefit equation nuclear weapons thrust upon security relationships. Historically, American presidents scoring both high and low in complexity, sensitive ones like Eisenhower and Kennedy, as well as less sensitive ones such as Truman, Johnson, and Reagan, have all (despite their rhetoric) shown great caution when making foreign policy decisions that could in any way provoke a true nuclear response from an opponent. Indeed, Truman and Johnson (in Korea and Vietnam respectively) both recognized the serious constraints which the Soviet possession of nuclear weapons posed on the unlimited exercise of American power in both conflicts (see Preston 2001). The reactions of policy makers under the immense stress of nuclear crises has also been pointed to by deterrence skeptics as likely leading to greater chances for decisional pathologies (e.g., misperception, motivated misperceptions, avoidance of value trade-offs, groupthink) to impact decision making and lead to deterrence failure (Janis 1972; Janis and Mann 1977; Jervis 1976; Lebow 1981, 1987; Lebow and Stein 1989, 1990). And while such dangers are clearly of concern, their application to nuclear confrontations has historically not resulted in these kinds of malfunctions. In fact, it is only in cases of conventional deterrence relationships—characterized by far less clear-cut and ambiguous cost/benefit equations—that one routinely sees these kinds of decisional pathologies. Even Janis (1972) cites the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, his lone nuclear crisis, as being an example of good group decision making and avoidance of groupthink. Similarly, George (1991) de scribes the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of excellent crisis management (see also Preston 2001). And Blight (1992) notes that for policy makers, the fear of nuclear war (a "shattered crystal ball") served as an "adaptive device" preventing JFK and the ExComm from taking reckless actions and seeking every possible means to avoid a nuclear exchange. Nevertheless, a substantial literature in political psychology (Janis and Mann 1977; Hermann 1979; Hermann and Hermann 1990; "t Hart 1994) warns that policy makers reactions and decision making patterns under intense stress deteriorate and become less effective as the levels increase—an element that can never be fully removed from considerations of the resilience of nuclear deterrence under severe crises conditions.

2NC Proximity

1. Proximity has no net effect—states near each other are more likely to fight conventional wars over borders, resources, or ethnic groups. Makes deterrence MORE necessary.  Plus proliferators acknowledge nukes are purely defensive—that’s Shen

2. Turn: Proximity reinforces deterrence stability guaranteeing stable second strike and minimizing preemption incentives.

McNaughter 90 (Thomas, Senior Fellow—Brookings, International Security, “Ballistic Missiles and Chemical Weapons: The Legacy of the Iran-Iraq War”, 15:2, Autumn, JSTOR)

Does this promise instability until secure second strike capabilities are in place. Gerald Steinberg argues that it does, and that the geographic proximity of antagonists in the region makes the problem of crisis instability even more dangerous in the Middle East than it was between the superpowers.71 It seems more logical, however, to argue that the physical proximity of Middle Eastern powers makes it inappropriate to transfer superpower logic to local confrontations. Precisely because Iran and Iraq share a common border, the variety of delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction available to these antagonists goes well beyond ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, to include trucks, small aircraft, small tactical missiles, and even artillery. Although Israel and Iraq are separated by Jordan, weapons of mass destruction could still be delivered by trucks, by aircraft, and by small missiles trucked into Jordan. Proximity multiplies the range of available delivery means, and thus reduces the viability of preemption as a defense. Put another way, under these conditions “secure second strike” capabilities of some sort are much more easily available. The acquisition of ballistic missiles does not fundamentally change this equation. Population distributions in many of these countries reinforce this logic. Populations in Israel, Iraq, and Syria are highly concentrated; Israel and Iraq, in particular, are little more than “two-target” states for real “city-busting” weapons. U.S. strategists who contemplated the usefulness of preemption never saw it as 100 percent effective; at best it would have held casualties to a minimum. For two-target states, however, any remaining weapons of mass destruction promise disaster. Thus preemptive attacks on an adversary’s delivery means are unlikely to save any Middle Eastern power from nuclear destruction, assuming the adversary possesses a nuclear arsenal of reasonable size. Nor should regional leaders feel compelled to fire nuclear weapons first to eliminate opponents’ missile delivery systems. Assuming that those leaders wish to fire nuclear weapons in the first place, their decision to do so will depend mainly on their assessment of their adversary’s retaliatory capabilities, which will be impossible to eliminate.

Extra

Hegemonic transition inevitable

Haass 8 (Richard, Pres.—CFR, Foreign Affairs, “Bottom of Form The Age of Nonpolarity What Will Follow U.S. Dominance”, May/June, L/N)

But even if great-power rivals have not emerged, unipolarity has ended. Three explanations for its demise stand out. The first is historical. States develop; they get better at generating and piecing together the human, financial, and technological resources that lead to productivity and prosperity. The same holds for corporations and other organizations. The rise of these new powers cannot be stopped. The result is an ever larger number of actors able to exert influence regionally or globally. A second cause is U.S. policy. To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo, the post-World War II comic hero, we have met the explanation and it is us. By both what it has done and what it has failed to do, the United States has accelerated the emergence of alternative power centers in the world and has weakened its own position relative to them. U.S. energy policy (or the lack thereof) is a driving force behind the end of unipolarity. Since the first oil shocks of the 1970s, U.S. consumption of oil has grown by approximately 20 percent, and, more important, U.S. imports of petroleum products have more than doubled in volume and nearly doubled as a percentage of consumption. This growth in demand for foreign oil has helped drive up the world price of oil from just over $20 a barrel to over $100 a barrel in less than a decade. The result is an enormous transfer of wealth and leverage to those states with energy reserves. In short, U.S. energy policy has helped bring about the emergence of oil and gas producers as major power centers. U.S. economic policy has played a role as well. President Lyndon Johnson was widely criticized for simultaneously fighting a war in Vietnam and increasing domestic spending. President Bush has fought costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed discretionary spending to increase by an annual rate of eight percent, and cut taxes. As a result, the United States' fiscal position declined from a surplus of over $100 billion in 2001 to an estimated deficit of approximately $250 billion in 2007. Perhaps more relevant is the ballooning current account deficit, which is now more than six percent of GDP. This places downward pressure on the dollar, stimulates inflation, and contributes to the accumulation of wealth and power elsewhere in the world. Poor regulation of the U.S. mortgage market and the credit crisis it has spawned have exacerbated these problems. The war in Iraq has also contributed to the dilution of the United States' position in the world. The war in Iraq has proved to be an expensive war of choice -- militarily, economically, and diplomatically as well as in human terms. Years ago, the historian Paul Kennedy outlined his thesis about "imperial overstretch," which posited that the United States would eventually decline by overreaching, just as other great powers had in the past. Kennedy's theory turned out to apply most immediately to the Soviet Union, but the United States -- for all its corrective mechanisms and dynamism -- has not proved to be immune. It is not simply that the U.S. military will take a generation to recover from Iraq; it is also that the United States lacks sufficient military assets to continue doing what it is doing in Iraq, much less assume new burdens of any scale elsewhere. Finally, today's nonpolar world is not simply a result of the rise of other states and organizations or of the failures and follies of U.S. policy. It is also an inevitable consequence of globalization. Globalization has increased the volume, velocity, and importance of cross-border flows of just about everything, from drugs, e-mails, greenhouse gases, manufactured goods, and people to television and radio signals, viruses (virtual and real), and weapons. Globalization reinforces nonpolarity in two fundamental ways. First, many cross-border flows take place outside the control of governments and without their knowledge. As a result, globalization dilutes the influence of the major powers. Second, these same flows often strengthen the capacities of nonstate actors, such as energy exporters (who are experiencing a dramatic increase in wealth owing to transfers from importers), terrorists (who use the Internet to recruit and train, the international banking system to move resources, and the global transport system to move people), rogue states (who can exploit black and gray markets), and Fortune 500 firms (who quickly move personnel and investments). It is increasingly apparent that being the strongest state no longer means having a near monopoly on power. It is easier than ever before for individuals and groups to accumulate and project substantial power. NONPOLAR DISORDER The increasingly nonpolar world will have mostly negative consequences for the United States -- and for much of the rest of the world as well. It will make it more difficult for Washington to lead on those occasions when it seeks to promote collective responses to regional and global challenges. One reason has to do with simple arithmetic. With so many more actors possessing meaningful power and trying to assert influence, it will be more difficult to build collective responses and make institutions work. Herding dozens is harder than herding a few. The inability to reach agreement in the Doha Round of global trade talks is a telling example. Nonpolarity will also increase the number of threats and vulnerabilities facing a country such as the United States. These threats can take the form of rogue states, terrorist groups, energy producers that choose to reduce their output, or central banks whose action or inaction can create conditions that affect the role and strength of the U.S. dollar. The Federal Reserve might want to think twice before continuing to lower interest rates, lest it precipitate a further move away from the dollar. There can be worse things than a recession. Iran is a case in point. Its effort to become a nuclear power is a result of nonpolarity. Thanks more than anything to the surge in oil prices, it has become another meaningful concentration of power, one able to exert influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and beyond, as well as within OPEC. It has many sources of technology and finance and numerous markets for its energy exports. And due to nonpolarity, the United States cannot manage Iran alone. Rather, Washington is dependent on others to support political and economic sanctions or block Tehran's access to nuclear technology and materials. Nonpolarity begets nonpolarity.

Prolif makes the transition stable preventing great power war

Alagappa 8 (Muthiah, Distinguished Senior Fellow—East-West Center, in “The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21^st Century Asia, Ed. Muthiah Alagappa, p. 484)

The fear of escalation to nuclear war conditions the role of force in major power relations and circumscribes strategic interaction among them. By restraining measures and actions that could lead to conflict escalation, nuclear weapons limit the competitive strategic interaction of major powers to internal and external balancing for deterrence purposes; constrain their resort to coercive diplomacy and cornpellence; and shift the burden of international competition and adjustment in status and influence to the economic, political, and diplomatic arenas. They also render remote the possibility of a hegemonic war should a power transition occur in the region. More immediately, nuclear weapons enable Russia and China to deter the much stronger United States and mitigate the negative consequences of the imbalance in conventional military capability. Nuclear weapons reinforce India's confidence in dealing with China. By reducing military vulnerabilities and providing insurance against unexpected contingencies, nuclear weapons enable major powers to take a long view and engage in competition as well as cooperation with potential adversaries. Differences and disputes among them are frozen or settled through negotiations. Though they are not the only or even primary factor driving strategic visions and policies, nuclear weapons are an important consideration, especially in the role of force in major power strategic interaction. They prevent the outbreak of large-scale war. Military clashes when they occur tend to be limited.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 1 and 4 | Opponent: UNT KP and Trinity MR | Judge: 

A. Interpretation—the aff has to defend a normative statement that more USFG incentives for or less USFG restrictions on energy production would be good.

B. Our interpretation is best—

1. Predictability—ignoring the resolution opens up an infinite number of topics—this undermines our ability to have in-depth research on their arguments destroying the value of debate.

2. Ground—the resolution exists to create fair division of aff and neg ground—any alternative framework allows the aff to pick a moral high ground that destroys neg offense.

2NC—Fairness O/W Edu

And, Debate is played for its own sake—fairness and quality of play outweigh all other concerns.

Villa 96—Dana Villa Political Theory @ UC Santa Barbara Arendt and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political p. 37

If political action is to be valued for its own sake, then the content of political action must be politics “in the sense that political action is talk about politics.”  The circularity of this formulation, given by George Kateb, is unavoidable.  It helps if we use an analogy that Kateb proposes, the analogy between such a purely political politics and a game.  “A game,” writes Kateb, “is not ‘about’ anything outside itself, it is its own sufficient world…the content of any game is itself.”  What matters in a game is the play itself, and the quality of this play is utterly dependent upon the willingness and ability of the players to enter the “world” of the game.  The Arendtian conception of politics is one in which the spirit animating the “play” (the sharing of words and deeds) comes before all else—before personal concerns, groups, interests, and even moral claims.  If allowed to dominate the “game,” these elements detracts from the play and from the performance of action.  A good game happens only when the players submit themselves to its spirit and do not allow subjective or external motives to dictate the play.  A good game, like genuine politics, is played for its own sake.

Turn—Rules are key to fun.

Prensky 1—Marc Prensky, Internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning, Founder, CEO and Creative Director of games2train.com, former vice president at the global financial firm Bankers Trust, BA from Oberlin College, an MBA from Harvard Business School with distinction and master's degrees from Middlebury and Yale “Fun, Play and Games: What Makes Games Engaging,” Digital Game-Based Learning, www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Game-Based%20Learning-Ch5.pdf

So fun — in the sense of enjoyment and pleasure — puts us in a relaxed, receptive frame of mind for learning. Play, in addition to providing pleasure, increases our involvement, which also helps us learn.   Both “fun” and “play” however, have the disadvantage of being somewhat abstract, unstructured, and hard-to-define concepts. But there exists a more formal and structured way to harness (and unleash) all the power of fun and play in the learning process — the powerful institution of games. Before we look specifically at how we can combine games with learning, let us examine games themselves in some detail.  Like fun and play, game is a word of many meanings and implications. How can we define a game? Is there any useful distinction between fun, play and games? What makes games engaging? How do we design them?  Games are a subset of both play and fun. In programming jargon they are a “child”, inheriting all the characteristics of the “parents.” They therefore carry both the good and the bad of both terms. Games, as we will see, also have some special qualities, which make them particularly appropriate and well suited for learning.   So what is a game?  Like play, game, has a wide variety of meanings, some positive, some negative. On the negative side there is mocking and jesting, illegal and shady activity such as a con game, as well as the “fun and games” that we saw earlier. As noted, these can be sources of resistance to Digital Game-Based Learning — “we are not playing games here.” But much of that is semantic. What we are interested in here are the meanings that revolve around the definition of games involving rules, contest, rivalry and struggle.    What Makes a Game a Game? Six Structural Factors  The Encyclopedia Britannica provides the following diagram of the relation between play and games: 35 PLAY  spontaneous play    organized play (GAMES)         noncompetitive games   competitive games (CONTESTS) intellectual contests   physical contests (SPORTS)   Our goal here is to understand why games engage us, drawing us in often in spite of ourselves.  This powerful force stems first from the fact that they are a form of fun and play, and second from what I call the six key structural elements of games:  1. Rules 2. Goals and Objectives 3. Outcomes and Feedback 4. Conflict/Competition/Challenge/Opposition  5. Interaction, and 6. Representation or Story.   There are thousands, perhaps millions of different games, but all contain most, if not all, these powerful factors. Those that don’t contain all the factors are still classified as games by many, but can also belong to other subclasses described below. In addition to these structural factors, there are also important design elements that add to engagement and distinguish a really good game from a poor or mediocre one. Let us discuss these six factors in detail and show how and why they lead to such strong engagement. Rules are what differentiate games from other kinds of play. Probably the most basic definition of a game is that it is organized play, that is to say rule-based. If you don’t have rules you have free play, not a game. Why are rules so important to games? Rules impose limits – they force us to take specific paths to reach goals and ensure that all players take the same paths. They put us inside the game world, by letting us know what is in and out of bounds. What spoils a game is not so much the cheater, who accepts the rules but doesn’t play by them (we can deal with him or her) but the nihilist, who denies them altogether. Rules make things both fair and exciting. When the Australians “bent” the rules of the America’s Cup and built a huge boat in 1988, and the Americans found a way to compete with a catamaran, it was still a race — but no longer the same game.

And, Fun is key to education and knowledge retention.

Prensky 1—Marc Prensky, Internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning, Founder, CEO and Creative Director of games2train.com, former vice president at the global financial firm Bankers Trust, BA from Oberlin College, an MBA from Harvard Business School with distinction and master's degrees from Middlebury and Yale “Fun, Play and Games: What Makes Games Engaging,” Digital Game-Based Learning, www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Game-Based%20Learning-Ch5.pdf

So what is the relationship between fun and learning? Does having fun help or hurt? Let us look at what some researchers have to say on the subject:  “Enjoyment and fun as part of the learning process are important when learning new tools since the learner is relaxed and motivated and therefore more willing to learn.”6   "The role that fun plays with regard to intrinsic motivation in education is twofold. First, intrinsic motivation promotes the desire for recurrence of the experience… Secondly, fun can motivate learners to engage themselves in activities with which they have little or no previous experience." 7 "In simple terms a brain enjoying itself is functioning more efficiently." 8 "When we enjoy learning, we learn better" 9 Fun has also been shown by Datillo and Kleiber, 1993; Hastie, 1994; Middleton, Littlefield and Lehrer, 1992, to increase motivation for learners. 10  It appears then that the principal roles of fun in the learning process are to create relaxation and motivation.  Relaxation enables a learner to take things in more easily, and motivation enables them to put forth effort without resentment.

b. Prevents rigorous testing—we need to research and isolate weaknesses of the aff.

Zappen 4—James Zappen, Professor of Language and Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute “The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition,” p. 35-36

Finally, Bakhtin describes the Socratic dialogue as a carnivalesque debate between opposing points of view, with a ritualistic crownings and decrownings of opponents. I call this Socratic form of debate a contesting of ideas to capture the double meaning of the Socratic debate as both a mutual testing of oneself and others and a contesting or challenging of others' ideas and their lives. Brickhouse and Smith explain that Socrates' testing of ideas and people is a mutual testing not only of others but also of himself: Socrates claims that he has been commanded by the god to examine himself as well as others; he claims that the unexamined life is not worth living; and, since he rarely submits to questioning himself, "it must be that in the process of examining others Socrates regards himself as examining his own life, too." Such a mutual testing of ideas provides the only claim to knowledge that Socrates can have: since neither he nor anyone else knows the real definitions of things, he cannot claim to have any knowledge of his own; since, however, he subjects his beliefs to repeated testing, he can claim to have that limited human knowledge supported by the "inductive evidence" of "previous elenctic examinations." This mutual testing of ideas and people is evident in the Laches and also appears in the Gorgias in Socrates' testing of his own belief that courage is inseparable from the other virtues and in his willingness to submit his belief and indeed his life to the ultimate test of divine judgment, in what Bakhtin calls a dialogue on the threshold. The contesting or challenging of others' ideas and their lives and their ritualistic crowning/decrowning is evident in the Gorgias in Soocrates' successive refutations and humiliations of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles.

3. We solve the terminal impact to education—fairness in a debate context through topicality fosters tolerance of alternative viewpoints which solves dogmatism and bigotry in society.

Muir 93—Star Muir, Professor of Communication at George Mason “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26.4, p. 291-292

Firm moral commitment to a value system, however, along with a sense of moral identity, is founded in reflexive assessments of multiple perspectives. Switch-side debate is not simply a matter of speaking persuasively or organizing ideas clearly (although it does involve these), but of understanding and mobilizing arguments to make an effective case. Proponents of debating both sides observe that the debaters should prepare the best possible case they can, given the facts and information available to them.52 This process, at its core, involves critical assessment and evaluation of arguments; it is a process of critical thinking not available with many traditional teaching methods.53 We must progressively learn to recognize how often the concepts of others are discredited by the concepts we use to justify ourselves to ourselves. We must come to see how often our claims are compelling only when expressed in our own egocentric view. We can do this if we learn the art of using concepts without living in them. This is possible only when the intellectual act of stepping outside of our own systems of belief has become second nature, a routine and ordinary responsibility of everyday living. Neither academic schooling nor socialization has yet addressed this moral responsibility,54 but switch-side debating fosters this type of role playing and generates reasoned moral positions based in part on values of tolerance and fairness. Yes, there may be a dangerous sense of competitive pride that comes with successfully advocating a position against one's own views, and there are ex-debaters who excuse their deceptive practices by saying "I'm just doing my job." Ultimately, however, sound convictions are distinguishable from emphatic convictions by a consideration of all sides of a moral stance. Moral education is not a guaranteed formula for rectitude, but the central tendencies of switch-side debate are in line with convictions built on empathic appreciation for alternative points of view and a reasoned assessment of arguments both pro and con. Tolerance, as an alternative to dogmatism, is preferable, not because it invites a relativistic view of the world, but because in a framework of equal access to ideas and equal opportunities for expression, the truth that emerges is more defensible and more justifiable. Morality, an emerging focal point of controversy in late twentieth-century American culture, is fostered rather than hampered by empowering students to form their own moral identity.

4. Empiricism is on our side—an experimental debate tournament with no topic caused students to perceive a lack of educational value—this discouraged them from participating in debate—

The vast majority of students thought it was unfair.

Preston 3—Thomas Preston, Professor of communications at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Summer 2003, “No-topic debating in Parliamentary Debate: Students and Critic Reactions,” http://cas.bethel.edu/dept/comm/npda/journal/vol9no5.pdf

The study involved forty-three students and nine critics who participated in a parliamentary debate tournament where no topic was assigned for the fourth round debates. True to the idea of openness, no rules regarding the topic were announced; no topic, or written instructions other than time limits and judging instruction, were provided. In this spirit, the participants first provided anecdotal reactions to the no-topic debate, so that the data from this study could emerge from discussion. Second, respondents provided demographic data so that patterns could be compared along three dimensions. These dimensions, the independent variables for the student portion of the study, involved three items: 1) level of debate experience; 2) whether NPDA was the only format of parliamentary debate the students had experienced; and 3) whether students had participated in NDT or CEDA policy debate. Third, the questions were to determine how students rated the debates based on criteria for good debate-educational value, clash, and a fair division of ground. Students were also asked two general questions: whether they would try the no-topic debate again, and whether they liked the no-topic round. These questions constituted the dependent variables for the student study. Because the sample was small, descriptive statistical data were gathered from critics. Taking into account the experience of the critics, additional questions concerning items such as whether no-topic debating deepened discussion. Both students and critics were asked which side they thought the no-topic approach favored, and the students with NDT/ CEDA policy debating experience were asked if a no-topic debating season would be good for policy debate.For the objective items, critics and students were asked to circle a number between 1 and 7 to indicate the strength of reaction to each item (Appendix I and Appendix II). In scoring responses, the most favorable rating received the highest score of seven and the least favorable rating a score of one. In some instances, values that were circled on the sheet were reversed such that the most favorable reaction to that category received the higher score. Frequency distributions and statistics were then tabulated for each question, and the anecdotal remarks were tabulated. For the student empirical data, t-tests were conducted to determine whether overall debate experience, NPDA experience, or policy experience affected how the students reacted to an item. As a test for significance, p was set to less than or equal to .05. Finally, of the 43 responses, 35, or 81.4 per cent, felt that the no-topic debate skewed the outcome of the debate toward one side or the other. Of those responses, 32 (91.4 per cent of those indicating a bias, or 74.4 per cent of all respondents) indicated that the no-topic debate gave an advantage to the Government. Three (8.6 per cent of those indicating a bias, or 7.0 per cent of all respondents) indicated that the no-topic debate gave an advantage to the Opposition.

And, the experiment empirically proves our argument—people do quit debate because of a lack of rules, causing the activity to degenerate into chaos.

Preston 3—Thomas Preston, Professor of communications at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Summer 2003, “No-topic debating in Parliamentary Debate: Students and Critic Reactions,” http://cas.bethel.edu/dept/comm/npda/journal/vol9no5.pdf

For the overall student data, each the mean of each item was slightly below 4.0, but mostly, the kurtosis figures were negative, and the standard deviations high, indicating a bipolar response to each question. The frequency tables bear out strong negative reactions, but a number of positive reactions which tended to be less strong. On the one hand, a substantial number of students and critics felt very strongly that the experience was negative, with the mode=l for each item on the survey; however, on others, a substantial number of respondents rated aspects of the experience at 4 and above. The educational value had the highest central tendencies (mean=3.65, median=4.0, and mode=1.0), whereas the question over whether the students liked the experience was the lowest (mean=3.19, median=3.0, mode=1.0). Although there was a weak positive pole to the responses, those who had NDT/CEDA experience strongly opposed the idea of a no-topic year of debating in those organizations (mean=2.77, median =1.00, mode=1.00). cont. Reduced to absurdity, the notion of no rules for a debate tournament would result in chaos, bringing up an infinite regress into whether or not chaos is a good thing! At least on the surface, the results of this particular study would seem to discourage repeating this experiment as conducted for the present study. A number of participants may not want to return to the tournament because of the confusion and perceived lack of educational value. However, an exact representation and t-tests between results could help not only assess the validity and reliability of the instrument, but whether attitudes and perceptions have changed toward no-topic debating. Therefore, whereas Option III may seem to be out of the questions, benefits can still be gained from it in terms of studying the evolution of parliamentary debate form.

AT: Neg Still Has Ground

The aff rigs the game—topicality prevents the aff from just defending a moral high ground which gives them unpredictable advantages to weigh against any disad—even if we could engage this aff, it’s not what they do, it’s what they justify.

Speice and Lyle 3 — Patrick Speice, Debater at Wake Forest University, and Jim Lyle, Director of Debate at Clarion University, 2003 (“Traditional Policy Debate: Now More Than Ever,” Debater’s Research Guide, Available Online at http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/ MiscSites/DRGArticles/SpeiceLyle2003htm.htm, Accessed 09-11-2005)

The plan is a necessary convention in debate because it is a specific statement of topical advocacy that the affirmative is bound to defend, and all negative ground comes from attacks on the plan and it’s justifications. If the affirmative team argues for the judge to vote for them based on statements not related to the plan, it is likely that these portions of the 1AC will not be topical. Allowing teams to advocate non-topical statements as a reason to vote for them makes it impossible for the negative to debate. The affirmative could simply defend a statement such a “racism is bad” or “2 + 2 = 4.” Such non-falsifiable statements make going negative immensely unattractive, as the affirmative would win virtually every debate. Teams that run such affirmatives, or that justify such affirmatives by divorcing the judge’s decision from a topical plan-focus, skew the debate in such a way that it becomes a “rigged game” in favor of the affirmative.

Ground is inevitable, but the affirmative hurt the quality of in-round dialogue.

Galloway 7 — Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and Director of Debate at Samford University, 2007 (“Dinner and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Re-Conceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Volume 28, September, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Premier, p. 12)

In addition, even when the negative strategy is not entirely excluded, any strategy that diminishes argumentative depth and quality diminishes the quality of in-round dialogue. An affirmative speech act that flagrantly violates debate fairness norms and claims that the benefits of the affirmative act supersede the need for such guidelines has the potential of excluding a meaningful negative response, and undermines the pedagogical benefits of the in-round dialogue. The “germ of a response” (Bakhtin, 1990) is stunted.

AT: Must Learn About “x”

Topicality structurally mandates difference within debate -- this avoids the perpetuation of extremism and intolerance through enclaves of radical similarity.

Sunstein 2k—Cass Sunstein, Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago October 2000, “Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes,” Yale Law Journal, 110 Yale L.J. 71, Lexis

The central problem is that widespread error and social fragmentation are likely to result when like-minded people, insulated from others, move in extreme directions simply because of limited argument pools and parochial influences. As an extreme example, consider a system of one-party domination, which stifles dissent in part because it refuses to establish space for the emergence of divergent positions; in this way, it intensifies polarization within the party while also disabling external criticism. In terms of institutional design, the most natural response is to ensure that members of deliberating groups, whether small or large, will not isolate themselves from competing views - a point with implications for multimember courts, open primaries, freedom of association, and the architecture of the Internet. Here, then, is a plea for ensuring that deliberation occurs within a large and heterogeneous public sphere, and for guarding against a situation in which like-minded people wall themselves off from alternative perspectives.

The presence of only one view-point encourages enclaves spurring social fragmentation and intolerance.

Sunstein 2k—Cass Sunstein, Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago October 2000, “Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes,” Yale Law Journal, 110 Yale L.J. 71, Lexis

One of my largest purposes is to cast light on enclave deliberation as simultaneously a potential danger to social stability, a source of social fragmentation, and a safeguard against social injustice and unreasonableness. n14 Group polarization helps explain an old point, with  *76  clear constitutional resonances, to the effect that social homogeneity can be quite damaging to good deliberation. n15 When people are hearing echoes of their own voices, the consequence may be far more than support and reinforcement. An understanding of group polarization thus illuminates social practices designed to reduce the risks of deliberation limited to like-minded people. Consider the ban on single-party domination of independent regulatory agencies, the requirement of legislative bicameralism, and debates, within the United States and internationally, about the value of proportional or group representation. Group polarization is naturally taken as a reason for skepticism about enclave deliberation and for seeking to ensure deliberation among a wide group of diverse people.

AT: Framework is Exclusionary

And they have excluded the neg from the debate—lack of predictability means we can’t engage them.

Galloway 7 — Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and Director of Debate at Samford University, 2007 (“Dinner and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Re-Conceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Volume 28, September, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Premier, p. 12)

While affirmative teams often accuse the negative of using a juridical rule to exclude them, the affirmative also relies upon an unstated rule to exclude the negative response. This unstated but understood rule is that the negative speech act must serve to negate the affirmative act. Thus, affirmative teams often exclude an entire range of negative arguments, including arguments designed to challenge the hegemony, domination, and oppression inherent in topical approaches to the resolution. Becoming more than just a ritualistic tag-line of “fairness, education, time skew, voting issue,” fairness exists in the implicit right to be heard in a meaningful way. Ground is just that—a ground to stand on, a ground to speak from, a ground by which to meaningfully contribute to an ongoing conversation.

C. Voting issue—resolving the topicality is a pre-condition for debate to occur.

Shively 2k—Ruth Lessl Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science, Texas AandM University Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 181-2

The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

And fairness comes first—absent fairness, debate as an activity would cease to exist.

Speice and Lyle 3 — Patrick Speice, Debater at Wake Forest University, and Jim Lyle, Director of Debate at Clarion University, 2003 (“Traditional Policy Debate: Now More Than Ever,” Debater’s Research Guide, Available Online at http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/ MiscSites/DRGArticles/SpeiceLyle2003htm.htm, Accessed 09-11-2005)

As with any game or sport, creating a level playing field that affords each competitor a fair chance of victory is integral to the continued existence of debate as an activity. If the game is slanted toward one particular competitor, the other participants are likely to pack up their tubs and go home, as they don’t have a realistic shot of winning such a “rigged game.” Debate simply wouldn’t be fun if the outcome was pre-determined and certain teams knew that they would always win or lose. The incentive to work hard to develop new and innovative arguments would be non-existent because wins and losses would not relate to how much research a particular team did. TPD, as defined above, offers the best hope for a level playing field that makes the game of debate fun and educational for all participants.

Fairness is a decision rule—it rigs the game and makes neutral evaluation by a judge impossible—their ability to pick the high ground is an inequality that ought to be eliminated.

Loland 2 Sigmund, Professor of Sport Philosophy and Ethics at the Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education, Fair Play and Sport, 95

Rule violations are of several kinds.  The long jumper who steps over the board has her jump measured longer than it really is.  By illegally hitting a competitor on the arm, a basketball player ‘steals’ the ball and scores two points.  I have argued that without adhering to a shared, just ethos, evaluations of performance among competitors become invalid.  Advantages resulting from rule violations that are no part of such an ethos must be considered non-relevant inequalities that ought to be eliminated or compensated for.  The argument is similar to that in the discussion of equality.  This time, however, we are dealing not with external conditions, equipment, or support systems, but with competitors’ actions themselves.

And constraints are more conducive to creative thinking—following the rules is key to argument innovation.

Gibbert et al. 7 — Michael Gibbert, Assistant Professor of Management at Bocconi University (Italy), et al., with Martin Hoeglis, Professor of Leadership and Human Resource Management at WHU—Otto Beisheim School of Management (Germany), and Lifsa Valikangas, Professor of Innovation Management at the Helsinki School of Economics (Finland) and Director of the Woodside Institute, 2007 (“In Praise of Resource Constraints,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, Available Online at https://umdrive.memphis.edu/gdeitz/public/The%20Moneyball%20Hypothesis/Gibbert%20et%20al.%20-%20SMR%20(2007)%20Praise%20Resource%20Constraints.pdf, Accessed 04-08-2012, p. 15-16)

Resource constraints can also fuel innovative team performance directly. In the spirit of the proverb "necessity is the mother of invention," end page 15 teams may produce better results because of resource constraints. Cognitive psychology provides experimental support for the "less is more" hypothesis. For example, scholars in creative cognition find in laboratory tests that subjects are most innovative when given fewer rather than more resources for solving a problem.

The reason seems to be that the human mind is most productive when restricted. Limited—or better focused—by specific rules and constraints, we are more likely to recognize an unexpected idea. Suppose, for example, that we need to put dinner on the table for unexpected guests arriving later that day. The main constraints here are the ingredients available and how much time is left. One way to solve this problem is to think of a familiar recipe and then head off to the supermarket for the extra ingredients. Alternatively, we may start by looking in the refrigerator and cupboard to see what is already there, then allowing ourselves to devise innovative ways of combining subsets of these ingredients. Many cooks attest that the latter option, while riskier, often leads to more creative and better appreciated dinners. In fact, it is the option invariably preferred by professional chefs.

The heightened innovativeness of such "constraints-driven" solutions comes from team members' tendencies, under the circumstances, to look for alternatives beyond "how things are normally done," write C. Page Moreau and Darren W. Dahl in a 2005 Journal of Consumer Research article. Would-be innovators facing constraints are more likely to find creative analogies and combinations that would otherwise be hidden under a glut of resources.

AT: We = USFG

The U.S. government is 3 branches

Black’s Law Dictionary 90 (6^th Edition, p. 695)

In the United States, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in addition to administrative agencies.  In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and county governments, and city and township governments.

Federal government is central government

WEBSTER'S 76 NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY UNABRIDGED, p. 833.

Federal government. Of or relating to the central government of a nation, having the character of a federation as distinguished from the governments of the constituent unites (as states or provinces).

AT: Predictability Bad

Modest predictability of procedural limits is worth potential substantive tradeoff.  Topicality creates space for relevant debate.

Massaro 89—Toni Massaro Law @ Florida Empathy, Legal Storytelling, and the Rule of Law: New Words, Old Wounds? 87 Mich. L. Rev. L/N

Yet despite their acknowledgment that some ordering and rules are necessary, empathy proponents tend to approach the rule-of-law model as a villain. Moreover, they are hardly alone in their deep skepticism about the rule-of-law model. Most modern legal theorists question the value of procedural regularity when it denies substantive justice.52 Some even question the whole notion of justifying a legal decision by appealing to a rule of law, versus justifying the decision by reference to the facts of the case and the judges' own reason and expe-rience.53 I do not intend to enter this important jurisprudential de-bate, except to the limited extent that the "empathy" writings have suggested that the rule-of-law chills judges' empathic reactions. In this regard, I have several observations. My first thought is that the rule-of-law model is only a model. If the term means absolute separation of legal decision and "politics," then it surely is both unrealistic and undesirable.54 But our actual statutory and decisional "rules" rarely mandate a particular (unempathetic) response. Most of our rules are fairly open-ended. "Relevance," "the best interests of the child," "undue hardship," "negligence," or "freedom of speech" - to name only a few legal concepts - hardly admit of precise definition or consistent, predictable application. Rather, they represent a weaker, but still constraining sense of the rule-of-law model. Most rules are guidelines that establish spheres of relevant conversation, not mathematical formulas. Moreover, legal training in a common law system emphasizes the indeterminate nature of rules and the significance of even subtle variations in facts. Our legal tradition stresses an inductive method of discovering legal principles. We are taught to distinguish different "stories," to arrive at "law" through experience with many stories, and to revise that law as future experience requires. Much of the effort of most first-year law professors is, I believe, devoted to debunking popular lay myths about "law" as clean-cut answers, and to illuminate law as a dynamic body of policy determinations constrained by certain guiding principles.55 As a practical matter, therefore, our rules often are ambiguous and fluid standards that offer substantial room for varying interpretations. The interpreter, usually a judge, may consult several sources to aid in decisionmaking. One important source necessarily will be the judge's own experiences -including the experiences that seem to determine a person's empathic capacity. In fact, much ink has been spilled to illuminate that our stated "rules" often do not dictate or explain our legal results. Some writers even have argued that a rule of law may be, at times, nothing more than a post hoc rationalization or attempted legitimization of results that may be better explained by extralegal (including, but not necessarily limited to, emotional) responses to the facts, the litigants, or the litigants' lawyers,56 all of which may go un-stated. The opportunity for contextual and empathic decisionmaking therefore already is very much a part of our adjudicatory law, despite our commitment to the rule-of-law ideal. Even when law is clear and relatively inflexible, however, it is not necessarily "unempathetic." The assumed antagonism of legality and empathy is belied by our experience in rape cases, to take one important example. In the past, judges construed the general, open-ended standard of "relevance" to include evidence about the alleged victim's prior sexual conduct, regardless of whether the conduct involved the defendant.57 The solution to this "empathy gap" was legislative action to make the law more specific - more formalized. Rape shield statutes were enacted that controlled judicial discretion and specifically defined relevance to exclude the prior sexual history of the woman, except in limited, justifiable situations.58 In this case, one can make a persuasive argument not only that the rule-of-law model does explain these later rulings, but also that obedience to that model resulted in a triumph for the human voice of the rape survivor. Without the rule, some judges likely would have continued to respond to other inclinations, and admit this testimony about rape survivors. The example thus shows that radical rule skepticism is inconsistent with at least some evidence of actual judicial behavior. It also suggests that the principle of legality is potentially most critical for people who are least understood by the decisionmakers - in this example, women - and hence most vulnerable to unempathetic ad hoc rulings. A final observation is that the principle of legality reflects a deeply ingrained, perhaps inescapable, cultural instinct. We value some procedural regularity - "law for law's sake" - because it lends stasis and structure to our often chaotic lives. Even within our most intimate relationships, we both establish "rules," and expect the other party to follow them.59 Breach of these unspoken agreements can destroy the relationship and hurt us deeply, regardless of the wisdom or "substantive fairness" of a particular rule. Our agreements create expectations, and their consistent application fulfills the expectations. The modest predictability that this sort of "formalism" provides actually may encourage human relationships.60

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Cal HS | Judge: 

Restrictions are a limitation that prohibits an action.  It excludes terms for acting

Court of Appeals 12 STATE OF WASHINGTON DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH,  THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON, DIVISION I, RANDALL KINCHELOE Appellant. vs. Respondent, BRIEF OF APPELLANT, http://www.courts.wa.gov/content/Briefs/a01/686429%20Appellant%20Randall%20Kincheloe's.pdf

3. The ordinary definition of the term "restrictions" also does not include the reporting and monitoring or supervising terms and conditions that are included in the 2001 Stipulation.  Black's Law Dictionary, 'fifth edition,(1979) defines "restriction" as; A limitation often imposed in a deed or lease respecting the use to which the property may be put.

The term "restrict' is also cross referenced with the term "restrain." Restrain is defined as;

To limit, confine, abridge, narrow down, restrict, obstruct, impede, hinder, stay, destroy. To prohibit from action; to put compulsion on; to restrict; to hold or press back. To keep in check; to hold back from acting, proceeding, or advancing, either by physical or moral force, or by interposing obstacle, to repress or suppress, to curb.

“On” means directly targeted at and focused on production

Oxford Dictionary online, 12 The World’s most trusted Dictionary, http:~/~/oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/com/definition/american_english/on

5.  having (the thing mentioned) as a target, aim, or focus: five air raids on the city, thousands marching on Washington ,her eyes were fixed on his dark profile

Violation—the aff reduces a supervising term—not a restriction.  Restrictions prohibit.

SUPREME COURT OF CALIFORNIA  93  Howard v. Babcock, No. S027061. , SUPREME COURT OF CALIFORNIA, 6 Cal. 4th 409; 863 P.2d 150; 25 Cal. Rptr. 2d 80; 1993 Cal. LEXIS 6006; 28 A.L.R.5th 811; 93 Cal. Daily Op. Service 8975; 93 Daily Journal DAR 15372, December 6, 1993, Decided ,  Rehearing Denied February 3, 1994, Reported at: 1994 Cal. LEXIS 534.

 **156   ***86  Rule 1-500 provides: "(A) A member shall not be a party to or participate in offering or making an agreement, whether in connection with the settlement of a lawsuit or otherwise, if the agreement restricts the right of a  *419  member to practice law, except that this rule shall not prohibit such an agreement which: ¶ (1) Is a part of an employment, shareholders', or partnership agreement among members provided the restrictive agreement does not survive the termination of the employment, shareholder, or partnership relationship; or ¶ (2) Requires payments to a member upon the member's retirement from the practice of law; or ¶ (3) Is authorized by Business and Professions Code sections 6092.5, subdivision  or 6093 providing for authority of State Bar Court to impose conditions of probation on disciplined attorneys. ¶ (B) A member shall not be a party to or participate in offering or making an agreement which precludes the reporting of a violation of these rules." 6

CA(4)(4) We are not persuaded that this rule was intended to or should prohibit the type of agreement that is at issue here. HN10 An agreement that assesses a reasonable cost against a partner who chooses to compete with his or her former partners does not restrict the practice of law. Rather, it attaches an economic consequence to a departing partner's unrestricted choice to pursue a particular kind of practice.

We agree with the Court of Appeal in Haight, supra, 234 Cal.App.3d 963, declaring HN11an agreement between law partners that a reasonable cost will be assessed for competition is consistent with rule 1-500. Rejecting an interpretation of rule 1-500 like that proffered by plaintiffs here, the court stated: "We do not construe rule 1-500 in such a narrow fashion. . . . The rule does not . . . prohibit a withdrawing partner from agreeing to compensate his former partners in the event he chooses to represent clients previously represented by the firm from which he has withdrawn. Such a construction represents a balance between competing interests. On the one hand, it enables a departing attorney to withdraw from a partnership and continue to practice law anywhere within the state, and to be able to accept employment should he choose to do so from any client who desires to retain him. On the other hand, the remaining partners remain able to preserve the stability of the law firm by making available the withdrawing partner's share of capital and accounts receivable to replace the loss of the stream of income from the  *420  clients taken by the withdrawing partner to support the partnership's debts." (Haight, supra, at pp. 969-970.) Concluding that the agreement was not invalid on its face, the court held that the validity of the agreement depended on whether it "amounts to an agreement for liquidated damages or an agreement resulting in a forfeiture." (Id. at p. 972.)

VOTE NEG

LIMITS—the number of supervising terms is limitless—each one becomes an aff.

CORE GROUND—only insured ground is energy production—regulations mean they don’t have to produce more, just make it less regulated.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Cal HS | Judge: 

COUNTERPLAN: The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission should waive regulations on staffing, manufacturing licensing, emergency planning zone, and safety for Small Modular Reactors to be consistent with the unique attributes of Small Modular reactors.

The counterplan solves all the aff—back-end waiver avoid the need to meet restrictions.  Insures public engagement in environmental processes

GLICKSMAN and SHAPIRO 4 a. Robert W. Wagstaff Professor of Law, University of Kansas Member Scholar, Center for Progressive Regulation b. John M. Rounds Professor of Law, University of Kansas Member Scholar, Center for Progressive Regulation; University Distinguished Chair in Law, Wake Forest University School of Law Robert L. Glicksman, Sidney A. Shapiro, Improving Regulation Through Incremental Adjustment, Kansas Law Review, 52 U. Kan. L. Rev. 1179

Reform of environmental and other regulation has been a popular topic for academics, think-tanks, and interested parties for the last two decades. Claiming that existing regulation is excessive and irrational, critics have successfully convinced Congress and the White House to implement a plethora of procedural requirements to analyze a proposed regulation before it is promulgated.I In our recent book, Risk Regulation at Risk,2 we argued that the previous initiatives address the possibility of regulatory failure on the wrong end of the regulatory policy implementation process. Current efforts to rationalize environmental and other health and safety regulation at the "front end" of the regulatory process are doomed to fail because of moral, methodological, and informational limitations.3 We suggested that one way of improving regulation would be to rely on incremental adjustments in regulation on the "back end" of the regulatory process.4 One important advantage of proceeding in this manner is that regulatory policy is adjusted in light of its actual impact, as compared to the significant guesswork that is required to use front-end analysis. In this manner, a back-end adjustment process is consistent with the pragmatic approach to public policy that we advocated in the book.5

This article addresses in more detail the potential of two types of back-end processes: (1) deadline extensions and (2) waivers, exceptions, and variances.6 Our analysis proceeds in three steps. Part II describes the almost exclusive focus of regulatory reformers on the front end of the process. Part III offers a close examination of five federal statutes that provide opportunities for the two types of adjustments we are studying. The results confirm our earlier assertion that Congress has authorized agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Interior Department to make these types of back-end adjustments available in a variety of contexts and for a variety of reasons.? Our analysis reveals that Congress has established six different grounds for back-end adjustment, and we assess the potential for each of these grounds to improve regulatory policy. Although we recommend the imposition of conditions on the issuance of some of these back-end adjustments, we find that these adjustments are generally consistent with the precautionary tilt of the statutes in which they are located because they still require the regulated entity to do the best it can to protect people and the environment. Where such protective mechanisms are absent, we urge that the statutes be amended to include them.

Part IV analyzes the procedures by which requests for back-end adjustments are currently processed. We find that agencies consider most applications for back-end adjustments using informal procedures that include public notice and solicitation of public comments, although in a few instances, more formal procedures apply. We favor the informal approach because it is an efficient way for agencies to respond to the issues raised by requests for back-end adjustments and because more elaborate procedures are not necessary to promote rational decisionmaking, given the nature of the issues likely to be raised in back-end adjustment proceedings. We are concerned, however, about the extent to which effective public participation will occur under these procedures. We therefore endorse two steps to enhance the transparency of back-end adjustment decision-making: the establishment of electronic reading rooms and the issuance by agencies of annual reports on back-end ad- justments.8 We argue that these two mechanisms will facilitate involvement by public interest groups and interested citizens by allowing them to prioritize the adjustment proceedings in which they wish to become involved. The result is likely to be enhanced agency accountability and reduced opportunities for agency abuse of the back-end adjustment process.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Cal HS | Judge: 

No widespread prolif

Hymans 12—Jacques E. C. Hymans is Associate Professor of IR at USC April 16, 2012, “North Korea's Lessons for (Not) Building an Atomic Bomb,” Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137408/jacques-e-c-hymans/north-koreas-lessons-for-not-building-an-atomic-bomb?page=show

Washington's miscalculation is not just a product of the difficulties of seeing inside the Hermit Kingdom. It is also a result of the broader tendency to overestimate the pace of global proliferation. For decades, Very Serious People have predicted that strategic weapons are about to spread to every corner of the earth. Such warnings have routinely proved wrong -- for instance, the intelligence assessments that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- but they continue to be issued. In reality, despite the diffusion of the relevant technology and the knowledge for building nuclear weapons, the world has been experiencing a great proliferation slowdown. Nuclear weapons programs around the world are taking much longer to get off the ground -- and their failure rate is much higher -- than they did during the first 25 years of the nuclear age.

As I explain in my article "Botching the Bomb" in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, the key reason for the great proliferation slowdown is the absence of strong cultures of scientific professionalism in most of the recent crop of would-be nuclear states, which in turn is a consequence of their poorly built political institutions. In such dysfunctional states, the quality of technical workmanship is low, there is little coordination across different technical teams, and technical mistakes lead not to productive learning but instead to finger-pointing and recrimination. These problems are debilitating, and they cannot be fixed simply by bringing in more imported parts through illicit supply networks. In short, as a struggling proliferator, North Korea has a lot of company.

Deterrence breakdowns don’t cause full-scale nuclear war

Waltz 3—Kenneth, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, p. 34-35

States are deterred by the prospect of suffering severe damage and by their inability to do much to limit it. Deterrence works because nuclear weapons enable one state to punish another state severely without first defeating it. "Victory," in Thomas Schelling's words, "is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy." 37 Countries armed only with conventional weapons can hope that their military forces will be able to limit the damage an attacker can do. Among countries armed with strategic nuclear forces, the hope of avoiding heavy damage depends mainly on the attacker's restraint and little on one's own efforts. Those who compared expected deaths through strategic exchanges of nuclear warheads with casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in World War II overlooked the fundamental difference between conventional and nuclear worlds. 38

Deterrence rests on what countries can do to each other with strategic nuclear weapons. From this statement, one can easily leap to the wrong conclusion: that deterrent strategies, if they have to be carried through, will produce a catastrophe. That countries are able to annihilate each other means neither that deterrence depends on their threatening to do so nor that they will necessarily do so if deterrence fails. Because countries heavily armed with strategic nuclear weapons can carry war to its ultimate intensity, the control of force becomes the primary objective. If deterrence fails, leaders will have the strongest incentives to keep force under control and limit damage rather than launching genocidal attacks. If the Soviet Union had attacked Western Europe, NATO's objectives would have been to halt the attack and end the war. The United States had the ability to place thousands of warheads precisely on targets in the Soviet Union. Surely we would have struck military targets before striking industrial targets and industrial targets before striking cities. The intent to hit military targets first was sometimes confused with a war-fighting strategy, but it was not one. It would not have significantly reduced the Soviet Union's ability to hurt us. Whatever American military leaders thought, our strategy rested on the threat to punish. The threat, if it failed to deter, would have been followed not by spasms of violence but by punishment administered in ways that conveyed threats of more to come.

A war between the United States and the Soviet Union that got out of control would have been catastrophic. If they had set out to destroy each other, they would have greatly reduced the world's store of developed resources while killing millions outside of their own borders through fallout. Even while destroying themselves, states with few weapons would do less damage to others. As ever, the biggest international dangers come from the strongest states. Fearing the world's destruction, one may prefer a world of conventional great powers having a higher probability of fighting less- destructive wars to a world of nuclear great powers having a lower probability of fighting more-destructive wars. But that choice effectively disappeared with the production of atomic bombs by the United States during World War II.

Your authors overstate the risks and pace of Middle East proliferation

Carpenter ‘7 (Ted Galen, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies – Cato, Mediterranean Quarterly, “Toward a Grand Bargain with Iran”, Vol. 18, Iss. 1, Project Muse)

Finally, those who favor a more confrontational policy toward Iran warn that if Tehran succeeds in its quest for nuclear weapons, other nations in the region will quickly do the same, creating an especially dangerous security environment. As in the case of concerns about possible blackmail, this fear has some validity. Because of the uncertain reliability of the protection afforded by the US umbrella for some US allies and client states in the Middle East, there is a very real prospect that if Iran develops a nuclear arsenal, sooner or later such countries as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey might follow suit. Indeed, Egypt may already be thinking along those lines. In late September, Gamal Mubarak, President Hosni Mubarak's son and political heir apparent, stated that his country needed to develop a nuclear program for power generation.19 Although he stressed that the program would be entirely peaceful, his proposal had all the earmarks of a hedging strategy. As we have seen with India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, "peaceful" nuclear programs can easily become the foundation for a nuclear weapons program. Whether additional proliferation would reach epidemic proportions and create the nightmare scenarios forecast by some analysts is uncertain. It is important to recall that pundits and even international relations experts have tended to overestimate both the probability and the extent of proliferation in the past. The conventional wisdom in the 1960s was that there would be as many as two dozen nuclear weapons powers within a generation.20 Similar predictions took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s.21 End Page 22 Moreover, it is not an established fact that nuclear weapons in the hands of a larger number of nations would necessarily be a bad development. Indeed, some respected International Relations scholars have argued that nuclear proliferation might be stabilizing rather than destabilizing.22 Given its volatile political makeup, though, the Middle East is probably not the best region to test that thesis.

Prolif decreases the risk of war—robust statistical, empirical evidence proves.

Asal and Beardsley 7 (Victor, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—SUNY Albany, and Kyle, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.—Emory U., Journal of Peace Research, “Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior,” 44:2, Sage)

As Model 1 in Table IV illustrates, all of our variables are statistically significant except for the protracted conflict variable. Our primary independent variable, the number of nuclear actors involved in the crisis, has a negative relationship with the severity of violence and is significant. This lends preliminary support to the argument that nuclear weapons have a restraining affect on crisis behavior, as stated in H1. It should be noted that, of the crises that involved four nuclear actors—Suez Nationalization War (1956), Berlin Wall (1961), October Yom Kippur War (1973), and Iraq No-Fly Zone (1992)—and five nuclear actors—Gulf War (1990)—only two are not full-scale wars. While this demonstrates that the pacifying effect of more nuclear actors is not strong enough to prevent war in all situations, it does not necessarily weaken the argument that there is actually a pacifying effect. The positive and statistically significant coefficient on the variable that counts the number of crisis actors has a magnitude greater than that on the variable that counts the number of nuclear actors. Since increases in the number of overall actors in a crisis are strongly associated with higher levels of violence, it should be no surprise that many of the conflicts with many nuclear actors—by extension, many general actors as well—experienced war. Therefore, the results can only suggest that, keeping the number of crisis actors fixed, increasing the proportion of nuclear actors has a pacifying effect. They do not suggest that adding nuclear actors to a crisis will decrease the risk of high levels violence; but rather, adding more actors of any type to a crisis can have a destabilizing effect. Also in Table IV, Model 2 demonstrates that the effect of a nuclear dyad is only approaching statistical significance, but does have a sign that indicates higher levels of violence are less likely in crises with opponents that have nuclear weapons than other crises. This lukewarm result suggests that it might not be necessary for nuclear actors to face each other in order to get the effect of decreased propensity for violence. All actors should tend to be more cautious in escalation when there is a nuclear opponent, regardless of their own capabilities. While this might weaken support for focusing on specifically a ‘balance of terror’ as a source of stability (see Gaddis, 1986; Waltz, 1990; Sagan and Waltz, 2003; Mearsheimer, 1990), it supports the logic in this article that nuclear weapons can serve as a deterrent of aggression from both nuclear and non-nuclear opponents.6 Model 3 transforms the violence variable to a binary indicator of war and demonstrates that the principal relationship between the number of nuclear actors and violence holds for the most crucial outcome of full-scale war. Model 4 demonstrates that accounting for the presence of new nuclear actors does not greatly change the results. The coefficient on the new nuclear actor variable is statistically insignificant, which lends credence to the optimists’ view that new nuclear-weapon states should not be presupposed to behave less responsibly than the USA, USSR, UK, France, and China did during the Cold War. Finally, Model 5 similarly illustrates that crises involving superpowers are not more or less prone to violence than others. Superpower activity appears to not be driving the observed relationships between the number of nuclear-crisis actors and restraint toward violence. It is important to establish more specifically what the change in the probability of full-scale war is when nuclear actors are involved. Table V presents the probability of different levels of violence as the number of nuclear actors increases in the Clarify simulations. The control variables are held at their modes or means, with the exception of the variable that counts the number of crisis actors. Because it would be impossible to have, say, five nuclear-crisis actors and only two crisis actors, the number of crisis actors is held constant at five. As we can see, the impact of an increase in the number of nuclear actors is substantial. Starting from a crisis situation without any nuclear actors, including one nuclear actor (out of five) reduces the likelihood of fullscale war by nine percentage points. As we continue to add nuclear actors, the likelihood of full-scale war declines sharply, so that the probability of a war with the maximum number of nuclear actors is about three times less than the probability with no nuclear actors. In addition, the probabilities of no violence and only minor clashes increase substantially as the number of nuclear actors increases. The probability of serious clashes is relatively constant. Overall, the analysis lends significant support to the more optimistic proliferation argument related to the expectation of violent conflict when nuclear actors are involved. While the presence of nuclear powers does not prevent war, it significantly reduces the probability of full-scale war, with more reduction as the number of nuclear powers involved in the conflict increases. As mentioned, concerns about selection effects in deterrence models, as raised by Fearon (2002), should be taken seriously. While we control for the strategic selection of serious threats within crises, we are unable to control for the non-random initial initiation of a crisis in which the actors may choose to enter a crisis based on some ex ante assessment of the outcomes. To account for possible selection bias caused by the use of a truncated sample that does not include any non-crisis cases, one would need to use another dataset in which the crisis cases are a subset and then run Heckman type selection models (see Lemke and Reed, 2001). It would, however, be difficult to think of a different unit of analysis that might be employed, such that the set of crises is a subset of a larger category of interaction. While dyadyear datasets have often been employed to similar ends, the key independent variable here, which is specific to crises as the unit of analysis, does not lend itself to a dyadic setup. Moreover, selection bias concerns are likely not valid in disputing the claims of this analysis. If selection bias were present, it would tend to bias the effect of nuclear weapons downward, because the set of observed crises with nuclear actors likely has a disproportionate share of resolved actors that have chosen to take their chances against a nuclear opponent. Despite this potential mitigating bias, the results are statistically significant, which strengthens the case for the explanations provided in this study.

1NR-~--Slow

Prolif will be slow even in the new era.

Tepperman 9 (Jonathon, former Deputy Managing Ed. Foreig Affairs and Assistant Managing Ed. Newsweek, Newsweek, “Why Obama should Learn to Love the Bomb,” 44:154, 9-7, L/N)

The risk of an arms race--with, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb after Iran got one--is a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive. "In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace." Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them. That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighbors--Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say--might not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.

No chain reactions. Prolif domino effects never materialize.

Alagappa 8 (Muthiah, Distinguished Senior Fellow – East-West Center, in “The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21^st Century Asia,” Ed. Muthiah Alagappa, p. 521-522)

It will be useful at this juncture to address more directly the set of instability arguments advanced by certain policy makers and scholars: the domino effect of new nuclear weapon states, the probability of preventive action against new nuclear weapon states, and the compulsion of these states to use their small arsenals early for fear of losing them in a preventive or preemptive strike by a stronger nuclear adversary. On the domino effect, India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapon programs have not fueled new programs in South Asia or beyond. Iran's quest for nuclear weapons is not a reaction to the Indian or Pakistani programs. It is grounded in that country's security concerns about the United States and Tehran's regional aspirations. The North Korean test has evoked mixed reactions in Northeast Asia. Tokyo is certainly concerned; its reaction, though, has not been to initiate its own nuclear weapon program but to reaffirm and strengthen the American extended deterrence commitment to Japan. Even if the U.S. Japan security treaty were to weaken, it is not certain that Japan would embark on a nuclear weapon program. Likewise, South Korea has sought reaffirmation of the American extended deterrence commitment, but has firmly held to its nonnuclear posture. Without dramatic change in its political, economic, and security circumstances, South Korea is highly unlikely to embark on a covert (or overt) nuclear weapon program as it did in the 1970s. South Korea could still become a nuclear weapon state by inheriting the nuclear weapons of North Korea should the Kim Jong Il regime collapse. Whether it retains or gives up that capability will hinge on the security circumstances of a unified Korea. The North Korean nuclear test has not spurred Taiwan or Mongolia to develop nuclear weapon capability. The point is that each country's decision to embark on and sustain nuclear weapon programs is contingent on its particular security and other circumstances. Though appealing, the domino theory is not predictive; often it is employed to justify policy on the basis of alarmist predictions. The loss of South Vietnam, for example, did not lead to the predicted domino effect in Southeast Asia. In fact the so-called dominos became drivers of a vibrant Southeast Asia and brought about a fundamental transformation in that subregion (Lord 1993, 1996). In the nuclear arena, the nuclear programs of China, India, and Pakistan were part of a security chain reaction, not mechanically falling dominos. However, as observed earlier the Indian, Pakistani, and North Korean nuclear tests have thus far not had the domino effect predicted by alarmist analysts and policy makers. Great caution should be exercised in accepting at face value the sensational predictions of individuals who have a vested interest in accentuating the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Such analysts are now focused on the dangers of a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran may or may not have destabilizing effects. Such claims must be assessed on the basis of an objective reading of the drivers of national and regional security in Iran and the Middle East.

1NR-~--AT: Wars

Nuclear weapons reduce the risk and impact of nuclear war

Asal and Beardsley 7 (Victor, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci. – SUNY Albany, and Kyle, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci. – Emory U., Journal of Peace Research, “Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior*”, 44:2, Sage)

Other, more optimistic, scholars see benefits to nuclear proliferation or, perhaps not actively advocating the development of more nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon states, see that the presence of nuclear weapons has at least been stabilizing in the past. For example, some scholars are confident of the promise of the ‘nuclear peace’.4 While those who oppose proliferation present a number of arguments, those who contend that nuclear weapons would reduce interstate wars are fairly consistent in focusing on one key argument: nuclear weapons make the risk of war unacceptable for states. As Waltz argues, the higher the stakes and the closer a country moves toward winning them, the more surely that country invites retaliation and risks its own destruction. States are not likely to run major risks for minor gains. War between nuclear states may escalate as the loser uses larger and larger warheads. Fearing that, states will want to draw back. Not escalation but deescalation becomes likely. War remains possible, but victory in war is too dangerous to fight for. (Sagan and Waltz, 2003: 6–7) ‘Nuclear war simply makes the risks of war much higher and shrinks the chance that a country will go to war’ (Snyder and Diesing, 1977: 450). Using similar logic, Bueno de Mesquita and Riker (1982) demonstrate formally that a world with almost universal membership in the nuclear club will be much less likely to experience nuclear war than a world with only a few members.

They’ll build small arsenals – five reasons – limited targets, fear of fallout, economic constraints, political rewards and opacity requirements

Seng 98 (Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci. – U. Chicago, Dissertation, “STRATEGY FOR PANDORA'S CHILDREN: STABLE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AMONG MINOR STATES,” p. 56-57)

Kenneth Waltz argues that leaders in all new nuclear states will build only small arsenals. His claim rests primarily on the assumption that all new nuclear states will believe they only need to threaten adversaries with the destruction of one or two cities to ensure stable deterrence, and that they subsequently will be reluctant to dedicate massive resources to building large nuclear arsenals.' My claim is less broad, and it concerns only stares in the developing world. I argue that conditions in the developing world are such that whether leaders think they need to be able to destroy only one city or believe they should have the capability to achieve complete societal destruction of an adversary, they very likely will judge that only very small nuclear arsenals are needed for the job. Moreover, because conditions are such that arsenal buildups will exact high economic, political and security costs on developing states, it is very unlikely they will build more weapons than they believe they need. What follows is an examination of the specific conditions on which these claims are based. There are five main reasons to expect small arsenals among nuclear states in the developing world. They include 1) the limited number of targets developing states will have to worry about, 2) fears concerning 'regional suicide' through nuclear fallout, 3) economic constraints related to nuclear production and military budgets, 4) the specific manner in which developing states reap political rewards and prestige from nuclear weapons development, and 5) the requirements of keeping nuclear arsenals opaque. These factors can carry a cumulative weight in developing state proliferators, which is to say that their cumulative effect may serve to constrain arsenal buildup when the individual effect of any one of them may not be sufficient. They also reinforce each other in important ways, meaning that if policymakers recognize the existence of one or some of the conditions they are likely to recognize most or all of them, and thus their cumulative weight is likely CO be felt. Not all the factors discussed here will apply to all proliferators and potential proliferators in the developing world; however, it is not necessary that they do. It is simply necessary that enough of the factors apply, or that one of them applies strongly enough, to generate the essential constraining effects. This is very likely to be the case in all developing world situations.

1NR-~--AT: Horowitz

He concedes this is the focus of the study.

Horowitz 9 (Michael, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci. – U. Pennsylvania, Journal of Conflict Resolution, “The Spread of NuclearWeapons and International Conflict Does Experience Matter?” 53:2, April, Sage)

The crux of the relationship between nuclear proliferation and international stability is whether nuclear weapons matter only because of the technologies involved—because a nuclear war would likely be so much more destructive than a conventional conflict—or whether there is something about proliferation that alters, perhaps temporarily, existing expectations about capabilities and resolve. The indeterminacy of much of the deterrence literature highlights the importance of rigorous testing (Downs 1989; George and Smoke 1989; Jervis 1989b). Scholars have disagreed, extensively, over how states in deterrence crises calculate the costs and benefits of different actions (Huth and Russett 1990, 466). Many scholars argue that nuclear proliferation is likely to lead to more international conflict, although some disagree.Waltz, for example, argues that nuclear weapons deter challengers and take escalation off the table, making disputes less likely. The balance of threat from nuclear escalation outweighs issue-specific calculations of interests. According to Waltz, the risk of nuclear escalation trumps any uncertainty generated by nuclear acquisition, making postproliferation conflicts less likely (Waltz 1995, 5-8). A simple measurement problem limits existing research on nuclear war; all observations after 1945 are censored and end in a condition of no nuclear war. However, it is possible to empirically evaluate the relevance of nuclear weapons in military disputes short of war. In disputes such as some of the U.S.–Soviet clashes in the Cold War, the issue of nuclear proliferation intersects with broader questions of learning and information.

Horowitz cites 3 empirical studies—this evidence indicts every one of them.  Empirics go our way.

Sechser 9 (Todd, Assistant Prof. Politics – UVA and PhD Pol.. Sci. – Stanford, in “Controversies in Globalization: Contending Approaches to International Relations”, Ed. John A. Hird, Peter M. Haas and Beth McBratney, p. 169-171)

The evidence in the previous section tells against the view that the spread of nuclear weapons engenders instability. Yet proliferation pessimists nonetheless point to a very large body of empirical support for their arguments. Through years of painstaking archival research, scholars such as Bruce G. Blair (1994), Peter D. Feaver (1997), and especially Scott D. Sagan (1993) have amassed an extraordinary collection of "near-catastrophes"—incidents that almost resulted in nuclear accidents or outright nuclear war—that occurred in the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere during the Cold War and afterward. Sagan and Josh Weddle, for instance, write of military officers who sought to provoke war with aspiring nuclear rivals, organizational missteps that inadvertently left nuclear forces vulnerable to attack, and blunders that nearly led to accidental nuclear detonations or launches. 3 While doubtless worrisome, nuclear near-misses are insufficient to corroborate proliferation pessimism because they provide no information about the risk of actual accidents. Consider the following analogy. Imagine that an insurance company official is assigned to evaluate the accident risk for cars that use a particular brand of tires. After interviewing customers who have used these tires for many years, she writes a report concluding that clients using the tires in the future will suffer a high risk of accidents. She bases her conclusion on reports that customers' cars sometimes skidded while taking tight turns or when stopping rapidly, although none of the customers in her study ever experienced an actual crash. Would the researcher's conclusion be a reasonable inference from her data? It would not. The reason is that in the researcher's sample, experiencing skidding—that is, a "near-accident"—was not in fact associated with a higher likelihood of an actual accident. Cars that skidded had exactly the same likelihood of being involved in a crash—zero—as those that did not skid. Without having studied any actual crashes, the researcher can draw no inferences about the relationship between skidding and accidents. It may seem like common sense to assume that skidding cars have a greater likelihood of crashing, but intuition is no substitute for empirical data. Indeed, just the opposite might be true: perhaps skidding provides such a jolt to drivers that they become more cautious and attuned to road conditions as a result of the skid, thereby making a subsequent crash less likely.  So it is with the study of nuclear proliferation. Since none of the close calls in the sample collected by proliferation pessimists led to an actual nuclear detonation, it is inappropriate to infer that close calls raise the likelihood of nuclear accidents. 4 The only conclusion supported by such data is that states possessing nuclear weapons have a greater likelihood of near- misses than nonnuclear states. But near-misses, while dramatic and unnerving, are ultimately of little consequence if they never escalate to outright catastrophes.

1NR-~--AT: Below

Their examples don’t apply. Military officers won’t favor preemption.

Lavoy 95 (Peter, Assistant Prof. National Security Affairs – Naval Postgraduate School, Security Studies, “The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation”, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer, p. 720-721)

Sagan argues that military training and logic predispose military officers to favor preventive war in the following ways. Military officers are likely to see war as inevitable; they usually distrust nonmilitary approaches to international conflict; they are likely to neglect the nonmilitary costs and consequences of preventive war; and they usually favor offensive doctrines and decisive operations over protracted or delayed conflicts7. 5Although Sagan provides only anecdotal evidence in support of these controversial generalizations about military thinking, let us suppose that he is correct - suppose that military officers do favor preventive war. It is quite another matter to expect these officers to favor preventive war against nuclear targets (where the cost of failure could be exorbitant), or to expect their civilian leaders to authorize such risky military conduct. In anticipation of these points, Sagan relates several episodes in which u.s. military officers planned and seriously advocated preventive-war options to destroy the emergent nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union during the first decade of the cold war. Although Truman and Eisenhower ultimately ruled against these measures, Sagan believes that these cases support his argument about the biases of military organizations in favor of preventive nuclear war. This leads him to expect that such attacks will be carried out in the future by states having weak civilian control over their militaries. There are two problems with this argument. The first concerns Sagan's extrapolation of military roles from the U.S. experience to the context of new nuclear states. Even if we accept that U.S. military officers are biased in favor of preventive options, it does not follow that other militaries will share this bias. As Richard Betts relates, "statesmen and soldiers are partners in preventing war and fighting it." Since the primary job of civilian authorities in the United States is to ensure that deterrence does not fail, military officials plan ways to limit damage and win the war if deterrence does fail!' Not all countries around the world have the luxury of dividing these roles in this manner. In countries with weak civilian control - the countries with which Sagan is especially concerned - military officers assume many of the duties that civilians perform in the United States and in other nations in which civilian control is strict. Consider the case of Pakistan. Apart from the traditional military duties of recruitment, training, discipline, and strategic planning, Pakistan's military leadership plays an active part in deciding when, where, and how to use military force. Because Pakistani military officers assume much of the responsibility for ensuring the country's national security and well-being, they display few of the biases Sagan observes among American officers. Pakistani officers do not see war with India as inevitable; they do not distrust nonmilitary approaches to international conflict; and they do not neglect the nonmilitary costs and consequences of preventive war. The second problem with Sagan's argument about preventive war lies with his inductive analysis of the new nuclear states themselves. Sagan cites the pre-nuclear case of Pakistan to illustrate his concern about preventive war among new nuclear states. He rightly observes that the 1965 war between Pakistan and India began as a Pakistani attempt to wrest control of Indian-held Kashmir before India's rearmament effort - which began after India's loss to China in the 1962 Himalayan border war - would forever shift the regional balance of power. A deal with the Soviet Union to build on Indian soil an assembly factory for MiG aircraft and the prospect that India might also receive American F- 104s convinced President Ayub Khan and his young foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to take preventive military action against India." In the end, however, Pakistan's Operation Grand Slam was a failure. Pakistan never again attempted a preventive military campaign against India. 80 Why, then, does Sagan fear preventive military attacks by Pakistan against Indian nuclear facilities in the future?

1NR-~--AT: Knopf

Lots of historical disproof

Alagappa 8 (Muthiah, Distinguished Senior Fellow – East-West Center, in “The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21^st Century Asia, Ed. Muthiah Alagappa, p. 522)

The prospect of military action to destroy nuclear weapons and facilities in East and South Asia has declined markedly. The Soviet Union contemplated preventive military action against China's nuclear facilities in 1969, but the United States refused to support such action. Several years ago there was concern that India might attack Pakistan's nuclear installations. Even if this was a serious possibility, its probability has declined sharply. The two countries entered into an agreement not to attack each other's nuclear facilities. This agreement held even during the crisis situations in the 1999-2002 period. Since then, India and Pakistan have taken additional measures to prevent an accidental outbreak or escalation of conflict. More germane to the contemporary context is the emphasis in the U.S. 2002 Nuclear Posture Review on offensive military action against rogue states. The United States seriously contemplated a preventive strike against North Korea's nuclear weapon facilities during the first nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula in 1993-94 (Perry 2006). And the George W. Bush administration threatened preventive action against North Korea during its first term. 3 However, that policy has lost traction and has no support among states in Northeast Asia, including U.S. allies. Neighboring countries oppose any preventive strike, fearing that it could result in a general war that would have negative consequences for their own national security and regional stability. Although the United States has the military capability to undertake such an action it is unlikely to act without the support of its regional allies. The force option is still on the table, but the approach to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem has decidedly shifted to the diplomatic arena.

1NR-~--AT: Edelman

Dire proliferation predictions never come true – a nuclear Iran would establish stability in the region – empirically proved

Van Creveld ‘6 (Martin, Prof. Mil. Hist. – Hebrew U., The Forward, “Knowing Why Not To Bomb Iran Is Half the Battle”, 4-26, http://www.d-n-i.net/creveld/to_bomb_iran.htm)

The first and most obvious question is whether it is worth doing in the first place. Starting right after Hiroshima, each time a country was about to go nuclear Washington went out of its way to sound the alarm, warning of the dire consequences that would surely follow. From 1945 to 1949 it was the Soviet Union which, once it had succeeded in building nuclear weapons, was supposed to make an attempt at world conquest. In the 1950s it was America's own clients, Britain and France, who were regarded as the offenders and put under pressure. Between 1960 and 1993, first China, then Israel (albeit to a limited extent) and finally India and Pakistan were presented as the black sheep, lectured, put under pressure and occasionally subjected to sanctions. Since then, the main victim of America's peculiar belief that it alone is sufficiently good and sufficiently responsible to possess nuclear weapons has been North Korea. As the record shows, in none of these cases did the pessimists' visions come true. Neither Stalin, Mao nor any of the rest set out to conquer the world. It is true that, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington's ability to threaten them or coerce them declined. However, nuclear proliferation did not make the world into a noticeably worse place than it had always been — and if anything, to the contrary. As Europe, the Middle East and South Asia demonstrate quite well, in one region after another the introduction of nuclear weapons led, if not to brotherhood and peace, then at any rate to the demise of large-scale warfare between states. Given the balance of forces, it cannot be argued that a nuclear Iran will threaten the United States. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fulminations to the contrary, the Islamic Republic will not even be a threat to Israel. The latter has long had what it needs to deter an Iranian attack. Should deterrence fail, Jerusalem can quickly turn Tehran into a radioactive desert — a fact of which Iranians are fully aware. Iran's other neighbors, such as Russia, Pakistan and India, can look after themselves. As it is, they seem much less alarmed by developments in Iran than they do by those thousands of miles away in Washington.

1NR-~--AT: Org Theory

Org theory doesn’t apply to new powers. Small arsenals and no alert.

Goldstein 2k (Avery, Prof. Pol. Sci. – U. Penn., “Deterrence and Security in the 21^st Century”, p. 277-278)

Third, nuclear optimists assert that states with the resources to develop and deploy a nuclear arsenal will also possess the rudimentary organizational and technological capabilities necessary to maintain control over what are likely to be relatively small numbers of weapons. And because these weapons are not only a regime's most prized military asset, but one whose possession and possible use by renegade officers, criminals, or terrorists could invite catastrophic retaliatory punishment, the state will have powerful incentives to devise the means for ensuring such contro1.34 Bruce Blair and Scott Sagan, disagreeing with such optimism, have described how bureaucratic routines designed to cope with the unforgiving realities of nuclear war increase the risk that any nuclear use will be spasmodic rather than carefully managed." Their work suggests a terrifying loss of control once the dynamics of escalation begin. Optimists offer two countervailing considerations. One is that the pessimists may be correct in their characterization of the organizational risks when the linked adversaries were the overarmed Cold War superpowers, but wrong to impose their logic on other nuclear states. For states other than the superpowers, the small size of the arsenals, along with simple doctrines for weapons use, render irrelevant many of the organizational pathologies that the pessimists detail. The other optimist counter is that fear of the very dynamic the pessimists describe may well be an important consideration discouraging leaders from greatly easing tight peacetime controls, even in a crisis, lest they set in motion standard operating procedures that prove irreversible. Fearing even a small probability of inadvertent disaster discourages recklessness in confrontations among nuclear-armed states. Doubt about one's actual ability to manage alerted nuclear forces, or to exercise sustained positive control over the use of nuclear weapons in a military conflict, like doubt about an adversary's actual ability and willingness to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike, tips the balance further in the direction of war avoidance and encourages a reluctance to loosen controls.37

No impact to org theory.

Madson 6 (Peter, Graduate Student – Naval Postgraduate School, Masters Thesis, “THE SKY IS NOT FALLING: REGIONAL REACTION TO A NUCLEAR-ARMED IRAN”, STINET, p. 9)

The negative side of the Pessimists debate is that it is based upon theory without a factual basis to support its ultimate conclusions. Certainly, there have been instances in which nuclear weapons have nearly been used in conflict, but the taboo against their use remains in place. There could be a nuclear war, intended or otherwise tomorrow; however, history, and the threat that if there was the consequences would be vast, argues against it. Nuclear conflict cannot happen through graduated steps─the weapons either have or have not been used. Theorizing about what might happen because of societal, organizational, or institutional standards is useful for adding additional security to ensure that accidents do not happen. On the other hand, these factors do not explain completely, with historical events to back them up, how the spread of nuclear weapons is inherently dangerous.

Adaptive learning solves – new powers will learn from US mistakes building modest arsenals with tight command systems

Chellaney 95 (Brahma, Prof. – New Delhi Center for Policy Research, Security Studies, “Naivete and Hypocrisy: Why Antiproliferation Zealotry Does Not Make Sense”, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer, p. 780-81)

To apply such logic (or lack of it) to possible developments in other parts of the world would be a grave error. New nuclear states are likely to pursue modest, programs and goals and be contented with minimal deterrent arsenals. The three quasi-nuclear-weapons states - India, Israel, and Pakistan - for example, have pursued strategies of minimum deterrence. This is reflected in their willingness to embrace a global fissile cut-off and a comprehensive test ban. These two proposed measures will impose quantitative and qualitative caps, respectively, on the nuclear programs of these countries and ensure that they do not go beyond minimal deterrent levels. New nuclear states, obviously, will have the advantage that they can learn from the mistakes of the established nuclear powers. Only in recent years have these powers removed sections of their arsenals from full alert and adopted new targeting strategies to avert an accidental launch. New nuclear states could seek deterrence without fusing the warheads to the missiles or even keeping the warheads in fully assembled form. For deterrence to work, a nation does not need to have a launch-on-warning strategy, only the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on an adversary. As Waltz points out, a state could take its time to respond to an attack. If security interests of a nation can be served by an operational capability to ready nuclear weapons within a day or even hours, it would reduce or eliminate the onerous responsibilities involved in servicing and maintaining nuclear weapons and replacing decaying material. More importantly, it would obviate some of the critical safety-related organizational problems Sagan is concerned about. Only now are the big powers realizing that deactivating nuclear weapons does not compromise deterrence. The basic requirements of minimum deterrence can be met by a new proliferator in a way that does not, from an organizational approach, lead to deterrence failure or an accidental or unauthorized launch of a weapon, or invite a preventive strike by an adversary. Sagan's use of the United States as a case study to illustrate the problems supposedly inherent in building stable deterrence is analogous to the use of Western deterrence theory to understand developments elsewhere in the world. Sagan contends that if those problems existed in the United States, with its highly professional military and strong civilian authority, there are bound to be even more acute in other countries. Not necessarily. Much of the world does not have the extraordinarily high urban crime rate of the United States, whose police force unquestionably is very professional. A new nuclear state may decide to build only two to three dozen nuclear weapons and disperse them widely without weakening its political command and control and ensuring that at least a few weapons would survive a first strike by a potential adversary. New nuclear states are unlikely to fit into the traditional Western deterrence paradigm. The Indian, Israeli, and Pakistani nuclear-weapons programs and strategies, for example, cannot be easily explained with the aid of Western deterrence logic and theory.

1NR-~--BioShift

Solving nuclear prolif causes a shift to bio-weapons

Cordesman 2k Anthony, Senior Fellow for Strategic Assessment – CSIS, Federal News Service, 3-28, L/N

New, critical technologies are escaping our control One of the problems I have noticed in US government efforts to analyze proliferation is that they focus on past and current threats. As result, our studies tend to give primary weight to ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Advances in genetic engineering, biotechnology, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and food processing, however, are making it progressively easier to manufacture biological weapons with nuclear lethalities, to do so under breakout conditions, and do so with little or no warning of the precise nature of the threat. The engines and guidance systems needed for cruise missiles are becoming industrial devices like GPS, sensor-triggered fuses, cluster munitions, drones, crop sprayers, cellular phones interaction with the steady growth in global commerce, shipping, and labor migration to make covert and proxy attacks steadily more effective. Ironically, controlling ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons alone tends to simply push proliferation into other weapons systems and modes of delivery.

Bioweapons are comparatively worse than nuclear war—causes extinction and turns the case

Singer 1— Clifford Singer, Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign Spring 2001, “Will Mankind Survive the Millennium?” The Bulletin of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 13.1, http://www.acdis.uiuc.edu/research/SandPs/2001-Sp/SandP_XIII/Singer.htm

In recent years the fear of the apocalypse (or religious hope for it) has been in part a child of the Cold War, but its seeds in Western culture go back to the Black Death and earlier. Recent polls suggest that the majority in the United States that believe man would survive into the future for substantially less than a millennium was about 10 percent higher in the Cold War than afterward. However fear of annihilation of the human species through nuclear warfare was confused with the admittedly terrifying, but much different matter of destruction of a dominant civilization. The destruction of a third or more of much of the globe’s population through the disruption from the direct consequences of nuclear blast and fire damage was certainly possible. There was, and still is, what is now known to be a rather small chance that dust raised by an all-out nuclear war would cause a socalled nuclear winter, substantially reducing agricultural yields especially in temperate regions for a year or more. As noted above mankind as a whole has weathered a number of mind-boggling disasters in the past fifty thousand years even if older cultures or civilizations have sometimes eventually given way to new ones in the process. Moreover the fear that radioactive fallout would make the globe uninhabitable, publicized by widely seen works such as “On the Beach,” was a metaphor for the horror of nuclear war rather than reality. The epidemiological lethal results of well over a hundred atmospheric nuclear tests are barely statistically detectable except in immediate fallout plumes. The increase in radiation exposure far from the combatants in even a full scale nuclear exchange at the height of the Cold War would have been modest compared to the variations in natural background radiation doses that have readily been adapted to by a number of human populations. Nor is there any reason to believe that global warming or other insults to our physical environment resulting from currently used technologies will challenge the survival of mankind as a whole beyond what it has already handily survived through the past fifty thousand years.

There are, however, two technologies currently under development that may pose a more serious threat to human survival. The first and most immediate is biological warfare combined with genetic engineering. Smallpox is the most fearsome of natural biological warfare agents in existence. By the end of the next decade, global immunity to smallpox will likely be at a low unprecedented since the emergence of this disease in the distant past, while the opportunity for it to spread rapidly across the globe will be at an all time high. In the absence of other complications such as nuclear war near the peak of an epidemic, developed countries may respond with quarantine and vaccination to limit the damage. Otherwise mortality there may match the rate of 30 percent or more expected in unprepared developing countries. With respect to genetic engineering using currently available knowledge and technology, the simple expedient of spreading an ample mixture of coat protein variants could render a vaccination response largely ineffective, but this would otherwise not be expected to substantially increase overall mortality rates. With development of new biological technology, however, there is a possibility that a variety of infectious agents may be engineered for combinations of greater than natural virulence and mortality, rather than just to overwhelm currently available antibiotics or vaccines. There is no a priori known upper limit to the power of this type of technology base, and thus the survival of a globally connected human family may be in question when and if this is ¹file:///D:/userdata/Documents/Dropbox/Debate%20Tub/'12-'13%20Energy%20BM/Intel-Hitlist/Emory%20-%20Hitlist%20'12-13.docx#_ftn1||name="_ftnref1"achieved.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Cal HS | Judge: 

2NC Godhaven

Technology can’t solve all environmental problems and masks the true problem of consumption.

Godhaven 9 Merrick Godhaven is an environmental writer and activist. He co-authored the Corporate Watch report Technofixes: A Critical Guide to Climate Change Technologies. The Guardian, “Swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change,” July 15, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/jul/15/technofix-climate-change

Technology is part of the solution to climate change. But only part. Techno-fixes like some of those in the Guardian's Manchester Report simply cannot deliver the carbon cuts science demands of us without being accompanied by drastic reductions in our consumption. That means radical economic and social transformation. Merely swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change.  We need to choose the solutions that are the cheapest, the swiftest, the most effective and least likely to incur dire side effects. On all counts, there's a simple answer – stop burning the stuff in the first place. Consume less.  There is a certain level of resources we need to survive, and beyond that there is a level we need in order to have lives that are comfortable and meaningful. It is far below what we presently consume. Americans consume twice as much oil as Europeans. Are they twice as happy? Are Europeans half as free?  Economic growth itself is not a measure of human well-being, it only measures things with an assessed monetary value. It values wants at the same level as needs and, while it purports to bring prosperity to the masses, its tendency to concentrate profit in fewer and fewer hands leaves billions without the necessities of a decent life.  Techno-fixation masks the incompatibility of solving climate change with unlimited economic growth. Even if energy consumption can be reduced for an activity, ongoing economic growth eats up the improvement and overall energy consumption still rises. We continue destructive consumption in the expectation that new miracle technologies will come and save us.  The hope of a future techno-fix feeds into the pass-it-forward, do-nothing-now culture typified by targets for 2050. Tough targets for 2050 are not tough at all, they are a decoy. Where are the techno-fix plans for the peak in global emissions by 2015 that the IPCC says we need?  Even within the limited sphere of technology, we have to separate the solutions from the primacy of profit. We need to choose what's the most effective, not the most lucrative. Investors will want the maximum return for their money, and so the benefits of any climate technologies will, in all likelihood, be sold as carbon credits to the polluter industries and nations. It would not be done in tandem with emissions cuts but instead of them, making it not a tool of mitigation but of exacerbation.  Climate change is not the only crisis currently facing humanity. Peak oil is likely to become a major issue within the coming decade. Competition for land and water, soil fertility depletion and collapse of fisheries are already posing increasing problems for food supply and survival in many parts of the world.  Technological solutions to climate change fail to address most of these issues. Yet even without climate change, this systemic environmental and social crisis threatens society, and requires deeper solutions than new technology alone can provide. Around a fifth of emissions come from deforestation, more than for all transport emissions combined. There is no technological fix for that. We simply need to consume less of the forest, that is to say, less meat, less agrofuel and less wood.  Our level of consumption is inequitable. Making it universal is simply impossible. The scientist Jared Diamond calculates that if the whole world were to have our level of consumption, it would be the equivalent of having 72 billion people on earth.  With ravenous economic growth still prized as the main objective of society by all political leaders the world over, that 72 billion would be just the beginning. At 3% annual growth, 25 years later it would be the equivalent of 150 billion people. A century later it would be over a trillion. Something's got to give. And indeed, it already is. It's time for us to call it a crisis and respond with the proportionate radical action that is needed.  We need profound change – not only government measures and targets but financial systems, the operation of corporations, and people's own expectations of progress and success. Building a new economic democracy based on meeting human needs equitably and sustainably is at least as big a challenge as climate change itself, but if human society is to succeed the two are inseparable.  Instead of asking how to continue to grow the economy while attempting to cut carbon, we should be asking why economic growth is seen as more important than survival.

2NC T/C—Economy/Growth

Sustainable, equal economic well-being requires a critique of consumption. Focus on increasing production hurts economic security and sufficiency.

Barry 12—John Barry, Reader Politics @ Queen’s University (Belfast) The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability p. 164-165

I outline here how 'economic security' could be a replacement for economic growth, and present a green economic case for a new type of economy, in which redistribution and reducing socio-economic inequality are central (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). A model of green political economy cast in terms of 'economic security' has the advantage of presenting a positive and attractive discourse for addressing the problems of actually existing unsustainability. Using the language and analysis of economic security introduces a way of arguing and presenting the case for a less growth-orientated economy and high-consumption society, which at the same time aims to raise quality of life while lowering inequality. At the same time it is important (not least strategically) that a green critique of 'growth' should be viewed as a critique of orthodox and undifferentiated growth as measured by conventional economics. That is, lest a critique of economic growth be viewed as a critique of any and all types of growth, it is important to stress that greens reserve their critique for what Daly calls 'uneconomic growth' -the expansion of forms of activities which (after a threshold) undermine or compromise human flourishing. Thus, it is perfectly consistent for greens to criticize economic growth yet support growth in, for example, education, public health, public transport, or subsidized organic farming, but criticize the growth of consumerism, the quantity of arms and weapons an economy produces and trades, the size of domestic/household credit card debt. Thus, when I talk of 'economic growth' I am referring to 'undifferentiated, orthodox economic growth' as measured by conventional national accounting measurements such as GDP. One of the foci of analysis for green critiques of economic growth is consumerism, since consumerism has become a central driver and is functional for contemporary economic growth policies. As the current economic crisis aptly demonstrates, if (too many) people save rather than consume, the capitalist system becomes unstable and does not function. One of the critiques of consumerism is based on the notion that easy consumption 'devalues' that which is consumed- hence the disposable, banal, and ephemeral, but constantly repetitious character of modern consumerism. There is no sense of the fragility (despite the evident ephemerality) or any associated sense of preciousness attached to the mass produced goods and services consumed. Consumerism denotes an attitude towards that consumed of indifference, repetition, with little connection or meaningful connection made-one good or service is as good as another. The 'repressive tolerance' which defines the consumer experience and its associated highly disciplined subjectivities, was outlined by Marcuse (and others) over fifty years ago as characterizing modern Western capitalist societies (Marcuse, 1964). This still has analytical purchase and remains an apt description today of those societies. As Murray Bookchin points out, the judgement of a repressed psyche is not a good standard for determining what is 'good' and virtuous and what is not (Bookchin, 1982). One of the upshots of the analysis of vulnerability, developed in ohapter 2, for green politics is a reaffirmation of the need to examine issues of identity and the creation of new 'sustainability' and 'resilient' subjectivities, against the repressive tolerant. consumer identities which demarcate the limit of 'normal' and hence 'possible' or 'desirable' identities. Whether it is the putative identities and practices one can discern within the Transition movement, or the cultivation of virtue and certain character traits for green political and economic practices (such as 'green citizenship'), vulnerability and resilience are suggestive of specific types of virtue (such as compassion, care, courage, prudence, temperance, self-assuredness, steadfastness, sensuality, humility, and materiality-as opposed to 'materialism'). They also denote certain types of character traits, such as that of the 'pioneer' and 'dissident'. One thing is sure, in the creation of any sustainable and resilient economy, one that is adaptive, in the sense indicated in chapter 3, any putative 'greening' of production (through technology, for example) has to go hand in hand with a close reappraisal of consumption and consumerism, and the latter's function in being functional for and stimulating economic growth. As Princen et al. put it, 'Consumption becomes sacrosanct. If water supplies are tight, one must produce more water not consume less. If toxics accumulate, one must produce with fewer by-products-or even better, produce a cleanup technology rather than forego the production itself ... Production reigns supreme because consumption is beyond scrutiny' (Princen, Maniates, and Conca, 2002: 5; emphasis added). Like the sequestration of vulnerability, dependence, illness, and death, the growing opaqueness of the connections between production and consumption under global capitalism, globalized supply-chains and a global division of labour and so on, are also in need of critical examination.

2NC T/C—Resource Wars

Consumption makes resource wars inevitable—which is their internal link to china war.

Taylor 8 Graeme Taylor is a social activist committed to constructive global transformation and the coordinator of BEST Futures, a project supporting sustainable solutions through researching how societies change and evolve, Evolution's Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World, Pomegranate Press, 2008, ISBN: 9781550923810, EBrary, pg. 185-6

The financial and social inequality of the global economy is destabilizing and dangerous. 35 Growing income gaps between rich nations and poor nations and within countries like the United States, China and India can be managed as long as average incomes keep rising. But if shortages of essential goods and rising prices lower the standards of living of hundreds of millions of people — if people who are middle class today become poor tomorrow, and people who are poor today become hungry tomorrow — then there will be massive social unrest. In early 2008 rising food prices triggered protests and riots around the world. 36 Most people will tolerate bad government if they have economic security and hope for a better future. But if they lose that hope, then anger and despair can easily be channelled into intergroup violence and/or demands for radical political change. 37 While governments can use economic measures, laws and force to stabilize financial and political disturbances, there is little that they can do to solve problems caused by biophysical limits to growth and environmental degradation. Resource shortages restrict the supply of goods with the consequence that they must be rationed either with higher prices that make them unaffordable for poorer consumers, or by limiting availability — e.g. by turning off the supply of water or electricity for part of each day. Because resource shortages and other environmental problems cannot be resolved by the current global system, they are likely to be the root causes of increasing global economic crises. Countries are becoming increasingly concerned about their access to water, energy and mineral resources. For example, both China and India are making major investments in African resources: by 2010 China will probably be the continent’s major trading partner. 38 Fears of being excluded from critical supplies are leading to new strategic alliances and a new arms race — in 2007 the US, Japan, India, Australia and Singapore held joint naval exercises, while Russia and China held joint military exercises that were observed by the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan). 39 The focus of this competition is control over the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia — objectives clearly articulated by the former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard. 40 We should not forget that competition over resources helped start two world wars. We are now in a situation that is similar to the years leading up to the First World War — while no country desires war, no major power believes that it can afford to be denied access to critical resources. This is the American dilemma in Iraq — political leaders do not want to stay and be bogged down in an unending war, and yet they are afraid that if they withdraw from the region they could lose access to vital energy supplies. 41 If global resource consumption continues to expand, competition over increasingly scarce resources will grow. The competition will initially be primarily political and economic in nature, but as prices rise and economies are destabilized, there will be more and more willingness to use military means to guarantee access to strategic resources. The danger is that at some point competition and confrontation will escalate into a war involving major powers armed with weapons of mass destruction.

2NC Framework

We must begin with a social critique and analysis of the modern energy regime.  Ethical criticism of the existing energy regime cultivates alternatives to technocratic consumption.

Barry 12—John Barry, Reader Politics @ Queen’s University (Belfast) The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability p. 284-290

'Dissident' is perhaps a better and more accurate term to apply to greens than 'revolutionary', since while both share an opposition to the prevailing social order, revolutionary is clearly more antagonistic rather than agonistic, to use the terms indicated in chapter 7. Dissidents seek to direct a self transforming present in a more radical direction, whereas revolutionaries typically seek the complete destruction of the existing order and then the construction of a new one. Greens as dissidents also begin from an acceptance of the inevitability of key aspects of this transition-primarily around climate change and the end of the oil age-and thus see an answer to 'what is to be done?' in terms of managing and shaping that inevitable transition, rather than building/re-building. Dissident also seems less extreme and dogmatic in its critique and its demands, than those who advocate full-blown revolution. And given what was said in chapter 3 and elsewhere about the link between creativity, flexibility, and adaptive fitness, it would be odd for green politics to be dogmatic revolutionaries animated by a sense of the hopelessness of working within and through contemporary institutiohs or that there was nothing worth preserving within and from the contemporary social order. Green dissent could perhaps be (wrongly) described as somewhere on a continuum between 'reformism' and 'revolution', a form of 'creative adaptive management' to create collective resilience in the face of actually existing unsustainability.1 In his essay 'The Power of the Powerless', Vaclav Havel uses the story of a greengrocer who unthinkingly displays his 'loyalty' to the regime by displaying a Communist Party slogan in his shop. This the greengrocer does 'ritualistically, since this is the only way the regime is capable of acknowledging his display of loyalty' (Havel, 1978: 45). In a similar way, being a dutiful consumer and not questioning economic growth could also perhaps be regarded as the way in which loyalty to a dominant capitalist, consumer regime is ritualistically displayed, enacted, and affirmed. It is for this reason, if not only this reason, that one completely misunderstands consumerism, consumption, and being a 'consumer', if one views it solely individualistically as some economic-cum-metabolic act. As a public display of loyalty, consuming is first and foremost a collective act, an individual joining others in a shared activity and associated identity. So while critics such as Fromm are correct in highlighting the distinction in consumer culture between 'being' and 'having' (Fromm, 1976), what these analyses often miss is that consumption is also an act of'  belonging' and identity affirmation (Keat, 1994; Jackson, 2009b).It is for this reason that a refusal to consume is so damaging to the modern political and economic order and why to consciously choose not to consume is perhaps one of the most politically significant acts one can do in a consumer society. And one that, the continual performance (or rather non-performance) of which, further marks one out as a dissident, part of 'the great refusal' to use Marcuse's term (Marcuse, 1964). That is, to question economic growth under consumer capitalism is to be 'disloyal' to the prevailing order. While for Havel living in what he calls the 'post-totalitarian' communist regime is 'living a lie', I do not want to go so far and say that life in contemporary consumer capitalist democracies is in the same way to 'live a lie'. Rather what I would like to dwell upon is Havel's notion of'living within the truth' and what this can offer for green dissidents. For Havel 'living within the truth ... can be any means by which a person or group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers' strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections, to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike' (Havel, 1986: 59-60). Though clearly written with the then communist regime in mind, Havel's call to 'live in truth' is equally pertinent to consumer capitalism. As he puts it: The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has not roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his or her own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society. (Havel, 1978: 62; emphasis added) Silence is of course a consequence and precondition for this demoralization, and what power requires under consumer capitalism is passive and silent acquiescence as much as active participation. For Havel the re-appropriation of individual responsibility is something to be actively striven for. This reverses or balances the usual focus on rights and freedoms with which often 'progressive' critiques of consumerism are couched. In Havel's response to what Tim Jackson amongst others has called 'The Age of Irresponsibility' (Jackson, 2009b ), also connects with some of the green republican arguments outlined in chapters 6 and 7, not least the stress on both the recovery of the good of politics and the centrality of the individual citizen as a moral being and not just or only a consumer (or producer/worker or investor). As Jackson notes, 'the "age of irresponsibility" is not about casual oversight or individual greed. The economic crisis is not a consequence of isolated malpractice in selected parts of the banking sector. If there has been irresponsibility, it has been much more systemic, sanctioned from the top, and with one clear aim in mind: the continuation and protection of economic growth' (Jackson, 2009b: 26; emphasis added). The struggle Havel describes from the 1968 'Prague Spring' between 'the system' and 'the aims of life' (Havel, 1978: 66) resonate green concerns of the degradation of natural life-supporting systems and the undermining of conditions promoting human conviviality, quality of life, and well-being (Barry, 2009b; De Geus, 2009, 2003; Jackson, 2009a). What Havel goes on to say about political change and strategy in the context of a consumer culture is pertinent and important for those seeking a transition away from unsustainability, 'Society is not sharply polarized on the level of actual political power, but ... the fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person' (Havel, 1978: 91; emphasis added). This is a profound point, namely that it is difficult, if not impossible, to simply analyse actually existing unsustainability as an oppressive totalitarian regime in which there is an identifiable 'them' dominating 'us'. Under consumer capitalism, debt-based consumption, and so on, we who live in these societies are all implicated in its continuation. And while of course there are identifiable groups and institutions (such as large corporations, financial wealth management firms, the leadership of mainstream political parties, key agencies of the nation state such as departments of finance, global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMP, and what Sklair has called the 'transnational capitalist class') who do benefit more from actually existing unsustainability, we have to face up to the fact that 'ordinary people', that is, everyone also contributes (unequally of course) to the 'mundane' operation of global capitalism and the exploitation of people and planet. The recognition of this is but another way of drawing attention to the fact that capitalism, the common sense of neoclassical economics, and so on have achieved 'full spectrum' domination of hearts and minds, such that capitalism, and realistic critiques of it, need to be viewed as cultural (and indeed psychological) projects. It is for this reason that I canvassed the Transition movement in chapter 3, since it adopts an explicitly cultural and psychological approach. Of course such cultural and psychological critical analyses are not exhausted by this movement and these cannot be a substitute for oppositional political struggle. This 'cultural turn' in green politics is, to my mind, linked to the 'postscarcity economics of sustainable desire' outlined in chapter 5, and is premised firmly on a notion of human flourishing that lies beyond production, 'supplyside' solutions, 'competiveness', and increasing 'labour productivity'. This notion of flourishing is not anti-materialist. Let me make that abundantly clear, it is not an ascetic renunciation of materialism for its own sake, as if material life is intrinsically unworthy or does not express valued modes of human being. Thus I do not accept the Fromm-inspired view that materialism or indeed material consumption is simply a mode of 'having' and not 'being'. After all, the critique should be directed at consumerism and overconsumption, not materialism or consumption per se. At a basic level one can see how communism and consumerism are two 'regimes of truth' -to return to the Foucauldian language used in chapter 4 imposing their version of the truth, exacting payment, compliance, and subjectivity from their client populations, quelling, distracting, and undermining dissidents, and using different but also some shared techniques to continue. And the appropriate dissident, progressive attitude, and strategy against both is, for Havel, ultimately an ethical one, an ethical and political life-affirming 'reconstitution of society' (Havel, 1978: 115). That Havel conceives consumer-capitalist and communist societies as comparable can be seen in his view that: traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the autonomism of technological civilization, and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies ... the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information. (Havel, 1978: 116; emphasis added) Some of the republican elements expressed in Havel's thought centre around 'responsibility' (Havel, 1986: 104). He maintains that the abdication of responsibility in the name of consumer choice-what I have elsewhere described as the reduction of political liberty to a consumer 'freedom of choice' (Barry, 2009a)-weakens the ethical and political capacities of citizens within liberal democracies. Liberal consumer-citizens then become 'victims of the same autonomism, and are incapable of transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny' (Havel, 1978: 116; emphasis added). In this Havel is articulating concerns very close to the type of green republicanism outlined in this book. His concluding comments in The Power of the Powerless also offer suggestive lines for interpreting the Transition movement. In a passage focusing on the contours of what Havel calls the 'existential revolution' that is needed to renew the relationship of humans to the 'human order and cosmopolitan responsibility', Havel notes that the structures needed to make this happen 'should naturally arise from below as a consequence of authentic "selforganization"; they should derive energy from a living dialogue with the genuine needs from which they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structures should also disappear ... The decisive criterion of this "selfconstitution" should be the structure's actual significance and not just a mere abstract norm' (Havel, 1978: 119). A better description of the Transition movement's aims, motivations, and objectives would be hard to find. Havel goes on to describe these new, provisional, and practical structures 'postdemocratic'. He describes the outlines of these 'authentic' political structures in this manner: Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to create an articulate form of 'living within the truth' and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of some rudimentary moral reconstitution? In other words, are riot these informed, non-bureaucratic dynamic and open communities that comprise the 'parallel polis' a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful 'post-democratic' political structures that might become the foundation of a better society? (Havel, 1978: 120-121). Fundamental here, I think, is Havel's call to responsibility and struggle against the prevailing political order when it undermines quality of life, perpetuates injustice, or the denial or compromising of democratic norms. In a similar vein Carla Emery puts it eloquently, 'People have to choose what they're going to struggle for. Life is always a struggle, whether or not you're struggling for anything worthwhile, so it might as well be for something worthwhile' (in Astyk, 2008: 204). Or to phrase it differently: get busy living or get busy dying. WHAT IF WE ARE THE PEOPLE WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR? 289 As argued throughout this book in facing the many challenges of the present time-climate change, peak oil, diminishing forms of social well-being, financial and economic crises, and the ecological liquidation of the foundations of life on the planet-the most important response needed is one which explicitly focuses on imagination and creativity. As W. B. Yeats (long before Barak Obama used a version of these sentiments) suggested, what is needed is for us 'to seek a remedy ... in audacity of speculation and creation' (Yeats, 1926). While 'another world is possible' it can only be possible if it is imagined, and perhaps one of the most persistent obstacles to the transition away from actually existing unsustainability apart from ignorance of the ecological and human costs of our capitalist-consumer way of life-is the stultifying grip of 'business as usual' and its limited and limiting horizons of possible futures for ourselves and our societies. In many respects, our collective inability to respond to 'limits to growth' is in large measure due to limits of creativity and imagination. We cannot, or find it very difficult, to imagine a different social order. For Richard Norgaard the answer to our present ecological predicament is as difficult to achieve as it is simple to express, 'We need a new life story. We need an overarching story that respects a diversity of life stories. Living the story of economic development is destroying humanity and nature and a good many other species along with us. We need a master story that puts our hope, compassion, brains, sociality, and diversity to new and constructive ends' (in Deb, 2009: xxiii). And if we follow Havel, it may be that this new story we need is already here, in the same sense that the eco-feminist Mary Mellor (Mellor, 1995) has persuasively written that the sustainable world, society, or mode of being is not some utopian 'there' but an already living, embodied, engendered 'here' in the reproductive and exploited labour of women, in the 'core' economic activity of caring and sharing and ... flourishing. The Polanyi-inspired attempt to 'reembed' the economy within human social relations can be viewed as a defensive move to protect community from both the formal market and the state. Such protective measures can include the expansion of the social economy, or the efforts by the Transition movement in seeking to disrupt, slow down and re-conceptualize the economy. Such reactive measures could all be thought of as seeking to defend and extend those sustainable practices in the here and now, that is, that already exist within 'actually existing unsustainability'. This is particularly the case with reproductive labour as outlined in this book. Actually it is the neoclassical economic view that is 'utopian' in promoting a fictitious and dangerous imaginary of human life lived at 365/24/7 speed and a way of life completely out of synch not just with human biological but also ecological time. And, it must be recalled, 'Mother Nature does not do bailouts'. As Havel suggests, 'For the real question is whether the "brighter future" is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?' (Havel, 1978: 122). Now there's an intriguing set of concluding thoughts-what if not only the resilient, sustainable way of life is 'always already here', present, and available to us if we so choose-but also if it is indeed the case that 'we are the people we've been waiting for?' And what of the hard greens, where do they and their analysis fit within this book? For it is fair to say that they have been shadowing the book. While I discussed them briefly in the Introduction and made some casual comments about them and their diverse positions and prescriptions throughout, I have not met them head on as it were. So it would be fitting for me to offer my thoughts on the place and status of the hard green position. Are they basically correct? Do I agree with them (from the green republican acceptance of the time-bound and contingent character of all human creations, including civilizations and societies) that they have identified the beginning of the end of our existing capitalist, carbon-based civilization and societies? While I certainly admire their brutal honesty, I baulk at their jump from crisis to collapse, and then from collapse to violence and 'de-civilization' (Elias, 2000; Hine and Kingsnorth, 2010). Their political analyses echo (almost always unwittingly) the eco-authoritarian position of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The hard-green view in being so pessimistic means its pessimism precludes a view of politics as the 'art of the possible', and a view of the inevitability of collapse can and does lead to de-politicized or even anti-political responses. But surely the challenge, as outlined by the green republican project of this book, is to embrace new intelligibilities, ways of being, having, and doing, new identities and subjectivities, and new arts of life, all must be part of a project to avert collapse?2 This is, as I see it, the point of green republican politics as a form of 'anticipatory politics' to challenge the rule of the 'nee-liberal vulgate'. At this present moment, on the cusp of this 'Great Transition', what greens need is to cultivate critical awareness, opposition, and dissent, to have the courage of their convictions in analysing and resisting actually existing unsustainability, and outlining their vision for the transition to a better society, in part to engage, inform, and prepare citizens for the coming changes that will characterize the decades ahead. Greens need to be realistic and cleareyed in their disavowal of naive utopianism, but convinced of its basic conviction that another world is possible, necessary, and desirable. And while on quiet mornings we may hear it coming, its arrival, like all major transitions in human history, will demand political struggle. The battle for hearts, minds, and hands has begun, and my writing this book and you reading it are constitutive of that struggle.

AT: CTP/Spillover

Small momentum and change in language is the basis for large-scales social change.

Princen 10—Thomas Princen School of Natural Resources and Environment @ Michigan Treading Softly p. 50-53

A Crisis People won't change until there's a crisis. They're stuck in their ways. They're comfortable. They won't do anything, even with daily reports of melting ice and starving children. That's just human nature-selfish, greedy, short-sighted. It is true that when there is a crisis people come together. When the town floods, everyone pitches in to stack sandbags and evacuate the elderly. But to conclude that people will only act when there's a crisis defies logic-and a whole lot of history. I will give an example of such history, but first let's put the general point right up front: Fundamental social change starts with (1) a few committed people, (2) new understandings, and (3) small acts that eventually confront the structures of power. And for motive, fundamental change draws on people's basic need for meaning, engagement, and fairness. Take slavery. For the great bulk of human history, across cultures, from India and China to Europe and the Americas and Africa, slavery was a perfectly normal practice. Indeed, it was an institution-a set of widely shared norms and principles, rules and procedures. And what people back then shared-rulers and commoners alike-was the idea that some people, by virtue of birth or race or nationality, would be slaves. That's just the way it was, and everyone knew it; it was beyond questioning. Always has been, always will be. Then a dozen shopkeepers and clergy got together in a print shop in London in 1787 and said, in effect, no more; this is wrong; it must stop. So they set about gathering information on what was really happening on slave ships and on the plantations. They distributed brochures and pamphlets and lectured across England and abroad. And they introduced legislation in Parliament and lobbied parliamentarians. Maybe most significantly, they systematically undercut arguments defending the normalcy and necessity of slavery-the economic arguments (the British Empire and all who depend on it around the world will collapse), the political arguments (this is just an attempt by the opposition party to take control of the government), the moral arguments (the slaves rejoice when they leave the Dark Continent).1 Today we take the abolition of slavery to be perfectly reasonable, moral, inevitable. But notice that for the early abolitionists, there was no crisis: They were quite comfortable. Their country was riding high. Life was good. Those shopkeepers and clergy and a few noblemen simply concluded that slavery was wrong. Others might have foreseen slavery's demise due to economic trends or movements for democracy and individual rights. But for much of this early history of abolition, there was no crisis. Instead, a few people acquired new understandings, took a strong moral stance, and confronted power. They took on one of the most pervasive, most accepted, most "necessary" structures in human history-slavery. And they did not back down when defenders ridiculed them, when some claimed that the economy would collapse and people would be thrown out of work, that the empire required it. The abolitionists spoke truth to power. And the truth was that Britain and the world as a whole would do quite well without slavery. In fact, if one accepts the maxim that slavery degrades slave and slaveholder alike, Britain and the world did better without slavery. But notice: there was nothing normal or inevitable, and certainly nothing moral, about slavery. Today there is nothing normal or inevitable about unending growth on a finite planet. There is nothing normal or inevitable about 10 percent of the world's population holding 85 percent of global household wealth 2 while a billion or two struggle day to day just to survive. There is nothing normal or inevitable about knowingly degrading ecosystems, permanently extinguishing entire species, causing irreversible changes in climate, or dislocating millions of people by failing to stop the resultant rise in sea levels. And there is nothing normal or inevitable about justifying all this in the name of "economic growth" or "progress" or "consumer demand" or "efficiency" or "jobs" or "return on investment" or "global competitiveness." So yes, many people in advanced industrial countries are comfortable. They appear unlikely to change until a crisis affects them personally. They have done well by the current structures, economic and political. But just a bit of reflection, a glimmer of foresight, a glance at the biophysical trends, not to mention at financial trends where mounting debt threatens the entire confidence game, and the path's end point is clear: collapse. All the market forces and technological wizardry will not change some basic facts: we have one planet, one set of ecosystems, and one hydrologic cycle; and each of us has just one brain, one body, and one lifetime. Limits are real. If the current system cannot continue on one planet, just as slavery could not continue with trends in democracy and free markets and religious rights and human rights, then the action is with those with a bit of foresight, those with a vision of a different way of living on the planet, of living with nature, not against nature. The action is with those who can accept limits indeed, embrace them. So readers of this book, I assume, may be comfortable, but they are not content. They are looking ahead, they are concerned, they are looking for change. And they know that a fundamental shift is inevitable. They know that all systems, from organisms to ecosystems, from household economies to global economies, have limits. They are the ones preparing the way, laying the groundwork, devising the principles and, yes, the technologies and markets that will allow everyone to live within immutable ecological constraints. They are the ones making sure the sand and the sandbags are on hand so that others can pitch in when the time comes. They are the ones building the compost piles, collecting the information, experimenting with new forms of community, speaking truth to power. The others, the people who need a crisis to act, are not the leaders. They will eventually act, to be sure; they will act when personally threatened. But they will need guidance. They will need role models, concrete examples, opportunities to engage and do good as they protect themselves. And they will need enabling language. That's where the real leaders come in. And now is the time to prepare-not when the crisis hits home and hits hard. So make no mistake, some people will act when there's a crisis. But many others will be getting ready now. These are the concerned and committed, the "moral entrepreneurs" who are already discovering that acting now is very satisfying, very engaging. It's hard, yet at times quite simple.

AT: Coal DA

Replacing every coal plant isn’t enough to solve—neither is the aff.

Rapier 12—Chief Technology Officer at Merica International—a Renewable Energy Company, Master’s in Chemical Engineering from Texas AandM University  March 15, 2012, Robert Rapier, Study: Eliminating Coal-Fired Power is Worth 0.2 Degrees in 100 Years, http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/03/05/study-eliminating-coal-fired-power-is-worth-0-2-degrees-in-100-years/

Who could have dreamed solving climate change would be so easy? A new paper in Environmental Research Letters called “Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity” concludes that replacement of all of the world’s currently operating coal-fired power plants — which produce about 40% of the world’s electricity — and replacing them with renewable energy would have an impact of 0.2 degrees Celsius 100 years from now.

Cherry-Picking Conclusions According to One’s Viewpoint

However, a number of climate change websites took away a very different message than I took away from the paper. Here is Joe Romm’s view:

Bombshell: You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power

I seem to recall another “bombshell” that he recently reported upon on the same theme: Natural Gas Bombshell: Switching From Coal to Gas Increases Warming for Decades, Has Minimal Benefit Even in 2100. I debunked that by showing that in that particular study, every possible alternative — including wind power, solar power, and even simply shutting down all of the coal plants — was projected to increase global warming in the short term: BOMBSHELL: Solar and Wind Power Would Speed Up, Not Reduce, Global Warming.

But Joe is back with the hyperbolic titles and exaggerations (which I get into below), and he missed the biggest story in the paper.

Coal and Sunlight-Reflecting Pollutants

The subject of Romm’s earlier “natural gas bombshell” was a paper written by Tom Wigley that concluded that shutting down coal-fired power plants would cause the global temperature to increase in the short term because of the loss of sunlight-reflecting pollutants.

In that particular paper, Dr. Wigley modeled what would happen if coal-fired power was replaced with natural gas. He did indeed project short-term warming in that scenario, yet it was a result of the air becoming cleaner and allowing sunlight through as the coal was phased out. Thus, the media really got that story wrong, which was not about a deficiency of natural gas, but rather about the peculiarity of burning coal — that the particulate emissions reflect sunlight. Those who fixated on natural gas as the culprit could have written the same story about solar power — which the study’s author confirmed for me. Hence, I made that my “Bombshell” to illustrate the point.

However, that particular study didn’t actually model the temperature impact of shutting down coal plants and replacing them with anything other than natural gas. So, I posed the following question to Dr. Wigley:

What does the graph look like in 2100 if all coal-fired plants were replaced with zero emission sources (as the idealized study)? I am just wondering what the potential actually is. Are we talking about 1 or 2 degrees lower? I just have no idea of the relative context.

We had several email exchanges over his paper, and he said that my questions were intriguing and he would look into them. I never heard back from him on that, but this new paper answers the question.

Shuttering All the World’s Coal Plants Wouldn’t Do Much

The authors of this newest study modeled the replacement of coal-fired power plants with either natural gas, coal with carbon capture and storage, hydropower, solar PV, solar thermal, wind power, or nuclear power.  You can see from Joe Romm’s headline how the story is being spun, but let’s break it down in a more objective fashion.

The following graphic from the paper tells the story. Pay particular attention to the temperature scale.

The graphic indicates — as Tom Wigley’s previous paper indicated but which was only reported relative to natural gas — that in every single case, it doesn’t matter what coal-fired power plants are replaced with, the temperature is projected to increase for almost the next 40 years. This is true even in the baseline “Conservation” case, which involves merely idling the coal-fired plants and not replacing them with anything.

The paper projects that if coal-fired power plants continue to operate, the expected temperature rise relative to the baseline (i.e., relative to the expected temperature increase from other sources) in 50 years is 0.15 degrees C, and in 100 years is about 0.33 degrees C. If coal is phased out and replaced with natural gas, the relative 50 and 100 year temperature rise is projected to be 0.14 degrees C and 0.24 degrees C, respectively. So the paper shows slightly less warming when natural gas is used, which Climate Progress Tweeted as “Switch from coal to natural gas would have zero effect on global temperatures by 2100” and included a link to Joe’s “bombshell.” That is obviously an exaggeration, as the graphic clearly shows that the effect is not zero. If it was, the natural gas line would overlay the coal line.

Shocking Implications

One shocking implication from the paper was the projection that hydropower would be worse than coal for the next 60 years. The study’s authors cited methane emissions from organic matter buried under water as the reason for this apparent anomaly. But that’s not the really shocking thing about the study for me.

The most shocking conclusion was the magnitude of the numbers we are talking about. Even if you could in theory shut down all of the coal-fired power plants in the world and replace them with wind, solar, and hydropower — in 50 years the projected temperature is only one-twentieth of a degree C cooler than the base case of continuing to use coal. In 100 years, if I could replace all global coal-fired power plants with firm, renewable power — the temperature is only projected to be about 0.2 degrees cooler than under the coal base case. And the way this is being spun is that the 0.09 degree reduction from switching to natural gas is equivalent to an effect of “zero”, but the 0.2 degree reduction in hypothetically replacing everything with wind and solar power 100 years from now is significant. About the natural gas case, Romm literally said the 0.09 degree lower temperature in switching to natural gas means that “natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere”, but the 0.2 degree lower temperature in switching to renewables is “the world’s only plausible hope to avert catastrophic temperature rise.”

Nuclear and Natural Gas to the Rescue — But Most Environmentalists Hate Them

A big irony here is that there are only two power sources that are today capable of achieving the study’s conclusion that we must rapidly replace coal-fired power plants: Nuclear power and natural gas. If people really believe that we must urgently address this issue — and they don’t believe that the change from going to natural gas is enough — that leaves nuclear power as the only option capable of achieving a rapid replacement.

Bear in mind that this is for a global replacement of coal — most of which is used in Asia. Good luck trying to sell China and India on a 0.2 degree temperature difference in 100 years if they quickly abandon their coal-fired power plants and replace them with wind power.

Conclusion: Study is a Major Downer for Activists Battling Climate Change

To be honest, if I was devoting my life to fighting against the threat of climate change, this would be one of the most depressing papers I have ever read. If we could convince everyone in the world to shut down their coal-fired power plants — which we can’t — and replace them with renewable power — which isn’t available in quantities sufficient to replace coal-fired power — then by the end of my life there would still be no statistically significant temperature change to even be able to tell if my life’s work was successful.

But let’s be realistic, shall we? The people who are concerned about global warming have dug in their heels over natural gas, and they are generally opposed to nuclear power. Because of the sheer impossibility that we will rapidly replace coal with wind and solar power (especially since “we” is the world), then we will in all likelihood be left with the status quo. As I have said before, emissions are much higher in Asia Pacific than they are in the U.S. and Europe combined, and they are rising rapidly. Unless we can figure out a way to convince them to develop without fossil fuels — something no country has done — then global carbon emissions will continue to rise. This is why — even though I accept the science behind climate change — it isn’ t my focus. I just don’t see how the West can possibly do anything about it.

AT: Alt Links to Tech Good DA

Social critique of consumption creates genuine innovation.  Focus on technological growth undermines creativity.

Barry 12—John Barry, Reader Politics @ Queen’s University (Belfast) The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability p. 168-169

Others, such as Alastair Macintyre have also noted some psychological cum ethical impacts of economic growth, particularly in relation to the types of identities, subjectivities, and character traits it requires and calls forth. According to Macintyre, 'modern societies recognize that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensable to continuous and limitless economic growth, and one of their central beliefs is that continuous and limitless economic growth is a fundamental good. That a systematically lower standard of living ought to be preferred to a systematically higher standard of living is a thought incompatible with either the economics or the politics of peculiarly modem societies' (Macintyre, 1988: 112; emphasis added). This is an obvious but nonetheless important point. Namely, that a post-growth economy and society calls for 'non-acquisitive' identities and interests, or at least identities and interests that are not orientated towards orthodox economic growth and associated practices of passive consumerism. Of course there are those for whom economic insecurity is a positive and indeed necessary feature of modern capitalism. Schumpeter, for example, famously noted capitalism's 'creative destruction' by which he meant that, 'This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in' (Schumpeter, 1975: 82). But as the Foucauldian analysis in the last chapter suggested, this risk-taking is no longer limited to the 'entrepreneur' but is now a feature of every neo-liberal subject in contemporary capitalist societies (Mellor, 2010). For Schumpeter, and indeed other mainstream economists, a key feature of capitalism's productive dynamism is its inherent instability. Its very capacity to generate insecurity is a way of spurring innovation and entrepreneurialism; all with the aim, of course, of increasing production and consumption, profitability and therefore economic growth. Therefore, arguments for economic security run counter to this vision, both in questioning the means (creative destruction and manufactured and structurally maintained insecurity) and the ends (orthodox economic growth as measured by GDP). However, this does not necessarily mean (as critics are wont to point out) that a focus on economic security as a main objective of macroeconomic policy means an end to entrepreneurialism or innovation. It is a fair comment to make, and one any alternative to our current economic growth-focused model needs to take seriously. That is, how to ensure that stagnation and regress will not be the outcome of a post-growth economy. However, we have reasons for thinking that development 'comes from innovation, from consuming different things, rather than more of the same things' (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009: 221). And once one begins to free up key economic goals-such as 'innovation' from its technological-economic straightjacket, 'growth' from its reduction to material wealth or capital accumulation, 'work' from being identified solely with formally paid 'employment' and so on-there is reason to suppose that more, not less, innovation and creativity and innovation beyond technological or institutional spheres, will be the result of living in such a society, rather than stagnation or regress. In fact, such forms of innovation and creativity are necessary features and therefore 'required' for low-carbon, high well-being lives and communities, and not some 'added extra'. And they can be seen not only as forms of social innovation (Scott-Cato and Hillier, 2010) but can also take individual forms (Doran, 2010; Alexander, 2011).

2NC Climate Links

Universal framing of climate change eliminates political response in favor technological management. Their framing prevents changes in distribution and consumption required to cope with climate change.

Swyngedouw 10—Erik Swyngedouw, Geography @ Manchester “Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change” Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2-3) p. 216-219

The Desire for the Apocalypse and the Fetishization of CO2 It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. (Jameson, 2003: 73) We shall start from the attractions of the apocalyptic imaginaries that infuse the climate change debate and through which much of the public concern with the climate change argument is sustained. The distinct millennialist discourse around the climate has co-produced a widespread consensus that the earth and many of its component parts are in an ecological bind that may short-circuit human and non-human life in the not too distant future if urgent and immediate action to retrofit nature to a more benign equilibrium is postponed for much longer. Irrespective of the particular views of Nature held by different individuals and social groups, consensus has emerged over the seriousness of the environmental condition and the precariousness of our socio-ecological balance (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). BP has rebranded itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ to certify its environmental credentials, Shell plays a more eco-sensitive tune, eco-activists of various political or ideological stripes and colours engage in direct action in the name of saving the planet, New Age post-materialists join the chorus that laments the irreversible decline of ecological amenities, eminent scientists enter the public domain to warn of pending ecological catastrophe, politicians try to outmanoeuvre each other in brandishing the ecological banner, and a wide range of policy initiatives and practices, performed under the motif of ‘sustainability’, are discussed, conceived and implemented at all geographical scales. Al Gore’s evangelical film An Inconvenient Truth won him the Nobel Peace price, surely one of the most telling illustrations of how eco - logical matters are elevated to the terrain of a global humanitarian cause (see also Giddens, 2009). While there is certainly no agreement on what exactly Nature is and how to relate to it, there is a virtually unchallenged consensus over the need to be more ‘environmentally’ sustainable if disaster is to be avoided; a climatic sustainability that centres around stabilizing the CO2 content in the atmosphere (Boykoff et al., forthcoming). This consensual framing is itself sustained by a particular scientific discourse.1 The complex translation and articulation between what Bruno Latour (2004) would call matters of fact versus matters of concern has been thoroughly short-circuited. The changing atmospheric composition, marked by increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is largely caused by anthropogenic activity, primarily (although not exclusively) as a result of the burning of fossilized or captured CO2 (in the form of oil, gas, coal, wood) and the disappearance of CO2 sinks and their associated capture processes (through deforestation for example). These undisputed matters of fact are, without proper political intermediation, translated into matters of concern. The latter, of course, are eminently political in nature. Yet, in the climate change debate, the political nature of matters of concern is disavowed to the extent that the facts in themselves are elevated, through a short-circuiting procedure, on to the terrain of the political, where climate change is framed as a global humanitarian cause. The matters of concern are thereby relegated to a terrain beyond dispute, to one that does not permit dissensus or disagreement. Scientific expertise becomes the foundation and guarantee for properly constituted politics/ policies. In this consensual setting, environmental problems are generally staged as universally threatening to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature termination of civilization as we know it and sustained by what Mike Davis (1999) aptly called ‘ecologies of fear’. The discursive matrix through which the contemporary meaning of the environmental condition is woven is one quilted systematically by the continuous invocation of fear and danger, the spectre of ecological annihilation or at least seriously distressed socio-ecological conditions for many people in the near future. ‘Fear’ is indeed the crucial node through which much of the current environmental narrative is woven, and continues to feed the concern with ‘sustainability’. This cultivation of ‘ecologies of fear’, in turn, is sustained in part by a particular set of phantasmagorical imaginaries (Katz, 1995). The apocalyptic imaginary of a world without water, or at least with endemic water shortages, ravaged by hurricanes whose intensity is amplified by climate change; pictures of scorched land as global warming shifts the geopluvial regime and the spatial variability of droughts and floods; icebergs that disintegrate around the poles as ice melts into the sea, causing the sea level to rise; alarming reductions in biodiversity as species disappear or are threatened by extinction; post-apocalyptic images of waste lands reminiscent of the silent ecologies of the region around Chernobyl; the threat of peak-oil that, without proper management and technologically innovative foresight, would return society to a Stone Age existence; the devastation of wildfires, tsunamis, diseases like SARS, avian flu, Ebola or HIV, all these imaginaries of a Nature out of synch, destabilized, threatening and out ofcontrol are paralleled by equally disturbing images of a society that continues piling up waste, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, deforesting the earth, etc. This is a process that Neil Smith appropriately refers to as ‘nature-washing’ (2008: 245). In sum, our ecological predicament is sutured by millennial fears, sustained by an apocalyptic rhetoric and representational tactics, and by a series of performative gestures signalling an overwhelming, mind-boggling danger, one that threatens to undermine the very coordinates of our everyday lives and routines, and may shake up the foundations of all we took and take for granted. Table 1 exemplifies some of the imaginaries that are continuously invoked. Of course, apocalyptic imaginaries have been around for a long time as an integral part of Western thought, first of Christianity and later emerging as the underbelly of fast-forwarding technological modernization and its associated doomsday thinkers. However, present-day millennialism preaches an apocalypse without the promise of redemption. Saint John’s biblical apocalypse, for example, found its redemption in God’s infinite love. The proliferation of modern apocalyptic imaginaries also held up the promise of redemption: the horsemen of the apocalypse, whether riding under the name of the proletariat, technology or capitalism, could be tamed with appropriate political and social revolutions. As Martin Jay argued, while traditional apocalyptic versions still held out the hope for redemption, for a ‘second coming’, for the promise of a ‘new dawn’, environmental apocalyptic imaginaries are ‘leaving behind any hope of rebirth or renewal . . . in favour of an unquenchable fascination with being on the verge of an end that never comes’ (1994: 33). The emergence of newforms of millennialism around the environmental nexus is of a particular kind that promises neither redemption nor realization. As Klaus Scherpe (1987) insists, this is not simply apocalypse now, but apocalypse forever. It is a vision that does not suggest, prefigure or expect the necessity of an event that will alter history. Derrida (referring to the nuclear threat in the 1980s) sums this up most succinctly: . . . here, precisely, is announced—as promise or as threat—an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation . . . without message and without destination, without sender and without decidable addressee . . . an apocalypse beyond good and evil. (1992: 66) The environmentally apocalyptic future, forever postponed, neither promises redemption nor does it possess a name; it is pure negativity. The attractions of such an apocalyptic imaginary are related to a series of characteristics. In contrast to standard left arguments about the apocalyptic dynamics of unbridled capitalism (Mike Davis is a great exemplar of this; see Davis, 1999, 2002), I would argue that sustaining and nurturing apocalyptic imaginaries is an integral and vital part of the new cultural politics of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) for which the management of fear is a central leitmotif (Badiou, 2007). At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms. As such, apocalyptic imaginations are decidedly populist and foreclose a proper political framing. Or, in other words, the presentation of climate change as a global humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another, one that is not articulated with specific political programs or socio-ecological project or revolutions. It is this sort of mobilization without political issue that led Alain Badiou to state that ‘ecology is the new opium for the masses’, whereby the nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations (Badiou, 2008; Žižek, 2008). We have to make sure that radical techno-managerial and socio-cultural transformations, organized within the horizons of a capitalist order that is beyond dispute, are initiated that retrofit the climate (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). In other words, we have to change radically, but within the contours of the existing state of the situation—‘the partition of the sensible’ in Rancière’s (1998) words, so that nothing really has to change.

AT: Specific Tech (Nuclear)

Appeal to specific nuclear technology magnifies the problem of authoritarian expertise.  They depoliticize social choice about the purpose of technology.

Wynne 11—Brian Wynne Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change @ Lancaster (UK) Rationality and Ritual 2^nd Edition p. 8-11 Gender Paraphrased

Such detachment of ambitious technological commitment from organized fantasy has to be a hope; but this hope also has to be interrogated, cold-bloodedly, carefully, and openly. As I tried to assert in this book, nuclear proponents including its scientists belied their own claims to objective hard-factual discipline, with their intense and unbridled emotional commitments clearly evident. These scientistic emotions (and their denial) manifested profound insecurities on the part of their agents, combined with an effective assumption of almost superhuman powers. Thus the mutual identification and reinforcement of nuclear technology with a culture of exaggeration is no less real and no less dangerous just because other technologies have also suffered from similar such idolatry in the past (Ezrahi, 1990) as well as since the 1980s. Although it was Lewis Strauss - a non-scientist head of the scientific body for both weapons and civil nuclear power, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) - who voiced in 1954 the infamous promise that his generation's children would enjoy 'electrical energy too cheap to meter' (Strauss, 1954; Weart, 1988, p166), what is notable is the refusal of any nuclear expert to refute such fatuous promises made in the public name of their science (Laurence, 1959, p251).10 If science claims the credit for the putative benefits from such technologies, as it does, then it cannot easily distance itself from the related discredits - nor from the arguments over which is which. Paradoxically, as nuclear energy prepares to return, society still has not come to terms with the cultural significance of its mass-destructive and apocalyptic military origins and consequences. With the failure of the Atoms for Peace programme and its global institutional UN 'safeguards' supposedly to arrest nuclear weapons proliferation (granted that it must have slowed it down), the systematic and sustained social unrealism of this 60-year commitment cannot but encourage a continuing sense of public unease and distrust of nuclear energy technologies, even if the reprocessing option is forestalled. The imagery of Figure 1 is referred to in Chapter 2 of the original book, but was not printed there. Looking back now, I realize I did not do justice to the issues it raised. Thanks to various theoretical, technological and public developments since then, it deserves fuller treatment now. The image is from a supplement on 'The Atomic Age' published by the Financial Times in 1956, at the birth of both the UK civil nuclear power programme (claimed to be the first in the world) and the UN global Atoms for Peace programme.11 This 50-page publication celebrated the Queen's forthcoming opening of the Calder Hall (Windscale) nuclear electricity (and weapons plutonium) reactors.12 This imagery did not just project nuclear technology as human perfection. It portrayed much more about the nuclear imagination and its mode of public communication and self-promotion, thus of nuclear technology's material social being. This includes its normative characterization (and performance, as explained below) of 'the public' which it imagined as part of the nuclear era. It emphasized the religious forces and feelings animating this science-inspired technology, the epitome of modern scientific rationality as public authority. The technology is shown not just as precise, pure, pristine and clinical. It is also hovering in its own superhuman realm, above the Earth and beyond mere human life, even surrounded by a glowing celestial halo. The text indicates an imagined (and desired) awestruck public: 'Millions of people 'mankind' stand amazed at the prospect of heat light and power from a source that cannot even be seen.' There is not the slightest sense of a technology and its embodied science that envisages any hint of public engagement: indeed quite the opposite, only distant awe, exclusion and admiration. These extra-terrestrial, extra-social experts 'know best', not only about nuclear power, but about what is best for 'humankind'. Public exclusion, subordination, passivization and alienation are here actively cultivated, through symbolic action. The Windscale book is about how this same kind of symbolic imagination of 'the public' was, through a participatory public inquiry, its report and parliamentary and media uptake, enacted into material performance in later policy culture and commitments. These processes, their forms of reason and discourse, can be said to have performed a particular imagination of their public, and encouraged the material enactment of that imagination into society. If we also refer back here to the practices of pollution management at the Windscale-Sellafield site, as reflected in Dunster's 1958 description earlier of how routine marine radioactive discharges were set, we can see in this account, and in the ensuing environmental contamination and human exposures from this, a performance of nuclear technology's imagined publics. We can see from not only the typical symbolism but also in corresponding material practices that as democratic participants, worthy of respectful recognition and to be given standing as part of the moral --community in which nuclear technology exists, effectively there is no public. It has been one of the most significant shifts of collective understanding amongst many - contributed by the late twentieth century social sciences and humanities, that symbolic actions carry corresponding changes in material social relations. Thus the normatively imposed social relations of technoscience here are not just symbolically projected, but also materially performed. In addition to the instances noted above, a further routinized example of the latter was the sustained extreme secrecy and misinformation that was practised by the UK nuclear authorities behind the scenes of this 1956 flood of positive publicity, and in imposed assumptions-in-practice about what people's concerns, needs and capacities are and should be. These were in no need of co ll ective negotiation; they were subsumed into the dominant assumed ontology. Inquiry inspector Mr Justice Parker's later empiricist framing and interpretation of the Windscale inquiry's conflicting ontological commitments, as these were embodied in the irreconcilable arguments of the parties but represented by him as measurable - and measured by him - against an empirically discoverable standard, did the same. Despite all the noise and fury of public debate and controversy, his discrete translations of expressed public concerns into his own terms were not subjected to any direct accountable scrutiny. Of course, his rational arguments in favour of THORP's approval were, but that is not what I am referring to here. This book still stands as a sole, modest and utterly marginal witness to this.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Proliferation constructs the world in imperialist and Orientalist terms—this condemns the global South to violent intervention and discipline.  The 1AC is part of a process of knowledge-creation that restricts our understanding of proliferation to Western ideology.

Behnke 2k—Andreas Behnke, Prof. of Poli Sci @ Towson January, International Journal of Peace Studies 5.1, “Inscriptions of the Imperial Order,” http://www.gmu.edu/academic/ijps/vol5_1/behnke.htm

David Mutimer (1997) has argued that the use of the metaphor 'proliferation' carries certain entailments. That is to say, it structures our understanding and handling of the problem. In particular, he refers to the "image of a spread outward from a point or source", and the "technological bias" introduced in the discourse (Mutimer 1997:201-2). As concerns the first point, 'proliferation' presupposes a center at which WMD are to be held and controlled, and from which these weapons disseminate into the body of the international society. To the extent that this process gets out of the center's control, certain measures have to be taken to 'suffocate', limit, or curb the 'spread' of these weapons. As concerns the second point, Mutimer (1997:203) points out the peculiar agency implied in the concept: "Notice that the weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by an external agent of some form - say, a human being or political institution". The fact that a large number of these weapons were actually 'spread' by Western states is consequently hidden through this discursive structure. These points are also relevant for the Mediterranean Initiative. We can add a third entailment to the list which appears through a critical reading of the NATO/RAND narrative. As the RAND authors (1998:15) observe, "The mere existence of ballistic missile technology with ranges in excess of 1,000 km on world markets and available to proliferators around the Mediterranean basin would not necessarily pose serious strategic dilemmas for Europe."

In fact, we might even agree with the neorealist proposition that 'more might be better', above all in terms of nuclear weapons. This is certainly the preferred solution of John Mearsheimer (1990) for the stabilization of European political order after the end of the cold war. After all, conventional wisdom has it that nuclear weapons and the threat of mutually assured destruction preserved stability and peace during the Cold War. The RAND authors, however, fail to grasp the irony in their identification of WMD proliferation, which ends up denying this central tenet of cold war strategy. According to them, "the WMD and ballistic missile threat will acquire more serious dimensions where it is coupled with a proliferator's revolutionary orientation. Today, this is the case with regard to Iran, Iraq, Libya, and arguably Syria" (RAND, 1998:16).

What preserved the peace during the cold war -- mutual deterrence -- is now re-written as a strategic problem:

As a result of proliferation trends, Europe will be increasingly exposed to the retaliatory consequences of U.S. and European actions around the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, including the Balkans. ... As a political threat and a weapon of terror capable of influencing the NATO decisionmaking during a crisis, their significance of conventionally armed ballistic missiles could be considerable (RAND, 1998:16).

Two implications of these arguments deserve elaboration. First, there is the reversal of the traditional relationship between WMD and rationality. For what makes the presence of WMD in the South so worrisome is the absence of the requirements of reason and rationality. Within NATO's discourse on the South, 'revolutionary orientation' accounts for the undesirability of distributing these weapons to such unfit hands. In order to qualify for their possession, reason and rationality must be present -- as they are obviously assumed to be in the West. The discourse of proliferation consequently produces a third entailment by constructing the relationship between West and South in 'orientalist' terms. In this rendition, the South becomes the quintessential antithesis of the West, the site of irrationality, passion, and terror (Said, 1995). Within this site, different rules apply, which are not necessarily subject to Western ideals of enlightened reason. 'Proliferation' articulates a hierarchical structure in global politics, with the West as the privileged site of from which to surveil, control, and engage the rest of the world.

This privilege is further dramatized in the above complaint about the possibility of retaliation. For the South to achieve the possibility of influencing NATO decisionmaking is to violate the epistemic sovereignty of the West. 'U.S. and European actions' and interventions have to be unrestrained in order to constitute proper crisis management. NATO demands a docile subjectivity and accessible territory from the South, the latter's identity cannot be ascertained against the West. Its arms have to be surrendered, its retaliatory capabilities to be revoked.

'Information' is the third mode besides 'Securitization' and 'Proliferation' within which we can discern the subjugation of the South to the strategic Western gaze. A central purpose of the Mediterranean Initiative/Dialogue is to improve 'mutual understanding' and to 'dispel some of the misperceptions and apprehensions that exist, on both sides of the Mediterranean' (Solana, 1997a:5). And both the RAND Corporation and NATO put some emphasis on public information and perception. Yet the structure of this relationship proves to be unbalanced and virtually unilateral. As mentioned above, for NATO, the prime task is above all the "further refinement of its definition of security" (de Santis, 1998). The general identity of the South as a site of danger and insecurity is consequently never in question. Western perceptions are never problematized. Knowledge of the South is, it appears, a matter of matching more and better information with proper conceptual tools.

On the other hand, (mis)perceptions take the place of knowledge in the South.

NATO is perceived widely as a Cold War institution searching for a new enemy. That is why the best course to change the perception of NATO in these countries is to focus more on "soft" security, building mutual understanding and confidence before engaging in "hard" military cooperation. Measures should be developed with the aim of promoting transparency and defusing threat perceptions, and promoting a better understanding of NATO's policies and objectives (de Santis, 1998:34).

To interpret political misgivings about NATO and its post-cold war diplomacy as 'misperceptions' which can be put straight by "educating opinion-makers in the dialogue-countries"(RAND, 1998:75) tends to naturalize and objectify the Western rendition of NATO's identity. The possibility that from the perspective of the 'Southern' countries NATO's political and strategic design might look quite different is lost in this narrative. NATO's identity is decontextualized and objectified, the productive role of different cultural and strategic settings in the establishment of identities and formulation of interests denied. To maintain such a lofty position becomes more difficult if we let the Mediterranean participants voice their concerns openly. Far from being 'misperceptions and misunderstandings', these countries' less than enthusiastic attitudes towards NATO are based on, for instance, the establishment of powerful Western military intervention capabilities off their beaches. Also, NATO's attempts to institutionalize a military cooperation is interpreted as an attempt to gain a strategic foothold in the region in order to monitor the flow of missile technology and the possession of WMD (Selim 1998:12-14). In other words, we encounter rather rational and reasonable security political and strategic concerns. The fact that NATO is unwilling or unable to acknowledge their concerns once again demonstrates the 'imperial' nature of the purported dialogue.

Conclusion: The Imperial Encounter

In her exploration of Western representations of the South, Roxanne Doty (1996:3) describes the relationship between these two subjectivities as an "imperial encounter" which is meant "to convey the idea of asymmetrical encounters in which one entity has been able to construct 'realities' that were taken seriously and acted upon and the other entity has been denied equal degrees or kinds of agency". Her focus is on an aspect of power which has received increasing treatment within critical International Relations (IR) theory during the last years, that is, the power to define and articulate identities and to determine the relations between them.

As was argued above, the Western invention of the South during the cold war can be interpreted as an imperial gesture. The South was rendered into a West-in-the-making, with its own distinguished historical, cultural, and social features reduced to indicators of 'underdevelopment'. Ultimately, the narrative proclaimed, the South would become part of the Western 'Empire', the latter would be able to expand into 'barbaric' areas of the world -- provided it could win the war against Communism.

The end of the cold war saw this 'expansionist' logic give way to a exclusive posture. The relations between the West and the South are no longer mediated through time. Instead, a spatial differentiation now structures the imperial encounter, the South is no longer to be 'developed' and 'Westernized'. It is to be surveilled, controlled and disciplined, its 'spillage' of crisis and instability to be contained.

NATO's Mediterranean Initiative is a cornerstone in this new rendition. For while we so far cannot observe any direct military intervention by the Alliance in the Mediterranean region, NATO's discourse on the South in general, and the Initiative in particular render it accessible and available for such action. Strategic knowledge is produced as an expression of, and in anticipation of, strategic power. The 'self-determination' of NATO as a continuously capable and competent military agent is effected through a discourse that inscribes a particular, securitizing, strategic order upon the South, positing it as a site of danger, irrationality and insecurity against the West. In this context it is interesting to observe the exclusion of states from the Mediterranean Initiative that are not considered to be 'moderate, Western-looking and constructivist' (RAND 1998:57). This differentiation between insiders and outsiders appears to be based on the degree to which the respective countries are willing to subject themselves to the imperial encounter with the West, and to open themselves to the strategic gaze and control of NATO.

The imperial encounter is then made possible and supported by what one may call the Emperor's two bodies. On one hand, the West appears as a cultural identity among others, located in space (North of the Mediterranean) and time (in the post-cold war era). In this sense, the West is the entity that needs to be protected from the dangers and threats which 'spill over' from the South through adequate strategic means.

On the other hand, the West is presented as a 'site of knowledge', as the source or author of the proper and objective 'world-picture' that depicts the realities of post-cold war global politics. In this sense, the West becomes the metaphysical grounds from which knowledge can be gathered and disseminated. And in its different versions -- securitization, proliferation, and information -- this knowledge draws on and reproduces this metaphysics. There are consequently reasons to be skeptical about NATO's ability to conduct a 'dialogue' with an other it is unwilling to listen to.

The nuclear apartheid is a manifestation of racism—ensures genocide and war is inevitable.

Batur 7 Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3

War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not inevitable. This article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and genocide, to examine the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE AGE OF “CULTURE WARS” Racist legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed biological inferiority to assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence, much less equality. The Jim Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and modern racism (Baker 1981; Ansell 1997) with “culture war” as the key to justify difference, hierarchy, and oppression. The ideology of “culture war” is becoming embedded in institutions, defining the workings of organizations, and is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but are not blind to the inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese, or whomever, and “us.” “Us” as a concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a superior value to its institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with “them” will be harmful to its existence (Hunter 1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past century and what has remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to explore societal complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism persists due to a “white racial frame,” defining and maintaining an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 2006: 25). The white racial frame arranges the routine operation of racist institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial oppression and now frames “culture war,” or “clash of civilizations,” to legitimate the racist oppression of domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of “culture war” emerged to define opposing ideas in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the “war on terrorism.” Its discourse and action articulate to flood the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies based on racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering inequality even while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to maintain the structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame, defining the terms of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism (Du Bois 1942; Winant 1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between racist systems of oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create such oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections of “words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts” (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and challenger of the “the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism division of the universe into opposites of good and evil goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes” (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.

The aff’s fantasy of control will only produce a “never-ending war” for security—blowback ensures efforts to create order out of disorder will fail.

Ritchie 11—Nick, PhD, Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies @ University of Bradford, Executive Committee of the British Pugwash Group and the Board of the Nuclear Information Service “Rethinking security: a critical analysis of the Strategic Defence and Security Review” International Affairs Volume 87, Issue 2, Article first published online: 17 MAR 2011

Third, the legitimating narrative of acting as a ‘force for good’ that emerged in the 1998 SDR to justify an expensive, expeditionary, war-fighting military doctrine in the name of ‘enlightened self-interest’ must be scrutinized. But the relationship between the rhetoric and the reality is highly questionable. From a critical perspective it can be argued that successive governments have framed interventionist policy choices as positive, progressive and ‘good’ to generate support for ‘risk transfer’ military operations of choice that are presented as essential to the security of UK citizens but in fact reproduce a state-centric construction of a particular ‘national role’. This reflects Hirshberg’s contention that ‘the maintenance of a positive national self-image is crucial to continued public acquiescence and support for government, and thus to the smooth, on-going functioning of the state’. 86 The notion that Afghanistan is a ‘noble cause’ for the British state reflects a state-centric concern with ideas of status and prestige and the legitimating moral gloss of the ‘force for good’ rhetoric. 87 Furthermore, the rhetoric of ‘enlightened self-interest’ implies that the exercise of UK military force as a ‘force for good’ will lessen security risks to the British state and citizenry by resolving current security threats and pre-empting future risks. But, returning again to Iraq and Afghanistan, we must ask whether sacrificing solders’ lives, killing over 100,000 Iraqi civilians including a disproportionate number of women and children, destroying the immediate human security of several million others through injury, displacement, persecution and trauma, and sparking long-term trends of rising crime rates, property destruction, economic disruption, and deterioration of health-care resources and food production and distribution capabilities, all while providing profits for largely western corporations through arms deals, service contracts and private military contractors, constitutes being a ‘force for good’ when the outcomes of these major military interventions have proven at best indeterminate. 88 The legitimacy of this question is reinforced by Curtis’s analysis of the deadly impact of British foreign policy since the 1950s. Curtis argues that ‘the history of British foreign policy is partly one of complicity in some of the world’s worst horrors … contrary to the extraordinary rhetoric of New Labour leaders and other elites, policies are continuing on this traditional course, systematically making the world more abusive of human rights as well as more unequal and less secure’. 89 Add to this the statistic that the UK was involved in more wars between 1946 and 2003 (21 in total) than any other state, and the ‘force for good’ rationale begins to unravel. 90 Furthermore, the militarized ‘force for good’ narrative encompasses the active defence of the ‘rules-based system’ as a global good. But it is clear that the current ‘rules-based system’ of western-dominated multilateral institutions and processes of global governance does not work for billions of people or for planetary ecological systems. The Human Development Reports produced by the United Nations Development Programme routinely highlight the global political and economic structures and systems that keep hundreds of millions of people poor, starving, jobless, diseased and repressed. 91 A stable ‘rules-based system’ is no doubt in the interests of UK citizens and the interests of global human society. With stability comes predictability, which can minimize uncertainty, risk and insecurity. But there is a growing consensus that long-term stability, particularly the reduction of violent conflict, will require far greater political, economic and environmental equity on a global scale, as advocated in the Department for International Development’s 2009 white paper on Eliminating world poverty. 92 An interventionist, military-oriented, state-centric, global risk management doctrine and the risks it can generate are unlikely to stabilize and transform the rules-based system into a more equitable form. A growing literature now argues that prevailing western approaches to understanding, managing and ameliorating global insecurity and its violent symptoms are inadequate and unsustainable. They are proving, and will continue to prove, increasingly incapable of providing security for both the world’s poor and immiserated, concentrated in the Global South, and the world’s elite of around one billion, mainly located in the North Atlantic community, Australasia and parts of East Asia, which will remain unable to insulate itself from violent responses to pervasive insecurity. 93 This is not to suggest that the UK should not exercise elements of national power to alleviate others’ suffering as a consequence of natural or man-made disasters. Indeed, the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s 2001 ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine sets out clearly the principle of conditional sovereignty and the grounds for legitimate intervention when a state cannot or will not protect its citizens from pervasive and severe harm. 94 More broadly, if we accept that in an increasingly complex, interdependent world the human security of UK citizens enmeshed in global networks of risk and opportunity is intertwined with the human security of others, particularly in conflict-prone regions often characterized by poverty, weak governance and underdevelopment, then actions to improve others’ long-term human security does constitute a form of ‘enlightened self-interest’. But we must question the assumption that war-fighting interventionist missions of choice do, in fact, serve the long-term human security interests of UK citizens as opposed to the interests of the state based on prevailing conceptions of national role. Utility of force Connected to this critique is a reappraisal of the utility of force within the conception of national security as global risk management, on two counts. First, security risks are increasingly likely to arise from a complex mixture of interdependent factors. Environmental, economic, military and political sources of insecurity could include the effects of climate change, mass poverty and economic injustice, global pandemic disease, mass migration and refugee flows, poor governance, weak and failing states, international terrorism and asymmetric warfare, the spread of WMD and advanced conventional military technologies, ethnic and sectarian nationalism, and competition over access to key resources such as oil and water. Future conflicts are therefore likely to be complex and diverse. They are unlikely to be susceptible to purely military solutions, and the use of military force in regional crises will be messy, indeterminate and of limited value and effectiveness. 95 It is not obvious that the armed forces have a significant war-fighting role to play in mitigating these risks, as opposed to supporting police, intelligence and security forces in countering terrorist plots—and possibly launching a limited, precision strike against WMD capabilities in the event of the extreme scenario of robust intelligence that a WMD attack is imminent. In fact, the 2009 National Security Strategy limited the role of the armed forces to ‘defence against direct threats to the UK and its overseas territories’ (which one could qualify as ‘direct violent, or military, threats’) together with a contributory role in ‘tackling threats to our security overseas by helping to address conflict, instability and crises across the globe’. 96 This broad but essentially supportive remit for the military was reinforced in the 2010 National Security Strategy’s catalogue of priority risks. The three-tiered list enumerated 15 risks, which can be reduced to five: terrorism, civil emergencies, international crime, trade disputes and an attack by another state. 97 The role of military force is limited in all of these except the last, which remains by far the least likely. As Jenkins argues, almost none of the above is a threat. They are crimes, catastrophes, or, in the case of being ‘drawn in’ to a foreign conflict, a matter of political choice … as for the threat of conventional attack on the British Isles by another state, we can only ask who? The threat is so negligible as to be insignificant. It is like insuring one’s house for billions of pounds against an asteroid attack. 98 Bob Ainsworth, then Defence Secretary, seemed to grasp this in 2009, arguing that ‘our initial conclusions on the character of warfare should be first that international intervention will be more difficult not less. We will have to consider carefully how to apply military force in pursuit of national security. And second, and related to this, that the timely application of soft power and methods of conflict prevention will be a high priority.’ 99 Yet the government also insists on maintaining an interventionist, expeditionary military doctrine and corresponding capabilities based on a seemingly unquestioned national security role as a ‘force for good’ in global risk management operations. Second, risk management through military intervention in a complex international security environment characterized by asymmetric cultures, actors and distributions of power and knowledge, and interconnections on many levels, can generate significant negative feedback, or ‘blowback’, from unintended outcomes that create more risk. This challenges notions of effective risk management and control through linear change via the exercise of military power. 100 In fact, as Williams argues, the decision to act to mitigate a risk itself becomes risky: in the attempt to maintain control, negative feedback from the effects of a decision ‘inevitably leads to a loss of control’. 101 The danger is that military-based risk management becomes a cyclical process with no end in sight. 102 Rogers, for example, presciently envisaged a post-9/11 ‘never-ending war’ of military-led risk mitigation generating new and potentially more dangerous risks deemed susceptible to further military solutions, and so on. 103 This risk is not limited to distant theatres of conflict, but also applies to the very ‘way of life’ the current militarized risk management doctrine is meant to protect, through the erosion of civil liberties and the securitization of daily life. There is a powerful argument that the exercise of UK military force for optional expeditionary war-fighting operations will be an increasingly dangerous, expensive and ethically dubious doctrine that could generate more, and potentially more lethal, risks than it resolves or contains. Since absolute security cannot be achieved, the value of any potential, discretionary increment in UK security through the exercise of military force must take into account its political, economic and human cost. As Wolfers argues, ‘at a certain point, by something like the economic law of diminishing returns, the gain in security no longer compensates for the added costs of attaining it’, and the exercise of military force becomes ineffective or, worse, wholly counterproductive. 104 After following George W. Bush on a risky adventure into Iraq, the UK must question the effectiveness of a militarized ‘risk transfer’ strategy as the foundation for managing globalized security risks in relation to the long-term human security needs of British citizens.

The alternative is to critique the aff’s discourse.  Rejecting their demand for immediate yes/no policy response is the only way to raise critical ethical questions about the racialized discourse and practice of IR.

Biswas 7—Shampa Biswas, Politics at Whitman “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist” Millennium 36 (1) p. 117-125

The recent resuscitation of the project of Empire should give International Relations scholars particular pause.1 For a discipline long premised on a triumphant Westphalian sovereignty, there should be something remarkable about the ease with which the case for brute force, regime change and empire-building is being formulated in widespread commentary spanning the political spectrum. Writing after the 1991 Gulf War, Edward Said notes the US hesitance to use the word ‘empire’ despite its long imperial history.2 This hesitance too is increasingly under attack as even self-designated liberal commentators such as Michael Ignatieff urge the US to overcome its unease with the ‘e-word’ and selfconsciously don the mantle of imperial power, contravening the limits of sovereign authority and remaking the world in its universalist image of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.3 Rashid Khalidi has argued that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq does indeed mark a new stage in American world hegemony, replacing the indirect and proxy forms of Cold War domination with a regime much more reminiscent of European colonial empires in the Middle East.4 The ease with which a defence of empire has been mounted and a colonial project so unabashedly resurrected makes this a particularly opportune, if not necessary, moment, as scholars of ‘the global’, to take stock of our disciplinary complicities with power, to account for colonialist imaginaries that are lodged at the heart of a discipline ostensibly interested in power but perhaps far too deluded by the formal equality of state sovereignty and overly concerned with security and order.

Perhaps more than any other scholar, Edward Said’s groundbreaking work in Orientalism has argued and demonstrated the long and deep complicity of academic scholarship with colonial domination.5 In addition to spawning whole new areas of scholarship such as postcolonial studies, Said’s writings have had considerable influence in his own discipline of comparative literature but also in such varied disciplines as anthropology, geography and history, all of which have taken serious and sustained stock of their own participation in imperial projects and in fact regrouped around that consciousness in a way that has simply not happened with International Relations.6 It has been 30 years since Stanley Hoffman accused IR of being an ‘American social science’ and noted its too close connections to US foreign policy elites and US preoccupations of the Cold War to be able to make any universal claims,7 yet there seems to be a curious amnesia and lack of curiosity about the political history of the discipline, and in particular its own complicities in the production of empire.8 Through what discourses the imperial gets reproduced, resurrected and re-energised is a question that should be very much at the heart of a discipline whose task it is to examine the contours of global power.

Thinking this failure of IR through some of Edward Said’s critical scholarly work from his long distinguished career as an intellectual and activist, this article is an attempt to politicise and hence render questionable the disciplinary traps that have, ironically, circumscribed the ability of scholars whose very business it is to think about global politics to actually think globally and politically. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I believe, is a certain kind of global sensibility, a critical but sympathetic and felt awareness of an inhabited and cohabited world. Furthermore, it is a profoundly political sensibility whose globalism is predicated on a cognisance of the imperial and a firm non-imperial ethic in its formulation. I make this argument by travelling through a couple of Said’s thematic foci in his enormous corpus of writing. Using a lot of Said’s reflections on the role of public intellectuals, I argue in this article that IR scholars need to develop what I call a ‘global intellectual posture’. In the 1993 Reith Lectures delivered on BBC channels, Said outlines three positions for public intellectuals to assume – as an outsider/exile/marginal, as an ‘amateur’, and as a disturber of the status quo speaking ‘truth to power’ and self-consciously siding with those who are underrepresented and disadvantaged.9 Beginning with a discussion of Said’s critique of ‘professionalism’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ as it applies to International Relations, I first argue the importance, for scholars of global politics, of taking politics seriously. Second, I turn to Said’s comments on the posture of exile and his critique of identity politics, particularly in its nationalist formulations, to ask what it means for students of global politics to take the global seriously. Finally, I attend to some of Said’s comments on humanism and contrapuntality to examine what IR scholars can learn from Said about feeling and thinking globally concretely, thoroughly and carefully.

IR Professionals in an Age of Empire: From ‘International Experts’ to ‘Global Public Intellectuals’

One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been a significant constriction of a democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive curtailment of intellectual and political dissent and a sharp delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of state power. The academy in this context has become a particularly embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic freedom. At the most obvious level, this has involved fairly well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that have invoked the mantra of ‘liberal bias’ and demanded legislative regulation and reform10, an onslaught supported by a well-funded network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and ‘concerned citizen groups’ within and outside the higher education establishment11 and with considerable reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But what has in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist and statist agendas has been a larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying ‘professionalisation’ that goes with it. Expressing concern with ‘academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the United States’, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which the university is beginning to operate as another transnational corporation12, and critiqued the consolidation of a ‘culture of professionalism’ where academic bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask the larger managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively autonomous administrative elite and the rise of insular ‘expert cultures’ have led to academics relinquishing their claims to public space and authority.13

While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, ‘the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today’15, and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that ‘the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged (intellectuals)’16. The most serious threat to the ‘intellectual vocation’, he argues, is ‘professionalism’ and mounts a pointed attack on the proliferation of ‘specializations’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ with their focus on ‘relatively narrow areas of knowledge’, ‘technical formalism’, ‘impersonal theories and methodologies’, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power.17 Said mentions in this context the funding of academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an area in which there was considerable traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at various influential US academics as ‘organic intellectuals’ involved in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms of ‘intellectual articulation’.19 This is not simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global politics, where ‘relevance’ is measured entirely in terms of policy wisdom. Edward Said’s searing indictment of US intellectuals – policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf War20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic ‘for or against’ and ‘costs and benefits’ analysis can simply not be raised. In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an understanding of ‘intellectual relevance’ that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical, ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and important senses of the vocation.21

Appeal to specific nuclear technology magnifies the problem of authoritarian expertise.  They depoliticize social choice about the purpose of technology.

Wynne 11—Brian Wynne Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change @ Lancaster (UK) Rationality and Ritual 2^nd Edition p. 8-11 Gender Paraphrased

Such detachment of ambitious technological commitment from organized fantasy has to be a hope; but this hope also has to be interrogated, cold-bloodedly, carefully, and openly. As I tried to assert in this book, nuclear proponents including its scientists belied their own claims to objective hard-factual discipline, with their intense and unbridled emotional commitments clearly evident. These scientistic emotions (and their denial) manifested profound insecurities on the part of their agents, combined with an effective assumption of almost superhuman powers. Thus the mutual identification and reinforcement of nuclear technology with a culture of exaggeration is no less real and no less dangerous just because other technologies have also suffered from similar such idolatry in the past (Ezrahi, 1990) as well as since the 1980s. Although it was Lewis Strauss - a non-scientist head of the scientific body for both weapons and civil nuclear power, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) - who voiced in 1954 the infamous promise that his generation's children would enjoy 'electrical energy too cheap to meter' (Strauss, 1954; Weart, 1988, p166), what is notable is the refusal of any nuclear expert to refute such fatuous promises made in the public name of their science (Laurence, 1959, p251).10 If science claims the credit for the putative benefits from such technologies, as it does, then it cannot easily distance itself from the related discredits - nor from the arguments over which is which. Paradoxically, as nuclear energy prepares to return, society still has not come to terms with the cultural significance of its mass-destructive and apocalyptic military origins and consequences. With the failure of the Atoms for Peace programme and its global institutional UN 'safeguards' supposedly to arrest nuclear weapons proliferation (granted that it must have slowed it down), the systematic and sustained social unrealism of this 60-year commitment cannot but encourage a continuing sense of public unease and distrust of nuclear energy technologies, even if the reprocessing option is forestalled. The imagery of Figure 1 is referred to in Chapter 2 of the original book, but was not printed there. Looking back now, I realize I did not do justice to the issues it raised. Thanks to various theoretical, technological and public developments since then, it deserves fuller treatment now. The image is from a supplement on 'The Atomic Age' published by the Financial Times in 1956, at the birth of both the UK civil nuclear power programme (claimed to be the first in the world) and the UN global Atoms for Peace programme.11 This 50-page publication celebrated the Queen's forthcoming opening of the Calder Hall (Windscale) nuclear electricity (and weapons plutonium) reactors.12 This imagery did not just project nuclear technology as human perfection. It portrayed much more about the nuclear imagination and its mode of public communication and self-promotion, thus of nuclear technology's material social being. This includes its normative characterization (and performance, as explained below) of 'the public' which it imagined as part of the nuclear era. It emphasized the religious forces and feelings animating this science-inspired technology, the epitome of modern scientific rationality as public authority. The technology is shown not just as precise, pure, pristine and clinical. It is also hovering in its own superhuman realm, above the Earth and beyond mere human life, even surrounded by a glowing celestial halo. The text indicates an imagined (and desired) awestruck public: 'Millions of people 'mankind' stand amazed at the prospect of heat light and power from a source that cannot even be seen.' There is not the slightest sense of a technology and its embodied science that envisages any hint of public engagement: indeed quite the opposite, only distant awe, exclusion and admiration. These extra-terrestrial, extra-social experts 'know best', not only about nuclear power, but about what is best for 'humankind'. Public exclusion, subordination, passivization and alienation are here actively cultivated, through symbolic action. The Windscale book is about how this same kind of symbolic imagination of 'the public' was, through a participatory public inquiry, its report and parliamentary and media uptake, enacted into material performance in later policy culture and commitments. These processes, their forms of reason and discourse, can be said to have performed a particular imagination of their public, and encouraged the material enactment of that imagination into society. If we also refer back here to the practices of pollution management at the Windscale-Sellafield site, as reflected in Dunster's 1958 description earlier of how routine marine radioactive discharges were set, we can see in this account, and in the ensuing environmental contamination and human exposures from this, a performance of nuclear technology's imagined publics. We can see from not only the typical symbolism but also in corresponding material practices that as democratic participants, worthy of respectful recognition and to be given standing as part of the moral --community in which nuclear technology exists, effectively there is no public. It has been one of the most significant shifts of collective understanding amongst many - contributed by the late twentieth century social sciences and humanities, that symbolic actions carry corresponding changes in material social relations. Thus the normatively imposed social relations of technoscience here are not just symbolically projected, but also materially performed. In addition to the instances noted above, a further routinized example of the latter was the sustained extreme secrecy and misinformation that was practised by the UK nuclear authorities behind the scenes of this 1956 flood of positive publicity, and in imposed assumptions-in-practice about what people's concerns, needs and capacities are and should be. These were in no need of co ll ective negotiation; they were subsumed into the dominant assumed ontology. Inquiry inspector Mr Justice Parker's later empiricist framing and interpretation of the Windscale inquiry's conflicting ontological commitments, as these were embodied in the irreconcilable arguments of the parties but represented by him as measurable - and measured by him - against an empirically discoverable standard, did the same. Despite all the noise and fury of public debate and controversy, his discrete translations of expressed public concerns into his own terms were not subjected to any direct accountable scrutiny. Of course, his rational arguments in favour of THORP's approval were, but that is not what I am referring to here. This book still stands as a sole, modest and utterly marginal witness to this.

The critique is prior—proliferation discourse undercuts aff solvency by prioritizing supply-side solutions at the expense of addressing legitimate demand-side concerns.

Mutimer 94—David Mutimer is Deputy Director of YCISS and Associate Professor of Political Science at York University August 1994, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10315/1415/YCI0074.pdf?sequence=1

The Assembled Image

The image of PROLIFERATION knits together the metaphors of 'proliferation', 'stability' and 'balance' to shape the policy responses of the international community. The metaphors have certain entailments, which serve to highlight, downplay and hide aspects of the security environment. Thus, the policy responses which are being developed address primarily those aspects highlighted, while ignoring those downplayed and hidden. The image is of an autonomously driven process of spread, outward from a particular source or sources. It is an apolitical image, which strongly highlights technology, capability and gross accounts of number. As such, it is an image that masks the political interests of those supporting the present structure of proliferation control—a structure which strongly reflects this image and its entailments.

To begin with, the control efforts are classified by the technology of concern. Thus there are global instruments for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, and a register of conventional arms. There is no global instrument for the control of the spread of missile technology, but the MTCR addresses this technology as a discrete problem, and is considering evolving into a global regime. There is thus little or no recognition in the practical response to PROLIFERATION that the spread of these technologies might all be part of a common 'security' problem. The security concerns which might drive states to acquire one or more of these technologies are hidden by the PROLIFERATION image. This division of the problem into discrete technologies persists, despite the fact that the connection among the various technologies of concern manifests itself in a number of ways. I will mention only two by way of illustration. The first is the common reference to biological weapons as "the poor man's atomic bomb". The implication of this phrase is that a state prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons—in this case for reasons of cost—could turn to biological weapons to serve the same purposes. The second example is of the links being drawn in the Middle East between Arab states' potential chemical arms, and Israel's nuclear arsenal. The Arab states are balking at ratifying the CWC until the Israeli nuclear arms are at least placed on the negotiating table. Conversely, supporters of the Israeli position can cite the Arab states' overwhelming conventional superiority as a justification for Israel's nuclear arms.

The common approach to 'controlling' proliferation across the technologies of concern is the limitation and even denial of the supply of technology. Each of the technologies of concern is addressed by at least one suppliers group, and the major Western suppliers maintain export controls to implement the groups' lists. Such an approach is clearly informed by the entailments of the PROLIFERATION image. Supplier controls respond to the 'spread outward from a source' entailment of 'proliferation'. They also reflect the ways in which both the metaphors of 'proliferation' and 'stability' highlight technology, by focussing solely on its nature and movement. In addition, these groups reflect the various entailments of 'stability' and 'balance' outlined above. They seek to prevent "excessive and destabilizing accumulations" of technologies through the application of their controls. Lost entirely in these practices are considerations of the political and economic underpinnings of security. These aspects are hidden by the image, and so are not addressed by the policy responses.

The relationship between these political interests, the policy responses and the metaphors of the PROLIFERATION image would form the subject of another paper, at the very least. However, it is not responsible to ignore entirely this relationship, and so I will provide an example by way of illustration. India stands as a leading opponent of the present approach to proliferation control, with its roots in technological denial. India represents a different set of interests from those of the northern states most concerned with PROLIFERATION as presently understood and practiced. For India, access to technology is vital, and the principle of discrimination between the have and have not states—enshrined most notably in the NPT, but seen throughout the non-proliferation measures for denying technologies' spread—is absolutely unacceptable. As such, the Indians reject the image of PROLIFERATION, and call rather for DISARMAMENT. This view is reflected in the following passage, quoted from a paper by the Indian Ambassador to Japan, who was previously the Indian representative on the Conference on Disarmament:

It would be futile to pretend that 1995 is 1970, that nothing has changed and nothing requires to be changed in the 1995 NPT. It would be a cruel joke on the coming generation to say that they will be safer with an indefinite extension of the 1970 NPT. 1995 presents an opportunity; there is great scope for non governmental agencies, intellectuals and academics, who believe in nuclear disarmament to work towards changing this mindset and spur governments in nuclear weapon countries to look at reality, to accept that there are shortcomings in the NPT and that nations, both within and outside the NPT have genuine concerns which need to be addressed in order to make the NPT universal, non discriminatory and a true instrument for nuclear disarmament. Emphasis added.66

There are three noteworthy elements of this plea for change. The first is that Ambassador Shah recognises the importance of changing the mindset toward the problem in order to effect change in the policy responses to that problem. This feature of his remarks relates to the second. Ambassador Shah casts his justification for alterations in the NPT as reflecting a changed reality—thereby attacking the naturalisation of the features of the world which are highlighted by the PROLIFERATION image, as reflected in the NPT. Finally, Ambassador Shah calls for the new NPT to be an instrument of 'nuclear disarmament', not non-proliferation. In other words, he recognises that there is a policy problem to be addressed, but it is not a PROLIFERATION problem—that is, a spread of weapons technology from those who have to those who do not presently have. Rather, the problem needs to be imagined as a (DIS)ARMAMENT problem—the possession of nuclear and other arms, regardless of who has them.

For the countries of the north, the indefinite extension of an unamended NPT is considered essential. The NPT is seen as the linchpin of the proliferation control effort, without which the entire edifice might fall. What Ambassador Shah's comments demonstrate, reflecting the position taken in India, is the way in which that effort, tied so closely to the entailments of the PROLIFERATION image, serves only a particular set of interests by highlighting only specific features of 'reality'. From where he sits, 'reality' provides Ambassador Shah with a different approach to the problem of nuclear (and other mass destruction) weapons, an approach better captured through an image of (DIS)ARMAMENT than one of PROLIFERATION.

2NC—SPF K Prior

Proliferation discourse spurs ineffective policies—focus on motives and actors, not on weapons.

Mutimer 94—David Mutimer is Deputy Director of YCISS and Associate Professor of Political Science at York University August 1994, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10315/1415/YCI0074.pdf?sequence=1

'Proliferation' in its base biological meaning then, refers to an autonomous process of growth and outward spread, internally driven but externally controlled. Danger arises when the controls fail and the natural proliferation of cells produces excessive reproduction.

The first step of the adoption of 'proliferation' as a metaphor for international security involved applying the term to the development of nuclear technology after the discovery of controlled fission in the United States' Manhattan Project. The United States' nuclear programme represented the source 'cell' or 'organism' from which the technology would spread. Such spread was a 'natural' process, and so scholars confidently predicted that there would be thirty or forty nuclear powers by 1980. Such a condition was considered dangerous, and undesirable, and so attempts were made to establish external controls on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. These attempts resulted in the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, which remains the principal mechanism of proliferation control. The development of nuclear technology was thus imagined in terms of the 'proliferation' metaphor. The first question to be asked is what are the implications of this image, with its understandings of autonomy, spread and external control, for the policy response to the development of nuclear technology? There are two crucial entailments of the proliferation metaphor as applied to nuclear weapons.

The first entailment is the image of a spread outward from a point, or source. Cell division begins with a single, or source cell, and spreads outward from there — in the case of a cancer, both to produce a single tumour and to create a number of separate tumours throughout the host body. Similarly, the 'problem' of proliferation is one of a source or sources 'proliferating', that is reproducing itself by supplying the necessary technology to a new site of technological application. This image highlights the transmission process from source to recipient, and entails policy designed to cut off the supply, restricting the technology to its source. Hence, the dominant response to nuclear proliferation is the creation of supplier groups, the Zangger Committee and the NSG, which seeks to 'control' the spread of nuclear technology. In other words, they attempt to provide "the checks and balances that normally ensure orderly" transfer, and prevent the spread of nuclear technology resulting in the "cancer" of weapons' proliferation. The image is repeated even in the more extreme proposals for policy. For example, former Prime Minster Trudeau proposed a scheme to the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament for preventing weapons' spread. This scheme included two measures currently under consideration at the Conference on Disarmament, a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and a Cutoff of Fissile Material Production. Trudeau's plan was known as the 'suffocation proposal'—firmly in keeping with the biological referent of proliferation. To stop, rather than control, reproduction by organisms, you need to 'suffocate' the progenitors.

The second entailment of the 'proliferation' metaphor for the problem of nuclear weapons spread is an extreme technological bias. Biological proliferation is an internally driven phenomenon, and so the image of 'Proliferation' applied to the development of nuclear technology highlights the autonomous spread of that technology, and its problematic weapons variant. As Frank Barnaby writes in a recent work, "A country with a nuclear power programme will inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise, and will accumulate the fissile material necessary to produce nuclear weapons."50 In fact, the text from which this is drawn presents an interesting example of the autonomy of the 'proliferation' metaphor. The book is entitled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclear-weapon proliferation in the 1990s. Notice that the weapons themselves spread, they are not spread by an external agent of some form—say a human being or human institution. Under most circumstances such a title would be unnoticed, for as Lakoff and Johnson argue, the metaphors are so deeply engrained in our conceptual system that they are not recognised as being metaphorical.

This image, by highlighting the technological and autonomous aspects of a process of spread, downplays or even hides important aspects of the relationship of nuclear weapons to international security. To begin with, the image hides the fact that nuclear weapons do not spread, but are spread—and in fact are spread largely by the western states. Secondly, the image downplays, to the point of hiding, any of the political, social, economic and structural factors which tend to drive states and other actors both to supply and to acquire nuclear weapons. Finally, the image downplays the politics of security and threat, naturalising the 'security dilemma' to the point that it is considered as an automatic dynamic. The image of PROLIFERATION thus privileges a technical, apolitical policy, by casting the problem as a technical, apolitical one. The Non-Proliferation Treaty controls and safeguards the movement of the technology of nuclear energy. The supporting supplier groups jointly impose controls on the supply—that is the outward flow—of this same technology. The goal, in both cases, is to stem or, at least slow, the outward movement of material and its attendant techniques.

Such a policy is almost doomed to fail, however, for it downplays and hides the very concerns which motivate the agents of the process. Iraq was driven to acquire nuclear weapons, even in the face of NPT commitments, and so employed technology which is considered so outdated that it is no longer tightly controlled. This simply does not fit with the NPT-NSG-Zangger Committee approach. In addition, in order to gain the necessary material, the Iraqis needed access to external technology. Such technology was acquired by human agents acting for the Iraqi state and was acquired from other agents, who had their own motivational interests to provide the necessary technology. The technology does not 'spread' through some autonomous process akin to that causing a zygote to become a person, but rather they are spread, and so the agents involved are able to sidestep the technologically focussed control efforts.

The second step of this process, reimagining international security in the terms of PROLIFERATION following the end of the Cold War, adopts the policy entailments along with the underlying biological imagery. By using the PROLIFERATION image now to address biological and chemical weapons, missile technology and even conventional weapons, the international community is replicating the problematic policy solutions which highlight technology and hide politics and agency. Thus the NPT and its supplier groups are joined by the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Australia Group, a supplier group which also oversees export controls on both chemical and biological weapons' technology. Missile technology is controlled by the Missile Technology Control Regime. Even conventional arms, the ones we might expect to be most closely related to understandings of politics, are conceived in terms of 'excessive and destabilising accumulations'. Once more, it is the weapons themselves, rather than the political agents acquiring and using them, which are the lexical focus of discussions of conventional arms. What is ignored by this policy approach is any suggestion that there are political interests or motivations at work, which may cause human institutions to act in ways which promote insecurity (which, in other words, destabilize). A good part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that the image of the problem is one which downplays, and even hides, the involvement of the politics of human agency in both the acts of supply and acquisition.

AIAs Legit

The alternative can agree with the aff’s policy, but disagree with their justifications—

We should be analyzing the relationship between the plan and the advantages, not just the plan alone.  Policy stories, like the 1ac institutionalize a particular understanding of both problems and solutions.  Their advantage choices crowd out different policy practices and concepts.

Sending 4—Ole, Research Fellow @ Norweigan Inst. of Int’l Affairs Global Institutions and Development eds. Morten Boas and Desmond McNeil p. 58-59

Granted that the objectification and definition of a given phenomenon is open to a variety of normative and political considerations, it becomes interesting to explore how scientific knowledge constitutes a symbolic resource used by politically motivated actors. In order to justify and legitimize certain courses of action, and to render these possible and effective, scientific knowledge forms an important component both for efforts of persuading and mobilizing different groups, and for formulating and establishing policy practices. This can he grasped through the concept of poli1y stories. A policy story can be defined as follows: A set of factual, causal claims, normative principles and a desired objective, all of which are constructed as a more or less coherent argument a story which points to a problem to be addressed and the desirability and adequacy of adopting a specific policy approach to resolve it.

This conceptualization incorporates how politically motivated actors integrate scientifically produced imowledge in the form of facts, concepts or theories in order to i) convince others that a certain phenomenon is a problem, (ii) demonstrate that this problem is best understood in a certain way as shown by the facts presented, and (iii) link these factual claims to normative principles giving moral force to the argument that it should be resolved. This perspective thus subjects the factual dimensions of political processes to the interests and normative commitments of actors, in the sense that knowledge is used to justify and legitimize calls for adopting certain policies to resolve what is seen to be a problem that 'ought' to be resolved. The formulation is partly inspired by Rein and Schuss (1991. 265), who refer to problem-setting stories that 'link causal accounts of policy problems to particular proposals for action and facilitate the normative leap from "is" to 'ought"'. We depart from Rein and Schon's conception somewhat by emphasizing more strongly the factual claims (the characteristics of a phenomenon and normative principles (the morally' grounded principles used to legitimize the policy formulation invoked by actors as they define a problem and argue for a specific policy approach. The concept of policy stories seeks to capture how actors integrate knowledge claims into their politically charged arguments so as to 'frame' the issue under discussion. Because of the interlocking of the factual and normative dimension of policy making, a policy story, can be seen to create space for political agency. That is: a policy story serves by creating an argument grounded in a body of scientifically produced knowledge, to persuade and mobilize different groups as it represents a complete package: an authoritative problem-definition and a concomitant policy solution that is legitimized in both factual and normative terms. A policy story- that wins acceptance at the discursive level can be seen to define the terms of the debate for the establishment of policy and to de- legitimize competing conceptualizations and policy approaches. Through the political agency performed through a policy story it may come to dominate the policy field as it forms the central cognitive-normative organising device for specific formulation and establishment of policy within different organizations. In this way, the policy story' may over time attain a 'taken for granted' char- acter as it comes to structure, and reflect, policy practice. This process of stabilization is best described as a process of institutionalization. Following Scott, we can define institutionalization as a 'process by which a given set of units and a pattern of activities come so be normatively' and cognitively held in place, and practically taken for granted as lawful' Scott at al. 1994: 10). This latter feature is critical to the argument presented here. In the change from an argument for a specific policy approach to the establishment of that policy in practice, the policy story comes to define the cognitive-normative outlook of a policy regime. This can he defined as an interlock between the knowledge which underwrites the policy story, and the establishment in practice of the policy advocated in a policy story: That is: the knowledge that once formed part of an argument for a policy is now an integral part of the very rationality and identity' of the organization involved with managing this policy in practice. As such it becomes pact of the bundle of routines, rules, priorities and rationality of the organizations in the policy field see Douglas 1986; March and Olsen 1989: Scott and Meyer. 1994).

AT: Universal Opposition

Saying they oppose all nuclear weapons is irrelevant.  The script of nuclear arms control constructs the world in Orientalist terms—only the Western script of the 1AC makes norms appear universal.

Krause and Latham 98 Keith Poli Sci @ Graduate Inst. of Int’l Studies (Geneva) and Andrew Poli Sci @ Macalester “Constructing Non-Proliferation and Arms Control” Contemporary Security Policy 19 (1) p. 45-46

It took about forty years to build a dense web of agreements and treaties, and to reach the point where European and transatlantic policy-makers could negotiate comprehensive agreements over conventional force deployments, or discuss such complex issues as a 'security architecture for the twenty-first century', without being blocked by misunderstanding and mistrust at every turn. As a result, it is not surprising that most of the 'models' policy-makers turn to as foundations for contemporary non- proliferation or security-building proposals have been derived from the East-West experience. Prominent examples include the lessons of the CSCE process and the concept of confidence building, the emphasis on formal negotiated agreements with effective verification, the focus on 'balance', 'parity' and crisis stabilizing measures, and the concentration on particular types of weapon and technologies.

There is, however, a tendency to forget how this state of affairs came about, and to leap to the end products of the process (architectures, security building, broad agreements), without paying attention to the scaffolding upon which such concepts were erected, or to the implicit baggage that such concepts carry. The Western NACD legacy was built upon a slowly created shared understanding that the East-West security dilemma needed to be addressed co-operatively, and upon a large body of negotiation, analysis and debate that created an 'epistemic community' of experts who developed the essential basic concepts (such as arms control, deterrence, mutual assured destruction, parity, confidence building, transparency, verification) around which substantive agreements were constructed. A great deal of learning and adaptation took place on both sides in the negotiation and dialogue, and this learning was not confined to the narrow diplomatic circle of negotiators and policy-makers, but reached deep into the broader domestic political context and involved a wide range of relevant actors (bureaucracies, parliaments, interest groups).

There is also a tendency to forget that what we now call 'global' NACD norms and practices are in fact derived from, and reflective of, both the  'Western cultural account' in general and Western security culture in particular. The norms of Western security practice are not simply 'rational' responses to 'objective' threats. Rather, they are socially constructed 'scripts' that are embedded in a specific cultural context. Although these scripts have been universalized to a large degree, the process of diffusion has been neither uncomplicated nor linear. Within non-Western countries, the dominant Western cultural account competes and interacts with indigenous cultural accounts to produce a wide range of nation-specific security-building scripts which are then enacted by foreign policy officials. Thus it should come as no surprise that, even in this era of globalization, many non-Western states are ambivalent, antagonistic or resistant to 'global' norms. Nor should it be too surprising that Western arms control, non-proliferation and confidence-building processes or concepts have not necessarily taken root when they have been exported to different regional contexts, or to more multilateral forums. New cleavages and fissures have appeared, as demonstrated by the acrimony that surrounded the preparatory conferences for the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the difficulties encountered in the creation of the Wassenaar Arrangement, the dissension concerning a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the complications that have emerged with an expanded membership in the MTCR, and the general weakness of measures to control conventional arms transfers. These examples reflect strongly diverging perceptions of the nature of the problem, the means to its solution, and the appropriate mechanisms to achieve greater regional and global security, but they are also in part a product of different 'security culture' orientations towards regional and international peace and security. Western policy-makers need to be cognisant of this fact if they are to avoid the tendency to interpret this lack of enthusiasm as being somehow 'irrational', 'sinister' or 'hostile'. Moreover, a clear acknowledgement of the way in which the central elements of the Western security culture are, bound by history and deeply held beliefs can alert policy-makers to the need to look for similar deeply- help beliefs or historical lessons that could be used to shape the evolution of NACD ideas in different regions and contexts.

AT: Perm—Nuclearism

Their representations of nuclear war sustain the nuclear weapons complex—despite their efforts to disarm, they inadvertently reinforce the utility of nuclear weapons in the public’s mind. Focusing on particular instances of nuclearism allows the weapons complex to hang on to the concept of minimum deterrence and makes their impacts self-fulfilling.

Arkin 97— independent expert on defense and editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists William, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March-April, http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1997/ma97/ma97arkin.html

Even when under attack, the nuclear weapons enterprise is remarkably resilient. Fundamentally, nuclear weapons equal danger, which equals prominence, which equals funding, support, and prominence, which equals danger. Whether for military advocates and weapons designers who rely on government money or anti-nuclear pressure groups and arms control organizations dependent on foundation funds, this equation is unchanging. Of course danger always suggests terrible consequences, such as a Saddam Hussein getting a nuclear weapon or loose nukes falling into the hands of terrorists. Solutions, whether arms reduction treaties, cooperative threat reduction programs, counterproliferation strategies, or the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, promise relief-but never instant relief, mind you, or permanent relief. Nuclear professionals thus engage in a perilous balancing act. The problems associated with nuclear weapons are, of course, grave enough for the public to surrender control to the custodians. Yet the impression can never be conveyed that things are completely out of control. That would catch the public's full attention, cause general alarm, and perhaps disrupt the gloom-and-more-gloom cycle by forcing real change. Arms controllers and anti-nuclear advocates inadvertently sustain this same cycle. Though they spar with government custodians and unrepentant boosters, they are so wedded to the habit of declaring things forever on the brink that they come off as like-minded supporters of the relevance and utility of nuclear weapons. This odd devil's alliance between opposing camps bolsters the steady impression that a lot needs to be done. And yet, it is an unequal contest. The public-and the anti-nuclear community-has every right and duty to reveal the government's sluggishness or deceit, to complain that this or that facility isn't clean enough, or this or that warhead isn't safe enough, or this or that weapon is too expensive, or this or that plan isn't well thought out or executed efficiently enough. But invariably after the complaint is lodged there is the requisite back and forth and congressional hearings and blue-ribbon panels, and the bomb boosters win. Write another check and we will fix whatever needs fixing, say the custodians-stockpile stewardship miraculously costs more than the nuclear budget in the days of production and testing-and so the cycle continues. Butler is not the first nuclear figure to speak out against his former employer. He offers all of the logical and necessary steps needed to reduce the dangers associated with nuclear weapons. Yet there is something missing in terms of jolting us off of the treadmill. Cry wolf For 40 years, nuclear midnight meant just that: the end of it all. Today that definition is fuzzy, for there is life after midnight. Because the public no longer frets much about nuclear war and "the arms race," there is enormous and simultaneous competition from pro and anti-nuclear forces, both to prolong the public slumber and to capture the public's attention. Through it all, the two communities-myself included-thrive on bad news. On one side are the anonymous colonels, bureaucrats, and scientists at nuclear agencies, laboratories and "strategic" commands that populate study groups and committees. On the other side are arms controllers, diplomats, peaceniks, lobbyists, and busybodies who also populate study groups and committees. These otherwise disparate actors have never had more common ground than today. They may battle for the public's heart and mind, and disagree about policy alternatives and the velocity of change, but they remain equally addicted to a climate of disaster, particularly the spectre of a nuclear crisis triggered by rampant proliferation. The never-ending impulse to cry wolf-whether in the name of disarmament, stewardship, or renewal creates the self-fulfilling reality of crisis and danger. Inflated value is conferred upon nuclear materials and weapons, thereby creating artificial demand and undermining work towards reducing the "danger." The constant ticking of the clock contributes to a sense of doom, one that naturally conveys the message that the problems are so massive as to be unsolvable///

. Butler describes the mind-numbing nuclear business and the unfortunate prolongation of Cold War policies, yet he intentionally avoids condemning anyone, an unfortunate oversight. As principal overseer of the nuclear establishment for many years, he says he fought against the Cold War nuclear mindset, and even ended some careers prematurely. But who are the faceless and too-powerful covert decision-makers who have outlived the general and continue to nurture and safeguard their blessed weapon? Isn't it time to ask who agitates against nuclear disarmament? The way things really work is that lab scientists, defense program bureaucrats, science advisers to the commanders of the unified commands, and nuclear specialists on military staffs manufacture "needs" and develop nuclear "requirements." One may hail their Cold War devotion and commitment on behalf of the bomb, but the unfortunate legacy is an enduring process by which nuclear requirements persist due to inertia. It is bottom-up rather than top-down policy. In choosing not to criticize the nuclear establishment, Butler allows these pro-nuclear forces to hide behind service, hardly ever facing up to their spellbound dedication to the bomb, never having to acknowledge their corrosive role in ultimately undermining the universal task-which is bringing the bomb under control. Organically withering The assumption was once that weapons modernization was an automatic process. The labs would by necessity get the money to build new warheads to replace outmoded ones; the next model of missile or bomber would certainly be developed to supplant the obsolete. But now that the political situation has changed, no one officially wants any complications or problems associated with anything that smacks of nuclear weapons being "new" or "modernized" or "improved." Absent a frank statement of the permanence of nuclear weapons that is fundamental to current U.S. policy, the real intentions remain opaque. Decisions are masked by stewardship and talk of "hedges" and "contingencies." Nuclear disarmament is thwarted by "supreme national interest" escape clauses that, in the end, connote continued utility for nuclear weapons. And the bomb wins. It is no wonder that the fight over the nuclear future is again becoming ferocious. The believers pounce on the weaknesses of the White House and attempt to turn the nuclear debate into a partisan battle. Unlike the Democrats, they say with scorn, Republicans are not about to leave the nation vulnerable by engaging in nuclear disarmament. What is most striking about the four-score list of retired generals and admirals who joined Butler and retired Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster in calling for a renewed commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons is not the weight of the names but the absence of the two most prominent military officers in American society: Gens. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. The bomb evidently still has plenty of friends. When writing of the pro-nuclear constituency, a tone of ridicule comes easily. I could describe the kookier efforts of nuclear scientists and apparatchiks-from neutron bombs to mini-nukes. I could make fun of the vocabulary, from mushroom clouds, to Davy Crocketts, red beards, broken arrows, and peacekeepers. I could recount the dark side-the tests at Bikini, the human radiation experiments, Silkwood, Thule, Palomares, Rocky Flats. This is a history and geography that makes the nuclear elite wince. While ridicule is great for sound bites, it alienates not just the custodians but the arms control community as well. The arms controllers are hampered by their own Cold War history, when they pushed for incremental change to lessen the danger of global nuclear war, always mindful not to challenge the fundamental existence of nuclear weapons. Today, they struggle to be "relevant" and helpful. Yet in their unreformed reverence for the bomb in its deterrent role, they delude themselves into thinking that incremental change could lead to an Eden of "minimum deterrence." However, if nuclear weapons ever were relevant and kept the peace, it was because they were very much in evidence, because nuclear adversaries were conscious of one another's potential inclination to use them. As the weapons declined in number, in the extent of deployment, and in prominence, they lost that very intrusive quality. Nuclear weapons are intrinsically colossal in their demands. In the nuclear realm, minimum anything is not possible, while the state of nuclear dominance is unacceptable. As the Cold War struggled through its final decade, the arms control establishment gained the grudging acquiescence of nuclear advocates, men and women who have always known that nuclear weapons can only survive if they are relatively invisible. Get nuclear weapons off the front pages, whether through secrecy or arms control treaties-that was the way to keep control of the machine and to insure modernization and advance. But that was yesterday. Today nuclear weapons are virtually invisible. So much so that ordinary people just don't pay any attention to them anymore. In fact, all of the evidence points to the undeniable conclusion that the nuclear era is over and nuclear weapons are organically withering on the vine. But we'd never know it. A governmental commitment to nuclear disarmament would be irrelevant, of course, if the nuclear weapons enterprise were satisfied to completely wither away. But it isn't. And so on top of the we-need-nukes-because-nukes-exist conundrum, there is the self-interest of organizations and industries wedded to the bomb. Any commitment to abolition is rejected on the basis of technical impossibility. Which is to say that the very scientists and engineers who constructed and controlled tens of thousands of warheads for 50 years seemingly cannot put their minds to undoing it all. Their modesty is increasingly transparent. Yet this cycle will not be broken solely through caution and a Butler-esque professional courtesy that avoids naming names, a politeness that never condemns the anti-disarmament forces that still grind away just as vigorously as Butler did when he worked his way up in the nuclear enterprise. Nuclear disarmament will not occur just because well-meaning scientists, bureaucrats and military officers chip away at the grotesque arithmetic, "revise" the war plan to make it more humane, repair the most egregious excesses. Butler is dead-on, of course, in saying that a real commitment to the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament is essential. But while he came out of the trance and is now speaking up, his failure to point fingers does not really explain the dynamics of the final battle. The anonymity of the problem he describes is completely at odds with the gravity of the issues he says are at stake. Little noticed during the Christmas season was the response of Gen. Eugene Habiger, the current head of U.S. Strategic Command, to the generals' and admirals' initiative. Calling the weapons a "viable part" of U.S. national security strategy, Habiger told Defense Daily that he would undertake a spread-the-message strategy, personally visiting members of Congress one-on-one to promote his product. "I will tell them that we've got a sharp team of superstars and that we are committed to making sure our national strategy of deterrence is viable and credible," he said. "I hope eventually we come to zero nuclear weapons, but we need to do it in a prudent manner so that we don't compromise national security," he continued. "We can't afford another Pearl Harbor-with nuclear weapons." Habiger's justification for the bomb should remind everyone that Butler and his colleagues are the exception and not the rule. The bomb survives all attempts to dominate it. Reduced in numbers, its essential quality remains intact, resistant to partial solutions and a quiet retirement.

AT: Case Outweighs

Bracket off and reject their risk assessment claims—they are shaped by orientalism.

Saunders 5 Rebecca Comparative Lit @ Illinois St., “Risky Business: Edward Said as Literary Critic” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle Eas p. 529-532

Risk-free ethics, like all protection from risk, are a class privilege. As Deborah Lupton puts it, “The disadvantaged have fewer opportunities to avoid risks because of their lack of resources compared with the advantaged”; “people’s social location and their access to material resources are integral to the ways in which they conceptualize and deal with risk.”22 Or, as Ulrich Beck argues, “Poverty attracts an unfortunate abundance of risks. By contrast, wealth (in income, power or education) can purchase safety and freedom from risk.”23 Thus when we endorse a risk-free ethics, we should bear in mind that members of social groups with less to lose and more to gain are more likely to engage in risky behaviors than are members of more secure and privileged social groups. Moreover, as Mary Douglas has argued at length, risk is a forensic resource and, much like the “danger” she elaborated in her early work, functions as a means of social control. “Anthropologists would generally agree,” she writes, “that dangers to the body, dangers to children, dangers to nature are available as so many weapons to use in the struggle for ideological domination.”24 These weapons are sharpened, she argues, by Western societies’ association of risk assessment with scientific neutrality. Along similar lines, Nick Fox contends that “risk analysis is a deeply political activity. The identification of hazards (and the consequent definition of what is a risk) can easily lead to “the valorization of certain kinds of living over others.”25 The identification of “risk groups” deemed to be threatening to the social order—the unemployed, criminal, insane, poor, foreign—are a common technology for establishing boundaries between self and other, the normal and the pathological, that is, for securing that “formidable battery of distinctions” Said analyzes between “ours and theirs, proper and improper,” higher and lower, colonial and native, Western and Eastern.26 In a fascinating article on debates over native title in Australia, Eva Mackey demonstrates both the way in which political actors deploy a rhetoric of risk, danger, and threat and the uses of risk management to imperial hegemony. Not only have newspaper headlines “presented native title as an issue that has brought the nation to the brink of a dangerous abyss, to the point of destruction,” but the Howard government “constructs native title as a danger and risk to the ‘national interest,’ particularly a risk to competitiveness, opportunities, and progress. The entire anti-native title lobby have all stated . . . that the uncertainty over native title is dangerous for investment and economic competitiveness.”27 As Mackey points out, these notions of danger imply “a normative, non-endangered state,” and it is through ideas of the normal and deviant that institutional power is maintained.28 A related argument articulated by governmentality theorists is that modern societies normalize risk avoidance and pathologize risk taking, represent the former as rational and mature, the latter as irrational and childish— oppositions that, again, are familiar to any student of colonial discourse.29 These oppositions are buttressed by an elaborate apparatus of expert knowledge produced by disciplines such as engineering, statistics, actuarialism, psychology, epidemiology, and economics, which attempt to regulate risk through calculations of probability and which view the social body as “requiring intervention, management and protection so as to maximize wealth, welfare and productivity.”30 Knowledge produced about probability is then deployed as counsel to individuals about how to conduct their lives. As Lupton contends: “In late modern societies, not to engage in risk avoiding behavior is considered ‘a failure of the self to take care of itself—a form of irrationality, or simply a lack of skillfulness’ (Greco 1993). Risk-avoiding behavior, therefore, becomes viewed as a moral enterprise relating to issues of self-control, self-knowledge and self-improvement.”31 This is a characteristic of neoliberal societies that Pat O’Malley, Franc¸ois Ewald, and others refer to as the “new prudentialism.”32 To recognize that risk is a form of social control, and that risk taking is more necessary to certain classes than to others, is also to recognize that risk is not an objective entity or preexisting fact but is produced by specific cultural, political, and institutional contexts, as well as through competing knowledges. “To call something a risk,” argues Douglas, “is to recognize its importance to our subjectivity and wellbeing.” 33 Anthony Giddens, similarly, contends that “there is no risk which can be described without reference to a value.”34 In a frequently cited passage, Ewald writes, “Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event.”35 Indeed, this is precisely the unconscious of risk-management technologies, which assume both that risks are preexistent in nature and that individuals comport themselves in strict accordance with a “hedonic calculus.” 5 3 1 Also embedded within this insurantial unconscious is the fact that, as Fox puts it, “The welladvertised risk will turn out to be connected with legitimating moral principles.”36 If postcolonial studies, as I am arguing, should more rigorously interrogate risk-avoidance strategies (including those that repress or discipline the foreignness in language) on their political, class, and ideological investments, it should also recognize the degree to which risk management (no doubt among modernity’s most wildly optimistic formulations) indulges in a fantasy of mastery over uncertainty. In risk-management discourses, risk has taken on the technical meaning of a known or knowable probability estimate, contrasted with uncertainty, which designates conditions where probabilities are inestimable or unknown. This transformation of the unknown into a numerical figure, a quantification of nonknowledge that takes itself for knowledge, attempts to master whatever might be undesirable in the unknown (i.e., the future) by indemnifying it in advance—and thereby advertising its own failure. I believe it could be demonstrated, moreover, were we to trace the genealogy of this fantasy, that it coincides at crucial moments with the history of colonization. The notion of risk, first used in relation to maritime adventures, arises contemporaneously with modern imperialism, to describe the hazards of leaving home. With industrial modernity, and particularly the rise of the science of statistics in the nineteenth century, it took on themien of instrumental reason and the domination of nature, nuances that bear an unmistakable resemblance to the logics of concurrent colonial enterprises.37 This fantasy of mastery is also a suppression of possibility; in most instances, risk avoidance is an (implicit or explicit) maintenance of dominant values. Risk taking, by contrast, is the condition of possibility of possibility— that is, of change. It is perhaps no surprise that one’s political position is the strongest predictor of his/her attitude toward risk. Risk, as we have seen, is regularly formulated as that which threatens the dominant order (conceived on the level of a society, a colonial regime, or a global economic order). That threat, of course, is the “danger” of transformation, of reorganized social and ideological hierarchies, redistributed economic and cultural capital, renovated geopolitical relations—in short, precisely the kinds of transformation called for by much of postcolonial studies. Risk, including the risk of errors in meaning, may be necessary to any social change, that is, to engaging in the kind of oppositional criticism Said advocates: “Criticism must think of itself,” he writes, “as constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.”38 The necessity of risk to change (and the craven conformism of risk avoidance) is a principle Friedrich Nietzsche elaborates in Beyond Good and Evil, where, critiquing the “timidity of morality,” he calls for a new species of philosophers, willing to risk untruth, uncertainty, even ignorance, thinkers willing to inhabit “the dangerous maybe.”39 Nietzsche was also prescient in recognizing that “howmuch or how little is dangerous to the community . . . now constitutes the moral perspective; here, too, fear is again themother ofmorals.”40 More recently, philosophers such as Derrida and John D. Caputo (explicitly taking up Nietzsche’s vocation) have argued that change, indeed social responsibility itself, inevitably demands a wager on uncertain possibilities (or, in Derridean terms, the “aporia”). “Let us not be blind,” writes Derrida, “to the aporia that all change must endure. It is the aporia of the perhaps, its historical and political aporia. Without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event or decision. . . . no decision (ethical, juridical, political) is possible without interrupting determination by engaging oneself in the perhaps.”41 On similar grounds, Caputo argues for “the suspension of the fine name of ethics in the name of obligation” and contends that “to speak of being against ethics and deconstructing ethics is to own up to the lack of safety by which judging is everywhere beset. . . . to admit that ‘obligation’ is not safe, that ethics cannot make it safe, that it is not nearly as safe as ethics would have us believe.”42

AT: Threat Con Good

Threat construction privileges ethnocentric thinking and increases proclivity for war—empirical psychological research proves.

Willer and Feinberg 8—Dr. Robb Willer is Assistant Professor of Sociology @ UC Berkeley and Matthew Feinberg is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology @ UC Berkeley “The Political Psychology of National Security, War, and Civil Liberties” http://www.americanenvironics.com/PDF/AE%20NSHR%20LIT%20REVIEW.pdf

A central tenet of the progressive agenda is to oppose and work to prevent unnecessary wars. This is a challenge, as public opinion on foreign policy has been combustible, reactionary, and easily manipulated since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. American progressives concerned with deterring future wars, such as a possible military 6 strike against Iran, may find useful political psychology research on the psychological roots of support for war. A thorough understanding of the psychological and social bases of war support may offer some building blocks for a political agenda designed to intelligently confront and undermine support for unnecessary wars in the future. Below we review relevant research on why people support war and other military engagements. Our review is broad, but it focuses most of al;l on the roles of “fear and loathing,” perceptions of threat, and inter-group prejudice on support for military action. Perhaps more than any other factor, perceptions of threat and feelings of endangerment are strong predictors of support for war. This notion stems from research and theory that associate the perception of threat, especially threat from an out-group, with an increased likelihood of aggressive and militant stances (Gordon and Arian 2001; Herrmann, Tetlock, and Visser 1999; McFarland 2005). For instance, “Integrated Threat Theory” (Stephan and Stephan 2000) and “Social Identity Theory” (Tajfel 1981; Tajfel and Turner 1986) both predict that feeling threatened by some out-group leads individuals to have heightened levels of out-group hostility and to support (or engage in) conflict with that out-group. For example, Oswald found a positive association between feelings of threat and anti-Arab hostility (2005). In that study, perceptions of threat were tapped using a five-item scale that measured participants’ sense of fear and vulnerability toward terrorist attacks. The strongest relationship was for the following item: “I feel personally at risk for being a victim of a terrorist attack.” Along those lines, perceived threat of terrorism among Americans, specifically, leads to support for war — especially wars targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East. Some previous research has directly examined the link between perceived threat of terrorism and support for militant attitudes, policies, and leaders (Arian 1989; Friedland and Merari 1985; Huddy, Feldman, Taber, and Lahav 2005; Kam and Kinder 2007; Landau, Solomon, Greenberg, Cohen et al. 2004; Willer 2004). For example, Huddy et al. (2005) found that Americans who viewed terrorism as a major threat were significantly more likely to support the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, one associated with preemptive war. A variable closely linked to these perceptions of threat – in fact, believed to be motivated by the desire for increased security and reduced threat – is right wing authoritarianism (RWA), which has been associated with support for militancy and war (Altemeyer 1988; Doty, Peterson, and Winter 1991). Duckitt (2001) and Altemeyer (1998) argue that feelings of fear and endangerment are the foundations of authoritarian attitudes. In turn, abundant research has linked RWA with support for military action (Cohrs and Moschner 2002; Cohrs, Moschner, Maes, and Kielman 2005; Crowson, Debacker, and Thoma 2005, 2006; Doty, Winter, Peterson, and Kemmelmeier 1997; Feldman and Stenner 2008; Izzett 1971; McFarland 2005). Furthermore, certain worldviews related to feeling threatened lead to support for war. For instance, chronic perceptions of the world as a hostile, distrustful, and corrupt place have been linked to increased aggressiveness and authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1988; Duckitt, Wagner, du Plessis, and Birum 2002; Bonanno and Jost 2006; Miller, Lynam, and Leukefeld 2003; Willer, Feinberg, and Laurison 2008). Consistent with this, research using the “Belief in a Dangerous World” scale has shown that perceptions of a hostile world lead to authoritarian attitudes and derogation of out-groups (Altemeyer 1988; Duckitt et al. 2002), which, as mentioned above, have been linked to aggressive and violent attitudes toward out-groups, including support for war (e.g., Altemeyer 1988; Duckitt 2001; McFarland 2005). Furthermore, Willer et al. (2008) found that those who view others generally as untrustworthy are significantly more likely to support war. There is also some research that examines the origins of perceived threat and, most specifically, right wing authoritarianism. Those high in RWA are believed to have had much harsher and more punitive (i.e., threatening) upbringings that emphasized strict adherence to rules and norms (Duckitt 2001). In fact, it is theorized that authoritarian attitudes manifest themselves in order to help combat the perpetual sense of threat and insecurity that was instilled during childhood. Inter-group prejudice and the related construct of ethnocentrism are also major contributing factors to support for war. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own group and that group’s culture are superior to all others (Kam and Kinder 2007). Kam and Kinder (2007) used a direct measure of ethnocentrism and found it to be a robust predictor of support for war in Iraq. However, inter-group prejudice and ethnocentrism is more often operationalized in past research on war in other forms. The most common way of operationalizing them is by using the “Social Dominance Orientation” (SDO) scale. High SDO individuals tend to perceive the world as highly competitive and hierarchical, believing that certain groups of people (especially their own group) are inherently better than others and should dominate lesser groups in society (Duckitt 2001; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, Malle 1994; Sidanius and Pratto 1993; Sidanius and Pratto 1999). High SDO individuals are driven by in-group dominance motives to establish and maintain power over other groups. Furthermore, having a high SDO likely stems from having a tough-minded, power-hungry personality, and from viewing the world as a “competitive jungle” that is ruthless and zero-sum (Duckitt 2001; Duckitt et al. 2002; but see also Jost and Thompson 2000 for a more complex view). The properties of social dominance orientation are explained by “Social Dominance Theory” which contends that societies develop ideologies, or “legitimizing myths,” that provide justification for, and help maintain, group inequalities. Individuals high in SDO are much more likely to ascribe to these legitimizing myths and feel comfortable with prejudicial attitudes toward supposedly inferior groups. Along these lines, researchers have identified SDO as a foundational ideology behind prejudice (e.g., Duckitt 2001; Duckitt et al. 2002; Duckitt and Sibley 2007) and have empirically associated SDO with various forms of discrimination, including anti-black racism, antiArab racism, negative attitudes toward Middle Easterners, negative attitudes toward miscegeny, U.S. dominance over other nations, cultural elitism, and opposition to women’s and gay rights (Heaven, Organ, Supavadeeprasit, and Leeson 2006; Pratto et al. 1994). Research on SDO has shown that it is also predictive of support for war and war related activities. Specifically, in past studies SDO was positively correlated with prowar attitudes and support for the US-led wars in Afghanistan and both wars in Iraq (Cohrs et al. 2005; Crowson et al. 2006; Heaven et al. 2006; McFarland 2005; Pratto et al. 1994), as well as support for the idea of going to war in pursuit of perceived national economic interests, such as oil prices (Pratto et al. 1994). More recent research based on American Environics data from the spring of 2007 shows that SDO also predicts support among Americans for a military attack on Iran (Willer et al. 2008). However, the militancy of those high in SDO disappears entirely for – and may even correlate 10 negatively with – support for wars framed as humanitarian (e.g. military efforts to prevent genocide) (McFarland and Matthews 2005; Pratto et al. 1994; but see also Cohrs et al. 2005). These findings suggest that SDO is related to pro-war attitudes, but only if those wars are perceived as dominance oriented.

2NC Link—Supply/Export Control

Supply groups dichotomize the First and Third world—this results in racist policing.

Mutimer 2k—David Mutimer is Deputy Director of YCISS and Associate Professor of Political Science at York University The Weapons State, ch. 5, “Entailing Self and Other,” pg. 96-97

The central practices of supplier groups and their attendant export controls construct a core set of inside states, those sufficiently responsible and mature to take it upon themselves to judge the behavior of other states and sanction them for troubling activities. That set overlaps notably with the club of advanced industrial States of the North. There is also a clear move from within this privileged group to draw in the old East and to reconstruct (or rebuild, as efforts at transition are often called) those countries as part of that inside. Outside this privileged core States are gathered into regions, each of which is expected to remain stable through the balancing of power. Proliferation, that autonomous process the image constructs, can upset these balances—nuclear weapons give certain States disproportionate power and thus destabilize entire regions; even conventional arms can be acquired in sufficient quantities to be excessive and destabilizing. If states act in such a way that they upset or threaten to upset these balances, they are rogues, outlaws, immature or backward states unwilling to conform to the rules of civilized behavior.

The proliferation image creates two clear lines of difference. The first marks the distinction between those who can be trusted to make the rules—signaled by inclusion in the ranks of suppliers—and those who must follow the rules—the recipients. The second line marks those who do follow the rules from those who refuse—the rogues from the herd, the outlaws from the law-abiding. This second line marks the emergence of an enemy in this discourse of military security, for it is rogue behavior that poses a threat, that causes concern to those who make the rules. Thus the recipients are accepted as part of the community of the law-abiding and thus have access to prized technology the suppliers can provide. The recipients, however, are also potential rogues. Their behavior must be policed through export control and compliance monitoring to ensure that they conform to the rules and do not become rogues. This policing gives in to the temptation of othering difference Connolly discussed. Not only are those not included in the supplier groups to be marked as different, but they are to be labeled as potential enemies and sanctioned as such.

The proliferation image constructs states in the Third World as outsiders. Even if they do not become rogues, they are not permitted inside the privileged Northern club; if they do behave in ways that cause concern to the privileged, they are labeled enemy and heavily sanctioned. Not surprisingly, not all Third World states are entirely happy with the “proliferation” construction. Iran, for example, finds itself abiding by the rules of NPT membership, rules that are supposed to guarantee its access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Nevertheless, its behavior—in this case, the domestic politics of government—causes concern among members of the supplier groups, and so it is sanctioned. India has established itself as the preeminent critic of the proliferation discourse in the Third World. India does not accept the problem as it has been constructed by the insiders, and it does not accept the practices to which the construction has given rise. In Chapter 6 I examine the alternative framings produced in this resistance and elsewhere to see the possible objects and i

AT: Permutation

3.         Any inclusion of the proliferation metaphor makes confronting unequal power relations impossible.

Mutimer 94—David Mutimer is Deputy Director of YCISS and Associate Professor of Political Science at York University August 1994, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10315/1415/YCI0074.pdf?sequence=1

A second important entailment of the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors is that they highlight numerical capabilities, while downplaying qualitative capabilities, and hiding other aspects of security—even aspects of the military other than equipment. This entailment is rooted both in the experiential basis of the metaphors and in their use during the Cold War. 'Balance' is by and large a quantitative, not qualitative characteristic—on a scale, a kilo of feathers will balance a kilo of lead. In particular, the accounting of numbers of various kinds, though notably money, involves the metaphor of 'balance'. Thus it should not be surprising that the application of the balance metaphor to the relationships of arms leads to a focus on numerical capabilities. The experience of superpower arms negotiation was in large measure guided by attempts to achieve 'essential equivalences'—in the number of launchers, the number of warheads, the throw weight of missiles, or the number of tanks.

What gets downplayed by the numerical entailment of these metaphors is the variation in capability among different weapons and weapon systems. This can be seen in the present proliferation control systems. The MTCR identifies technologies of concern by range and payload, entirely ignoring the reliability of the weapons, and even their accuracy (which is generally well measured)—in other words, ignoring most of what determines whether a weapon will be delivered on target by a given missile. Similarly, the UN Arms Register records weapons in seven categories, so that, for example, all 'tanks' are counted together. Thus, in the first reporting cycle, the United Kingdom included several pieces of obsolete equipment that were transferred for display in museums. The comments that allow the Register's users to realise that these entries are museum pieces were purely voluntary. For example, Britain reported two exports of tanks. Six tanks were sent to Switzerland, and were marked "Obsolete equipment for museums", while 25 were reported sent to Nigeria. Nothing more than that 25 tanks were sent was reported by the UK, and so the character of these weapons is still formally opaque.60

While it is unfortunate that the numerical entailment of the balance metaphor downplays the quality of arms, it is much more problematic that it hides entirely aspects of the security problem other than arms—be this military doctrine and policy, or the more general politics of security.61 Indeed, the entailments of 'stability' and 'balance' in this context tend to reinforce the autonomous, technological character of the problem which is entailed by the 'proliferation' metaphor. Technology 'spreads' through some natural process. We can count the occurrence of this spread, so that we know where the technology is accumulating. We may even be able to control this autonomous process. However, it is these accumulations, if we do not prevent them, which can then 'upset' balances; in the words of Resolution 46/36L: "excessive and destabilizing arms build-ups pose a threat to national, regional and international security."

There is a third, and rather ironic, entailment to the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors—they can lead to the promotion of the spread of nuclear weapons to a greater number of states. The logic of the 'balance' between the superpowers, it has been argued, is that mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons introduces a caution conducive to 'stability'. If the metaphors of the Cold War are adopted to imagine the new international security environment, there seems little way to escape the conclusions of this argument, that nuclear weapons can be stabilisers. Indeed, it has led John Mearsheimer to argue:

If complete Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe proves unavoidable, the West faces the question of how to maintain peace in a multipolar Europe. Three policy prescriptions are in order.

First, the United States should encourage the limited and carefully managed proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope for avoiding war in post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence; hence some nuclear proliferation is necessary to compensate for the withdrawal of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals from Central Europe. Emphasis added.62

As part of the 'managed proliferation' of nuclear weapons in Europe, Mearsheimer suggests provision of nuclear arms to Germany. On this and on other points Mearsheimer's argument has been widely, and justifiably, attacked. But what is interesting about it is the way in which it makes the entailments of the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors so clear. What is important is to assure that the numbers of weapons are distributed so that the balance among them is stable — regardless of who holds the weapons. The problems of history and politics which would be raised by German nuclear weapons are blithely ignored, because the metaphors informing Mearsheimer's conceptualisation hide them entirely. Most of us are sufficiently sensitive to these problems that Mearsheimer's argument is jarringly uncomfortable. However, the problem persists in all uses of the PROLIFERATION image, and yet it is only when the problems are as dramatic as in this case that the implications of the image are widely rejected.

In the title of his article, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War", Mearsheimer also indicates the final entailment of the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors—they are inherently conservative. It is not an accident that it was a conservative alliance facing a revolutionary challenge that formulated the practice we now call the balance of power. Nor is it an accident that the changes in Eastern Europe, while welcomed in the West on democratic grounds, were feared for their capability to introduce 'instability'.63 When a 'balance' is 'stable', an asymmetrical alteration to either side introduces instability. Thus once a stable balance is achieved, the metaphor highlights the importance of the maintenance of the status quo.

The conservative bias of the metaphors is problematic, even within the limited confines of a proliferation problem. The goal of policy makers seems clearly to be the reduction of weapons and their related technologies—at least in the arsenals of others! The image, however, which is informing the policy response to the problem, provides no support for reduction once a stable balance is achieved. There can be no guarantee that any reduction in arsenals, even a 'symmetrical' reduction, would produce a similarly stable balance at the lower levels of arms. Indeed, building on the received wisdom of the Cold War, there might even be a case to be made for high levels of arms, as a 'balance' at high levels is more resistant to small changes—that is, it is more 'stable'.

AT: We’re not Racist

Racist intent is irrelevant—the aff’s “proliferation metaphor” entails a normative commitment to racist power relations.

Biswas 1 (Shampa Biswas, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA , 2001, “Nuclear Apartheid” as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?” Alternatives 26.4, 485—522)

It is interesting here that the “self” (that opposes Fundamentalism) is clearly named—it is “democracy’ Democracy here becomes the marker of a common (modern) civilizational boundary that the BJP shares with the West in the act of’ naming the common enemy—(anti— modern) “Islamic fundamentalism.” An article in the BJP—published newsmagazine BJP Today titled The Fundamentalists sic Threat to USA,” which identifies the growing recognition within the United States of the emerging Muslim terrorist threat,87 is designed to more explicitly mark out this Islamic threat that plagues both the West and India. Further, in “naming” this threat, the words used sometimes are familiar and evocative: Another article says that “the emerging reality is that India is being gradually encircled by a hostile Islamic Fundamentalist arc which besides being a security threat. Is a civilizational challenge as well.”8’5 The ghost of Huntington is unmistakable. The article goes on to say that mobilizing international opinion on this set re is imperative. 89 Clearly, international/Western opinion is more easily mobilized by tapping into Western fears and apprehensions, and doing so in a language that is familiar. These fears and apprehensions come from a racist discourse, fairly widespread in Western media, policymaking, and sometimes academic representations of the Islamic threat, the Muslim terrorist, the oppressed woman in veil, and so on. If race. as invoked through the nuclear—apartheid position, constitutes India through juxtaposition against a neocolonial West, race in the global discourse on Islam serves to constitute Hindu India as aligned with the West. Both strategies, however, work to effect closure on a hegemonic vision of the Indian nation that serves particular interests. International relations in general, and security studies more specifically’. have tended to privilege the “problem of order over the “concern for justice.” Coining from a critical perspective, Simon Dalby points out that national security is in general premised on the “desirability of order, and hence has often been “a conservative formulation, equating the political status quo with desirable order.”9 This political status quo has been somewhat unsettled by the dissolution o the Soviet threat: the primary bipolar balance-of-power framework that for so long dominated security studies has been rendered obsolete in the post—Cold War period. In the words of another critical security-studies scholar, David Mutimer proliferation is a problem enunciated to fill the gap left by the Cold War.”’1 Examining the use of the dominant metaphors that structure thinking about global security issues, Mutimer has shown how the increasing salience of the “proliferation issue’ in the post-Cold War world builds on underlying anxieties about instability and disorder; so that the very use of the metaphor of proliferation entails a conservative normative commitment to tête maintenance of stable and balanced orders—a commitment that naturalizes a particular set of relations of power and interest, privileging those who are able to set the metaphorical agenda, and render invisible the political basis of their claims.” This article has attempted to demonsrtate that taking the “nuclear apartheid” argument seriously is to reveal that underlying this fear of proliferation is a series of racialized constructions of Third World people. With the discrediting of scientific racism and with the increasing recognition by scholars of race that “color” is not necessarily the prime index or the only marker of racialization. it may not be entirely surprising that the question of race in global politics has been so intractable. Yet many scholars have argued that contemporary racism exists in a far more invidious form precisely because it often rejects a biologized concept of race in favor of culturalist forms, or what has been called the “new racism.” The invidiousness of such racism lies in that it often exists without making any explicit reference to race, so that it has been said that we now live in a world with “at lot of racism hut very few racists. If the process of racialization and racism—a process of hierarchieation, inferiorization, and subordination of racialized group’—can use all kinds of signifiers or markers, a biological and cultural tracing of its operations in global politics requires innovative conceptual lenses and new analytical tools. However. “race,” as Roxanne Doty points out, “has most fundamentally been about being human. Racist discourses historically have constructed different kinds and degrees of humanness through representational practices that have claimed to be and have been accepted as ‘true’ and accurate representations of ‘reality.” This article has argued that if one takes “rationality” as fundamental to what makes us fully human—the premise of most Enlightenmentinspired narratives—fears of proliferation that rely on presuppositions of the irrationality of “others” draw on racist discourses that deny a degree of humanity to “others” in the very constitution of the “self” as human. However, this article is also premised on the claim that rather than a generalized formulation of a singular, monolithic racism, it is more useful to talk of historical racisms, examining processes of racializations in the contexts in which they exist. Hence, in addition to the construction of a racialized Third World in nuclear proliferation discourses, I have also examined the racializations of religious and other minorities in the BJPs discourses of the Hindu/Indian nation as well as the operations of a racist global discourse on Islam and Muslims that serves this project.

AT: Hegemony

Hegemony projects our anxiety and paranoia onto the world—creates self-fulfilling prophecies that make war inevitable—all of their arguments are ideologically loaded—this evidence will smoke them

Hoggett and Clarke 4—*prof of politics and co-dir. of Center for Psycho-Social Studies, U West England, Degree in social psychology, U Sussex, AND **Dr. Simon Clarke—prof of psycho-social studies and co-dir. of the center “The Empire of Fear: The American Political Psyche and the Culture of Paranoia,” http://www.btinternet.com/~psycho_social/Vol5/JPSS5-PHSC1.htm

The image of Prometheus has often been used as a metaphor to describe the conjoining of capitalist and technological development, something which has unleashed processes of modernisation, the like of which have never been seen before (Landes 1969). The metaphor of `Prometheus Unbound’, once used by Shelley as descriptor for the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, now seems an apt image for American economic, military and cultural power at the beginning of the new century. Prometheus represents humanity’s freedom to rebel against the God’s, a rage against the arbitrary finality of mortality. But whilst Prometheus is noble hubris and grandiosity also mark his stance – the creations of his imagination will displace the divine. Therefore, like other less clamorous and dynamic narcissants, the Promethean is one also contemptuous of limits and incapable of (inter)relations. Alone in a world of his own creation. In her classic paper on narcissism Joan Riviere (1936) insists `we should not be deceived by the positive aspects of narcissism but should look deeper, for the depression that will be found to underlie it’ (p.368). Fear is now an abiding, pervasive and dominant affect in American life and has been since the Second World War. However this relates to a paradox that the ancient Greeks knew so well. Lying at the very heart of the hubris of an individual or nation that believes in its omniscience lies fear, fear of its own capacity for self-annihilation. Speaking of the narcissistic character, Rivierre noted that ultimately this individual lives in `fear of his own suicide or madness’; this is the essence of what she calls his depressive anxiety. It is necessary therefore to focus upon this dark side of the new Promethean for this is a figure wracked by guilt and anxiety concerning the destructive consequences of his creative powers. First there is internal destruction. In a recent bestseller, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Barry Glassner (1999) investigates a range of social anxieties which have beset the American psyche, from panics about smack and gunslinging black teenagers to scares about satanic abuse and internet addiction. The book is a rich description of some of the fears that haunt the contemporary American psyche but it is ultimately disappointing for it offers little insight into the deeper cultural anxieties that the American media so cleverly exploits. What Glassner highlights, without ever examining, is the internal destruction consequent upon the American mode of development. The USA is a grossly unequal society and one in which structural inequality remains steadfastly mapped onto questions of race and class. Right at the end of his book Glassner briefly examines the source of the moral panics he has described, suggesting that they are `oblique expressions of concern about problems Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash – problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the US population’ (Glassner p.209). No more vivid expression of this social divisiveness can be found than in statistics regarding prison populations. According to recent Home Office (2000) figures, Britain, the worst offender in Europe, has a prison population of 72,000, equivalent to 139 per 100,000 people (Norway has 59). But the US tops the table with 686 per 100,000 (compared to China’s 111 and Brazil’s 133). The US prison population currently stands at 1.96 million people, an astronomical figure, the overwhelming proportion of whom are black men, and the US government spends more on imprisonment than on higher education! Contrary to the belief that the US exemplifies an effective multicultural society what we see is a severely restricted multiculturalism in which racial divisions, focusing upon the exclusion of African-Americans and Latinos, are more entrenched than ever. This has led some commentators to suggest that the US’s failure to understand global inequality and its incomprehension at the rage that many peoples feel towards it is an expression of its own inability to understand the sharpness of its own internal differences (Shapiro 2003). But social disintegration in the US is not just mapped along racial lines. As the effects of decades of neo-Liberal social and fiscal policies accumulate it is increasingly clear that in the US the concept of a `safety net’, central to the post-war settlement in western type democracies, has all but disappeared. As a consequence, and this has been glimpsed in some of Richard Sennett’s (1998) recent work, failure can now have catastrophic psychological and material effects even upon the American middle classes. The result seems to be a form of `moral isolationism', which is spreading through American society, a feeling that there is no-one and no-thing to rely upon. And whilst associationism, despite Putnam’s (2000) gloomy prognostications, still seems to be a strong feature of civic culture in the USA, with a few exceptions, such as strong faith communities, this offers little consolation when the chips are really down. In the absence of collective solutions to shared risk Americans fall back upon themselves. But this is not healthy individualism but social anomie, an isolationism fueled by those survival anxieties which were first glimpsed by Christopher Lasch (1985). There exists a second reservoir of guilt and anxiety, which is intimately connected to the destructive creativity of the American Prometheus. This can be traced back to the hideous and monstrous child that America, more than any other, nurtured from conception through to realisation. A monstrous child, Little Boy by name, which was unleashed upon the ordinary civilians of Hiroshima. The first of countless thousands of such children which, along with consequences of other monstrous biological and chemical conceptions, now constitute the exterminating logic of modernity. Let us not forget who unleashed the first Weapon of Mass Destruction and the imprint that this act must have left upon the collective psyche of the perpetrator. Within a few years a whole genre of sci-fi American B movies, paperbacks and comics was flourishing in which the theme of mutation was a constant motif (Jancovich 1996). This was the return of the repressed, or, rather, the annihilated. A whole culture of paranoia was developing; partly fueled by the Cold War, a culture that remains a potent dimension of the American psyche to this day. Richard Hofstadter (1979) described how this culture of paranoia infused American politics. Describing the paranoid style of the American politician, Hofstadter argues that whilst retaining some of the characteristics of the clinical paranoiac - overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression – this character does not perceive that the hostile and conspiratorial world is necessarily directed at him. Rather he sees all that is bad and evil directed at his nation, his culture and his way of life (Hofstadter, p.4). This has been typical of new right politics for many years and, for example, has resulted in persecutory immigration policies designed to protect ways of life that are often fictitious and based in phantasy. In a recent essay, Jason Cowley (2001) argues that this culture, despite its religiosity, ‘is essentially an entertainment culture, addicted to narratives of catastrophe’ in everything from film right through to computer games. Sat astride the pinnacle of this culture is Tom Clancy, the best-selling, Reagan-adoring writer of fiction such as the Sum of all Fears which presciently described the hijacking by Arab militants of civilian planes which were then used as weapons against the American people. Fiction becomes fact. America looks into the mirror of the world and sees an enemy, an enemy which if not contained will spread. Thus the `domino theory’, given vivid expression by Harry.S. Truman who succeeded Roosevelt as US President in 1944, a `theory’ which justified American intervention in Greece, Turkey and countless Latin American countries during the Cold War, inspired the Vietnam tragedy and now `the War on Terror’ in which a febrile Islam is imagined to be spreading rhizome-like around the edges of the `free world’. But who is this enemy if not Thanatos, Little Boy and all his heirs, the dark echoes of the idealisation of the American way of life - a variety and quantity of weapons of mass destruction which are now, like China’s citizens, almost beyond enumeration? In 2000 American defence expenditure stood at $295bn, this exceeded the combined expenditure of the rest of the world by almost $30bn. This year, 2003, it is set to rise by a further 14%, the biggest leap in over two decades, as a new generation of tactical nuclear weaponry, outlined in Rumsfeld’s `nuclear posture review’ of the previous year, is actively contemplated by the National Nuclear Security Agency (Guardian 2003). Despite the caution of John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, not to go `in search of monsters to destroy’, Rumsfeld and Co. are clearly bent on fostering the conditions that will keep this species sustainable for decades to come (and the US defence industry by the way). Such an overwhelming degree of military superiority betrays not just the extent of American ambitions for global hegemony but also the extent of America’s fear. Returning to Riviere, she notes how depressive anxiety gives rise to its own special defence, the manic defence. In place of vulnerability there is omnipotence and specifically an attitude of contempt and depreciation for the relationships upon which the narcissist depends. Listening to Richard Perle and other architects of the Project for the New American Century this contempt – for the United Nations, `Old Europe’ and countries which cannot or will not embrace the neo-conservative brand of modernisation – is explicit and worn with smirking pride. Contemplating the demise of the UN after the war on Iraq, Perle notes that `whilst the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat’ what will die `is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of the new world order’ (Perle 2003). He then unleashes an apparently clinical demolition of the repeated failure of the Security Council to act against breaches of international law without providing even the faintest of hints that in truth it has been the US which has most consistently used its veto on the Security Council – nine times in all since 1990 against the four vetos cast by the other four members combined during the same period. And whilst we’re on the subject of inaction in the face of breaches of international law we’d do well to remember that over the last thirty years the USA has vetoed 34 UN resolutions on Israel and has consistently supported Israel’s routine violations of UN resolution 242 to which the US is a signatory. What we have here is both cold cunning – there is no room for the UN as a countervailing source of authority in `the Project’ – and a paranoia about the world which has become so routine that it is not even aware of itself. Allusions to `threat’ and `security’ run like a thread throughout the brief manifesto of the Project, that is, its `Statement of Principles’. But what makes this paranoia, instead of a rational fear response to the real threats that exist to American hegemony around the world? The massive overkill, the self-fulfilling nature of so many American interventions, the uncanny knack that American foreign policy has displayed of making its worst fears come true, the classic paranoid conviction that one is the misunderstood victim and never the perpetrator, the complete inability to perceive how ones own ‘defensive actions’ are experienced by the other as provocation and threat – wherever we look, the ‘arms race’ with the Soviet Union, the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, fear of communist contagion in S.E Asia and Latin America, the current ‘war on terrorism’ and ‘containment’ of N.Korea we see the same mixture of provocation, ineptness and misunderstanding. In his recent book on paranoia, David Bell (2003) notes how the fears that the paranoid is subject to are the echo of what has become alien(ated). In this way Melanie Klein adds a twist to our understanding of alienation by insisting that what we project into the world forever threatens to return and haunt us. Bell notes how films such as Alien and The Conversation vividly depict this. Indeed Klein argues that through projective identification the other can become subject to control by self, in subtle ways becoming nudged and coerced into enacting what is put into them. In this way paranoia can become self-fulfilling and it really does seem as if the world is out to get you. God’s chosen people Estimates suggest that well over 60% of the citizens of the USA engage in religious worship on a regular basis – in Britain the figure is more like 7%. Christian fundamentalism has become particularly powerful in the USA since the late 1960’s, perhaps as the backlash towards 60’s `godlessness’. But these fundamentalist movements seem to be simply the tip of the iceberg that is modern American religiosity. Indeed, as Karen Armstrong (2001) noted, the concept of `fundamentalism’ was first coined to characterise the emergence of charismatic religious movements in N.America at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact God and America have walked hand in hand ever since the Founding Fathers. This has found a powerful and consistent expression in the politics of the United States, and particularly in its foreign policy, where analysts have coined the phrase `American exceptionalism’ to describe the belief that `the United States is an extraordinary nation with a special role to play in human history’ (McCrisken 2001). Almost from the beginning of the occupation by European settlers N.America has been construed as a promised land and its citizens a chosen people. The New World was, in this sense contrasted with the Old, a world of famine, war and intolerance from which many of these settlers had fled. McCrisken provides countless indications of this exceptionalist belief system from George Washington to Bill Clinton but all are characterised by certain common suppositions – that America is the land of the free, that its intentions are inherently benevolent, that inside every non-American there is an American struggling to get out and, perhaps most importantly given the War on Terror and the occupation of Iraq, that the US is the embodiment of universal human values based on the rights of all mankind – freedom, democracy and justice. Weinberg (1935) described this in terms of the belief in `manifest destiny’ which gave successive administrations in the nineteenth century the sense of America’s special mission to bring freedom to the peoples of the world, as in the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War which led to the `liberation’ of Cuba. Today the sense of manifest destiny is no less strong but now it is garbed in the cloak of ‘modernisation’ – the belief that all societies pass through certain stages of development (from traditional to modern) and that the West, and particularly the United States, is the common endpoint towards which all peoples must irresistibly move. Of course, this is Fukuyama’s `end of history’ and it is perhaps no surprise to find him to be (along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Co.) one of the 25 signatories to the Statement of Principles (written in June 1997) of the Project for the New American Century – the neo-Conservative manifesto which now directs American and British foreign policy. The point about all this is that this very idealisation of America by Americans, its self-identification with virtue, contributes enormously both to its innocence and to its arrogance. There is often a real generosity of spirit and a friendly naivete which strikes the non-American (at least the English ones) when encountering an American citizen. One thinks of the countless jokes about the American as an `innocent abroad’ captured in the image of the gawping American tourist. But there is also the arrogance added to this, an arrogance which leads even hard nosed strategists to assume that invading troops need know nothing about the peoples that they are about to `liberate’, a mistake which had tragic consequences in Somalia and is now being repeated in Iraq. Moreover this is an arrogance which leaves Americans with such a strong sense that they have virtue on their side, and it is this that has provided the fertile ground for the splitting and paranoia which has been such a feature of the American view of the world since the Second World War. Again, if we return to Hofstadter's ideas about American politics we can see this paranoid belief in a vast and sinister conspiracy which is set out to undermine and destroy a way of life. Indeed for Hofstadter, ‘the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization’ (Hofstadter 1979, p.29). Three decades on and this still sounds very familiar. One thinks of the `fighting talk’ of George Bush in the war on Iraq, in the fight against the Axis of Evil, and the struggle against global terrorism - fighting terror with terror, the talion morality of the paranoid schizoid position, destroying and re-creating political systems, acting as the purveyor of civilization to the world. This then, is a world in which American society has been called upon to resist the spreading evils, first of communism, now of militant Islam. Moreover, it has been this splitting of good and evil which fueled the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950’s and which is threatening American civil liberties today. Injured narcissism In 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms' Melanie Klein (1946) describes the destructive and controlling nature of the narcissistic state of mind. A typical feature of paranoid object relations is their narcissistic nature, for in reality the objects to which the paranoid individual or group relates are representations of their alienated selves. Moreover the narcissistic relationship has strong obsessional features, and in particular the need to control others, to remain omnipotent and all powerful. David Bell develops this theme in his commentary on Mike Davis’s recent NLR article (Davis 2001) in which he notes that the resort, following September 11th, to increasingly pervasive forms of security and control within the USA actually contributes the very anxiety these measures seek to address. Bell argues, `the grandiose demand for complete security creates ever more, in our minds, enemies endowed with our own omnipotence who are imagined as seeking to control us’ (Bell, p.37). But what happens when this narcissism is injured, omnipotence punctured? In the real world, as opposed to the world of the imaginary, this attitude of omnipotence is repeatedly subject to disconfirmation. McCrisken (2003) refers to the `Vietnam syndrome’ as a defining element of American foreign policy since the 1970’s, something which formed the backdrop to the first Gulf War through which it reached a partial and incomplete resolution. Vietnam was a trauma for the USA in two ways. The American claim to have a monopoly on virtue was destroyed by successive scandals, atrocities and outrages, in fact they were revealed to be as savage as any other occupying power. Jean-Paul Sartre (1968) famously argued that the war waged by America on Vietnam was implicitly genocidal. Indeed for Sartre, the war in Vietnam signified a new stage in the development of imperialism - 'it is the greatest power on earth against a poor peasant people. Those who fight it are living out the only possible relationship between an over-industrialized country and an under-developed country, that is to say, a genocidal relationship implemented through racism' (p.42). Worse still, they lost the war, against one of the most economically backward societies imaginable the might of American military power came to nought. The impact of Vietnam was such that the USA virtually avoided direct military involvement for twenty five years, preferring indirect involvement (encouraging and equipping Iraq versus Iran, Afghanistan versus the Soviet Union) or direct engagement in situations such as tiny Grenada where they could hardly lose. The Vietnam Syndrome also encouraged the development of an approach to warfare which gave maximum emphasis to the use of air power and the avoidance of ground troops, something exemplified by the intervention in Kosovo and, later, Afghanistan. We can also understand the Vietnam Syndrome in terms of Freud’s work on trauma and his notions of repetition and working through. Trauma (whether loss of limb or sexual abuse) is an attack upon the narcissistic organisation of the psyche/body, it is experienced as loss which is irreparable. But loss can be managed sufficiently for a life to move on, and for this to occur a place in the psyche/culture needs to be found in which some of the shock, rage, horror and grief can be addressed symbolically. And for a while in the 1970’s elements of the liberal American intelligentsia were able to initiate such a process through critical self-analysis, literature, film and music. But a quite different response, based upon a manic form of denial, was waiting in the wings. Freud notes how a child may engage in the repetition of traumatic experience in an attempt to magically overcome it by reversing the subject/object relationship, by becoming master rather than victim. But this is a ‘working through’ by enactment, an attempt to ‘act upon’ reality rather than understand it. Thus the `action movie’ and the `action hero’ of the Hollywood movies which began in the 1970’s featuring Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, and, later, Bruce Willis. But, more seriously, we can also see the same process of ‘working through’ in terms of the search to re-enact in reverse the humiliation of Vietnam but this time with the US as master. The first Gulf War only partially accomplishes this, Saddam remains unfinished business for many of the neo-conservatives gathering with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in the late 1990’s. It is in this context that we can understand September 11th . For September 11th was a second huge narcissistic injury for the USA and the current war on Iraq is a further attempt at ‘working through’. As by now is absolutely clear (and openly admitted by Wolfowitz) the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was the pretext for an intervention which had quite different motives. These motives were partly strategic (oil, the need to find an alternative to Saudi Arabia as a forward base for US forces in the region) but they were also partly simply about the reassertion of American power against a more fulfilling target than the Taliban in Afghanistan. They set about `finishing the job’ begun by Bush Snr and achieving `closure’, closing the narcissistic wound opened up by Vietnam and never properly healed. Psychotic Anxieties, Splitting and September 11th If we think psychoanalytically about the events leading up to the war on Iraq, then the starting point is the twin towers - September 11th . Its not easy to forget the horror of that day. There was no absence of bodies then. Horrific scenes of people jumping out of windows, running for life, mangled and dismembered corpses. On September 11th we witnessed true annihilation, not a film, just annihilation. As Cowley (2001) acutely observed, `Islamic terrorists appropriated the destructive impulses of American entertainment culture, making of a nation’s apocalyptic fantasies a terrifying actuality, as if they were attempting to speak to the Americans in their own language’. This was a massive attack on the security of the American nation. As Hanna Segal (2002) noted, the trauma of the terrorist attack had an added dynamic 'the crushing realisation that there is somebody out there who actually hates you to the point of annihilation'. It is now commonplace to say that the USA lost its innocence on September 11th. But what it really lost was its embrace of the imaginary. Until that day the American psyche had been consumed by a helpless fascination with a fictional threat, or rather a series of fictional threats; on September 11th they received the shock of the real. `Welcome to the world’ some people said. Suddenly Americans became as vulnerable as the rest of us. The immediate response to September 11th was bewilderment and incredulity. Again, as Segal noted, the question on most American lips was `why’? It is a common reaction for people in trauma situations to think that people are out to get them, ‘in the case of the terrorist attacks it is actually a true fact. One’s worst nightmares come true’. Segal added another dimension - the symbolism of the twin towers and the Pentagon. This is very important if we are to try and understand the meanings and motivations behind the war on Iraq. So, the symbolism equates to ‘we are all-powerful, with our weapons, finance, high tech - we can dominate you completely’. The suicide bombers destroyed this omnipotence. As Segal noted: we were pushed into a world of terror versus terror, disintegration and confusion. The shock was followed by mourning and barely contained anxiety. The president of the United States of America appeared on global television networks as `the child adult’, a little boy lost. At first he seemed quite inadequate to the part that was being demanded of him. It almost looked like he wanted to run – asking, `why me’? For weeks the USA was gripped by a wave of panics about anthrax and other impending attacks. But traces of American triumphalism were being quickly reasserted. The flags which, from Maine to Arizona, first hung from poles and windows in grief quickly transmuted into a sign of strength and resolution, and later, to bellicosity. This other mood could also be discerned in homage to the courage of fire crews and emergency service personnel and to the passengers who overcame the hi-jackers on the fourth plane (`let’s roll’). But rage took time to gather. Many liberals and leftists in Europe anticipated an outpouring of vengeful rhetoric from the Republicans, but it did not come. Rather, the response was surprisingly measured and multilateral. And whilst many opposed the war of the `coalition against terror’ against Afghanistan, at least the connection with September 11th seemed obvious – Al Quaeda was clearly being protected by the Taliban regime. It was only when this phyric victory had been swiftly achieved that a shift, symbolised by the `Axis of Evil’ speech in January 2002, into a more paranoid and in-your-face triumphalist discourse began. The question of weapons of mass destruction became central to the moral and ethical charge for war. Was there any proof of their existence? The weapons inspectors could find none, yet we were told time after time that clear evidence existed, even though the documents cited had very little credibility. Again, as Hofstadter noted, the typical procedure of higher paranoid scholarship is to start by accumalating facts, or what appear to be facts to establish 'proof' that a conspiracy exists - the paranoid mentality seeks a coherence that reality cannot provide. Indeed for Hofstadter, `what distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events.’ (Hofstadter 1979, p.39). The deployment of reason and strategic cunning becomes unpinned by the apocalyptic vision of paranoid politics. Destroying the Bad Object Classically, in a paranoid schizoid state, manic defenses are called into play. The splitting of good and bad, processes of idealisation and denigration, as we have seen, lead us to perceive the world in dichotomous relationships between good and bad. The bad object/other becomes the fixation point of our anger, fear, rage and paranoia. Excessive projection leaves the individual in mortal fear of an attack from the bad object. Thus we try and destroy this object, lest it comes back to destroy us. The question arises though, as to what happens when these destructive forces are unable to find a satisfactory object. Despite the measured and multi-lateral nature of the intervention there was still something murderous and retaliatory about the attack on the people of Afghanistan. An attack based in the talion morality of the paranoid schizoid position - an eye for an eye. The problem with the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban was there was no sense of gratification and the lust to get equal was never satisfied. There are several reasons for this. First, the bombing of Afghanistan simply wasn’t enough to either exact revenge, or to demonstrate the power of the Apocalypse - you cannot bomb the stone age back into the stone age even though, as Sartre (1968, p.40) had noted over thirty years earlier, this had already been attempted in Vietnam with disastrous effects. Second, Bin Laden disappeared, vaporised - there was no bad object to destroy. Finally, the exercise of military might, of unadulterated power had nothing to be powerful over - power only exists if people are the objects of that power. Instead we seemed to have an increasingly paranoid American population and its government on the one hand and disappearing enemy bodies on the other. And then came the `Axis of Evil’ speech and a further ratcheting up of the spiral of splitting, projection, paranoid phantasy, and defensive offence. White House rhetoric began providing florid depictions of a world divided between good and evil in which there was no `in between’, `you are either with us or you are against us’. Fakhry Davids (2002) notes that the events of September 11th were brought home vividly to us by the wall to wall media coverage - the shocking images of the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, and then its collapse. Psychically unbearable events, argues Davids, call into play powerful defences whose aim is to protect us from perceived danger. For Davids, the extent to which the event has been reframed in stereotyped racist terms is apparent everywhere, ‘the problem has now been reduced to a conflict between the enlightened, civilised, tolerant, freedom loving, clean living democrat versus the bearded, robed, Kalashnikov bearing bigoted, intolerant, glint in the eye fundamentalist fanatic, or viewed from the other side, the humble believer with God on his side versus the infidel armed with all the worldly might of the devil’ (Davids 2002, p.362). For Davids, it is difficult for us to find neutral ground - you are either with us, or against us - which side are you on? This reduction of a complex situation into black and white, good and bad is a paranoid solution to intense anxiety which reinforces the self-idealisation which we have seen lies at the heart of American exceptionalism. As Davids notes, such a world view makes us feel that we know who we are, and may justify actions that make us feel better. The problem is that we don’t face the problem. There have been many arguments about why America and Britain decided to wage war on Iraq. All quite plausible in their own right - Saddam the evil dictator, Saddam the murderer of his own people, then there are the economic, the oil, the money to be made from reconstructing the country, the geo-political, securing the middle east - stopping a snowball of violence, and of course harbouring the terrorist. Then of course there are the weapons of mass destruction, yet to be found, despite the documentation of the paranoid conspirators. All these explanations contribute to a fuller picture, but as David Hare (2003) recently wrote, the main motivation behind this war was a simply assertion of American power, ‘the feral pleasure of the flex’. Uppity Saddam had dared to piss on the boots of Uncle Sam. A lesson in respect was due. An annihilatory lesson aimed at the global (and not just Islamic) psyche. But we’ve been here before. This is Sartre (1968, p.42) again on Vietnam, `when a peasant falls in his rice paddy, mowed down by a machine gun, everyone of us is hit…. The group which the United States wants to intimidate and terrorize by way of the Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety’. Not just an attack but an annihilatory one aimed at the Iraqi body, its government, its history and its country – an attempt at vaporisation - an apocalyptic vision - such is the style of paranoid politics. And for a while the world did look on in shock and awe. Empty Boots, Empty Tanks, Empty Buildings According to Baudrillard (1994), `Coppola makes his films like the Americans make war… with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candour… and the same success. The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war becomes film even before being filmed… a test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms, their methods, their power.’ America had a choice after September 11th. It could have joined much of the rest of the world in its shared sense of vulnerability and interdependence. But, once more, America chose denial and magic. Denial of the real and a manic reassertion of omnipotence. The war on Iraq was a demonstration of pure and total power. It became sanitised as a film of all the elements that might obstruct or resist power. There were no bodies, just empty tanks, boots and buildings that were endlessly pounded as a demonstration of shock andawe. The Iraqi bodies disappeared, the presidential guard disappeared and then Saddam disappeared, as did the mighty Republican Guard and, oh yes, it seems so have the weapons of mass destruction. Peter Preston (2003) commented along similar lines, `the missing link, for those of us watching far away is death: the bodies of the men and women who have died’. Preston argued that the televised war turned away from the reality of the situation. Nobody wanted to see dead bodies, wounded soldiers or civilians suffering. We can watch the bombs falling, but not see the effect - ‘the dead become undead for photographic purposes’. In Britain, the first time we saw blood and bodies, despite the apocalyptic first night of the cruise missiles, was a report by John Simpson two weeks into the war. Simpson (2003) was with a convey of Kurdish fighters and American special forces when they came under attack from American warplanes: "This is just a scene from hell here. All the vehicles on fire. There are bodies burning around me, there are bodies lying around, there are bits of bodies on the ground. This is a really bad own goal by the Americans" . The very graphic images were even worse, broadcast on BBC television - blood dripping down the windscreen of a vehicle while the reporter sat inside. The cameraman wiping blood from the lens of the camera with his fingers. It was as if the full horror of war had suddenly hit the world. We could at last see the very symbolic and sickening images of a real, as opposed to a hyperreal war. It is paradoxical that there has been more emphasis on casualties since the end of the war. Some conclusions The destruction of the world trade centre was a terrible event in world history, a terrible shock to the American psyche and brought terrible traumas to the ordinary citizens of New York. For the USA as the only world power, the bubble was burst. Coppolla wasn’t there, or even Bruce Willis to protect the ordinary person in the street - the terrorists struck at the very heart of America. The tables, however, were turned and the Middle East temporarily succumbed to the (film) show of power (with no casualties), the show that should have protected the twin towers but didn’t. The problem is we cannot have war without bodies - and there cannot be power without being in relation to the other. Despite the fact the neo-Conservatives were itching to take on Saddam before Bush even got into office, despite the fact that for some of these strategists September 11th was therefore both a shock and an opportunity sent from heaven, despite the long period of military preparation and the diplomatic side-show conducted by that naïve Mr Blair that accompanied it, despite all this the occupation of Iraq looks like being a piece of inept foreign policy making in the best traditions of American irrationalism. Little thought appears to have been given to what happens once the military occupation was achieved, to the problem of law and order or to reviving the basic infrastructure. Little thought appears to have been given to the possibility that armed Saddam loyalists might `melt’ into the night in order to fight a sustained campaign of sabotage and guerilla warfare or that the repressed Shias might quickly fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Baathists and look to their theocratic Shia neighbours in Iran as guide and model. Little thought seems to have been given to an exit strategy and, as the situation deteriorates, the obvious solution – call for the UN to pick up the pieces – can only be reached for if an enormous chunk of humble pie is swallowed. Besides, the Project for the New American Century is not concerned to restore any legitimacy to this `Old World’ institution. To return to more or less where we began, it is impossible to stress enough the narcissistic and fearful character of contemporary American power. This is a power based in a paranoid syle of politics and expressed from a seemingly omnipotent position. Five decades of a growing ascendancy have encouraged the fantasy that there really are no limits, a delusional belief system has become corroborated by reality. Well almost. God’s chosen people really have acquired a technical, military and economic superiority, which seems to make interdependence unnecessary. But this is the problem of the narcissant, the attack upon relatedness. That America can destroy (like in Afghanistan) there can be no doubt, but it has little or no capacity to build or create beyond that which can be included within a commodified mode of relatedness – it has lost the capacity to rebuild states or civil societies (witness the continued degradation of the former Soviet Bloc). America, the Empire of Fear, now stands as the major threat to global society.