UTNIF 2010 Nuclear Presence Starter Pack

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF UTNIF 2010
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF ................................................................................................ 1
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC ............................................................................................... 2
Nuclear Presence 1AC ................................................................................................................................... 2
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF — EXTENSIONS......................................................................17
Solvency: Tactical Weapons Key ................................................................................................................. 17
Solvency: Public Debate .............................................................................................................................. 19
Solvency: Public Debate—Plan Prerequisite ................................................................................................ 20
Solvency: Taboo Good—Influence Policymakers ........................................................................................ 21
Solvency: Taboo Good—Challenge Elites ................................................................................................... 22
AT: Nuclear Psychology .............................................................................................................................. 23
AT: Weaponitis ........................................................................................................................................... 24
AT: Alternative ............................................................................................................................................ 25
AT: Nuclear Focus Strengthens U.S. Empire ............................................................................................... 26
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG...............................................................................................27
1NC Anti-Nuclear Nuclearism (K)............................................................................................................... 28
*****ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM — EXTENSIONS...............................................................33
Link: Arms Control...................................................................................................................................... 33
Link: Quick Fix ........................................................................................................................................... 34
Link: Weaponitis ......................................................................................................................................... 35
Link: Fetishism ............................................................................................................................................ 37
AT: Permutation .......................................................................................................................................... 39
Alternative: Movements............................................................................................................................... 41
Alternative: Rejection .................................................................................................................................. 43
*****FRAMEWORK ..................................................................................................................44
1NC Framework Topicality ......................................................................................................................... 44
Framework Negative—Extensions ............................................................................................................... 46
2AC Framework Topicality Block ............................................................................................................... 48
1
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC UTNIF 2010
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC
CONTENTION ONE: NUCLEAR PRESENCE

THE UNITED STATES TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS DEPLOYED IN TURKEY ARE A LEGACY OF THE COLD
WAR IN SEARCH OF A NEW MISSION—AND THAT NEW MISSION IS PREEMPTION. TODAY, IRAN IS THE NEW
TARGET OF CHOICE FOR NUCLEAR WARFIGHTING
GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL, MAY 2006 [“SECURING OUR SAFETY, ENSURING OUR SURVIVAL WHY US NATO
NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE MUST GO,” HTTP://WWW.GREENPEACE.ORG/RAW/CONTENT/
INTERNATIONAL/PRESS/REPORTS/SECURING-OUR-SAFETY.PDF P. 14-18]
Nuclear sharing is irresponsible
NATO policy allows for first use of nuclear weapons, which adds a new dimension of danger
when coupled with a US security policy that argues for pre-emptive and preventive war. The US
encourages developing nuclear weapons that provide ‘more flexible options’ in times of
military/political conflict or tension. This clearly increases the likelihood of the use of nuclear
weapons. The 2006 US National Security Strategy states “we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty
remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”13 The US has recently developed a “Global Strike Plan”
which describes the potential use of US/NATO nuclear bombs deployed in Europe in a pre-
emptive strike.14 US nuclear policy includes arguments and plans in support of sustaining and
modernizing its nuclear forces in this context, including a role for NATO nuclear weapons.
NATO nuclear doctrine mirrors that of the US. The NATO Nuclear Planning Group is even chaired by the US Assistant
Secretary of Defence, who is also responsible for drafting and implementing all US nuclear doctrine.
how NATO nuclear sharing countries
In April an article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh provided a real example of
are implicated in US Policy. Hersh exposed US military plans considering the option of using
tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.15 These plans specifically mentioned the B61 nuclear
bomb, which may be housed at the US/NATO airbases. If the intention in such a scenario were
to use land based aircraft, then this would probably involve the use of Incirlik airbase in
Turkey,16 where US weapons are currently stored. As such, European NATO nuclear sharing
countries are not only endorsing preemptive US nuclear weapons policy through their passivity,
but they also risk bases on their territories being used to launch nuclear weapons in a US conflict.
No NATO member state has publicly criticized the new US policy on the use of nuclear weapons, even in a conventional conflict or before a
Through their silence, through hosting these weapons and through supporting
visible threat emerges.
NATO policy, NATO member states are accepting the use of US nuclear weapons by Alliance
aircraft and pilots in these scenarios. Eliminating nuclear weapons from Europe will enable
Europeans to disassociate themselves from the US nuclear doctrine, which is giving an increased
role for nuclear weapons and thereby increasing the likelihood of use.
Nuclear sharing sets a dangerous precedent
NATO nuclear sharing sets a dangerous precedent for nuclear-armed states to deploy nuclear weapons outside their territory and to share them
with non-nuclear weapon states.
NATO nuclear sharing is a model that others could follow, using pre-existing relationships as a legal basis. Pakistan could cite NATO nuclear
sharing to support sharing its nuclear weapons with another state in the Middle East.What would stop it arguing, as the current NATO Strategic
Concept does, that its nuclear forces are a “significant factor” in the maintenance of security and stability? The presence of nuclear weapons on
European soil is more likely to provoke than deter potential proliferation.
NATO nuclear weapons inhibit negotiations with Russia
NATO tactical nuclear weapons impede efforts to negotiate with Russia over reductions of of its nuclear weapons.The Russian Federation has
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NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC
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been explicit about its unwillingness to negotiate reductions in tactical nuclear weapons as long as the US continues to deploy nuclear weapons in
Europe.The thousands of tactical (nonstrategic) nuclear weapons that Russia unilaterally declared in 1991 that it would destroy remain mostly
intact. Nuclear sharing is looking for a justification
Perhaps most alarmingly, NATO nuclear sharing seems to be seeking a new justification.
There is a well-founded concern that NATO is increasingly looking to the Middle East as a
reason for keeping US weapons in Europe. Largely driven by US nuclear war planning this
new rationale has developed outside of NATO and stands to influence evolving NATO
policy.The war on terror and the “axis of evil” rhetoric has put a spotlight on the Middle East and
past experience indicates that the US does not always fully consult its allies when making
nuclear war plans.
In addition, efforts by some European countries to stop and reverse the nuclear shadow that is
spreading over the Middle East today will be more credible and successful if foreign
deployments of nuclear weapons in European countries cease. European states could actually do more to prevent
escalation of a nuclear crisis in the Middle East, but at the moment European efforts to negotiate with Iran are severely
undermined by the duality (and resulting perceptions of hypocrisy) in European states’ nuclear policies.
Attempting to negotiate the denuclearisation of Iran from this position is patently absurd.
3
TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE BEING RETARGETED AGAINST STATES LIKE IRAN IN ORDER TO SHIFT
NUCLEAR POLICY FROM DETERRENCE TO WARFIGHTING AND PREEMPTION—THIS MAKES OFFENSIVE
NUCLEAR WAR INEVITABLE
CHOSSUDOVSKY, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA, 2006 [MICHAEL, “IS THE BUSH
ADMINISTRATION PLANNING A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST? WILL THE US LAUNCH "MINI-NUKES" AGAINST IRAN IN
RETALIATION FOR TEHRAN'S "NON-COMPLIANCE"?” GLOBAL RESEARCH, FEBRUARY 22,
HTTP://WWW.GLOBALRESEARCH.CA/INDEX.PHP?CONTEXT=VA&AID=2032]
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity
been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of
radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as "a weapon of last
resort" have been scrapped. "Offensive" military actions using nuclear warheads are now
described as acts of "self-defense".
The distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and the conventional battlefield arsenal
has been blurred. America's new nuclear doctrine is based on "a mix of strike capabilities". The
latter, which specifically applies to the Pentagon's planned aerial bombing of Iran, envisages the
use of nukes in combination with conventional weapons.
As in the case of the first atomic bomb, which in the words of President Harry Truman "was dropped on Hiroshima, a military
base", today's "mini-nukes" are heralded as "safe for the surrounding civilian population".
Known in official Washington, as "Joint Publication 3-12", the new nuclear doctrine (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations , (DJNO) (March
2005)) calls for "integrating conventional and nuclear attacks" under a unified and "integrated" Command and Control (C2).
It largely describes war planning as a management decision-making process, where military and
strategic objectives are to be achieved, through a mix of instruments, with little concern for the
resulting loss of human life.
Military planning focuses on "the most efficient use of force", -i.e. an optimal arrangement of different weapons
systems to achieve stated military goals. In this context, nuclear and conventional weapons are considered to
be "part of the tool box", from which military commanders can pick and choose the instruments that they require in accordance with
"evolving circumstances" in the war theater. (None of these weapons in the Pentagon's "tool box", including conventional bunker buster bombs,
cluster bombs, mini-nukes, chemical and biological weapons are described as "weapons of mass destruction" when used by the United States of
America and its coalition partners).
The stated objective is to:
"ensure the most efficient use of force and provide US leaders with a broader range of [nuclear and conventional] strike options to address
immediate contingencies. Integration of conventional and nuclear forces is therefore crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy. This
integration will ensure optimal targeting, minimal collateral damage, and reduce the probability of escalation." (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear
Operations p. JP 3-12-13)
The new nuclear doctrine turns concepts and realities upside down. It not only denies the devastating impacts of
nuclear weapons, it states, in no uncertain terms, that nuclear weapons are "safe" and their use in the
battlefield will ensure "minimal collateral damage and reduce the probability of escalation". The
issue of radioactive fallout is barely acknowledged with regard to tactical nuclear weapons. These various guiding principles which
describe nukes as "safe for civilians" constitute a consensus within the military, which is then fed into the
military manuals, providing relevant "green light" criteria to geographical commanders in
the war theater.
"Defensive" and "Offensive" Actions
While the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review sets the stage for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons
in the Middle East, specifically against Iran (see also the main PNAC document Rebuilding America`s Defenses, Strategy,
Forces and Resources for a New Century ) The Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations goes one step further in
blurring the distinction between "defensive" and "offensive" military actions:
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"The new triad offers a mix of strategic offensive and defensive capabilities that includes nuclear and non-nuclear strike capabilities, active and
passive defenses, and a robust research, development, and industrial infrastructure to develop, build, and maintain offensive forces and defensive
systems ..." (Ibid) (key concepts indicated in added italics)
The new nuclear doctrine, however, goes beyond preemptive acts of "self-defense", it calls for
"anticipatory action" using nuclear weapons against a "rogue enemy" which allegedly plans to
develop WMD at some undefined future date:
Responsible security planning requires preparation for threats that are possible, though perhaps unlikely today. The lessons of military history
remain clear: unpredictable, irrational conflicts occur. Military forces must prepare to counter weapons and capabilities that exist or will exist in
the near term even if no immediate likely scenarios for war are at hand. To maximize deterrence of WMD use, it is essential US forces prepare to
use nuclear weapons effectively and that US forces are determined to employ nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD
use. (Ibid, p. III-1, italics added)
Nukes would serve to prevent a non-existent WMD program (e.g. Iran) prior to its development.
This twisted formulation goes far beyond the premises of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and NPSD 17. which state that the US can retaliate
with nuclear weapons if attacked with WMD:
"The United States will make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including potentially nuclear weapons – to the
use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies." ... (NSPD 17)
"Integration" of Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Plans
The Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations outlines the procedures governing the use of nuclear weapons and the nature of the relationship
between nuclear and conventional war operations.
The DJNO states that the:
"use of nuclear weapons within a [war] theater requires that nuclear and conventional plans be integrated to the greatest extent possible"
(DJNO, p 47 italics added, italics added, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 )
The implications of this "integration" are far-reaching because once the decision is taken by the
Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States, to launch a joint conventional-nuclear military
operation, there is a risk that tactical nuclear weapons could be used without requesting
subsequent presidential approval. In this regard, execution procedures under the jurisdiction of the
theater commanders pertaining to nuclear weapons are described as "flexible and allow for
changes in the situation":
"Geographic combatant commanders are responsible for defining theater objectives and developing nuclear plans required to support those
objectives, including selecting targets. When tasked, CDRUSSTRATCOM, as a supporting combatant commander, provides detailed planning
support to meet theater planning requirements. All theater nuclear option planning follows prescribed Joint Operation Planning and Execution
System procedures to formulate and implement an effective response within the timeframe permitted by the crisis..
Since options do not exist for every scenario, combatant commanders must have a capability to perform crisis action planning and execute those
plans. Crisis action planning provides the capability to develop new options, or modify existing options, when current limited or major response
options are inappropriate.
...Command, control, and coordination must be flexible enough to allow the geographic combatant commander to strike time-sensitive targets
such as mobile missile launch platforms." Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations Doctrine (italics added)
Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO)
While presidential approval is formally required to launch a nuclear war, geographic combat
commanders would be in charge of Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO), with a mandate not only to
implement but also to formulate command decisions pertaining to nuclear weapons. ( Doctrine for Joint
Nuclear Operations Doctrine )
We are no longer dealing with "the risk" associated with "an accidental or inadvertent nuclear
launch" as outlined by former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara , but with a military decision-making
process which provides military commanders, from the Commander in Chief down to the
geographical commanders with discretionary powers to use tactical nuclear weapons.
Moreover, because these "smaller" tactical nuclear weapons have been "reclassified" by the
Pentagon as "safe for the surrounding civilian population", thereby "minimizing the risk of
collateral damage", there are no overriding built-in restrictions which prevent their use. (See
Michel Chossudovsky, The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War , Global Research, February 2006) .
Once a decision to launch a military operation is taken (e.g. aerial strikes on Iran), theater
commanders have a degree of latitude. What this signifies in practice is once the presidential
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decision is taken, USSTRATCOM in liaison with theater commanders can decide on the
targeting and type of weaponry to be used. Stockpiled tactical nuclear weapons are now
considered to be an integral part of the battlefield arsenal. In other words, nukes have become
"part of the tool box", used in conventional war theaters.
Planned Aerial Attacks on Iran
An operational plan to wage aerial attacks on Iran has been in "a state of readiness" since June
2005. Essential military hardware to wage this operation has been deployed. (For further details see Michel
Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).
Vice President Dick Cheney has ordered USSTRATCOM to draft a "contingency plan", which "includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War , The American Conservative, 2
August 2005).
USSTRATCOM would have the responsibility for overseeing and coordinating this military deployment as well as launching the military operation. (For details, Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).
In January 2005 a significant shift in USSTRATCOM's mandate was implemented. USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." To implement this mandate, a brand
new command unit entitled Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike , or JFCCSGS was created.
Overseen by USSTRATCOM, JFCCSGS would be responsible for the launching of military operations "using nuclear or conventional weapons" in compliance with the Bush administration's new nuclear doctrine. Both categories of weapons would be integrated into a "joint strike operation"
under unified Command and Control.
According to Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
"The Defense Department is upgrading its nuclear strike plans to reflect new presidential guidance and a transition in war planning from the top-heavy Single Integrated Operational Plan of the Cold War to a family of smaller and more flexible strike plans designed to defeat today's
adversaries. The new central strategic war plan is known as OPLAN (Operations Plan) 8044.... This revised, detailed plan provides more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies....
One member of the new family is CONPLAN 8022, a concept plan for the quick use of nuclear, conventional, or information warfare capabilities to destroy--preemptively, if necessary--"time-urgent targets" anywhere in the world. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an Alert Order in
early 2004 that directed the military to put CONPLAN 8022 into effect. As a result, the Bush administration's preemption policy is now operational on long-range bombers, strategic submarines on deterrent patrol, and presumably intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)."
The operational implementation of the Global Strike would be under CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022, which now consists of "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,' (Japanese Economic Newswire, 30 December
2005, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, op. cit.).
CONPLAN 8022 is 'the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.'
'It's specifically focused on these new types of threats -- Iran, North Korea -- proliferators and potentially terrorists too,' he said. 'There's nothing that says that they can't use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.' (According to Hans Kristensen, of the
Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese Economic News Wire, op. cit.)
Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization
The planning of the aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued.
The contents of this highly sensitive document remains a carefully guarded State secret. There has been no mention of NSPD 35 by the media nor even in Congressional debates. While its contents remains classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the deployment of tactical
nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.
In this regard, a recent press report published in Yeni Safak (Turkey) suggests that the United States is currently:
"deploying B61-type tactical nuclear weapons in southern Iraq as part of a plan to hit Iran from this area if and when Iran responds to an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities". (Ibrahim Karagul, "The US is Deploying Nuclear Weapons in Iraq Against Iran", (Yeni Safak,. 20 December 2005,
quoted in BBC Monitoring Europe).
This deployment in Iraq appears to be pursuant to NSPD 35 ,
What the Yenbi Safak report suggests is that conventional weapons would be used in the first instance, and if Iran were to retaliate in response to US-Israeli aerial attacks, tactical thermonuclear B61 weapons could then be launched This retaliation using tactical nuclear weapons would be
consistent with the guidelines contained in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and NSPD 17 (see above).
Israel's Stockpiling of Conventional and Nuclear Weapons
Israel is part of the military alliance and is slated to play a major role in the planned attacks on Iran. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).
Confirmed by several press reports, Israel has taken delivery, starting in September 2004 of some 500 US produced BLU 109 bunker buster bombs (WP, January 6, 2006). The first procurement order for BLU 109 [Bomb Live Unit] dates to September 2004. In April 2005, Washington
confirmed that Israel was to take delivery of 100 of the more sophisticated bunker buster bomb GBU-28 produced by Lockheed Martin ( Reuters, April 26, 2005). The GBU-28 is described as "a 5,000-pound laser-guided conventional munitions that uses a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead. "
It was used in the Iraqi war theater:
The Pentagon [stated] that ... the sale to Israel of 500 BLU-109 warheads, [was] meant to "contribute significantly to U.S. strategic and tactical objectives." .
Mounted on satellite-guided bombs, BLU-109s can be fired from F-15 or F-16 jets, U.S.-made aircraft in Israel's arsenal. This year Israel received the first of a fleet of 102 long-range F-16Is from Washington, its main ally. "Israel very likely manufactures its own bunker busters, but they are
not as robust as the 2,000-pound (910 kg) BLUs," Robert Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons, told Reuters. (Reuters, 21 September 2004)
The report does not confirm whether Israel has stockpiled and deployed the thermonuclear version of the bunker buster bomb. Nor does it indicate whether the Israeli made bunker buster bombs are equipped with nuclear warheads. It is worth noting that this stock piling of bunker buster
bombs occurred within a few months after the Release of the NPSD 35¸ Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization (May 2004).
Israel possesses 100-200 strategic nuclear warheads . In 2003, Washington and Tel Aviv confirmed that they were collaborating in "the deployment of US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines." (The Observer, 12 October
2003) . In more recent developments, which coincide with the preparations of strikes against Iran, Israel has taken delivery of two new German produced submarines "that could launch nuclear-armed cruise missiles for a "second-strike" deterrent." (Newsweek, 13 February 2006. See also
CDI Data Base)
Israel's tactical nuclear weapons capabilities are not known
Israel's participation in the aerial attacks will also act as a political bombshell throughout the Middle East. It would contribute to escalation, with a war zone which could extend initially into Lebanon and Syria. The entire region from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia and
Afghanistan's Western frontier would be affected..
The Role of Western Europe
Several Western European countries, officially considered as "non-nuclear states", possess tactical nuclear weapons, supplied to them by Washington.
The US has supplied some 480 B61 thermonuclear bombs to five non-nuclear NATO
countries including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, and one nuclear country, the
United Kingdom. Casually disregarded by the Vienna based UN Nuclear Watch, the US has actively contributed to the proliferation of nuclear
weapons in Western Europe.
As part of this European stockpiling, Turkey, which is a partner of the US-led coalition
against Iran along with Israel, possesses some 90 thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs at the
Incirlik nuclear air base. (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)
Consistent with US nuclear policy, the stockpiling and deployment of B61 in Western Europe
are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with "NATO strike
plans", these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the "non-nuclear States") could be
launched "against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran" ( quoted in
National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)
Moreover, confirmed by (partially) declassified documents (released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act):
"arrangements were made in the mid-1990s to allow the use of U.S. nuclear forces in Europe outside the area of responsibility of U.S. European
Command (EUCOM). As a result of these arrangements, EUCOM now supports CENTCOM nuclear missions in the Middle East, including,
potentially, against Iran and Syria"
(quoted in http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/nato.htm italics added)
With the exception of the US, no other nuclear power "has nuclear weapons earmarked for delivery by non-nuclear countries." (National
Resources Defense Council, op cit)
While these "non-nuclear states" casually accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, without
documentary evidence, they themselves have capabilities of delivering nuclear warheads, which
are targeted at Iran. To say that this is a clear case of "double standards" by the IAEA and the "international community" is a
understatement.
6
THIS LOGIC OF PREEMPTION WILL NEVER STOP—TODAY’S GLOBAL MILITARY VIOLENCE IS STRUCTURED BY A
SYSTEM OF FEAR WHICH MUST CONSTANTLY IDENTIFY AND DESTROY NEW TARGETS TO KEEP US
PREEMPTIVELY SAFE
MASSUMI, PROFESSOR AT THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL, 2007 [BRIAN, “POTENTIAL POLITICS AND THE
PRIMACY OF PREEMPTION,” THEORY & EVENT 10:2 | PROJECT MUSE]
Fear is always a good reason to go politically conditional. Fear is the palpable action in the present of a threatening
future cause. It acts just as palpably whether the threat is determinate or not. It weakens your resolve,
creates stress, lowers consumer confidence, and may ultimately lead to individual and/or economic paralysis. To avoid the paralysis,
which would make yourself even more of a target and carry the fear to even higher level, you
must simply act. In Bush administration parlance, you "go kinetic."6 You leap into action on a level with the
potential that frightens you. You do that, once again, by inciting the potential to take an actual
shape you can respond to. You trigger a production of what you fear. You turn the objectively
indeterminate cause into an actual effect so you can actually deal with it in some way. Any time
you feel the need to act, then all you have to do is actuate a fear. The production of the effect
follows as smoothly as a reflex. This affective dynamic is still very much in place, independent of Rumsfeld's individual fate. It
will remain in place as long as fear and remains politically actuatable.
The logic of preemption operates on this affective plane, in this proliferative or ontogenetic way:
in away that contributes to the reflex production of the specific being of the threat. You're afraid
Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists? It could have been. If it could have been, it would have
been. So go ahead, make it one. "Bring 'em on," the President said, following Hollywood-trained reflex. He knew it in his "guts."
He couldn't have gone wrong. His reflex was right. Because "now we can all agree" that Iraq is in actual fact a breeding ground for "terrrorists".
That just goes to prove that the potential was always there. Before, there was doubt in some quarters that Saddam had to be removed from power.
Some agreed he had to go, some didn't. Now we can all agree. It was right to remove him because doing so made Iraq become what it always
could have been. And that's the truth.
Truth, in this new world order, is by nature retroactive. Fact grows conditionally in the affective
soil of an indeterminately present futurity. It becomes objective as that present reflexively plays
out, as a effect of the preemptive action taken. The reality-based community wastes time studying empirical reality, the
Bushites said: "we create it." And because of that, "we" the preemptors will always be right. We always will have
been right to preempt, because we have objectively produced a recursive truth-effect for your judicious study. And while you are
looking back studying the truth of it, we will have acted with reflex speed again, effecting a new
reality. 7 We will always have had no choice but to prosecute the "war on terror," ever more
vigilantly and ever more intensely on every potential front. We, preemptors, are the producers of your world. Get
used to it.
The War in Iraq is a success to the extent that it made the productivity of the preemptive "war on
terror" a self-perpetuating movement. Even if the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the
war would have to continue on other fronts no matter who controls Congress or who is in the White House. It
would have to continue in Afghanistan, for example, where the assymetrical tactics perfected in Iraq are now being applied to renew
the conflict there. Or in Iran, which also always could have/would have been a terrorist breeding
ground. Or it could morph and move to the Mexican-US border, itself morphed into a distributed frontline proliferating throughout the
territory in the moving form of "illegal immigration". On the indefinite Homeland Security front of a protieform
war, who knows what threats may be spinelessly incubating where, abetted by those who lack
the "backbone" to go kinetic.
Preemption is like deterrence in that it combines a proprietary epistemology with a unique ontology in such a way as to make present a future
cause that sets a self-perpetuating movement into operation. Its differences from deterrence hinge on its taking
objectively indeterminate or potential threat as its self-constitutive cause rather than fully formed
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and specified threat. It situates itself on the ground of ontogenetic potential. There, rather than deterring the feared
effect, it actualizes the potential in a shape to which it hopes it can respond.
It assumes a proliferation of potential threats,
and mirrors that capacity in its own operation. It becomes proliferative. It assumes the objective imbalance of
a far-from-equilibrium state as a permanent condition. Rather than trying to right the imbalance, it seizes it as an opportunity for itself.
Preemption also sets a race in motion. But this is a race run on the edge of chaos. It is a race of movement-flushing, detection, perception, and
affective actuation, run in irreparably chaotic or quasi-chaotic conditions. The
race of preemption has any number of laps,
each ending in the actual effecting of a threat. Each actualization of a threat triggers the next lap,
as a continuation of the first in the same direction, or in another way in a different field.
Deterrence revolved around an objective cause. Preemption revolves around a proliferative
effect. Both are operative logics. The operative logic of deterrence, however, remained causal even as it displaced its cause's
effect. Preemption is an effective operative logic rather than a causal operative logic. Since its ground is potential, there
is no actual cause for it to organize itself around. It compensates for the absence of an actual cause by producing an actual
effect in its place. This it makes the motor of its movement: it converts an absent or virtual cause really, directly into a taking-actual-effect. It
does this affectively. It uses affect to effectively trigger a virtual causality.8 Preemption
is when the futurity of unspecified
threat is affectively held in the present in a perpetual state of potential emergence(y) so that a
movement of actualization may be triggered that is not only self-propelling but also effectively,
indefinitely, ontologically productive, because it works from a virtual cause whose potential no
single actualization exhausts.
Preemption's operational parameters mean that is never univocal. It operates in the element of vagueness and objective uncertainty. Due to its
proliferative nature, it cannot be monolithic. Its logic cannot close in around its self-causing as the logic deterrence does. It includes an essential
openness in its productive logic.9 It incites its adversary to take emergent form. It then strives to become as proteiform as its ever-emergent
adversary can be. It is as shape-shifting as it is self-driving. It infiltrates across boundaries, sweeping up existing formations in its own transversal
movement. Faced with gravity-bound formations too inertial for it to sweep up and carry off with its own operative logic, it contents itself with
opening windows of opportunity to pass through. This is the case with the domestic legal and juridical structure in the US. It can't sweep that
away. But it can build into that structure escape holes for itself. These take the form of formal provisions vastly expanding the power of the
executive, in the person of the president in his role as commander-in-chief, to declare states of exception which suspend the normal legal course
in order to enable a continued flow of preemptive action.10
Preemption stands for conflict unlimited: the potential for peace amended to become a
perpetual state of undeclared war. This is the "permanent state of emergency" so presciently described by Walter Benjamin.
In current Bush administration parlance, it has come to be called "Long War" replacing the Cold War: a
preemptive war with an in-built tendency to be never-ending.
8
THE NORMALIZATION OF PREEMPTION WILL MAKE THE BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL OF LIFE TOTAL—FREEDOM
WILL BE VIOLENTLY ELIMINATED IN A STATE OF ABSOLUTE WAR
GOH, VISITING FELLOW AT HARVARD, 2006 [IRVING, “DISAGREEING PREEMPTIVE/ PROPHYLAXIS: FROM PHILIP
K. DICK TO JACQUES RANCIÈRE,” FAST CAPITALISM 2.1, HTTP://WWW.UTA.EDU/HUMA/AGGER/
FASTCAPITALISM/2_1/GOH.HTML]
Wait At present, the time of the preemptive presents the targeted body without the chance, or the
right, to offer a counter-hypothesis, so as to prove the preemptive erroneous. The targeted body of the
preemptive is not offered, and cannot offer, a prophylaxis contra the preemptive so as to delay the elimination of the right to be
alive. In other words, in the staging of the preemptive, there is no space for disagreement. His or her speech, phone
or logos—the desperate cries (phone) of denial of any (future) wrongdoing; or the cries of injustice of a treatment
towards another human being, articulated in a linguistic idiom rational and intelligible (logos); and the cries to surrender (including deferring one's
own innocence for the sake of one's safety)— no longer matters. It is no longer heard, as in the case of the preemptive shooting in Miami. Even silence is
not heard either, as in the case of the London shooting. The rush of a preemptive is a sonic barrage that drowns out any
(silent) voice that seeks to defer it. The gap opened by a suspected body between itself and the
law that promises the security of the territory is already too great. The law and its need to secure
a terrifying peace cannot bear the widening or delaying of that interval by a further demand of a
disagreeing counter-hypothesis or auto-prophylaxis.
To allow the normalization of the fatal preemptive would be to institute the legitimization
of an absolute or extreme biopolitics. According to Foucault, biopolitics is the control and
management of individual bodies by the State through technics of knowledge (usually through surveillance) of
those same bodies. In a biopolitical situation, the State holds the exceptional power to determine either
the right to let live or make die the individual belonging to the State. Should the preemptive become a force of
reason of contemporary life, one would terribly risk submitting the freedom of life and therefore
an unconditional right to be alive to a biopolitical capture, handing over the right to let die to the
State police and military powers. It would be a situation of abdicating the body as a totally
exposed frontier of absolute war. For in the constant exposure of the imminent preemptive, the
body at any time—when decided upon by military or police powers to be a security threat—
becomes the point in which the space and time of conductibility of war collapse in a total
manner. The preemptive reduces the body to a total space of absolute war. Virilio has
suggested that the absolute destruction of an enemy in war is procured when the enemy can no
longer hypothesize an alternate if not counter route or trajectory (of escape or counter-attack) from impending forces (1990: 17). In
the sequence of executing the preemptive to its resolute end, the escaping body faces that same
threat of zero hypothesis. There is no chance for that body to think (itself) outside the vortical
preemptive. Preemptive bullets into the head would take away that chance of hypothesis.
A spectral figure begins to haunt the scene now. And that is the figure of the homo sacer, who according to
Agamben's analysis, is the one who in ancient times is killed without his or her death being a religious sacrifice, and the one whose killers are nonindictable of
homicide. This figure is also the sign par excellence of the absolute biopolitical capture of life by the
State, in which the decision to let live and make die is absolutely managed and decided by the
State, and thereby the right to be alive is no longer the fact of freedom of existence for the homo
sacer (Agamben 1998). For the right to be alive to be secured in any real sense from any political
capture, for it to be maintained and guaranteed as and for the future of the human, the body
cannot be allowed to return to this figure of the homo sacer. But victims of the preemptive
irrepressibly recall the figure of the homo sacer. In the current legal proceedings of the London shooting, it has not been the fact that
the police officers shot an innocent Brazilian that they will be charged. That charge remains absent. The charge of homicide against the officers remains elliptical.
Instead, the plan has been to charge them for altering the police log book to conceal the fact that they had mistakenly identified the victim as a terror suspect.
9
THUS, WE DEMAND:
THAT THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD END THE PRESENCE OF ITS TACTICAL NUCLEAR
WEAPONS IN TURKEY
CONTENTION TWO: NUCLEAR ABSENCE

VOTING AFFIRMATIVE REOPENS THE SPACE OF DISAGREEMENT AGAINST THE CLOSED LOGIC OF
PREEMPTION— OUR DEMAND INTERRUPTS THE CONSENSUS FOR PREEMPTION GROWING AROUND THE NEW
MISSION OF TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
GOH, VISITING FELLOW AT HARVARD, 2006 [IRVING, “DISAGREEING PREEMPTIVE/ PROPHYLAXIS: FROM PHILIP
K. DICK TO JACQUES RANCIÈRE,” FAST CAPITALISM 2.1, HTTP://WWW.UTA.EDU/HUMA/AGGER/
FASTCAPITALISM/2_1/GOH.HTML]
For a critical response to the preemptive, such that a counter-hypothesis to disprove the
preemptive is thinkable, such that no profiling politics of homo sacer is resurrected, and such that
a right to be alive unconditionally remains thinkable or remains open and free to thought, one
needs to open the space of disagreement with it and resist it, even though the State cannot
bear such an interval between its preemptive law for territorial security and the interruption of a
disagreement. One nonetheless has to interrupt the preemptive in overdrive to allow the counter-
hypothesis or its prophylaxis to surface or arrive; or, one has to interrupt the prophylaxis when it precipitates into
a destructive preemptive. And one cannot allow this reserve of the prophylaxis in contradistinction with the
deadly preemptive to be the sole domain or hidden property of exceptional power. It cannot
be deferred to be the decision and the enclosed time of reading of power. That is in fact the aporia of the
prophylaxis in the text of Minority Report. John Anderton comes to realize that the prophylaxis of him not being a criminal-to-come is possible
only because only he, as a figure of sovereign power, as the chief of "precrime" operations, has access to this strategic information. It is a
privileged access, exceptional only to him, and not to the others, the other common beings that do not personify the figure of law and therefore
already arrested for a crime they have not (yet) commit. Only John Anderton can be offered the prophylaxis (provided he chooses to want to read
it), and only he can offer a prophylaxis. As he admits at the end of the text, "My case was unique, since I had access to the [prophylaxis] data. It
could happen again—but only to the next Police Commissioner" (Dick 1997:353). But the sending and the offering of the prophylaxis cannot
It must arrive from the other side of the law, arriving as the
remain as the exceptional reserve of figures of law.
disagreement with the preemptive, and it must be listened to. This disagreement will be the time
that holds back if not delays the preemptive so that a prophylaxis can come into negotiation with
it.
Disagreement here will be the enunciation of wait in response to the preemptive. Indeed, wait is the word
in Spielberg's adaptation upon which is hinged the critical duration that offers the prophylaxis that will be the counter-hypothesis to the deadly
preemptive. John Anderton gets an initial glimpse of the value of holding back a second before rushing to the crime-scene-to-come, when a
counter-check on the information of the address of the criminal-to-be shows it as obsolete. Finally arriving at the right address, John Anderton
proceeds to arrest the criminal-to-be, ignoring the cries of "wait" of the latter—perhaps because he has not committed any crime yet, or perhaps
he did not intend to follow through the act he thought he would commit. Anderton then, as the leader of the "precrime" task force, of course does
not wait. But the critical value of wait and its offering of a prophylaxis or counter-hypothesis against the preemptive begin to turn on John
Anderton when his image and name appear as the future perpetrator of a future crime. He then understands the value of the enunciation of wait to
disarticulate the accelerated judgment of the "precogs" and to secure his right to be alive against the preemptive force of "precrime." But as said,
wait cannot be the sole remainder of sovereignty. Wait must also arrive from the side of the one without power but under threat of the
preemptive. And it must be heard, and received by the forces of law delivering the preemptive. Wait
might be an untimely word for the speed of the preemptive. "There is little time to waste," as the police chiefs of the
United States proclaim in consensus (New York Times. 25 July 2005). But wait is not insignificant refuse, ready to be
abandoned absolutely in no time, if its act of refusal of the deadly speed of the preemptive in fact
(Continues…)
10
(Continues…)
proves the preemptive wrong or that it offers another possibility unthinkable to the preemptive
and thereby keeps open the chance for the right to be alive. Wait, in negotiation if not in
disagreement with the speed of the preemptive, is that interruption, that possible chance and
prophylaxis for the right to be alive, by saying that there is something not totally right about the
preemptive.
5.
An international organization representing police chiefs has broadened its policy for the use of deadly force by telling officers to shoot suspected
suicide bombers in the head.
—Washington Post, as cited in Reuters. 04 August 2005.
They should not be exterminating people unjustly. [2]
—"Ban 'Shoot-to-Kill, Urge Family." BBC News. 27 July 2005.
The articulation of wait cannot be more urgent today. It must be pronouncedly reiterated, in
disagreement with the deadly preemptive, before the latter becomes a "necessary" global security
condition of living in the world today. The deadly preemptive without chance for a counterhypothetic prophylaxis
being offered must be resisted against its gaining momentum to procure a global consensual, legal
status. And even if it is already in the process of being legalized or normalized as a contemporary fact or
"necessity" of life in this twenty-first century of insecurity, it still has to be disagreed with. According to Rancière, consensus
is arrived at from a striated observation of the real. The real today is a situation in which terror is
surprising major cities and cities thought to be defensible against if not impenetrable to such surprises in ever greater media visibility
and spectacle. To prevent more of these terrifying surprises (mediatising themselves) elsewhere, or such that
second surprises will not tear apart the same city, the determination has been to short-circuit the
possible dissemination of such terror at whatever cost. And this is where the preemptive has
come in, the only possible measure to erase the slightest shadow of the next surprise. It cannot take
chances. There is no chance for the counter-hypothesis. The real "is the absorption of all reality and
all truth in the category of the only thing possible" (Rancière 1999:132). This is the real through which
the consensus on the preemptive is or will be reached. The consensus is that "which asserts, in all circumstances, that it
is only doing the only thing possible to do" (ibid.). The aggregation of the striated observation of the real, the "only thing possible to do," and
consensus, is the final collapse of thinking of another trajectory of the future of the real, the
erasure of the exposition of what is unthinkable or impossible that will falsify the future of "the only thing possible
to do."
11
THISSPACE OF INTERRUPTION IS NOT JUST AN ABSTRACT ONE—REMOVING TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
ALLOWS FOR TURKEY TO REPLACE THE AMERICAN LOGIC OF PREEMPTION WITH DIPLOMACY AND
COOPERATION
LAMOND & INGRAM, BRITISH-AMERICAN SECURITY INFORMATION COUNCIL, 2009 [CLAUDINE & PAUL,
“POLITICS AROUND US TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN HOST STATES”, BASIC GETTING TO ZERO PAPERS, NO.
11, JANUARY 23, HTTP://WWW.BASICINT.ORG/GTZ/GTZ11.PDF, P. 4]
Turkey
There is a rising sentiment amongst the population for the removal of US nuclear weapons from
Turkish territory. In a recent survey,20 more than half the respondents stated that they are against nuclear weapons being stationed in
Turkey. Almost 60% of the Turkish population would support a government request to remove the nuclear weapons from their country, and 72%
causes behind this sentiment,
said they would support an initiative to make Turkey a nuclear-free zone.21 There may be several
including the Iraq War, Turkish relations with neighboring states, budget expenditure and the moral
concern over nuclear weapons. The historic precedence of Greece, a NATO member and Turkey’s historic rival, ending its
commitment to nuclear sharing in NATO may have further strengthened this tendency.
There have been public expressions of resentment towards the US military presence in Turkey
ever since the lead up to the US war with Iraq. The United States insisted on the government allowing American troops to
use Turkey as a staging post, despite overwhelmingly antiwar Turkish public and political opinion. Limited permission was granted after heavy
debates and delay in the Turkish parliament.
Turkey’s location has added an element of both risk and opportunity to NATO nuclear sharing.
Turkey’s close proximity to states deemed potentially hostile, such as Iran and Syria, make
Turkey a preferred NATO base for TNWs. The risk, of course, is that stationing TNWs in Turkey
might provoke a pre-emptive strike upon NATO bases. Turkish parliamentarians have expressed
to NATO the difficulty of explaining the continued presence of US TNWs on Turkish
territory to Muslim and Arab neighbors. There is a fear that they undermine Turkey’s clear
diplomatic objectives to act as a mediator within the region.
Turkey has a unique opportunity to play a positive role in promoting non-proliferation. Ending
nuclear sharing and fully complying with the NPT would act as a powerful example to neighboring
states and strengthen Turkey’s legitimacy. Moreover, efforts by the Turkish government to play a
leading role in the elimination of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would receive
overwhelming public support.22
12
AND, CHALLENGING THESE WEAPONS MUST BEGIN WITH TURKEY—OTHERWISE, TURKEY WILL SIMPLY
BECOME THE REPOSITORY OF ALL TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY, M.A. IN PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION AT UMASS-AMHERST, 2010 [ANNA, “A

STEP CLOSER TO A WORLD WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS,” COSMOPOLITAN REVIEW 2.1, HTTP://
COSMOPOLITANREVIEW.COM/ARTICLES/56-2010-SPRING-VOL-2-NO1/201-A-STEP-CLOSER-TO-A-WORLD-
WITHOUT-NUCLEAR-WEAPONS]
Although nuclear disarmament has long appeared to be a dream of far leftist idealists and religious scholars, the past few years have shown
significant political support for, as U.S. President Barack Obama called it in his Prague speech, “a world without nuclear weapons.” Unlikely
former U.S. hawks have argued that international security threats are no longer dominated by a cold-war paradigm, but instead by terrorists,
proliferation, and non-state actors; nuclear deterrence as a strategy is “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective” and the world should
pursue complete nuclear disarmament. Leaders from across the world have echoed Obama’s sentiment and pledged to work towards a world
without nuclear weapons. While promoters of disarmament have been in favor of the current U.S. and Russian negotiations on a new START
treaty, many are hoping for a new focus once Start is ratified: tactical nuclear weapons.
Since the 1950s, NATO has deployed U.S. owned tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) and their
accompanying delivery vehicles at bases in Europe. Short-range missiles developed during the Cold War for use during
in-theater conventional battle situations, TNW are non-strategic in the sense that they don’t provide strategic deterrence; they are militarily
distinct from strategic missiles which are thought to provide a guarantee of “mutually assured destruction.” During the Cold War, it was thought
that these short range TNWs would provide a “ladder of escalation” in fighting should combat take place on European soil. NATO did not have
the conventional weaponry necessary to rebuke a Russian ground invasion of Western Europe, and would have been able to employ these sub-
strategic TNW in conventional warfare while limiting the conflict from escalating to full-blown international nuclear war.
At the height of deployment there were over 7,000 U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. Due to major reductions, including the Presidential Nuclear
Initiatives of 1991, today there are only between 150-200 TNW that are stationed at bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey.
Many experts argue that TNW no longer provide any military or strategic purpose for NATO but instead maintain symbolic security guarantees
between the U.S. and European NATO allies. At the beginning of February, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and Swedish foreign
minister Carl Bildt published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for new negotiated reductions for both U.S. and Russian TNW. This call
was supported by a letter to NATO Secretary General Rasmussen penned by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs for Belgium, Germany,
Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Norway, asking for the topic to be discussed at the upcoming meeting in Tallinn.
Following the calls from European leaders to move towards a more focused discussion on the possibility of reducing or removing TNW from
Europe, NATO Secretary General Rasmussen has stated that discussions on NATO’s nuclear policy and posture will continue up until the NATO
summit in November when a new strategic concept will be approved. Though this sounds promising for proponents of disarmament, Rasmussen
also emphasized practicality and that as long as nuclear weapons exist, “it would be wise to have and maintain a nuclear capacity as part of a
credible deterrence.”
NATO will likely look to the U.S. for leadership on this issue. Although there have been rumors that the
Obama Administration is interested in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s mission, conservative domestic politics will continue to
stress the importance of nuclear deterrence and indivisible security guarantees within NATO. Conservatives in the U.S. are also concerned about
security issues for the Baltic States and some Eastern European states that have expressed their desire for continued NATO TNW deployment to
strategically balance Russia’s increased revanchism. Additionally, neither Italy nor Turkey have expressed their desire
to have the nukes removed from their bases; some suspect that the presence of TNW in Turkey is what has prevented them
from developing their own nuclear weapons technology to counterbalance the growing threat of neighboring Iran.
Advocates for removing TNW from Europe should be careful not to push their agenda too
quickly; if European leadership requests immediate removal of TNW at the same time that an
increasing threat of a nuclear Iran creates more conservative domestic pressure in the U.S.,
Europeans may find themselves with TNW being moved from Germany, Luxembourg, and
Belgium to the Incirlik base in Turkey, a situation which could be more dangerous and less
helpful to the overall goals of disarmament than a maintenance of the status quo would
have been. In Western Europe, TNW are militarily fairly useless, but in Turkey’s relative
proximity to Iran, TNW may begin to be included in strategic planning once again. As
NATO deliberates, caution and tact is advised, less disarmament advocates are left to shake their
heads and repeat the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for ...” CR
13
AND, CHALLENGING TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS SPILLS OVER TO BROADER ACTION AGAINST NUCLEAR
VIOLENCE—IT WILL SET THE DISARMAMENT FRAME FOR FUTURE NUCLEAR POLICIES
KELLEHER & WARREN, 2009, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND & EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR OF GENERATION CITIZEN [BY CATHERINE M. KELLEHER AND SCOTT L. WARREN, “GETTING TO ZERO
STARTS HERE: TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS,” OCTOBER, HTTP://WWW.
ARMSCONTROL.ORG/ACT/2009_10/KELLEHER]
A critical debate on nuclear weapons is once again in the limelight. President Barack Obama has
unequivocally, ambitiously, and repeatedly stated his ultimate vision of a world without nuclear
weapons. Under the Obama policy, zero nuclear weapons is, for the first time in U.S. history, an
operational, tangible U.S. policy goal and thus a measuring stick against which to judge a host
of shorter-range, less ambitious initiatives or actions.[1]
Obama has acknowledged that the goal will not be reached during his presidency, and probably not even during his lifetime. Nevertheless, it is a
dramatic move, probably the most dramatic foreign policy commitment in a principally domestic presidential agenda.
The question of how to reduce or eliminate tactical nuclear weapons should be (and, Obama
experts promise, will be) among the first in this ambitious campaign, once an agreement extending the logic and
verification protocols of START is reached. An agreement to extend key provisions of the treaty, at least on an interim basis, will have to be
reached by the time the current treaty expires December 5. A formal agreement is expected to follow early next year. Tactical nuclear
weapons are an important priority partly because of their seemingly easy solution, but also
because the challenges they present are emblematic of those in the larger arms control
debate.
14
FINALLY, PUBLIC DEBATE IS KEY—CHALLENGING THE PLANNING OF PREEMPTIVE WARS AGAINST IRAN AND
OTHERS SHIFTS THE DEBATE AND EXPOSES MILITARISM TO INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CHANGE
CHOSSUDOVSKY, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA, 2006 [MICHAEL, “IS THE BUSH
ADMINISTRATION PLANNING A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST? WILL THE US LAUNCH "MINI-NUKES" AGAINST IRAN IN
RETALIATION FOR TEHRAN'S "NON-COMPLIANCE"?” GLOBAL RESEARCH, FEBRUARY 22, HTTP://WWW.
GLOBALRESEARCH.CA/INDEX.PHP?CONTEXT=VA&AID=2032]
The World is at a Critical Cross-roads
It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.
In recent developments, Western European governments --including the so-called "non-nuclear states" which
have joined the bandwagon. In chorus, Western Europe and the member
possess nuclear weapons--
states of the Atlantic alliance (NATO) have endorsed the US-led military initiative against
Iran.
The Pentagon's planned aerial attacks on Iran involve "scenarios" using both nuclear and
conventional weapons. While this does not imply the use of nuclear weapons, the potential danger of a Middle East
nuclear holocaust must, nonetheless, be taken seriously. It must become a focal point of the
antiwar movement, particularly in the United States, Western Europe, Israel and Turkey.
It should also be understood that China and Russia are (unofficially) allies of Iran, supplying them with advanced military equipment and a
sophisticated missile defense system. It is unlikely that China and Russia will take on a passive position if and when the aerial bombardments are
carried out.
The new preemptive nuclear doctrine calls for the "integration" of "defensive" and "offensive"
operations. Moreover, the important distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons has
been blurred..
From a military standpoint, the US and its coalition partners including Israel and Turkey are in "a
state of readiness."
Through media disinformation, the objective is to galvanize Western public opinion in support
of a US-led war on Iran in retaliation for Iran's defiance of the international community.
War propaganda consists in "fabricating an enemy" while conveying the illusion that the
Western World is under attack by Islamic terrorists, who are directly supported by the Tehran
government.
"Make the World safer", "prevent the proliferation of dirty nuclear devices by terrorists",
"implement punitive actions against Iran to ensure the peace". "Combat nuclear proliferation by
rogue states"...
Supported by the Western media, a generalized atmosphere of racism and xenophobia directed
against Muslims has unfolded, particularly in Western Europe, which provides a fake legitimacy
to the US war agenda. The latter is upheld as a "Just War". The "Just war" theory serves to
camouflage the nature of US war plans, while providing a human face to the invaders.
What can be done?
The antiwar movement is in many regards divided and misinformed on the nature of the US military agenda. Several non-governmental
organizations have placed the blame on Iran, for not complying with the "reasonable demands" of the "international community". These same
organizations, which are committed to World Peace tend to downplay the implications of the proposed US bombing of Iran.
To reverse the tide requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people
across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools,
universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war, which contemplates the use
of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: Iran is not the threat. Even without the use of nukes, the proposed aerial
(Continues…)
15
(Continues…)
bombardments could result in escalation, ultimately leading us into a broader war in the Middle East.
Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community,
particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US
Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the
political and military actors in high office must be challenged.
The corporate media also bears a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. It must also be forcefully challenged for its
biased coverage of the Middle East war.
For the past year, Washington has been waging a "diplomatic arm twisting" exercise with a view to enlisting countries into supporting of its
military agenda. It is essential that at the diplomatic level, countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America take a firm stance against
the US military agenda.
Condoleezza Rice has trekked across the Middle East, "expressing concern over Iran's nuclear program", seeking the unequivocal endorsement of
the governments of the region against Tehran. Meanwhile the Bush administration has allocated funds in support of Iranian dissident groups
within Iran.
What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions,
confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-
called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has
embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.
It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America
and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions.
Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
16
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF — EXTENSIONS UTNIF 2010
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF

— EXTENSIONS
SOLVENCY: TACTICAL WEAPONS KEY
FOCUSING ON TACTICAL WEAPONS ADVANCEMENTS ARE KEY—NEW STRATEGIC SYSTEMS ARE ALWAYS
CHALLENGED, BUT SMALLER WEAPONS GO UNNOTICED—MOST LIKELY SCENARIO FOR NUCLEAR WAR
RAJARAMAN, PROFESSOR OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS AT JNU, 2002 [R., “BAN BATTLEFIELD NUCLEAR WEAPONS,”
4/22/2, THE HINDU, HTTP://WWW.HINDUONNET.COM/THEHINDU/2002/04/22/STORIES/ 2002042200431000.HTM]
Whatever military advantage tactical sub-kiloton weapons may offer, it is not worth the price of
destroying the time-tested psychological barrier blocking the road to nuclear holocaust.
THE NOTION of using tactical nuclear weapons as just another piece of arsenal in waging war,
rather than as a deterrent against nuclear attacks, has started rearing its head again. During the Afghan offensive, the U.S.
Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when asked whether the U.S. planned to use t actical nuclear weapons to "flush
out" the Taliban and Al-Qaeda members from their shelters, would not rule out such contingency plans. In the event, no nuclear
weapons were used in Afghanistan, but one cannot remain sanguine about the prospects of such reticence in future conflicts if one goes by the recent disclosures of a
"Nuclear Posture Review" document prepared by the Pentagon. The document reportedly recommends contingency plans to use tactical nuclear weapons not just in
retaliation against biological or chemical weapons but even in the event of surprising military developments. Stronger, nuclear tipped earth-penetrating weapons are
also on the anvil. In the words of a nuclear arms expert, all this "makes nuclear weapons a tool for fighting a war rather than deterring it".
It is vital to register strong worldwide opposition to the use of such weapons. In countries fortunate enough not
to possess them already, such as India and Pakistan, there should be a mutually agreed ban on their development.
At first sight, a call for opposing the less potent tactical weapons may seem silly in a world which
already has loads of giant nuclear bombs going up to the multi-megaton range. Historically, the branching out of
weapon builders into smaller tactical bombs has taken place relatively unopposed. As the initial arsenal
of 15-20 kiloton fission bombs of the type used in Hiroshima gradually grew to include "hydrogen" (fusion) bombs running into
megatons in TNT equivalent, each stage of this growth was met with alarm and protest by anti-nuclear activists.
But somewhere along the line started a parallel development of smaller "tactical" nuclear weapons,
originally intended for use in Europe should conflicts flare up between the NATO and Soviet
blocs, far away from the Cold War principals. Advocates of such battlefield nuclear weapons argue that with their
relatively low yield they need not be viewed as such horrendous things since they would not cause
significantly more damage than a barrage of giant conventional bombs.
But there are very sound reasons for vigilantly opposing these battlefield nuclear weapons which pose a
grave danger of a different sort, no matter how low their yield. That danger stems from opening, after a very long gap,
the nuclear Pandora's box. It should be remembered that subsequent to the two atom bombs dropped on Japan in rapid
succession at the end of World War II, there has been no known incidence of nuclear weapon usage except for tests. This
despite the fact that the nuclear arsenals have grown from a handful of weapons in the hands of the Americans to tens
of thousands of far more powerful bombs spread among a half a dozen countries. It is not as if
there has been a shortage of major conflicts involving countries possessing nuclear weapons. We
have had, among others, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Iraqi war,
the Sino-Soviet border skirmishes and most pertinently for us, the Kargil conflict. Some of these were long
drawn out wars with heavy casualties. The U.S. in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan had
to bear the ignominy of losing the wars to smaller and technologically less developed
(Continues…)
17
SOLVENCY: TACTICAL WEAPONS KEY
(Continues…)
antagonists. One might have imagined that under such severe circumstances nations would
employ all available weapons in their power to turn defeat into victory. Yet, none of these countries
used a nuclear bomb even once.
There were a variety of different reasons behind each of these examples of abstinence from using
nuclear weapons. But one major common factor contributing to all of them has been an ingrained
terror of nuclear devastation. The well documented images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
awesome photographs of giant mushroom clouds emerging from nuclear tests in the Pacific and
the numerous movies based on nuclear Armageddon scenarios have all contributed to building
up a deep rooted fear of nuclear weapons. This is not limited just to the abhorrence felt by anti-
nuclear activists. It permeates to one extent or another the psyche of all but the most pathological of
fanatics. It colours the calculations, even if not decisively, of the most hardened of military
strategists. The unacceptability of nuclear devastation is the backbone of all deterrence strategies.
There is not just a fear of being attacked oneself, but also a strong mental barrier against actually
initiating nuclear attacks on enemy populations, no matter how much they may be contemplated
in war games and strategies. As a result a taboo has tacitly evolved over the decades preventing
nations, at least so far, from actually pressing the nuclear button even in the face of serious military
crises.
It is this taboo which will be broken if battlefield nuclear weapons, however small, begin to be used. Once the line dividing
nuclear weapons and conventional bombs is crossed, it will become acceptable to use "baby nukes" and the radiation deaths that go with it.
A gradual erosion of the feeling of abhorrence against nuclear weapons is bound to occur. The use of
a sub-kiloton artillery shell in battle by one country will elicit a similar response with possibly a heavier
yield weapon, if not in the same war, somewhere else. The ante will keep going up till eventually
the use of bigger multi-kiloton and megaton weapons would be contemplated more seriously as
realistic military alternatives. The single largest universal deterrent against nuclear holocaust will
be lost forever.
TACTICALNUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE THE MOST VIOLENT—THEY MAKE NUCLEAR WEAPONS AN EVERYDAY
PATHOLOGY OF THE NUCLEAR SYSTEM
ZIZEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER, INSTITUTE OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2002 [SLAVOJ, WELCOME
TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL!, P. 108-109]
Along the same lines, we should be able to discern what is realy new in the list of seven states
considered by the USA to be the potential target of its nuclear weapons (not only Iraq, Iran and
North Korea, but also China and Russia): it is not the list as such which is problematic, but its
underlying principle —namely, the abandonment of the golden rule of Cold War confrontation,
according to which each of the superpowers publicly proclaimed that under no conditions would
it be the first to use nuclear weapons: the use of nuclear weapons remained the threat of
MADness (Mutually Assured Destruction) which, paradoxically, guaranteed that no conflict would explode
beyond certain limits. The USA now renounced this pledge and proclaimed that it is ready to be
the first to use nuclear weapons as part of the war against terrorism, thus cancelling the gap
between ordinary and nuclear warfare, that is, presenting the use of nuclear weapons as
part of 'normal' war. I am almost tempted to put it in Kantian philosophical terms: in the Cold
War, the status of nuclear weapons was `transcendental', even noumenal (they were not to be
used in any actual war; rather, they designated a limit of total destruction to be avoided in
any`empirical' warfare); while now, with the new Bush doctrine, the use of nuclear weapons is
reduced to just another empirical (`pathological ') element of warfare.
18
SOLVENCY: PUBLIC DEBATE
CHALLENGING WAR PLANNING RHETORICALLY CONSTRAINS POLICY REVERSAL—DEBATING THE PLAN
SOVLES
WITTNER, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT SUNY-ALBANY, 2009 [LAWRENCE S., “WHAT HAS PREVENTED NUCLEAR
WAR?” HISTORY NEWS NETWORK, 7-06-09, HTTP://HNN.US/ARTICLES/97229.HTML]
The Kennedy administration also found its options limited by the public's distaste for nuclear war. A late 1960 Defense
Department report to the President-elect, recalled one of its drafters, argued that "the political mood of the
country" weighed heavily against developing a U.S. "`win' capability" for a future nuclear war.
This fear of the public response also tempered administration policy during the Cuban missile
crisis, when Kennedy—as Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled—worried about "an adverse public reaction,"
including "demonstrations, peace groups marching in the streets, perhaps a divisive public
debate." In addition, even in conflicts with non-nuclear powers, U.S. policymakers felt it necessary to rule out
nuclear war thanks to the stigma attached to it by the public. A nuclear power, Rusk explained years later, "would
wear the mark of Cain for generations to come if it ever attacked a non-nuclear country with nuclear weapons."
The Vietnam War provided a particularly attractive opportunity for the U.S. government's use of its nuclear might. Here, once more, U.S.
military forces were engaged in a war with a non-nuclear nation—and, furthermore, were losing that war. And yet, as Rusk recalled, the
Bundy, who
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations deliberately "lost the war rather than 'win' it with nuclear weapons." McGeorge
maintained that the U.S. government's decision to
served as the national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson,
avoid using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam conflict did not result from fear of nuclear
retaliation by the Soviet and Chinese governments, but from the terrible public reaction that a
U.S. nuclear attack would provoke in other nations. Even more significant, Bundy maintained,
was the prospect of public upheaval in the United States, for "no President could hope for
understanding and support from his own countrymen if he used the bomb." Looking back on the war,
Richard Nixon complained bitterly that, had he used nuclear weapons in Vietnam, "the resulting domestic and international uproar would have
damaged our foreign policy on all fronts."
And so it went in the following decades. Even the remarkably hawkish officials of the Reagan
administration came up sharply against political realities. Entering office talking glibly of
fighting and winning nuclear wars, they soon confronted a worldwide antinuclear uprising,
undergirded by public opinion. In April 1982, shortly after a Nuclear Freeze resolution began
wending its way through Congress, the President began declaring publicly: "A nuclear war
cannot be won and must never be fought." He added, on that first occasion: "To those who protest against nuclear war, I'm
with you." Cynics might argue that Reagan's rejection of nuclear war was no more than rhetoric. Nevertheless, rhetoric repeated
often enough inhibits a policy reversal. And, in fact, although the Reagan administration sponsored
wars in numerous places, it does not appear to have factored nuclear weapons into its battle
plans. Kenneth Adelman, who directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for most of the Reagan years, claimed that he "never
heard anyone broach the topic of using nuclear weapons. Ever. In any setting, in any way."
Thus, evidence certainly exists that public pressure has prevented nuclear war. Where is the evidence that nuclear weapons
have done so?
19
SOLVENCY: PUBLIC DEBATE—PLAN PREREQUISITE
WE MUST CALL INTO QUESTION WAR PLANS, OR DETERRENCE RHETORIC WILL DRIVE THE DEBATE—THE
PLAN RECLAIMS POLICYMAKING FOR THE PUBLIC THROUGH DEBATE
CLARKE, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT RUTGERS, 2006 [LEE, “MISTAKEN IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS,” THE
OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONTEXTUAL POLITICAL ANALYSIS, ED. GOODIN & TILLY, P. P. 311-312]
Organizations scholar Chris Demchack argues that "technologically-induced organizational changes will tend to
establish a field of choices and condition the way military options are selected by insiders and
viewed by outsiders" (Demchak op, 4). This logic applies to nuclear weapons. While the technologies are products of human effort they
become such overwhelming social facts that they become strong constraints on future action.
Most writings on nuclear diplomacy and nuclear war planning neglect the low degree of
coordination in their respective organizational systems, emphasizing instead the one concept that
unifies them: deterrence, Doing so creates the impression that there has indeed been a single system. In this telling, high-
level politicians set military and diplomatic goals, which in turn propose weapons systems that
would meet those goals. All actions are driven by the same conception of deterrence.
But deterrence is a complicated concept, and has served more purposes than a simple view
acknowledge. Long ago, Robert Jervis (1976; 1984) brought attention to the problem of misperception in nuclear diplomacy. In particular,
the standard view neglects the symbolic functions that deterrence has sometimes served. Rather
than driving talk and choices about nuclear weapons (and defense), the idea of deterrence
has been used to justify decisions and actions already made. Ideas about deterrence have
legitimated courses of action that were driven by nuclear warfighting capabilities and technical
systems acquisition. The larger point is that deterrence rhetoric was mainly in the public realm. It was directed especially at the Soviet
Union. of course, but also toward the American public in an effort to legitimate whatever was the current policy, to secure funds for weapons
procurement, or simply for electoral purposes. For example, talk in the Reagan administration. especially in the early 1980s, of a "window of
vulnerability.' (a term revived from the 1950s) tried to convince people, through the media, that America was open to a Soviet preemptive strike.
Deterrence rhetoric was used misleadingly to try to convince audiences that America's war planning was animated by rational, intellectual
considerations. That rhetoric was aimed at misleading domestic and foreign audiences into believing that civilian politicians both were in contrast
nuclear weapons and understood the technologies they had at their disposal.
It is worth pausing here to point out several major mistakes in the history I've discussed: the neglect by strategists and policy-makers of nuclear
winter and nuclear-generated fire, and the logical problem of maintaining control of the arsenal in hostilities. If either factor were given serious
consideration a good bit of nuclear discourse would have looked irrational. The idea of nuclear winter is that even a small handful of large
detonations would throw enough debris into the upper atmosphere that the sun would be blotted out for a period of time sufficient to threaten the
survival of hundreds of millions of people, and perhaps all of civilization (Powers Grinspoon 1986). Thus even a first strike launch that drew no
response would be suicidal. Such a realization suggests that the rational course of action would he to disarm, or at least draw back to a second-
strike force. For if the models that project nuclear winter are valid, then self-deterrence is as important as other-deterrence. But under that
condition, the whole project looks like one giant mistake.
The problem of nuclear-generated fire is crucial. As noted, Eden (2004) has shown that military planners systematically ignored fire damage in
their estimates of nuclear-generated damage. The organizational production of military blindness said that the only damage that mattered was the
damage from blasts. One result of this deeply mistaken idea was that the militant requested numbers of weapons at least twice as large as
necessary for the amount of destruction they wanted to achieve. Had the knowledge of fire been folded into war plans, the number of necessary
warheads would drop, damage estimates would increase, projections of nuclear winter would have been bolstered, and the representation that
nuclear war could be controlled would be revealed as a mistake.
One effect of the mismatch between nuclear war planning and nuclear war talk was that the
latter of was importantly obscured from public view. Had the built-in, all-or-nothing
assumptions of planning been more in the public realm, those who tried to persuade us that
nuclear wars could he fought like any other could have been challenged more effectively.
The notion of a nuclear war that was less-than-Armageddon was long sought after by nuclear
planners and policy-makers. It was a notion that was even in the literal sense of the word,
chimerical. The very idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war was misleading.
20
SOLVENCY: TABOO GOOD—INFLUENCE POLICYMAKERS
AND, THE NUCLEAR TABOO IS A KEY INFLUENCE ON POLICYMAKERS—PLAN DIRECTLY AFFECTS SYSTEMIC
DECISION CALCULI
GORMLEY, 2006, SENIOR FELLOW IN THE WASHINGTON DC OFFICE OF THE MONTEREY INSTITUTE’S CENTER FOR
NONPROLIFERATION STUDIES AND A FACULTY MEMBER IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH [DENNIS M., “SECURING NUCLEAR
OBSOLESCENCE,” SURVIVAL | VOL. 48 NO. 3 | AUTUMN 2006 | PP. 127–148, P. 129-130]
Rather than resting on the threat of nuclear retaliation, the review’s ‘denial’ strategy hinges on developing credible war-fighting options to deny
potential adversaries the capacity to do America and its allies and friends harm – most notably by using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Because post-Cold War threats are more diverse, the review argues that they demand better integration of the full range of offensive and
defensive weapons and doctrine. By calling for such integration, however, it wrongly conflates both classes of weapons as if they were equally
useful weapons of war.
This is not the first time policymakers have sought to make nuclear weapons just like any other
weapon. Two brief examples illustrate the periodic testing of the longstanding nuclear taboo on and
universal revulsion against nuclear weapons and their use, which extends not just to megaton-yield strategic nuclear
weapons but also to so-called ‘tactical’ ones.8 In its ‘New Look’ policy, formulated after the Korean
War, the Eisenhower administration attempted, without success, to reduce the stigma associated
with nuclear use by placing heavy reliance on tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use. An
even more compelling case occurred during the Carter administration. Responding to broad
public pressure, President Jimmy Carter cancelled the enhanced radiation weapon. Although the
weapon arguably was no more indiscriminate in its effects (albeit nuclear ones) than large conventional
bombs, the chance that it might blur the critical distinction between nuclear and conventional
weapons made the risk of deployment seem prohibitive.9
As for policymakers’ personal views about using nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower and his
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that by the late 1950s the distinction between nuclear
and conventional weapons remained solidly in place from a public perspective.10 As the Kennedy
administration moved to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons by improving conventional military
capabilities, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk both came to view the use
of nuclear weapons as mostly ‘unthinkable’ on political and moral grounds as well as military
ones.11 More recently, President George H.W. Bush privately ruled out a nuclear response in the 1991 Gulf
War and later acknowledged this stance in a book.12 Colin Powell, in a memoir written after the 1991 Gulf War, also dismissed
the utility of nuclear use.13
21
SOLVENCY: TABOO GOOD—CHALLENGE ELITES
TABOO KEY TO CHALLENGE NUCLEAR ELITES
FREY, POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW, INSTITUTE BARCELONA D'ESTUDIS INTERNACIONALS, 2006

[KARSTEN, “NUCLEAR WEAPONS AS SYMBOLS: THE ROLE OF NORMS IN NUCLEAR POLICY MAKING,” IBEI
WORKING PAPERS #3, HTTP://WWW.RECERCAT.NET/BITSTREAM/2072/4273/1/WP_IBEI_3.PDF, P. 4]
The motives of nuclear arming behaviour are thus bound to the socially constructed values
attached to such weapons. According to Scott D. Sagan, “[f]from this sociological perspective, military
organizations and their weapons can therefore be envisioned as serving functions similar to those
of flags, airlines, and Olympic teams; they are part of what modern states believe they have to
possess to be legitimate, modern states”4. While some states might consider the acquisition of nuclear weapons a necessary prerequisite for being a modern
state, others develop diametrically opposed norms, along which the acquisition of nuclear weapons becomes inhibitive and incompatible with their identity as a modern state. Such
opposing norms do not only emerge across societies, but also across the perceptions of different
weapons systems within a society. For example, most of those states owning or developing nuclear weapons (with the exception of Israel and North Korea)
signed the Chemical Weapons Convention while explicitly applying moral, normative driven arguments for doing so.
Both the taboo and the myth stem from a general and widely accepted understanding that nuclear weapons are different – incomparable to any other weapons system. Accordingly, both
Attempts to ‘trivialise’ the nuclear bomb as an

normative directions rest on the understanding of nuclear weapons as the ‘ultimate weapon’.
acceptable and usable weapon similar to conventional weaponry, which were frequently made by defence planners
and decision makers in nuclear weapons states – most prominently the US insistence on a first use option – largely failed
to have much impact on the normative discourse. The nuclear taboo turned the first use of
nuclear weapons into an incalculable military option. The nuclear taboo is thought to have
trickled up from an increasingly sensitive civic society to the policy elite, frequently against
the preferences of the respective defence community. The nuclear myth, on the other hand, appears to have followed a trickle down
dynamic, in which the policy making elite attached a positive set of norms to nuclear weapons which was then adopted by larger segments of the society.
THE NUCLEAR TABOO IS A VEHICLE FOR GRASSROOTS CHALLENGES—INSTITUTIONAL FOCUS KEY

TANNENWALD, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH PROFESSOR IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT BROWN, 2006 [NINA, “A
TABOO SUBJECT,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, MAY/JUNE, P. 64]
Yet, that would not be the case with nuclear weapons, which came to be viewed as abhorrent weapons of mass destruction. The taboo against their use was the
product of a gradual evolution in thinking, driven by the grassroots efforts of the global
antinuclear movement; the stigmatization of nuclear weapons within the United Nations; a vociferous campaign waged by the non-nuclear, nonaligned states; the no-win
nuclear stalemate of the Cold War, and, eventually, the institutionalization of arms control in the U.S. government
as a means to stabilize relations between the superpowers. The widespread sense of revulsion
associated with this unique class of weapons helps explain why no leader has used a nuclear
weapon in war since 1945, even against non-nuclear states. This taboo is also fundamental to the
nuclear nonproliferation regime, which cannot be sustained over the long haul by sheer force,
coercion, or physical denial. Today, although the taboo on use remains strong, accumulating developments threaten to erode it: Russia’s return to greater reliance on
nuclear weapons in its defense policies, heated rhetoric from India and Pakistan, pursuit of nuclear weapons by North Korea and possibly by Iran, and the dismal failure of the May 2005 Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. This erosion is also visible in the United States, which has nearly 6,000 operational nuclear warheads. In recent years, the U.S. government has
endorsed doctrines that place renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons. These developments raise the question of how deeply the taboo has been internalized—and nowhere is
this more evident than in the fate of government bureaucracies with institutional interests in arms restraint. Starting in 1997, under pressure from a housecleaning Republican Congress, the U.S.
government dismantled the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), an independent agency created in 1961, and folded its duties into the State Department, where it became the Bureau
of Arms Control. In July 2005, the Bureau of Arms Control was eliminated. The relevant agency is now the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation—the phrase “arms control” is
gone. Who advocates for the stigmatization of nuclear weapons within the U.S. government today?
As in the old adage about bureaucracies, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” In the
1960s, the ACDA was a forceful advocate for the NPT, arguing against the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, which wanted to
preserve “peaceful nuclear explosions,” and even against the State Department, which sided with friendly countries hoping to retain the nuclear option. Today, no U.S.
agency is devoted to nuclear selfrestraint, and the unsurprising consequence is that U.S. policy
appears to imply that the taboo does not apply to the weapons themselves but rather to who has
them.
22
AT: NUCLEAR PSYCHOLOGY
FOCUSINGON NUCLEAR PSYCHOLOGY SHUTS DOWN DEBATES AND PRECLUDES CHANGE—WE MUST
ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF ACTUAL THREATS
GUSTERSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND SCIENCE STUDIES AT MIT, 1998 [HUGH, NUCLEAR
RITES, P. 11-13]
The psychological critique consists of three main claims. First, Lifton and the antinuclear psychologists have construed the nuclear
relationship between the superpowers in terms of psychopathology. Where the realists saw nuclear weapons as potential instruments of stability and
security, the psychologists saw them as manifestations of dementia. Lifton (1982a: ix–x, 18), for example, tells us that the arms race is "an objective social madness," a "disease," and "something
on the order of a psychotic fantasy." Another leading antinuclear psychologist, John Mack (1985: 292), says that "the nuclear arms competition fulfills the conditions of a severe collective
psychiatric disorder in a formal, literal, or scientific sense" and "is quite literally psychotic." Joel Kovel (1983: 84) calls the arms race "paranoid madness," and Robert R. Holt (1984: 212) calls it
"certifiably pathological."
Second, antinuclear psychologists have argued that those who design nuclear weapons, or devise strategies that might involve their use, could not carry out such potentially genocidal work unless
they were in a state of numbness or denial. Lifton repeatedly makes an analogy between working in a nuclear weapons laboratory and working in a Nazi death camp.18 Accusing weapons
professionals of psychodynamic rigidity, he has also claimed to find among them a "fundamentalist" mode of thinking involving unquestioning faith in the protective power of nuclear weapons
(Lifton 1982a, 1982b, 1983; Lifton and Markusen 1990).19
Third, Lifton and others have argued that the nuclear arms race is based on a distorted psychology of enmity—a stark demonization of "the Other," polarizing the world between the American
"we" who are good and the Soviet "they" who are evil. They argue that we have enemies at least partly because we need and create them. In this view, the psychology of enmity draws its energy
from "disavowed elements of the self" (Stein 1985: 257) and from unresolved childhood conflicts and fears that unscrupulous national leaders are able to tap into and manipulate.'
The psychological critique of the arms race is important. It reminds us that nuclear weapons are dangerous and potentially genocidal. It warns us that people can become numb in response to the
overwhelming destructive force and apparent immovability of such weapons. And it tells us that we must pay attention to emotions and the unconscious mind as well as the rational calculations
of the conscious mind when we discuss nuclear policy. In this context, however, I want to concentrate on gaps and problems in the psychologists' arguments.'
To begin with, they often fail to take seriously what is important in the realist view of the world, namely, that, as Stanley Hoffmann (1986: 9) puts it, "enemies are not mere projections of
negative identities; they are often quite real." Given the way the world is currently organized, states do indeed have enemies and are sometimes attacked by them if they are weak. The
psychologists are often so eager to find the pathology in the arms race that they do not take seriously enough nuclear professionals' own rationales for their positions. For example, in his book
Minds at War, Steven Kull, one of the more influential antinuclear psychologists, criticizes strategists' scenarios for winnable nuclear wars as unrealistic and
maladaptive and thereforehunts down unconscious motives for them—without seriously addressing their rationale:
they know nuclear wars should not be fought but must still somehow communicate to potential
enemies the credibility and resolve that, they believe, deter aggression. Whether or not one
agrees with the strategists' solution, it is important to take account of the problem the strategists
see themselves as trying to solve.'
The psychological critique of the arms race also tends to confound psychological and social processes. Although some
psychologists embroider their analyses with caveats that individual and collective processes are different, the incessant discussion of international
relations in terms of individual pathology and the frequent comparisons of national politics and
personal psychology encourage the reduction of national and international politics to individual
psychology. However, the individual and the national are not only, as the jargon of political science would phrase it, different
"levels of analysis"; they also involve different processes requiring different kinds of analysis.
Understanding the psychology of Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb," may illuminate the arms race, but it does not explain it.' Although institutional
processes are enmeshed with individual psychological processes, neither kind of process can be
reduced to the other, and societies cannot be analyzed as if they were giant personalities. In this book,
proceeding more in the spirit of Emile Durkheim than of Sigmund Freud, I show how institutions and processes of cultural production act on individuals to produce certain normative structures
of feeling while at the same time I try to respect the partial autonomy of individual psychological processes.'
Finally, the psychological critique, just like the realist position it attacks, uses the rhetoric of positivist science to
contract the space for political debate. If the realists invoke notions of the "realistic" and the "natural" to reduce our sense of
the possible in international relations and to bolster their own expert authority, the psychologists achieve the same effect by
labeling certain policies pathological. The rhetoric of psychopathology, although it is a useful weapon in the armory of
critique, becomes a way of closing off debate and silencing opponents, who can then be accused
of being "in denial" if they fight back. In this book, viewing the nuclear debate through the lens of relativism rather than psychopathology, I present the
recent struggle over nuclear weapons policy in America as a struggle between different cultural values and political orders rather than in terms of a choice between sanity and insanity.
Instead of presuming an Archimedean point from which people can be declared to be "in denial,"
"paranoid," and "psychotic"—labels that can, in any case, without too much effort of the
imagination, be thrown back at the labelers—it is my presumption that such diagnoses are
themselves stratagems of power and that a more self-aware approach might eschew normative
labeling while exploring how different psychological states are made real for different people. If
there is critique here, it takes the form of what Marcus and Fischer (1986) call cultural critique—the deconstruction of ideology—rather than psychiatric labeling.
23
AT: WEAPONITIS
THE CRITIQUE REPRODUCES WEAPONITIS—IT IGNORES THE BROADER SOCIO-POLITICAL EFFECTS ARMS
CONTROL PRODUCES AND IGNORE HOW WEAPONS SYSTEMS EMPIRICALLY CAUSE CONFLICT
MCLAUCHLAN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT OREGON, 1991 [GREGORY, “DOES THE NUCLEAR
ARMS RACE MATTER?” JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH 28.3, SAGE, P. 329-330]
Sociology Department, University of Oregon
The Nuclear Seduction shows persuasively that there can be a 'deadly connection' between intervention or regional conflict and nuclear war. But
the other side of this deadly connection - that possession of vast nuclear arsenals may have
facilitated or been an impetus to intervention - is not explored. The theoretical problem here is
the idea that causal forces between intervention and the arms race flow in only one direction. The
connections between the arms race and intervention may not be so explicit, but this is all the more reason for scrutiny. For example, the
Cuban missile crisis, discussed at great length by the authors, was a case involving complex interaction
between the arms race and intervention, where what might be called the 'politics of nuclear
prestige' led to intervention (a US naval blockade) and nearly to nuclear war, not the other way around.
Once superpowers invest a great deal of political capital in nuclear arsenals, this may be seen by
some political elites as requiring risky acts and intervention, to preserve the capital. The political
problem here is expressed in the book's subtitle - 'Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter - and What Does'. While rhetorical overstatement is often
useful to make a point, the unfortunate consequence here is a view that the politics of opposition to the arms race and the politics of opposition to
superpower intervention are dichotomous. I am not certain the authors would want to go this far, but this is how some may read their argument.
4. Conclusion: End of the Cold War + Arms Control = Nuclear Peace?
The concluding chapters present a powerful critique of what the authors characterize as the politics of arms control, a politics they claim is
subscribed to by many peace movements even if this is not fully acknowledged. Arms control in their view is not only ineffectual, but ultimately
reinforces weaponitis. An arms control approach is always on the defensive, forever challenging this or that new weapon that rolls out of the
laboratory. Worse, an arms control orientation leads to demobilization of peace movements, even as treaties such as INF and START do not
appreciably reduce the risk or consequences of nuclear war. They put forward an eloquent argument for a more broadly based, forward-looking
and politically- oriented peace movement, concluding with the observation that 'peace is the path to nuclear disarmament, not the other way
around' (p. 2()7).
they have characterized arms control in a narrow, one-
As far as it goes, this is a provocative critique. But
dimensional fashion which makes such a critique rather easy. Arms control has also had
profoundly political dimensions; it is ironic that in treating arms control as a solely technological
phenomenon the authors ignore their own admonition against 'weaponitis'. Nuclear arms control
has always been a crucial part of the political discourse between the superpowers, for obvious reasons.
While INF or START will not qualitatively change super power arsenals, they have been integral
to creation of a radically altered political relationship. Arms control can also have powerful
domestic political effects. For example, Gorbachev needed arms control agreements to rein in
his military and continue his program of domestic economic transformation.
NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN WEAPON CHOICES AND BROADER POLICIES—EMPIRICALLY, WEAPONS SYSTEMS
SHAPE PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL PERCEPTION
LACKEY, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT BARUCH, 1990 [DOUGLAS P., REVIEW OF NUCLEAR SEDUCTION &C,
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 84.4: 1455-157, JSTOR, P. 1456]
One can admire the historical narrative and deplore nuclear risk taking without fully agreeing that weapons
choices hardly matter. For one thing, weapons choices are entangled with military planning; and, as
Morton Halperin (Nuclear Fallacy, [19871) and others argue, U.S. military planning is dangerously dependent on
nuclear options. Second, weapons choices have symbolic weights that affect the risk of nuclear war.
A cool and rational person might agree with McNamara that placing nuclear weapons in Cuba
does not affect the strategic balance, but the inevitable public reaction to the symbolism of
nuclear weapons in Cuba made nuclear war more likely. So also for SS-20s, Pershing Hs, and so
forth; and so also—in the other direction—for the INF treaty, which the authors dismiss as
trivial.
24
AT: ALTERNATIVE
THE ALTERNATIVE RETURNS US TO THE BUSH DOCTRINE—REJECTING NUCLEAR COERCION IN FAVOR OF
DIPLOMACY IS KEY TO DISRUPT THE LOGIC OF REGIME CHANGE AND EMANCIPATORY MILITARISM
HUNTLEY, 2009, SIMONS CENTRE FOR DISARMAMENT AND NON-PROLIFERATION RESEARCH LIU INSTITUTE FOR
GLOBAL ISSUES, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA [WADE L., “NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION: REGIME
TRANSFORMATION IN THE SECOND NUCLEAR ERA,” PAPER FOR PRESENTATION AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
ASSOCIATION MEETING, NEW YORK, NY, FEBRUARY 15, 2009, HTTP://LIU.XPLOREX.COM/SITES/LIU/FILES/
PUBLICATIONS/HUNTLEY-REGIMETRANSFORMATION-ISA2009.PDF, (NACD) = NONPROLIFERATION, ARMS
CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT, P. 11-12]
This vision of virtuous US global leadership based on dominant military power harkens to a nineteenth century idealist internationalism
underpinned by the security of broad oceans. The Bush administration’s embrace of a globalized reincarnation of this vision on the basis of US
military inviolability represents the re-ascendance of idealism in shaping US grand strategy following the prevailing realism of the Cold War
period. But this articulation also marks the emergence of a specific form of idealism. The active promotion of overseas democratization, by force
if necessary, pushes aside aspirations to constitute a society among states, aiming instead to challenge the prerogative of state sovereignty itself.
President Bush’s repudiation of the Yalta agreements at the end of World War II evinces this viewpoint.36 The Bush
Administration’s emergent grand strategy of emancipatory militant idealism draws on a distinct
variant of the American idealist tradition.37 This thinking drives the Bush Administration’s approach to proliferation. The
approach draws implicitly on observations that strengthening liberalizing and externally-oriented elements within a governmental regime
produces less proliferation-prone nuclear weapons policies.38 From this perspective, nuclear weapons proliferation itself is not really the
problem; the presence of nuclear weapons in the hands of illiberal regimes is the problem. In this view, the interest of global nuclear safety helps
justify pressing for liberalizing regime change in problem countries – an endeavor that could require a range of US military capabilities. Hence,
increased US reliance on nuclear threats against such states is actually part of the nonproliferation solution, and greater US commitment to
nuclear disarmament is irrelevant or even counterproductive. In the value system underlying emancipatory militant idealism, there is no
contradiction in threatening nuclear attack to thwart nuclear proliferation. Thus, Bush Administration officials maintain that US nuclear weapons
policies are consistent with US NPT obligations and not relevant to the nuclear ambitions of states such as North Korea and Iran.
Representatively, Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Rademaker, head of the US delegation to the 2005 NPT Review Conference, stated on the
eve of the conference: “This notion that the United States needs to make concessions in order to encourage other countries to do what is necessary
in order to preserve the nuclear nonproliferation regime is at best a misguided way to think about the problems confronting us.”39 Here the
essence of the alternative nonproliferation paradigm, and the grand strategy it evokes, draw on deeper disposition in the US political culture. US
conservatives’ opposing domestic gun control have long maintained the credo: guns don’t kill
people; bad people with guns kill people. The nuclear weapons attitudes reflected emancipatory
militant idealism constitute the international equivalent: nukes don’t kill people; bad states with
nukes kill people. Both outlooks draw on a value system longstanding in US political ethics traditions emphasizing individual
responsibility.40 The simple fact that regime type does matter to the nuclear weapons behavior of
states reinforces the deep resonance of this metaphor, assuring that outlook will endure long after
the Bush Administration has left the scene. From this perspective, the idea of complete nuclear
disarmament is thus quixotic and irrelevant. The NPT regime, embodying this quaint notion, is
obsolescent rather than merely shopworn. Indeed, no grand global nonproliferation movement is
necessary; rather, remedies are as context specific as the challenges. Implications This perspective
helps explain the Bush Administration’s resistance not only to North Korea’s and Iran’s
acquisition of nuclear arms but to engaging either the Pyongyang or Tehran regimes as
sovereign interlocutors. Such antipathy dismisses “normal diplomacy” as a solution to the
conflicts with such states, and questions the realist security framework that premises sovereign
equality and rational behavior. Anti-diplomatic rhetoric refusing to allow North Korea or Iran to
be “rewarded for bad behavior” evinces this attitude – one does not negotiate with outlaws.
Here arises the logic of counterproliferation and “regime change” among “rogue” regimes as an
ultimate proliferation remedy. This predilection evinces the disposition to confront autocratic
regimes and the ambitions for democratization that have come to define the Bush Administration’s global outlook.
25
AT: NUCLEAR FOCUS STRENGTHENS U.S. EMPIRE
PROGRESSIVE NUCLEAR POLITICS DO NOT REPRODUCE AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, THEY REPLACE IT
WITH A PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL VISION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
SCHELL, HAROLD WILLENS PEACE FELLOW AT THE NATION INSTITUTE, 2003 [JONATHAN, “NO MORE UNTO THE
BREACH, PART TWO, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD,” HARPER’S MAGAZINE, APRIL, P. 50-51, * = FOOTNOTE]
An agreement to abolish nuclear arms and all other weapons of mass destruction is the sine qua non of any sane
international system in the twenty-first century, and the necessary condition for the
construction of a cooperative world. Any other attempted settlement of the issue of weapons of mass
destruction will clash with plans to halt or reverse proliferation, with other efforts to bring peace, with common sense,
and with elementary decency. No reliable policy can be founded upon the permanent institutionalization of a capacity and an intention to kill tens of millions of innocent people. No humane
Abolition alone provides a sound basis for the continued

international order can depend upon a threat to extinguish humanity.
deepening and spread of liberal democracy, whose founding principles are violated and affronted by the maintenance of nuclear terror. And a clear
commitment to abolition, by ending the nuclear double standard, alone can create a basis for stopping nuclear proliferation and making effective the existing bans on other weapons of mass
The logic of abolition is the real alternative to the logic of empire. But, my critics will ask, won't the
destruction.
abolition of nuclear' weapons undo one of the very building blocks of peace that I have named? If the ever present
danger of nuclear annihilation has paralyzed great-power war, won't great-power war spring to life once
nuclear weapons are removed from the picture? The answer to the question lies at the very root of the nuclear predicament. It is a profound
misunderstanding of the nuclear age to suppose that its basic features emanate from nuclear
hardware. They do not. They emanate, as we have seen, from the scientific knowledge that underlies the hardware. The number of
nuclear warheads in the world can fall and the number of fingers on the nuclear button can decrease, even to zero, without subtracting a single digit from the physical equations on which the
bomb is based. The spread of this knowledge throughout the world guarantees that the war system can
never operate on a global basis as it did before. The persistence of the knowledge and the capacity to rebuild nuclear arsenals, or produce other
weapons of mass destruction, will stand in the way. Let us imagine that nuclear weapons have been abolished by treaty, and that a nation then violates it by secretly
or openly building a nuclear arsenal and threatening to use it to bully the world. As soon as the threat has been made, scores of other
nations, all nuclear capable, would be free to build, and threaten the use of, their own nuclear
arsenals in response, in effect deterring the violator. Not global hot war but a reignition of cold war
would result and reestablish a crude system of mutual assured destruction. Wider war would be deterred, just as it is in our
world of large nuclear arsenals. The important point, as always in matters of deterrence, is not that the threatened
nations would necessarily rearm (though this "scenario" has a credibility that many existing ones lack) but that any government would
know in advance that such a response was available, and would have every reason to desist from
its reckless scheme in the first place. The threat would not constitute nuclear deterrence in the classic sense of threatening instant nuclear retaliation, yet it
would still be a kind of deterrence. Abolition, when seen in this cold light, cannot mean a return to the pre-nuclear age, whether one might
wish for such a development or not, nor can it rule out once and for all a resurgence of nuclear armaments in some future
dark age, whose coming no one can preclude. It does, however, mean that a return to the global adapt-or-die war system is
impossible. Abolition, in view of these circumstances, which as far as we know are unchangeable, would be nothing more or less than an indispensable though insufficient recognition
by the human species of the terrible, mortal predicament it has got itself into and a concrete expression of its resolve to find some relief. Abolition should not be undersold, but it should not be
oversold either.*
in
* My critics may also wonder whether such "weaponless deterrence" is an improvement, either militarily or morally, over the present system of armed deterrence. The simple answer is that
a world in which nuclear know-how is inexpungible, the step of physically eliminating nuclear
weapons would create a threshold that would be difficult to recross in the other direction-
just as today the threshold between conventional and nuclear war is difficult to cross. Even after
such abolition, a critical decision would remain to be made: whether or not to continue to rely as a matter of policy on nuclear rearmament in the event that the abolition treaty is violated. The
nuts and bolts of any abolition agreement would be highly detailed arrangements suppressing certain technologies-all, of course, inspected to the hilt. The agreement would specify exactly which
nuclear-bomb materials are permitted, in what quantities, and where. There assuredly would be an enforcement provision in the treaty, specifying what it is that the menaced nations of the world
are entitled or obliged to do in the event of the treaty's violation. If nuclear rearmament is specified as a response, and technical arrangements suitable for it are provided, then, to an extent, the
world would still be relying on nuclear terror to counter nuclear terror. If, on the other hand, nuclear arms are banned absolutely by the treaty, and nuclear rearmament is forbidden even in the
face of the treaty's violation, whose remedy is sought by other means, then the world would formally and finally have renounced all, dependence on nuclear terror for its safety. This is not the
place, however, even to attempt to summarize the cases for and against the abolition of nuclear weapons, which I have discussed at great length elsewhere.
26
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG UTNIF 2010
*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG
27
1NC ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM (K)
THE PLAN’S MINOR CONCESSIONS TO NUCLEAR ARMS REDUCTIONS ARE A TRICK—INSTEAD OF CREATING
SYSTEMIC CHANGE, GETTING RID OF A FEW DOZEN TINY, NON-DEPLOYED WARHEADS WILL ONLY BE USED AS
RHETORICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR THE MILITARY VIOLENCE THEY CRITIQUE
BONDGRAHAM & PARRISH, SOCIOLOGIST & NUCLEAR AGE PEACE FOUNDATION, 2009 [DARWIN & WILL,
“ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM,” FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS, JANUARY 12, HTTP://WWW.FPIF.ORG/FPIFTXT/5782]
The Obama administration is likely to continue a policy that we call “anti-nuclear nuclearism.”
Anti-nuclear nuclearism is a foreign and military policy that relies upon overwhelming U.S. power, including
the nuclear arsenal, but makes rhetorical and even some substantive commitments to
disarmament, however vaguely defined. Anti-nuclear nuclearism thrives as a school of thought in
several think tanks that have long influenced foreign policy choices related to global nuclear forces. Even the national
nuclear weapons development labs in New Mexico and California have been avid supporters and crafters of
it.
As a policy, anti-nuclear nuclearism is designed to ensure U.S. nuclear and military
dominance by rhetorically calling for what has long been derided as a naïve ideal: global
nuclear disarmament. Unlike past forms of nuclearism, it de-emphasizes the offensive nature
of the U.S. arsenal. Instead of promoting the U.S. stockpile as a strategic deterrence or umbrella
for U.S. and allied forces, it prioritizes an aggressive diplomatic and military campaign of
nonproliferation. Nonproliferation efforts are aimed entirely at other states, especially non-nuclear nations with
suspected weapons programs, or states that can be coerced and attacked under the pretense that they possess
nuclear weapons or a development program (e.g. Iraq in 2003).
Effectively pursuing this kind of belligerent nonproliferation regime requires half-steps toward
cutting the U.S. arsenal further, and at least rhetorically recommitting the United States to
international treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It requires a fig leaf that the United
States isn’t developing new nuclear weapons, and that it is slowly disarming and de-emphasizing
its nuclear arsenal. By these means the United States has tried to avoid the charge of hypocrisy,
even though it has designed and built newly modified weapons with qualitatively new capacities
over the last decade and a half. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have allowed for and even promoted a mass proliferation of nuclear
energy and material, albeit under the firm control of the nuclear weapons states, with the United States at the top of this pile.
Many disarmament proponents were elated last year when four extremely prominent cold
warriors — George P. Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — announced in a series of op-eds their
commitment to "a world free of nuclear weapons." Strange bedfellows indeed for the cause. Yet the fine print of
their plan, published by the Hoover Institute and others since then, represents the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform to a
tee. It’s a conspicuous yet merely rhetorical commitment to a world without nuclear weapons.
These four elder statesmen have said what many U.S. elites have rarely uttered: that abolition is both possible and desirable. However, the
anti-nuclear posture in their policy proposal comes to bear only on preventing non-nuclear states
from going nuclear, or else preventing international criminal conspiracies from proliferating
weapons technologies and nuclear materials for use as instruments of non-state terror. In other words, it’s about other people's
nuclear weapons, not the 99% of materials and arms possessed by the United States and other established nuclear
powers.
This position emphasizes an anti-nuclear politics entirely for what it means for the rest of the world — securing nuclear materials and preventing
other states from going nuclear or further developing their existing arsenals. U.S. responsibility to disarm remains in the
distant future, unaddressed as a present imperative.
Exclusive Route around the CTBT
Concerns about the nuclear programs of other states — mostly Islamic, East and South Asian nations (i.e., Iran, North
(Continues…)
28
(Continues…)
conveniently work to reinforce existing power relations embodied in U.S. military
Korea, etc.) —
supremacy and neocolonial relationships of technological inequality and dependence. By
invoking their commitment to a "world free of nuclear weapons," the ideologues behind the anti-
nuclear nuclearist platform justify invasions, military strikes, economic sanctions, and
perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons themselves against the "rogue states" and
"terrorists" whose possession of weapons technologies vastly less advanced than those perpetually stockpiled by the United States is
deemed by the anti-nuclear nuclearists the first and foremost problem of the nuclear age.
Obama administration is likely to pursue this Orwellian policy of anti-nuclear
Unfortunately the
nuclearism rather than taking a new, saner direction. A strong early indication of this trajectory is his
selection of many Clinton administration advisers and officials as national security officials in his Cabinet. The Clinton
administration fought hard for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999, which would commit the United States to
cease all nuclear explosions. But, in true anti-nuclear nuclearist fashion, it also gave the United States nuclear weapons labs the Stockpile
Stewardship Program, by which they could move forward with a massive scientific effort to develop the knowledge and scientific expertise for
virtual weapons design and testing via a multi-billion dollar infrastructure of supercomputers, laser, and flash X-ray facilities that brazenly give
the United States an exclusive route around the CTBT. Meanwhile, the United States has further violated the spirit of the treaty by detonating an
average of 10 so-called "sub-critical" nuclear bombs every year at the Nevada Test Site since 1997: explosions involving as many as 3.3 pounds
of plutonium that stop just short of splitting the atom.
29
THE POLITICS OF NUCLEAR REDUCTION FETISHIZES THE BOMB—THE AFFIRMATIVE’S INTERRUPTION OF THE
PREEMPTIVE ECONOMY WILL ONLY MAKE THOSE WEAPONS MORE FEARFUL AND THUS MORE DESIRABLE
HARRINGTON DE SANTANA, PH.D. CANDIDATE, POLITICAL SCIENCE AT CHICAGO, 2009 [ANNE, “U.S. NUCLEAR
POLICY AND THE FETISHISM OF FORCE,” PAPER PRESENTED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MIDWEST POLITICAL
SCIENCE ASSOCIATION 67TH ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE, HTTP://WWW.ALLACADEMIC.COM/
META/P_MLA_APA_RESEARCH_CITATION/3/6/1/6/3/P361632_INDEX.HTML]
Territoriality The first theme, territoriality, refers to the irreducible materiality of fetishism. Fetishism always refers to a pattern
of human behavior organized with respect to a material object: the African worshipping a trinket, or the
capitalist exchanging a commodity. This differentiates a fetish object from a symbolic object. A symbol is referential. Its
purpose is communicative. A physical change in the status of a symbolic object does nothing in and of itself to alter the nature of its
social context. A fetish object, on the other hand, is essential to the functioning of the social context in which it
is embedded. Nationalists do not require a flag, but capitalists do require a commodity.
As the culmination of the fetishism of force, nuclear weapons function as a fetish object
because their material form could be imagined and produced in a manner consistent with the
embodiment of a weapon. In so far as the fetishism of force has at its heart the reification of
social power in the material technologies produced to enhance the use of force, the destructive
capacity of nuclear weapons is necessary for them to function as fetish objects. However, the same
way the materiality of money has no use-value apart from its exchange-value, the value of
nuclear weapons reside in their threat (exchange) value rather than their use-value. In essence, their
material form is nothing but a carrier of their social function.25 As material embodiments of
social value their value is not determined by physical properties in the same way that use-value is
determined by properties such as color, taste, or destructiveness for instance. What is significant about their material
embodiment is that it is treated as if it were not subject to the effects of time or the details of use. Money is treated as if it did not
experience the wear and tear of physical exchange, and nuclear arsenals are treated as if their
development and maintenance had no human or economic costs. Although individuals know very well that
mechanisms exists to reproduce their material existence, as the ultimate expression of the development of commodity fetishism and
the fetishism of force respectively both objects are treated as if they consisted of an immutable,
indestructible substance, a ‘sublime’ material. Also like money, it is their “scarcity” that makes
them an appropriate carrier of social value. The degree of industrial and technological
capability that is required to produce nuclear weapons makes them available to a state with the
necessary level of development, the same way a tank or an aircraft is. With the progressive sophistication of
industrialization, warfare developed into a contest of innovation and productive capacity only
possible in the context of a particular political and economic structure. Intercontinental ballistic
missiles are the culmination of this dynamic. However, in so far as the destructive potential of these
weapons exceeds any conceivable human end, their use-value gave way to their threat-value. In
this sense the material properties of nuclear weapons are necessary, but not in their particularity. It does not so much matter what
they can destroy because the act of destruction will not contribute to the achieving the desired
ends, only compliance with the threat of destruction will further those ends. The material properties of
money function in a similar fashion, whether that material is coin, paper, or plastic. The particularities are not necessary
except that they conform to certain standards that make them appropriate carriers of social value.
In all cases, their material embodiment allows for their quantity to be strictly controlled. The lack
of control over that embodiment placed on public display by states that have chosen to acquire
nuclear weapons since enactment of the Non-proliferation Treaty in 1967 provides a partial
explanation for the international attention accorded to even the limited achievements such as the
North Korean test in 2006.
30
MAKING NUCLEAR WEAPONS THE CENTER OF A CRITIQUE OF PREEMPTIVE WAR FAILS—ANTI-NUCLEAR
THINKING ONLY DRAINS THE POLITICAL CAPITAL NECESSARY TO CHALLENGE BROADER SYSTEMS OF
MILITARY VIOLENCE
BOYD, NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST AT SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION, 2010 [DALLAS,
“UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING: WHY CONVENTIONAL DISARMAMENT MUST PRECEDE NUCLEAR ABOLITION,”
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, MARCH/APRIL, WWW.THEBULETIN.ORG]
Unconventional thinking: Why conventional disarmament must precede nuclear abolition The movement
to abolish nuclear weapons threatens to consume political capital better spent addressing
more immediate threats to international security: conventional weapons such as combat
aircraft, naval vessels, and small arms. So compelling was the idea of eliminating nuclear
weapons when their use was plausible that disarmament advocates have held tightly to this aspiration even as the
threat of nuclear war has become vanishingly small. Though weary of Cold War strategic
arsenals, nuclear abolitionists remain curiously loyal to the intellectual orthodoxy of that era, which
held that these weapons should be relinquished as soon as a practical framework for doing so could be conceived. Yet, if excessive nuclear
stockpiles are Cold War relics, so, too, is the idea that negotiating reductions in their size, or eliminating them altogether, is the most constructive
expression of a nation’s commitment to international security. After decades of concerted intellectual investment in preventing nuclear war,
members of the nuclear weapons establishment have been slow to appreciate the irrelevance of these weapons now that the tradition of non-
use has become, in part due to their efforts, so deeply entrenched. As Leo Tolstoy observed, the cleverest of men “can seldom
discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they
have formed, perhaps with much difficulty— conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built
their lives.”1 Consequently, nuclear abolitionists continue to advance a disarmament agenda that bears little
relation to the most pressing security threat of the day—conventional rather than nuclear arms. Reflecting on the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, James Agee suggested in Time magazine that the first use of the Bomb was an event “so much more
Our fascination with nuclear weapons has
enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance.”2
continued apace ever since, despite these weapons having claimed not a single life in anger since
1945. Meanwhile, no comparable angst surrounds conventional weapons—combat aircraft, naval
vessels, small arms—whose death toll during the same period cannot be ascertained to the
nearest million. This perverse prioritization resembles the fear of airplane crashes over
automobile accidents, in which our preoccupation with low-probability but highly dramatic
events distracts us from more frequent but less damaging occurrences of far greater cumulative
significance. Perhaps only the persistent attention paid to nuclear weapons during the Cold War prevented their use, but today it
is far out of proportion to the conceivable threat of nuclear war. A more valuable exercise would
entail pursuing reductions in the more widely used appliances of war and institutionalizing a
global taboo against inter-state conflict similar to the one that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons: the
lesser of two evils. That nuclear weapons should occupy such a prominent space in our consciousness is unsurprising—their absolute and
indiscriminate destructiveness permits none of the classic romanticization of war. Yet, unlike similarly abhorrent chemical and biological
weapons, the Bomb has proven difficult to abandon. It is so fearsome, goes the argument, that we cannot relinquish our ability to answer its use in
kind. Still, several characteristics peculiar to nuclear weapons appear to make their abolishment especially desirable: Though they have not been
used since Nagasaki and thus fare poorly against even the infantryman’s rifle in total casualties produced, their potential destructiveness is
without peer; unlike destroyers or armored columns, they can be stolen or used without authorization; and the speed of their delivery makes
nuclear crisis decision-making uniquely unforgiving of error. However, owing to this terrible potential, powerful mechanisms of self-deterrence
inhere to nuclear weapons that conventional arms lack. With few exceptions—and no deterrence failures—national leaders have
behaved conservatively in nuclear crises while conventional power has been wielded far
more promiscuously. Arguing at the end of the Cold War that nuclear arms had proven unexpectedly stabilizing, Columbia
University scholar Kenneth Waltz attributed this effect to the lack of ambiguity surrounding their use. “The catastrophe promised
by nuclear war contrasts sharply with the extreme difficulty of predicting outcomes among
conventional competitors,” he wrote. Conventional wars “start more easily because the
uncertainties of their outcomes make it easier for the leaders of states to entertain illusions of
victory at supportable cost.
31
THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO REVERSE OUR PRIORITIES—OUR DEMANDS MUST PUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS ON THE
BACKBURNER AND FOCUS ON THE EVERYDAY EXPRESSIONS OF MILITARISM SUCH AS CONVENTIONAL WAR.
ULTIMATELY, ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE CAN SOLVE THE CASE
Conventional disarmament must precede nuclear abolition. If using nuclear weapons would be unimaginably destructive and using
conventional weapons is often irresistible, both instruments must be reduced in size and structure so as to be unrecognizable from their present forms. The choice between nuclear abolition and
conventional disarmament cannot be binary. If conventional forces are unavailable for national defense while nuclear weapons remain, a nation facing coercion may be forced to choose between
two unacceptably stark outcomes: capitulation or nuclear war. Conversely, if nuclear weapon defenders are to be believed, discarding
these weapons while large conventional forces remain could make wars bloodier and more
frequent, rendering the abolition movement a de facto engine of global conflict. The order of
their elimination is then simply a question of priority. It seems reasonable that general
disarmament should begin with the weapons that have the greatest propensity for use and
whose elimination would be most difficult to reverse. Here conventional arms are the clear
favorite, and not simply because they are frequently and recklessly wielded. The virtue of conventional disarmament is that the
greatest sources of hesitation in eliminating nuclear weapons—the difficulty of verification and
the short bridge separating a latent capability from an actual one—are less applicable to
conventional arms. The manufacture of warships, aircraft, and armor cannot easily be concealed,
nor can these capabilities be reconstituted quickly. Conventional disarmament should begin with
the states whose non-nuclear inventories are most superfluous. Among many such nations the psychological allure of arms is the
most formidable obstacle to relinquishing them. The belief that states must field armed forces commensurate with their sense of national self is particularly evident in France, Britain, and Russia,
whose military strength is a vestige of diminished power, and China and India, whose growing capabilities symbolize the power to which they aspire. For no country is this
truer than the United States, which maintains military capabilities far in excess of its own needs
on the basis of perception— specifically, the conviction that U.S. power supplements its allies’ modest defenses and underwrites global security writ large. To argue,
as many hawks do, that U.S. military expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product are historically low is to assume the extraordinary conditions that drove less favorable ratios in the
last century—World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War—are appropriate bases for comparison in the current one. Why should this be? Serious introspection about the size of the
defense budget, long overdue since the demise of the Soviet Union, would consider the appropriateness of Washington spending more on its armed forces than the military outlays of the next 45
While conventional reductions are virtuous for their own sake, they are also a
nations combined.8
necessary step toward nuclear abolition. The international community will resist U.S. leadership
in the drive to zero as long as Washington retains conventional advantages that only nuclear
weapons can nullify. As Gen. Krishnaswamy Sundarji, India’s late chief of army staff, remarked in 1993, “The Persian Gulf War showed that if you are going to take on the
United States, you had better have a nuclear weapon.”9 Pakistan, vastly outgunned by India’s conventional strength, appears to have reached the same conclusion. Thus, former Soviet leader
conventional arms stand as an “insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world

Mikhail Gorbachev has observed that
of nuclear weapons.” Until the major powers reduce military expenditures and commence with
the “demilitarization of international politics,” he argues, discussion of nuclear abolition will remain
“just rhetorical.”10 Toward a twenty-first-century security landscape. Lack of vision characterizes both ends of the spectrum of attitude toward military power. One side looks
dreamily to a world where interstate violence has been banished while offering few solutions for getting there. The other’s grim view of humanity provides a justification for military strength that
is endlessly self-reinforcing; its adherents have little imagination for a world in which warfare is obsolete. Because the risks of indulging the former appear greater than the costs of maintaining
the latter,we have deferred to security through strength rather than peace through disarmament. In the
second of their two seminal Wall Street Journal op-eds on nuclear disarmament, former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former defense secretary William Perry, and
former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn artfully described the goal of nuclear abolition as resembling the top of a tall mountain whose invisible summit discourages any attempt at ascent. By taking
many of the measures the

incremental steps between base camp and the peak, they suggest, the ultimate objective will come into sharper view.11 Fittingly,
abolition movement endorses—reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile, ratifying the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty, and ending fissile material production for nuclear weapons—are eminently
achievable. Advocates of conventional disarmament, an even more daunting goal than its nuclear counterpart, should
likewise focus on intermediate objectives that gradually subtract from our skepticism that
interstate war can be eradicated. The following recommendations provide a starting point for grappling with many of the institutional and psychological
forces that undergird the world’s conventional postures.
32
*****ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM — EXTENSIONS UTNIF 2010
*****ANTI-NUCLEAR
NUCLEARISM — EXTENSIONS
LINK: ARMS CONTROL
ARMS CONTROL STRATEGIES ONLY FEED THE EXPANSION OF U.S. EMPIRE
BONDGRAHAM, SOCIOLOGY AT U.C.–SANTA BARBARA, 2009 [DARWIN, 9-1, HTTP://DARWINBONDGRAHAM.
BLOGSPOT.COM/2009/09/ANTI-NUCLEAR-IMPERIALISM-NEW-FACE-OF.HTML]
Since the Cold War's end elite strategists have become increasingly divided over the question of nuclear weapons. A hard core of hawks in the
Congress and military, the nuclear weapons laboratories, and academia have maintained that a large, continuously improved arsenal, and an
aggressive “nuclear posture” remain necessary for the “security” of the United States: arms control treaties and diplomacy be damned.
Meanwhile,
a growing number of reformers has argued that nuclear weapons pose more of a
problem than a solution for the maintenance of US hegemony. The solution, they claim, is for the
US to lead an open-ended campaign of global arms control diplomacy, beginning with Russia,
but extending to all nations. This exercise of soft power, they hope, will legitimate and facilitate
the aggressive nonproliferation measures —including sanctions, and war— that they believe are ultimately
necessary to prevent the emergence of new nuclear states, and the spread of fissile materials into the hands of “terrorists.” Like their hawkish
counterparts, the chief concern among this new nuclearist school is to prevent developments that
would inhibit the reach and continued expansion of US empire.
The 1990s was an era of failures and half-measures for US nuclear policy makers on all sides of this debate. While Bush I implemented a ban on
full-scale nuclear testing (which continues to this day) and while the START I treaty proceeded to eliminate a significant portion of the rival
superpower's vast nuclear overkill capacities, major transformations were deferred in favor of what the Clinton administration, under the
The US would ostensibly “lead” in the
leadership of defense secretary William Perry, called a “lead but hedge” strategy.
overall de-emphasis of atomic weapons, hoping that this would trickle down and dissuade lesser nations from acquiring
nuclear weapons. Contrarily, however, the US would also “hedge” by maintaining an unrivaled nuclear
arsenal and strike capacity, to say nothing of its increasingly gross conventional superiority in
arms.
More so, the Clinton administration bowed to the core demands of the US nuclear weapons establishment by fully funding a multi-billion dollar
scheme called Stockpile Stewardship and Management, a highly euphemistic program that proclaimed to safeguard the aging stockpile, but that
actually built a virtual nuclear weapons research, development and testing apparatus at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear
weapons labs. In the words of the Western States Legal Foundation's executive director Jacqueline Cabasso, it was essentially an “anti-
disarmament program.” The qualitative improvement of the US arsenal proceeded in spite of stern
warnings from a minority of imperial strategists who warned that this would seriously undercut
the long-term goal of nonproliferation. It would constrain the exercise of military force by
opening the US to claims of hypocrisy in security matters. The 2003 invasion of Iraq
represented the nadir of this confused and controversial imperial strategy.
33
LINK: QUICK FIX
THE PLAN IS A QUICK FIX WHICH ONLY MAKES THEIR IMPACTS MORE LIKELY
HUNTLEY, 2008, PROGRAM DIRECTOR AT THE SIMONS CENTRE FOR DISARMAMENT AND NON-PROLIFERATION
RESEARCH [WADE L., AT THE NUCLEAR PRECIPICE: CATASTROPHE OR TRANSFORMATION? P. 181-182]
Nuclear disarmament has always been not only an ultimate goal, but also a vision with practical consequences for nearer-term arms control and
nonproliferation practices. The vision reminds us that arms control and nonproliferation are means to a greater end, not simply instruments to
Sustaining global nuclear disarmament as the ultimate objective
curb the greatest dangers of a nuclear status quo.
is a prerequisite for any arms control and nonproliferation achievements to be sustainable. In other
words, to be realistic, solutions even to immediate nuclear challenges must aim to advance nuclear disarmament. But today, we face a
cruel paradox: success in mitigating the greatest nuclear dangers of the Cold War era has made
it easier for governments to disassociate the nearer-term means from the ultimate end. Some
nuclear dangers of the emerging second nuclear era are more potent than those of the first. But these nuclear dangers are also different in kind,
and not strictly comparable. Now more than ever, these dangers are tied to threats to use nuclear weapons to instill fear and seek gain in specific
Here emerges a second paradox: although the responsibility of states to
social and political contexts.
pursue disarmament is broader, the diminution of the prospect of massive nuclear war has
made the world appear to be "safer" for governments to embrace nuclear capabilities
(extant or latent) as currencies of power and prestige. Governments of states possessing nuclear
weapons increasingly regard arms control not as a means to disarmament but as an
instrument only to curb the greatest dangers of a nuclear status quo. Governments of incipient
nuclear weapon states increasingly regard nonproliferation not as a means to disarmament but as
an instrument only to prevent new entrants into the nuclear "club." Both sets of governments,
grasping the short-term "fix" nuclear weapons seem to offer, have abandoned the long-
term imperative of nuclear disarmament. For this reason, civil society efforts to rekindle a global movement toward
nuclear disarmament are as vital as ever. More than before, such efforts must now also recognize the depths to which nuclear weapons and
nuclear threat-making are enmeshed in global security structures, and must therefore also offer progressive new forms of global governance that
The imperative of nuclear disarmament is today
create security structures sustainable in a non-nuclear world.
inseparable from the need to establish new forms of global governance independent of the
sovereign state system and based on principles of law and democratic accountability."
34
LINK: WEAPONITIS
WEAPONITIS—FOCUS ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS ONLY DISTRACTS US FROM THE FLASHPOINTS OF CONFLICT
AND THE STRUCTURES THAT MAKE THOSE WEAPONS
SCHWARTZ & DERBER, 1990 COMMAND SERGEANT MAJOR US ARMY & PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT BOSTON
COLLEGE [WILLIAM A. & CHARLES, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION P. 186-188, 205-207]
Many believe that nuclear arms control agreements are historic accomplishments politically even if the
military and economic impact is minor. Arms control has in fact become the main public barometer of the prospects for peace and disarmament.
history suggests
Though the ultimate political consequences of the INF treaty and the START treaty negotiations are not yet certain,
that the superpowers' main interest in arms control may lie elsewhere: in public relations. The
signing of the INF treaty, like others before it, did not noticeably reduce the nuclear danger, but it did lead to a spectacular political bonanza for
both superpowers and for their leaders. As James G. Hershberg colorfully puts it, "In a virtuoso display of method acting, Reagan shed the role of
Gary Cooper in High Noon and contracted for a surreal buddy movie with Gorbachev, in which both salved troubles on the home front by taking
dramatic steps to dispel nuclear gloom and spotlight hopes for global peace." 31 To see the political usefulness of treaties such as INF, imagine
that the central symbol of planetary security was something more realistic, say, the number of people killed by the superpowers' troops and their
allies and clients around the world. In that case, the signing of the 1972 SALT treaty might have seemed unimpressive in comparison to the
enormous slaughter then occurring in Vietnam and, at lower levels, elsewhere around the world. The signing of the 1987 INF treaty likewise
might have seemed a modest achievement in comparison to the wholesale dev-astation of Afghanistan and the many other bloody Third World
con-flicts then fully in progress. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists might not have dramatically rolled back the hands of their
"doomsday clock"; Gorbachev and Reagan might not have been nomi-nated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The INF treaty prompted both re-sponses
(and when we examine the actual significance of the treaty we will see how very remarkable that is). Arms control provides a low-
cost way for both superpowers periodi-cally to convey a commitment to reducing the nuclear
danger without necessarily forgoing the violent foreign policies that in fact produce the
danger. Arms treaties are mutually advantageous devices for keeping the peace movements of the
twentieth century, in the East and the West, at bay. In them, the superpowers have found a remarkably efficient
way to allay worldwide popular alarm about nuclear war that might other-wise lead to
serious political problems for both Moscow and Washington. Still, even resounding ideological victories do
not come without risk. By using nuclear arms control to project an image of peaceableness, the
superpowers invite a widening public response that they may not be fully able to control. By loudly
proclaiming to be "on the road" to nu-clear disarmament and world peace, they risk that their audiences may take the slogan seriously and even
seek to hold them to it. An analogy is the orchestration of contrived "demonstration elections" in Third World states to project an image of true
democracy even when there is no intention of delivering it. Sometimes this works nicely, for a while at least, as in El Salvador. But in other cases,
as in Haiti, it can backfire. 32
[THEY CONTINUE…]
Even those parts of the U.S. peace movement most committed to nu-clear disarmament as a present-day focus of political work are begin-ning to
recognize these problems. In June 1987, for example, a major conference of disarmament activists met in Ringwood, New Jersey, "to discuss the
requirements and the plausibility of a long-term, unified campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide. . . . The initial impetus for the
conference was a 'Disarmament 2000' campaign pro-posal . . . focused primarily on nuclear weapons and on the mass move-ment building
necessary to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000." But according to Rob Leavitt, "There was little consensus that nuclear disarmament by
2000 was possible." The participants concluded: "It is difficult to imagine that total nuclear disarmament is possible in the ab-sence of a new
world order," enjoying, among other changes, conven-tional disarmament and an end to military intervention.' That conclusion may be too
pessimistic. A huge global mass move-ment (ignited, perhaps, by a nuclear accident, a small nuclear war, or some other scare) could force
nuclear disarmament on the nations of the world—if it is prepared to use civil disobedience on a huge scale and to endure the terrible state
violence that would likely be unleashed against it in the West, the East, and the Third World alike. Whether a powerful enough movement could
be organized, and whether it could succeed, no one can know. But it is probably the only way nuclear disarmament could be achieved prior to
We must surely abandon the hope that arms control as we know it
radical political changes in the world order.
is a promising strategy for pursuing nuclear abolition. Many insist that arms control is at least
a "step in the right direction." One bumper sticker reads: "The Freeze: Step One." The communications director of the largest
U.S. antinuclear organization, SANE/Freeze, said in refer-ence to the INF treaty, "Our slogan is 2000 down, 48,000 to go." 72 The
metaphor is misleading, another reflection of weaponitis. The path to nuclear disarmament is
not like a continuous road from here to there on which one makes gradual progress by taking
step after step. It is more like a road interrupted by a vast canyon. States can indeed take gradual
steps toward the edge of the canyon—the minimum deterrent. But once there they would quickly
(Continues…)
35
LINK: WEAPONITIS
(Continues…)
discover not only that they still faced the threat of nuclear annihilation but also that all the prior
"steps in the right direction" had not brought nuclear disarmament any closer. That goal requires
crossing the canyon—getting the most powerful states on a violent planet to relinquish their
ultimate weapons with no guaran-teed assurances that all others would do the same. That is an
entirely different enterprise from junking redundant weapons that don't really matter anyway.
Deep cuts in nuclear arsenals might do some good at a purely sym-bolic level, suggesting that if
reductions are good elimination would be even better. But the symbolism could cut both ways.
Dramatic progress in arms control could in fact hurt the prospects for abolition by breed-ing
complacency about the nuclear peril while doing nothing to under-mine the real forces that
motivate states to get and keep nuclear weapons. Those forces must be confronted directly by restraining the illegiti-mate
violence of our governments wherever we can. Considering the im-mense power and low moral standards of modern states, world peace will of
course not come in a day. But reducing aggression and inter-vention by the leading states is probably a prerequisite for a long-run institutional
solution to international violence, whether by means of world government, conventional disarmament, the "peace system" that some advocate, or
other schemes! In the meantime, we must do what we can to make sure we survive long enough to find out. In short, peace
is the path to
nuclear disarmament, not the other way around. Paradoxically, a disarmament movement
working to reduce the weapons that it seeks to abolish probably cannot establish the condi-tions
under which abolition might be possible. That requires a peace movement.
36
LINK: FETISHISM
THE IMAGE OF NUCLEAR WAR INVOKED IN THE 1AC IS A FICTION, A VIRTUAL CONSTRUCTION ACCESSIBLE
ONLY THROUGH FANTASY—THE CONSEQUENCE OF DEBATE OVER THE NUCLEAR THREAT LIES IN THE
MEANINGS PRODUCED. VISIONS OF THE BOMB’S POWER ONLY MAKE US WANT IT MORE
CORDLE, NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY, 2006 [DANIEL, “CULTURES OF TERROR: NUCLEAR CRITICISM
DURING AND SINCE THE COLD WAR,” LITERATURE COMPASS, VOL. 3, NO. 6, NOVEMBER]
Nevertheless, it is worth pondering the ways in which nuclear weapons might be considered textual. First, they are, as
Derrida hints, not only missiles but missiles that are held in suspension, ready to be launched
from, and by, vast interconnected informational networks. They are part of cybernetic systems,
comprised of humans and machines that ‘talk’ to each other, that sift information about potential
threats, and which, during the Cold War, had to strike a precarious balance between performing the safety checks and fail-safe procedures that
would prevent the accidental triggering of global war, and launching a swift and devastating attack, on a hair-trigger response to an outside threat.
Perhaps more importantly, though, they are textual to the extent that global nuclear war is itself an entirely
virtual construction that is accessible only through fictions of various kinds. Once it happens
then the possibility of a fiction or art with which it might be rendered accurately is itself erased
because such a nuclear war has been presumed, from as early as the 1950s, to be world-, or at least civilization-,
ending. Fictions seeking to represent this occurrence are caught in a bind because they have to
postulate a perspective on the end of culture, from within culture. This was powerfully expressed by Jonathan
Schell, in The Fate of the Earth, a piece serialized initially in the New Yorker, and then published as a book: [F]or most people, and
perhaps for all, it [nuclear war] wouldn't be like anything, because they would be dead. To depict the
scene as it would appear to the living is to that extent a falsification. . . . The right vantage point
from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse, but from that vantage point, of course, there is
nothing to report.5 There is, in other words, not only a sense in which all representations of global
nuclear war are virtual, but a terrible precariousness about these virtual realities. They challenge
the capacity of the mind to imagine its own non-existence. This is a paradox on which a number of writers
picked up. Martin Amis, for instance, introduced a collection of short stories about the nuclear context with an essay, ‘Thinkability’, that was
pointedly titled both to challenge the disturbing call by some nuclear strategists to ‘think the unthinkable’, by considering nuclear war as a serious
strategic option, and to raise the difficulty of conceptualizing both nuclear war and meaningful disarmament. Similarly, Arundhati Roy, writing
about a later nuclear standoff, between India and Pakistan, made a point about the conceptual trauma occasioned by thinking about nuclear war,
by titling her impassioned protest, ‘The End of Imagination’.6 Of course, it was not only in works by writers of fiction that nuclear weapons had
this textual and virtual dimension. For instance, Michael Mandelbaum singles out an intriguing turn of phrase by Robert McNamara: ‘[The
United States can] absorb fully a Soviet strike and survive with sufficient power to destroy utterly the Soviet Union. We have made that
statement. We wish them to believe it. They should believe it. It is true.’ The first sentence contains the entire informational content of the
statement, with the four following acting only as intensifiers. While Mandelbaum comments that deterrence ‘required not only a huge nuclear
club that was shatterproof, but one that was well known to be shatter-proof’, we might push our reading of McNamara's declaration further by
In the absence of absolute proof of the US
considering the purpose of those four, seemingly redundant, extra sentences.7
nuclear capability – which could only, indeed, have been provided by ‘utterly’ destroying the Soviet Union – the virtual
construction of this reality, its existence in discourse, had to bear a tremendous weight. Repetition was
a way of shoring up the statement to bear this burden. If nuclear weapons were useful only to the extent that they deterred attack (to fire them was
suicide, bringing destruction upon oneself), then talking about virtual attacks became the primary way in which they could actually be used. It is a
cliché to point out that nuclear
weapons were, and are, primarily psychological: in a Cold War context, their purpose was to
The
shape the behaviour of the enemy with the threat of their use; once they were actually used, both sides would have lost the game.
paradox this created was that it became necessary to profess, loudly and continually, an absolute
willingness to use nuclear weapons, regardless of whether or not there was an intention to do
so. In this understanding, the weapons themselves operated not primarily as explosive devices, but as
props for a suspension of disbelief. This was a true theatre of war, and we might read not only literary
fictions, but the whole panoply of Cold War posturing, including the missiles themselves, civil defence drills and leaflets, and photographs of
bomb tests, as texts, amenable to critical analysis, and constitutive of a drama of confrontation. For Daniel Zins it was precisely this sort of
critical activity that made nuclear criticism revolutionary: ‘I submit that it [the canon] be further problematized, indeed exploded, to confront
(Continues…)
37
LINK: FETISHISM
(Continues…)
nuclear texts: plays, poems, novels and short stories, to be sure, but also a wide variety of "non-literary" nuclear texts.’8 Zins was, in other words,
calling for an opening up of the canon analogous to that demanded by other theoretical approaches, including (but clearly not limited to) feminist,
language constructs our sense of the
structuralist and postcolonial criticisms. Furthermore, such an approach insisted that
nuclear. In other words, it was not interested only in the way in which nuclear science and technology
influences writing, but maintained that the cultural impact of nuclear forces is constructed from
within it: ‘[The nuclear] is itself a discursive construct. . . . [It] not only leaves its traces
linguistically in a variety of literary and non-literary texts, but is itself constructed linguistically
by the metaphors and images we use in trying to imagine it.’
38
AT: PERMUTATION
THE PLAN WILL BE USED TO DELEGITIMIZE MORE RADICAL PROPOSALS—DOOMS FUTURE POLITICAL CHANGE
COOPER, PEACE STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF BRADFORD, 2006 [NEIL, “PUTTING DISARMAMENT BACK IN THE
FRAME,” REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (2006), 32, 353–376, JOURNALS.CAMBRIDGE.ORG]
Traditional arms control thus appears to have been rejected both in rhetoric and policy – at least by the Bush White House. Despite this, I want to
suggest that the
persistence of arms control theory in academic and policymaking circles continues
to perform important functions – not least in the way it serves to delegitimise more radical
proposals for disarmament. Moreover, current concerns over the death of arms control also mask the strong elements of
continuity between past approaches to arms limitation and those of the present Bush White House – both of which have been profoundly unequal
in their impact on actors and have thus fostered contemporary insecurities rather than resolved them. What is the basis for such assertions? There
is an established body of arms control theory that forms the basis of most textbooks on arms control and security or strategic studies. This is
despite the fact that much of the subsequent discussion of contemporary arms control practice in the very same books often demonstrates the
essential inadequacy of these principles. There are a number of key points that are normally recited. In
particular, the development of arms control theory is presented as a reaction to the perceived
failure of successive initiatives on general and complete disarmament (GCD).4 Indeed, this
scepticism about the real world relevance of disarmament has been a recurring theme in the
traditional literature on arms control that students of IR and security studies are still weaned on.5 Typical of such
scepticism is Buzan’s conclusion that: within anarchy, the logic of disarmament is so obviously
flawed that except for propaganda purposes, and for limited reductions in the context of arms
control the idea is, as the historical record indicates, a non-starter.6 Thus, the claim to superiority made by arms
control theory has consistently rested on its real-world relevance and practicability compared to the failed utopianism of disarmament. Moreover,
arms control is understood to be philosophically distinct from disarmament.7 In particular, it is based
on different assumptions about the relationship between arms and the inception of war. For disarmers,
all arms are destabilising and thus likely to increase the risk of war, while for arms controllers certain arms and arms relationships can be
stabilising and can thus serve to mitigate the insecurity inherent in an anarchic international system. Consequently, as in the case of SALT 1 and
II, arms control may even permit an increase in certain categories of arms. This difference is often characterised by reference to Bull’s distinction
between disarmament, understood as the reduction or abolition of arms, and arms control understood as restraint internationally exercised upon
armaments policy – not only in terms of the number of arms but also their character, deployment or use.8 Thus, arms control and disarmament are
there is a blurring that occurs in the discourse –
deemed to be philosophically distinct. At the same time though,
between arms control expressed as an alternative to disarmament understood solely as GCD (which has
been a failure and thus discredited) and arms control as a practice, of which disarmament initiatives such
as the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) or the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) are represented as a subset. Indeed,
there is often a double blurring at work, because disarmament’s link with GCD is often used
to damn disarmament as utopian in principle and unachievable in practice, whilst arms control’s
association with really existing disarmament treaties is used to demonstrate its greater realism
and (potential) relevance. We can see these processes at work in the quote from Buzan above, but a more recent example is from
Larsen who notes that: . . . arms control should be distinguished from general and complete disarmament. Proponents of disarmament [note the
move from GCD to disarmament] see the goal as simply [so naive, so crude] reducing the size of military forces, budgets, explosives power and
other aggregate measures. . . . Disarmament has a longer legacy than arms control..[but] 1960s international security specialists believed
[disarmament] lacked precision and smacked of utopianism.9 Despite the above conclusion from Larsen, just a few lines later on, the
second kind of blurring occurs: ‘advocacy of disarmament [can also be] part of a state’s
arms control policy’. As evidence of this, Larsen cites US negotiation of conventions on biological and chemical weapons, noting (not
incorrectly) that ‘The US decided in both cases that maintaining such weapons would not enhance its security’.10 Thus, for mainstream
strategic and security studies, disarmament is simultaneously distinct from arms control and a
utopian project characterised by failure whilst also a subset of arms control that has produced
concrete results. The effect is to neatly condemn ‘disarmament’ as both an activity with a
long record of failure and as a project suitable only for naive idealists. However, as I intend to
demonstrate below, if GCD is understood as merely one kind of disarmament activity (some of which has a decidedly non-utopian flavour to it)
then it becomes clear that, at least when judged against the kind of criteria set by the disarmament negotiators of the 1950s and 60s, a great deal
of disarmament can be said to have occurred – much of it quite successful. What are the different kinds of disarmament activity that can be
identified?
39
AT: PERMUTATION
WE NEED TO SHIFT THE DEBATE AWAY FROM NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ONTO CONVENTIONAL FORCES—
REFUSING THE AFF IS KEY
Shifting the disarmament debate from nuclear weapons to conventional forces will require
overcoming powerful psychological obstacles erected during the world’s 65-year obsession with
the Bomb. Complicating this effort is the late entrance into our nuclear nightmares of nonstate actors, whose potential access to nuclear
material has naturally become a key talking point of nuclear abolitionists. Nonetheless, the movement for a nuclear-weapon-
free world should be deferred until the world’s major powers have first taken steps to retire
their tradition of armed antagonism, of which nuclear weapons are merely the most extreme manifestation. In his Prague speech
calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama exhorted the world to “stand together for the right of people everywhere to
Far fewer people live today in fear of nuclear war than in terror
live free from fear in the twentyfirst century.”26
of less sophisticated forms of conflict. If Obama is sincere, he will do more than devote his
energies to abolishing a single tightly controlled class of weapons. Any disarmament effort
worthy of the name will look to the much broader suite of arms we have devised and begin the process
of ending what Adm. Hyman Rickover called “this whole nonsense of war.”27
40
ALTERNATIVE: MOVEMENTS
ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE CAN SOLVE THE CASE—RESISTANCE TO U.S. MILITARISM AS A WHOLE MUST COME
FIRST
VANAIK, PROFESSOROF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT DELHI UNIVERSITY, 2009 [ACHIN, “OBAMA AND HOPES FOR
GLOBAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT,” 4/22, TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE HTTP://WWW.TNI.ORG/DETAIL_PAGE.
PHTML?ACT_ID=19420]
But aside from such hopes the
larger question is what should be the strategic line of march particularly in the US of
the anti-nuclear peace movement? This must lie in its participation in a wider, more
encompassing anti-war/anti-imperialist movement. For all its unassailable military strength
the US can be (and has been) politically defeated. Over the last century and a half there has emerged (especially after
WWII) a growing disjunction between military power and political power/success that has thrown
up strategic and intellectual problems that, Waltz. and others in the Realist/Neorealist school, cannot
adequately handle because their understanding of power is so under-and poorly- theorized.(16)
The political defeat of US ambitions in the Middle East sends the message that the most extreme
form of military power – nuclear weapons – is not a source of decisive or even significant
political strength. Successes in building an anti-war/anti-imperialist struggle then facilitate the
spread of a sentiment of anti-nuclearism. If it is accepted that this must be the key strategic line to adopt, then it follows
that it is the deficiencies pertaining to the building of such a mass anti-imperialist movement today that
are most important to correct, not so much the deficiencies in building an anti-nuclear
mass movement. And in this regard the role and impact of the NPT are of even less, if not nil, consequence.
EMPIRICALLY, PEACE MOVEMENTS ARE EFFECTIVE—IRAQ PROVES
CORTRIGHT, CHAIR OF THE BOARD AND SENIOR FELLOW OF THE FOURTH FREEDOM FORUM, 2004 [DAVID, “A
PEACEFUL SUPERPOWER: THE MOVEMENT AGAINST WAR IN IRAQ,” 2/15, HTTP://WWW.FOURTHFREEDOM.ORG/
APPLICATIONS/CMS.PHP)]
On February 15, 2003 in hundreds of cities across the world an estimated ten million people
demonstrated against war on Iraq. More international in character than any previous antiwar
effort, the Iraq campaign “was the largest transnational antiwar movement that has ever taken
place,” according to social movement scholar Barbara Epstein. Built largely through the Internet, the movement involved religious
communities, trade unions, students, women’s organizations, environmentalists, academics, business executives, Hollywood artists, musicians,
and many more. The movement attracted widespread media coverage, as the antiwar cause gained unprecedented recognition and legitimacy.
A few days after the February 15 demonstrations, New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler conferred “superpower” status on the antiwar
movement. The huge antiwar demonstrations were indications, wrote Tyler, of “two superpowers on the
planet: the United States and world public opinion.” The White House faced a “tenacious new adversary” which was
generating massive opposition to the administration’s war policy. Author David Cortright writes as an engaged activist who was intimately
involved in many of the activities described in A Peaceful Superpower. He helped to create the Win Without War coalition, wrote articles and
reports challenging the justification for war, and participated in numerous efforts to build the opposition movement. This is the story of that
February 15, 2003 was the
movement, offered as both testament to history and assessment of impact and relevance. Introduction
largest single day of antiwar protest in human history. More than a million people jammed the
center of London, and huge throngs marched in Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Sydney,
and hundreds of other cities. An estimated four hundred thousand braved bitter cold in New York, and tens of thousands
demonstrated in San Francisco.1 The people of the globe spoke out as never before in one unified voice against the planned invasion of Iraq.
“The world says no to war,” was the slogan and the reality. The February 15 demonstrations were the high point of a vast and unprecedented
mobilization of public opposition to war. The Iraq campaign “was the largest transnational antiwar movement that has ever taken place,”
according to social movement scholar Barbara Epstein..2 In the course of just a few months, the movement in the United States reached levels of
mobilization that, during the Vietnam era, took years to develop. The Iraq movement was more international in character than any previous
antiwar campaign, as protests were coordinated throughout the world and activists understood themselves to be part of a truly global struggle.3
The movement represented a convergence of antiwar and global justice efforts in a common campaign against military-corporate domination.4
It was an expression of what scholar Stephen Gill has called “new . . . forms of global political agency.
41
ALTERNATIVE: MOVEMENTS
THE ALTERNATIVE SOLVES—DEMANDING BROADER CHANGES AGAINST GLOBAL MILITARISM IS KEY TO
UNITE DIVERSE MOVEMENTS AND SOLVE
SANTOS, DIRECTOR OF CENTER FOR SOCIAL STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COIMBRA, 2003 [BOAVENTURA DE
SOUSA, “COLLECTIVE SUICIDE?,” BAD SUBJECTS #63, APRIL ESERVER.ORG/ BS/63/SANTOS.HTML]
At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming
collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the
broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide
becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian
fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations",
referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral
damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two
facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians
will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion
dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.
Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic
pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural
exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though
hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation,
legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's
version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine
of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction.
In opposition to this, there
is the ongoing movement of globalization from below, the global struggle for
social justice, led by social movements and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF) has been an eloquent
manifestation. The WSF has been a remarkable affirmation of life, in its widest and most inclusive sense, embracing human beings and nature.
What challenges does it face before the increasingly intimate interpenetration of the globalization of the economy and that of war?
I am convinced that this new situation forces the globalization from below to re-think itself, and
to reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the WSF, at its second meeting, in 2002, identified
the relationship between economic neoliberalism and imperial warmongering, which is why it
organized the World Peace Forum, the second edition of which took place in 2003. But this is
not enough. A strategic shift is required. Social movements, no matter what their spheres of
struggle, must give priority to the fight for peace, as a necessary condition for the success of all
the other struggles. This means that they must be in the frontline of the fight for peace, and not
simply leave this space to be occupied solely by peace movements. All the movements against
neoliberal globalization are, from now on, peace movements. We are now in the midst of the
fourth world war (the third being the Cold War) and the spiral of war will go on and on. The
principle of non-violence that is contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must no longer be a
demand made on the movements; now it must be a global demand made by the movements. This
emphasis is necessary so that, in current circumstances, the celebration of life can be set against
this vertiginous collective suicide. The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of war or of
terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon the elimination of the conditions that foster war and
terrorism: global injustice, social exclusion, cultural and political discrimination and oppression
and imperialist greed.
42
ALTERNATIVE: REJECTION
MILITARISM MUST BE RESISTED AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY—THE ALTERNATIVE IS A PREREQUISITE TO DEBATE
ITSELF
GIROUX, DIRECTOR OF THE WATERBURY FORUM IN EDUCATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES AT PENN STATE, 2006
[HENRY A., “THE EMERGING AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE UNITED STATES,” SYMPLOKE 14.1/2, 98-151, MUSE]
As militarization spreads through the culture, it produces policies that rely more on force than
on dialogue and compassion; it offers up modes of identification that undermine democratic
values and tarnish civil liberties; and it makes the production of both symbolic and material
violence a central feature of everyday life. As Kevin Baker points out, we are quickly becoming a nation
that "substitute[s] military solutions for almost everything, including international alliances,
diplomacy, effective intelligence agencies, democratic institutions—even national security" (38).
Within this ideology, masculinity is associated with violence, and action is often substituted for the
democratic processes of deliberation and debate. Militarization is about the rule of force and
the expansion of repressive state power. In fact, democracy appears as an excess in this logic
and is often condemned by militarists as being a weak system of government. Echoes of this anti-
democratic sentiment can be found in the Patriot Act with its violation of civil liberties, in a rancorous patriotism that equates dissent with
treason, and in the discourse of public commentators, who, in the fervor of a militarized culture, fan the flames of hatred and intolerance. One
example that has become all too typical emerged after the September 11 attacks. Columnist Ann Coulter, in calling for a holy war on Muslims,
wrote "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing
only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we [End Page 134] killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."15 While this
statement does not reflect mainstream of American opinion, the uncritical and chauvinistic patriotism and intolerance that inform it not only have
become standard fare among many conservative radio hosts in the United States but are increasingly being legitimated in a wide variety of
By blurring the lines between military and civilian functions, militarization deforms
cultural venues.
our language, debases democratic values, celebrates fascist modes of control, defines citizens as
soldiers, and diminishes our ability as a nation to uphold international law and support a
democratic global public sphere. Unless militarization is systematically exposed and resisted
at every place where it appears in the culture, it will undermine the meaning of critical
citizenship and do great harm to those institutions that are central to a democratic society.
43
*****FRAMEWORK UTNIF 2010
*****FRAMEWORK
1NC FRAMEWORK TOPICALITY
A) INTERPRETATION: “RESOLVED” IN THE RESOLUTION IS A REFLEXIVE VERB AND IT MEANS THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE RESOLVED TO ESTABLISH A POLICY
MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY, 1996 [HTTP://DICTIONARY.REFERENCE.COM/SEARCH?Q=RESOLVED]

“6. To change or convert by resolution or formal vote; -- used only reflexively; as, the house
resolved itself into a committee of the whole.”
B) VIOLATION: THE PLAN DOESN’T FIAT A UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POLICY
C) FIAT GOOD:
1. FAIRNESS—FIATING IMMEDIATE PASSAGE OF THE PLAN IS THE ONLY WAY TO GUARANTEE THAT THE
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING WHICH IS THE STARTING POINT FOR ALL NEGATIVE
GROUND. THIS IS KEY TO ALL OUR DISAD UNIQUENESS AND LINKS AS WELL AS COUNTER-PLANS WHICH AFFECT
THE POLITICAL PROCESS. THERE ARE ALSO AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOVEMENTS AND NO ONE WRITES CARDS
ABOUT ACTIVISM AT A DEBATE TOURNAMENT ON THIS ISSUE BY THEM. AT A MINIMUM, IT DOUBLE THE
GROUND WE HAVE TO RESEARCH BECAUSE NOW WE HAVE TO RESEARCH THE EFFECTS OF THEIR POLICY AND
ITS ADVANTAGES AS WELL AS WHETHER OR NOT THEIR ACTIVISM TO DO THAT POLICY IS GOOD.
2. EDUCATION—FIAT IS KEY TO BEING INFORMED CITIZENS, WITHOUT IT WE NEVER LEARN ABOUT THE
POLITICAL PROCESS AND DON’T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE POSSIBLE BAD OUTCOMES OF OUR ACTIONS.
SIMULATING POLICY SOLVES ALL THEIR OFFENSE, ALLOWING PEOPLE A SAFE SPACE TO TEST NEW IDEAS
JOYNER, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AT GEORGETOWN, 1999 [CHRISTOPHER C., “TEACHING

INTERNATIONAL LAW,” 5 ILSA J INT'L & COMP L 377, L/N]
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing
simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a
perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to
realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional
role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the
class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and
enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team.
Thesedebates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States
foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States
national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant
principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United
States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force
to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada
In addressing both sides of
in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein."
these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the
nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an
incredibly rich body of
analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most
of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international
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44
1NC FRAMEWORK TOPICALITY
(Continues…)
relations, much less to the average undergraduate.
By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policymaking, students realize that United States actions do not always
measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national
interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States
policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the debate
format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged
with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and
structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case.
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work
together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this
way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they
work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international
law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or
creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to become familiarized with
contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and
executing these policies. n8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale
arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal
defense.
3. EXTRA-TOPICALITY—THE AFFIRMATIVE ADDS NON-GOVERNMENTAL ACTION TO THE RESOLUTION FROM
WHICH THEY CLAIM ALL THEIR ADVANTAGES, A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF EXTRA-TOPICAL ACTION GIVING THEM
A STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE IN THE DEBATE. EVEN IF WHAT THEY DO IS PREDICTABLE, IT’S INFINITELY
REGRESSIVE AND JUSTIFIES OTHER EXTRA-TOPICAL ACTIONS, AND PREDICTABILITY DOES NOT MAKE IT
RIGHT. THIS IS AN INDEPENDENT VOTING ISSUE.
D) IT’ A VOTING ISSUE:
1. SEVERINGTHEIR FRAMEWORK IS ILLEGIT, IT CREATES A MOVING TARGET AND FURTHER SKEWS OUR
STRATEGY BY MAKING US DEBATE MULTIPLE WORLDS AND THEY GET TO SPEAK LAST SO WE WOULD NEVER
WIN.
2. KEY TO OBJECTIVITY—THEIR FRAMEWORK DEMANDS A JUDGE INTERVENING WITH HER OR HIS PERSONAL
POLITICS WHICH REFLECTS EVERYONE’S BIAS, MEANING DEBATE IS POINTLESS BECAUSE THE JUDGE WOULD
ALREADY HAVE THEIR MINDS MADE UP. THE POINT OF FIAT IS TO SUSPEND OUR BIASES SO WE CAN THINK
ABOUT AND DEBATE OTHER WORLDS
3. FAIRNESS, EDUCATION, AND JURISDICTION
45
FRAMEWORK NEGATIVE—EXTENSIONS
POLICY DEBATERS BECOME POLICY MAKERS—AND, EVEN IF WE DON’T JOIN CONGRESS, SIMULATING POLICY
ALLOWS US TO CHECK GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE AND PROMOTES PEACE
RAWLS, PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1999 [JOHN, THE LAW OF PEOPLES, P. 54-57]
Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized , or satisfied, whenever chief
executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the principles of the
Law of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reason for pursuing or revising a people's foreign policy and
affairs of state that involve other societies. As for private citizens, we say, as before, that ideally citizens are to think of
themselves as if they were executives and legislators and ask themselves what foreign policy
supported by what considerations they would think it most reasonable to advance, Once again, when firm
and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal executives and legislators, and to
repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate the public reason of free and equal
peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and understanding among peoples.
THEIR INTERPRETATION DESTROYS EDUCATION: IT LEADS TO USELESS PREACHING THAT PREVENTS A

CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUE. SWITCH-SIDE DEBATE IS EDUCATIONAL BECAUSE IT REJECTS THEIR APPROACH
JOYNER, PROF. OF INT’L LAW AT GEORGETOWN, 1999 [CHRISTOPHER , 5 ILSA J INT'L & COMP L 377, L/N]
For many international law courses taught from a political science perspective, the most sustained and most rewarding learning experience can
Teaching international law is not supposed to be a platform for the professor to
come from a collaborative process.
pontificate or proselytize. Rather, it furnishes an opportunity for a community of persons to learn
together, in effect, to use the classroom experience for shaping and testing new ideas after being exposed or basic
philosophical concepts and general principles of international law.
For collaborative learning experiences to be especially meaningful for political science students, it is essential that they reflect exposure to
hypothetical cases, if used as
various legal problems, hopefully set out in authentic setting with real world analogies. This means that
should be constructed in such a manner that mirrors as truly as practicable real world events
learning devices,
and real world circumstances. International law must function in a real world political environment, and simulation exercises should
reflect that fact.
One successful collaborative learning experience is to assign a series of topics for team debates before the classroom. This
compels students on each debate side to conduct legal research on the merits of a particular issue, formulate
proposed rationales for its lawfulness, follow the debate, and take questions from class members on the legal
implications and merits of their respective positions. It combines individual responsibility with the necessity of
collaborative intra-group learning.
Confronting international law in practice is critical to achievement of the course objectives, and this is effectively done through a series of
debates in a course that I teach on International law and United States Foreign Policy. Students try to WIN the games by garnering support from
the rest of the class based on the merits and suasion of their legal arguments, although past experience indicates that clear winners are not often
produced. The degree of success this exercise enjoys depends on two key factors: first, the willingness of students to assume their adopted roles
with energy and, second, the extent to which student participants in the debates can learn and relate how, where, and why international law is
[*385] integrated into the United States foreign policy decision-making process and can demonstrate the tensions between national security
these two ingredients
considerations and international legal constraints in formulating United States foreign policy. Taken in tandem,
can produce a successful and unique learning experience that fosters a deeper understanding of
the subject matter than would likely be attained through a lecture-format course.
46
FRAMEWORK NEGATIVE—EXTENSIONS
TURN: NEUTRALITY PREVENTS DOMINATION. WE CAN DEBATE ISSUES THAT WE DON’T NECESSARILY
BELIEVE IN THIS FORUM, PROVIDING A SAFE SPACE WITH WHICH TO EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT IDEAS
MUIR, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATIONS AT GEORGE MASON, 1993 [PHILOSOPHY & RHETORIC, V.26, N.4]
The role of switch-side debate is especially important in the oral defense of arguments that foster tolerance
without accruing the moral complications of acting on such beliefs. The forum is therefore unique in providing debaters with attitudes of
debaters are indeed exposed to a
tolerance without committing them to active moral irresponsibility. As Freeley notes,
multivalued world both within and between the sides of a given topic. Yet this exposure hardly commits
them to such "mistaken" values. In this view, the divorce of the game from the "real world" can be
seen as a means of gaining perspective without obligating students to validate their hypothetical
value structure through immoral actions. <288>
FRAMEWORK COMES FIRST—RATIFYING A COMMON STARTING POINT FOR DEBATE IS THE ONLY WAY FOR
ANY PRODUCTIVE DISCUSSION TO OCCUR
SHIVELY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENACE, TEXAS A&M, 2000 [RUTH LESSL, POLITICAL THEORY
AND PARTISAN POLITICS, 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
There can be no argument except on the premise, and
ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true.
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.
47
2AC FRAMEWORK TOPICALITY BLOCK
1. WE MEET: WE ENDORSE GOVERNMENT ACTION
2. COUNTER-INTERPRETATION: RESOLVED COMES BEFORE THE COLON
WEBSTER'S REVISED UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, 1996, EVIDENCE GENDER PARAPHRASED

[HTTP://DICTIONARY.REFERENCE.COM/SEARCH?Q=RESOLVED]
To determine or decide in purpose; to make ready in mind; to fix; to settle; as, he [or she] was resolved by an
unexpected event,”
3. MIDDLE GROUND—WE MUST DEFEND HOW WE GET POLICIES PAST, AS WELL AS THEIR OUTCOME—THE
PLAN IS 100% TOPICAL
4. NET-BENEFITS
A) SPECTATORSHIP—THEIR MODEL OF DEBATE IS OUTDATED AND PRIVILEGES ELITES
BRUNS, 2008, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION, CREATIVE INDUSTRIES FACULTY, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF
TECHNOLOGY [AXEL, “LIFE BEYOND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: TOWARDS A NETWORKED MODEL FOR POLITICAL
DELIBERATION,” INFORMATION POLITY 13 (2008), P. 67-68]
Many other Western nations are experiencing a similar decline of the mass-mediated public sphere as an
accurate representation of public opinion, and a conduit for connecting state and society: in such countries, too, a variety of factors ranging from the
faltering revenue of print newspapers, increasing concentration in ownership, cuts in staff numbers and the subsequent amalgamation of newsrooms with commercial sections in the organisation,
This is further exacerbated by overt

have led to a marked and continuing decline in journalistic standards for some time now (see e.g. [13,15]).
political pressure by proprietors and politicians, as well as journalistic self-censorship in anticipation of such
pressure, as they have been evident for example in the systemic failure of mainstream journalism in many nations to question the reasons
for the invasion of Iraq (see e.g. [4]), and to provide independent coverage of its aftermath. (Veteran New York Times journalist John F. Burns openly admitted that “we
failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration’s plan to go to war”, for example; see e.g. [25]) Such developments remain somewhat less
pronounced in a number of European countries where journalism has traditionally operated in the presence of a strong public service broadcasting ethos, but (as the Hutton enquiry into the BBC
has shown) even here, persistent political interference has increasingly served to undermine citizens’ trust in the independence of the mediated public sphere (see e.g. [18]). As a result, many
such nations have seen the emergence of “a debate about the reinvention of representative democracy for an age in which the cultural norms of deference, distance and distrust are in decline”, as
Coleman notes. “The extent to which that decline is reversible depends to a considerable extent upon the capacity of e-democracy to nourish a more inclusive, connected, and collaborative
democratic sphere” – with e-democracy therefore understood here in its widest possible sense, not simply as a shift to providing e-government services [11, p.137].
It is no accident that this challenge to the continued existence of the public sphere as an independent, intermediary system between state and society has
emerged precisely at a time that the fundamental framework for mass-mediated communication
itself is tested and undermined by the arrival of networked, many-to-many media as an alternative to the traditional mass
media model of the industrial age. The state→public sphere→society mod el maps immediately on the producer→distributor→consumer model of the industrial economy, best formulated in the
in keeping with the dominant media structures of the industrial

context of political mass media perhaps as politicians→ journalists → citizens;
age, none of these models provide for strong mechanisms allowing feedback from the consumers or end users in the chain back to its
starting points – communication remains largely unidirectional except for an occasional, limited
opportunity for consumers and citizens to express their preferences through their purchasing (or
voting) decisions.
Conventional political systems of the mass media age, then, by necessity embrace a model in which “mediated
political communication is carried on by an elite” [17, p. 416] on the “virtual stage” provided by journalism, acted out
in front of an audience of largely passive spectators whose own views are represented on the
virtual stage only to the extent that journalists make the effort to seek them out. Traditionally, the
privilege of forming part of the ‘Fourth Estate’ (especially where it is coupled with access to scarce public resources, such as the broadcast spectra of radio and television) has
compelled and obliged journalists to act in the citizenry’s best interests by seeking out public opinion – as noted earlier, recent
experience suggests, however, that for a variety of commercial, institutional, and ideological
reasons such efforts to fairly and comprehensively represent society on the virtual stage are in
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48
(Continues…)
decline. Instead, mass media journalism in many Western nations now forms an increasingly closed system – an echo
chamber for the views of politicians, journalists, and pundits that operates at a growing
distance from public opinion itself, or which at best carefully orchestrates the presentation of
citizen views in radio call-in shows and televised ‘town hall’ meetings to support conventional journalistic clich´es of public opinion (in
the Australian context, see e.g. [22,36]). The public, meanwhile, are rapidly developing their own, alternative media
– citizen journalism sites, news blogs, and other spaces for user-led content creation (see [6,7]) – within which they conduct engaged and lively
political discussion and deliberation away from the perceived spin of journalism’s punditariat.
1. Beyond the public sphere
In such spaces, the formation of public opinion(s) continues even in spite of the casual collapse of industrial journalism; as the role of the traditional, society-wide public sphere in enabling
citizens to form their views declines, a wide variety of new, conceptually localised public spheres has thus
emerged, focussing on specific topics which are of interest to their particular constituencies of users
and participants. Such issue publics no longer rely on the presence of specific entities in the journalism industry to provide their information, but are engaged in
a communal process of gatewatching in which bloggers and citizen journalists identify and link to or directly cite relevant materials as they become
available (see [6]). Through such processes, content is reappropriated and reinserted into the public debate
beyond the conventional spaces of the virtual, mass media stage; discussion and deliberation are no
longer staged by proxies acting in front of a relatively passive audience, but now directly involve
citizens as active participants. In such environments, in other words, the virtual stage is altered and even
dissolved, and citizens themselves become actors in the play of political engagement; rather
than merely watching the struggle between a small number of political positions (in common journalistic practice
represented often by no more than the two standard views espoused by the left and right of party politics), they now directly contribute their own
opinions and ideas to the debate, alongside politicians, journalists, and pundits, leading to the
emergence of a vastly more multiperspectival debate.
B) BUREAUCRACY—ROLEPLAYING AUTHORIZES SADISTIC VIOLENCE, MASKING DOMINATION IN NEUTRALITY

REED ET AL, DIRECTOR OF COMMAND AND LEADERSHIP STUDIES, U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE, 2005 [PROFESSOR
GEORGE E., GUY B. ADAMS, PROFESSOR, PUBLIC AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA, DANNY L.
BALFOUR, PROFESSOR, PUBLIC AND NONPROFIT ADMINISTRATION, GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY,
“PUTTING CRUELTY FIRST: ABU GHRAIB, ADMINISTRATIVE EVIL AND MORAL INVERSION,” PAPER PREPARED FOR
PRESENTATION TO “E THICS AND INTEGRITY OF GOVERNANCE: A TRANSATLANTIC DIALOGUE,” LEUVEN,
BELGIUM, JUNE 2-5, 2005 HTTP://SOC.KULEUVEN.BE/IO/ETHICS/PAPER/PAPER%20WS5_PDF/GUY%20ADAMS.PDF, 24-28]
Total guard aggression increased daily, even after prisoners had ceased any resistance and deterioration was visible. Prisoner rights were redefined as privileges, to be earned by obedient
behavior. The experiment was planned for two weeks, but was terminated after six days. Five prisoners were released because of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and/or acute anxiety.
Guards forced the prisoners to chant filthy songs, to defecate in buckets that were not emptied, and to clean toilets with their bare hands. They acted as if the prisoners were less than human and
so did the prisoners (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, 1973, p.94): At the end of only six days we had to close down our mock
prison because what we saw was frightening. It was no longer apparent to us or most of the subjects where they ended and
their roles began. The majority had indeed become "prisoners” or "guards," no longer able to clearly
differentiate between role-playing and self. There were dramatic changes in virtually every
aspect of their behavior, thinking and feeling. In less that a week, the experience of imprisonment undid (temporarily) a lifetime of learning; human
values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw some boys
("guards") treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty, while other boys
("prisoners") became servile, dehumanized robots who thought only of escape, of their own individual
survival, and of their mounting hatred of the guards. This experiment suggests that group and organizational roles and social structures play
a far more powerful part in everyday human behavior than most of us would consider. And we can see clearly how individual morality and
ethics can be swallowed and effectively erased by social roles and structures. One is rarely
confronted with a clear, up-or-down decision on an ethical issue; rather, a series of small, usually
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49
(Continues…)
ambiguous choices are made, and the weight of commitments and of habit drives out morality. One does not have to be
The skids are further greased if the situation is
morally degenerate to become caught in a web of wrongdoing that may even cross the line into evil.
defined or presented as technical, or calling for expert judgment, or is legitimated, either tacitly or explicitly,
by organizational authority, as we shall see below. It becomes an even easier choice if the immoral behavior has itself been masked, redefined through a moral
inversion as the "good" or "right" thing to do. Administrative Evil and Dehumanization The Stanford prison experiment provides a fairly powerful
explanation for at least some of what happened at Abu Ghraib. But it also does not fully fit the specifics of the situation. Unlike the Stanford experiments, the
guards did not act in an isolated and controlled environment, but were part of a larger organizational structure and political environment. They interacted regularly with all sorts of personnel, both
directly and indirectly involved with the prisoners. They were in a remarkably chaotic environment, were by and large poorly prepared and trained for their roles, and were faced with both
enormous danger and ambiguity. However, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, tacit permission was available to those who chose to accept it. In his ground-breaking book, The Destruction of
a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced among

the European Jews, Raul Hilberg observed that
German bureaucrats in a manner that (Hilberg, 1985, p.55), “…was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared
comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.” In another study of mid-level bureaucrats and the Holocaust, Christopher Browning describes this process in some detail as he also found
that direct orders were not needed for key functionaries to understand the direction that policy was to take (Browning, 1992, pp. 141-142): Instead, new signals and directions were given at the
center, and with a ripple effect, these new signals set in motions waves that radiated outward… with the situations they found themselves in and the contacts they made, these three bureaucrats
could not help but feel the ripples and be affected by the changing atmosphere and course of events. These were not stupid or inept people; they could read the signals, perceive what was
expected of them, and adjust their behavior accordingly… It was their receptivity to such signals, and the speed with which they aligned themselves to the new policy, that allowed the Final
based more on a
Solution to emerge with so little internal friction and so little formal coordination If something as horrific and systematic as the Holocaust could be perpetrated
common understanding than upon direct orders, it should not be difficult to imagine how abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere occurred, with
otherwise unacceptable behaviors substituting for ambiguous, standard operating procedures. While the Nazi Holocaust was far, far worse than
anything that has happened during the American occupation of Iraq, it has been amply demonstrated that Americans are not
immune to the types of social and organizational conditions that make it possible and seemingly permissible to violate the boundaries
of morality and human decency, in at least some cases, without believing that they were doing anything wrong. It would be naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others
in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously
evil administrative activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to
occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts within
the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons
run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be
found in at least some locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress situation, in which the expectation was to It would be naïve to
assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt
acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked
evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing
prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by
SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the
boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least some locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress
situation, in which the expectation was to extract usable intelligence from detainees in order to help their comrades suppress a growing insurgency, find weapons of mass destruction, and prevent
acts of terrorism. In this context, the power of group dynamics, social structures, and organizational ambiguities is readily seen. The normal inhibitions that might have prevented those who
perpetrated the abuses from doing these evil deeds may have been further weakened by the shared belief that the prisoners were somehow less than human, and that getting information out of
them was more important than protecting their rights and dignity as human beings. For example, in an interview with the BBC on June 15, 2004, Brig. General Janis Karpinski stated that she was
told by General Geoffrey Miller – later placed in charge of Iraqi prisons and former commander at Guantanamo Bay – that the Iraqi prisoners, “…are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at
any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.” Just as anti-Semitism was central to the attitudes of those who implemented the policy of mass murder in the Holocaust,
the abuses at Abu Ghraib may have been facilitated by an atmosphere that dehumanized the detainees. In effect, these detainees, with their
ambiguous legal status, could be seen as a “surplus population,” living outside the protections of
civilized society (Rubenstein, 1983). And when organizational dynamics combine with a tendency to
dehumanize and/or demonize a vulnerable group, the stage is set for the mask of administrative
evil.
C) EDUCATION—CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IS KEY TO EFFECTIVE POLITICAL CHANGE—CROSS-APPLY
SOLVENCY
4. THEIR INTERPRETATION IS WORSE:
A) RESOLUTION CHECKS LIMITS: PROVIDES BUILT IN A GROUND

B) PREDICTABILITY IS A PRACTICE: CRITICAL AFFS HAVE EXISTED FOR DECADES, IGNORANCE IS A CHOICE
C) NO GROUND LOSS—WE WON’T SPIKE ARGUMENTS, RUN YOUR DISADS, WE’LL DEFEND PLAN PASSAGE
5. FIAT IS AN EXTRA-TOPICAL CONSTRUCT—NO RESOLUTIONAL MANDATE, AT BEST IT MEANS FRAMEWORK

IS NOT A VOTING ISSUE
50

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*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF UTNIF 2010

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC

CONTENTION ONE: NUCLEAR PRESENCE

CONTENTION TWO: NUCLEAR ABSENCE

TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY, M.A. IN PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION AT UMASS-AMHERST, 2010 [ANNA, “A

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF

FREY, POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW, INSTITUTE BARCELONA D'ESTUDIS INTERNACIONALS, 2006

Attempts to ‘trivialise’ the nuclear bomb as an

THE NUCLEAR TABOO IS A VEHICLE FOR GRASSROOTS CHALLENGES—INSTITUTIONAL FOCUS KEY

Abolition alone provides a sound basis for the continued

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG

conventional arms stand as an “insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world

many of the measures the

MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY, 1996 [HTTP://DICTIONARY.REFERENCE.COM/SEARCH?Q=RESOLVED]

JOYNER, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AT GEORGETOWN, 1999 [CHRISTOPHER C., “TEACHING

D) IT’ A VOTING ISSUE:

3. FAIRNESS, EDUCATION, AND JURISDICTION

THEIR INTERPRETATION DESTROYS EDUCATION: IT LEADS TO USELESS PREACHING THAT PREVENTS A

WEBSTER'S REVISED UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, 1996, EVIDENCE GENDER PARAPHRASED

This is further exacerbated by overt

in keeping with the dominant media structures of the industrial

B) BUREAUCRACY—ROLEPLAYING AUTHORIZES SADISTIC VIOLENCE, MASKING DOMINATION IN NEUTRALITY

a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced among

4. THEIR INTERPRETATION IS WORSE:

A) RESOLUTION CHECKS LIMITS: PROVIDES BUILT IN A GROUND

5. FIAT IS AN EXTRA-TOPICAL CONSTRUCT—NO RESOLUTIONAL MANDATE, AT BEST IT MEANS FRAMEWORK

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