UTNIF 2010 Nuclear Presence Starter Pack

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF UTNIF 2010

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*****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

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC UTNIF 2010

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*****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

Nuclear sharing is irresponsible

[“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]

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. In April an article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh provided a real example of how NATO nuclear sharing countries 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 visible threat emerges. Through their silence, through hosting these weapons and through supporting 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 (Continues…)

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.


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NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC

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

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.

[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]

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.


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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

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.

[BRIAN, “POTENTIAL POLITICS AND THE PRIMACY OF PREEMPTION,” THEORY & EVENT 10:2 | PROJECT MUSE]

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.


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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

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.

[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]

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.


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NUCLEAR PRESENCE 1AC 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

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 remain as the exceptional reserve of figures of law. It must arrive from the other side of the law, arriving as the 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.

[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]

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…)


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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."


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THIS SPACE 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

Turkey

[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]

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% said they would support an initiative to make Turkey a nuclear-free zone.21 There may be several causes behind this sentiment, 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


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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

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.

[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]

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


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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

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]

, 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]

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.


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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

The World is at a Critical Cross-roads

[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]

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

possess nuclear weapons-- have joined the bandwagon. In chorus, Western Europe and the member 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…)


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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.

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE AFF — EXTENSIONS UTNIF 2010

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*****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 tactical 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…)

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/22/stories/%202002042200431000.htm�


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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.

TACTICAL NUCLEAR 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

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.

[SLAVOJ, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL!, P. 108-109]


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SOLVENCY: PUBLIC DEBATE

CHALLENGING WAR PLANNING RHETORICALLY CONSTRAINS POLICY REVERSAL—DEBATING THE PLAN SOVLES

WITTNER, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT SUNY-ALBANY, 2009

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."

[LAWRENCE S., “WHAT HAS PREVENTED NUCLEAR WAR?” HISTORY NEWS NETWORK, 7-06-09, HTTP://HNN.US/ARTICLES/97229.HTML]

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 Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations deliberately "lost the war rather than 'win' it with nuclear weapons." McGeorge Bundy, who

served as the national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, maintained that the U.S. government's decision to 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?


20

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

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.

[LEE, “MISTAKEN IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS,” THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONTEXTUAL POLITICAL ANALYSIS, ED. GOODIN & TILLY, P. P. 311-312]

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.


21

SOLVENCY: TABOO GOOD—INFLUENCE POLICYMAKERS

AND, THE NUCLEAR TABOO IS A KEY INFLUENCE ON POLICYMAKERS—PLAN DIRECTLY AFFECTS SYSTEMIC DECISION CALCULI

GORMLEY, 2006

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.

, 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]

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


22

SOLVENCY: TABOO GOOD—CHALLENGE ELITES

TABOO KEY TO CHALLENGE NUCLEAR ELITES

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

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.

[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]

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

normative directions rest on the understanding of nuclear weapons as the ‘ultimate weapon’. Attempts to ‘trivialise’ the nuclear bomb as an 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

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.

[NINA, “A TABOO SUBJECT,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, MAY/JUNE, P. 64]


23

AT: NUCLEAR PSYCHOLOGY

FOCUSING ON 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

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."

[HUGH, NUCLEAR RITES, P. 11-13]

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 therefore hunts 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.


24

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

Sociology Department, University of Oregon

[GREGORY, “DOES THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE MATTER?” JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH 28.3, SAGE, P. 329-330]

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).

As far as it goes, this is a provocative critique. But they have characterized arms control in a narrow, one-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

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.

[DOUGLAS P., REVIEW OF NUCLEAR SEDUCTION &C, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 84.4: 1455-157, JSTOR, P. 1456]


25

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

HTTP://LIU.XPLOREX.COM/SITES/LIU/FILES/ PUBLICATIONS/HUNTLEY-REGIMETRANSFORMATION-ISA2009.PDF

, 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,

, (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.

http://liu.xplorex.com/sites/liu/files/Publications/Huntley-RegimeTransformation-ISA2009.pdf�

http://liu.xplorex.com/sites/liu/files/Publications/Huntley-RegimeTransformation-ISA2009.pdf�


26

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

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

international order can depend upon a threat to extinguish humanity. Abolition alone provides a sound basis for the continued 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

destruction. The logic of abolition is the real alternative to the logic of empire. But, my critics will ask, won't the

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.*

[JONATHAN, “NO MORE UNTO THE BREACH, PART TWO, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD,” HARPER’S MAGAZINE, APRIL, P. 50-51, * = FOOTNOTE]

* 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 in 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.

*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG UTNIF 2010

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*****NUCLEAR PRESENCE NEG


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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

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.

[DARWIN & WILL, “ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM,” FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS, JANUARY 12, HTTP://WWW.FPIF.ORG/FPIFTXT/5782]

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…)


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1NC ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM (K) (Continues…)

Korea, etc.) — conveniently work to reinforce existing power relations embodied in U.S. military 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. Unfortunately the Obama administration is likely to pursue this Orwellian policy of anti-nuclear 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.


30


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

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

[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]

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.


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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

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 enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance.”2 Our fascination with nuclear weapons has 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.

[DALLAS, “UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING: WHY CONVENTIONAL DISARMAMENT MUST PRECEDE NUCLEAR ABOLITION,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, MARCH/APRIL, WWW.THEBULETIN.ORG]


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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

nations combined.8 While conventional reductions are virtuous for their own sake, they are also a 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

Mikhail Gorbachev has observed that conventional arms stand as an “insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world 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

incremental steps between base camp and the peak, they suggest, the ultimate objective will come into sharper view.11 Fittingly, many of the measures the 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.


*****ANTI-NUCLEAR NUCLEARISM — EXTENSIONS UTNIF 2010

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*****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

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.

[DARWIN, 9-1, HTTP://DARWINBONDGRAHAM. BLOGSPOT.COM/2009/09/ANTI-NUCLEAR-IMPERIALISM-NEW-FACE-OF.HTML]

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 leadership of defense secretary William Perry, called a “lead but hedge” strategy. The US would ostensibly “lead” in the 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.


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LINK: QUICK FIX

THE PLAN IS A QUICK FIX WHICH ONLY MAKES THEIR IMPACTS MORE LIKELY

HUNTLEY, 2008

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 curb the greatest dangers of a nuclear status quo. Sustaining global nuclear disarmament as the ultimate objective 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 social and political contexts. Here emerges a second paradox: although the responsibility of states to 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 create security structures sustainable in a non-nuclear world. The imperative of nuclear disarmament is today 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."

, PROGRAM DIRECTOR AT THE SIMONS CENTRE FOR DISARMAMENT AND NON-PROLIFERATION RESEARCH [WADE L., AT THE NUCLEAR PRECIPICE: CATASTROPHE OR TRANSFORMATION? P. 181-182]


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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

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. Though the ultimate political consequences of the INF treaty and the START treaty negotiations are not yet certain, history suggests 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

COMMAND SERGEANT MAJOR US ARMY & PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT BOSTON COLLEGE [WILLIAM A. & CHARLES, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION P. 186-188, 205-207]

[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 radical political changes in the world order. We must surely abandon the hope that arms control as we know it 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…)


36

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.


37

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

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 considering the purpose of those four, seemingly redundant, extra sentences.7 In the absence of absolute proof of the US 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

shape the behaviour of the enemy with the threat of their use; once they were actually used, both sides would have lost the game. The 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

[DANIEL, “CULTURES OF TERROR: NUCLEAR CRITICISM DURING AND SINCE THE COLD WAR,” LITERATURE COMPASS, VOL. 3, NO. 6, NOVEMBER]

(Continues…)


38

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, structuralist and postcolonial criticisms. Furthermore, such an approach insisted that language constructs our sense of the 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.’


39

AT: PERMUTATION

THE PLAN WILL BE USED TO DELEGITIMIZE MORE RADICAL PROPOSALS—DOOMS FUTURE POLITICAL CHANGE

COOPER, PEACE STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF BRADFORD, 2006

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 deemed to be philosophically distinct. At the same time though, there is a blurring that occurs in the discourse – 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?

[NEIL, “PUTTING DISARMAMENT BACK IN THE FRAME,” REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (2006), 32, 353–376, JOURNALS.CAMBRIDGE.ORG]


40

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 live free from fear in the twentyfirst century.”26 Far fewer people live today in fear of nuclear war than in terror 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



41

ALTERNATIVE: MOVEMENTS ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE CAN SOLVE THE CASE—RESISTANCE TO U.S. MILITARISM AS A WHOLE MUST COME FIRST

VANAIK, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT DELHI UNIVERSITY, 2009

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)

[ACHIN, “OBAMA AND HOPES FOR GLOBAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT,” 4/22, TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE HTTP://WWW.TNI.ORG/DETAIL_PAGE. PHTML?ACT_ID=19420]

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

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 movement, offered as both testament to history and assessment of impact and relevance. Introduction February 15, 2003 was the 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.

[DAVID, “A PEACEFUL SUPERPOWER: THE MOVEMENT AGAINST WAR IN IRAQ,” 2/15, HTTP://WWW.FOURTHFREEDOM.ORG/ APPLICATIONS/CMS.PHP)]


42

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

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.

[BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA, “COLLECTIVE SUICIDE?,” BAD SUBJECTS #63, APRIL ESERVER.ORG/ BS/63/SANTOS.HTML]

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.


43

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

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 cultural venues. By blurring the lines between military and civilian functions, militarization deforms 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.

[HENRY A., “THE EMERGING AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE UNITED STATES,” SYMPLOKE 14.1/2, 98-151, MUSE]

*****FRAMEWORK UTNIF 2010

44

*****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

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.

[CHRISTOPHER C., “TEACHING INTERNATIONAL LAW,” 5 ILSA J INT'L & COMP L 377, L/N]

These debates 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 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of 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

(Continues…)

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=resolved�


45

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. SEVERING THEIR 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


46

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

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.

[JOHN, THE LAW OF PEOPLES, P. 54-57]

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, 1999For many international law courses taught from a political science perspective, the most sustained and most rewarding learning experience can come from a collaborative process. Teaching international law is not supposed to be a platform for the professor to 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.

[CHRISTOPHER , 5 ILSA J INT'L & COMP L 377, L/N]

For collaborative learning experiences to be especially meaningful for political science students, it is essential that they reflect exposure to various legal problems, hopefully set out in authentic setting with real world analogies. This means that hypothetical cases, if used as

learning devices, should be constructed in such a manner that mirrors as truly as practicable real world events 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 considerations and international legal constraints in formulating United States foreign policy. Taken in tandem, these two ingredients 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.


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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

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 tolerance without committing them to active moral irresponsibility. As Freeley notes, debaters are indeed exposed to a 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>

[PHILOSOPHY & RHETORIC, V.26, N.4]

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

The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to—they must reject and limit—some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest—that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and

within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not

communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

[RUTH LESSL, POLITICAL THEORY AND PARTISAN POLITICS, P. 181-2]


48

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

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,”

[HTTP://DICTIONARY.REFERENCE.COM/SEARCH?Q=RESOLVED]

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

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,

have led to a marked and continuing decline in journalistic standards for some time now (see e.g. [13,15]). This is further exacerbated by overt 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].

, 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]

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

context of political mass media perhaps as politicians → journalists → citizens; in keeping with the dominant media structures of the industrial 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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2AC FRAMEWORK TOPICALITY BLOCK (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

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

[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 “ETHICS 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]

(Continues…)


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2AC FRAMEWORK TOPICALITY BLOCK (Continues…)

ambiguous choices are made, and the weight of commitments and of habit drives out morality. One does not have to be

morally degenerate to become caught in a web of wrongdoing that may even cross the line into evil. The skids are further greased if the situation is 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

the European Jews, Raul Hilberg observed that a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced among 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

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 based more on a 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

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