Advanced LD Brief January/February 2020

Home , Nuclear disarmament, Nuclear weapon

Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

This topic brief was written by Jesse Meyer. Jesse is a diamond coach, recipient of the Donald Crabtree Service Award, the state of Iowa’s 2015 Coach of the Year, member of the TOC’s PF advisory board, and board member of the Iowa Forensics League. He is currently an assistant coach at Iowa City West High School. He can be reached at [email protected].

Table of Contents

Contents Advanced LD Brief January/February 2020 ...... 1 Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals...... 2 Table of Contents ...... 3 Topic History and Background ...... 5 Topic Analysis...... 8 Values, Criterions, and Definitions ...... 10 Miscalculations ...... 14 Sample Evidence ...... 16 Further Reading ...... 18 Deterrence ...... 19 Sample Evidence ...... 21 Further Reading ...... 25 Proliferation ...... 26 Sample Evidence ...... 28 Further Reading ...... 32 Morality...... 33 Sample Evidence ...... 36 Further Reading ...... 40 Social Contract ...... 41 Sample Evidence ...... 43 Further Reading ...... 46 Survival ...... 47 Sample Evidence ...... 50 Further Reading ...... 54 Accidents/Disposal...... 55 Sample Evidence ...... 58 Further Reading ...... 61 Spark ...... 62 Sample Evidence ...... 64

Further Reading ...... 67 Conclusion ...... 68 Aff and Neg Arguments At-A-Glance ...... 69

Topic History and Background

The concept of radioactivity was discovered by scientists and husband and wife Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. During an experiment a substance that was created by the processing of inert elements created the element Radium. This element emitted a huge amount of radiation over time and slowly poisoned the Currie’s. Shortly after their deaths, scientists saw the potential behind the idea of radioactive elements in both energy production and potentially weaponization. However, dur to the times, ideas had moved faster than science and technology and all attempts at this failed. The dream of radioactive energy fueled many a science fiction writer. In 1914, HG. Wells, was inspired to write the alien weapons in his book, War of the Worlds, off of the potential destructive power of atomic energy. In 1924. Winston Churchill wrote a speculative policy on the political implication of atomic weapons. In 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. His desire to create a third Reich that spanned the globe, he determined that a weapon of immense power would be needed to overcome the resource disadvantage of the German empire. Fearing what he might make them down Jewish and other German scientists fled the nation and settled in London and the United States. It was through this migration that Leó Szilárd fled to London where he proposed, and in 1934 patented, the idea of a nuclear chain reaction via neutrons. In August 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him concerned that Germany might have its own project to develop fission-based weapons. Roosevelt responded by setting up the Uranium Committee, It was only after the attack on Peral Harbor that Roosevelt took things seriously. Roosevelt appointed Robert Oppenheimer to head up the group of scientists whose soul job was to develop atomic weapons into something that can be used the allies before the NAZI’s. This project was called the “Manhattan Project.” With headquarters at Blue Ridge and Los Alamos, the Americans began their work. During this time, the United Kingdom was read into the file, but the USSR was not. Oak Ridge processed the uranium into workable nuclear material and Los Alamos constructed the weapon. In 1943, Oppenheimer advocated two detonation devices receive further testing. One was a plutonium gun to trigger the chain reaction and the other was a plutonium implosion. By 1944, the implosion method was chosen, and Operation Fat Man was given the green light. Testing commenced in mid-1944 in the desert of New Mexico. From the testing, three weapons were created for final use. After D-Day and the inevitable victory in Europe, Allied High Command determined that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would take millions of troops with a potential of a half a million Allied soldiers killed. In weighing the potential for deaths vs war speed, the choice was made to drop the bomb. On August 6, 1945, a uranium-based weapon, Little Boy, was detonated above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and three days later, a plutonium-based weapon, Fat Man, was detonated above the Japanese city

of Nagasaki. Over one hundred thousand civilians were killed in the initial blast with thousands more dying in the years after due to radiation relations effects. Shortly after the end of World War II, Soviet spies began sending data from the tests and projects back to the USSR. USSR troops began to search the remains of Europe for any remaining German scientists who might have information on the German nuclear projects. In 1949, the USSR, using mostly stolen science, tested their first atomic bomb. The nuclear arms race had begun. After the detonation of the first atomic weapons test in the United States, the scientists of the Manhattan project called for a restriction of nuclear energy as it had the potential to end the world. However, the alure of power was too powerful for politicians and the race continued. Over the next two decades, the nations of China, France, the United Kingdom, and South Africa would all develop nuclear weapons. In the 1971’s rumors would circulate that Israel had developed a small number of nuclear weapons with the help of the United States. These rumors have never been confirmed but it is universally understood as true. In the 1981’s South Africa voluntarily disarmed their nuclear weapons program. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were a dozen more nuclear states as the now independent nations had leftover weapons from the USSR. Over the next few years, they would transfer the weapons back to the Russians. In the 1991’s. India and Pakistan would both develop nuclear weapons andong with the means to launch them. In the mid 2000’s, North Korea would test their first atomic weapon followed with their first thermonuclear weapon a decade later. As we progress from the 1940’s until now, the weapons have become more advanced. The first weapons were crude atomic weapons; They worked by combining a core of plutonium in a shell of plutonium. The sudden force of neutrons being combined caused the core to overhead and fuse plutonium into heavier elements. This type of explosion is devastation but relatively small. The atomic weapons detonated over Japan were only in the hundreds of tons of TNT (kiloton). The weapons developed by every nation in the 1940-60’s was based on thermonuclear weapons. They used heavier radioactive elements. They could be built smaller and with more impact. Weapons could not extend into the megaton range (capable of devastating a region the size of the New York City area)/ The USSR developed the most powerful bomb in the world. Codenamed “Tsar,” the bomb detonated over the Arctic Circle was only 50 megatons. The shockwave could be registered on scientific instruments on its third pass over the world. This was only a mid-range bomb according to the Russians as they could have amped up the power to 100 megatons. Nuclear weapons play an important role in the international policies of the world. For nations that poses these weapons, there are three means to launch or deliver weapons; via bombers, missels and subs. This is called the nuclear triad, and every nation that has nuclear weapons strives to fulfill these triad as a means of delivery. In North Korea, our greatest fear is not necessarily their weapons, which they already own, but that they will one day develop a delivery system that can reach the United States. When dealing with some nations, attention is played to nuclear states. India and Pakistan have fought six wars over the course of the last 70

years, but they have not fought a war since both nations acquired and tested a bomb. South Korea and japan have not developed their weapons programs due to the nuclear protection provided by our sharing agreement.

Although we could cover it more here, concepts like deterrence, miscalculation, and other issues that might develop into arguments will be discussed later in the file in the framework and under arguments. Please read on.

Topic Analysis

The topic of nuclear disarmament hits at the very core of both the idea of debate and at Lincoln Douglas debate. This topic is asking us to look at the result for most debate advantages, nuclear war, and asking us to debate the mechanism for which this will occur through lenses of pragmatism and morality. What I mean by this is that we avoid the entire context of what an advantage might say and debate the context for which nuclear weapons are built, stored, armed, and used and how we get from bomb in a bunker to total global end. This topic should also bring us closer to how much a nuclear weapon affects us on a daily basis. For lots of us out there, weapons are thousands of miles away and pose no real threat to us. But to others, the threat is real. Those that work with the weapons daily, those that live in areas of first strike, those that live in areas of fallout and in the paths of prevailing winds, those that have to deal with the waste and the mining, all have a bested interest in the creation or destructrion of our nuclear weapons. For years, the acronym that ruled international politics when it came to nuclear war was “MAD” or mutually assured destruction. The idea was that any nation that launched a first strike would allow others free reign to retaliate in kind. To destroy one was to destroy everyone. Appropriate that it is called MAD this concept still governs our use of weapons. The minute that any one nation launches, it is almost impossible to determine targets as most weapons are sub orbital and final destinations can’t be determined for sure until reentry. Thus, to prevent destruction before retaliation, other nations would be inclined to launch. Mad for sure. For decades, activists have touted the benefits of disarmament and the harms of nuclear deterrence. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was branded a Communist sympathizer when he came out against his own creation. General Colin Powel was labeled a “liberal” by the Bush Administration when he spoke out on TV while working for the same administration about how pointless nuclear deterrence was. Theorists and writers and philosophers are seen as academics and “bleeding hearts” if they argue that nuclear arms are dangerous. However, rarely can we dismiss people with expertise in the fields they critique with simple ad hom attacks. Their arguments must be evaluated. Treaties have attempted to limit the testing and use of weapons. The Non-Proliferation Treaty sought to stop more nations from acquiring nuclear weapons- this failed. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty hoped to stop testing of nuclear weapons- this failed on multiple occasions. The Start and Salt treaties attempted to limit the number of weapons the US and USSR could own. This was working, however in the last decade, our disarmament has slowed. Obama, in his final year as president, only removed 309 weapons from service. This put our total at just under 5000. Under President Trump, we are planning a rebuilding of our nuclear arsenal, in defiance of treaties. The NMD and Ballistic Weapons Treaties were withdrawn by President George W. Bush so we could build Regan’s dream of a space-based

weapons interceptor system. Abolitionists argue that we can’t be trusted to police ourselves so total disarmament is necessary. On the other side of the coin are the nuclear hawks. They argue that we need our weapons to defend against real threats. We live in a world where the thing that is respected the most, that is understood the most, and is universal no matter what country or nation you come from is force. For the last 75 years, our nuclear weapons have been a security blanket keeping not only the United States safe, but our allies at peace and potentially, from proliferating weapons of their own. Furthermore, our reliance on nuclear weapons has kept international order as nations are far less willing to go to war with nations that have ties to one of the major nuclear superpowers. Beyond that, nuclear weapons development has led to huge jumps up the scientific ladder. Developments in transportation, rocket technology, and even medicine have came from nuclear weapons and the experimentation that lead to their development. We can’t turn a blind eye to this. The debate over nuclear weapons is unique as it is the fundamental end impact for most debate cases. Nuclear weapons have a special place in the world. Almost no other impact or thing we can do to each other can lead to total world extinction. However, nuclear war is one of the few that can. So, lets start by looking at the value and criterion structures that might be used in debate. I will note that the coverage on the values and criterions will be to discuss their applications in debate. As to how they relate to arguments, you can go more in depth in the argument sections below. This is done so that I don’t end up repeating myself a ton.

Values, Criterions, and Definitions

On the affirmative, you could value life. Life, one could argue, is a prerequisite to all other values. Being alive is the door to other value systems and functions of society. Nucellar weapons, as will be shown multiple times in this brief, threatens the basic concept of life and has the ability to put even the chance of life at risk. This means that nuclear weapons stop a prerequisite to humanity. Survival is as a potential value follows the same logic as life. Although one could use survival on both sides of the topic, but I think the biggest splash will be made on the affirmative. Using Carl Sagan’s work (see a card om the Survival section) you could argue that life on Earth is special as this is the only planet we know of thus far that can support life and for the time being, it is the only planet that we can live on. To risk the destruction of this world means we end life for humanity but also life for every living thing on Earth and an entire history that is awash in culture and civilization will end. Nuclear weapons represent a unique threat to this surivival as they are one of the few humans made objects that has the power to do such a thing. Morality or a moral obligation is derived from the core context of the world “ought” in the resolution. For most debaters, the world “ought” to imply a moral obligation or the idea that morality exists and affirming requires the use of a moral lens. As is explained under the “Morality” section, nuclear weapons and namely the use cause extensive human suffering and death which violates the basic tenants of what is moral. Furthermore, almost every other argument could be linked back to morality in some way as the means used to justify action do not justify a moral end. Peace or global peace might be a value system that others will gloss over. However, if we look at the root cause of why we are debating for the abolition and disarmament of nuclear weapons, the end goal is that of stabilizing the international community. Removal of nuclear weapons necessitates a global peace structure to replace what once was. Social Contract Theory as justified in the “Social Contract” section discusses how the very foundations of democracy are violated by the drive for a nuclear weapons stockpile. Just governments then can’t exist as long as there exists a form of nuclear weapons and thus you must affirm. Looking to the negative, your value structures would likely stem from the absence or sudden absence of nuclear weapons. To snap your fingers and abolish nuclear weapons all at once would leave a power vacuum that nations would rush to fill. So, the first value would be international stability. For decades, we have learned to live with the nuclear weapon neighbor so to speak of. We may not love it nor may it always be welcomed, but it has been the foundation of international relations for so long that absent our weapons, nations would all of a

sudden be left to fend with a we world order. This might cause wars, famine, and conflict on a scale that would rival a nuclear war. Realism is a solid value for the negative. The realistic nature of international relations is that nations will fight tooth and nail to keep their weapons. If you want a real-world example of how this is playing out right now, look no further than North Korea. They have lied, cheated, and deceived the international community to gain a nuclear deterrent because they believe that it is the only way for them to protect their nation from outside force. Realism states that nations do not exist in a perfect utopia and that we must operation under the assumption that every action is motivated by a desire for something more than what we can see. In the case of nuclear weapons, it might be power, control, or dreams of keeping control, In such a world, nations won’t relinquish their weapons and this obstacle might be something that even fiat can’t overcome. Deterrence or self-defense is another strong value structure as the basic concept of our weapons today is that of defending ourselves from external threats. Threats might take the form of a hostile nation that threatens us first with weapons they create first or rouge groups that create weapons of war. Threats might be from rival nations seeking to expand their sphere of influence. Or threats might come from a war that was declared legitimately but has the potential to harm our own citizens. Either way, for decades nuclear weapons have provided a deterrence for us and we need to maintain this. Looking to a criterion structure that could fit the values for the affirmative and negative, you would want to pick something that allows you to measure the value. Considering the resolution, you would want to use this as a gauge of when we have met the value or established the value as a true fact. In the case of the affirmative, the generic criterion would be “eliminating our nuclear arsenal” as it not only is mandated by the resolution, but it sets the standard of nothing less that total abolition. This protects you from counterplans that PIC out of specific instances for keeping weapons or specific weapons systems. Other than that, I would pick criterions that match the verbiage of the case and the value. If you are using life as a value, then a criterion might be “when all life is protected against nuclear threats.” The key moment is to establish a test for the value that matches the language of your case and directly links back to your resolution. On the negative, a value structure that allows you some flexibility would be to say, “maintaining our nuclear weapons arsenals.” This is a converse of the affirmative and allows you to defend a broad range of arguments on the negative case like survival, deterrence, self- defense, and others. If you are a LARP debate, your criterion, if you have one, might be related to your counterplan. Use the criterion as a psudo-counterplan text and as a justification mechanism for the counterplan. So, you could say that your value is international stability and the criterion is “maintaining a only submarine launched warheads.” This would allow you to claim a deterrence effect, stability internationally, and you still can claim some of the advantages of the affirmative. Outside of this, the argumentation and choice is much the same

as for the affirmative. Chose a criterion structure that fits the language of your case and links to the resolution. When we look at definitions, we see a few points of contention that have to be addressed.

States’- This term as quoted from Websters and used by multiple legal sources and the federal government, a state is defined as “A nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government.” This means that a state extends to lands beyond traditional borders. US subs would count as part of the United States as they are US soil. So, would bases in foreign countries or bombers flying over nations. This would not mean individual states within the United States as those entities are at the will of the federal government and violate the “one government” clause of the definition. This would also limit out most non state actors like terrorist groups as they don’t have a defined nation or area and their government structure is viewed but not globally recognized. IE- ISIS hasn’t been extended a seat at the UN and I doubt that they will any time soon. So, we hit a snag in the plans for disarmament as it limits this to recognized nations. Terrorist states, not recognized, if they get weapons are free to operate.

Eliminate- A classic and basic definition means “to remove.” This is pretty cut and dry. But the not so easy part is that the definition does not specify the speed at which we eliminate. So do we assume that once the judge votes aff, all of the weapons are gone and we are left to see what fills in the void or does the affirmative get to specify in an advocacy text the timeline for disarmament? If the aff defends this, does the negative have grounds for a theory violation that the speed of disarmament is their ground and the aff must defend an immediate removal? The other point of contention is that the resolution does not specify how we eliminate the weapons. This will play a role in the ‘spark” section.

Their- A possessive that indicates ownership. In this case, it refers to states. Thus, we are eliminating our weapons. We are not forcing others to eliminate theirs. So, the debate on the negative becomes this; what if a nation like Russia or China refuses to disarm? What kind of solvency can we gain from this if every nation won’t disarm? Can the negative gain offense from one nation saying “no” and arguing that gives them unlimited hegemony? Also, since we are eliminating our weapons, does this mean that if a nation really wants to disarm but can’t afford the process, we can’t help? The US and international community have been helping nations disarm their weapons for years. To say to nations that want to give them up now they can’t because they are too poor might harm the affirmative and solvency.

Nuclear arsenal- Defined by ICAN, a nuclear arsenal is defined as “A weapon whose destructive power comes from nuclear energy; an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb.” My feeling is that some debaters will conflate the idea of the “arsenal” and “a weapon” together or use the terms interchangeability. You are debating the entirety of our nuclear weapons systems as defined by arsenal not just warheads, or one part of the nuclear triad. Also, and this goes without saying, that this means an offensive or defensive device. Things like radiation therapy in hospitals don’t count as they were never designed to be weapons. I know this might seem silly, but I have heard this argued as a contention before. The important thing to remember is to keep the debate clean. On a topic such as nuclear disarmament, either the judges will be at the complete mercy of the debaters as they know nothing about the topic or they will come in thinking they know everything about the topic and you will be fighting this perception. The best thing to do in either way is to lay out a clear link chain and really give the judge clear voting issues in the end. Judges that are new to the topic will appreciate the breakdown and judges that are experienced will have to evaluate the line by line and can’t ignore your explanations. Above all, remember that this debate will stem into the world of emption. Emption is good as it shows a human connection, but it is important to link this back to real world facts and statistics that actually prove one side true or false. Don’t just think reading a dozen “nuke war bad” cards will win you the debate. You still need t relate these to the resolution and your case.

Miscalculations

First, when we look at the concept of morality, the question on both sides arises as who which side provides a moral basis for either the existence of nuclear weapons or the abolition of nuclear weapons. Looking back at the history of the creation and development of the weapons, at any given time, it was seen that morality, both sides had claims that nuclear weapons were moral. For the affirmative, one can argue that the act of possession leads to an inevitable temptation and the desire to use such weapons in war. During the transition to our new president in the winter of 2016, Donald Trump was quoted in a meeting as having asked the question “Why can’t we just nuke them?” This attitude demonstrates the general feeling among most people that our problems can be solved by going from a point of agitation to mushroom clouds without repercussions. Although it is impossible to know the details of what really goes through the minds of everyone who believes that nuclear weapons can solve the problems of the world, part of the issue may be the fact that those with the weapons see themselves as indestructible or untouchable. In a hypothetical war, if the United States were to use even a small nuclear weapon, the international community would lose their collective minds so to speak. But on the flip side, which nation would date take retaliatory action against us? Yes, it is almost a certainty tht there would be diplomatic consequences to our use of the weapons as nations attempt to restrict trade, banking, and influence, but in a globalized world, how far can they go before the effects of a US isolated world start to ripple across the continents? And then if this is not the course of action, what nation is bold enough to send military forces in retaliation against a nation that has just shown the ability to use such a weapon in war? Even small nuclear states can use the potential fear of a second or third strike to their advantage. Israel has kept many challengers at bay for decades by concealing their almost assured nuclear weapons as a “hidden six gun” while India and Pakistan have managed to stay out of major conflict since 1998 (their longest stretch without a full blown war since the creation of both nations) due to both nations having nuclear weapons. North Korea has continued to develop and test their nuclear weapons systems as a deterrent to what they believe is a potential invasion by the United States. They look at nations like Iraq and Libya that gave up their weapons of mass destruction programs years ago and later say no way to maintain control over the populace or no way to deter the American invasions of the 2000’s.

Because of this “hidden six shooters” mentality, nations have not shown the willingness to voluntarily disarm their nuclear arsenals. In history, the only nations that have disarmed or turned over their weapons were the former Soviet Bloc nations that after the fall of the USSR, realized they were now legally responsible for the hundreds of nuclear weapons in their new countries. This power and cost were too much for them to want or bear and they turned to Russia and the US to help them get the weapons out of their nations. The other is South Africa, which both created and disarmed their nuclear program under voluntary circumstances. So those that hold weapons are tempted to use such devices in combat, so to eliminate the

weapons takes away the temptation. Even if the desire and want to go to war still exists, countries will have to do it the old-fashioned way with troops, planes, and ships. The second impact off the temptation is that of miscalculation. Actions between nations are constantly misunderstood and only through diplomatic channels can they be resolved. In modern times, this all happens diplomat to diplomat and behind the scenes, so the public is non the wiser that there was a potential conflict or misunderstanding. In the past, however, the miscalculations had devastating impacts. World War I was a direct result of a misunderstanding of actions Between Austria, France, Russia and the Ottomans. Failure to read diplomatic communications correctly and in a timely fashion led us to the attack at Peral Harbor, and a broken radio on a fighter jet doing routine patrols over the Northern US almost got the US into a World War. If we look to nuclear miscalculations, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the blockade of Cuba, a Russian submarine had accidentally crossed the line due to faulty radar and the US began to drop light depth charges designed to bring the sub to the surface without causing damage. Think of them as warning shots underwater. The sub commander, thinking that the chargers were real and designed to sink their ship, believed that the war had started. He and his first officer activated their keys to launch their entire load of nuclear tipped rockets at targets in the Southern US including New Orleans, Miami, Orlando, Washington DC, and every major military base below the Mason Dixon line. It was only because the second officer who had to verify the command and press turn his key to confirm refused to that we averted nuclear war. In 1992, a clock of geese (further proof that geese are evil) confused a Russian radar station in Norway. The Russian thought that the Us had launched a first strike and had brought the nuclear football (the suitcase with nuclear launch codes and a radio transmitter) to then President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had activated his codes and was preparing to turn his key when he paused and said, “Let’s wait 5 minutes.” This 5-minute wait allowed the Russians to establish that it was a goose, not the Top Gun pilot Goose and thus nuclear war was averted again. History is scattered with other times where misunderstandings or misreading signs has almost led us to the brink of nuclear war. If we were to eliminate the weapons, although war could still happen, and as the examples from the pre nuclear age showed, has happened, the consequences are far less devastating than that of a potential nuclear exchange. Even though there are multiple examples of non-nuclear miscalc when compared to even the brinksmanship that is nuclear miscalculations, the risk is greater. In a nuclear launch, one small explosion or a small exchange of weapons could kill more people than most wars in totality.

Sample Evidence

Nuclear weapons force aggression into covert channels, increasing miscalculation

Betts 2000, Richard, Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, "Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. 66-67]

The notion that widespread nuclear capability would inhibit aggression by creating a world of porcupines or a "unit veto system" of omnilateral deterrence is an old one. The suppression of military interventionism, however, could simply channel impulses to meddle into covert political action or other less direct methods. These in turn could increase diplomatic tension and the chances of miscalculation, especially since many of the political systems of the potential proliferators are likely to be weak, permeable, and praetorian, unlike the stable institutionalized governments of the developed world. Internal political weakness and externally deployable military strength (via WMD) are a volatile combination. It was reckless enough for the Argentine junta in 1982 to divert public attention from internal economic problems by grabbing the Falkland (or Malvinas) Islands- one of only two cases of a non-nuclear state initiating combat against a nuclear power (the other being Egypt and Syria against Israel in 1973).

Miscalculation more likely

Wilcock 1997, Luke, "Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Efficacy of Deterrence," Interstate Online, Issue 50, Spring, http://users.aber.ac.uk/scty34/50/prolif.htm, accessed 8/3/02]

Evidently the regional consequences of nuclear proliferation raise some important questions, but what are the wider implications of nuclear weapons proliferation? How will emergent nuclear states affect stability on an international scale? For Stanley Hoffmann, "a world of many nuclear states would raise extremely difficult issues of management." The crucial factor is perceived to be the resultant increase in difficulty in decision making, that more nuclear powers will complicate calculations and that mis-perceptions will become more dangerous and more likely as a consequence. It is argued that the relatively clear-cut bipolarity which characterised the Cold War would diminish and that "uncertainties will tempt instead of deter. " Having got used to a stable nuclear world, states may start to take the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons for granted and in so doing become more and more daring in their foreign policy aims. (ftntlO) Nuclear weapons possession might create ambitions, ambitions which are likely to be conflictual.

Proliferation increases the risk of inadvertent escalation

McGwire 1994, Michael, Faculty of Social and Political Science at Cambridge, "Is There a Future for Nuclear Weapons?" International Affairs, 70, 2, p. 224-225]

Advocates of an LSN world claim that nuclear war would be prevented by the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction. This assumes that war is always the outcome of rational decision-making and ignores the possibility of accidental or inadvertent war. Recent analysis of the command, control and communications (C3) systems ofUS and Soviet strategic forces during the Cold War argues that a significant probability of procedural and systems malfunctions (and hence mistaken activation of strike plans) was inherent in both systems. Inadvertent war can come about through misunderstanding and/or the momentum of events. The Cuban missile crisis is a classic example of this process, but access to the archives is revealing other incipient cases, the misreading of a NATO exercise in November 1983 being a good example. So far our luck has held, but it will be severely tested as_we move from a bipolar to a multipolar

game, where the new players' nuclear C3 will be more prone to system errors, and each player's understanding of the others' thought processes will be even more rudimentary. And can we assume that the other players will all be as cautious as the Soviet Union, which saw the primary threat as inadvertent war, a danger that could be avoided but not prevented? Or are they more likely to emulate the United States, which believed that war could be prevented by the threat of escalation, and was prepared to up the ante in a crisis? The existence of two or more such players would sharply increase the future probability of inadvertent and accidental war.

Further Reading

Borger, Julian. 2-16-2018, "Nuclear risk at its highest since Cuban missile crisis, says ex-energy secretary," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/15/nuclear- weapons-ernest-moniz-accident-risk

Creamer, Robert. 9-28-2017, "The Greatest Threat To U.S. Security Is A Miscalculation Or Mistake," HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/greatest-threat-to-us-security- miscalculation-or_b_59ccd965e4b028e6bb0a687d

Gower, John. 3-6-2018, "The Dangerous Illogic of Twenty-First-Century Deterrence Through Planning for Nuclear Warfighting," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/03/06/dangerous-illogic-of-twenty-first-century- deterrence-through-planning-for-nuclear-warfighting-pub-75717

Schlosser, Eric.12-23-2016, "World War Three, by Mistake," New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake

Voice, 9-18-2019, "Risks of nuclear accident, misjudgement or miscalculation have not been higher since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis," https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/media-coverage/risks-of-nuclear- accident-misjudgement-or-miscalculation-have-not-been-higher-since-the-1962-cuban- missile-crisis/

Deterrence

Theodor Roosevelt was famous for saying “Walk softly but carry a big stick.” When we unpack the metaphor, tread lightly into the world but make sure that you are ready to defend yourselves. Teddy was famous for his harrowing military career and being a tough as nails president who believed that the best defense was a great offense. His leadership built up the Great White Fleet which sailed around the world enforcing the will of America. He proclaimed a decade before World War I that the old-world system of alliances and treaties would bring the world to ruin and stressed America’s need to built up their military. He believed in the concept that you don’t need to worry about the guy with a gun if you have a canon. That is the principal of deterrence. Deterrence, in short, is the ability to scare away any and all threats to your or your nation before they become serious through a short of force. This show of force can be a literal show of force like parading military might through the nation’s capital or foreign nations or as Teddy did, around the world in the navy or through a mutual understanding of the power that the deterrence force has such as quoting numbers or statistics or the general knowledge of military strength or in this case, our nuclear arsenal. The concept of deterrence is simple and is used in much the same way that gun rights advocates use the nature of self-defense to justify the ability to own and carry weapons. If you are armed and people know it, the odds of being attacked are reduced because of the chance of harm to the attacking party. In the world, whether it be a person, animal, or national level, force looks to the weakest first and uses that as a prey target. Self-defense theory justifies that even the weakest animal can deter an attack if it shows that any potential attack would lead to massive harms to the attacker. On the international level, this has historically been done with troop movements and army sizes. As technology advanced, armies with bronze and then iron, and then steel weapons became superior. Armor became a necessity and eventually, projectile weapons became standard. Then weapons such as naval ships, trucks, cars, tanks, and air superiority fighters replaced simple troop movements. Now, we live in a nuclear age where at the push of a button, battlefields can be turned to glass and entire cities wiped out. This power has becomes the new king of the hill that at times has both brought us closer to war through miscalculations as well as diverted war because of a fear that one action might send the whole world into chaos. Since the mid 1970’s when most nations solidified their status as nuclear powers, nations have generally avoided large scale wars in exchange for smaller more regional conflicts. Even before this time, conflicts like Korea and Vietnam might have led to larger troops movements, bigger battles, and more deaths if one or both sides fighting in the conflict had not had nuclear weapons and troops felt the freedom to attack en mass like the days of old. Even new nuclear powers like Pakistan and India have avoided major conflict in recent times due to their nuclear weapons. So great are the power of nuclear weapons and the nations that have

them that others have been placed under the shield or umbrella of others like a protectorate. Japan and Korea have agreed to non develop a nuclear weapons program even though most experts agree that they could have a functioning bomb within 3-5 years because they are protected by the nuclear guarantee and promise of the United States. German and Austria both gave up their nuclear ambitions’ decades ago because of protection assurances from France and the United Kingdom. The former Soviet states gave up the Russian weapons in their possession after the fall of the USSR for protection guarantees from the new nation of Russia to protect them under their umbrella. The flip side to this is the inevitable arms race. As the pervious example showed, armies gave way to numbers and new technology and eventually nuclear weapons. But once a nation reached nuclear status, it drove competition for numbers. Much as the USSR wanted nuclear technology in a post WWII future, the United States needed to develop new systems to attempt to further deter this new rising power. This paved the way from the atomic weapon to the nuclear weapon to the thermonuclear weapon. Then the delivery systems had to advance. Bombers gave way to ballistic weapons to Intercontinental rockets. Single warhead weapons gave way to peacemaker multiple weapon warheads. Submarines gained the ability to launch medium range warheads. Russia, in the meantime, was less technologically advanced, so instead of trying to build more accurate bombs, they just built bigger bombs. 200 nuclear weapons gave way to 500 then 1000 the 10000. Soon, both the USSR and USA had enough nuclear weapons to level the world multiple times. This was all done in the name of deterrence. We have reached an apex. Many nuclear powers realize that the cost of deterrence is too high. To keep up with a huge nuclear stockpile requires billions of dollars. This money could be going towards other programs that yield a better international image. For years, nations like the US and Russia have been slowly dismantling their older nuclear weapons and not building any new weapons. Treaties like Salt I and II and Start I and II both put limits on the number of weapons that nations can have. However, under Presidents Putin and Trump, both nations have pledged to withdraw or ignore these treaties in leu of rebuilding their arsenals. Could we be seeing a return to deterrence? In the case of the resolution, one must ask that if we eliminate our weapons, would re return to a state of armies clashing on the field? Would this be better than the threat posed by our existing nuclear fleets? And do nuclear weapons really deter us from conflict or does our modern-day diplomacy and globalization do that for us?

Sample Evidence

MAD means that deterrence theory fails

Ellsberg 2017m Daniel [American activist and former US Military Analyst], The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. P. 345-7)

The bottom line is that arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it highly likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow— whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack (as in Fail Safe or Dr. Strangelove) or as a result of an independent terrorist action—would lead to the end of human civilization (and most other species). That has been, and remains, the inevitable result of maintaining forces on both sides that are capable of causing nuclear winter, and at the same time are poised to attack each other’s capital and control system, in response to fallible warnings, in the delusion that such an attack will limit damage to the homeland, compared with the consequences of waiting for actual explosions to occur on more than one target. Here, then, is the actual situation that has prevailed for more than half a century. Each side prepares and actually intends to attack the other’s “military nervous system,” command and control, especially its head and brain, the national command headquarters, in the first wave of a general war, however it originates. This has become the only hope of preempting and paralyzing the other’s retaliatory capability in such a way as to avoid total devastation; it is what must above all be deterred by the opponent. But in fact it, too, is thoroughly suicidal unless the other side has failed to delegate authority well below the highest levels. Because each side does in fact delegate, hopes for decapitation are totally unfounded. But for the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, their allies, and the world, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by acknowledging its own delegation.

The logic of deterrence is protected by a cadre of highly trained, personally invested professionals who encourage the public to turn a blind eye to nuclear weapons.

Kultgen, 2015 (John [Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of Missouri, specializing in philosophy of science and warfare], Abolition of Nuclear Weapons as Moral Imperative, Lexington Books: Lanham, NC.)

(iv) People who thoughtlessly assume that deterrence works. Perhaps the largest portion of those who are complacent about nuclear deterrence as national policy, including many of the people of the types sketched above, succumb to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. They think it obvious that deterrence works since nuclear weapons have not been used since Nagasaki (that is, not used in war, though obviously used as a tool of power politics). They are anxious to be reassured by an establishment that has a vested interest in maintaining the balance of terror. The establishment is happy to oblige. Some of this group believes what they want to believe. Others trust “the experts” because they are imbued with a technocratic mentality nourished by what Randall Collins calls our credential society.18 Collins observes that we live in a culture where many of the things that are most important to us are

decided by specialists certified to take care of us by credentials that attest that they possess expertise lacked by the ordinary person. Responsibility for monitoring the quality of their work is largely assigned to their peers and professional societies. These are commis- sioned by society to see that high standards are met by practitioners of the particular specialty. All of this insures that they will receive hand- some compensation for their work and discredits work of individuals who are not certified. Outsiders are discouraged from criticizing professional decisions in the absence of egregious incompetence or moral turpi- tude. For the most part the credential system works for the benefit of those who receive the services of experts. In any event the system seems a necessity in the face of the explosion of scientific knowledge and its practical applications. The downside is that it accustoms people to turn their fate over to others who may not be equipped to handle its moral dilem- mas and are biased by a narrow professional outlook as well as their own material interests. In our case the nuclear fate of citizens is in the hands of an establishment that is locked into deterrence as the only protection against the danger that lies in the accessibility of nuclear technology to other nations. The careers of the members of the establishment depend on maintaining the policy, regularly modernizing the weapons, finding new threats to counter with them and convincing the public that its very survival hinges on their work. It is only natural that a large segment of the public that lack the special knowledge to make informed judgments persuade themselves that they are in good hands, that the experts know best. It is too frightening to think otherwise.

Nuclear deterrence fails and we have a moral obligation to eliminate nuclear arsenals.

On February 16–17, 2011, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation hosted a conference in Santa Barbara, CA on the dangers of nuclear deterrence. On the final day of the conference, participants drafted the Santa Barbara Declaration, an urgent call to action for the public to reject nuclear deterrence.10 The declaration first summarizes how deterrence is oppressive: Nuclear deterrence is a doctrine that is used as a justification by nuclear weapon states and their allies for the continued possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence is the threat of a nuclear strike in response to a hostile action. However, the nature of the hostile action is often not clearly defined, making possible the use of nuclear weapons in a wide range of circumstances. Nuclear deterrence threatens the murder of many millions of innocent people, along with severe economic, climate, environmental, agri- cultural, and health consequences beyond the area of attack. Nuclear deterrence requires massive commitments of resources to the industrial infrastructures and organizations that make up the world’s nuclear weapons establishments, its only beneficiaries. Then it highlights its flaws: Despite its catastrophic potential, nuclear deterrence is widely, though wrongly, perceived to provide protection to nuclear weapon states, their allies, and their citizens. Nuclear deterrence has numerous major problems:

1. Its power to protect is a dangerous fabrication. The threat or use of nuclear weapons provides no protection against an attack.

2. It assumes rational leaders, but there can be irrational or paranoid leaders on any side of a conflict.

3. Threatening or committing mass murder with nuclear weapons is illegal and criminal. It violates fundamental legal precepts of domestic and international law, threatening the indiscriminate slaugh- ter of innocent people.

4. It is deeply immoral for the same reasons it is illegal: it threatens indiscriminate and grossly disproportionate death and destruction.

5. It diverts human and economic resources desperately needed to meet basic human needs around the world. Globally, approximate- ly $100 billion is spent annually on nuclear forces.

6. It has no effect against non-state extremists, who govern no territory or population.

7. It is vulnerable to cyber attack, sabotage, and human or technical error, which could result in a nuclear strike.

8. It sets an example for additional countries to pursue nuclear weapons for their own nuclear deterrent force.

And finally, a call to action: Its benefits are illusory. Any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic. Nuclear deterrence is discriminatory, anti-democratic and un- sustainable. This practice must be discredited and replaced with an urgent commitment to achieve global nuclear disarmament. We must change the discourse by speaking truth to power and speaking truth to each other. Before another nuclear weapon is used, nuclear deterrence must be replaced by humane, legal, and moral security strategies. We call upon people everywhere to join us in demanding that the nuclear weapon states and their allies reject nuclear deterrence and negotiate without delay a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Proliferation results in conflict deterrence, not use

Waltz 2007m Ken [Professor of political science, Berkley], ”A nuclear Iran”, Journal of international affairs, Spring/summer 2007, 60.2)

Richard Betts: Ken, would Iranian nuclear weapons have any potential function other than as a pure deterrent? Could they function for coercive purposes in the region, especially given that other countries in the region do not yet have nuclear weapons? Do you think that the solution is to spread nuclear weapons to other regimes in the region, or to involve the United States in extended deterrence to deal with that prospect? And, if so, is that in the interests of the United States? Kenneth Waltz: No one has discovered how to use nuclear weapons other than for deterrence. Let me amend that. There is a form of blackmail that might work, and that is blackmail for money North Korea might have had that in mind. But when most people say "nuclear blackmail," they think of one country saying, "We have nuclear weapons, and unless you do this--whatever this is--we'll drop one on you." That's simply not plausible. Nobody has tried it, and, if anyone does, it won't work. There are many countries with nuclear weapons, the United States among them, and we haven't figured out how to do anything with these things, except to use them for deterrence. How is a relatively backward, dinky nuclear country going to manage to use its nuclear weapons for purposes other than deterrence? I don't see any possibility of that. It may be, as Scott says, that possessing nuclear weapons gives a country a little more freedom of action. But it certainly does not gain much ability to act in a conventional way because it has

nuclear weapons. Again, nuclear weapons have one purpose and only one purpose, and that's deterrence.

Nuclear Weapons lower incentives for war, modify state behavior, and conventional war

Wesley 2005, Michael [Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy], Australian Journal of International Affairs, September, “It’s Time To Scrap the NPT,” EBSCO, p. 293-294)

A fifth concern is that conflicts between regional powers will become more likely as the demise of the NPT results in more states with nuclear weapons. An increase in regional conflict in Asia may well be coming, mainly as a result of the newly intense patterns of competition among that continent’s new great powers. But possession of nuclear weapons will more likely have a positive (containing, de-escalating) effect on such conflicts, rather than a negative (escalating, broadening) effect. The most dangerous strategy one can choose in a war is to make a nuclear-armed state feel desperate; as a result, conflicts involving nuclear-armed states are more likely to be carefully limited and confined to stakes that are calculated to be well below the nuclear threshold of It’s time to scrap the NPT 293 all parties (Waltz 1981: 20). Moreover, history shows that nuclear weapons have only been used or threatened to de-escalate or bring an end to conventional conflicts: the experience or prospect of catastrophic damage has tended to be a powerful motive forcing belligerents to modify their objectives. Further, the costs of nuclear war would be proportionately greater for new as opposed to the older nuclear states: the smallness of the territory and high rates of urbanisation of most aspiring nuclear states would ensure that a nuclear exchange would devastate a greater percentage of their populations and industry than projected exchanges between the superpowers were estimated to imperil during the height of the Cold War. The case of India and Pakistan offers some cautious hope that in some cases, after an unstable and dangerous period, acquisition of nuclear weapons will cause opponents to begin to address the root causes of their antagonism and delimit spheres of interest.

Further Reading

Bush, Richard C. et al.6-7-2010, "U.S. Nuclear and Extended Deterrence: Considerations and Challenges," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-nuclear-and- extended-deterrence-considerations-and-challenges/

David P, 1-14-2018, "Nuclear deterrence is a myth. And a lethal one at that," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/nuclear-deterrence-myth-lethal- david-barash

Kriege, David 2-7-2011, "Ten Serious Flaws in Nuclear Deterrence Theory," Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, https://www.wagingpeace.org/ten-serious-flaws-in-nuclear-deterrence- theory/

Rudolf, Peter "US Nuclear Deterrence Policy and Its Problems," No Publication, https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/us-nuclear-deterrence-policy-and-its- problems/

Schelling Thomas C. "Nuclear Deterrence for the Future," Issues in Science and Technology, https://issues.org/schelling/

Proliferation

Nations are kind of like small children. When one sees what the other has, everyone becomes envious and wants the same thing. This might be fine if it comes to hosting the Olympics or creating public works, but what if the thing that drives ambition is the drive for weapons so powerful, one use could end all life on Earth? Whether the fear be missing out on deterrence, having an attack waged on you, or not being a part of a superpower club, since United States first tested their atomic bomb, others have wanted the same power. The USSR wanted it so that they could stand up to what they saw as an aggressive capitalist system that might sweep them out of power much like others had in the centuries prior. Nations like the United Kingdom and France wanted nuclear weapons as a deterrent from Soviet aggression. China developed their program after disagreements with both the United States and Russia. India and Pakistan developed weapons as a deterrent against each other, Israel’s undisclosed weapons program is meant to stop the flood of wars that besieged them during the 1960’s and 70’s and North Korea is preparing for a potential attack from the United States. In the 1960’s fearing a surge in nations gaining nuclear weapons, a treaty was proposed that would ban the further development of nuclear weapons and restrict the nuclear powers to the nations that currently were in possession of them. Ratified in 1969 and coming into power in 1971, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT contained and covered all but four UN member states. India, Pakistan, Israel have never signed the treaty while South Sudan, formed in 2011 has yet to join. North Korea announced that it was leaving the treaty in 2003 although it has failed to submit the proper paperwork to do so. The basic idea of the treaty was to prevent the uncontrolled spread of weapons to new states. This spread is referred to as horizontal proliferating as it would increase the number of states with weapons. It does nothing to address the numbers that each country that currently has. That term is vertical proliferation. The founders of the treat agreed that with more nations came a harder time policing and controlling the use of weapons. Any conflict could then become a flashpoint for a nuclear exchange and a potential nuclear war. The founders agreed that although they could not get any nation to disarm by treaty, having fewer nations with bombs was preferable to more nations.

Although good intentioned, even the best of intentions can fail. As stated above, the three nations that have yet to sign that were in existence when this treaty was ratified are part of the nuclear superpower club. North Korea, a nation that may or may not be part of the treaty openly defied the treaty nonetheless and developed nuclear weapons without any major world repercussions

So, in this regard, the resolution acts as a check on proliferation. Nations that have developed weapons since the creation of the NPT would give up their weapons for elimination while, in theory, nations that wanted weapons would not be allowed to acquire such weapons as they would have to eliminate them under an affirmative world as the resolution provides a blanket statement on the status of states and their ownership of nuclear weapons. However, on the proliferations front, for the affirmative to win this argument they will need to actually show a harm to proliferation. As we have seen with the examples of India and Pakistan, proliferations happened and we haven’t seen any worldwide catastrophe. A good affirmative team will argue that miscalculations are increased by proliferation or that we haven’t reached the critical mass of states with weapons.

Sample Evidence

Private companies and terrorist organizations can and will continue to build nuclear weapons

Krushnik and King 15 (Jonathan Alan King is professor of molecular biology at MIT and chair of the Nuclear Abolition Committee of Massachusetts Peace Action.Richard http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176047/tomgram%3A_krushnic_and_king%2C_the _corporate_nuclear_complex/

Private companies have a history of operating practically independently, eliminating the state. One of the reasons nuclear weapons profitability is extremely high is that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the Department of Energy, responsible for the development and operations of the DOE’s nuclear weapons facilities, does not monitor subcontractors, which makes it difficult to monitor prime contractors as well. For example, when the Project on Government Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information on Babock & Wilcox, the subcontractor for security at the Y-12 nuclear complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the NNSA responded that it had no information on the subcontractor.

Proliferation would be rapid and lead to nuclear war

Taylor no date, Theodore fellow of the American physical society, “Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/taylor.pdf

Nuclear proliferation - be it among nations or terrorists - greatly increases the chance of nuclear violence on a scale that would be intolerable. Proliferation increases the chance that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of irrational people, either suicidal or with no concern for the fate of the world. Irrational or outright psychotic leaders of military factions or terrorist groups might decide to use a few nuclear weapons under their control to stimulate a global nuclear war, as an act of vengeance against humanity as a whole. Countless scenarios of this type can be constructed Limited nuclear wars between countries with small numbers of nuclear weapons could escalate into major nuclear wars between superpowers. For example, a nation in an advanced stage of “latent proliferation,” finding itself losing a nonnuclear war, might complete the transition to deliverable nuclear weapons and, in desperation, use them. If that should happen in a region, such as the Middle East, where major superpower interests are at stake, the small nuclear war could easily escalate into a global nuclear war. A sudden rush of nuclear proliferation among nations may be triggered by small nuclear wars that are won by a country with more effective nuclear forces than its adversary, or by success of nuclear terrorists in forcing adherence to their demands. Proliferation of nuclear weapons among nations could spread at an awesome rate in such circumstances, since “latent proliferation” is far along in at least several dozen nations, and is increasing rapidly as more nuclear power plants and supporting facilities are built in more countries. In summary, much more serious international attention than is now

New nuclear states lead to instability

Horowtiz Michael 2-10-2009, Dept of Political Science @ UPenn, “The Spread of nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter?” Journal of Conflict Resolution, SAGE

The hypotheses above are compared to a null hypothesis predicting no effect between time and behavior. Given the dichotomous nature of the dependent variable, the most appropriate statistical model is logistic regression.18 These tests include Huber-White robust standard errors and control for the possibility of fixed time effects with peace-year splines (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998).19 Table 1 presents initial statistical representations of the relationship between MID reciprocation and the possession of nuclear weapons, building from a simple model without any control variables to larger models including relevant controls. The results show a clear and consistent statistically significant impact to learning over time with nuclear weapons. The control variables behave in the predicted directions. As Schultz finds, reciprocation is less likely when a challenger is democratic. Interestingly, as the relative power of Side A in a dispute increases, reciprocation appears more likely. This suggests that the general relationship between power and dispute reciprocation is not necessarily linear. Neither the dyadic-satisfaction variable nor the joint-nuclearpossession variable, measuring whether both sides have nuclear weapons, is significant. 20 In general, the significance of the Side B nuclear-weapons variable suggests there is something inherent about nuclear capabilities that influences militarized behavior, although the nuclear variable for Side A is not significant. However, the results show that nuclear experience matters as well. The Side A nuclear-experience variable is –0.024 and significant at the .05 level. Given the caveats above about the indirect nature of these tests, the nuclear-learning argument seems clearest in explaining the results for challengers. The negative and significant coefficient for Side A shows that the challenges of older nuclear states are reciprocated significantly less than the challenges of younger nuclear and nonnuclear states.

Proliferation is slow and stable

Mueller 2012, John Mueller, PhD, “Old fears cloud Western views on Iran's nuclear posturing,” 2-18 http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/old-fears-cloud-western-views-on-irans-nuclear-posturing- 20120217-1te94.html]

Alarmism about nuclear proliferation is fairly common coin in the foreign policy establishment. And of late it has been boosted by the seeming efforts of Iran or its friends to answer covert assassinations, apparently by Israel, with attacks and attempted attacks of their own in India, Georgia and Thailand.¶ A non-hysterical approach to the Iran nuclear issue is entirely possible. It should take several considerations into account. If the rattled and insecure Iranian leadership is lying when it says it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, or if it undergoes a conversion from that position (triggered perhaps by an Israeli air strike), it will find, like all other nuclear-armed states, that the bombs are essentially useless and a considerable waste of time, effort, money and scientific talent.¶ Nuclear weapons have had a tremendous influence on our agonies and obsessions since 1945, inspiring desperate rhetoric, extravagant theorising, wasteful expenditure and frenetic diplomatic posturing. However, they have been of little historic consequence. And they were not necessary to prevent a third world war or a major conflict in Europe: each leak from the archives suggests that the Soviet Union never seriously considered direct military aggression against the US or Europe. That is, there was nothing to deter.¶ Moreover, there never seem to have been militarily compelling – or even minimally sensible – reasons to use the weapons, particularly because of an inability to identify targets that were both suitable and could not be effectively attacked using conventional munitions.¶ Iran would most likely "use" any nuclear capacity in the same way all other nuclear states have: for prestige (or ego‑stoking) and to deter real or perceived threats. Historical experience strongly suggests that new nuclear countries, even ones that once seemed hugely threatening, like communist China in the 1960s, are content to use their weapons for such purposes.¶ Indeed, as strategist (and Nobel laureate) Thomas Schelling suggests, deterrence is about the only value the weapons might have for Iran. Such devices, he points out, "would be too precious to give away or to sell" and "too precious to waste killing people" when they could make other

countries "hesitant to consider military action".¶ The popular notion that nuclear weapons furnish a country with the capacity to "dominate" its area has little or no historical support – in the main, nuclear threats since 1945 have either been ignored or met with countervailing opposition, not timorous acquiescence. It thus seems overwhelmingly likely that, if a nuclear Iran brandishes its weapons to intimidate others or get its way, it will find that those threatened, rather than capitulating or rushing off to build a compensating arsenal of their own, will ally with others, including conceivably Israel, to stand up to the intimidation – rather in the way an alliance of convenience coalesced to oppose Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.¶ Iran's leadership, though hostile and unpleasant in many ways, is not a gaggle of suicidal lunatics. Thus, as Schelling suggests, it is exceedingly unlikely it would give nuclear weapons to a group like Hezbollah to detonate, not least because the rational ones in charge would fear that the source would be detected, inviting devastating retaliation.¶ Nor is an Iranian bomb likely to trigger a cascade of proliferation in the Middle East, as many people insist. Decades of alarmist predictions about proliferation chains, cascades, dominoes, waves, avalanches, epidemics and points of no return have proven faulty. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has been far slower than routinely expected because, insofar as most leaders of most countries, even rogue ones, have considered acquiring the weapons, they have come to appreciate several defects: the weapons are dangerous, distasteful, costly and likely to rile the neighbours. And the nuclear diffusion that has transpired has had remarkably limited, perhaps even imperceptible, consequences. As Professor Jacques Hymans has shown, the weapons have also been exceedingly difficult to obtain for administratively dysfunctional countries like Iran.

Proliferation deters nuclear conflict. Solve for their impacts

Forsyth 2012, James Wood Forsyth Jr., PhD, “The Common Sense of Small Nuclear Arsenals,” Summer, Strategic Studies Quarterly, http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2012/summer/forsyth.pdf]

Whatever its logical shortcomings, it is important to stress that deterrence worked—it kept the Cold War “cold” and allowed international life to go on without a catastrophic nuclear war. After 70 years, most analysts agree on the basic dynamics of deterrence, and the contemporary debate regarding deterrence, when not addressing the problem of nonstate actors, tends to pivot on force structure considerations. 19 Here, the behavior of states with small nuclear arsenals is instructive. As previously mentioned, most states with nuclear arsenals have not acquired large numbers of nuclear weapons. Instead, they appear content with a relatively small arsenal capable of warding off an attack as well as dissuading others from interfering in their internal and external affairs. But of the two roles nuclear weapons seem to play—deterrence and dissuasion—is one more important than another? For India and Pakistan, nuclear weapons play a decidedly deter rent role. But if one were to free Britain of its NATO obligations, who exactly would Britain be deterring today? What about France? Neither of these countries is as hard-pressed in the security arena as India or Pakistan, yet both hold on to nuclear weapons. While nuclear weapons still “hold power at bay,” one must wonder whose power is being held at bay and how. It is important not to overinterpret this. Nuclear weapons serve a purpose. How else can one explain why nine states have them, while others appear to want them? But what purpose do they serve, in general? To answer that question, one must look at what nuclear weapons do for states. Among other things, nuclear weapons socialize leaders to the dangers of adventurism and, in effect, halt them from behaving or responding recklessly to provocation. 20 Statesmen may not want to be part of an international system that constrains them, but that is the system that results among nuclear powers. Each is socialized to the capabilities of the other, and the relationship that emerges is one tempered by caution despite the composition, goals, or desires of its leaders. In short, nuclear weapons deter and dissuade.

Proliferation leads to miscalculation and escalating conflict, ends in nuclear wars

Evans, and Kawaguchi, 12/15/2009, “Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers,” http://www.icnnd.org/ reference/reports/ent/ downloads.html

Ensuring that no new states join the ranks of those already nuclear-armed must continue to be one of the world’s top international security priorities. Every new nuclear-armed state will add significantly to the inherent risks – of accident or miscalculation as well as deliberate use – involved in any possession of these weapons, and potentially encourage more states to acquire nuclear weapons to avoid being left behind. Any scramble for nuclear capabilities is bound to generate severe instability in bilateral, regional and international relations. The carefully worked checks and balances of interstate relations will come under severe stress. There will be enhanced fears of nuclear blackmail, and of irresponsible and unpredictable leadership behaviour. In conditions of inadequate command and control systems, absence of confidence building measures and multiple agencies in the nuclear weapons chain of authority, the possibility of an accidental or maverick usage of nuclear weapons will remain high. Unpredictable elements of risk and reward will impact on decision making processes. The dangers are compounded if the new and aspiring nuclear weapons states have, as is likely to be the case, ongoing inter-state disputes with ideological, territorial, historical – and for all those reasons, strongly emotive – dimensions. The transitional period is likely to be most dangerous of all, with the arrival of nuclear weapons tending to be accompanied by sabre rattling and competitive nuclear chauvinism. For example, as between Pakistan and India a degree of stability might have now evolved, but 1998–2002 was a period of disturbingly fragile interstate relations. Command and control and risk management of nuclear weapons takes time to evolve. Military and political leadership in new nuclear- armed states need time to learn and implement credible safety and security systems. The risks of nuclear accidents and the possibility of nuclear action through inadequate crisis control mechanisms are very high in such circumstances. If this is coupled with political instability in such states, the risks escalate again. Where such countries are beset with internal stresses and fundamentalist groups with trans-national agendas, the risk of nuclear weapons or fissile material coming into possession of non-state actors cannot be ignored. The action–reaction cycle of nations on high alerts, of military deployments, threats and counter threats of military action, have all been witnessed in the Korean peninsula with unpredictable behavioural patterns driving interstate relations. The impact of a proliferation breakout in the Middle East would be much wider in scope and make stability management extraordinarily difficult. Whatever the chances of “stable deterrence” prevailing in a Cold War or India–Pakistan setting, the prospects are significantly less in a regional setting with multiple nuclear power centres divided by multiple and cross-cutting sources of conflict.

Further Reading

Evans, Gareth 12/15/2009, Professorial fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences @ University of Melbourne, and Yoriko Kawaguchi, Co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, “Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers,” http://www.icnnd.org/ reference/reports/ent/ downloads.html

Gopin 9/12/12, Marc Gopin, Ph.D in Eastern studies from Brandeis, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution Director, “Could a Nuclear Iran Bring About More Stability, Not Less”, http://scar.gmu.edu/icar-news/14753

Taylor, Theodore fellow of the American physical society, “Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/taylor.pdf

Walton, Dale 2006, “Navigating the Second Nuclear Age: Proliferation and Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” Global Dialogue, Volume 8, Number 1–2

Waltz, Kenneth The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, 2003

Morality

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Robert Oppenheimer

This quotation from the lead scientists of the Manhattan Project illustrated the general mindset of the people that designed the atomic bomb in a post atomic world. After seeing the destruction and hearing from the victim’s firsthand accounts of survival in the days after the explosion, most of the scientists went on to become the biggest proponents of nuclear abolition. The devastating impacts of the first atomic blast were evident. Those that were within the initial blast zone were killed instantly by the intense heat and the blunt force of the shockwave. Those farther out were blinded by the intense light from the explosion as the power of a star was unleashed on the surface of Earth. Then the blast wave hit, leveling almost any structure within a few miles of the blast. Those that were lucky enough to live through this were scorched by the intense heat of the fireball. For those that were farther out, the fireball and embers from cooking fires caught the wooden structures that still stood, and the rubble left on the ground on fire and giant fires consumed anything left. For years after, thousands more would die from radiation sickness and cancers from the explosion. Thousands of children were born with birth defects due to radiation. To this day, visitors to the bomb sites can see walls where shadows of people and objects were burned into the cement as the intense light bleached everything but the shadows away. This is the aftermath of an atomic blast. The hypothetical deaths from a nuclear or thermonuclear explosion would be worst. Recent evidence says that a modern nuclear weapon of 10 megatons, or 10 million tons of TNT exploding over New York City would bring the immediate area within a half mile to several 10’s of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit in a split second. The blast wave would spread out destroying and leveling any building within the immediate 10-mile blast zone of the bomb. The fireball would rush out creating winds in excess of the strongest hurricane to ever make landfall. As the mushroom cloud rises from the center of the explosion, cold air rushes back in to fill the gap creating a vacuum of wind that returns to the center at the same speeds that it exited. Radiation is spread across the tri state area and millions are left dead or dying and thousands more are stranded as the electromagnetic pulse created by the weapon’s detonation has eliminated most electronic devices.

This pales in comparison to the hypothetical weapon that was created on paper by both the US and USSR. This weapon is called the salted nuclear weapon and it works by combining a cobalt shell to the explosion at the last second. As the warhead detonates, the cobalt catches the radioactive particles as they scatter and bonds with them. Cobalt extends the half life of radiation and also helps spread the radiation. This radioactive “salt” falls across the land leaving it uninhabitable for double the time of a normal nuclear explosion. Although never built, a smaller but similar weapon was. This is called the neutron bomb. In the days of the Cold War,

both the US and USSR were worried that a nuclear war would devastate the land and leave it uninhabitable for generations. To speed up resettlement, a layer of carbon was added to the nuclear shell. This carbon would inhibit the explosion at the last second. Instead of going thermonuclear, only radiation was released with only a tiny area under the bomb experiencing heat damage. This meant that a bomb exploding in the middle of a major city would only devastate a small area, perhaps around a city block or less while the rest of the city was left untouched except for massive radiation death. After a few days, the radiation would clear and the winning army could move in, clear out the bodies and resettle a city with working buildings and infostructure. The morality of the weapons as they are shown above is clear. The death toll and human suffering that they wrought on the populaces they are unleased on is tantamount to a war crime. Nuclear bombs don’t distinguish between innocent civilians and enemy soldiers. They can’t aim their blasts to hit only military bases, they are designed to wipe out large areas without discrimination. Fallout shelters designed for use during the Cold War were barely adequate then and by today’s standards, they would only collapse under a blast. However, advocates of our nuclear arsenal ask us to look at the reason that we developed these weapons in the first place. The development as spurred by a potential invasion of the Japanese home islands had the potential to kill half a million US troops and countless Japanese civilians. The loss of life was considered unacceptable and the time and cost was also considered avoidable. In this case, the deaths of a few hundred thousand at the hands of an atomic blast was considered the moral option as it ended the war early. Is it fair to weight the lives that would be lost to a potential invasion and prolonged war vs one quick shot and a few thousand dead? Can risk calculus be done on this level or does morality have a definite point of return where any death is acceptable? Furthermore, can we hold other arguments to this level of morality? Does the possession of nuclear weapons mean that we are culpable for the actions caused by the creation of said weapons? Critical writers and postmodern philosophers have written that the ownership of nuclear weapons poses an ongoing genocide against the third world and indigenous people as the tests were done on native lands or lands far from the lives of the average Westerner. We did so under the idea that few would know about those that were to be affected and even fewer would care. Furthermore, the harms from testing dramatically impact those in poverty or lesser developed countries more as the radiation causes higher rates of cancer and death. In the Western world, modern medicine can be used to treat and cure such ailments but in the poorest parts of the world, people are left to survive on their own. Also, when testing was done, scientists were aware of prevailing winds and tests were done to carry the waste and radiation away from inhabited US soil while disregarding native and third world lands.

We also have the mining of the uranium. Every country has their own mine or mining source. IN the United States, the Western deserts of Nevada and the Colorado flats are the

perfect place to find nuclear material. But for most of the world, the best place to find uranium is in Africa. For generations, African nations were tasked with mining this material for sale to the nuclear powers. Even when sanctions and bans on “blood” products like diamonds were being put into place, nuclear material remained off the list. To this day, large amounts of nuclear material that has been used in bombs from the United Kingdom to China was mined with child slave labor from Africa. How do we weight this when it comes to the concepts of defense, deterrence, and national protection? Is it possible for the concerns of the lives of many to be weighed against the rights of the few or do we have to look to life overall? Bostrom would write that any chance to avert extinction level events must be taken, but the question remains; at what cost? Can an action still be moral if result is successful, but the means were immoral? Do the means justify the ends or should we treat people as ends unto themselves? Sadly, there is no simple answer to this. Unless we are debating the concept of an objective morality, the concept of a basic morality exists in the eye of the beholder. In some cases, it might be moral to let a few people die to save a nation. In a few cases, a prolonged war might be preferable to a war that is over in the blink of an eye and a hundred thousand lives. The concept of perception and point of view will become very important when debating this point as it all comes down to how well you can persuade the judge. Odds are you will never persuade your opponent that you are right, so you must find a weighing mechanism in morality that fits the judge. Shape your narrative around the end goal of what kind of morality and how you will weight it and you will be fine.

Sample Evidence

Nuclear arsenals should be morally condemned from both deontological and consequentialist perspectives.

Kultgen 2015, John [Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of Missouri, specializing in philosophy of science and warfare], Abolition of Nuclear Weapons as Moral Imperative, Lexington Books: Lanham, NC.)

The wrongful intentions principle is taken to be basic and self-evident by some moralists. For them consequences are irrelevant or at least secon- dary to the intentions that inform particular acts. Anthony Kenny ex- presses this view succinctly. He asks an imaginary person who believes in nuclear policies, Suppose deterrence fails and you are faced with the choice of using nuclear weapons or surrendering. What, in your heart, do you think you should do? [If the person replies that he would use the weapons] I could only tell him, quite soberly, that he is a man with murder in his heart. 7 Kenny is a Christian, so he may have in mind the words of Jesus: You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment” But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. (Matthew 5:21) Charismatic preachers are given to hyperbole. Whether or not Jesus meant that murderous anger is as wrong as murder and whether or not Kenny means that to plan nuclear war is as wrong as to wage it, Kenny takes it to be obvious that planning it is very, very wrong. He believes that whether or not it is as evil to want to commit murder when you are not able to do so as it is to commit it when you are able, it is evil for much the same reasons and falls in the same range of culpability. It is the intention that makes the act wrong; whether it can be carried out is matters of circumstances beyond one’s control—a matter of moral luck, as it were. The reduction of morality to good intentions smacks of moral purism. In our case it seems to say that a person should let the security of his country go down the drain for the sake of personal innocence and an easy conscience. Something is clearly flawed in this idea and if it is an implication of the wrong- intentions principle, the principle must be flawed. At the very least, it shows that the principle is not absolute, that there are exceptions to it. We must spell out the principle and examine what there is to say for it if we are to determine when it holds and what its exceptions are. Then we must judge whether intentions behind nuclear deterrence are among the exceptions. Objections to the wrongful intentions principle based entirely on moral intuitions, like appeals to moral intuitions to defend it, are self-defeat- ing. Neither go deeply enough into the principle to show its grounds or its possible flaws and whether particular intentions fall under it or are exceptions to it. What the objections do show is that the principle is not self-evident—it needs to be argued on the basis of broader considerations. I will defend it in terms of the consequences of bad intentions in the expectation that these consequences will highlight exceptions as well, showing why the principle of wrongful intentions holds for most cases. The point of the principle of wrongful intentions is not that a person’s determination to do something horrible makes her a horrible person, though it is certainly a sign that something is wrong with her character. The point is that her determination and the flaws that it reveals in her have bad consequences even if she does not carry out what she now intends. These consequences may not be

sufficient to condemn the intention; it may have other consequences that are good enough to outweigh the bad. But it also may not. In the case of the contingent intentions behind nuclear deterrence, a good consequence is claimed to be a reduction in the short-term probability of nuclear war. But if among the bad consequences is that the probability that the weapons will be used and the world destroyed will be increased over the long term, and it is almost certain that society will be corrupted even if the weapons are not used, it is obvious that the bad consequences outweigh the good. We can see this without denying that there might be good consequences.

Nuclear disarmament is a moral obligation

Ellsberg 2017, Daniel [American activist and former US Military Analyst], The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing,

In sum, most aspects of the U.S. nuclear planning system and force readiness that became known to me half a century ago still exist today, as prone to catastrophe as ever but on a scale, as now known to environmental scientists, looming vastly larger than was understood then. The present risks of the current nuclear era go far beyond the dangers of proliferation and nonstate terrorism that have been the almost exclusive focus of public concern for the past generation and the past decade in particular. The arsenals and plans of the two superpowers represent not only an insuperable obstacle to an effective global anti-proliferation campaign; they are in themselves a clear and present existential danger to the human species, and most others. The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over fifty years, all-out thermonuclear war—an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth—has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And that is still true today. No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.

Current nuclear policy is immoral

Ellsberg 2012, Daniel [American activist and former US Military Analyst], The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. P. 345-7)

Moreover, the warnings and demands of activists are almost entirely ignored in mainstream media and politics and academic discussion as being non-expert and emotional rather than rational, failing to give appropriate weight to the complexities, the competing moral considerations and priorities that must drive reasonable and responsible policy-making. What is missing—what is foregone—in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness

and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil. And yet part of what must be grasped—what makes it both understandable, once grasped, and at the same time mysterious and resistant to our ordinary understanding—is that the creation, maintenance, and political threat-use of these monstrous machines has been directed and accomplished by humans pretty much the way we think of them: more or less ordinary people, neither better nor worse than the rest of us, not monsters in either a clinical or mythic sense. This particular process, and what it has led to and the dangers it poses to all complex life on earth, shows the human species—when organized hierarchically in large, dense populations, i.e., civilization—at its absolute worst. Is it really possible that ordinary people, ordinary leaders, have created and accepted dangers of the sort I am describing? Every “normal” impulse is to say “No! It can’t be that bad!” (“And if it ever was, it can’t have persisted. It can’t be true now, in our own country.”) We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates, Hannah Arendt’s controversial proposition regarding the “banality of evil” I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the “banality of evildoing, and of most evildoers.” After all, we Americans have seen in recent years human-caused catastrophes reflecting governmental or corporate recklessness far greater and more conscious and deliberate than our public can easily imagine or is allowed to discover in time. Above all, the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, but also the failure to prepare for or respond to Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and financial disasters affecting millions: the savings-and-loan scandal, Internet and housing bubbles, criminal fraud, and the meltdown of the banking and investment system. Perhaps reflection on these political, social, and moral failures—preceding though amplified by current premonitions of disastrous decision-making during the tenure of Donald Trump—will lend credibility to my basic theme, otherwise hard to absorb: that the same type of heedless, shortsighted, and reckless decision-making and lying about it has characterized our government’s nuclear planning, threats, and preparations, throughout the nuclear era, risking a catastrophe incomparably greater than all these others together.

Moral Imperatives regarding nuclear weapons misses the point, and risks ironically encouraging proliferation.

Rutherford 2011 (Ian. P. [Ph.D. candidate War Studies Program in the Royal Military College of Canada. Visiting Defense Fellow at the Center for International and Defense Policy, Queen’s University.] “NATO’s New Strategic Concept, Nuclear Weapons, and Global Zero.” International Journal 66.2 (June, 2011) pp. 463-482. P. 479-80)

The problem of nuclear proliferation is real; ignoring it will not solve it. However, the proponents of global zero seem to believe that the existence of any nuclear weapons is the issue, rather than the nature of the regime that possesses them. Few serious analysts would suggest that should Canada or

Japan decide to proliferate and acquire 10 or even 100 warheads, it would represent a real threat to international security (although it would certainly damage the nonproliferation treaty); the same cannot be said for Iran or Venezuela. The “moral imperative” of global zero delegitimizes those states that have responsibly possessed nuclear weapons for over 60 years without ever employing them, except as a deterrent. This is a mistake: “Unfortunately, fixing on zero as the urgent issue before us obscures the real challenge: keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of countries or organizations that might use them offensively. Seen from this viewpoint, the two most decisive acts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons were the Israeli attacks on Iraq’s weapons program in 1981 and Syria’s in 2008.”25 Focusing on preventing proliferation—through sanctions, covert military actions when required, and efforts such as the proliferation security initiative—are a far more reliable course of action than reliance on goodwill and the humanitarian impulse of regimes that are quite ready to murder their own protesting citizens, never mind their perceived enemies. The Stuxnet computer virus, reportedly released by Israeli hackers (or agents) and aimed against Iran’s centrifuges in an effort to cripple the latter’s capacity to produce nuclear fuel, is indicative of the actions that are possible to prevent proliferation.26 Global zero, however, remains a chimera insofar as it will be unlikely to live up to the expectations of its supporters. Like the Kellogg-Briand pact or the responsibility to protect doctrine before it, it risks cynicism and disillusionment among its supporters while inadvertently encouraging proliferation by making even a small arsenal significant in the strategic calculations of the US, and by extension, NATO.

Further Reading

DAVID A. HOEKEMA, “MORALITY, JUST WAR, AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS: An Analysis of ‘The Challenge of Peace.’” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 67, no. 4, 1984, pp. 359–378. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41178311.

"Deterrence or Disarmament?: The Ethics of Nuclear Warfare," No Publication, https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/02/deterrence-or-disarmament-the-ethics-of- nuclear-warfare/

E. Pellecchia,R., 6-17-2014, "Total nuclear disarmament: ethical and moral issues," Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/11287462.2014.924724

Heinrichs, Rebeccah 12-4-2019, "Pope Francis is Wrong about the Morality of Nuclear Weapons," Providence, https://providencemag.com/2019/12/noblesse-oblige-nuclear- weapons-pope-francis/

"The Nuclear Dilemma: The Greatest Moral Problem of All Time," No Publication, https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/archive/morgenthau/766

Social Contract

Although there are many social contract theorists, today I will be focusing on John Locke as his approach to social contracts and democracy work well with the concept of nuclear weapons and which states possess them. To start things off, John Locke’s Social Contract states that of all the rights we hold to ourselves, the only right that we concede to the government in order to be accepted into a civil and working society is the ability to punish other people. Locke argues that we might be pressed into the role of enforcer by a state but that is at the leisure of the state. In short, Locke says that the decision to punish must come from the government and not from the people. This differs from other social contract theorists as their views state that other rights must be curtailed in order to maintain free society. The right to punish however, can return to the people if and only if the government violates their end of the contract first. In the case of Locke, his argument is that the violation of rights must occur when a government fails to punish those that have violated the collective laws of the land as democratically decided upon by the people. In this way, Locke both advocates for the idea that the government holds a reciprocal burden to defend its citizens from the lawless and to uphold democratic principles such as a legal system and the legislative decisions of the majority. It is through this that Locke protects against anarchy as once a government fails in their duties, the people have the ability to forge a new government with the ability to punish. This harkens back to one of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence and one of the best lines from National Treasure, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Based on this, the government has two limitations. First, any right we would have had in a state of nature remains regardless of government say (Jefferson’s basis for life, liberty and the presute of happiness/property), and that the government can only punish us for things that would demand punishment in the state of nature regardless of government. To determine the latter, we must look to a test case of three communities. The first community is that of a random nomadiac village, the second is a small frontier community, and the third is a major city. When questioning the government’s legitimacy and whether the legislative task at hand or whether the action taken at hand is governmentally just, you the action violate either of the tenants of Locke? If the answer is yes, it is not a just action and if no, it is a legitimate action on the part of the government.

Now we look to the resolution on the elimination of nuclear weapons. First, let’s look at the converse of the resolution, can we justify the maintenance of a nuclear weapons arsenal as

a just government action? Proponents of the weapons would argue that keeping them provides for national se4curity and global stability which fulfills a basic need in the social contract. The act of self-defense would be justified under any of the three communities from above. It might also fulfill the need for punishment as the weapons provide a needed deterrent for those that break international law or commit the act of war. On the other hand, the continued ownership of nuclear weapons provides us with punishment being indiscriminate. In Locke’s Contract, punishment must be directed at those that deserve it. In the case of a nuclear weapon, to use it in war would be to punish everyone in the blast range, innocent or not. Furthermore, if governments are keeping the weapons to enforce their own legitimacy or to defend their ruling power from outside forces, then they are not looking inward to what is in the best interest of the people and thus the action does not meet the criteria of Locke. This description is a very brief view of social contract theory regarding nuclear weapons. It also only looks at one theorist when there are over half a dozen that could be used in this debate. If you do chose to use the Locke flavor of contract, the end impact to democracy will likely be democracy promotion. Larry Diamond and his writings from 1995, 1997. And 2004 all have good warrants as to why democracy is a good and just form of government. For a negative team, you just need to flip the link and turn the contract to your advantage.

Sample Evidence

John Locke's 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (in Chapter VII, "Of Political or Civil Society"): they are clearly about the social contract but only mention the right to operationalize the law of nature in detailed legislation, judge according to those laws, and mete out appropriate punishments:

§. 88. And thus the commonwealth comes by a power to set down what punishment shall belong to the several transgressions which they think worthy of it, committed amongst the members of that society, (which is the power of making laws) as well as it has the power to punish any injury done unto any of its members, by any one that is not of it, (which is the power of war and peace;) and all this for the preservation of the property of all the members of that society, as far as it is possible. But though every man who has entered into civil society, and is become a member of any commonwealth, has thereby quitted his power to punish offences, against the law of nature, in prosecution of his own private judgment, yet with the judgment of offences, which he has given up to the legislative in all cases, where he can appeal to the magistrate, he has given a right to the commonwealth to employ his force, for the execution of the judgments of the commonwealth, whenever he shall be called to it; which indeed are his own judgments, they being made by himself, or his representative. And herein we have the original of the legislative and executive power of civil society, which is to judge by standing laws, how far offences are to be punished, when committed within the commonwealth; and also to determine, by occasional judgments founded on the present circumstances of the fact, how far injuries from without are to be vindicated; and in both these to employ all the force of all the members, when there shall be no need.

§. 89. Wherever therefore any number of men are so united into one society, as to quit every one his executive power of the law of nature, and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political, or civil society. And this is done, wherever any number of men, in the state of nature, enter into society to make one people, one body politic, under one supreme government; or else when any one joins himself too, and incorporates with any government already made; for hereby he authorizes the society, or which is all one, the legislative thereof, to make laws for him, as the public good of the society shall require: to the execution whereof, his own assistance (as to his own decrees) is due. And this puts men out of a state of nature into that of a commonwealth, by setting up a judge on earth, with authority to determine all the controversies, and redress the injuries that may happen to any member of the commonwealth; which judge is the legislative, or magistrates appointed by it. And wherever there are any number of men, however associated, that have no such decisive power to appeal to, there they are still in the state of nature.

Nuclear weapons are counterproductive for democracy

Kennette Benedict, 2-24-2014, "Can true democracy exist in a nuclear weapon state?," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2014/02/can-true-democracy-exist-in-a-nuclear-weapon- state/

Nuclear weapons and democracy do not mix. So argued Robert Dahl, a revered political scientist at Yale University, who died in February at the age of 98. His book Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy versus Guardianship is a powerful statement on the inherent contradiction between deploying nuclear weapons and governing by democracy. In it he observes that secrecy in nuclear policymaking coupled with the centralized and rapid decision making required by launch-on-warning protocols results in rule by guardians of the nuclear arsenal, rather than the people and their representatives.

While we mourn the passing of a great theorist of democracy, we are fortunate that, in her new book Thermonuclear Monarchy, Elaine Scarry takes up where Dahl and others left off. Where Dahl drew on Aristotle’s theories, Scarry draws from the 17th century political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, to show that nuclear weapons and democracy are contradictory. What makes Scarry’s argument so original is that she lodges the rationale for ridding our society of nuclear weapons in the very theoretical traditions, especially in Hobbes’ work, that have been used to justify leaders’ power to use nuclear weapons. In doing so, she reclaims the radically democratic intentions of Hobbes, Locke, and the founders of the United States.

The speed at which nuclear war moves means the executive gets unlimited power

Boston Review, 9-26-1983, "The Contradiction of Nuclear Democracy," http://bostonreview.net/us/elaine-scarry-nuclear-weapons

SW: Getting back to the consent issue—as it applies to all of these weapons—part of the reason there’s so much power invested in the executive is that there’s this rhetoric, and maybe reality, of very high- speed war making. We’re always on an imminent footing. Do you think that is a fair characterization of the American national security status? Are we under imminent threat?

ES: For sure, if you have nuclear weapons in the world, we’re under imminent threat. And more important, our larger threat is the one we pose to other countries. Joseph Gerson from American Friends shows in his books, in addition to the ten times where we’ve actually come close to using nuclear weapons, there are lots of times where we’ve actually used them, in his view, by threat, in order to get what we want from people. But the whole idea of eliminating them is to eliminate them from all the world’s people, and my assumption is that you can’t eliminate them from the world’s people if you don’t begin by eliminating what is by far the most powerful arsenal, namely our own.

Why does India have nuclear weapons? Why does North Korea? Because when they went to the International Court of Justice in 1995 they said to the court, “We don’t have them yet, but we’re going to get them if they’re not declared illegal.” Other countries, too, are saying that if the nuclear states don’t honor Article 6 of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires the nuclear states to give up their arms, then they’re going to get them too. So, yes, if you assume that we have them and they have them, then we’re all under immediate threat.

And yes, we’re living in a time when things are so rapid that there’s not even time for one person to make a decision, let alone more than one person to make a decision. But look at the absurdity of it. Why aren’t we getting rid of the things that put us in a situation where thousands of lives, millions of lives, are at stake, and we feel obliged, because there’s no time, to say, “Go ahead, leave it up to the one person who can do it.”

There was a very important article in the year 2000 by Bill Joy. It was about whether robots could carry out a revolution against their human makers, whether robotics and other kinds of new technologies— nanotechnology and being able to generate life and so forth—could eliminate the human species. And surprisingly for someone in the technological world, as Bill Joy is, he was arguing that there’s a real danger. And the whole article seemed like a fantasy and science fiction, until he said, again I’m paraphrasing, “Well, we already have the paradigm instance, which is nuclear weapons. Because they can eliminate us, and we can’t eliminate them.” We’ve built so much power and so much will into weapons technology; you feel you can’t undo it, and yet it’s going to annihilate us.

Further Reading

Kavka, Gregory S. “NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WORLD GOVERNMENT.” The Monist, vol. 70, no. 3, 1987, pp. 298–315. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27903036.

Institute of Medicine (US) Steering Committee for the Symposium on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War; Solomon F, Marston RQ, editors. The Medical Implications of Nuclear War. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1986. The Consequences of Nuclear War: An Economic and Social Perspective. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219185/

Scarry, Elaine "Constitutional Narratives," Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol2/iss1/9/

Scarry, Elaine. Thermonuclear Monarchy : Choosing Between Democracy and Doom. First edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Scarry, Elaine. “War and the Social Contract: Nuclear Policy, Distribution, and the Right to Bear Arms.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 139, no. 5, 1991, pp. 1257–1316. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3312365.

Survival

I know what many people are thinking, “hasn’t everything in this brief thus far been about surviving?” True, but what I’m referring to here are smaller advantages that show the use of nuclear weapons to the extent that they can be considered tools in a toolbox rather than weapons of war. I’ve combined several scenarios into this section as each scenario has enough to find under the heading but is too short to justify its own heading. In considering what to put here, I went with the most popular ideas that might or might not consider practical but at one time or another in the last few decades, they have been used for this purpose, discussed for this purpose, or are still being discussed for this purpose. I would like to mention that spark will NOT be discussed here as those arguments are being put in their own section. The first is stopping oil spills. As was demonstrated by the BP Gulf Spill, oil spills can take weeks to shut off and can cost billions in damages and cover an area the size of a small state. The shocking thing about this spill however is that it doesn’t even crack the top 10 in terms of cost, size, or impact to the environment. In fact, that year alone, there were three more oil spills around the world that rates worst. The main problem with oil spills like the BP disaster is that they are considered “Deep Earth” drills and thus, when they start spilling due to a broken pipe or a damaged shutdown valve, the spill is deep underground and hard to plug. On land, it gets slightly eaisier as you don’t have to fight hundreds of thousands of feet of water but when the spill occurs underwater, you have a situation where every drop will spread, and time is of the essence. The solution to this was discovered by the Russians in the 1970’s when a pipe broke in a Baltic Sea drill rig. The rig was gushing oil and could not be shut down, so the Russians slant drilled a second hole in a matter of a week and lowered a very small nuclear weapon into the hole. The detonation fused the rock into glass and caved in the original well, shutting down the spill and continuing the radiation underground in the oil chamber. The Russians would use this technique several more times in the 1980’s to shut down spills in a faction of the time it would have taken for them to seal them up via conventional means. To read and win this argument, you will need impacts to oil spills causing biodiversity loss or economic collapse. Second, we go back to the 1990’s and the birth of the movie category I like to call “Earth is screwed.” In this category, the Earth is about to be destroyed either from things falling onto it or things eruption from it. Such hits like Tommy Lee Jone’s Volcano, and Will Smith’s Independence Day fit into this category. But the 90’s also have us the “space rock” movie. In this type, a giant space rock or comet has taken aim at Earth and the only group of people that can save the Earth are a group of misfits (insert social renegated here) on a spaceship packing a nuclear weapon. Back in the 1990’s and for a few years before this, the idea of extinction from space rock was being floated around NASA. Many military officials felt that the worry was for nothing as if we needed to, we could use a nuclear weapon to send a deadly space rock off

course or blow it to dust before it hit. Modern science says that any space rock that could cause extinction would laugh at and take the force of every nuclear weapon on Earth and just keep coming, so our scientists and military experts had to think of real answers (we haven’t yet). However, for a smaller object, perhaps the size of the object that exploded over Russia a few years ago, if we could detect it with enough time, a small nuclear explosion in space might destroy it before it can hit land and do moderate damage to a city. To win this, you will need a realistic impact that talks about devastation done to a small city rather than ending all life on Earth. No aff should lose to the Armageddon Aff straight up but they might lose to a small city devastated by exploding comet aff. ***note that every movie I made fun of here are some of my favorites and I’d stop debate research any day of the week to watch one.*** Terraforming planets. This one is close to the fringes but still exists as a serious thought. Planets with potentially habitable landscapes but with little atmospheres might receive a benefit from the explosion of a few nuclear bombs in their upper atmospheres. This is a rouge scientific theory but it has been located around as a potential means to get Mars up to livable temperatures. The idea is that the interaction in the very high reaches of an atmosphere between the nuclear radiation and sun and natural gases of the planet will form a greenhouse effect that over time will warm the planet, thawing out the ice that exits into water and making the surface bearable for humans to at least inhabit. There are lots of technical issues with this but if you are going to argue that we need to “get off the rock” and the only way to find a habitable planet is to make one, then this might be an alternative. To back these arguments up, I would recommend a card from Carl Sagan and a value of survival. Survival is at the core of the resolution as the harms suffered upon the planet due to the expansion and continued exploitation of fossil fuels is leading the planet to destruction, and at the core, the subsidies for these fuels drives this destructive mindset.

Furthermore, survival must come first in this round. Our planet is one of a kind. On it's way out of the solar system, the Voyager space probes turned back one last time to take a picture of the solar system. In that photo, the Earth is just a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam of light. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan explains the importance of that picture. (Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994)

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on

the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Sample Evidence

Nuclear weapons increase diplomatic position and increase negotiation power

Gartzke and Kroenig, 2008 (Erik [Professor of political science, Columbia] and Matthew [asst. Professor, Georgetown], “A strategic approach to nuclear proliferation” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53.2)

Gartzke and Jo’s paper examines the effect of nuclear weapon possession on the probability of conflict. They find that nuclear weapons have no overall effect. Nuclear weapon states are neither more nor less likely to be involved in international disputes. Instead, they argue that even if nuclear weapons do not directly affect the probability of conflict, nuclear weapons status can still influence the allocation of resources and bargains in favor of nuclear powers. States may be able to use nuclear weapons strategically in order to garner international influence. To test the hypothesis that nuclear 12 weapon states enjoy greater influence, Gartzke and Jo examine whether nuclear possession affects patterns of diplomatic missions. Important states send and attract diplomatic missions to and from other nations. The authors build on previous research on diplomatic missions and carefully controls for other relevant factors including population and economic size. They find that nuclear weapon states tend to host greater numbers of diplomatic missions. The primary effect of nuclear proliferation on international politics is not a reduction or increase in the probability of conflict, but greater international influence for their possessors.

Nuclear war destroys ocean ecosystems

Harte, Professor of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley, 1984 (John,, “The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War”, p. 112-113)

The effect of a period of prolonged darkness on aquatic organisms has been estimated by experimentation in my laboratory and by mathematical modeling carried out by Drs. Chris McKay and Dave Milne. Both types of research produced similar results. Food chains composed of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish are likely to suffer greatly from light extinction. After just a few days of darkness, phytoplankton—the base of the food chain—would die off or go into a dormant stage. Within roughly two months in the temperate zone in late spring or summer, and within three to six months in that zone in winter, aquatic animals would show drastic population declines that for many species could be irreversible. These estimates (based on light reduction) probably underestimate the consequences for marine life of post–nuclear-war conditions because they take no account of thermal effects, and they do not include the effect of increased water turbidity arising from shoreline erosion and from soot and dust deposition. The sensitivity of marine life in the tropics to prolonged darkness is likely to be greater than that of marine life in the temperate zone because nutrient reserves are lower and metabolic requirements are greater in the tropics. In the polar regions, where adaptation to dark winters is a requirement for life, the sensitivity would be lessened. Freshwater lakes would become highly anoxic after the dust settles and the temperatures increase. Massive amounts of organic wastes, including thawing corpses, would render water supplies lethal. There is little reason to believe that the major forms of aquatic life that presently serve as food sources for us would survive a nuclear war occurring in spring or summer in sufficient numbers to be of much use to human beings, at least in the first few postwar years.

All life on earth is dependent upon the oceans-if it dies we die

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1998

(Year of the Ocean Report, http://www.yoto98.noaa.gov/yoto/meeting/mar_env_316.html) storm frequency; this flooding can reduce wetland acreage and increase sediment and nutrient flows into the Gulf of Mexico, causing adverse impacts on water quality and reducing habitat for commercial fisheries. This in turn drives up the cost of fish at local markets nationwide. The environment and the economic health of marine and coastal waters are linked at the individual, community, state, regional, national and international levels. The interdependence of the economy and the environment are widely recognized. The United States has moved beyond viewing health, safety, and pollution control as additional costs of doing business to an understanding of broader stewardship, recognizing that economic and social prosperity would be useless if the coastal and marine environments are compromised or destroyed in the process of development (President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 1996).Much about the ocean, its processes, and the interrelationship between land and sea is unknown. Many harvested marine resources depend upon a healthy marine environment to exist. Continued research is needed so that sound management decisions can be made when conflicts among users of ocean resources arise. Although much progress has been made over the past 30 years to enhance marine environmental quality and ocean resources, much work remains. The challenge is to maintain and continue to improve marine water quality as more people move to the coasts and the pressures of urbanization increase. Through education, partnerships, technological advances, research, and personal responsibility, marine environmental quality should continue to improve, sustaining resources for generations to come. "It does not matter where on Earth you live, everyone is utterly dependent on the existence of that lovely, living saltwater soup. There’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water. The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That’s why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we’ll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one."

Surviving Nuclear War is nearly impossible—even if we survive blast, radiation will kill us.

Moti Nissani, writer who has examined the reception new scientific discoveries have received in history, 1992 (Lives in the Balance: the Cold War and American Politics, 1945-1991, http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/PAGEPUB/CH2.html) JDM

Some 15 percent of the bomb's energy is taken up by ionizing radiation. From the psychological point of view, and from the point of view of humankind's long-term future, radiation is perhaps the most frightening direct effect of nuclear explosions. We can sense blast, heat, and fire, but we can't detect ionizing radiation (except at very high intensities when it produces a tingling sensation4) without the aid of special instruments; we can be irradiated to death without knowing it. Unlike fire and blast, ionizing radiation not only damages our health, but, through its potential impact on fetuses and on reproductive cells, it may damage the health of our descendants. Though the heat and the blast wreak incredible havoc, their direct effects are gone within seconds, or, in the case of the fires they cause, within hours or days. In contrast, poisonous radioactivity may linger for years. X-rays are the most familiar type of ionizing radiation. Owing to their ability to penetrate the human body, they are widely used as a

diagnostic tool. But even when used in minuscule doses (as in dental examinations), X-rays can cause slight problems by damaging, or ionizing, the chemical constituents of our bodies. Two overlapping schemes are used to classify the ionizing radiations produced by nuclear bombs. The first, which will not be taken up here, is based on their ability to penetrate matter. The second scheme is based on their order of appearance. Initial radiation is released within the first minute of an explosion. It accounts for about 5 percent of the bomb's energy. The initial radiation of a 12.5 kt explosion will knock unconscious people standing in the open at a distance of less than half a mile from ground zero. These people will die from radiation sickness within two days (even if they somehow managed to escape the heat and blast). People standing in the open three-quarters of a mile away will die within one month.6b Given these three powerful effects-blast, heat, initial radiation-the chances of survival are slim for anyone within a one mile radius of a small nuclear explosion. With larger explosions, or with multiple detonations in one area, the lethal range is greater. Those who manage to survive all three must still deal with radioactive fallout (also called residual radiation). Fallout takes some 10 percent of the bomb's energy. Fallout is emitted by fission products such as radioactive iodine, weapon residues such as plutonium and radioactive hydrogen, and substances in the vicinity of the explosion which became radioactive as a result of exposure to the bomb's initial radiation. Radioactive fallout is usually classified into two components, early and delayed. Early fallout reaches the ground within 24 hours of the explosion. Delayed fallout reaches the ground after 24 hours. Early fallout is also called local fallout because it tends to remain in the vicinity of the explosion site. Delayed fallout is also called global fallout because it can take months or years to come down to earth, during which time it can be carried to all corners of the globe.

Nuclear war causes massive forest loss, soil erosion and climate change

Woodwell, of Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole,1983 (G.M. Director, in “The Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War”, ed. Peterson, p. 135-138)

The radiation exposures required to transform a forested zone into an impoverished landscape are well within the range of contemporary war, a few hundred to many thousands of roetgens. The areas affected might be large, tens to hundreds of square miles per bomb. Enough bombs are available that minor military and civilian centers, universities, colleges, small industrial or scientific centers, even individual laboratories, can all be individually favored with nuclear attention, providing overlapping zones affected by blast, heat and ionizing radiation from the fireballs. The fallout fields will also overlap, and cover hundreds of thousands of square miles.The biotic effects of such transitions are beyond human experience. The uncertainties of weather would cause anomalies in the distribution of fallout, sparing some areas, depositing heavier doses elsewhere. The result would probably be a mottled necrosis of the landscape, with whole valleys escaping virtually untouched by fallout, others scorched by radiation and subsequently by fires feeding on the devastation. The process started by irradiation from fallout would proceed variously in different places. Certain areas of the tropics serve as a model for impoverishment: once the tree canopy has been destroyed, the soils made vulnerable to erosion, and the stock of nutrients lost, the potential for recovery to forest is lost indefinitely. In other areas recovery is rapid, soils are not lost, fires do not compound the damage and the site becomes revegetated with forest in a decade or so. Between these extremes lie a full range of intermediate possibilities, all of which involve varying degrees of biotic impoverishment. (However, an increased frequency of the small-bodied, rapidly- reproducing organisms that we so often find in competition with man and label "pests" can be expected. a corollary of the disturbance is the stimulation of indigenous pests that thrive on weakened plants. For instance Ips, a bark-beetle destroyed weakened pines in the Brookhaven Irradiated Forest, and extraordinarily high populations of aphids and other insects occurred on radiation weakened trees). The impoverishment includes the loss of both forest products for man and the loss of the array of services the biota normally performs in maintaining an environment suitable for man.I have emphasized effects on forests because forests dominate the natural vegetation in most of the habitable sections of the globe. Forests, moreover, have an extraordinarily large influence on the rest of the biosphere. They have the capacity for fixing and releasing enough carbon to change the CO2 content of the atmosphere by several parts per million in a few weeks. The massive destruction of forests following an exchange of nuclear weapons can be expected to contribute a further surge in the rate of release of CO2 from the biota and soils into the atmosphere, compounding the growing problem of a CO2-caused climatic warming. Such analyses, however, are sufficiently complex and uncertain to be speculative, and require a much more elaborate analysis than can be offered here.

Further Reading

Chazov, cochairman of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1985 (Yevgeny, Tragedy and Triumph of Reason, Nobel Lecture, December 11, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1985/physicians-lecture.html)

Fowler Cary and Mooney Pat, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix

Phillips, 2000 PhD, Physics, Cambridge, (Alan, , Nuclear Winter Revisited, Oct, www.peace.ca/nuclearwinterrevisited.htm)

Robock Alan and. Stenchikov Gerogly L Climate Model. Journal of Geophysical Research. Revised April 2007. Accessed 7/15/09 http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~gera/nwinter/nw6accepted.pdf

Sagan and Turco, astrophysicist and astronomer at Cornell University, and founding director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment, 1990

Accidents/Disposal

“I don't know what's scarier, losing a nuclear weapon or that it happens so often there’s actually a term for it.’- Broken Arrow

I don’t nor can I speak for others, but I can’t keep track of my car keys. I have left them in my car overnight wile at debate tournaments, in the door to my classroom, on the counter by the copier, and surprisingly, never in the dish marked “keys” in my kitchen. I’m like most people in the world. I have a hard time keeping track of some things. For others, this might be a phone or where they parked their car, or in the case of the military, our nuclear weapons arsenal. Now, I’m not saying that this is entirely common place nor is a close call denotes abolition, but when you are dealing with something as severe as the most destructive weapons on Earth, slip up can be too many, one accident the trigger, and the consequences devastating. First, let’s look to the facilities that store our weapons. As of now, most data are from the US as most nations keep their launch information secret for national security purposes. Nuclear warhead on “ready launch” status is stored in Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and Wyoming. At a complex in Wyoming, a blast door was found to have no locking mechanism. When asked why, the officer in charge said that a request for a new one had been put in for years, but no supplies had been sent. The door was propped open and wedged closed by use of a door stop fashioned in the auto shop. In North Dakota, 17 officers in charge of launch procedure were removed from command in 2016 after they received a “D” grade on their knowledge and preparedness tests. In Montana, officers fared better. This might have been due to one officer texting others the answers of the test before they took it. Finally, in Montana, exterior doors that keep people out of the silos that are supposed to be kept closed were wide open. Inside, the guards were asleep at their posts. This was discovered by a pizza delivery driver who was dropping off food and made it past the front gate without having his ID checked or verification inside to check if anyone had really ordered a pizza. Looking past the site incidents, let’s look to the accidents with the weapons themselves that have almost led to us accidentally blowing ourselves up or starting a world war. These examples primarily concern the US and Russia as other nations are not as willing to share their data. But there is enough here that it should still leave a memory. Also note that this list is not comprehensive. If I were to event mention all the incidents, you’d be reading this until the March/April topic brief was released. The list in all seriousness has hundreds of incidents. What I’ve compiled here is a choice few came the closest to destruction. In 1961 over Goldsborough, North Carolina, a B 17 bomber was on a routine training mission when it struck a goose and the plane broke apart. On board were two thermonuclear weapons. One was not armed and landed safely in a river outside of town. The other somehow

armed the trigger and began an altitude countdown. However, at the precise altitude set before takeoff, the trigger shorted out and the bomb crashed harmlessly into a swamp within range of the church and school. Had the bomb detonated, the town would have been destroyed along with thousands of people. In Arkansas at one of the few silos that exists outside of the Rocky Mountains, a socket wrench was dropped by a worker down the launch shaft. This wrench hit a hose on the way down causing a fuel spill that caught fire, the fuel tanks exploded. The warhead would have detonated had the trigger not melted from the heat first. In 2007, four nuclear tipped cruise missiles were loaded by accident onto a plane, unloaded at a commercial airport and sat on the end of a runway for 36 hours with no guards. Their nuclear triggers were armed. Besides that, you have incidents of lost warheads due to vehicle malfunction. If you want a visual representation, think of the first five minutes to the movie The Sum of All Fears. In the 1960’s, the French, Israelis, Russians, and US lost submarines in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. The French, Russian, and US subs were known to have been carrying nuclear weapons. Of note was the USS Thresher whose batteries created toxic and explosive hydrogen gas when exposed to salt water and caused it to sink and the Russian Kursk that sank after the air tanks failed to blow and let the vessel rise. Both were lost for decades with their total of eight nuclear warheads lost. It was only after decades of searching and the biggest coverup by the government that the Thresher was found. Bob Ballard was tasked with finding the Thresher using his new underwater unmanned sub. To hide the search area, he told everyone he was searching for the wreck of the Titanic. Although he failed to find the Thresher, he did discover the Titanic. It would be a decade later, but he would eventually find the Thresher with all the warheads still in their tubes. The Russian sub was never found. A small French first strike sub was lost in the 19601’s while helping the US search for the Thresher and it’s wreckage and two nuclear warheads are still lost. Furthermore, looking back on the contents of the brief, there are numerous accidents that have been averted. From holding back in the Cuban Missile Crisis to not truing the key in the 1990’s, our destruction has been kept at bay by cooler heads and calm judgement. However, as was stated earlier, all it takes is one accident and one slip to cause the final countdown to start.

Above is a good justification for disarming the weapons and voting pro. However, the flip side ot this coin is the products created by abolition. If we debate in a traditional LD world where we defend the hypothesis that is the resolution, then we can void the argument that is “but what about the waste created by disarming?” However, this is a question that in a world where debaters value fiat and the concept of real-world impacts, we must consider. The waste created from disarming a nuclear bomb is as deadly and as numerous as what is produced by a nuclear power plant. In fact, old cores from nuclear weapons are reprocessed into nuclear fuel rods. This waste is harmful, hot, and takes up space. As of 2020, there is no good method for

disposal. In the past, the idea of burying the waste far underground was popular with policymakers until they realized that few people wanted nuclear waste dumps anywhere their homes. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s. the government attempted to bury the waste at mountain sites like Yucca, but pulled their plans when native tribes protested that not only should they be forced to live with a radioactive mountain on their land, but the burial locations were sacred to them. Above ground storage facilities in the Pacific Northwest store radioactive material in glass rods in pools of pater filled with graphite and iodine. These work for now but we are running out of space. Ideas of dumping the waste in deep sea trenches has been debated and in the 1950’s, waste from the manhatten Project was dumped 200 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. This was stopped after scientists found that the metal containers would rust over time and they didn’t know how the waste would react with saltwater. In areas like Russia or as we are seeing in India, Pakistan, and North Korea, waste is generally left in remote areas. In 2004, hikers in Russia, searching for warmth from a cold winter day, came across a site that was oddly devoid of snow. They settled in and made camp. In the center of this camp they discovered a small sphere that was radiating heat. They used this to cook their meals and as warmth. They were found in the morning, dead where they fell asleep, radiation blisters covering their skin. They had wandered into a dumping zone for old Russian bombs. The sphere was a core to an old atomic weapon. In India and Pakistan, and based on spy data, in North Korea, waste is being buried in shallow areas of military bases in remote locations. The impact to this is terrorism. Terrorists have stated in the past a desire to gain control of a nuclear weapon or nuclear material for a dirty bomb. Waste that is just sitting around in a forest makes an easy target. For those that wish to cause damage without the work, the US has rated the transport system for nuclear material to disposals sites as “poor.” Even the concept of lost weapons leads us to danger. Lots of rouge nations can recover debris from the ocean, so all it would take is for them to find the wrecks and they would or could have an instant bomb. So although we face harms from the maintenance of the weapons, we also face harms of the disarming of the weapons. In this debate, it will really come down to weighing of the impacts and balancing out that no one side will be entirely harm free. Both sides will have negatives, so it comes down to weighing and using your framework to adequately argue how the judge should prioritize impacts.

Sample Evidence

Permissive action links and combination locks that the operators don't know the codes to prevent even rogue launchers from using the weapons.

Slocombe 2009 (Walter B., Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, “De-Alerting: Diagnoses, Prescriptions, and Side-effects,” presented at the De-Alerting Seminar in Switzerland, http://www.ewi.info/system/files/Slocombe.pdf)

Let’s start with Technical Failure – the focus of a great deal of the advocacy, or at least of stress on past incidents of failures of safety and control mechanisms.4 Much of the “de-alerting” literature points to a succession of failures to follow proper procedures and draw from that history the inference that a relatively simple procedural failure could produce a nuclear detonation. The argument is essentially that nuclear weapons systems are sufficiently susceptible of pure accident (including human error or failure at operational/field level) that it is essential to take measures that have the effect of making it necessary to undertake a prolonged reconfiguration of the elements of the nuclear weapons force for a launch or detonation to be physically possible. Specific measures said to serve this objective include separating the weapons from their launchers, burying silo doors, removal of fuzing or launching mechanisms, deliberate avoidance of maintenance measures need to permit rapid firing, and the like. . My view is that this line of action is unnecessary in its own terms and highly problematic from the point of view of other aspects of the problem and that there is a far better option that is largely already in place, at least in the US force – the requirement of external information – a code not held by the operators -- to arm the weapons.

We aren't on hair trigger now.

Slocombe 9 (Walter B., Former Secretary of Defense, "De-Alerting: Diagnoses, Perscriptions, Side Effects", http://www.ewi.info/system/files/Slocombe.pdf)

My view is that this line of action is unnecessary in its own terms and highly problematic from the point of view of other aspects of the problem and that there is a far better option that is largely already in place, at least in the US force – the requirement of external information – a code not held by the operators -- to arm the weapons. Advocates of other, more “physical,” measures often describe the current arrangement as nuclear weapons being on a “hair trigger.” That is – at least with respect to US weapons – a highly misleading characterization. The “hair trigger” figure of speech confuses “alert” status – readiness to act quickly on orders – with susceptibility to inadvertent action. The “hair trigger” image implies that a minor mistake – akin to jostling a gun – will fire the weapon. The US StratCom commander had a more accurate metaphor when he recently said that US nuclear weapons are less a pistol with a hair trigger than like a pistol in a holster with the safety turned on – and he might have added that in the case of nuclear weapons the “safety” is locked in place by a combination lock that can only be opened and firing made possible if the soldier carrying the pistol receives a message from his chain of command giving him the combination.

Nuclear waste creates a unique environmental harm. Care must be taken before disposal. Damages have the potential to be devastating

Hawkins, Gay 2004. senior lecturer, university of new south wales Culture and Waste 48-51

We're swimming in shit; that's Beder's bottom line. And this archetypal scene of horror and contamination is also the theme in a recent public education campaign run by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Central to this campaign was a graphic television advertisement. It began with images of a man washing his car on the street without any concern for the liters of soapy water draining into the stormwater system. The next scene cut to the interior of the drain where soapy water gushes on its way accompanied by street detritus: empty bottles, plastic bags, rubbish. The final scene returns to the car washer now at leisure swimming in a pristine river surrounded by bush, an image of Eden. He dives underwater and surfaces with a plastic bag clinging to his shoulder. With a shudder of horror he flicks it off. A stern voice-over instructs us: "the drain is just for rain." This is a depiction of a disturbing encounter in which the multidimensional politics of disturbance are resolutely denied. The EPA allows for no ambiguity about the status of waste: it is unequivocally bad. It is matter out of place, contaminating the purity of the natural with its sticky persistence. There is only one response to it: disgust. The contents of the drain disrupt the binary between pure and impure and in the same moment remind us that binaries are more often than not unequal relations. For in this ad contamination is not simply purity's other, it is the lesser and devalued term in a moral framework. Disturbing encounters with drains become the opportunity for political instruction, for the reinforcement of moral codes and selfdiscipline. The complexity of our everyday relations with drains, of contradictory affects, is suppressed in the impulse to reform. But it's not just the power of the visceral that is denied in this lesson; it is also the force of secrecy. This ad takes us inside a drain; it shows us the things drains are designed to hide. It exposes a secret and the effect is strangely numbing, more like watching a worthy documentary than a horror movie. In this pedagogic context cinema vênte's appeal to "the shocking truth" denies the disturbing and ambiguous nature of public secrecy, the sense in which our active not knowing makes the contents of drains already familiar. In the EPA campaign truth is resolutely opposed to secrecy, but the effect is hardly enlightening, because we already know this history, we've smelt it. This is a revelation that denies the energized configuration between truth and secrecy, a revelation that does not do justice to the secret. Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing is driven by exactly the same logic: revelation in the name of environmental "awareness." Like the EPA it is blind to the social power of the negative, to the force of the desire to keep shit out of sight and the way sewers are implicated in this. Both these accounts of drains read pollution as a transgression of the taboo on purity, but they are unable to see that transgression does not so much break the taboo as suspend it, creating a strange space where new dynamics might come into play. Thinking about beach pollution in these terms, rather than in the dominant ones of the environmental movement, would render the moment of traumatic revelation a chance encounter with the sacred, a startling bringing into being of the force and beauty of the natural; a magnification rather than a destruction of value. But this is a value built on ambivalence, a value that forces us to acknowledge how much the desire for a deodorized self and world depends on active not seeing, on the denial of all those drains snaking their way along the bottom of the ocean. In the home, drains release us from this ambivalence. Their location in those two sites of domestic purification, the kitchen and the bathroom, facilitate the endless process of escaping what isn't connected to self. At the beach drains and their smells remind us that our waste hasn't really been mastered. Our rituals of cleansing and disposal are enfolded with this landscape, our personal secrets are implicated in the public secret of sanitation. The problem with much environmental thinking is the tendency toward ecological righteousness. It too readily derives its authority from fundamentalist assumptions about nature and purity. And it presumes that "truth" exists in an unproblematic relation with falsity, lies, or deception. What then are the effects of environmentalism's techniques of revelation? To reinforce the moral superiority of environmental campaigners, to fuel resentment toward state power and rampaging capital, to reform the population? Reasonable effects in the search for environmental justice, but also seriously limited because this form of environmentalism is absolutely continuous with that which it critiques. The desire of official environmentalism, such as employed by the EPA, to improve the waste habits of recalcitrant subjects completely ignores the ways in which modern waste infrastructure creates ocean pollution. Reforming personal relations with drains does not change a whole history of sewer construction in which rivers and oceans were used as convenient sites of elimination. These accounts of shit also deny a range of political responses and forms of power, thereby foreclosing other reactions to pollution beyond moralism or resentment and its various states of grievance and injury. They insist on maintaining the moral purity of categories—truth, lies, clean, dirty—and they deploy a very closed critical method that excludes a more porous field of responses. Ultimately, this produces a blindness to how experiences of horror, grief, messiness, disgust—all those multidimensional registers of disturbance in the body— could be crucial sources of ethical and political thinking. Environmentalism too often refuses to put the goal of purity up for reconsideration. Yet that is precisely what you have to do when you walk into the surf at Bondi. Swimming there means being anxious about what you cannot see and forgetting about it, letting go of critical faculties, being relieved of doubts, believing in the public secret. THE POLITICS OF DISTURBANCE Putting purity up for reconsideration does not mean accepting the desecration of oceans in the name of waste management. This is an obscenity in any language. Rather, it means thinking differently about ethico-political responses and their sources of authority.

This is Connolly's argument in the final chapter of Why I Am Not a Secularist: A Critique of Pure Politics, where he develops a compelling argument against morality as law and politics. If "pure, practical reason," as Kant calls it, governs moral judgment, what then of all those messy, impure sensations and desires that register in the body? What, then, of feelings? Sacrificed or disciplined in order that reason and morality remain uncontaminated. Yet it is precisely this fear of disturbance and ambiguity that limits the possibilities of new political relations and responses, new sensibilities for our waste. That's why Connolly turns to Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benedict de Spinoza to explore the role of bodily discordance and the visceral register in ethical thinking and politics. For each of these thinkers in different ways assumes the plurivocity of being, each is open to the impure and unstable forms body and politics take in a rhizomatic culture: An ethic of cultivation must also attend . . . to the politics of becoming, to that politics by which old rules, laws and identities are disturbed as new possibilities of life are propelled into being. Such a double attentiveness subtracts simplicity from ethics; it folds ambiguity and complexity into its very core while calling into question the sufficiency of morality as law to the politics of becoming.2° Using disturbances to cultivate new relations with waste is the radical possibility of Connolly's argument. And it leads to the example of the house without drains. I'm standing in the backyard of an inner city terrace in the late winter sun, with my small son and a group of strangers. We're on a tour of Sydney's sustainable house, a house without infrastructure, an old house sitting very lightly on the ground. We've seen the solar panels covering most of the roof, the water tank to catch rainwater for drinking; the complex brown water recycling system. It is remarkable, but I'm wondering about shit. Some of the group is sitting on a narrow enclosed wooden bench running the length of the side fence listening to Michael, the owner, explain how the solar power gets converted. Then someone asks my question: "Where's the sewerage system?" Michael walks over to the bench and opens a lid; a rich fecund smell escapes. "You're sitting on it; the flushing toilet pushes the waste into this worm farm specially designed for shit." People peer into the bench, noses crinkled. It's not a stagnant smell, not malodorous—more like a hint of shit mixed with abundant life. My son refuses to look. Then Michael walks to a tap at the end of the box and fills a glass with liquid. He holds it up to the amazed crowd: it's perfectly clear. There's a kind of theatricality in his gestures; it's like a magic show. "You could drink this," he says, handing it to my son. "Go on, try it." "No thanks," says a horrified and embarrassed child. A ripple of laughter spreads through the group, no one else volunteers. Purity and danger, the moment of laughter releasing the tension of a taboo transgressed. I remember this scene vividly because of the drama of revelation: the unmasking of the garden bench was so surprising, so unexpected, and the nature of its secret so disturbing. Shit accumulating in your backyard, being your responsibility; not at all unusual for rural residents but startling for those accustomed to living with the easy convenience of sanitation. How to make sense of this moment? A triumphant display of the power of recycling, of course, but there was something else. A sense of being ethically disturbed, of being forced to consider all the other possibilities for shit apart from ocean outfalls: What would these mean for notions of purity and its borders? Here was a house where waste wasn't eliminated, but managed; where a different relation to shit was in play: a relation of relationality. All the quotidian rituals of caring for the worm farm, keeping it functioning efficiently have implications for more than sustainability and the environment. These daily practices and habits have effects on the self. Different technologies of waste management show how corporeal disciplines and symbolic systems intersect and how these points of intersection can be transformed, used to generate different micropolitics of the self and responses to shit. Acknowledging our co-existence with shit means giving up ethics and politics driven by the logic of purity; but this doesn't mean an embrace of messiness, disgust, impurity, unboundedness. In the house without drains a family lives happily and carefully with its shit. The people who come to visit (ecotourists, perhaps?) witness an experiment in a different art of living. When they confront the worm farm for shit masquerading as a garden seat, they experience another way of ordering the relation between pure and impure. A secret revealed not to expose a truth, but to thicken meaning.21

Further Reading

Blairm Bruce, 2008. President of the World Security Institute and former Minuteman launch officer, February 27, “Increasing Warning and Decision Time (‘De-Alerting’)” http://disarmament.nrpa.no/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/Paper_Blair.pdf]

Esin 2009 (General Viktor Esin (Ret.), June 23 09, “Crossing Obstacles and Implementation of De-alert Approach,” http://www.ewi.info/system/files/Esin.pdf)

Karas 2001 [4/01, Thomas H.: Principal Member, Sandia National Laboratories Technical Staff and Advanced Concepts Group and former member of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. “De-Alerting and De-Activating Strategic Nuclear Weapons,” Advanced Concepts Group, Sandia National Laboratories: Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy: p. 12.)

Rosenberg 2006 [staff writer“Experts Warn of Accidental Atomic War” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/06/MNGF9LJSMM1.DTL]

Slocombe 2009 [The Honorable Walter B. Slocombe, June 2009. De-Alerting: Diagnoses, Prescriptions, and Side-Effects, East West Institute. http://www.ewi.info/system/files/Slocombe.pdf

Spark

Ok, before we start on this argument, I’m setting a few ground rules. First, this will not venture into wipeout. I’m not going to debate the existence of aliens or whether their lives would be better by human extinction. I’m also not going to argue Schopenhauer. I draw the link at arguing collective suicide good. What this argument will cover is good old-fashioned spark, nuclear war good for real change. Second, even in this form, you are running the risk that judges will just not be willing to vote for you. Even flow-based judges can and will have a hard time voting for the idea that in some way, nuclear war is a good idea and that the deaths of millions of people is a good thing. It’s not impossible, and I’ve won debates running spark before, but it takes a lucky draw, lots of practice, and the right judge. This is a special argument that works like a glass canon. Once people realize you are running spark, it won’t be long before people have prep outs ready and you will be as toast as the cities you hoped to nuke. Spark works on the idea that the horrors of a nuclear war haven’t been seen in almost 80 years. This is shown by the sheer amount of people today that are willing to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons in combat against enemies like ISIS or as a deterrent to China in the South China Sea. This is a dangerous mentality because of the reasons stated above in other arguments. Nuclear war is a horrific experience that left thousands maimed and disfigured after the atomic attacks in Japan. Under this precedent, it would be almost impossible to get any sort of disarmament plan on the affirmative passed as our love of nuclear weapons is too high and our knowledge about the effects is too low. The second part of this argument relies on the wording of the resolution. The resolution states that there must be an elimination of these weapons. The means to which we eliminate the weapons is not specified. Using this logic, the affirmative would argue that traditional disarmament would fail due to lack of empathy with the horrors of nuclear war, second, the advocacy would be that at the first available chance, all states should eliminate their weapons via launching a limited nuclear strike on any target of their choice. The key word here is “limited.” Third, the affirmative would then read cards about the horrors of a nuclear war and how the only path to true abolition is for people to dee the destruction firsthand. The few caveats and blocks you will need for the 1AR would be a spike out on the world “limited” in the plan text. By restricting your advocacy to a limited strike, you remove the odds that there is a world ending number of nuclear weapons used. Second, you will need blocks that argue that a limited nuclear war is survivable and won’t totally collapse society. Third, you will need blocks that defend that killing hundreds of thousands of people, potentially even millions of people is worth it to save the planet from a larger uncontrolled nuclear war. Fourth, you will need blocks that without total abolition now, there will be an uncontrolled nuclear war.

In case, you will want to have a defense of future life on Earth. Bostrom is a good card on this as he argues that there is some trillions of lives that will exist before the sun expands by 1% and roasts the Earth into a cinder in 100 million years. So killing a few million people now is worth it if we can save the lives of the trillions that have yet to live. The biggest issue you will have besides the arguments that nuclear war will lead to extinction and the war will be uncontrolled is that of morality and the deliberate sacrifice of human life does not treat people as ends unto themselves but as tools to achieve policy goals. The argument that allows you hedge back against this is that morality stands to save the most lives and according to Bostrom, there are trillions of potential lives yet to be born. Now, from this set of arguments, you do get to wipeout and Schopenhauer. Mostly you’d modify it by arguing that there will be extinction and then taking the argument paths to the next level. But as stated above, I will stick with the general theory of spark and limited war leads to abolition. If you want to know more about the other arguments, I seriously recommend you ask a policy team or a coach. The arguments of wipeout and Schopenhauer are popular now in high school and they will be able to fill out in and get you the add on files you need to make the spark into something else entirely. If you are seriously interested in those arguments but don’t have access to a policy coach or team, send a message to the e-mail listed in the title page of this brief and I’ll give you a brief summary. (I chose to not include these arguments because including that are morally unsound in many people’s minds could get my e- mail account filled with angry coch complaints.) Note that those two arguments are even less accepted in LD than spark proper so you have been warned.

Sample Evidence

A limited nuclear conflict destroys the technology base and solves the overconsumption that stresses the biosphere.

Caldwell, 2008. (Joseph, PhD in mathematical statistics from UNC Chapel Hill. “The

Late Great United States: The Decline and Fall of the United States of America,” d/l: .)

So, from the point of view of what might stop the ongoing destruction of the biosphere, it does not really matter whether fossil fuels exhaust by 2050 or whether an energy replacement for them is found. The destruction of the biosphere and the mass species extinction began when mankind’s numbers and energy use reached its present high levels, and it will continue as long as those levels remain high, whatever the energy source may be. This section of this article is not concerned, however, with the issue of whether an energy replacement for oil will or will not be found. The purpose of this section is to identify events that might halt the destruction of the biosphere and mass species extinction that is being caused by large human numbers and industrial activity, i.e., to identify events that would reduce human numbers and industrial activity / energy use. One such event is the exhaustion of fossil fuels, but the biosphere will have been seriously damaged and possibly destroyed long before that, if the present rate of fossil-fuel consumption continues. We are hence more concerned here with events that might reduce human numbers and industrial activity before the end of the petroleum / fossil-fuel age.¶ Disease could wipe out mankind. It is clear that HIV/AIDS will not accomplish this – it is not even having a significant impact on slowing the population explosion in Africa, where prevalence rates reach over thirty percent in some countries. But a real killer plague could certainly wipe out mankind. The interesting thing about plagues, however, is that they never seem to kill everyone – historically, the mortality rate is never 100 per cent (from disease alone). Based on historical evidence, it would appear that, while plagues may certainly reduce human population, they are not likely to wipe it out entirely. This notwithstanding, the gross intermingling of human beings and other species that accompanies globalization nevertheless increases the likelihood of global diseases to high levels.¶ The introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the biosphere poses a danger similar to that of disease. When a plant GMO is created, its pollen spreads around the world. It is quite conceivable that much of mankind’s food supply could be eliminated, simply by a terrible error in which the introduction of one or more GMOs resulted in the global loss of harvests of a staple food, such as a cereal grain. And war. War could wipe out mankind . Not small wars, such as the scores of small conflicts that continue year after year. Not even big wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. But a really big war, involving thousands of nuclear weapons. That can make a real difference. Furthermore, it can bring an immediate halt to the high level of industrial activity that is destroying the planet. It can reduce human numbers to the point where they no longer have a significant impact on the planet’s ecology. The famous astronomer and writer Sir Fred Hoyle once observed that mankind will have only one chance to do something worthwhile with the energy from fossil fuel and the minerals at the Earth’s surface: if it ends up destroying the planet it will never have a second chance. Global industrialization is causing the destruction that Hoyle referred to. Global nuclear war could bring that process to a halt. This section has identified a number of phenomena that might bring a halt to mankind’s destruction of the biosphere. Some of them, such as asteroids or volcanoes, are beyond mankind’s control, and their occurrence has nothing to do with its large numbers and high industrial production / energy use. Of the anthropogenic factors that might reduce mankind’s destruction of the biosphere – famine, plague, and war – it appears that famine and plague would have little effect on stopping the mass species extinction. They may cause a temporary reduction in human numbers, but the population would rebound, and high levels of industrial production would continue, and damage to the biosphere would continue. The industrial nations of the world, which account for most of the global energy use, would likely continue in numbers and in industrial activity pretty much as before. These eventualities would do little to stop the destruction of the biosphere and the mass species extinction. But war is different. The main difference is not that it may reduce human numbers faster or to a greater degree than famine or plague, but that it can cause a catastrophic decrease in the level of industrial production, which is the major cause of environmental destruction. Also, it can occur at any

time – it does not have to wait until fossil fuels run out, after many more species have been destroyed. It can occur tomorrow, and prevent the species loss that would otherwise occur over the last half century of the petroleum age. By reducing industrial activity by a large amount, it could reduce the current horrific rate of consumption of fossil fuels, leaving some for many future generations to take advantage of – to use for mankind’s benefit, rather than for a few generations’ mindless pleasure. (Of course, economics does not distinguish between production spent on war or video games or tourism or religion or art or philosophy, and the discounted “present value” of things in the far distant future is negligible, so this argument is of little consequence in today’s world.) And the likelihood of its occurrence is increasing fast. The next two sections will discuss the likely damage from global nuclear war, and the likelihood of its occurrence.

A small-scale nuclear war would cause a revolution and bring social change

Martin, 1982. (Brian, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong. “How the Peace¶ Movement Should be Preparing for Nuclear War,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1982, pp. 149-159)

As well as encouraging moves towards repressive rule, the political and social upheaval resulting from nuclear war could also provide major opportunities for rapid social change in progressive directions.

Several factors would operate here.¶ (a) There would be worldwide anguish and outrage at any significant use of nuclear weapons against populations. This emotion could easily turn against established institutions.¶ (b) A nuclear war involving the US, Soviet Union and Europe would weaken or destroy the bases for imperialism and neocolonialism in poor countries, and stimulate widespread revolutionary action that could not be contained by local elites left without rich country support.¶ (c) In areas directly affected by nuclear attack, the destruction of established institutions would allow the creation of new structures.¶ Historically, periods of economic or military crisis often have preceded revolutionary change, though not always with desirable results. Crises provide opportunities for groups which are organised and able to take advantage of them. In the case of nuclear war, present governments have made some arrangements to preserve their type of rule after a nuclear war. By contrast, the peace movement is almost completely unprepared to respond to a crisis engendered by nuclear war.

One nuclear conflict leads to disarm.

In the context of a nuclear emergency or nuclear war, campaigns around peace conversion assume a new role and importance. In the throes of a nuclear crisis or the aftermath of nuclear war, opportunities may arise for direct action to disarm or convert military facilities. For example, if a limited nuclear war occurred in the Middle East or Europe, the popular upsurge of opinion may support worker or citizen intervention in nuclear weapons production facilities. Or in the aftermath of a major exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and the Soviet Union, there could still be armed nuclear submarines roaming the world's oceans, looking for a place to dock. What would be needed then would be popular support for disarming and/or disabling the submarine and its missiles, and for opposing local military elites or opportunists who might try to use the submarine's firepower for their own purposes. This means knowing how to undertake the nuts and bolts of disarmament, and having experience in approaching sympathetic workers or members of the military to gain their help in disarming or converting the facility.

Even if the plan kills billions, it saves 40 quadrillion lives in the long run.

Caldwell, 2008. (Joseph, PhD in mathematical statistics from UNC Chapel Hill. “The

Late Great United States: The Decline and Fall of the United States of America,” d/l: .)

With respect to ethical considerations, this book (and the minimal-regret criterion) places strong importance on preserving the planet’s biosphere, and does not place a higher value on the lives of the current living than on those of future generations. The loss of the six billion current inhabitants of Earth is viewed as an inconsequential price to pay, if that is what is required to save the planet for future use, enjoyment and fulfillment by other living creatures for the next four billion years (the expected remaining lifetime of our solar system). The current wanton destruction of Earth by mankind is viewed as a morally repugnant action of grotesque proportions. Mankind has been given dominion over the planet, and in his venal prodigality has chosen to squander its bounty and destroy its irreplaceable biological diversity. If the morality of nuclear war is to be considered, the morality of destroying a planet and all its species by overpopulation and industrialization must also be considered. Works on this subject include Fritz Schumacher’s books and the plethora of books on environmentalism, including Healing the Planet by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Rescue the Earth! by Farley Mowat, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by J. E. Lovelock, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management by Norman Myers, ed., and many more, some of which are listed in the bibliography. Although a minimal-regret nuclear war may kill almost six billion people, that must be balanced against the very real possibility that not having such a war may not only result in the deaths of six billion people, but also the extinction of mankind and the extinction of all other species on the planet (from the greenhouse effect). If the human race is made extinct by the greenhouse effect, millions of people will have been denied life for every year of the next four billion years that the solar system is expected to last. If the Earth can support ten million people indefinitely, that represents forty quadrillion person-years of life. Is that amount of human life inconsequential compared to the lives of the mere six billion that occupy the planet today?

Further Reading

Dyer, 2005. (Gwynne, a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. “War: The Lethal Custom.” April 10th. pg. 1)

Liber, 2006. (Keir, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and Press Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Spring 2006. International Security. “The End of Mad The Nuclear dimension of US Primacy” .)

Martin, 1984. (Brian, physicist specializing in researching stratospheric modeling. He is a research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, and a member of SANA, “Extinction Politics”, Scientists Against Nuclear Arms Newsletter, number 16, May 1984,)

Skousen, 2004. (Joel, Editor of World Affairs Brief. “ANALYSIS OF STRATEGI THREATS IN THE CURRENT DECADE (2000-2010). World Affairs Brief. .)

Zerker, 2008. (Sally, Economist & professor emeritus and senior scholar at York University. “Thomas Malthus Was Right,” July 10, 2008. .)

Conclusion

Since the days of the first atomic test in the deserts of the Southwest, there has been a push for abolition. The horrors of war compacted into an instant and a flash give great power and responsibility to those that wield such power. Do we trust mortal humans with this task or can we not be trusted? As a species, we have shown a knack of finding new ways to hurt or maim each other in the name of national pride, self-defense, deterrence, and war. How then can we trust that our time with the so called “big red button” will be used judiciously? On the other hand, threats abound. For the better part of 75 years, our nuclear deterrence has kept at bay the enemies of the United States. Even at a time when we could have come to blows with the Russians over the smallest of conflicts, the concept that either nation could start a process to end the world always loomed over the events. Some might say that this was a cloud that cast a shadow over international relations, but others would say7 that this was a fog that help back action while cooler heads prevailed. For all that it was and what it could have been, we are still here and we are still alive. But the question remains. At a time and place where the US has close to 5000 nuclear weapons and is in a new era of weapons development, when our national debt is at it highest in years and each year, our weapons systems cost 350 billion dollars alone to maintain, we must ask ourselves the real cost of keeping these weapons around? For debaters on this topic, it is important to remember to not get caught in debating the simple emotions that come with and from nuclear war or the threat of such. This brief might have cast a lot of text on describing the impact of nuclear weapons, but that is should only create a backdrop for the debating that has to come first. It is your job as a debater to link the emotion back to arguments and a justification for your side of the resolution. Relying on emotions and descriptions of burning cities isn’t enough to win rounds if the negative can root their arguments back to concrete data. Have a clear end goal for the debate. Know what you want the judge to be voting on before the round starts and find ways to make sure that argument makes it to the end. My feeling is that lots of debaters will go in and treat their cases like a sprinkler. They will hope what hits the wall sticks and they will keep throwing more and more at the wall until it does. You can’t layer on arguments and cards and hope to win. Show the judge focus and a clear path with clear impacts and you will be rewarded with a win. Good luck and have fun.

Aff and Neg Arguments At-A-Glance

ARGUMENT AFF ARGUMENT/RESPONCES NEG ARGUMENT/RESPONCES

MISCALCULATIONS Will eventually happen if we have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have existed for decades with no impacts.

Nuclear weapons create paranoia, causes situations where Safeguards protect us from launches. people jump to conclusions. The human element behind nuclear weapons will stop launches.

DETERENCE Nukes keeps others from attacking us or others. Leads to a feeling of distrust.

Stops major conflicts. Causes proliferation as others want nukes for deterrence.

Keeps international stability and order. Causes others to feel like they are being forced to take actions because of the nuclear retaliation.

PROLIFERATION No treaty can stop more countries from getting weapons. It has Proliferation has been slower because of our nuclear states failed several times in the past. than without. At least with nukes, we can deter others from using them. Horizontal proliferation is bad. More people with weapons only increases the chance of war. Slow proliferation means that we can regulate who actually gets nuclear weapons; .

MORALITY Nuclear weapons are immoral. They cause massive devastation. Nuclear weapons keep stability and stops major war. This prevents deaths and that is moral. Even the ownership of weapons is immoral. It creates a power dynamic that is unfair to others. More would die in a conventional war than in a nuclear war. Japan doesn’t prove that they are immoral.

SOCIAL CONTRACT Contracts say that democracy and nuclear weapons are can’t Nukes are the ultimate form of a government providing exist. Creates a system where governments remove power from security from others. the people for one person to use. Living in a nuclear world is better removes the state of nature Creates a perpetual state of nature as governments can’t provide from the Earth. Every place has access to safety and justice. security from others.

SURVIVAL Planet Earth’s survival is the only point where life exists so far. Nuclear weapons save us from multiple scenarios of We need to protect it. Nuclear weapons threaten this. extinction.

Nuclear weapons pose a unique threat of life on Earth.

ACCIDENTS A nuclear world has multiple chances of an accidental detonation Safeguards protect us from accidents. Even if there is one or a launch. situation where a weapon was missing or damaged, it takes many steps to detonate. Multiple examples exist. Multiple examples but no accidents prove that safeguards work.

DISPOSAL The amount of waste is a small price to pay for a nuclear free Disarming the weapons creates a ton of waste. This poisons world. the environment and creates a storage nightmare.

This will spur a search from a secure waste site. Terrorism can benefit from this- They can attack waste transport sites or routes. No risk of terrorism during transport or storage.

SPARK Limited nuclear war is the only way to spur true abolition. War won’t be limited. Will spread. Their plan destroys MAD.

Nuke war is survivable. Nuke war is not survivable.

Nuke war will be limited. . These are all reasons why we need nukes for deterrence and to stop others from doing things like launching.