West Coast Publishing 1All Things Nuclear

All Things NuclearNuclear Weapons Good – Peace..............................................................................................................................2Nuclear Weapons Good – CBW Proliferation...........................................................................................................3Nuclear Weapons Good – Better than Conventional Weaposn...............................................................................4Nuclear Weapons Good – Moral..............................................................................................................................5Nuclear Weapons Good – Disarmament Fails..........................................................................................................6Nuclear Weapons Good – Rejection Fails.................................................................................................................7Nuclear Weapons Good – Rejection Fails.................................................................................................................8Nuclear Weapons Good – A2: Lifton........................................................................................................................9

Nuclear Deterrence Good – Peace.........................................................................................................................10Nuclear Deterrence Good – Hegemony.................................................................................................................11Nuclear Deterrence Good – CBWs.........................................................................................................................12Nuclear Deterrence Good – Moral.........................................................................................................................13Nuclear Deterrence Good – Necessary..................................................................................................................14Nuclear Deterrence Good – Effective.....................................................................................................................15Nuclear Deterrence Good – Proliferation..............................................................................................................16Nuclear Deterrence Good – Cold War Model Still Accurate...................................................................................17Nuclear Deterrence Good – Credibility Key............................................................................................................18Nuclear Deterrence Good – No Alternative...........................................................................................................19Nuclear Deterrence Good – Alternative Causes Proliferation................................................................................20Nuclear Deterrence Good – Saudi Proliferation.....................................................................................................21Nuclear Deterrence Good – China/Taiwan War.....................................................................................................22

Nuclear Discourse Good – Solves Criticisms...........................................................................................................23Nuclear Discourse Good – Alternative Fails...........................................................................................................24

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Immoral........................................................................................................................25Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Unnecessary.................................................................................................................26Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Justifies Nuclearism......................................................................................................27Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Realism.........................................................................................................................28Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Must Reject..................................................................................................................29Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Individuals Must Reject................................................................................................30Nuclear Deterrence Bad – A2: Perm......................................................................................................................31

Nuclearism Bad – Genocide...................................................................................................................................32Nuclearism Bad – Alternative – Species Focus.......................................................................................................33Nuclearism Bad – Alternative – Individual Action..................................................................................................34

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – Acronyms/Shorthand...........................................................................................35Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Nuclear Weapons” and “Nuclear War”...............................................................36Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Nuclear Strategy”................................................................................................37Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Limited” Nuclear War.........................................................................................38Nuclear Discourse Bad – Extinction........................................................................................................................39Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism........................................................................................................40Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism........................................................................................................41Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism........................................................................................................42Nuclear Discourse Bad – Dehumanizes..................................................................................................................43Nuclear Discourse Bad – Immoral/Desensitizing....................................................................................................44Nuclear Discourse Bad – A2: Turns........................................................................................................................45

West Coast Publishing 2All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Peace

1. NUCLEAR WEAPONS MAKE THE WORLD A SAFER PLACEPaul Robinson, president and director of Sandia National Laboraties, PURSUING A NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, March 22, 2001, p. 26.

I believe nuclear weapons must have an abiding place in the international scene for the foreseeable future. I believe that the world, in fact, would become more dangerous, not less dangerous, were U.S. nuclear weapons to be absent. The most important role for our nuclear weapons is to serve as a “sobering force,” one that can cap the level of destruction of military conflicts and thus force all sides to come to their senses. This is the enduring purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War world. I regret that we have not yet captured such thinking in our public statements as to why the U.S. will retain nuclear deterrence as a cornerstone of our defense policy, and urge that we do so in the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review. Nuclear deterrence becomes in my view a “countervailing” force and, in fact, a potent antidote to military aggression on the part of nations.

2. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE USEFUL TO COMPEL NATIONS INTO COMPLIANCEKanti Bajpai, School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, “The Military Utility of Nuclear Weapons and the Case for Disarmament,” PUGWASH ONLINE, March 25, 2001, p. np., Pugwash Webpage, Accessed June 25, 2001, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/nw/nw13c.htm

Nuclear weapons might also be used in a compellence or coercive role to make an opponent do what it otherwise would not do or to undo what it had already begun to do. Compellence only appears possible against a non-nuclear opponent or in a situation of extreme nuclear asymmetry. While no government publicly talks about nuclear weapons in this role, nuclear weapons have been used to try and force others to do one's will. The US has used nuclear weapons in a compellent way on several occasions, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the only case of actual nuclear use for coercive purposes. The US has also threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions, with mixed results. It has contemplated actual use on other occasions

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE SEVERAL LEGITIMATE USESPaul Buteux, director of the Center for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, CANADIAN MILITARY JOURNAL, Winter 2000-2001, p. 36.

Nuclear weapons, we are told, serve a number of purposes. They create uncertainty in the mind of a potential aggressor and they ensure that aggression is not a rational option. Furthermore, the linkage of NATO’s nuclear forces with those of the United States and those of Britain and France provide the supreme guarantee of Allied security. The ‘sub-strategic’ forces still deployed in Europe provide for widespread participation in collective defence planning and command and control arrangements. It is also claimed that they provide a link to the strategic forces of the United States and Britain, although how ‘sub-strategic’ forces are coupled with strategic forces remains unclear in the absence of an adversarial relationship with a nuclear-armed challenger to Allied vital interests. It is worth noting that the approximately 85 percent reduction in the number of US weapons deployed in Europe since 1991 means that there now exists rough parity in the number of French and British warheads and the number of American warheads remaining in Europe. Nonetheless, the presence of US nuclear weapons in Europe remains a feature of the current strategic concept because they are seen as a symbol of the continuing centrality of the Alliance to American strategic interests. They also symbolize American leadership in the Alliance and reinforce the willingness of the US to exercise it.4 The visibility of the US commitment is still regarded as important, and it is for this reason that suggestions that US nuclear forces assigned to European security be based offshore have been resisted.

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Nuclear Weapons Good – CBW Proliferation

1. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE UNIQUELY CAPABLE OF PREVENTING CBW PROLIFERATIONMark Lakamp, Captain in the U.S. Army Naval PostGraduate School, “Moral and Legal Judgments of the Nuclear Option for Counter-proliferation,” MILITARY PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS, February 1999, p. np., National Security Affairs Homepage, Accessed June 25, 2001, http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Lakamp.html

Nuclear weapons have also been suggested as possible weapons to preempt a potential enemy’s chemical and biological weapons capability. This preemption could come either in the course of a war as was conducted against Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War, or as a stand alone counterproliferation action similar to Israel’s attack on the Al Tuwaitha nuclear reactor at Osirak, Iraq. While all previous cases of preemption of WMD (both chemical/biological and nuclear) have been conventional, a case can be made that future efforts may require nuclear weapons. The suspected Libyan chemical weapons plant formerly under construction at Tarhunah is a case in point. This complex is located in a deeply buried tunnel, beneath 18-30m of concrete and sandstone. The tunnels that make up the complex are estimated to be between 200 and 450 feet long. Just inside the entrance they diverge around a solid rock wall. This prevents Tomahawk cruise missiles of other weapons with similar trajectories from flying down the length of the tunnels to destroy the suspected chemical weapons facility inside. This top cover prevents vertically dropped, penetrating weapons from being effective as well. The most advanced conventional, deep penetration munitions in the American arsenal, the GBU-28/B, is capable of penetrating only 6m of reinforced concrete. While several initiatives to improve capabilities in this area are underway, no conventional means of destroying Tarhunah or similarly protected targets from the air currently exists or likely will for several years.

2. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE THE SAFEST MEANS OF ELIMINATING CBW SITESMark Lakamp, Captain in the U.S. Army Naval PostGraduate School, “Moral and Legal Judgments of the Nuclear Option for Counter-proliferation,” MILITARY PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS, February 1999, p. np., National Security Affairs Homepage, Accessed June 25, 2001, http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Lakamp.html

The ability of nuclear weapons to "hold at risk" a wide range of deeply buried targets is not the only positive attribute they posses in the WMD preemption role. Any attack on a chemical or biological weapons facility must take into account the possibility that such an attack might release large amounts of agent which could then cause significant unintended casualties. During the Allied invasion of Italy in the Second World War two instances of unintentional release of mustard gas occurred. In one case German artillery struck a chemical weapons storage depot, in the other a bomb struck a ship in the harbor containing the chemical weapons. In each instance, a cloud of mustard gas was released and both civilian and military casualties occurred. While the evidence is still not conclusive, it has also been argued that a factor in the "Gulf War Syndrome" is that destruction of Iraqi chemical munitions unintentionally exposed troops to harmful amounts of chemical agents. Given the concern regarding collateral damage, conventional attacks on targets accessible to conventional munitions may not be practical. A nuclear attack is probably not subject to this specific concern. The intense heat generated by a nuclear explosion, tens of millions of degrees, will incinerate the chemical or biological agents present at the target. While fallout considerations are of concern, timing an attack to take advantage of favorable winds can reduce the dangers significantly. The "dial-a-yield" capability of many nuclear weapons in the American stockpile could allow planners to tailor the yield to effectively neutralize both the target and any agent present.

West Coast Publishing 4All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Better than Conventional Weaposn

1. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE CHEAPER THAN CONVENTIONAL FORCESStephen M. Younger, Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century,” FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS, June 27, 2000, p. 2, Federation of American Scientists Web Page, Accessed June 23, 2001, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/doctrine/doe/younger.htm

Another important consideration in planning future strategic forces is cost. Nuclear weapons systems are sometimes considered expensive to maintain due to their complexity, their unique characteristics, and the lack of private industry support of some components of their infrastructure. In fact, nuclear weapons are cheaper to develop and to maintain than very large conventional force structures. This was the reason why NATO chose to rely on nuclear weapons as a principal part of its defense against the massive Soviet conventional threat in Europe. Nuclear weapons are considered expensive today because they are primarily strategic in nature and we are in the midst of a “strategic pause" that has lessened the perceived need for strategic weapons.

2. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE RELIABLE AND VERSATILEStephen M. Younger, Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century,” FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS, June 27, 2000, p. 2, Federation of American Scientists Web Page, Accessed June 23, 2001, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/doctrine/doe/younger.htm

Nuclear weapons represent the ultimate defense of the nation, a deterrent against any and all potential adversaries. Combined with diplomacy and conventional military capabilities, nuclear weapons have helped to avoid a large-scale conflict between leading world powers for over fifty years. This is an astonishing achievement given the acceleration in communications and transportation that took place during this time. When the Cold War ended, the U.S. nuclear stockpile consisted of a set of highly optimized warheads and bombs on highly reliable missiles and aircraft. These weapons systems were designed primarily to counter the massive Soviet threat. They were and are the most advanced of their kind in the world. Current plans call for them to be retained essentially indefinitely. There are several good reasons for this. These weapons are safe, reliable, and meet performance requirements. We have nuclear test data that support our understanding of their operation. New warheads of comparable capability are difficult or impossible to field without nuclear testing. They can be modified in many ways to respond to changing military requirements, as was done when the B61 bomb was modified to give it an earth-penetrating capability.

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE USEFUL FOR DEFENSE AND TACTICAL PURPOSESKanti Bajpai, School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, “The Military Utility of Nuclear Weapons and the Case for Disarmament,” PUGWASH ONLINE, March 25, 2001, p. np., Pugwash Webpage, Accessed June 25, 2001, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/nw/nw13c.htm

Nuclear weapons can and have been justified in the name of military defense. If defense means the ability to stop and eventually turn back a conventional invasion by means of denial or punishment, then nuclear weapons might play a role. For instance, tactical nuclear weapons might be used to halt an enemy's military advance and thereby to deny it crucial military objectives. Strategic nuclear weapons might be used to punish the aggressor by bombing its cities and other high value targets and cause it to halt its advance in the battlefield. Countries with an aversion to military casualties as well as those with serious conventional military asymmetries would be tempted to use nuclear weapons in this role. The US is the best example today of the former. It is quite conceivable that, in a regional conflict, the US might use tactical nuclear weapons in order to minimize American military casualties even when it is in a position to turn back aggression by conventional means. Other states might invest in nuclear weapons to blunt an attack because they fear that their conventional forces are inadequate to the task. For countries with very small populations, lack of strategic depth, and budgetary limitations, nuclear weapons may be a rational investment.

West Coast Publishing 5All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Moral

1. ABSENCE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WOULD BE MORALLY DISASTROUSRobert Johnson, nqa, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PROSPECTUS, Fall 1999, p. 12.

Those who reject nuclear deterrence on moral grounds must say whether...they are prepared to support the conventional defense effort implicit in non-nuclear deterrence, with the corollary of a greater diversion of human and material resources from other potential applications...And just as the statesman who commits his country to war...must weigh in his conscience the death to which he may be sending others, so must the pacifist weigh in his conscience, and be prepared to carry as his moral burden, the oppression and the injustice which others may suffer as a result of a policy which he has adopted on grounds which are for him more morally or spiritually compelling. Conventional wars are no doubt less horrible and less destabilizing to civilization than nuclear wars may be, but they may be fought more often, with far more casualties, and environmental damage, than the world is used to today. And if nuclear weapons are the only Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that are removed, biological and chemical weapons will still remain. Biological weapons are much more indiscriminate and can have more devastating effects on civilization than nuclear weapons can. Ridding the world of only nuclear weapons may remove us from the somewhat benign fear of war that exists today and place us in a world where the threat of war is much more imminent and the consequences equally catastrophic.

2. DEBATE ON THE MORALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MUST AVOID ABSOLUTISMRon G. Jacobson, Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, “Morality of Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense,” NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS, 2000, p. 19, National Security Affairs Web Page, Accessed June 24, http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Jacobson.html

Finding an acceptable balance between morality, politics, and security is necessary for every argument. We can judge no action moral or immoral without accounting for political and security motives and consequences. Morality is not a function of politics, nor are politics a function of morality. The two must work in tandem. As such, moral skeptics must realize hat there are no omniscient experts, only fallible specialists, on the subject of nuclear war. There are too many unknowns to make concrete conclusions, as typically surround the cold war deterrence debate. Skeptics must recognize cosmopolitan moral criticisms are not bankrupt. Similarly, philosophers and moralists (tending toward the cosmopolitan world-view) would do well to pay more respect to the strategists’ arguments and to realize that they need to work with more realistic assumptions if they wish to be effective in a dialogue between ethics and strategy.

3. DEONTOLOGICAL CLAIMS ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE INEPTRon G. Jacobson, Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, “Morality of Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense,” NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS, 2000, p. 19, National Security Affairs Web Page, Accessed June 24, http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Jacobson.html

Surrounding nuclear weapons and the strategy of nuclear deterrence, the various moral arguments (see Table 1) contain several troublesome assumptions. A particular problem for both sides is an assumption that moral arguments are clear. Specious clarity plagues moral debates, which Ryan attributes to describing our actions with morally pleasing, or at least morally acceptable words. Some words are charged with passion (e.g., killing or murder) while others remain distant (e.g., collateral damage).Third, again a problem for both sides of the nuclear debates, is an assumption that whatever moral criteria are used, they reach universal conclusions. This last errant assumption is a nemesis for any moral argument crossing cultural borders, and even within a culture; Christianity doesn’t agree with Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism, and within Christianity there are many different moral interpretations of scripture. With an assumption of moral unity are many sub-assumptions: that there is an a priori moral order, that this a priori moral order has been correctly found by man, and that every culture agrees this moral order is the correct interpretation. Each of these additional assumptions is disputable, and every one most likely impossible to prove, find, or achieve.

West Coast Publishing 6All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Disarmament Fails

1. THE U.S. COMMITTING TO ABOLITION CAN’T SOLVE FOR DISARMSpurgeon M. Keeny Jr., former senior government official, has been engaged in national security and arms control activities since, former Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Scholar-In-Residence of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Folly of Disparaging Arms Control,” ARMS CONTROL TODAY, October 2000, http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/oct00/focusoct00.html, Accessed May 25, 2001.

At this time, a U.S. president cannot and should not commit his successors to a time-bound schedule for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He should energize the ongoing process of reductions and constraints, avoiding disruptive diversions such as national missile defense. How fast and how far the process will go will depend on the evolution of international political relations. Each successful step in arms control will build confidence that security can be safely maintained at lower levels of dependence on nuclear weapons. In this manner, the abolition or prohibition of nuclear weapons can become an attainable objective and not a distant goal. To disparage arms control as a process because it does not promise instant resolution of all the problems and contradictions of the nuclear age is to abandon hope of eliminating nuclear weapons.

2. THE WORLD WOULD BE MORE DANGEROUS WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONSC. Paul Robinson, President and Director, Sandia National Laboratories, A WHITE PAPER: PURSUING A NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, http://www.lasg.org/whatsnew/whatsnew1_b.html, March 2001, Accessed May 24, 2001.

The intensity of the environment of any war game also demonstrates just how critical it is for the U.S. to have thought through in advance exactly what messages we would want to send to other nations (combatants and noncombatants) and to "history," should there be any future use of nuclear weapons - including threatened use - in conflicts. Similarly, it is obvious that we must have policies that are well thought through in advance as to the role of nuclear weapons in deterring the use of, or retaliating for the use of, all weapons of mass destruction. Let me then state my most important conclusion directly: I believe nuclear weapons must have an abiding place in the international scene for the foreseeable future. I believe that the world, in fact, would become more dangerous, not less dangerous, were U.S. nuclear weapons to be absent. The most important role for our nuclear weapons is to serve as a "sobering force," one that can cap the level of destruction of military conflicts and thus force all sides to come to their senses. This is the enduring purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War world. I regret that we have not yet captured such thinking in our public statements as to why the U.S. will retain nuclear deterrence as a cornerstone of our defense policy, and urge that we do so in the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review.

3. SCHELL’S IDEA OF IMMEDIATE ABOLITION IS NOT CONNECTED TO REALITYSpurgeon M. Keeny Jr., former senior government official, has been engaged in national security and arms control activities since former Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Scholar-In-Residence of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Folly of Disparaging Arms Control,” ARMS CONTROL TODAY, October 2000, http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/oct00/focusoct00.html, Accessed May 25, 2001.

As an alternative to arms control, which he sees as inextricably constrained by U.S. commitments to deterrence, Schell calls on the United States to take the lead in a concerted effort for the immediate abolition of all nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, Schell proposes that a U.S. presidential candidate should adopt abolition as the central issue in his campaign to rally public support and after the election throw the full weight of his administration behind the effort. But with little or no public interest in foreign policy or military and arms control issues, the idea of such a political campaign is not connected to reality.

West Coast Publishing 7All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Rejection Fails

1. STIGMATIZING NUCLEAR WEAPONS UNDERMINES DETERRENCERobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 108.

In addition, French perceptions of the lack of credibility of the American nuclear guarantee led directly to the force de frappe. (Detargeting US and Russian ICBMs would not have been acceptable if these weapons could not be retargeted quickly, because the lack of verifiability would undermine the credibility of the ICBM forces.) Minimizing and stigmatizing our nuclear weapons can create a self-imposed taboo with respect to even nuclear adversaries, thereby delegitimizing deterrence and inviting threats to our interests.

2. STIGMATIZING NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOPS US FROM REDUCING THE RISKS Robert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 108-9.

There are many different kinds of danger associated with nuclear weapons, including the danger that policies which minimize and stigmatize nuclear weapons may exacerbate old threats and introduce new threats to US security. All choices involve risk. Stigmatizing all aspects of nuclear weapons may blind us to the extent that we overlook policies that could actually reduce the danger of war or violence to the United States and the rest of the world. This concept therefore interferes with our ability to formulate good policies to deal with national security and with the myriad issues related to nuclear weapons.

3. WE ABSOLUTELY CANNOT ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS, EVEN IF NUCLEAR STIGMATIZATION HAPPENSRobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 110.

Since we absolutely cannot achieve the goal of abolishing both nuclear weapons and the knowledge of how to construct them, policies and actions that appear to move in that direction will always fail the test of plausibility. But since these policies and actions would be undertaken in the name of "reducing nuclear danger," they acquire a respectability that they have not earned through critical examination. This is the reason it is necessary to reject the emotional appeal reflected in Les Aspin's assertion in 1992 that, in the new era, "the burden of proof is shifting toward those who want to maintain" policies supporting US nuclear weapons and away from those who advocate "four prescriptions of the left . . . a comprehensive test ban, an end to production of fissile material . . . removal of forward-based tactical weapons, and renunciation of first use." An assumption that the formulation of US security policy is biased a priori toward a given set of policy recommendations is exactly the problem with nuclear stigma.

4. WE MUST ASSESS THE RISKS AND BENEFITS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, NOT JUST REJECT Robert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 106.

Among proponents of nuclear stigma, there is an overarching presumption that it would be a good thing if the world could be made free of nuclear weapons, including our own. In contrast to the cautious recommendations of the Nuclear Posture Review, policies of stigmatizing nuclear weapons are seen to be positive measures that can approach the ideal of a nuclear-free world, despite our inability to put the genie back in the bottle. These pejorative perceptions of nuclear weapons, should they prevail, would represent a shift in the attitudes of policymakers. Whereas most were once convinced of the necessity of nuclear weapons to form the bedrock of strategic deterrence and to counter the conventional might of the Warsaw Pact, the nuclear stigma philosophy is grounded in an optimistic academic debate about nuclear weapons in a less threatening world. The purpose of this article is to point out that the nuclear stigma philosophy lacks careful consideration of both the risks and benefits associated with nuclear weapons. In fact, the true risks of nuclear weapons seem to be obscured at the same time that the benefits are assumed to have all but disappeared. Any policy made without full recognition of these risks and benefits is likely to have some serious unintended consequences.

West Coast Publishing 8All Things Nuclear

West Coast Publishing 9All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – Rejection Fails

1. GIVING UP NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS IMMORAL BECAUSE IT GIVES UP DETERRENCEKathleen Bailey, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, “Why Do We Have to Keep The Bomb?” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, January/February 1995, http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1995/jf95/jf95Bailey.html, Accessed April 1, 2001.

Some people also posit that nuclear weapon states would have more moral authority to insist on nuclear nonproliferation if they were to give up such weapons themselves. This, of course, is a subjective judgment. Alternatively, an argument can be made that giving up nuclear weapons is immoral in that it forfeits nuclear deterrence, which in the minds of many people is responsible for the relative world peace following World War II.

2. THE MORAL AUTHORITY ARGUMENT IS WRONG – OTHER NATIONS WON’T FOLLOW THE US TO DISARMKathleen Bailey, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, “Why Do We Have to Keep The Bomb?” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, January/February 1995, http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1995/jf95/jf95Bailey.html, Accessed April 1, 2001.

What matters here, however, is not philosophical perspective, but reality. If the five declared nuclear weapon states were to give up their nuclear weapons and, with great moral authority, ask the rest of the world to do so as well, it is highly unlikely that all others would follow-even if they said they would. Again, this goes back to the points that verification of disarmament is not technically possible at this time, and that the utility of nuclear weapons remains and could conceivably increase.

3. A NUCLEAR-FREE WORLD IS A FANTASY THAT CANNOT EXIST IN REALITYRobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 107.

At first glance, the image created of a world without nuclear weapons appears attractive. But since this fantasy cannot exist in reality, a point Bundy et al. readily admit, then it should not be used as any kind of guidance for the difficult choices to be made in US nuclear policy. However, these distinguished authors nonetheless explicitly link their considerations of the differences in US policy required by the end of the Cold War and their wish that nuclear weapons didn't exist.

4. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE INEVITABLE: WE MUST LEARN TO LIVE WITH THEM, PERHAPS FOREVERRobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 110.

My point is certainly not to argue against encouraging nonproliferation and democracy. These favorable policies generally serve the interests of the United States and most of the other nations of the world. But democracy and nonproliferation are not primary means to achieve security. They can contribute to, but cannot be allowed to dominate unquestioned, the true end of US nuclear policy, which is to provide for the security of the United States including addressing the various risks related to nuclear weapons. The world in which all the great or nuclear powers are liberal democracies does not exist and perhaps never will. It would be unwise to risk the existence of our nation on the fragile notion that democracies will dictate international affairs and, consequently, exist in peaceful union. It is especially unwise to allow wishful thinking to guide policy. Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented; we will have to live with them, perhaps forever. US nuclear weapons policy should not be constructed upon a mirage of disarmament sentiment.

West Coast Publishing 10All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Weapons Good – A2: Lifton

1. LIFTON’S VIEWS CAN JUSTIFY ANYTHING – EVEN ALIEN ABDUCTION Martin Kottmeyer, writer, REALL NEWS, July 1995, http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v03/n07/lifton.html, Accessed April 15, 2001.

"With all due respect, doctor. Everyone knows there are people who gravitate to this kind of thing. They read about it, see it on TV, in the movies. This is the pathology of a space-age psychosis. People don't see the Virgin Mary anymore -- now they see alien baby snatchers." The psychiatrist is prepared. "Robert Lifton's work on survivors -- we've all studied Lifton -- the people that he writes about -- the survivors of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam -- they all have the exact same symptoms as the people I've told you about; fear, anxiety, nightmares, suspicion -- suspicion especially of the mental health community who consistently misdiagnose them. These are reactions to real trauma. There's no fantasy here." The exchange is from the 1992 mini-series Intruders. The visionary and skeptic are fictional, but the argument is familiar enough. John Mack, the Harvard psychiatry professor who authored the controversial book Abduction was not the inspiration for the Richard Crenna character, but the writer admitted it "ends up being more like John Mack than anybody." Mack said it was kind of spooky how things in it happened to him, notably the credibility questions. People in the production had sat in on his therapy groups. One can find Lifton's name in the acknowledgments of Mack's book.

2. DEFENDERS OF ALIEN ABDUCTION USE LIFTON’S VIEWSMartin Kottmeyer, writer, REALL NEWS, July 1995, http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v03/n07/lifton.html, Accessed April 15, 2001.

This was not the first time that Lifton's name had been invoked by defenders of the abduction phenomenon. Editorializing in the January/February 1987 International UFO Reporter Jerome Clark observed, "A milestone of sorts may have been reached on April 10, 1987, when Dr. Robert J. Lifton, one of this country's most prominent psychiatrists, acknowledged on NBC's Today Show that the UFO abduction phenomenon has yet to be explained and merits serious investigation." In the October 1988 Fate, he regarded Lifton's statement as emblematic evidence of "a quiet revolution" that had taken place as scientific, medical-health professionals displayed a growing involvement, believing the evidence pointed toward "an extraordinary cause" and "a potentially explosive payoff." Elsewhere, he also thought it indicated abductions constituted now "a subject that could be discussed seriously outside the pages of tabloids."

3. LIFTON'S ANALYSIS IS SUPERFICIALLawrence J. Friedman, professor of History at Indiana University, TRAUMA AND SELF, 1996, p. 142.

Erikson also described Lifton's use of examples to illustrate the protean self as "all too glib and terribly superficial." Where Lifton had maintained that the protean self lacked a "classic superego" that had internalized clear criteria of right and wrong, Erikson noted that Lifton himself exemplified just that "classic superego" ("See Lifton himself.").

4. LIFTON'S VIEW OF TOTALIZING PSYCHOLOGY IS WRONGNorman Birnbaum, university professor at Georgetown University Law Center, TRAUMA AND SELF, 1996, p. 124-125.

Politics, in the larger sense of the search for a more humane and just community, has been much more an explicit part of the work of Robert Lifton. Consider three of his major themes. One is the view that a response to death (a response which is far broader and more varied than fear) is a rather more pervasive force in the psyche than libido. One human defense against death, in the metaphorical realm of the spirit, is memory -- yet another of Lifton's themes. The cultivation of memory makes possible inner regeneration after trauma, makes culture possible in the sense of inter-generational connection, and constitutes education in the larger sense of moral experience. Finally, Lifton's description of the protean self as a creative adaptation to destructive disruptions of historical discontinuity is an affirmation of human and social possibility; change, and change for the better, is possible. It is true that these processes are located in

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a psycho-cultural border-land, between the social biology of the psyche and our integration in culture. That integration, however, is never complete and total: persons become persons precisely in struggling against as well as in a milieu, and in both cases, alter it.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Peace

1. A LARGE NUCLEAR FORCE DETERS CHALLENGES TO US HEGEMONYKathleen Bailey, senior fellow at the National Institute for Public Policy, RATIONALE AND REQUIREMENTS FOR U.S. NUCLEAR FORCES AND ARMS CONTROL, Executive Report Volume 1, January 2001, p. 7.

Maintaining a numerical edge may usefully signal a U.S. readiness to compete with aggressive rivals, raise an entry barrier to states aiming to become major nuclear powers, and thus possibly prevent such challenges in the first instance. The latter point is important, because potential opponents may prefer to compete with the United States in nuclear arms, where the technologies are a half-century old, rather than in the nonnuclear strike systems of the “revolution in military affairs,” where advantage depends on exploiting ongoing advances in information technologies. The United States is likely to desire the capability to deter authoritarian adversaries who are impressed by an opposing nuclear force with greater, rather than fewer weapons. As a study of the effects of perceptions on the behavior of political and military leaders concluded, “Authoritarian states and leaders seem to place special emphasis on large numbers, perhaps because … dictators find in large numbers a promise or manifestation of the unlimited force they want to exercise.”

2. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE ESSENTIAL TOOLS FOR PREVENTING WAR AND ESCALATIONPaul Robinson, president and director of Sandia National Laboraties, PURSUING A NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, March 22, 2001, p.26.

Nuclear weapons must never be considered as war fighting tools. Rather we should rely on the catastrophic nature of nuclear weapons to achieve war prevention, to prevent a conflict from escalating (e.g., to the use of weapons of mass destruction), or to help achieve war termination when it cannot be achieved by other means, e.g., if the enemy has already escalated the conflict through the use of weapons of mass destruction. Conventional armaments and forces will remain the backbone of U.S. defense forces, but the inherent threat to escalate to nuclear use can help to prevent conflicts from ever starting, can prevent their escalation, as well as bring these conflicts to a swift and certain end.

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE 5 STRATEGIC USES FOR THE U.S.Kathleen Bailey, Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Public Policy, RATIONALE AND REQUIREMENTS FOR U.S. NUCLEAR FORCES AND ARMS CONTROL, Executive Report Volume 1, January 2001, p. 7.

What are additional plausible priorities when considering how U.S. nuclear forces may support these goals in the context of a dynamic strategic environment? In particular, U.S. nuclear weapons may be necessary to: Deter escalation by regional powers to the use of WMD, while the United States is defeating those powers in the conduct of a conventional war in defense of U.S. allies and security partners. Deter regional powers or an emerging global power from WMD or massive conventional aggression against the United States or its allies. Prevent catastrophic U.S. and allied wartime losses in a conventional war. Provide unique targeting capabilities in support of possible U.S. deterrence and wartime goals. Enhance U.S. influence in crises.

4. DETERRENCE AVERTS NUCLEAR HOLOCAUSTJan Lodal, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and as deputy for program analysis at the National Security Council, “Pledging 'No First Strike': A Step Toward Real WMD Cooperation,” ARMS CONTROL TODAY, March 2001, http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/March01/march01.html, Accessed April 17, 2001.

Nuclear holocaust during the Cold War was averted by the painstaking creation of a regime of nuclear deterrence. Rather than use nuclear weapons as offensive weapons of war, it has been the bedrock principle of nuclear strategy to maintain them to deter an adversary’s use of its nuclear weapons by maintaining the capability to absorb a nuclear attack, retaliate, and cause unacceptable damage to the attacker. Ensuring this capability has been the focus of U.S. nuclear weapons programs since the Soviet Union developed the capability to threaten the U.S. homeland directly.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Hegemony

Extended deterrence is the vital internal link to hegemony Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, May-June 2007, “Beyond American hegemony,” The National Interest, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_89/ai_n27268888/pg_2/?tag=content;col1

DURING THE Cold War, the United States was the stronger of two superpowers in a bipolar world. The anti-Soviet alliance was not a traditional alliance of equals, but a hegemonic alliance centered on the United States. West Germany, Japan and South Korea were semi-sovereign U.S. protectorates. Britain and France were more independent, but even they received the benefits of "extended deterrence", according to which the United States agreed to treat an attack on them as the equivalent of an attack on the American homeland. America's Cold War strategy was often described as dual containment--the containment not only of America's enemies like the Soviet Union and (until the 1970s) communist China, but also of America's allies, in particular West Germany and Japan. Dual containment permitted the United States to mobilize German and Japanese industrial might as part of the anti-Soviet coalition, while forestalling the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as independent military powers. The Cold War officially ended in Paris in 1990, but the United States has continued to pursue a dual containment strategy based on three principles: dissuasion, reassurance and coercive non-proliferation. Dissuasion--directed at actual or potential challengers to the United States--commits the United States to outspend all other great military powers, whether friend or foe. This policy's goal--in the words of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft leaked from then--Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's Pentagon--is the dissuasion or "deterring [of] potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." By the end of the 1990s, as Charles Krauthammer noted in these pages four years ago: The result is the dominance of a single power unlike anything ever seen. Even at its height Britain could always be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. Britain had a smaller army than the land powers of Europe and its navy was equaled by the next two navies combined. Today, American military spending exceeds that of the next twenty countries combined. Its navy, air force and space power are unrivaled. This approach flies in the face of the strategy usually adopted by traditional status quo great powers, which sought to ensure that they belonged to alliances with resources that exceeded those of potential challengers. It is no surprise that, despite the absence of any threat to the United States equivalent to that of the Soviet Union, our defense spending today, as a share of our total GDP, is nearly at the Cold War average. High levels of defense expenditures are not merely to overawe potential challengers. (In outlining possible competitors, Krauthammer noted, "Only China grew in strength, but coming from so far behind it will be decades before it can challenge American primacy--and

that assumes that its current growth continues unabated.") To again quote from the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." Reassurance, the second prong of the hegemonic strategy, entails convincing major powers not to build up their military capabilities, allowing the United States to assume the burdens of ensuring their security instead. In other words, while outspending allies like Germany and Japan on defense, the United States should be prepared to fight wars on behalf of Germany and Japan, sparing them the necessity of re-arming--for fear that these countries, having "renationalized" their defense policies and rearmed, might become hostile to the United States at some future date. For example, even though the threats emanating from the spillover of the Balkan conflicts affected Germany and its neighbors far more than a geographically far-removed United States, Washington took the lead in waging the 1999 Kosovo war--in part to forestall the emergence of a Germany prepared to act independently. And the Persian Gulf War was, among other things, a reassurance war on behalf of Japan--far more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the United States--confirmed by the fact that Japan paid a substantial portion of the United States' costs in that conflict. Today, the great question is whether or not two other Asian giants--India and China--will

eschew the development of true blue-water navies and continue to allow the United States to take responsibility for keeping the Gulf open. Finally , the global hegemony strategy insists that America's safety depends not on the absence of a hostile hegemon in Europe, Asia and the Middle East--the traditional American approach--but on the permanent presence of the United States itself as the military hegemon of Europe, the military hegemon of Asia and the military hegemon of the Middle East. In each of these areas, the regional powers would consent to perpetual U.S. domination either voluntarily, because the United States assumed their defense burdens (reassurance), or involuntarily, because the superior U.S. military intimidated them into acquiescence (dissuasion). American military hegemony in Europe, Asia and the Middle East depends on the ability of the U.S. military to threaten and, if necessary, to use military force to defeat any regional challenge--but at a relatively low cost. This is because the American public is not prepared to pay the costs necessary if the United States is to be a "hyperpower."

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – CBWs

Stable US deterrence prevents a bioweapons attackSusan Martin, Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University, 2001, “Responding to Chemical and Biological Threats,” International Security 25.4. pg. np

A proper assessment of this choice requires distinguishing between chemical and biological weapons. 5 I agree with Sagan that the policy of calculated ambiguity should not apply to chemical weapons. A nuclear threat is not necessary to deter the use of chemical weapons--they simply do not pose that great of a threat. Chemical weapons have not proved decisive on the battlefield, and chemical warfare defenses serve both to limit their effectiveness and to deter their use. Furthermore, because chemical weapons do not have great destructive power, they do not pose much of a strategic, countervalue threat, even when married to ballistic missiles. 6 Because the potential benefits of a strategic use of chemical weapons can be easily outweighed by the damage that could be inflicted by U.S. conventional forces, a conventional retaliatory threat will be adequate to deter their use. In this case, calculated ambiguity and the extra risk of nuclear use that the doctrine may create are unnecessary. In the case of a biological attack, however, significant damage could be done to U.S. interests. Although the general use of biological weapons on the battlefield is unlikely given the difficulties involved in their use, an attack on the rear areas of a battlefield could have a devastating effect on American troops as well as on U.S. allies, while a strategic biological attack on the continental United States could be catastrophic. In the case of biological weapons, therefore, the cost of a failure to deter the use of these weapons could be extremely high, and the extra risk of nuclear use that may follow from the policy of calculated ambiguity is well worth it. Here it is important to examine how both the policy of calculated ambiguity and Sagan's recommended policy of conventional deterrence interact with existential nuclear deterrence. Sagan and I agree, I think, that existential nuclear deterrence helps to protect the United States from attacks--including those with biological weapons--on its vital interests.

An attack on US cities would kill hundreds of thousands and collapse the economyJames Davis, Colonel and PhD, 2003, “The Looming Biological Warfare Storm,” Air & Space Power Journal, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj03/spr03/davis.html

The American public learned to fear anthrax after letters containing the substance had been sent via the US Postal Service to senators and various news agencies shortly after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The resultant deaths and the discovery that some al Qaida terrorists had explored renting crop dusters caused the US government to temporarily ground these important agricultural aircraft. The news media, in turn, informed the public that biological attacks were possible Similar to the 11 September attacks, a BW attack might be a coordinated attack and take place in several major US cities. Anthrax would probably be the agent of choice in a mass-casualty attempt since it is not contagious and the perpetrators would not have to worry about the disease getting back to their country. Five 100-pound bags of anthrax could easily be smuggled into the United States using one of the many shipments of grain that arrive at US ports every day. These bags could be made to blend in with the shipment and lined with plastic so that no powder would be prematurely released. Three to five major cities, on the order of Houston or Los Angeles, could be targeted and would require only a 100-pound bag each. An appropriate aerosolizing device, easily procured in the United States, could be mounted on an automobile, airplane, or boat. The terrorists that perpetrate this attack would not have to die because they could be vaccinated and treated with antibiotics prior to delivering the agents, which would protect them even if they were exposed. They could also easily depart the country before the first symptoms appeared and defeat the ability of federal authorities to respond and arrest them. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens could potentially become infected and die if the agent were correctly manufactured and employed and if optimal climatic conditions were present during the attack. Such a mass-casualty attack would overwhelm the US medical system and a human, economic, and political catastrophe would result.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Moral

1. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS MORAL BECAUSE WE HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO SELF-DEFENSEJames W. Child, teacher and philosopher, NUCLEAR WAR: THE MORAL DIMENSION, 1986, p. 32.

This is one horn of the dilemma of nuclear weapons: we cannot morally use nuclear weapons. The other horn is a factual claim I shall investigate below. For now we will suppose it only. What if, as many military thinkers believe, there is no meaningful nonnuclear defense against nuclear weapons? If that is true, the consequence is ugly indeed: effective defense against a nuclear aggressor is immoral; moral defense is ineffective. We cannot morally and effectively defend our lives and our liberty. Thus the dilemma: either we must no resist a nuclear aggressor and, thus, must surrender our rights to protect our lives and our liberty, or we must resist immorally. I shall grasp the second horn of the dilemma. I shall argue that, given some crucial structures upon how we do it, defensive nuclear war waging is both factually possible and morally permissible.

2. REALIST ASSUMPTIONS ARE MORAL BECAUSE THEY ACCURATELY DEPICT THE HUMAN CONDITIONSean M. Lynn-Jones, research associate in the International Security Program, JFK School of Government, Harvard University, CONTEMPORARY SECURITY AND STRATEGY, 1999, p. 59-60.

Realists offer two types of reply to claims that realism is morally unacceptable. First, they point out that realist theories do not exclude the possibility of international cooperation. The tradition of realpolitik, as practiced by Bismarck and Metternich includes many attempts to use diplomacy to manage crises, force alliances and prevent war. Second, realists suggest that the essential realist vision captures many truths about the human condition. Recognizing the limits of any attempts to change international politics may be better than a foolhardy attempt to transcend the existing system, however inadequate it may be.

3. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS NOT IMMORAL WHEN IT AVOIDS A GREAT EVILGregory Kavka, professor, University of California, Irvine, MORAL PARADOXES OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE, 1987, p. 2-3.

In Chapters 1 and 2, it is emphasized that the utilitarian costs and benefits of making deterrent nuclear threats may be very different from the costs and benefits of carrying out those threats if deterrence fails. Given this divergence, and the importance of what is at stake, we should not apply absolute deontological prohibitions in evaluating the moral status of nuclear deterrence. More specifically, even if it is wrong under any circumstances to deliberately kill many innocent civilians, it is not necessarily wrong to threaten (or intend or risk) such killings, provided such threats are necessary to deter great evils and a valid utilitarian justification for making them exists.

4. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS MORALLY JUSTIFIEDMark Lakamp, Captain in the U.S. Army Naval PostGraduate School, “Moral and Legal Judgments of the Nuclear Option for Counter-proliferation,” MILITARY PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS, February 1999, p. np., National Security Affairs Homepage, Accessed June 25, 2001, http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Lakamp.html

The case for deterrence seems clear. The ICJ noted the existence of deterrence and chose not to comment on it. Thus, no specific prohibition against it has been put forth. On the moral level, the case is very clear. Deterrence at the nuclear level has been very stable, and has successfully prevented any use of nuclear weapons for over fifty years. The one case of the use of nuclear weapons to deter the use of chemical or biological weapons was also successful, and likely save many lives, both Iraqi and Coalition. It is clear that although deterrence may be distasteful, it is the lesser of two evils. As such, it meets the requirements of morality.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Necessary

1. THE POTENTIAL FOR NUCLEAR USE JUSTIFIES CONTINUED U.S. RELIANCE ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCEWolfgang K.H. Panofsky, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Emeritus), POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 109.

Thus although indeed the "core" deterrent role of nuclear weapons (or any other strategy) will not prevent delivery of nuclear weapons under all conceivable circumstances, deterring nuclear aggression remains the least risky military course in preventing such a catastrophe. Defenses of sufficient impenetrability to prevent the delivery by any means of a sufficient number of nuclear weapons to inflict horrendous damage are demonstrably impossible. The risk inherent in any potential catastrophe is the product of the probability of occurrence of such a catastrophic event times the consequence of such an event. The probability of nuclear weapons delivery can never be reduced to totally zero as long as nuclear weapons remain, but the core deterrent function of U.S. nuclear weapons remains the principal means to minimize this probability in today's world. The consequence of potential delivery can be reduced from what used to be potential annihilation of civilization to what even now would be an unprecedented catastrophe but one of finite dimensions. Therefore risk minimization demands both retention of the core deterrent purpose of nuclear weapons combined with the maximum feasible reduction of stockpiles consistent with that purpose and an increased emphasis on the safety and reliability of command and control. For the above reasons the core purpose of nuclear weapons, that is, deterrence of nuclear threats or actual use of nuclear weapons, has retained its value in the post-Cold War era.

2. DETERRENCE IS STILL NECESSARY EVEN IF IT FAILS SOMETIMESAndrew J. Goodpaster, Retired General, et al., POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 24.

Not all actions can be deterred. Some adversaries are willing to pay any price to achieve a vital national goal in an area that is of less than vital interest to the United States, so that threats of substantial damage or destruction are meaningless. Most terrorists fall into this category; indeed, we may not know the identity of the perpetrators until after the event, if then. Thus, this circumstance lacks the "deter whom" component. The possibility of failure, however, does not mean that we should not pursue a policy of deterrence. Some behavior, like crime, may not be totally preventable, but we nevertheless do and must continue to take steps to deter it. And, since history does not reveal its alternatives, we would have little idea how much worse the behavior might be without the deterrent actions.

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE USEFUL DETERRENTS AGAINST AGGRESSION AGAINST NATOPaul Buteux, director of the Center for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, CANADIAN MILITARY JOURNAL, Winter 2000-2001, p. 36.

The experiences of the Gulf War and Yugoslavia have significantly informed the development of Allied strategic thinking in the post-Cold War period. Alliance forces have been configured away from territorial defence and towards power projection out of area. In these circumstances, the utility of NATO nuclear weapons lies in their latent potential to deter an adversary on the periphery of the Euro-Atlantic area (however extensively that periphery might be defined) from threatening or resorting to weapons of mass destruction.12 In short, nuclear weapons still have a role to play in backing the potential use of conventional force by the Alliance and remain an integral part of Alliance strategy. This is implicit in the Strategic Doctrine, but for reasons of political sensitivity is not spelled out.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Effective

1. DETERRENCE THEORY IS STILL AN IMPORTANT TOOL IN ANALYZING INTERNATIONAL SECURITY POLICYFrank Harvey, associate professor of Political Science, Dalhouse University, THE FUTURE’S BACK: NUCLEAR RIVALRY, DETERRENCE THEORY, AND CRISIS STABILITY AFTER THE COLD WAR, 1997, p. 136.

The evidence suggests that deterrence and compellence theories, two abstract theories derived from analysis of interstate relations in anarchy, continue to make important contributions to the study of international conflict, crisis management, and security policy in a post-Cold War world. With all their faults, state-centric theories are as relevant to the study of ethnic conflict within states as they were to an understanding of US-Soviet relations since 1945. The inference that nothing of value has been gained from the last fifty years of research on the causes and consequences of interstate war and ethnic conflict, that nothing of substance has emerged to facilitate an understanding of the properties of this form of violence and the prospects for stability, and that a radically new approach is required to assess the implications of change and strategies appropriate to deal with it is highly premature.

2. MODELING AND GAMING CAN STRENGTHEN DETERRENCE ABILITYAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 38.

Neither modeling nor gaming can predict outcomes with any confidence. However, modeling and gaming can provide useful insights to strengthen deterrence programs. They are particularly useful in understanding the dynamics of deterrence that often are not apparent in static analysis. Modeling can integrate a wide set of variables and may be particularly helpful in understanding key relationships and linkages that may not otherwise be apparent. Modeling also can help in understanding the likely consequences of alternative strategies. Similarly, gaming with expert surrogates provides opportunities to observe the interplay between two or more sides and to understand the rationale behind key responses in different value systems. Both of these analytic tools can be useful in examining important strengths and weaknesses of all sides—essential information for effective deterrence. Both can and should be applied a priori to anticipate potential crisis situations and the field of possible responses. They can be especially helpful to the group of "strategic worriers" called for above and for familiarizing strategic decision makers with situations and possible responses they may actually be called upon to face during their tenures.

3. EXISTENCE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTINUES TO BE AN EFFECTIVE DETERRENTAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 27.

Even if nuclear weapons are for all practical purposes decoupled from battlefield forces and other weapons of mass destruction, and explicitly limited to nuclear deterrent roles, the implied potential for their use—their very existence—still may make them effective deterrents in contexts other than the use of nuclear weapons by an opponent. For example, recent evidence from Iraq suggests that Saddam Hussein was deterred from using chemical and biological weapons that were prepared and delivered to missile sites and airfields because he believed that the United States would respond with nuclear weapons. According to the admittedly sketchy available data, such perceptions were said to be based mainly on Secretary Baker's threat of massive destruction of Iraqi industry if such weapons were used, with the implied threat of nuclear response. This is an illustration of the complexity of the issue in attempting to focus nuclear weapons on a tightly limited deterrence objective. Other complexities become apparent in this chapter's continuing discussion.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Proliferation

1. DETERRENCE IS NECESSARY TO STOP PROLIFERATIONBaker Spring, policy analyst, “PROLIFERATION AND ARMS CONTROL: Balancing Defense, Deterrence, and Offense, ISSUES 2000: HERITAGE FOUNDATION CANDIDATES BRIEFING BOOK NO. 16, 2000, http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap16.html, Accessed April 19, 2001.

Moreover, in October 1998, the White House released a national security strategy statement warning that the "Proliferation of advanced weapons and technologies threatens to provide rogue states, terrorists and international crime organizations the means to inflict terrible damage on the United States, its allies and U.S. citizens and troops abroad." Yet the Administration's actions to counter the proliferation threat have not matched this sobering rhetoric. Ambitious but often ineffective arms control measures have been implemented at the expense of other policy tools that are necessary to deter proliferation--most especially defense, deterrence, and preemption.

2. ARMS CONTROL IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR DETERRENCEBaker Spring, policy analyst, “PROLIFERATION AND ARMS CONTROL: Balancing Defense, Deterrence, and Offense, ISSUES 2000: HERITAGE FOUNDATION CANDIDATES BRIEFING BOOK NO. 16, 2000, http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap16.html, Accessed April 19, 2001.

Equating arms control treaties, such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), with national security is potentially disastrous. The Clinton Administration has demonstrated excessive faith in arms control treaties. These agreements effectively promote proliferation by increasing the perceived value of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, especially among rogue states. The Administration's policies assume that vulnerability promotes strategic stability, a policy embodied in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with the former Soviet Union. The Administration continues to adhere to the restrictions in the ABM Treaty even though the treaty effectively died with the Soviet Union, and despite the fact that doing so limits America from mounting a defense to counter the proliferation threat. Arms control should never be pursued at the expense of deterrence.

3. DETERRENCE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF STRATEGIC STABILITYBaker Spring, policy analyst, “PROLIFERATION AND ARMS CONTROL: Balancing Defense, Deterrence, and Offense, ISSUES 2000: HERITAGE FOUNDATION CANDIDATES BRIEFING BOOK NO. 16, 2000, http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap16.html, Accessed April 19, 2001.

Deterrence is the cornerstone of strategic stability. Deterrence is an essential component of America's non-proliferation policy. An effective deterrent enables Washington to convince hostile leaders that any attack on America with powerful weapons would be met with overwhelming force. But such a deterrent requires both a robust military arsenal that is survivable and a demonstrated willingness to use it if necessary.

4. OFFENSIVE WEAPONS ARE NECESSARY TO DEFEND THE COUNTRYBaker Spring, policy analyst, “PROLIFERATION AND ARMS CONTROL: Balancing Defense, Deterrence, and Offense, ISSUES 2000: HERITAGE FOUNDATION CANDIDATES BRIEFING BOOK NO. 16, 2000, http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap16.html, Accessed April 19, 2001.

A good defense requires a strong offense. Not only must Washington support deterrence and defense, but it must also be willing to fund adequate offensive capabilities. For example, the United States must be prepared to make preemptive strikes to destroy weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile regimes that threaten U.S. interests, America's friends and allies, and U.S. troops overseas, as well as Americans at home. Israel demonstrated the virtue of this approach in 1981 when it destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant before Baghdad could obtain its fissile material and fabricate a nuclear device.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Cold War Model Still Accurate

1. DETERRENCE CAN WORK IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London, ARMS CONTROL TODAY, October 2000, p. 8.

It may be wise to use deterrent threats only sparingly, but it can hardly make sense never to use them at all. In a developing confrontation there often comes a point when it might just make a difference if the opponent is made aware that if a particular line is crossed, then there will be a forceful response. Critics of deterrence can point to many instances when such conditional threats have failed to work. The implication of this is not that such threats should never be issued but that they should not be issued casually, without some readiness to implement them if necessary. Deterrence is one way for states to attempt to limit each other's behavior. The cause of a more orderly world is as likely to be helped by a readiness to provide explicit warnings about the risks associated with a breach of a crucial limit as by matters being left ambiguous and uncertain, so that the limits only become apparent once they have been exceeded.

2. DETERRENCE IS STILL RELEVANT IN THE POST-COLD WAR Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London, ARMS CONTROL TODAY, October 2000, p. 3.

The possibilities of deterrence should not be ignored. As an approach to security policy, deterrence still has a role to play, although not the role it was granted during the Cold War. Deterrence still helps explain why states, and even non-state actors, fail to act against the interests of others. Actors may be deterred because they have constructed a possible future in which they are worse off. These caution inducing constructions are often developed without any external help, but occasionally they can be encouraged by various combinations of statements and military deployments, put together as deliberate acts of deterrence. In this way, we can understand deterrence as a feature and consequence of good- strategy.

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS DETER, EVEN IN THE CASE OF NEW PROLIFERANTSKenneth Waltz, Ford Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, past President of the American Political Science Association, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, 2000, p. np., accessed June 30, 2001, http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/publications/journal/vol1_1/1_6.htm>

You've got to be sure that in an attack, whether with nuclear weapons or conventional weapons, you're attacking weapons. Now, it's hard-nuclear weapons are small-to be sure that you're going to destroy those weapons quickly and completely. With conventional weapons you at least have the illusion of control; that is, you can defend, you can delay, and you can exact a toll from the enemy. The ultimate question is whether you are going to win or lose. If you are fighting with nuclear weapons the issue is survival, not necessarily physically, but as a political entity. Military commanders are well aware of how many things can go wrong: failed intelligence, undetected warheads in an unexpected location. If Pakistan has two dozen nuclear weapons spread around and at least four or five India does not know about, is India going to attack and risk four or five warheads blowing up Indian cities? While the attack might not destroy India, what could be at stake that would be worth that price? It's a risk to their regime, it's a risk to rulers, and it's a risk to the military. You don't get much enthusiasm out of the military for fighting wars it's going to lose.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Credibility Key

1. THE LACK OF U.S. CREDIBILITY HAS EMPIRICALLY PREVENTED EFFECTIVE DETERRENCEAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 22.

Deterrence can succeed only if the combination of threats and incentives is credible, and this requires both capabilities and political will. The United States, for example, can call on a wide range of political, economic, and military capabilities that would be overwhelming in most cases. However, several adversaries have not been deterred because they judged that the United States lacked the political will to incur casualties, sustain costs, take risks, and deepen its involvement when vital interests were not at stake. Also, many potential adversaries probably doubt that the United States will use nuclear weapons short of responding to a major nuclear attack on the United States or U.S. forces.

2. PUBLIC BELIEF THAT THE U.S. WILL REMAIN ENGAGED IS KEY TO SUCCESSFUL DETERRENCEAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 40.

Given such a diverse array of problems, the main task for policy makers is to build a fabric of deterrence that embodies a sustained commitment to providing an increasing level of security, stability, and order among the peoples of the world. Accomplishing this task requires unprecedented cooperation between both international and domestic political leaders. Most importantly, the American public must be convinced that the United States should remain engaged abroad.

3. CREDIBILITY OF U.S. RESPONSE KEY TO DETERRENCE POSTUREPaul H. Nitze and J.H. McCall, Johns Hopkins University, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 82.

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, as the lessons of the successes, failures, and potential of conventional, strategic, high-precision strategic, smart weapons are digested by all nations, one message should come home most emphatically: the United States, when provoked, can and will use strategic conventional weapons against whatever targets it considers appropriate. A general understanding of this one lesson, at home and abroad, may offer us the first credible and therefore useful strategic deterrent we have seen since the early days of the nuclear era. At the same time, the United States should not squander its credibility by allowing challenges to go unmet and forfeit international leadership in moments of crisis. Unless and until the United States is willing to closely examine its new national interests as well as publicize them, and to take the foreign policy and security measures required to meet those interests, no amount of weapons, no matter how sophisticated, will succeed in deterring aggression.

4. ESTABLISHING U.S. CREDIBILITY IS THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE DETERRENCE SIGNALAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 41.

Some regimes are likely to challenge the United States because they believe we will be unable to build or sustain public or congressional support in the face of mounting or expected casualties, as demonstrated in Vietnam, Somalia, and the arguments about Bosnia. To meet these challenges, the United States must be perceived as willing to pay the costs in lives and resources, and to stay the course with the needed military skill and political stamina. However, leaders cannot determine in advance the threshold that will result in swift and certain U.S. response because each case involves a unique set of circumstances, and any previously announced set of criteria could tacitly permit lower-level violations of human rights and other important international norms. Therefore, effective deterrence must involve a dynamic process in which policies are frequently reviewed to determine whether underlying assumptions remain valid, and the case for U.S. action must continually be made to the American public and Congress. It will be important to have established credibility through previous actions in order to disabuse the potential aggressor of a belief that we would be self-deterred by internal divisions, past expressions of a lack of interest in events that may have appeared similar to the ones in question, logistic limitations, other force commitments, international pressures, and the like.

West Coast Publishing 21All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Good – No Alternative

1. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO YOUR KRITIK OF REALISMSean M. Lynn-Jones, research associate in the International Security Program, JFK School of Government, Harvard University, CONTEMPORARY SECURITY AND STRATEGY, 1999, p. 71

Realism will continue to be an important source of theories of international politics and security studies. Despite the barrage of criticisms directed against it before and after the Cold War, realism remains a vibrant source of theoretical innovations and predictions about the future of world politics. There are two reasons why realism continues to survive. First, no other paradigm offers a richer set of theories and hypotheses about international politics. Realism offers a world view that can be used to generate deductive theories to explain the recurrent patterns of international politics from ancient times to the present. No contending paradigm has been able to match realism’s ability to generate logically integrated theories that apply across space and time. Marxism had the potential to match the conceptual elegance and breadth of realism, but that ideology has fallen into disrepute and tends to focus on explaining economic, political and social phenomena within states, not between them. Because there is no alternative paradigm, by default realism retains a central place among theories of international politics. Second, realism will endure because its pessimistic emphasis on self-interest, conflict and power seems to capture important elements of the human condition. We may not like realism’s emphasis on tragedy and evil, but we have yet to find a way to escape it.

2. THERE IS NO VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO NUCLEAR DETERRENCEMichael Nacht, professor of Government and director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: NEW RISKS, NEW OPPORTUNITIES, 1986, p. 127-128.

The bottom line of this examination of three critical schools of deterrence is that, as unnerving and as dangerous as nuclear deterrence has been, there are at present no plausible and preferable alternatives to it. In a time when it seems to be becoming increasingly fashionable to be critical of the concept and condition of nuclear deterrence, this is a sobering reminder that even in the nuclear age “you can’t beat somethin’ with nothin’.” In these circumstances, it would be especially dangerous to try.

3. CONVENTIONAL FORCE POSTURE WOULD NOT BE EFFECTIVE AGAINST NUCLEAR THREATSJohn C. Hopkins and Steven A. Maaranen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 119.

Another concern is that it is probably impossible to assure complete and reliable nuclear disarmament. Nuclear weapons are easy to hide, and it has even proven difficult to demonstrate the existence of nuclear weapons development and production capabilities to the extent necessary to justify intervention. The credibility of a threat by the United States to deploy conventional forces alone against small powers that may possess weapons of mass destruction, perhaps including nuclear weapons, is problematic.

West Coast Publishing 22All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Good – Alternative Causes Proliferation

1. REJECTING THEORIES LIKE REALISM AND DETERRENCE IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVEFrank Harvey, associate professor of Political Science, Dalhouse University, THE FUTURE’S BACK: NUCLEAR RIVALRY, DETERRENCE THEORY, AND CRISIS STABILITY AFTER THE COLD WAR, 1997, p. 139.

Finally, the lack of purity and precision, another consequence of linguistic relativism, does not necessarily imply irrelevance of purpose or approach. The study of international relations may not be exact, given limitations noted by Wittgenstein and others, but precision is a practical research problem, not an insurmountable barrier to progress. In fact, most observers who point to the context-dependent nature of language are critical not so much of the social sciences but of the incorrect application of scientific techniques to derive overly precise measurement of weakly developed concepts. Clearly, our understanding of the causes of international conflict—and most notably war—has improved considerably as a consequence of applying sound scientific methods and valid operationalizations. The alternative approach, implicit in much of the postmodern literature, is to fully accept the inadequacy of positivism, throw one’s hands up in failure, given the complexity of the subject, and repudiate the entire enterprise. The most relevant question is whether we would know more or less about international relations if we pursued that strategy.

2. REJECTING DETERRENCE THEORY INCREASES NUCLEAR THREATSFrank Harvey, associate professor of Political Science, Dalhouse University, THE FUTURE’S BACK: NUCLEAR RIVALRY, DETERRENCE THEORY, AND CRISIS STABILITY AFTER THE COLD WAR, 1997, p. 143.

Of all the policy alternatives becoming available as a consequence of these global changes, the logic of nuclear (MAD) and conventional deterrence should remain as important considerations for those interested in establishing stable nuclear rivalries and controlling ethnic conflicts as we approach the twenty-first century. It would be dangerous, to say the least, to ignore the diagnostic and prescriptive qualities of deterrence and compellence theory if we are interested in managing nuclear rivalry or preventing the next ethnic war.

3. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT WOULD ENCOURAGE PROLIFERATIONJohn C. Hopkins and Steven A. Maaranen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 119.

It is often argued that a U.S. move to conventional deterrence might induce nuclear disarmament and prevent nuclear proliferation, but it is also plausible that nuclear disarmament by these powers would encourage or reward nuclear proliferation by rogue states or by those states that now take shelter under the umbrellas of the nuclear powers. A lesson that some foreign leaders and militaries learned from the Gulf War was that nuclear weapons may be necessary in order to offset otherwise overwhelming U.S. conventional capabilities.

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Nuclear Deterrence Good – Saudi Proliferation

Loss of credible U.S. extended deterrence leads to Saudi prolifThomas Scheber, Vice President of the National Institute for Public Policy, May 2009, “Contemporary Challenges for Extended Deterrence,” online

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other predominantly Sunni states in the region have expressed a renewed interest in nuclear energy. This interest in nuclear technology by oil-rich states in the Middle East is judged by many to be a thinly veiled hedge against Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. If Shi’a-dominated Iran is unchecked in its development of a nuclear arsenal, Sunni Muslims are likely to anticipate that they will be among the targets of coercion—or worse. On the margins of a UN meeting on December 16, 2008, six Arab states—Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—met with then-Secretary of State Rice and expressed their concern about Iran’s nuclear policies and its regional ambitions. A news report greatly understated their concern when it said, “these countries have very deep interests in how this issue is resolved.”8 Iran’s nuclear weapon aspirations could trigger nuclear proliferation by one or more of these countries who are not currently beneficiaries of U.S. extended nuclear guarantees. An official of the United Arab Emirates stated that the United States should consider countering an Iranian threat by offering Middle East allies Protection under a nuclear umbrella.9 Saudi officials are reported to have made statements that, in response to an Iranian nuclear threat, they would prefer to rely on a U.S. nuclear umbrella. However, if they believe the “United States lacks the will or capability to defend Saudi Arabia against a nuclear-armed Iran, Saudi Arabia is more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon capability of its own.” If needed, they would seek “a nuclear guarantee from Pakistan.”10

West Coast Publishing 24All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Good – China/Taiwan War

Extended deterrence is key to prevent a China-US war over Taiwan Lewis Dunn, former Assistant Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Summer 2007, “Deterrence Today, Roles, Challenges and Responses,” IFRI Security Studies Center, online

Unlike the case with Russia, a U.S.-China nuclear crisis or even confrontation is not inconceivable. Precipitous action by Taiwan could be one trigger; a decision by Chinese officials to act against Taiwan another. In any such confrontation over Taiwan, it is conceivable that Chinese officials could miscalculate the readiness of the United States to support Taiwan. Chinese officials also could miscalculate their ability to manage the risks of escalation. In that regard, some Chinese experts have stated informally that such an asymmetry of stakes would put the United States at a fundamental disadvantage in any China-Taiwan-U.S. crisis. That is, in their view, given asymmetric stakes, the United States would be reluctant to escalate even after a Chinese limited use of a nuclear weapon.30 The U.S.-China strategic relationship also is characterized by mutual uncertainties about each other’s longer-term strategic intentions in both Washington and Beijing. In Washington, the scope and goals of China’s planned nuclear modernization as well as its readiness to play a constructive role in dealing with pressing non-proliferation problems remain open questions. Beijing’s decision to test an anti-satellite weapon in January, 2007 clearly reinforced those uncertainties. In Beijing, the scope and goals of U.S. deployment of missile defenses and advanced conventional weapons is being closely watched given concerns about a possible U.S. pursuit of a disarming first strike against China’s nuclear arsenal. For their part, China’s experts and officials have signaled that the scope and pace of China’s nuclear modernization is linked to those American deployments. So viewed, China is prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve a limited nuclear deterrent.31 Against this backdrop, the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent has a role to play in lessening the risk of Chinese miscalculation over Taiwan. More broadly, as suggested above, the American presence in Asia and the U.S. nuclear deterrent also is seen by some Japanese and other officials as a reassuring factor in the context of China’s growing military capabilities and political rise in Asia. U.S. officials need to continue to make clear U.S. support for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question. U.S. officials need to be prepared to counter Chinese perceptions that an asymmetry of stakes reduces the risks of China of threats or use of force should any confrontation over Taiwan occur. The steps set out above to buttress the U.S.- Japan and U.S.-Korea alliance relationship also provide a broader reassurance vis-à-vis China. Nonetheless, a U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan is not inevitable. Indeed, unlike in the late 1990s and early 2000s, current Chinese thinking emphasizes the manageability of the Taiwan issue. Its resolution, so it seems, can be deferred for some time to come. The key is that Taiwan’s leadership exercises restraint on the matter of independence, a factor seen as more likely given the very extensive economic and people-topeople interaction across the Taiwan Straits. Moreover, China’s rise in Asia and globally need not result in growing instability and insecurity for the countries in that region. Rather both U.S. and Chinese interests – as well as those of China’s neighbors – would be well served by moving over time toward a non-adversarial strategic relationship as part of greater politicaleconomic- security cooperation.

Credible security reassurances are critical to prevent China-Taiwan war Robert S. Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College, 2002, “Navigating the Tiawan Strait: Deterrance, Escalation Dominance, and US-China Relations,” International Security, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v027/27.2ross.html#authbio

China's perception of U.S. resolve is thus a critical determinant of the effectiveness of the U.S. extended deterrence posture and the state of U.S.-China relations. China can acknowledge U.S. military superiority but still question U.S. resolve to risk war and high costs, including the potential for incurring a large number of casualties, over the defense of Taiwan. Thus, the United States must compensate for U.S.-Chinese asymmetric interests in Taiwan to deter China's use of force. Moreover, China's assessment of U.S. resolve affects U.S. defense planning. U.S. concerns over the credibility of its extended deterrence posture [End Page 51] could lead to a Taiwan policy that would be detrimental to American interests in U.S.-China cooperation.

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Nuclear Discourse Good – Solves Criticisms

1. RECOGNIZING WE ARE ALL VICTIMS IN A NUCLEAR WAR IS NECESSARY TO ENVISION AN ALTERNATIVE TO NUCLEARISMRobert Jay Lifton, professor at John Jay College, and Eric Markusen, professor of Sociology, THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY: NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT, 1990, p. 258.

The final reversal is a movement towards formed awareness of the actuality of nuclear threat by its prospective victims—that is, everyone on earth. Only by accepting the difficult truth that, in a nuclear attack, there would be complete merging of perpetrator and victim—of generals and presidents and premiers in deep shelters and ordinary people everywhere—can we create the responsibility and cooperation necessary to preserve the world.

2. EXPLAINING THE EFFECTS OF A NUCLEAR WAR IS MORAL BECAUSE IT DETERS ACTORS FROM THINKING NUCLEAR WAR IS POSSIBLEGeorge H. Quester, chairman of the Department of Government, University of Maryland, NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: NEW RISKS, NEW OPPORTUNITIES, 1986, p. 80.

The ultimate moral response thus remains as it was, that “assured destruction,” even if it be labeled MAD –“mutual assured destruction,”—is contingently acceptable, precisely because it deters itself from happening. Knowing how bad a nuclear war would be keeps national leaders from crossing the line into such a war. If the damage of a thermonuclear war were ever to become plausibly close to acceptable, if ideas of “limited nuclear war” were given too much credence, or if the defenses of population came to be rated as effective, or if the nuclear arsenals of the powers were to be substantially reduced, then this barrier might be in trouble, even where rulers were “rational” in all normal senses of the word.

3. EDUCATING THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS A NECESSARY PART OF THE ANTI-NUCLEAR WEAPONS MOVEMENTDr. Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Peace Laureate, “We Owe An Allegiance To Humanity,” October 1997, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/itv_rotblat_9710.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

You cannot start a mass movement without telling people what they are trying to achieve. Therefore, when I speak about starting a mass movement, of course, it has to start by educating the people. Give them the facts. They should not just believe that they are living in a world where nuclear weapons don't matter. The truth now is that many people think that the danger is over completely, and this is the reason why the nuclear issue is no longer on the agenda. The first thing is to inform the people that the process is not complete, and in fact it may reverse. Give them the facts. Groups like yours, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, have a big task in this mass movement campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

4. THE LACK OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE OVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY IS AN OBSTACLE TO THEIR ELIMINATIONDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “Nuclear Weapons and Sustainability,” November 1998, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/sustain.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

Obstacles to the elimination of nuclear weapons include official secrecy concerning nuclear policies, lack of public discourse on these policies, confusion and muddled thinking regarding deterrence by policy elites, and a lack of courage and imagination on the part of political leaders. All of these translate into a lack of political will to radically change nuclear policies and take bold steps toward the global elimination of nuclear weapons.

West Coast Publishing 26All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Good – Alternative Fails

1. RHETORICAL ATTACKS ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL FAIL OVER THE LONG TERMRobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 106.

Although nuclear stigma is usually presented as pragmatic, and sometimes includes only rhetorical speculation about the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, underlying disarmament motives often erupt as nonproliferation, democratization, or wishful thinking, which to some extent may be interlinked. The first form is the renewed emphasis on nonproliferation. President Clinton, in his address to the United Nations, proclaimed: "I have made nonproliferation one of our nation's highest priorities. We intend to weave it more deeply into the fabric of all of our relationships with the world's nations and institutions." A provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is that the nuclear weapon states will make progress toward nuclear disarmament; at the time, the current Administration appeared anxious to display apparent progress toward disarmament in response to this requirement of the NPT. The fear of proliferation may be an important element in nuclear stigma. For example, this is the reason that one popular recommendation to "reduce nuclear danger" is to end fissile material production. And, in fact, the US Secretary of Energy hailed the end of plutonium production as "progress on the path of nuclear disarmament." In "Phase Out the Bomb," Barry Blechman and Cathleen Fisher express concern that "America's continued reliance on nuclear weapons cripples its efforts to persuade others not to seek nuclear capabilities." They quote General Charles Horner, who stated, "It's kind of hard to say to North Korea, `You are a terrible people, you're developing a nuclear weapon,' when the United States has thousands of them." (The real message to North Korea should be: "You are acting like terrible people and that's why we can't let you develop a nuclear weapon.") As argued above, the benefits of nuclear weapons depend on the characteristics of the weapons themselves and the need for the United States to use force and the threat of force in a world where other nations will always have nuclear weapons. Thus, rhetorical attempts to "delegitimize" US nuclear weapons will fail when confronted with reality, a dangerous fact that will become obvious in the long run.

2. WE MUST REJECT EMOTIONAL APPEALS AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS: ANY A PRIORI CLAIMS ABOUT DISARMAMENT ARE EXACTLY THE PROBLEMRobert G. Spulak, senior analyst at Strategic Studies Center, Sandia National Labs, “The Case in Favor of US Nuclear Weapons,” PARAMETERS, Spring 1997, p. 106.

Since we absolutely cannot achieve the goal of abolishing both nuclear weapons and the knowledge of how to construct them, policies and actions that appear to move in that direction will always fail the test of plausibility. But since these policies and actions would be undertaken in the name of "reducing nuclear danger," they acquire a respectability that they have not earned through critical examination. This is the reason it is necessary to reject the emotional appeal reflected in Les Aspin's assertion in 1992 that, in the new era, "the burden of proof is shifting toward those who want to maintain" policies supporting US nuclear weapons and away from those who advocate "four prescriptions of the left . . . a comprehensive test ban, an end to production of fissile material . . . removal of forward-based tactical weapons, and renunciation of first use." An assumption that the formulation of US security policy is biased a priori toward a given set of policy recommendations is exactly the problem with nuclear stigma.

West Coast Publishing 27All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Immoral

1. NUCLEAR RETALIATION IS MORALLY UNACCEPTABLEJonathan Granoff, attorney and a member of Lawyers Alliance for World Security, Temple of Understanding, and the State of the World Forum, “Nuclear Weapons, Ethics, Morals and Law,” October 1999, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/granoff-nuclear-weapons-ethics.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

It is clear that deterrence is designed to threaten massive destruction which would most certainly violate numerous principles of humanitarian law. Additionally, it strikes at generations yet unborn. Even in the instance of retaliation the moral absurdity challenges us. As Mexico’s Ambassador Sergio Gonzalez Galvez told the Court, "Torture is not a permissible response to torture. Nor is mass rape acceptable retaliation to mass rape. Just as unacceptable is retaliatory deterrence—‘You burnt my city, I will burn yours.’" Professor Eric David, on behalf of the Solomon Islands, stated, "If the dispatch of a nuclear weapon causes a million deaths, retaliation with another nuclear weapon which will also cause a million deaths will perhaps protect the sovereignty of the state suffering the first strike, and will perhaps satisfy the victim’s desire for revenge, but it will not satisfy humanitarian law, which will have been breached not once but twice; and two wrongs do not make a right."

2. ARGUMENTS IN DEFENSE OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE ARE MORALLY ABSURDJonathan Granoff, attorney and a member of Lawyers Alliance for World Security, Temple of Understanding, and the State of the World Forum, “Nuclear Weapons, Ethics, Morals and Law,” October 1999, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/granoff-nuclear-weapons-ethics.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

Did the Court undermine the continued legitimacy of deterrence? The Court stated clearly that "if the use of force itself in a given case is illegal—for whatever reason—the threat to use such force will likewise be illegal." The moral position of the nuclear weapons states is essentially that the threat to commit an illegal act—massive destruction of innocent people—is legal because it is so horrible to contemplate that it ensures the peace. Thus the argument is that the threat of committing that which is patently illegal is made legal by its own intrinsic illogic. Does this engender moral coherence in the youth of the world to whom we must argue that violence and the threat of violence in daily life does not bring human fulfillment?

3. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS IMMORAL BECAUSE IT PREVENTS A MOVE TO DISARMAMENTPax Christi Bishops in the United States, “The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence”, June 1998, p. np. Pax Christi USA Web Page, http://www.paxchristiusa.org/morality698.htm, Accessed May 27, 2001.

On this, the 15th anniversary of The Challenge of Peace the time has come for concrete action for nuclear disarmament. On the eve of the Third Millennium may our world rid itself of these terrible weapons of mass destruction and the constant threat they pose. We cannot delay any longer. Nuclear deterrence as a national policy must be condemned as morally abhorrent because it is the excuse and justification for the continued possession and further development of these horrendous weapons. We urge all to join in taking up the challenge to begin the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons now, rather than relying on them indefinitely.

West Coast Publishing 28All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Unnecessary

1. SEVERAL FACTORS PROVE THAT NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS NOT A VIABLE STRATEGY FOR THE POST-COLD WAR WORLDJohn C. Hopkins (retired) and Steven A. Maaranen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 116-117.

Although nuclear weapons certainly played a major role in preventing major conflict during the Cold War, several problems emerged that increasingly cast doubt on the long-term utility of nuclear deterrence as the foundation of U.S. security policy. The first problem is related to the massive destructive power of nuclear weapons. In the early days, large-scale destruction was considered an advantage, since large targets, like cities, could be struck and destroyed using a small number of bombs delivered with poor accuracy. Some even spoke of widespread collateral effects as "bonus damage." But as interest grew in attacks that could be discriminating and limited, collateral damage needed to be reduced: the previous virtue of nuclear weapons became a limitation. Moreover, the deployment by the Soviet Union of its own nuclear forces quickly put in place a mutual deterrence relationship, where the United States had to persuasively establish the credibility of its use of nuclear weapons, both in retaliation and in a first-use mode, even though the expected strike from the Soviets would inflict enormous damage on the U.S. homeland. Partly because of these developments, the U.S. public came increasingly to question nuclear weapons as the basis for its security while America's European allies grew skeptical of the notion of extended deterrence. The end of the Cold War raised more doubts. Maintaining a ready nuclear strike force when the putative enemy had become a potential partner and seemed to be on the path to democracy appeared unwarranted. Moreover, continuing to rely heavily and directly on nuclear forces could be seen as reinforcing the idea that nuclear weapons have utility in assuring a nation's security interests, an argument that undermines our desire to make these weapons unattractive to potential proliferant states.

2. DETERRENCE IS NO LONGER NECESSARY BECAUSE LARGE-SCALE AGGRESSION IS NOT FEASIBLE

John D. Steinbruner, Brookings Institution, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 67. Perhaps the central fact is that deliberately calculated, large-scale aggression—the central focus of deterrent policy—is simply not a major temptation for a major government. The classic exercise of seizing territory by force is not worth the risk and expense involved, save for a few marginal situations. With the advanced capabilities of the United States and its major allies, those exercises can in principle be detected and preemptively defeated, and even an initial success could not be sustained. Basically the assertion of political jurisdiction by illegitimate force is ruinously inefficient in the globalizing economy. The variant of attempting political intimidation by threatening long-range destruction is such a blunt instrument and is so exposed to countervailing threat that it is not a credible policy for a major government. As long as the source of aggressive intent can be located and identified, the basic deterrent effect is not worth contesting and is therefore relatively easy to achieve.

West Coast Publishing 29All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Justifies Nuclearism

1. DETERRENCE LEGITIMATES A RELIANCE ON NUCLEARISMRobert Jay Lifton, professor at John Jay College, and Eric Markusen, professor of Sociology, THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY: NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT, 1990, p. 95.

In the case of nuclear weapons, there are also overt and covert ideological relations to legitimacy. On the one hand, the prevailing nuclearism enables the weapons to be openly and legally built, tested, and deployed: that is, legitimated both by official sanction and by moral claim of “national security” and “deterrence.” But nuclearism also creates covert areas of legitimation: the secret plans for fighting and winning nuclear wars and for decisions to use the weapons, under various circumstances, at different levels of command, as well as the elaborate targeting of virtually all Soviet cities.

2. DETERRENCE IS THE MAIN REASON FOR THE EXISTENCE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONSWolfgang K.H. Panofsky, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Emeritus), POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 107-108.

Although initially acquisition of nuclear weapons was generally justified by a "more bang for the buck" rationale, the core purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons has always been to deter the threatened or actual use of nuclear weapons by foreign powers against the U.S. homeland, U.S. allies, or U.S. interests overseas. During the Cold War, this core purpose usually incorporated the term "mutual" in such descriptions as mutually assured destruction or mutual deterrence. Barring reignition of NATO tensions with Russia, with its still partially intact nuclear weapons, the deterrence aspect of U.S. policy has now lost its bilateral focus and "mutual" no longer applies. However, the core purpose, referring to deterrence of nuclear aggression from whatever quarter it might originate, remains a principal rationale for retention of nuclear weapons.

West Coast Publishing 30All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Realism

1. DETERRENCE THEORY ASSUMES STATES ARE UNITARY, RATIONAL ACTORSAndrew J. Goodpaster, retired General, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 14.

Several important assumptions underlie most thinking about deterrence. Practitioners tend to assume, for example, that states are unitary actors, and logical according to our concepts of rationality. Deterrence also assumes that we can adequately understand the calculations of an opponent. One of the most important assumptions during the Cold War was that nuclear weapons were the most effective deterrent to war between the states of the East and the West. This assumption, carried into the post-Cold War era, however, may promote nuclear proliferation. Indeed, some authors suggest that the spread of nuclear weapons would deter more states from going to war against one another. The weapons would, it is argued, provide weaker states with more security against attacks by stronger neighbors. Of course, this view is also predicated on the assumption that every state actor's rationality will work against the use of such weapons, and that nuclear arms races will therefore not end in nuclear warfare.

2. DETERRENCE IS BASED ON FEARJohn C. Hopkins and Steven A. Maaranen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 114.

It is widely agreed today that "deterrence" as a term of art means preventing war either through fear of punishment or fear of defeat, or sometimes even through fear of undefined negative consequences. The word "deterrence" is derived from the Latin de + terrere, literally "to frighten from" or "to frighten away." Thus, fear is central to the original meaning of deterrence. The idea that vast, indiscriminate, and unacceptable damage would be inflicted in retaliation for aggression, as was associated with the prospect of the aerial bombing of open cities in the 1930s, or the employment of nuclear weapons since World War II, has long been central to the popular understanding of the term deterrence. That fear of defeat could be powerfully deterring, although a long-standing idea, has been less widely understood.

3. DETERRENCE INVOLVES WIELDING POWER TO CHANGE OTHER STATESPaul H. Nitze & J.H. McCall, Johns Hopkins University, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 75-76.

To understand our options and possible new approaches to strategic deterrence, we should start by defining what we mean by the term. Although it may sound trite to remind ourselves, it is helpful to restate again that, in its simplest form, to deter means to inhibit or prevent someone from doing something. The definition implies specificity: We should know whom we are deterring from doing what, to whom, and when. From these considerations arises the notion of a broader process or act—deterrence—which we propose to translate into policy, whereby a specific government or state seeks to deter another from pursuing a specific policy goal. More commonly, we think of strategic deterrence as our will and ability to wield military power to prevent or inhibit the use of force by another state in a manner of which we disapprove.

4. THE U.S. ABILITY TO GIVE PUNISHMENT IS A CRITICAL PART OF DETERRENCEAndrew J. Goodpaster, Retired General, et al., POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 22.

To persuade an opponent not to take proscribed actions, the capabilities and prospective outcomes invoked as a deterrent must convince the opponent that the costs, in terms of opportunities and value lost, judged by his own means of measuring them, will not be worth paying, and that in any case the deterring capabilities will prevent him from achieving his objectives. Furthermore, the opponent must be convinced that punishment will be forthcoming, and he must fear the punishment. Likewise, he must perceive that inducements offered will in fact be delivered. While the entire world understands the divisions between executive and legislature in the United States and various other parliamentary governments, doubt about whether the legislature will permit the executive to deliver on promised benefits can have as deleterious an effect on positive measures to induce desired behaviors as failure to punish can have on deterring undesirable behaviors. It is in areas such as these that uncertainties arising from vastly different political systems—U.S. and the potential opponents'—can contribute to the failure of deterrence.

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West Coast Publishing 32All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Must Reject

1. RESISTANCE TO NUCLEAR DETERRENCE POLICIES IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WARPax Christi Bishops in the United States, “The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence”, June 1998, p. np. Pax Christi USA Web Page, http://www.paxchristiusa.org/morality698.htm, Accessed May 27, 2001.

The policy of nuclear deterrence has always included the intention to use the weapons if deterrence should fail. Since the end of the Cold War this deterrent has been expanded to include any number of potential aggressors, proliferators and so-called "rogue nations." The inherent instability in a world unconstrained by the great-power standoff present throughout the Cold War leads us to conclude that the danger of deterrence failing has been increased. That danger can become manifest if but one so-called "rogue state" calls the deterrent bluff. In such a case the requirements of deterrence policy would be the actual use of nuclear weapons. This must not be allowed. Because of the horrendous results if these weapons should be used, and what we see as a greater likelihood of their use, we now feel it is imperative to raise a clear, unambiguous voice in opposition to the continued reliance on nuclear deterrence.

2. REJECTING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID COMPLICITY WITH EVILDavid Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “The New Millennium: The Past As Prologue,” December 1999, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, Accessed May 27, 2001, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/krieger-new-millennium.html

At the present time our national security is based upon the illegal threat of nuclear weapons use that could result in the murder of hundreds of millions of innocent people. We are all accomplices to this illegal threat. Were this threat ever to be carried out, we would be accomplices, willing or unwilling, to what the president of the World Court has described as the "ultimate evil." If nuclear weapons are ever used again, by accident or design, it will be a greater crime than that committed by the Nazis during World War II. The German people were rightly terrified to challenge the Nazis. The American people have no such excuse. Nor can we claim ignorance. We are all parties to the threatened crime. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, superior orders do not constitute a defense.

3. WE MUST CHANGE OUR THINKING TO SOLVE NUCLEARISMDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, "Nuclearism and Its Spread to Asia," 2000, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/asia.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

Einstein, who had at first encouraged Franklin Roosevelt to establish a U.S. government project to develop nuclear weapons, was utterly distraught by what had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He warned, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Einstein's reflection remains the central challenge of the Nuclear Age. What will it take to change our modes of thinking with regard to nuclearism? One source of encouragement is that nuclearism does not seem to be an ideology with widespread support among the people of the world. It appears to be largely concentrated among those who stand to profit from it, and their supporters in government. The nature of nuclearism has been revealed in starker terms in the aftermath of the Cold War. Despite the breakup of the former Soviet Union and the end of communism as a state ideology in Russia, the West has continued to rely upon nuclear arsenals and to pursue policies of maintaining these arsenals, although at lower levels than in the Cold War period. But these arsenals do not assure global security, and many experts have argued that the breakup of the former Soviet Union has created serious dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of unstable national leaders or terrorists.

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Nuclear Deterrence Bad – Individuals Must Reject

1. CITIZEN PRESSURE TO ELIMINATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAN BE EFFECTIVE IN CHANGING GOVERNMENT POLICYDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “The New Millennium: The Past As Prologue,” December 1999, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/krieger-new-millennium.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

Abolition 2000 has called for an international treaty to be concluded by the end of the year 2000 which would lead to the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Its goal is to enter the 21st century with a treaty in place providing a firm commitment on the part of the nuclear weapons states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. As the year 2000 is approaching rapidly, this may seem like an unrealizable goal. But this is not necessarily the case. Democracies respond to overwhelming citizen pressure. If such pressure were forthcoming in the United States, it could turn the tide. If we have continued complacency, then we will enter the 21st century with inertia and perhaps we will have to wait until a nuclear weapon destroys another city or many cities somewhere in the world before there is action to eliminate nuclear weapons. On the other hand, if Americans were to say, "Enough is enough," and demand leadership from our government to obtain a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, it could be done and it could be done rapidly.

2. EACH CITIZEN HAS AN OBLIGATION TO HAVE THEIR VOICE HEARD IN THE FIGHT AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONSDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “The New Millennium: The Past As Prologue,” December 1999, p. np. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web Site, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/krieger-new-millennium.html, Accessed May 27, 2001.

Someone recently said to me, "I’m glad you’re working on this because I have other priorities." That was not comforting. No one person is going to turn this country around. It will take all of us together. And all of us together can do it. As Jody Williams, the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for the Landmines Campaign, said, "We are the new superpower." She didn’t mean the United States or any other powerful nation alone. She meant us – you, me, and millions like us. Together we are the new superpower, but only if we make our voices heard.

3. EACH OF US HAS AN OBLIGATION TO JOIN IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE NUCLEAR GENOCIDAL MENTALITYRobert Jay Lifton, professor at John Jay College, and Eric Markusen, professor of Sociology, THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY: NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT, 1990, p. 279.

No one can claim knowledge of a single, correct path. Rather, there must be endless combinations of reflection and action and, above all, the kind of larger collective adaptation we have been discussing. At the same time, we must remain aware of persisting genocidal arrangements and expressions of genocidal mentality. We cannot afford to “stop thinking.” Nor can we wait for a new Gandhi or Saint Joan to deliver us. Rather, each of us must join in a vast project—political, ethical, psychological—on behalf of perpetuating and nurturing our humanity. We are then “people getting up from their knees” to resist nuclear oppression. We clear away the “thick glass” that has blurred our moral and political vision. We become healers, not killers, of our species.

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Nuclear Deterrence Bad – A2: Perm

1. RELIANCE ON DETERRENCE PREVENTS POLICYMAKERS FROM TAKING ACTIONS TO DEAL WITH MORE SALIENT SECURITY THREATSJohn D. Steinbruner, Brookings Institution, POST-COLD WAR CONFLICT DETERRENCE, 1997, p. 67-68.

The more serious security danger, moreover, is that emerging from spontaneous social violence and from small-scale but highly destructive threats whose originating source cannot be readily located or identified. The globalizing economy is making access to destructive technology inherently available, as dramatized but only indirectly illustrated by terrorist episodes in Tokyo and in Oklahoma City. Small states and substate organizations can acquire weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated means of delivery. The proliferation of highly destructive clandestine threats of this sort could reach unmanageable proportions. So also could the instances of radical internal disintegration such as have occurred in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Tajikistan, and many other places as well. At the moment, the leading military establishments are poorly prepared to handle this array of problems, and traditional deterrent practices interfere with the intricate collaboration among them that would be required to develop relevant capabilities.

2. REJECTING THE DETERRENCE SYSTEM IS THE ONLY WAY TO MOVE AWAY FROM THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITYRobert Jay Lifton, professor at John Jay College, and Eric Markusen, professor of Sociology, THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY: NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT, 1990, p. 257.

At the psychological and material heart of the transformation in consciousness we are suggesting is the replacement of dissociated deterrence with an integrated mind-set and a policy of national defense that is neither genocidal nor threatening. This reversal of mind-set and policy would be based on precisely those human truths blocked out by existing patterns of numbing, disavowal, and doubling. While these dissociative tendencies can hardly be eliminated entirely, their collective expression in weapons policies can be radically diminished. This goal requires the rejection of the entire deterrence system because that system is inherently genocidal. The reject the genocidal system requires breaking out of its closed reasoning and recognizing that destroying the world in response to a perceived attack is neither politically nor morally acceptable.

3. USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN STRATEGY IS ALWAYS IMMORAL AND VIOLATES HUMANITARIAN LAWJonathan Granoff, chair, American Bar Association Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, 2000, p. 1432.

Under no circumstance may states make civilians the object of attack, nor can they use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets. These limitations continue to hold regardless of whether the survival of a state, acting in self-defense, is at stake. For this reason, the President Judge stated in forceful terms that the Court's inability to go beyond its statement "can in no way be interpreted to mean that it is leaving the door ajar to the recognition of the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons." He emphasized his point by stating that nuclear weapons are "the ultimate evil and destabilize humanitarian law which is the law of the lesser evil. The very existence of nuclear weapons is therefore a major challenge to the very existence of humanitarian law." The Court held that no formal testimony was presented that nuclear weapons can meet the humanitarian law requirements for their use. The President Judge said, "Atomic warfare and humanitarian law therefore appear to be mutually exclusive, the existence of one automatically implying the non-existence of the other." The Court said, Methods and means of warfare, which would preclude any distinction between civilian and military targets, or which would result in unnecessary suffering to combatants, are prohibited. In view of the unique characteristics of nuclear weapons ... the use of such weapons in fact seems scarcely reconcilable with respect for such requirements.

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Nuclearism Bad – Genocide

1. NUCLEARISM CAUSES A GENOCIDAL MENTALITYAshis Nandy, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “The Epidemic of Nuclearism: A Clinical Profile of the Genocidal Mentality,” HIMAL MAGAZINE, July 1998, p. 1.

The genocidal mentality also tends to create an area protected from public responsibility or democratic accountability. Usually such responsibility is avoided by re-conceptualising oneself as only a cog in the wheel, advancing one's own bureaucratic or scientific career everybody else, by taking and obeying orders from superior authorities faithfully, mechanically, and without thinking about the moral implications of the orders. The Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg at the end of World War II all ventured the defence that they were under orders to kill innocent people, including women, children and the elderly, and could do nothing about it.

2. NUCLEARIST MENTALITY DEHUMANIZES, LEADS TO STALINIST THOUGHTSAshis Nandy, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “The Epidemic of Nuclearism: A Clinical Profile of the Genocidal Mentality,” HIMAL MAGAZINE, July 1998, p. 1.

The other way of avoiding accountability is to remove it from individuals and vest it in institutions and aggregates. As if institutions by themselves could run a death machine without the intervention of individuals! After a while, even terms like the military-industrial complex, fascism, imperialism, Stalinism, ruling class, or American hegemony become ways of freeing the actual, real-life persons from their culpability for recommending, ordering, or committing mass murders. In a society where genocidal mentality spreads, intellectuals also find such impersonal analyses soothing; they contribute to the creation of a business-as-usual-ambience in which institutions are ritually blamed and the psychopathic scientists, bureaucrats and politicians who work towards genocides move around scot-free.

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Nuclearism Bad – Alternative – Species Focus

1. REPLACING THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY WITH A SPECIES MENTALITY IS CRITICAL TO HUMAN SURVIVALRobert Jay Lifton, professor at John Jay College, and Eric Markusen, professor of Sociology, THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY: NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT, 1990, p. 258-259.

These moves away from the genocidal mentality replace it with a species mentality: that is, full consciousness of ourselves as members of the human species, a species now under threat of extinction. Indeed, that very threat may invoke the larger possibilities of the species self. Species consciousness contributes to a sense of self that identifies with the entire human species. But the self cannot live, so to speak, on the human species alone. Its traditional forms of immediate identification—other people, family, work, play, religion, ethnic group, and nation—give substance to the species identification and are necessary to it. As in many things, only by holding to the particular can we have access to the universal—as George Kateb (paraphrasing Neitzsche) means when he speaks of becoming “attached to the particulars in one’s life in a new way, without narrowness, exclusiveness, and obsession, in order to make room for a nonparticularist attachment to existence as such.” For “existence as such” is inseparable from survival of the human species.

2. BY OPPOSING NUCLEARISM, WE CAN UNITE ALL OF HUMANITYDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, "Nuclearism and Its Spread to Asia," 2000, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/asia.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

Opposition to nuclearism provides an opportunity for humanity to unite around a common theme of assuring a future for our children and grandchildren. The time to act is now. There is far too much to do that is positive rather than to continue to spend our human, our scientific, and our financial resources on weapons of mass annihilation and nuclear power reactors that create radioactive poisons that will endanger the Earth for thousands of generations. Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been enough of a lesson for the world to learn. There is no need to wait until more cities are added to this unfortunate list. East and West, North and South face the common problem of nuclear terror. We can end that terror once and for all if enough of us will stand up, speak out, and demand an end to nuclearism. It is time to reject both nuclear weapons and the dangerous technology of nuclear energy with which weapons production is so intimately intertwined.

3. SPECIES CONSCIOUSNESS IS PRACTICALRobert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York and Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Richard Falk, INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM, updated edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991, p. xvi.

That kind of species consciousness is no longer a mere wishful projection. It finds expression in practical renditions of policies associated with “common security” and reflects our recognition that every human being on earth, and all other forms of life as well, are threatened by weapons and by tendencies toward environmental destruction and decay. With that recognition, individual people form aspects of a species self – a self made up not only of existing identifications (with family, work, religion and nation) but including, importantly, a sense of being a member of the human species.

4. SPECIES CONSCIOUSNESS HELPS PEOPLE WORK COOPERATIVELYRobert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York and Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Richard Falk, INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM, updated edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991, p. xvi.

These shifts in collective consciousness and individual psychological function are of enormous importance for bringing about policies that renounce nuclearism in favor of significant forms of cooperation on behalf of mutual survival. Indeed, what has been most constructive in the Gorbachev-Reagan and the Gorbachev-

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Bush dialogues, including the INF Treaty of 1987, has undoubtedly been made possible by emerging species consciousness among the people of both countries as expressed by the leaders themselves.

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Nuclearism Bad – Alternative – Individual Action

1. WE MUST DECONSTRUCT NUCLEAR LANGUAGE IN ORDER TO RECONSTRUCT AN ALTERNATIVE VISION OF POSSIBLE FUTURESCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

I believe that those who seek a more just and peaceful world have a dual task before them- -a deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately linked. Deconstruction requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture that it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the world. The reconstructive task is to create compelling alternative visions of possible futures, to recognize and develop alternative conceptions of rationality, to create rich and imaginative alternative voices--diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures.

2. WE CAN PROMOTE A CULTURE OF PEACE THROUGH INDIVIDUAL TRANSFORMATIONSenator Douglas Roche, O.C., Chairman, Middle Powers Initiative, Public Lecture Sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, February 21, 2001, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/01.03/roche_globalizationnuclearweapons.html, Accessed April 15, 2001.

A culture of peace is a process of individual, collective and institutional transformation. It grows out of beliefs and actions of the people themselves and develops in each country within its specific historical, socio-cultural, and economic context. A key is the transformation of violent competition into cooperation based on the sharing of values and goals. In particular, it requires that conflicting parties work together to achieve objectives of common interests at all levels, including the development process.

3. ACKNOWLEDGING OUR OBLIGATION TO ELIMINATE THE TOOLS OF NUCLEAR GENOCIDE IS A KEY FIRST STEPDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “An Open Letter to the Next U.S. President: ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS,” September 9, 2000, www.wagingpeace.org, Accessed May 1, 2001.

In addition to moral and legal obligations to eliminate nuclear weapons, it is also in our security interests. Nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to the existence of our nation and, for that matter, the rest of the world. The American people and all people would be safer in a world without nuclear weapons. The first step toward achieving such a world is publicly recognizing that it would be in our interest to do so. That would be a big step forward, one that no American president has yet taken.

4. INDIVIDUAL CYNICISM CAUSES SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES OF UNIVERSAL DOOMRobert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York and Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Richard Falk, INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM, updated edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991, p. 11.

There is a particularly sophisticated version of resignation-cynicism that one encounters these days mainly at universities, which go something like this: “Well, what is so special about man? Other species have come and gone, so perhaps this is our turn to go extinct.” This is perhaps the ultimate “above the battle” position. Again nothing is to be done, one is philosophically – cosmically – detached from it all. All of these add up to a stance of waiting for the bomb and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy of universal doom.

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Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – Acronyms/Shorthand

1. NUCLEAR ACRONYMS REMOVE US FROM THE REALITY BEHIND THE WORDS, DESTROYING UNDERSTANDING AND EXCLUDING ALTERNATIVESCarol Cohn, professor of Womens’ Studies at Bowdoin College, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

Although I was startled by the combination of dry abstraction and odd imagery that characterized the language of defense intellectuals, my attention was quickly focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the articulation of acronyms. Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly as utilitarian they allow you to write or speak faster. They act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving the rest both uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate.

2. ACRONYMS DENUDE THE TRUE NATURE OF THE CONCEPT, WHICH PREVENTS REJECTION OF THE CONCEPT – WE ARE UNAWARE OF THE PROBLEMCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

Other acronyms serve in different ways. The plane in which the president will supposedly be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving intelligence and issuing commands for where to bomb next, is referred to as "Kneecap" (for NEACP--National Emergency Airborne Command Post). Few believe that the president would really have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would be working if he were in it--hence the edge of derision. But the very ability to make fun of a concept makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright.

3. SHORTHAND TERMS LIKE ‘NUKE’ CAUSE PEOPLE TO ACCEPT DANGEROUS NUCLEAR MYTHS – IT PROMOTES ACCEPTANCE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONSKathleen Sullivan, Centre For Human Ecology, “Sexualising Technology – or How We’ve Come to Love the Bomb,” NEWS IN REVIEW, May 15, 2000, p. 4.

Beyond violence against ‘female nature,’ there seems to be a normative acceptance of violence in U.S. society, that archetypical nuclear nation, which appears to condone the iconography of atomic symbols. The mushroom cloud, symbolizing a nuclear explosion, has won its place among major cultural icons. The words: ‘atomic,’ ‘nuke,’ ‘mutants,’ ‘meltdown,’ and ‘ballistic’ show up in an array or cultural contexts. The predominance of nuclear imagery in U.S. popular culture reveals a general acceptance of it. It is as if people in the U.S. live under the rule of nuclear mythology. Mushroom clouds, radiation signs, phallic caricature bombs, and other signs of pending nuclear doom have been elevated to a cult status. As the glamorized reversals of their true nature, these symbols are perceived as ‘cool’ and ‘sexy,’ and as such, ‘nukes’ and ‘mutants’ have won their place in culture.

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Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Nuclear Weapons” and “Nuclear War”

1. WEAPONS ARE DESIGNED TO BE USED: CALLING NUCLEAR TOOLS OF OMNICIDE WEAPONS IMPLIES USEJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

President Eisenhower once said that he saw "no reason why [nuclear weapons] shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else." In a world in which many nations possess nuclear devices, however, one is at a loss to see how they can be used against an enemy to accomplish an end worth attaining given the risks inherent in their use. As the American scholar Theodore Draper noted, "nuclear weapons are too effective to be used." Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under two Presidents, reached a similar conclusion, saying that "nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless -- except only to deter one's opponents from using them." And such opinions are not limited to civilians. Admiral Noel Gayler, Commander of all United States forces in the Pacific from 1972 until 1976, observed that "there is no sensible military use for nuclear weapons, whether 'strategic' weapons, 'tactical' weapons, 'theater' weapons, weapons at sea or weapons in space." If such statements are correct, then explosive nuclear devices can not be called weapons at all, for weapons, by definition, are instruments intended for use in combat.

2. SOLVING THE NUCLEAR THREAT REQUIRES A CHANGE IN TERMINOLOGY, BEGINNING WITH AND END TO TERMS LIKE "NUCLEAR WEAPONS" AND "NUCLEAR WAR"John M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

To solve the frightening problem of the nuclear threat, people need terms that they can use to speak and write about explosive nuclear devices that indicate how very different those devices are from anything heretofore invented. Ending all references to nuclear weapons, substituting a term such as nuclear explosives or nuclear deterrents in their place, represents an important first step. Similarly, one should never speak of nuclear war, only of deterrence, the possible breakdown of deterrence, and the possibility of a nuclear exchange. (I am not happy with the phrase "nuclear exchange" because it ignores the horrible consequences of the use of nuclear explosive devices, but "nuclear holocaust," a more vivid term, might not be accurate enough to cover all eventualities.)

3. THE TERM "NUCLEAR WAR" OBSCURES THE TRUE MEANING OF HUMAN CALAMITY: "NUCLEAR DISASTER" IS MORE APPROPRIATEJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

"War" is another term that loses its traditional meaning when the adjective "nuclear" precedes it. War is supposed to be a purposeful act, calculated to make one's enemy do one's will, to paraphrase Clausewitz. In its traditional meaning, war is an extension of politics and diplomacy, a violent attempt to achieve one's goals when other methods fail. Given that definition, however, the phrase "nuclear war," like "nuclear strategy," becomes an oxymoron. If both parties to a conflict possess nuclear explosives (or have allies possessing them), then the use of those explosive devices might well prove suicidal, and suicide is not a rational extension of policy. General Collins appeared to come to the only reasonable conclusion possible when he rejected nuclear war as "a rational form of warfare or a rational instrument of policy." An exchange of nuclear explosions is not an example of rational, goal oriented behavior, and therefore such an act is not war. One can speak rationally about nuclear disaster, but talking rationally about nuclear war is more difficult.

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Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Nuclear Strategy”

1. THE TERM "NUCLEAR STRATEGY" IS NUCLEARIST DISCOURSE THAT OBSCURES MEANINGJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

A similar problem of linguistic confusion exists with other military terminology. In virtually all cases, the minute the adjective "nuclear" is applied to a term, it ceases to mean what it has traditionally meant. For example, the term "strategy" is used to describe "the way in which military power is used by government in the pursuit of their interest." That being the case, one must believe that nuclear power can be used in the pursuit of one's interest before one can speak of "nuclear strategy." But almost anyone having written on the topic agrees that nuclear power does not have such utility. As the political scientist Robert Jervis observed, "a rational strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons is a contradiction in terms." The term nuclear strategy really has nothing to do with war; it is only applicable when one speaks of deterrence.

2. EVEN PLAYING THE GAME OF “NUCLEAR STRATEGY” TRAPS YOU IN THE NUCLEARIST PARADIGMCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

The language issues do not disappear. The seductions of learning and using it remain great, and as the pleasures deepen, so do the dangers. The activity of trying to out- reason nuclear strategists in their own games gets you thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms.

3. "NUCLEAR SUPERIORITY" IS A MISLEADING AND NUCLEARIST TERMJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

Another term that loses its meaning when used in the nuclear context is "superiority." In military affairs, the term "superiority" is usually associated with weapons and combat. One gains victory through superiority. It helps one win. In reference to nuclear devices, however, the term, like so many others, has little meaning. As Henry Kissinger, former U. S. Secretary of State, once asked: "What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?" The answer, of course, is that no one really knows what it means to be superior or inferior as far as the deployment of nuclear devices is concerned.

4. "NATIONAL SECURITY" AND "NATIONAL DEFENSE" REPRESENT NUCLEARIST DISCOURSEJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

Throughout the Cold War, people continued to talk about the importance of nuclear force for "national defense" and "national security," although one could neither defend a nation by using nuclear explosives nor guarantee its security by threatening to use them. Gwyn Prins, the editor of The Nuclear Crisis Reader, observed that security is "a state of mind," not to be equated "with military force and its attendant supports. Security is produced by general social well-being. . . . the sum of individual fulfillment, which depends upon the civilized arbitration of conflicts of interest in society, which in turn depends upon a just provision of goods, services and opportunities for all." Security, for Prins, was also "intimately bound up with . . . freedom. Freedom from want, freedom of thought, freedom from fear." The deployment of explosive nuclear devices and their delivery vehicles would seem to have nothing positive to contribute to the concept of security as defined here.

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Nuclear Discourse Bad – Link – “Limited” Nuclear War

1. THE NOTION OF “LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR” IS NONSENSICAL AND GROTESQUECarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

So the problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for example, is not only that it is a travesty to refer to the death and suffering caused by any use of nuclear weapons as "limited," or that "limited nuclear war" is an abstraction that obfuscates the human reality beneath any use of nuclear weapons. It is also that limited nuclear was itself an abstract conceptual system, designed, embodied, and achieved by computer modeling. In this abstract world, hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to know exactly what size nuclear weapon the opponent has used against which targets, and adequate command and control to make sure that their response is precisely equilibrated to the attack.

2. REFERRING TO LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR IS GROTESQUELY REMOVED FROM REALITYCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

No field commander would use the tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal at the height of a losing battle. Our rational actors would have absolute freedom from emotional response to being attacked, from political pressures from the populace they would act solely on the basis of perfectly informed mathematical calculus of megatonnage. To refer to limited nuclear war is to enter a system that is de facto abstract and grotesquely removed from reality. The abstractness of the entire conception system makes descriptive language utterly beside the point.

3. EVEN HINTING THAT A NUCLEAR DISASTER IS WINNABLE IS WRONG: TERMS LIKE "VICTORY" "OR "PREVAIL" DESTROY OUR UNDERSTANDINGJohn M. Gates, professor of history, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

Similarly, terms such as "victory" or "win" lose their meaning when used in conjunction with the term "nuclear." One wins by accomplishing one's goals, which is also how one defines victory. One has difficulty imagining how any nation might accomplish a set of goals through an exchange of nuclear explosions, despite the attempt by contemporary strategists such as Colin Gray to make "the Case for a Theory of Victory" and comments by Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, about using American "nuclear capabilities" to "prevail." Weinberger's assertion that nuclear devices could be used "to achieve political objectives and secure early war termination on terms favorable to the United States and its allies" was nothing short of ludicrous given the incredible dangers inherent in their use. More useful is the conclusion of Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, once director of military operations for all United States forces in Europe and the Middle East. Said Admiral Carroll, "there is no safety, no survival, if both sides continue to build and deploy war-fighting forces designed to prevail in a nuclear conflict. Safety lies ultimately in changing our way of thinking about the role of military power in the nuclear age."

West Coast Publishing 43All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Extinction

1. CONFUSION FROM MISLEADING LANGUAGE CAN LEAD TO DESTRUCTION OF ALL A SOCIETY HOLDS DEARJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

The dangers of conceptual confusion in thinking about military affairs should be obvious. They can include unnecessary death and destruction, as well as defeat and the loss of all that a society or group may hold dear. Unfortunately, potentially dangerous misperceptions are not always evident, particularly to the people who are most closely associated with them.

2. FLAWED THINKING ABOUT NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST CREATES SERIOUS RISKSJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

A more dangerous example of conceptual confusion and the use of inappropriate terminology came at the other end of the spectrum of conflict in analyses of nuclear deterrence and the attempts to develop a doctrine of nuclear war fighting. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War worked to moot some of the controversy, the relationship between the conceptual confusion evident in the discourse surrounding deterrence and the potential for nuclear disaster present during the Cold War is still worthy of analysis. Although the dangers of nuclear holocaust have abated, the dangers inherent in flawed thinking about nuclear explosives remains. In a text published in the United States in 1985 the editors referred to the system of international relations of the nuclear age as one of "structural terrorism." They argued that by holding entire populations hostage, forcing people to live in fear of nuclear annihilation, "the terror of the nuclear age has also become part of the international system's structure." Whether or not the editors were correct in their assessment, one cannot deny that the invention of the atomic bomb and the many devices that followed it, including the hydrogen bomb and the ICBM, created new and unprecedented dangers in the world.

3. EMPIRICALLY, MISLEADING NUCLEAR LANGUAGE CAN INCREASE THE RISKSJohn M. Gates, professor of History, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

What had enabled people like Gray and Payne to ignore the frightening possibility that the use of nuclear explosive devices could mean the end of civilization as we know it, perhaps even the end of the human species? Paul Chilton, a linguist at the University of Warwick in England, argued that in "both official and popular utterances about nuclear weapons and war" people have used language "in such a way that nuclear weapons and war are familiarized and made acceptable." He called the phenomenon "nukespeak.” Chilton observed that people used language to talk about nuclear devices that represented "an attempt to slot the new reality into the old paradigms of our culture." The process began in 1945, immediately after the first atomic bomb was dropped in Japan. Often individuals spoke of the bomb "in terms of religious awe . . . One useful consequence of such language, if not one of its actual motivations," wrote Chilton, "was to appear to diminish human control, responsibility, and guilt." Over time, something even worse happened to the language. A trend began toward what Chilton identified as "the acculturation of the nuclear phenomenon. Instead of being symbolically classified as objects of supernatural awe," wrote Chilton, nuclear weapons came "to be classified as safe and usable instruments." The change, argued Chilton, "accompanied

West Coast Publishing 44All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism

1. NUCLEARISM IS A HORRIBLY DANGEROUS IDEOLOGY – DEFENDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS PERPETUATES ITDavid Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, "Nuclearism and Its Spread to Asia," 2000, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/asia.html, Accessed March 31, 2001.

At its core, nuclearism is the belief that nuclear weapons and nuclear power are essential forms of progress that in the right hands will protect the peace and further the human condition. Nuclearism is a dangerous ideology __ as dangerous as the technologies it has unabashedly and unreservedly promoted. In this belief system, "the right hands" have generally been synonymous with one's own country, and "to further the human condition" has generally been synonymous with benefit to oneself, one's country or one's corporation. The key elements of nuclearism are: 1. The belief that nuclear weapons keep the peace, and are a necessary evil. 2. The belief that nuclear power is a safe, reliable and inexpensive source of energy, and that the nuclear power industry is an absolute good. 3. The belief that, despite the expansion of the nuclear power industry, the diversion of nuclear materials from the nuclear fuel cycle to military uses can be prevented. The ideology and the technologies it has supported have created extraordinary dangers for all life on Earth.

2. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IS THE ULTIMATE MORAL EVIL: WE MUST REJECT IT JUST AS WE REJECT SLAVERY, COLONIALISM AND APARTHEIDSenator Douglas Roche, O.C., Chairman, Middle Powers Initiative, Public Lecture Sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, February 21, 2001, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/01.03/roche_globalizationnuclearweapons.html, Accessed April 15, 2001.

Once again, we must summon up our confidence that this stranglehold over humanity can be broken. Just as institutional slavery was broken, just as colonialism was broken, just as apartheid was broken, so too can the ultimate evil of nuclear deterrence, which promises to rain down catastrophic destruction on peoples we do not know, with whom we have no quarrel and who have every bit the same human right to live in peace as we do. It is unacceptable for a civilized people to live with such terror. This is the essential message that needs to be conveyed to the public, not more mumbo-jumbo from the nuclear retentionists who would enslave us with bureaucratic technicalities instead of a broad vision of building a world community based on the rule of law.

3. DETERRENCE THEORY PROVES THERE IS NO REALITY BEHIND NUCLEAR LANGUAGECarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

The problem, however, is not simply that defense intellectuals use abstract terminology that removes them from the reality of which they speak. There is no reality behind the words. Or, rather, the "reality" they speak of it itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and much of strategic doctrine, was invented to hold together abstractly, its validity judged by internal logic. These abstract systems were developed as a way to make it possible to, in Herman Kahn's phrase, "think about the unthinkable"--not as a way to describe or codify relations on the ground.

West Coast Publishing 45All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism

1. NUCLEAR STRATEGY RHETORIC EXCLUDES THE POSSIBILITY OF SPEAKING OF ALTERNATIVES TO NUCLEAR WEAPONSDavid Mutimer, assistant professor in International Relations at York University, CONTEMPORARY SECURITY AND STRATEGY, 1999, p. 94.

Cohn examines the way that language these men have used to talk and think about nuclear war has shaped what is and is not possible. She reports her own attempts, as a peace researcher, to express to the strategists her abhorrence of the prospect of nuclear war: I found, however, that the better I got at engaging in this discourse [of nuclear strategy], the more impossible it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values. I could adopt the language and gain a wealth of new concepts and reasoning strategies – but at the same time as the language gave me access to things I had been unable to speak about before, it radically excluded others. I could not use the language to express my concerns because it was physically impossible. This language does not allow certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed. What Cohn’s article illustrates is the way in which a social fact – even one as concrete as a nuclear weapon and the strategy that governs its use – is constructed by the way in which we talk and think about it.

2. THE DISCOURSE EXTERNALIZES US FROM THE EFFECTS OF A NUCLEAR WAR AND MAKES NUCLEAR WAR POSSIBLEDavid Mutimer, assistant professor in International Relations at York University, CONTEMPORARY SECURITY AND STRATEGY, 1999, p. 95.

She proceeds to show that the sexual language that strategists use to talk about nuclear war serves to provide them with a sense of control, as well as a sense of distance from and domestic comfort with nuclear weapons. The feeling of being in control of nuclear war allows the strategists to plan strategies for waging nuclear war. Similarly the sense of distance – that is, the ability to separate themselves from their position as potential victims of nuclear war – together with the sense of sexual partnership – allow the strategists to plan for nuclear war without considering the horrifying human costs. Taken together, this sort of language is part of what makes nuclear strategizing possible. If it were not for forms of language that allow strategists to ignore key elements of the effects of nuclear war, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to ‘think about the unthinkable’. While Cohn’s focus is on nuclear war and nuclear strategy, the same is true of all aspects of security. The ‘facts’ of security – the threats, the referent objects, the measures taken to secure – are all made possible by the way in which we think about them.

3. USING NUCLEAR LANGUAGE STOPS US FROM EXPRESSING OUR OWN REAL IDEAS AND VALUESCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

This opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it. But the better I became at this discourse, the more difficult it became to express my own ideas and values. While the language included things I had never been able to speak about before, it radically excluded others. To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come is. "strategic stability," a term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems--not the political, social, economic, and psychological conditions that "peace" implies. Moreover, to speak the word is to immediately brand oneself as a soft-headed activist instead of a professional to be taken seriously. If I was unable to speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder even to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found that I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons, without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them.

West Coast Publishing 46All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Justifies Nuclearism

1. USING NUCLEAR LANGUAGE HAS A POWERFUL EFFECT: IT REMOVES US FROM THE REALITY OF NUCLEAR WAR AND EXCLUDES ALTERNATIVES FROM DISCUSSIONCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. The words are quick, clean, light, they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them. Nearly everyone I observed--lecturers, students, hawks, doves, men, and women--took pleasure in using the words; some of us spoke with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom. But perhaps more important, leaving the language gives a sense of control, a feeling of mastery over technology that is finally not controllable but powerful beyond human comprehension. The longer I stayed, the more conversations I participated in, the less I was frightened of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, discussed earlier, is that the language is abstract and sanitized, never giving access to the images of war. But there is more to it than that. The learning process itself removed me from the reality of nuclear war. My energy was focused on the challenge of decoding acronyms, learning new terms, developing competence in the language--not on the weapons and the wars behind the words. By the time I was through, I had learned far more than an alternate, if abstract, set of words. The content of what I could talk about was monumentally different.

2. NUCLEAR DISCOURSE PLACES US ON THE SIDE OF NUCLEAR DESTRUCTIONCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

Technostrategic language articulates only the perspective of users of nuclear weapons, not the victims. Speaking in expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape from thinking of oneself as victims of nuclear war. No matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge of a nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance. I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and longtime experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its abstraction, the sense of control afforded by mastering it, and the fact that its content and concerns are those of the users rather than the victims. In learning the language, one goes from being the passive, powerless victim to being the competent wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self, rather than threats to it.

West Coast Publishing 47All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Dehumanizes

1. THERE’S NO WAY TO ACCEPT THE REALITY OF HUMAN DEATH WHEN USING NUCLEAR LANGUAGE: THE PARADIGM ELIMINATES ANY CONCERN FOR HUMANSCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

In technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not human beings but the weapons themselves. The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; any other factors, such as what happened when the weapons landed, are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss. The fact that the subject of strategic paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there is no real way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death simply is collateral damage--collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves. Understanding this is also helps explain what was at first so surprising to me: most people who do this work are on the whole nice, even good, men, many with liberal inclinations. While they often identify their motivations as being concerns about humans, in their work they enter a language and paradigm that precludes people thus, the nature and outcome of their work can entirely contradict their genuine motives for doing it.

2. QUESTIONS THAT CAN BREAK THROUGH NUCLEAR NUMBING ARE PREVENTED BY NUCLEAR LANGUAGECarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

In addition, if weapons are the reference point, it becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be easily dismissed. No one will claim that they are unimportant. But they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand. The discourse among the experts remains hermetically sealed. One can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular people and their way of life without actually asking if they are able to go for it, or if they are the best way to do it, or whether they may even damage the entities they are supposedly protecting. These are separate questions. This discourse has become virtually the only response to the question of how to achieve security that is recognized as legitimate. If the discussion of weapons was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons might be of less note. But when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those interested in the pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering. And its entrapping qualities--the way it becomes so hard, once you adopt the language, to stay connected to human concerns-- become more comprehensible.

3. LANGUAGE IS NOT THE ENTIRE PROBLEM, BUT IT IS A SIGNIFICANT COMPONENT. IT REMOVES US FROM NUCLEAR REALITIESCarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

Other recent entrants into this world have commented that the cold-blooded, abstract discussions are most striking at first, within a short time you get past them and come to see the language itself is not the problem. I think it would be a mistake, however, to dismiss these early impressions. While I believe that the language is not the whole problem, it is a significant component, and clue. What it reveals is a whole series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that make it possible to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incineration of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and non sentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation--all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about, and from the realities one is creating through the discourse.

West Coast Publishing 48All Things Nuclear

West Coast Publishing 49All Things Nuclear

Nuclear Discourse Bad – Immoral/Desensitizing

1. OUR WAY OF SPEAKING ABOUT NUCLEAR GENOCIDE NUMBS US TO THE THREATRobert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York and Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Richard Falk, INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM, updated edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991, p. 107.

Quite simply, these words provide a way of talking about nuclear weapons without really talking about them. In them we find nothing about billions of human beings incinerated or literally melted, nothing about millions of corpses. Rather, the weapons come to seem ordinary and manageable or even mildly pleasant (i.e., a “nuclear exchange” sounds more like mutual gift-giving). Now, much of this domesticated language is intentionally orchestrated by military or political bomb managers who are concerned that we stay numbed in relation to the weapons. But it is a process in which others collude, so that we may speak of a more or less spontaneous conspiracy of linguistic detoxification that contributes to the comfort of just about everyone.

2. NUCLEARIST LANGUAGE CAUSES FEELING – AND MORALITY – TO DIEZia Mian, lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, HIMAL MAGAZINE, July 1998, p. 9.

When it comes to nuclear weapons, however, the moral response has been dulled. What is at issue is whether it is right or wrong to want to have, and to want to use, the power to kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in the blink of an eye, to maim many more and to poison them so they die slowly and painfully over years from cancers and other illnesses induced by radiation. The experience of Hiroshima should have been enough to convince anyone that nuclear weapons were an affront to humanity. Despite this there has been a world-wide debate about nuclear weapons for over fifty years. This has happened in large part because nuclear weapons are usually not discussed in moral terms. From the very beginning of the nuclear age there has been a tendency to use language that hides the reality of what is being considered. But it is more than simple disguise. Language is used as an anesthetic, as a way to kill feelings. Without feelings, morality dies. These are the first casualties of nuclear weapons.

3. NUCLEAR NUMBING IS FINAL STEP IN GENOCIDAL MENTALITYAshis Nandy, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “The Epidemic of Nuclearism: A Clinical Profile of the Genocidal Mentality,” HIMAL MAGAZINE, July 1998, p. 1.

Nuclearism is framed by the genocidal mentality. Eric Markusen and Robert J. Lifton have systematically studied the links. In their book, The Genocidal Mentality, Markusen and Lifton make a comparative study of the psychology of mass murderers, in Nazi Germany, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and among the ideologues of nuclearism today and find remarkable continuities. In the genocidal person there is, first of all, a state of mind called “psychic numbing"-a "diminished capacity or inclination to feel – and a general sense of meaninglessness". One so numbs one's sensitivities that normal emotions and moral considerations cannot penetrate one any more. Numbing "closes off" a person and leads to a "constriction of self process". To him or her, the death or the possibility of the death of millions begins to look like an abstract, bureaucratic detail, involving the calculation of military gains or losses, geopolitics or mere statistics. Such numbing can be considered to be the final culmination of the separation of affect and cognition-that is, feelings and thinking that the European Enlightenment sanctioned and celebrated as the first step towards greater objectivity and scientific rationality.

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Nuclear Discourse Bad – A2: Turns

1. USING PRE-NUCLEAR LANGUAGE TO DESCRIBE NUCLEAR ISSUES HURTS OUR UNDERSTANDINGJohn M. Gates, professor of history, The College of Wooster, The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1998, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book_ch11.html, accessed March 31, 2001.

Use of the language of the prenuclear age in discussions of nuclear questions made understanding of the nuclear dilemma more difficult. Many of the terms used in speaking about the nuclear phenomenon had been used for a century or more. Frequently the terms had meanings as a result of their history or usage that had little relevance in an age of ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads, yet analysts and leaders, both civilian and military, used them in their new context with little hesitation.

2. NUCLEAR DISCOURSE IS NOT AS LOGICAL AS IT CLAIMS TO BECarol Cohn, "Slick 'ems, Glick 'ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, June 1987, p. 17.

Close attention to the language itself also reveals a tantalizing basis on which to challenge the legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they play, their response is to claim the high ground of rationality they portray those who are radically opposed to the nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional-- "idealistic activists." But if the smooth, shiny surface of their discourse--its abstraction and technical jargon--appears at first to support these claims, a look below the surface does not. Instead we find strong current of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive toward competence and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and privileged group, of the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood. How is it possible to point to the pursuers of these values, these experiences, as paragons of cool-headed objectivity? While listening to the language reveals the mechanisms of distancing and denial and the emotional currents embodied in this emphatically male discourse, attention to the experience of learning the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings.