SCFI - Nuclearism K

SCFI 2010
Nuclearism
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Nuclearism K
Nuclearism K.....................................................................................................................................................1
1NC - Theological Nuclearism K (1/3)..............................................................................................................3
Link: Nuclear Extinction.....................................................................................................................................6
Link: Euphemisms.............................................................................................................................................7
Link: "Nuclear Exchange"/Khalilzad 95.............................................................................................................8
Link: Threats......................................................................................................................................................9
Link: Threats....................................................................................................................................................10
Link: Threats....................................................................................................................................................11
Link: Deterrence..............................................................................................................................................12
Link: Security/Hegemony................................................................................................................................13
Link: Nuclear War/Technostrategic Discourse...............................................................................................14
Link: Media......................................................................................................................................................15
Link: Localism..................................................................................................................................................16
Anti-Nuclear Nuclearism Link..........................................................................................................................17
Anti-Nuclear Nuclearism Link (1/2).................................................................................................................18
Anti-Nuclear Nuclearism Link (2/2).................................................................................................................19
Nuclear Orientalism Link.................................................................................................................................22
Nuclear Orientalism Link.................................................................................................................................23
Nuclear Globalism Link...................................................................................................................................24
Nuclear Globalism Link...................................................................................................................................25
Nuclear Globalism Link: Nuclear War = Textual.............................................................................................26
Impact: Value to Life/Numbing........................................................................................................................27
Impact: Violence..............................................................................................................................................28
Impact: Genocide............................................................................................................................................29
Impact: Nuclear War.......................................................................................................................................30
Impact: Arms Races/Turns Prolif....................................................................................................................31
Impact: Extinction............................................................................................................................................32
Impact: Statism/Technology Bad....................................................................................................................33
Impact: Fear/Totalitarianism...........................................................................................................................34
Alt: Theology of Peace....................................................................................................................................35
Alt: Imagine the Real.......................................................................................................................................36
Alt: Species Consciousness............................................................................................................................37
Framework: Theology.....................................................................................................................................38
Framework: Theology.....................................................................................................................................39
Framework: Representations..........................................................................................................................40
Framework: Discourse....................................................................................................................................41
Framework: Discourse....................................................................................................................................42
A2: Permutation..............................................................................................................................................43
A2: Realism/Deterrence Inevitable.................................................................................................................44
A2: Realism Inevitable....................................................................................................................................45
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A2: Case Outweighs/Threats Are Real...........................................................................................................46
A2: Cede the Political......................................................................................................................................47
A2: War Good..................................................................................................................................................48
A2: Deterrence Solves....................................................................................................................................49
AFF - Permutation...........................................................................................................................................50
AFF - No Impact..............................................................................................................................................51
AFF - Fear of the Bomb Good........................................................................................................................52
AFF - Fear of the Bomb Good........................................................................................................................53
AFF - Calculation Good...................................................................................................................................54
AFF - Nuclear Planning Good.........................................................................................................................55
AFF - Technostrategic Discourse Good.........................................................................................................56
AFF - A2: Technostrategic Discourse Bad.....................................................................................................57
AFF - Cede the Political..................................................................................................................................58
AFF - A2: Discourse........................................................................................................................................59
AFF - A2: Species Consciousness Alt............................................................................................................60
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1NC - Theological Nuclearism K (1/3)
Why are debaters so obsessed with nuclear war? 20th century secularization left a
symbolic vacuum that was filled in by the image of the Bomb, creating a social and political
atmosphere based around nuclear weaponry. The aff's impacts are their conversion to the
Church of Nuclearism - their scenarios are not psychologically neutral, but are borne out of
the drive to continually imagine total annihilation in order to regain some sense of meaning
in an age defined by the potential for massive, senseless destruction.
Chapman '90 G Clarke Chapman, chair of the department of religion and philosophy at Moravian College, Facing the Nuclear Hersey, 1990,
http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/chernus/4820-ColdWarCulture/Readings/FacingTheNuclearHeresy.pdf
We begin with Robert Jay Lifton, a research psychiatrist at Yale University who is best known for his 1962 studies of survivors of the Hiroshima bomb."° This
experience has impelled him over the years to expand his findings into a range of articles and books which probe our attitudes towards death, as well as the
effects on the psyche of living in a post Hiroshima world. He goes beyond the older Freudian views that one's own death is so unimaginable that the mind tries to
repress all thought of it. Instead Lifton
stresses the positive role of symbols in helping both the conscious and the unconscious
to transcend that personal finality. He sees "the symbolizing process around death and immortality as the individual's
experience of participation in some form of collective life continuity," of which there have been historically five modes." The biological mode of symbolic
immortality is expressed in the confidence of living through one's children and their descendants. The religious mode consists of rituals and formal beliefs about
an afterlife. Creative works that live on through artifacts, the arts and sciences, or other service to humanity, forms a third mode. Fourth is nature itself, which is
seemingly eternal; Hiroshima survivors often comforted themselves with the ancient saying, "The state may collapse but the mountains and rivers remain."
Finally and most fundamentally, there is the altered state of consciousness which Lifton calls "experiential transcendence," such as induced states of momentary
ecstasy through drugs, meditation, or various disciplines. We depend on these symbolic affirmations of life - continuity for our sense of inner well-being. But
especially the first four of the five have been steadily eroded and impoverished in modern times, which in turn unleashes an ominous sequence of reactions in
the unconscious .42 This dislocation of vital symbols opens the way for what Lifton calls "ideological totalisms," which rush in to fill the
dreaded vacuum. Such totalisms vainly promise symbolic immortalities by "an all-or-none subjugation of the self to an
idea"43 such as a fascist or totalitarian state. This fatal remedy is supported both by victimization, since absolute claims to virtue require a contrasting image of
incarnate evil as a scapegoat, and by the distinctively modern blend of passion and numbing that permits mass violence to be organized. Readers of Lifton
cannot mistake the religious implications of this analysis for an understanding of totalitarianism: it is an idolatrous answer to the death
anxieties of vulnerable modern humans, once desymbolization has reached a certain stage. Lifton goes beyond a critique of police state ideologies, however.
By 1945 technology had cleared the way for the ultimate extension of this totalism (even in constitutional societies), namely "nuclearism." Lifton's work has
helped us arrive at a name for what has thus far been described as the religious challenge posed by atomic weapons. We have sketched the functional
characteristics of wholeness and ultimacy, and that tenacious hold which the Bomb has on its adherents' loyalties-all of which the Catholic bishops' pastoral
letter, Jonathan Schell, and Gordon Kaufman seem unable to explain. But now the complex of ambivalent attitudes towards nuclear
weapons may be accounted for under the hypothesis that we are actually dealing with a covert religion. Or at least the
phenomena described by Lifton suggest something close to an alternate religion, once we look beyond the conventional indicators of the major historic faiths in
the West: formal scriptures, creeds, houses of worship, and clergy. Explicit forms of such identifying features represent one way, but not the only way, in which
human spirituality comes to expression-for good or ill. To resume a description of Lifton's analysis, here is his definition of this final modern totalism: nuclearism:
the passionate embrace of nuclear weapons as a solution to death anxiety and a way of restoring a lost sense of immortality. Nuclearism is a secular
religion, a total ideology in which "grace" and even "salvation"-the mastery of death and evil -are achieved through
the power of a new technological deity. The deity is seen as capable not only of apocalyptic destruction but also of
unlimited creation. And the nuclear believer or "nuclearist" allies himself with that power and feels compelled to expound on the virtues of his
deity. He may come to depend on the weapons to keep the world going. 44 To enter this or any other religion usually entails a conversion experience. In the case
of nuclearism this means "an immersion in death anxiety followed by rebirth into the new world view. At the heart of the conversion experience is
an overwhelming sense of awe-a version of Freud's `oceanic feeling' in which one's own insignificance in relationship to the
larger universe is so extreme as to feel oneself, in effect, annihilated ."45 That awe shines through the strikingly religious language used by
early witnesses to atomic explosions. For example Lifton notes that a "language reminiscent of a `conversion in the desert"' and "images of rebirth" are found in
the words of a science writer, William Laurence, in describing the Almagordo test: "On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a
pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World.... The big
boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash - the first cry of a newborn world. . . ."46 The same writer compared it also to witnessing the Second
Coming of Christ. Elsewhere Lifton has extended a description of the numinous awe inspired by the Bomb to include the rest of us who have never been
eyewitnesses. For us, our fear is amorphous, corresponding to the invisibility of the dreaded radiation; we have a sense of
mystery because the precise effects cannot be known; we feel a presence of nemesis and of being related to the
infinite by tapping an ultimate force of the universe; and we sense our creatureliness and absolute vulnerability.47
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Nuclearism is a violent and totalitarian means of social relation, obliterating all meaning to
life outside of continued, escalating violence. We come to regard total annihilation as
preferable to a constant state of paranoia - politically, this provides the actual basis for
nuclear weapon use, which turns the aff.
It is ironic that such religiosity is devoted to the Bomb. For that weapon is the culminating achievement of those very historical
processes that have eroded the traditional modes for symbolizing the sense of immortality and larger connectedness.
Under the nuclear threat it is impossible to be confident of posterity, for instance, or of cultural and social achievements that will endure, or even of the
capacity of nature to survive.48 Nor can we rely on conventional religious beliefs in an afterlife, if we accept the report of
survivors of Hiroshima, for whom traditional religious symbols and doctrine suddenly were emptied of meaning at the
very time they were most needed. The only mode remaining, experiential transcendence or ecstatic "high states" of consciousness,
therefore, must bear the additional weight in meeting our needs for psychic nurture. This helps explain, by the way, the
restless demands of our generation for new thrills, heightened sensory awareness, or exotic personal experiences; these are in a
complex sense religious quests for transcending the anxiety of extinction. "So `flexible' is the human mind that it can, in this way, contemplate
annihilation as a joyous event, more joyous than living with the sense of being meaninglessly doomed."49 The danger grows that the weapons
themselves may be subconsciously perceived as "the most Dionysian stimulants of all."50 That would tempt humans
to indulge themselves in the ultimate orgy-as is reflected in the apocalyptic ending of the classic film, Dr. Strangelove or How I
Learned to Slop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where the bomber pilot straddles the nuclear weapon and rides it down to its target with a wild Texas yodel. And
so, as Lifton remarks, "The weapon itself comes to usurp all of the pathways to symbolic immortality."51 The heritage of images for
death and immortality that formerly sustained us has become contaminated with forebodings of holocaust. Lately many people have turned in frustration to
conservative religions that promise security from nihilism. But this resurgence of traditionalism will be ineffectual, Lifton believes, for " as death imagery
comes to take the shape of total annihilation or extinction, religious symbolism becomes both more sought after and more
inadequate."" When basic symbols lose their nurturing power and plausibility in a culture, one desperate response is-so to
speak-to turn up the volume. It is no wonder that all over the world in the 1970s and 1980s there has been an upsurge of
fundamentalist religion and politics. "Fundamentalism is a form of totalism with a very specific response to the loss of
larger human connections. It is a doctrinal restatement of those connections in which literal, immutable words (rather than the original flow of vital
images) are rendered sacred and made the center of a quest for collective revitalization."' 3 However Lifton does not dwell long upon the dangers of, say,
Protestant literalists who understand little of the profound nature of symbolization, and who thereby only make the problem worse. His real concern lies
elsewhere, and so with disconcerting nonchalance he takes up this religious term primarily to bend it to his earlier point of reference: " Nuclearism, then, is
the ultimate fundamentalism of our time. The `fundamentals' sacrilized [sic] are perverse products of technicism and scientism-the worship of
technique and science in ways that preclude their human use."54
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The alternative is to reject nuclearism in favor of a theology of peace.
Constructing transcendent opposition to basic assumptions and practices of nuclearism
creates space for debate to produce new forms of social relations that aren't based in
violence and repression.
Austin '85 Dorothy Austin, "Reinventing Ourselves," Political Psychology, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 1985
Recently, the Catholic Church has figured prominently in the U.S. nuclear weapons debate. In May of 1983, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued
A Pastoral Letter on War and Peace. In that letter, the bishops asserted that religious leaders have a role as moral teachers in "helping to form public opinion
with a clear determination to resist resort to nuclear war as an instrument of national policy." In assuming their role as moral teachers, the bishops cited Pope
John Paul II's "World Day of Peace Message 1982" as a guiding touchstone: "Peace cannot be built by the power of rulers alone. Peace
can be firmly constructed only if it corresponds to the resolute determination of all people of good will. Rulers must be
supported and enlightened by a public opinion that encourages them or, where necessary, expresses disapproval." In heeding the Pope's call, the bishops are
exercising what they understand to be "a creative opportunity and a moral imperative to examine the relationship between public opinion and public policy." On
the question of nuclear weapons, the bishops believe that "prevention is the only cure." Consequently, their discussion of "Religious Leadership and the Public
Debate" begins by stating unequivocally that "a barrier" must be built "against the concept of nuclear war as a viable strategy for
defense. There should be," they say, "a clear public resistance to the rhetoric of 'winnable' nuclear wars, or unrealistic
expectations of 'suriviving' nuclear exchanges, and strategies of 'protracted nuclear war.' We oppose such rhetoric." For the
bishops, the role of religion in relation to public policy is that of "charting a moral course in a complex public policy
debate." Ecclesiastical reflections are intended to be "an invitation to a public moral dialogue." By encouraging a public forum, it is the bishops' hope that moral
questions and answers will become determinative in shaping national, political policy. Not surprisingly, the four questions which the bishops address are
thoroughly secular and public: (1) the use of nuclear weapons, (2) the policy of deterrence in principle and in practice, (3) specific steps to
reduce the danger of war, and (4) long-term measures of policy and diplomacy. No division of labor is called for by the bishops that
suggests we divide our capacity to think into two different spheres of influence: one, religious; the other, secular. On the contrary, in their letter, the bishops state
that "A theology of peace...should specify the obstacles in the way of peace, as these are understood theologically
and in the social and political sciences." For the bishops, a theology of peace depends upon the collaborative working
together of psychology, political science, and religion in the context of a public forum where citizens may think and
reason together. But beyond the participation of spritual or religious leaders in the public discussion of nuclear arms policies, the Catholic bishops rightly
recognize that the project of reinventing ourselves is a cultural project wider than the province of any one religious
tradition or political party. It includes all of us whether or not we think of ourselves as "religious" in a traditional way.
For the "spiritual" project is the urgent necessity to transform the very structures of human consciousness in the face
of possible human self-extinction. Such a "spiritual" project is both psychohistorical and "mythic." It involves a
transformation of the human mind-the way we think about ourselves, the world, and "others" with whom we share the
world, both in social and political terms and in mythological and ideological terms as well.
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Link: Nuclear Extinction
Their extinction scenarios are mythology produced by nuclearism - the affirmative presents
images of total annihilation to give us a comforting end to the perils of the nuclear age. This
produces political paralysis in the face of the enormity of the Bomb, ceding power to the
elites of nuclearism.
Lifton's analysis is carried further by a gifted young scholar in the study of history of religions. Ira Chernus of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been an
inspiration to many, including myself, in his pioneering work of applying cross cultural studies and symbolisms to the hold which nuclearism has on our inmost
heart. Like Lifton he sees religion as rooted in a profound hunger to experience spiritual power and transcendence through images that uphold the larger
continuities of life.74 He agrees that psychic numbing is both cause and effect of the mind's inability to produce culture specific
images that link death to these continuities. But he goes further than Lifton: our numbing towards the nuclear threat cannot account for the lurid
fascination such themes nevertheless have for the public imagination. Popular culture returns again and again to such pictures, and yet somehow the public
never attains a concrete understanding of what nuclear war would actually be like Why not? The answer lies in the In thinking about nuclear war,
we have largely set aside our rational, analytical faculties and our capacity to think in realistic detail. The reality they
depict has an elusive, blurred-at-the-edges quality, an open-endedness, a questionable mooring in everyday reality, and an emphasis
on a few central, intensely concrete sensory images linked by unpredictable distortions of ordinary logic. For the student of
religion, these characteristics remind one of nothing so much as that puzzlingly unreal reality found so often in myth. And
the student of religion is well prepared to predict that constellations of images relating to fundamental issues of life and death will
be likely to assume mythic forms.75 Analysis of mythic forms takes on a most practical function. "So psychic numbing is only half the story. It tells us
why we fail to face the nuclear issue. The mythic approach tells us what happens when we do face the issue: We are
fascinated, deeply moved, and somehow fulfilled in ways which we only dimly perceive or understand. Numbing and
mythologizing thus reinforce each other, and the upshot of this secret alliance is political paralysis ."16 Those knowledgeable
in religion can fathom how this numbing emasculates traditional symbols of faith just when they are most needed while also
impelling us to generate new mutations of mythic content. "The crisis of psychic numbing is, at its most fundamental level, a religious
crisis."77 Chernus describes several examples of cherished mythic images of nuclear war. One is the myth of the "heroic survivors" or the "big bang," so popular
in science fiction plots: civilization is destroyed, but a band of people ("blond and beautiful and creative") survive the purgative fires and build a new society that
is better than the past. We are beguiled with the promise of a fresh start after the traumas of rebirth. A second is the myth of "no survivors" or the "big
whoosh." Here, instead of narratives, we are charmed by simple images of' mushroom clouds and "the end" of everything, in a
universally quick and painless death. Somehow the notions suggests a comforting regression to primal chaos and unity,
a fantasy of "return to the womb." This gives expression to what Lifton calls the experience of transcendence, the Dionysian
ecstasy of letting go one's self-consciousness and merging with cosmic nothingness. 78 Together these two myths present a pair of attractive options as ways
of maintaining sanity in the nuclear age: either I will survive and become a member of the heroic remnant, or I will be painlessly vaporized along with everyone
else in an ecstatic "big whoosh." Both alternatives rest upon a third theme, the myth of "Destiny or Fate": the belief that one is
powerless as the End approaches, and So under no obligation to make decisions. These mythic perceptions operate in reciprocity
with numbing, shielding us from the concrete realities and the vast scale and chaos of what a holocaust would be. "When we
face the immense, our minds revert to the modes of childhood and dream thinking-symbolism, fantasy, archetype, myth"'9-and in direct
proportion to the enormity of thermonuclear war. In effect these several myths "all share the common characteristic of making that war in some
way acceptable or even attractive." 8 0
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Link: Euphemisms
Euphemistically discussing nuclear weapons domesticates them, which anesthetizes us to
nuclear violence - their rhetorical choices are not neutral, but produce a psychic numbness
to nuclearism
Lifton and Falk '82 Robert Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and Richard Falk, Professor of
International Law at Princeton University, Indefensible Weapons, 1982, pp. 106-107
Nuclear numbing arrives, so to speak, on this psychological soil. And when people are deeply uneasy about what and how much to feel, the specific call to feel
what happens on the other end of a nuclear weapon is not a very inviting one. A more compelling call to feel may be experienced around the sense of power
and allegedly increased security offered in connection with more advanced and sophisticated (both bigger and smaller) nuclear weapons. Further, we
domesticate these weapons in our language and attitudes. Rather than feel their malignant actuality, we render them
benign. In calling them "nukes," for instance, we render them small and "cute," something on the order of a household
pet. That tendency was explicit in the naming of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities - the first "Little Boy"
suggesting a newborn baby or small child, the second "Fat Man" after Winston Churchill. (So universal is the bomb-related impulse toward numbing that even
Japanese survivovrs domesticated their bomb by referring to it with the nont-unpleasent-sounding term pikadon, or "flash-boom." Many have
commented on the anesthetizing quality of the language of nuclear weapons, sometimes referred to as "nukespeak." What are we to
make of terms like "nuclear exchange," "escalation," "nuclear yield," "counterforce," "megatons," or of "window of vulnerability" or (ostensibly
much better) "window of opportunity." 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 (a "nuclear exchange" sounds
something like mutual gift-giving.
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Link: "Nuclear Exchange"/Khalilzad 95
Rhetoric of “nuclear exchange” sanitizes and legitimates nuclear violence – their process of
psychic numbing is what permits current nuclear politics to spiral out of control
A variant form of numbing, as a defense mechanism, is "denial." An unacceptable image is repressed by the mind until it
actually disappears from the field of our perception. Nicholas Humphrey has given an early example of this striking self-deception.61 Two hundred
years ago, when Captain Cook's great sailing ship reached Australia and anchored in Botany Bay, it passed within a quarter of a mile of some Aborigines fishing
offshore. But they showed no reaction whatever. Apparently they could not "see" a huge shape that was utterly without parallel in their experience. But they
finally did take alarm when Cook put down some rowing boats, which presumably resembled dangers known from past experience. In modern times we have
more subtle forms of denial. Great assistance is given by inappropriate language that distorts perception, often with endearing or
evasive labels. Liftondescribes some examples of what has come to be known as "Nukespeak": the domesticating or "anesthetizing
quality of the language of nuclear weapons."6z The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, for instance, were named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man,"
respectively. A "nuclear exchange" sounds like a party with mutual gift-giving, and so jargon obscures the grisly realities
of carnage. There are, furthermore, many examples beyond those listed by Lifton. In the recent trial of the Plowshares Eight, Christian activists who were
accused of damaging missile nosecones, the General Electric officials testifying insisted on calling the nosecone "the product," and warheads "the physics
package. "63 "Doublespeak Awards" are given annually by the National Association of English Teachers to public officials using language that is "grossly
deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory"; a 1983 award went to the officer who described the Titan 11 missile and its nine-megaton
warhead as a "potentially disruptive re-entry system ."61 Currently a renowned example of euphemism is the MX, our largest and most accurate offensive
missile, which President Reagan has renamed "Peacekeeper"-possibly unaware that the cognate word "peacemaker" has a history as a humorous name for a
gun or warship .65 Such affectations of language are not just happenstance. They have the effect of blocking images or of
diverting intense emotion that would normally accompany any symbolization of mass destruction. The unthinkable is
denied, the potential anguish benumbed, and all with a joyless intensity resembling religious fervor. This avoidance
by "linguistic detoxification," "a way of talking about nuclear weapons without really talking about them ,"66 is a
prerequisite for the many illusions we cherish about the Bomb. Lifton lists, for instance, the illusion of limit and control (the
supposition that thermonuclear warfare could be managed rationally and without escalating into global havoc), the illusions of effective foreknowledge,
preparation, and protection, the illusion of stoic behavior while under nuclear attack, the illusion of recovery afterwards, and a more encompassing
illusion of "systems rationality" that projects an aura of insane logic over the whole structure of nuclear strategy .6' Self-
deceptions of this kind depend upon "Nukespeak" and a habitual numbing against unspeakable images of holocaust. Moreover the entire process of denial is
structurally reinforced and encouraged by the postwar growth of "chronic secrecy," as part of our government's mythic quest for national security .68
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Link: Threats
Their impact scenarios of national and existential threats sustain nuclearism - these
apocalyptic images legitimate aggressive foreign policy, military adventurism, and pre-
emptive strike
Lifton and Markusen '90 Robert Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and Erik Markusen,
professor at South State University, The Genocidal Mentality, 1990, p. 74
The actual term national security came into general American use in 1947, partly in response to what was perceived as the
failure of international (United Nations) efforts at "collective security." In July of that year, the concept was formalized with the passage of the
National Security Act, which provided for the beginning of the Central Intelligence Agency, (derived from the wartime Office of Strategy Services) and for the
National Security Council as a direct advisory group to the president. But as the writer Marcus Raskin has pointed out, the term national security was
left undefined, "even as all manner of policy is justified in its name." Raskin describes an ideology of "the national security
state" which stresses state power, a strong military, and the inevitability of "constant conflict with other states." As that
ideology of the national security state merged with nuclearism, three place names-Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor, and Munich-took on special
significance. Each of these became part of a survivor legacy, tied to "lessons" learned from the death immersion of the
war. Such lessons are part of survivors' collective quest for meaning; however dubious their application to new historical situations, they can become part of a
passionately expressed survivor mission. Hiroshima, as we have seen, meant that we had to take steps against the danger of our
extinction. Pearl Harbor meant military preparedness in the face of the possible "infamy" (President Roosevelt's term at the time) of devious enemies.
Munich meant having the courage to "stand up" to one's enemies-or what the historian Martin Sherwin calls "appeasement phobia," in
which Nazi-like purposes can be attributed to every Soviet action, and diplomacy of any kind is deeply feared lest it
result in advantages for the Soviet Union and danger to ourselves.
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Link: Threats
Their representations of war are a technological process to incite fear and insecurity – this
legitimizes militarism and numbs us to global violence
Kroker ‘04 Arthur Kroker, cultural theorist and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory at the University of Victoria, Arthur Kroker on
cyberwar, Massive Change Radio, 2004, http://www.massivechange.com/media/MIL_ArthurKroker.pdf
Today not only the act of war itself, but also the
perception of war is a technological event. In a significant way, there are always two
theatres of war: actual battlefields with real casualties and immense suffering, and hyperreal battlefields where the
ultimate objective of the war machine is to conquer public opinion and manipulate human imagination. Particularly since
9/11 and the prosecution of the so-called “war on terrorism,” we live in a media environment which is aimed at the total
mobilization of the population for warfare. For example, in the American “homeland,” mobilization of the population is
psychologically conditioned by an image matrix, fostering deep feelings of fear and insecurity. This is reinforced daily
by the mass media operating as a repetition-machine: repeating, that is, the message of the threatening “terrorist”
Other. For those living in the increasingly armed bunker of North America and Europe, we don’t experience wars in any way except through
the psychological control of perception through mass media, particularly television. The delivery of weapons – themselves
intensely sophisticated forms of technology – are part of the same system. So tech-mediated war is the total mobilization for
warfare with us as its primary subjects and targets.
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Link: Threats
Rhetoric of apocalyptic threats serves to placate the populace to a defense establishment
that is inherently and hopelessly violent. This ensures a never-ending cycle of threats while
silencing any hope for change.
Chernus '98 Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Peace Review, Vol. 10, Issue 4, December 1998, p. 605
There was one flaw in this vision of peace, which first became evident in 1954, in Vietnam. Vietnam
was, in Eisenhower's words, the "leaky
dike" where he hoped to "put a finger in" rather than "let the whole structure [of the `free world'] be washed away."
This image summed up his notion of peace as a perfectly stable global dike, holding back all apocalyptic threats. But
he wanted to build that dike out of an unstable mixture of military actions, military threats, and promises of peace through
genuine reconciliation and compromise. The problem was that his allies took these peaceful words at face value; the more of them he uttered, the
less willing they were to accept U.S. plans for war. At the same time came the terrifying news of the first H-bomb test; Winston Churchill told the House of
Commons that the bomb's power filled his mind "out of all comparison with anything else." Dulles finally admitted to the NSC that the U.S. "tough policies were
increasingly unpopular and the British `soft policy' was gaining prestige and acceptance.... We must recognize the fact that we can no longer run the free world."
The president ruefully agreed. His dike would not hold. The two principal pillars of apocalypse management, nuclear weapons and staunch allies, were mutually
exclusive. Words of war increased the allies' desire for peace. Words of peace dampened enthusiasm for war. Every time the U.S. put its finger in to plug up one
hole, it opened up another. It seemed that the best to hope for was to live forever on the brink of disaster, plugging up just enough leaks to prevent the dikes from
crumbling completely and inundating the "free world." Today most Americans remember Eisenhower as a reassuring voice, bolstering the
nation's confidence with his bland optimism and praise of peace. This shared memory is treasured because it persuades us that we
endured all those years of scary cold war for a noble purpose. It assures us that the U.S. can still be devoted to world
peace, even if we do have the largest military establishment and the largest weapons industry in the world, even if we
are occasionally tempted to put one country or another in its place, with bombs if necessary. In fact, though, Eisenhower
was telling us that Augustine was right: the threats we fear are all permanent. But unlike Augustine, he was saying that the threats are all of
apocalyptic magnitude, all spelling doom for the world should the barriers of containment fail. He asked the nation to
trust that he and his secretary of state could arrange such a perfect rational balance of threatening forces that they could all
be managed over the long haul. As Dulles once put it, the trick was to learn to live constantly on the brink of global disaster without
going over it. Peace, like war, meant living permanently on that brink; it meant a permanent state of apocalypse
management. The end of the cold war brought not an end, but a new beginning, to this cold-war ideal. The fear of change that prevented Eisenhower from
responding to new realities with genuinely new policies works a similar effect on U.S. leaders today. Those leaders tell us that the world is not less but more
dangerous than before. And the public, tutored by Eisenhower and his successors, seems eager to hear about apocalyptic dangers and
plans for containing them. U.S. public discourse assumes that the peril is eternal, and that perfect stability-the containment of all
change-is the best to hope for, the true meaning of peace. So the public cannot talk about, or perhaps even imagine, fundamental
change as the path to peace. Public discourse is still framed largely in terms of apocalyptic threats and efforts to contain them. Peace through perfect
stability is still the goal. Efforts at containment, no matter how violent, are still presented and accepted as signs of a unique
American dedication to peace. Violence is still being sanctioned as a means to that kind of peace. And the word "peace" is
still used to sanction violence. This violence to the word "peace" is inevitable, as long as apocalypse management is the highest goal.
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Their reliance on military calculation and strategy sanitizes nuclear weapons - it reinforces
the belief that we can control them, and all their attendant dangers, with enough careful
planning, ignoring wider variables that make deterrence theory unreliable at best
Nuclearism involves a false reliance on "strategy" and a radical neglect of efforts at improving human arrangements
(diplomatic, political, and broadly social) that would be commensurate with the danger. All such considerations have been
subsumed in an elaborate discourse about tactical military questions and strategic assumptions--in the claim of an
all-purpose military science in connection with these genocidal devices. This claim leads to "the questionable
assumption that strategic problems and war lend themselves to cool and confident prior calculation, apart from
broader, random variables of personality, history, ambiguity, change, and chance." That assumption in turn confuses our
perception of the genocidal devices themselves, which are sometimes viewed as mere weapons and at other times
as virtual deities in protective reign over us, both images dangerous in the extreme. The commitment to nuclear
weapons can become absolute.
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Link: Security/Hegemony
Global instability necessitates continued nuclear dominance - external threats provide
justification for increased military spending and imperial overstretch, backed by nuclearist
deterrence logic
A related survivor legacy of the Second World War was the extraordinary power America had come to possess and our
sense that such dominant power was right and necessary. As the historian Ronald Steel put it, "America became not only a great world
power, but the world power." That extraordinary power, together with largesse toward the shattered economies of former enemies and allies alike,
enabled American leaders to experience "a certain omnipotence and hubris." So strong was the feeling of entitlement to
that power that every American president since the Second World War has said words to the effect that the security
of America and of the world depend upon our remaining the strongest nation in the world. That goal, of course, has
required a "burgeoning reliance on atomic weapons." We have had to rely on our technological superiority: A qualitative
edge in nuclear weaponry seemed to be the surest, safest, cheapest-and perhaps even the only-way to maintain the security of our country and its allies." This
was all part of what C. Wright Mills called "a military definition of reality." Moreover, "the country had no choice but to plan for the use of atomic weapons."
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Link: Nuclear War/Technostrategic Discourse
The language surrounding their nuclear war scenarios serves to psychically numb us to the
horrors of nuclear war - it shifts concern from protecting life to managing it
Carol Cohn was herself to discover that the language was "racy, sexy, snappy"; that "you can
get so good at manipulating the words that it
almost feels like the whole thing is under control"; and that "the longer I stayed, the more conversations I participated in, the
less frightened I was of nuclear war." Adopting that language, she found herself increasingly unable to express the
humane concerns she originally brought with her: "The better I got at engaging in this discourse, the more impossible
it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values." Here, as in the chapter epigraph ("I couldn't stay connected, couldn't keep
human lives as my reference points"), she was describing her own sequence of doubling: the formation of a nuclear-
weapons self that enabled her to become more comfortable in that environment, to experience its dissociated
pleasures along with a sense of mastery of the of the nuclear-weapons problem, and, above all, to cease to experience
the human consequences of the weapons whose use she was imagining. The whole process was enhanced by the decency of the
men around her and the appeal of being accepted as an articulate and knowledgeable member of the group. No wonder that Cohn concluded that "learning the
language is a transformative, rather than an additive, process." The key point about the language-as was true of Nazi euphemisms for
and about the Final Solution (see page 198)-is its dissociative power, its enhancement of numbing, disavowal, and doubling. The sexual imagery,
though important, is in the service of that dissociative function. Cohn, of course, interrupted and reversed the process in herself, as shown by her sensitive
exposure of it.
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Link: Media
Be skeptical of their evidence from mass media establishments - nuclearism produces a
cycle of fantastical journalism and state secrecy to ensure preservation of military-industrial
dominance. Their truth claims are tainted by their cultural and economic origin.
Mathur '01 Piyush Mathur,doctoral student at Virginia Tech, "Nuclearism: The Contours of a Political Ecology," Social Text, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2001
To be brought to a point where one feels that a strong "media activity" needs to be understood and analyzed as a contingency of a
technological event is, in my view, fairly significant. For one, it tells us about the certain peculiarities of nuclear technology that
lend it to particular political uses and status in the public sphere at the hands of powerful establishments even when
the technology is not quite in use. At the same time, the very same peculiarities remain strong enough across the globe to
significantly affect a number of elements and human forces in their surroundings in a fairly uniform way just by the
sheer fact of the technology's (inactive) existence. This point of eerie contact between (a) technology's universality and its societal determinism is
something I have attempted to explore in this essay. Within the context of this exploration, I also evolved a certain psychological view of (nuclear) technology
which, I believe, will have applications for future analyses. It is important to mention here that instead of calling it an issue in political economy and dealing with it
accordingly, I chose to write about nuclearism as a political ecology. For the most part, this was intended to retain the sense of geography and environment that
nuclear technology necessarily affects, both psychologically and materially. In addition, I felt that a typical political economy approach may run
the risk of framing issues related to nuclear technology or nuclearism in terms of military, diplomacy, and economics--
which is pretty much what I have accused the Indian media of doing. But to speak in terms of political ecology is to lay particular emphasis on the local
communities and geographies affected in so many ways and to see them as well as the overarching technology and politics as part of an interconnected human-
natural ecology. This is relevant also because the ecological movement has come to command a particularly broad base in India's non-establishment politics
and, I am inclined to believe, in politics globally. We were alerted to this fact early on by Rajni Kothari, who, while eloquently articulating the quest for "a
comprehensive democratic order," wrote: The concern of the more creative and imaginative voices in the ecological movement is not simply to arrest the
degradation of environment, but equally with issues like restoration of community life and dignity of women. It converges with the new thinking in the feminist
movement which seeks to go beyond mere catching-up and making it to the level of the masculine world. 27 Given this orientation, I have attempted to show
how the case at hand, although about a very particular technology in a given context, [End Page 13] points to much larger issues in cultural politics under the
thrust of global hierarchies and modernity. Even a cursory glance over the critical literature on nuclear issues is enough to suggest that secrecy, control,
misinformation, aggression, and pervasive fear are the terms associated with nuclear establishments, especially with those
serving military purposes. Unfortunately, what has not received enough attention is that nuclearism is also one conclusive extremity of the idea of technological
superiority that carries sufficient weight in the modern worldview of industrialism, development, and scientism. The nuclear arms race in South Asia has a lot to
do with the confluence of these broader universalistic ideologies--to which certain forces in the region have sold themselves rather hastily. While I have
presented and analyzed nuke journalism as a by-product and political contingency of nuclearism, the phenomenon also points to the Indian media's complicity
with the broad political vision and interests of the Indian state and other Indian elite as well as the bourgeoisie. To any alert media watcher or news analyst, it
should be clear that the Indian media, especially at the national level, has invested remarkably little in rural journalism, community-oriented urban reporting,
environmental news, and the coverage of domestic science and technology issues--especially from a critical and participatory people's perspective. The
media's lack of interest and specialization in these areas puts it quite in harmony generally with the paternalistic,
centripetal, and self-legitimating "development" project of the state. The English-language media, housed in the
metropolitan centers, tends to traffic the flows of information--both from within and outside India--toward the upper-
crust state machinery and other educated urban elites located in those centers. The media does the above both by
making the information intelligible and relevant to those sections of the society and by making those sections
intelligible and relevant to themselves, thereby generating exclusionary discourses overall. The non-English- language regional
media, lacking the resources and well-trained personnel, often depends heavily, on one hand, on local political patronage and local elites; on the other hand, it
must rely on government news agencies, the English-language Indian media, and international news agencies. The end result is that the structure of information
flows caters much more significantly to the ruling needs of the ruling (un)official powers, instead of holding them accountable to the concerns of the larger
population. What we have, then, is a persistent toning-up of information and newsworthiness and a public discourse complacent with the spectacular and the
belligerent: in short, an info-sphere that is ultimately not very enterprising.
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Link: Localism
There is no "local" in nuclearism - it exists cross-culturally as a universality of existence.
Their attempt to create a local or culturally sensitive model doesn't escape nuclearism.
How are we to comprehend those events that muscle their way into shaping the manner in which we understand them? On the assumption that the May 1998
Indian nuclear tests constitute one such event, I attempt in this essay to evince the means of such a comprehension. Toward this tantalizing objective, I find a
useful start in the following witticism from Ashis Nandy's response to the tests: "The culture of nuclearism is one of the true 'universals' of
our time. Like Coca-Cola and blue jeans, it does not permit cultural adaptation or edited versions. It is the same in Paris and
Pokharan, Lahore and Los Alamos." 1 There are several levels to Nandy's comment : It is about nuclear technology; it is about culture; but it
also is about technology and culture, technology as culture, and technologies of culture. More generally, then, Nandy obliges us
to pay attention to a certain exemplary interfacing of technology and culture--"the culture of nuclearism" --against its concomitant geopolitics, which disallows
"cultural adaptation or edited versions." Insofar as Nandy refers to this interface as an "-ism," he points up the need also to look at technology--nuclear
technology--as a coherent framework of ideas and actions with political and psychological underpinnings and ramifications. More specifically, Nandy's
characterization captures well the paradox whereby an exact technology--invoking universality of application and effect--is localized as a
homogenizing norm across various cultures such that it constitutes a universal culture of its own, an "-ism." Accordingly,
nuclear technology is not merely a defense or energy infrastructure or a scientific force running against "culture," nor is it to be upheld simply as culture-free or
value-neutral. In addition to these sometimes conflicting ways, the nuclear technology should also be viewed as the prime expression
and producer of a treacherous universality. Nandy, in fact, goes beyond the technology-culture interface at once by pointing to the eerie idiomatic
semblance between a technological behavior ("nuclearism") and a cultural behavior (symbolized by "Coca-Cola and blue jeans") that has evolved through
globalization. Taken to its conclusion, Nandy's "nuclearism" implies a homologous relationship between cultures of globalization
and globalizing technologies, inducing us, in [End Page 1] the end, to place nuclear technology in the cultural politics of the
global order.
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Anti-Nuclear Nuclearism Link
Their piecemeal nuclear reduction affirms anti-nuclear nuclearism - the aff allows US
belligerence and aggression against lower powers to ensure continued global dominance -
this causes violence, instability, and nuclear conflict
Bondgraham and Parrish '09 Darwin Bondgraham, writer, historian, and ethnographer, and Will Parrish, edited by Mariam Pemberton, "Anti-
nuclear Nuclearism," Foreign Policy In Focus, 12 January 2009, accessed 7/2/10 http://www.fpif.org/articles/anti-nuclear_nuclearism
The Obama administration is likely to continue a policy that we call “anti-nuclear nuclearism.” Anti-nuclear
nuclearism is a foreign and military
policy that relies upon overwhelming U.S. power, including the nuclear arsenal, but makes rhetorical and even some
substantive commitments to disarmament, however vaguely defined. Anti-nuclear nuclearism thrives as a school of thought in several think tanks
that have long influenced foreign policy choices related to global nuclear forces. Even the national nuclear weapons development labs in New Mexico and
California have been avid supporters and crafters of of it. As a policy, anti-nuclear nuclearism is designed to ensure U.S. nuclear and
military dominance by rhetorically calling for what has long been derided as a naïve ideal: global nuclear
disarmament. Unlike past forms of nuclearism, it de-emphasizes the offensive nature of the U.S. arsenal. Instead of promoting the
U.S. stockpile as a strategic deterrence or umbrella for U.S. and allied forces, it prioritizes an aggressive diplomatic and military campaign of nonproliferation.
Nonproliferation efforts are aimed entirely at other states, especially non-nuclear nations with suspected weapons
programs, or states that can be coerced and attacked under the pretense that they possess nuclear weapons or a
development program (e.g. Iraq in 2003). Effectively pursuing this kind of belligerent nonproliferation regime requires half-steps
toward cutting the U.S. arsenal further, and at least rhetorically recommitting the United States to international treaties such as the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It requires a fig leaf that the United States isn’t developing new nuclear weapons, and that it is slowly disarming and de-emphasizing
its nuclear arsenal. By these means the United States has tried to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, even though it has designed and built newly modified weapons
with qualitatively new capacities over the last decade and a half. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have allowed for and even promoted a mass proliferation of nuclear
energy and material, albeit under the firm control of the nuclear weapons states, with the United States at the top of this pile. Many disarmament proponents
were elated last year when four extremely prominent cold warriors — George P. Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — announced in a series
of op-eds their commitment to "a world free of nuclear weapons." Strange bedfellows indeed for the cause. Yet the fine print of their plan, published by the
Hoover Institute and others since then, represents the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform to a tee. It’s a conspicuous yet merely rhetorical commitment to a world
without nuclear weapons. These four elder statesmen have said what many U.S. elites have rarely uttered: that abolition is both possible and desirable.
However, the anti-nuclear posture in their policy proposal comes to bear only on preventing non-nuclear states from going
nuclear, or else preventing international criminal conspiracies from proliferating weapons technologies and nuclear materials for use as instruments of non-
state terror. In other words, it’s about other people's nuclear weapons, not the 99% of materials and arms possessed by the
United States and other established nuclear powers. This position emphasizes an anti-nuclear politics entirely for what it means for the rest
of the world — securing nuclear materials and preventing other states from going nuclear or further developing their existing arsenals. U.S. responsibility to
disarm remains in the distant future, unaddressed as a present imperative. Exclusive Route around the CTBT Concerns about the nuclear
programs of other states — mostly Islamic, East and South Asian nations (i.e., Iran, North Korea, etc.) — conveniently work to reinforce
existing power relations embodied in U.S. military supremacy and neocolonial relationships of technological
inequality and dependence. By invoking their commitment to a "world free of nuclear weapons," the ideologues
behind the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform justify invasions, military strikes, economic sanctions, and perhaps even
the use of nuclear weapons themselves against the "rogue states" and "terrorists" whose possession of weapons technologiesvastly less advanced
than those perpetually stockpiled by the United States is deemed by the anti-nuclear nuclearists the first and foremost problem of the nuclear age.
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Anti-prolif rhetoric and emphasis in global disarm regimes sustains US dominance by
removing nuclear opposition from the global scene - their removal of nuclear weapons is co-
opted and redeployed to sustain militarism
Bondgraham '09 Darwin Bondgraham, writer, historian, and ethnographer, "Anti-Nuclear Imperialism: The New Face of Nuclear Armed Empire is Quickly
Taking Shape," 1 September 2009, accessed 7/2/10 http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/2009/09/anti-nuclear-imperialism-new-face-of.html
The United States nuclear weapons establishment has been torn between a contradiction in the needs of American
empire. On the one hand, the empire has utilized nuclear weapons since the end of World War II to project overwhelming,
unrivaled American power across the planet, securing for its titan corporations zones of exclusive exploitation, and
safeguarding the consolidation of capitalist globalization. However, the contradiction built into nuclearized state power from the very beginning
has been that the acquisition of just one nuclear weapon with an effective transcontinental delivery system, survivable
and “secure” in the ways that US strategist mean when they talk about the “security” of their own missile topping fusion bombs, would provide a true
deterrent force for lesser states against superpower aggression. Since the 1970s many “undeveloped” nations have
acquired, in theory, the technical and bureaucratic capacity of produce a nuclear arsenal. Some, like Pakistan, have even gone
nuclear. Since the fall of the USSR several more states have decided to proceed with building up their nuclear energy and weapons capacities as counter-forces
against domination by the world's major powers, their own version of the “hedge” strategy. Caught in this contradiction —the need to threaten
other nations with its nuclear “deterrent,” but also to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, an eventuality ensured
by its own possession of nuclear weapons— US strategist have scurried about in frustration to find a solution. About the
only thing going for the US nuclear weapons establishment over the last two decades has been the demise of the anti-nuclear movement and the absence of any
serious, mass-based opposition to atomic weapons and energy. The eight long years of George W. Bush are widely seen as a wasted era even among the
nuclear establishment's leaders. The administration's bellicose and unilateralist foreign policy, combined with the push to develop new, “more usable” weapons
like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and the Reliable Replacement Warhead, is credited by many foreign policy elites and arms control advocates as having
exacerbated the empire's proliferation crisis without having even successfully delivered these new arms. Furthermore, the Bush years failed to produce a solution
to the crisis facing the nuclear weapons complex. After a round of privatization which put 96% of the US nuclear weapons complex under for-profit contracts with
a cartel of nine variously partnering corporations, and an ambitious plan to “transform” the entire complex into a meaner and more flexible machine, the weapons
labs continued to slide, skills and knowledge atrophied, morale plummeted. As if in preparation for the more methodical and tempered Obama administration,
four elder Cold Warriors penned a now famous essay for the Wall Street Journal in January of 2007. In it, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and
Sam Nunn called boldly for global nuclear disarmament. Portraying themselves as non-partisan leaders of a major coalition, these four have articulated a new
nuclear strategy for the United States, one that is heavy on disarmament rhetoric and chock full of practical, aggressive steps to prevent the spread of weapons
technologies and fissile materials. It is a blueprint for the survival and expansion of a nuclear-armed US empire far into the future. Their message has not only
found wide support among the foreign policy elite, it has also swiftly outflanked the entire field of disarmament and arms control NGOs, many of whom have
fallen over themselves to praise the Wall Street Journal manifesto and to join the metastasizing campaign these four men are leading in the name of “a world free
of nuclear weapons.” Shultz and Kissinger, Perry and Nunn, two former secretaries of state, a former defense secretary, and ex-senator, all have unparalleled
experience in fitting nuclear weapons into the wider military and diplomatic policies of the United States. Kissinger launched his career as a realist strategist by
writing an influential book in 1957, the main argument of which was that nuclear weapons should be de-emphasized in US military strategy to provide a more free
hand in the full exercise of US conventional military, economic and political power. Shultz, a former president of Bechtel corporation, the largest nuclear
weapons and energy contractor in the world, was Reagan's secretary of state and thoroughly involved in nuclear policy making through the 1980s. Sam Nunn
chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee and authored a highly influential bill aimed at dismantling much of the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and
converting its fissile materials into commercial reactor fuel. Nunn is now chairman of the influential Nuclear Threat Initiative, a quasi-state agency NGO that
works closely with the US on nonproliferation issues. Perry, former secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, is a board member of the two for-profit corporations
owned by the University of California and Bechtel which operate the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons labs. Most recently Perry chaired the
Congressional Commission on America's Strategic Posture and co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on US Nuclear Weapons Policy. Both
of these commissions released their final reports in May of this year, virtually coinciding with the release of the Obama administration's nuclear weapons budget.
The two reports call for an extension of the “lead but hedge” strategy, albeit with a rhetorical and political emphasis on
increasing the perception of US restraint and concrete steps toward disarmament. Perry and his fellow commissioners are
unequivocal about the US keeping its nuclear arms well into the distant, imperceptible future, writing in the CFR report for example: “the geopolitical conditions
that would permit the global elimination of nuclear weapons do not currently exist.” Obama's budget proposal concurs, more or less in numerical terms, funding
work on nuclear warheads at the usual levels (about $6.4 billion). A UN gathering to prepare for next year's review conference on the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty recently concluded in New York, and a discussion has begun to grow around the prospects of US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, an arms control regime that was formally rejected by conservative Republican leaders in 1999. Steps toward US ratification are being promoted by new
nuclearist thinkers as a means of strengthening the US position going into the NPT Review Conference. The desired result of CTBT ratification would be to
create the perception of US restraint, thus enabling it and other nuclear armed nations to push their nonproliferation agenda over the much more popularly
supported agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The NAM has also called for general measures to stem the further spread of nuclear weapons, but has
foregrounded far-reaching, verifiable, and immediate steps toward nuclear disarmament by the US and Russia and the other major nuclear powers. The NAM
has gone further, calling for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, a goal that immediately calls for cessation of nuclear cooperation with Israel and
non-transfer of nuclear weapons to Israel.
<card continues>
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<card continued>
Many of the foreign

policy elite, especially those who feel most adamantly that the Bush years were wasted and that they actually imperiled the imperial
project, see many of these recent
developments in the US as an immense possibility to turn the corner and implement a smart, far-
reaching US nuclear strategy, one complimentary to the extension of US hegemony. While they're still being digested by politicians,
military leaders, and weaponeers, it does appear that an emerging new majority is coalescing around what can only be described as a policy of anti-nuclear
imperialism. Anti-nuclear imperialism is a possible solution to the core contradiction of empire in the nuclear age: the
need to maintain and threaten use of nuclear weapons (ultimate power), but the simultaneous and opposite need to
prevent rivals from attaining parity, and lesser states from acquiring this form of power themselves, and finally to prevent the possibility of nuclear
attack by a non-state agent, a terrifying asymmetrical threat. Anti-nuclear imperialism begins with the use of strong, moralizing
disarmament rhetoric by leaders of the imperial power. Based on this, the imperial state then must take steps to create at
least the perception among as many states as possible that it is restraining its own nuclear arsenal and working with
the other great powers to dismantle weapons systems, all ostensibly moving toward disarmament. This in turn is meant to facilitate
and legitimate any and all means to prevent most other states from acquiring nuclear weapons or even the capability to produce
nuclear weapons. By de-emphasizing nuclear arms, these strategists hope to actually boost the overall military superiority
of the US, far above and beyond its current powers, which ironically have become constrained in some ways by its continuing possession of these weapons
in the post-Cold War era. The end goal is to maintain a balance of power under US hegemony and to tighten the ring of control around nuclear technologies and
fissile materials.
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Calls to end proliferation are a guise for US empire - nuclear opposition is all that's in the
way of US domination. The aff sustains a process of violent imperialism and destruction.
Bondgraham '09 Darwin Bondgraham, writer, historian, and ethnographer, "Anti-Nuclear Imperialism: The New Face of Nuclear Armed Empire is Quickly
Taking Shape," 1 September 2009, accessed 7/2/10 http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/2009/09/anti-nuclear-imperialism-new-face-of.html
Since the Cold War's end elite strategists have become increasingly divided over the question of nuclear weapons. A hard core of hawks in the Congress and
military, the nuclear weapons laboratories, and academia have maintained that a large, continuously improved arsenal, and an aggressive “nuclear posture”
remain necessary for the “security” of the United States: arms control treaties and diplomacy be damned. Meanwhile, a growing number of reformers has argued
that nuclear weapons pose more of a problem than a solution for the maintenance of US hegemony. The solution, they
claim, is
for the US to lead an open-ended campaign of global arms control diplomacy, beginning with Russia, but
extending to all nations. This exercise of soft power, they hope, will legitimate and facilitate the aggressive nonproliferation
measures —including sanctions, and war— that they believe are ultimately necessary to prevent the emergence of new
nuclear states, and the spread of fissile materials into the hands of “terrorists.” Like their hawkish counterparts, the chief concern
among this new nuclearist school is to prevent developments that would inhibit the reach and continued expansion of
US empire. The 1990s was an era of failures and half-measures for US nuclear policy makers on all sides of this debate. While Bush I implemented a ban
on full-scale nuclear testing (which continues to this day) and while the START I treaty proceeded to eliminate a significant portion of the rival superpower's vast
nuclear overkill capacities, major transformations were deferred in favor of what the Clinton administration, under the leadership of defense secretary William
Perry, called a “lead but hedge” strategy. The US would ostensibly “lead” in the overall de-emphasis of atomic weapons, hoping
that this would trickle down and dissuade lesser nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Contrarily, however, the US
would also “hedge” by maintaining an unrivaled nuclear arsenal and strike capacity, to say nothing of its increasingly
gross conventional superiority in arms.
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Arms control is a tool to ensure military dominance - the US demands others disarm while
maintaining its own arsenal for 'safekeeping'. Activist calls for disarmament are simply
extensions of the war machine designed for co-option and preservation of the military
industrial complex.
Bondgraham '10 Darwin Bondgraham, writer, historian, and ethnographer, "New Book - Beyond arms control: challenges and choices for nuclear
disarmament," 3 April 2010, accessed 7/3/10 http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-book-beyond-arms-control-challenges.html
"Arms control" is an academic and policy field invented during the Cold War to ideologically legitimate American
empire as it is manifested through the vastly superior armaments of the US warfare state which no other nation's war-
making capabilities can remotely compare to. Arms controllers have spent decades justifying why the United States possesses nuclear weapons
and other especially destructive implements of war (landmines, bio-weapons, depleted uranium, etc.), while explaining why other nations, particularly non-white,
Islamic, and formerly colonized nations should never aspire to these kinds of killing systems. In the 1990s stateside peace and disarmament
activism was professionalized with serious infusions of foundation money, and the end of the Cold War simultaneously
brought about a demobilization of mass movements that until then had sought to check the reckless qualitative and
quantitative expansion of nuclear and other arms. Around this time dozens of think tanks and centers sprang up at prestigious
universities and freestanding organizations established themselves inside the D.C. beltway, all to employ a cottage industry of "experts" who
would advise the state on how to control world armaments after the Reagan era race against the Soviets. Surviving
antinuclear and antiwar NGOs changed with the times. The result was that many activists began to adopt the language and rationale of
the formerly elitist and state employed arms controllers; they began to speak to the state, to advise its bureaucrats, generals, and
politicians in their uses and abuses of power, to assist them in legitimating the project of American imperial expansion after the fall of the
Soviet "evil empire." Because it was created and developed as an organ of the imperial state, arms control as a paradigm
can never be used to pursue democratic, self-determined development of nations. Its entire purpose for being is to
maintain the military (and thus economic and political) hierarchy of nations with the USA at the top.
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Nuclear Orientalism Link
Their discourse of anti-proliferation shields an orientalist double-standard that rhetorically
sustains nuclearism and imperialism - foreign nations are cast as instable to justify
continued American dominance
Gusterson '99 Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in
the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), JSTOR
Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem whereas "ours" are not.
During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two
senses of the word proliferation. This usage split off the "vertical" proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of new and
improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the "horizontal" proliferation of nuclear weapons to other
countries, presenting only the latter as the "proliferation problem." Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals
are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.5 However, the United States and Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations,
especially India, for the nuclear powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty
notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that nuclear weapons will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future.
Meanwhile, in a controversial move, the Clinton administration has broken with the policy of previous administrations in basically formalizing a policy of using
nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states to deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998). The dominant discourse that
stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a specialized variant within a broader system of
colonial and postcolonial discourse that takes as its essentialist premise a profound Otherness separating Third
World from Western countries.6 This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle Eastern) nations as ineradicably
different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled "Orientalism" by Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist
discourse constructs the world in terms of a series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image
of the West: where "we" are rational and disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are modern and
flexible, "they" are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where "we" are honest and compassionate, "they" are
treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure
in contemporary politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic development that represent Third World nations as
child nations lagging behind Western nations in a uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of popular magazines,
such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of contemporary orientalist ideology is also to be found in
U.S. national security discourse. Following Anthony Giddens (1979), I define ideology as a way of constructing political ideas, institutions, and
behavior which (1) makes the political structures and institutions created by dominant social groups, classes, and nations appear to be naturally given and
inescapable rather than socially constructed; (2) presents the interests of elites as if they were universally shared; (3) obscures the connections between different
social and political antagonisms so as to inhibit massive, binary confrontations (i.e., revolutionary situations); and (4) legitimates domination. The Western
discourse on nuclear proliferation is ideological in all four of these senses: (1) it makes the simultaneous ownership of nuclear
weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear weapons in Third World countries seem natural and
reasonable while problematizing attempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents
the security needs of the established nuclear powers as if they were everybody's; (3) it effaces the continuity between
Third World countries' nuclear deprivation and other systematic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world
in order to inhibit a massive north-south confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized
nuclear powers.
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Nuclear Orientalism Link
Anti-prolif efforts serve to legitimate Western domination over the global South and any
other entity identified as Other by the aff's Orientalist political imagination. Prolif threats
should be understood as the product of an Orientalist double-standard designed to deny
rights and self-determination to the global South.
Gusterson '99 Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in
the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), JSTOR
Noam Chomsky (1 982) has suggested that the

arms race between the superpowers was not really "about" the US.-Soviet rivalry at all but
was a convenient way to assure the subjugation of smaller countries in the Third World under the guise of
superpower competition. One does not have to swallow whole the simple reductionism of this argument to accept that there is obviously some
connection between the nuclear stockpiles of some developed nations on the one hand and the political clientship
and economic underdevelopment of Third World nations on the other. Just as some nations have abundant access to capital while
others do not, so some nations are allowed plentiful supplies of the ultimate weapon while others are prevented by
elaborate treaties and international police activities from obtaining it. Without devising rigidly deterministic models connecting economic
power and nuclear weapons-models that such states as Japan and Germany obviously would not fit-one can at least sketch the broad contours of this
generalization: the nuclear underdevelopment of the developing world is one fragment in a wider and systematic pattern
of global disempowerment that ensures the subordination of the south. 19 The discourse on nuclear proliferation
legitimates this system of domination while presenting the interests the established nuclear powers have in
maintaining their nuclear monopoly as if they were equally beneficial to all the nations of the globe. And, ironically, the
discourse on nonproliferation presents these subordinate nations as the principal source of danger in the world. This
is another case of blaming the victim. The discourse on nuclear proliferation is structured around a rigid segregation of "their"
problems from "ours." In fact, however, we are linked to developing nations by a world system, and many of the problems that, we claim,
render these nations ineligible to own nuclear weapons have a lot to do with the West and the system it dominates.
For example, the regional conflict between India and Pakistan is, in part at least, a direct consequence of the divide-and-rule policies adopted by the British raj;
and the dispute over Kashmir, identified by Western commentators as a possible flash point for nuclear war, has its origins not so much in ancient hatreds as in
Britain's decision in 1846 to install a Hindu maharajah as leader of a Muslim territory (Burns 1998). The hostility between Arabs and Israelis has been
exacerbated by British, French, and American intervention in the Middle East dating back to the Balfour Declaration of 191 7. More recently, as Steven Green
points out, "Congress has voted over $36.5 billion in economic and military aid to Israel, including rockets, planes, and other technology which has directly
advanced Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities. It is precisely this nuclear arsenal, which the U.S. Congress has been so instrumental in building up,
that is driving the Arab state to attain countervailing strategic weapons of various kinds" (1 990). Finally, the precariousness of
many Third World regimes is not at all unconnected with the activities of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the CIA, and various multinational
corporations based in the West. And if U.S. sanctions against India and Pakistan after their 1998 tests destabilize these countries, Western commentators will
doubtless point to this instability as a further reason why they cannot be trusted with the bomb. "Our" coresponsibility for "their" problems and
the origin of some of those problems in a continuing system of global domination which benefits the West is an
integral part of ordinary political discourse in the Third World itself; it is, however, denied by an orientalist discourse that
disavows that we and the Other are ultimately one.
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Nuclear Globalism Link
Representations of nuclear war as apocalyptic, unthinkable, and final are fantasies that
deny ongoing nuclear violence against the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This
denial legitimizes the ongoing war and affirms nuclearism's erasure of history to maintain
power.
Kato '93 Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, "Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via
the Strategic Gaze," Alternatives, No. 18, 1993
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late
capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the society into the division of labor but
also by the desire for "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery.26 The penetration of capital into the social fabric and the
destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However, what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism
is a rapid intensification of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer interested in incorporating
some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of such "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained, at
least partially, by another problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction.27 Particularly, the
latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of the "ultimate" means of destruction/
extermination, i.e., nuclear weapons. Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its
nature and became deregulated/ dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the inter-imperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due
recognition by the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond
this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to the inter-imperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm
of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking
place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991
1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715
times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). 29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology)
have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas
Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xiryian Province,
China) (36 times). so Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of
violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as
perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared,
has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity
intervention," or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth
World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing
nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the
imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and
ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of
the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of
nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which
we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself.
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Understanding nuclear war as something temporally unprecedented and in the future denies
ongoing nuclear violence - the idea that nuclear war causes apocalypse and extinction
carries an implicit assumption that there hasn't been a nuclear war yet.
Nuclear criticism flourished particularly during the early 1980s in reaction to the imminent "threat of limited nuclear warfare,"
which swept the entire European continent as well as other countries in the First World bloc. Nuclear criticism has variants depending on the perspectives and
targeted audiences. The most notable critics belong to what I call "popular nuclear criticism," which includes such authors as Jonathan Schell, Robert Lifton, and
Freeman Dyson. The leftists, most notably E. P. Thompson, on the other hand, made a less popularized and yet very serious critique of superpower nuclear
imperialism. Those earlier versions of nuclear criticism have offered a good text for deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida et al. in Diacritics. Reflecting the
historical context mentioned above, in which nuclear critique gained unprecedented popularity, one can say that nuclear criticism has been shaped
and structured by the logic of superpower rivalry.82 The superpower rivalry has distracted our attention from the ongoing process of
oppression/violence along the North-South axis. Mer all, the superpowers have functioned complementarily in solidifying the power of the North over the
South.88 Therefore, nuclear criticism has successfully mystified the North-South axis as much as the superpower rivalry. Just as the facade of superpower rivalry
(or interimperial rivalry in general for that matter) gave legitimation to the strategy of global domination of capital, nuclear
criticism has successfully
legitimated the destruction of periphery through nuclear violence. What is significant here is to locate the discourse in a proper context,
that is, the late capitalist problematic. To do so, we need to shift our focus back to the questions of strategy and technology discussed earlier. Let us recall our
discussion on the genealogy of global discourse. The formation of global discourse has been a discursive expression of the formation of technological interfaces
among rockets, cameras, and media furnished by the strategy of late capitalism. In a similar vein, nuclear criticism, whose epistemological basis
lies in the exchange of nuclear ballistic missiles between superpowers, emerged from yet another technostrategic
interface. Significantly, the camera on the rocket was replaced by the nuclear warhead, which gave birth to the first Inter Continental
Ballistic Missile in the late 1950s both in the United States and the former Soviet Union.84 Thus, the discourse of nuclear criticism is a product
of techno strategic interfaces among rocket, satellite, camera, photo image, and nuclear warhead. I next decipher the discourse of global capitalism
(globalism) interwoven throughout nuclear criticism by linking the techno strategic interface to the formation of discourse. Nuclear criticism finds the
likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved
in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly
designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human extinction-whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in
finding out about "85 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified
the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence: Unlike the other wars, which have all been
preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent.
It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The
terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text. At least today
apparently.56 By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe
(posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear
criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of
nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a
"rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe." The history of nuclear
violence offers, at best a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that
nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the Context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects."" Thus the elimination of
the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local
catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism
through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the
notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction" is configured. Herein, the
configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as
the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic
gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of
extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of
extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be
.dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already. "39 Robert Lifton attributed such difficulty in
locating the subject to the "numbing effect" of nuclear psychology. In other words, Lifton tied the difficulty involved here not to the question
of subjectivity per se but to psychological defenses against the overwhelming possibility of extinction. The hollowness of
extinction can be unraveled better if we locate it in the mode of perception rather than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is a result of
"confusing figure with the object"40 This phenomenon, called "the delirium of interpretation" by Virilio, is a mechanical process in which incorporeal existence is
given a meaning via the figure.41 It is no doubt a manifestation of technosubjectivity symptomatic of late capitalism. Hence, the obscurity of the subject
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in the configuration of extinction results from the dislocation of the subject by the technosubject functioning as a
meaning-generating machine.
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Nuclear Globalism Link: Nuclear War = Textual
Claims that nuclear war is merely textual or discursive denies the reality of nuclear violence
through testing, mining, and radiation. Their literary criticism denies that there IS a real
nuclear war and it's happening right now.
Nuclear criticism flourished particularly during the early 1980s in reaction to the imminent "threat of limited nuclear warfare," which swept the entire European
continent as well as other countries in the First World bloc. Nuclear criticism has variants depending on the perspectives and targeted audiences. The most
notable critics belong to what I call "popular nuclear criticism," which includes such authors asJonathan Schell, Robert Lifton, and Freeman Dyson. The leftists,
most notably E. P. Thompson, on the other hand, made a less popularized and yet very serious critique of superpower nuclear imperialism. Those earlier
versions of nuclear criticism have offered a good text for deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida et al. in Diacritics. Reflecting the historical context
mentioned above, in which nuclear critique gained unprecedented popularity, one can say that nuclear criticism has been shaped and
structured by the logic of superpower rivalry.82 The superpower rivalry has distracted our attention from the ongoing process of
oppression/violence along the North-South axis. Mer all, the superpowers have functioned complementarily in solidifying the power of the North over the
South.88 Therefore, nuclear criticism has successfully mystified the North-South axis as much as the superpower rivalry. Just as the facade of superpower rivalry
(or interimperial rivalry in general for that matter) gave legitimation to the strategy of global domination of capital, nuclear criticism has successfully
legitimated the destruction of periphery through nuclear violence. What is significant here is to locate the discourse in a proper context,
that is, the late capitalist problematic. To do so, we need to shift our focus back to the questions of strategy and technology discussed earlier. Let us recall our
discussion on the genealogy of global discourse. The formation of global discourse has been a discursive expression of the formation of technological interfaces
among rockets, cameras, and media furnished by the strategy of late capitalism. In a similar vein, nuclear criticism, whose epistemological basis
lies in the exchange of nuclear ballistic missiles between superpowers, emerged from yet another technostrategic
interface. Significantly, the camera on the rocket was replaced by the nuclear warhead, which gave birth to the first Inter Continental
Ballistic Missile in the late 1950s both in the United States and the former Soviet Union.84 Thus, the discourse of nuclear criticism is a product
of techno strategic interfaces among rocket, satellite, camera, photo image, and nuclear warhead. I next decipher the discourse of global capitalism
(globalism) interwoven throughout nuclear criticism by linking the techno strategic interface to the formation of discourse. Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of
"extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single
possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human extinction-
whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about "85 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction.
Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence:
Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in
this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical,"
conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or
past) of a discourse or text. At least today apparently.56 By representing the possible extinction as the single most important
problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history
of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is
designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic
catastrophe." The history of nuclear violence offers, at best a reality effect 10 the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of
nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the Context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people
by the local effects."" Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear
violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage
point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze:
nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction"
is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the
strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the
strategic gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed.
Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural
origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be .dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over
their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already. "39 Robert Lifton attributed such difficulty in locating the subject to the "numbing effect" of
nuclear psychology. In other words, Lifton tied the difficulty involved here not to the question of subjectivity per se but to psychological defenses against the
overwhelming possibility of extinction. The hollowness of extinction can be unraveled better if we locate it in the mode of perception rather than in nebulous
nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is a result of "confusing figure with the object"40 This phenomenon, called "the delirium of interpretation" by
Virilio, is a mechanical process in which incorporeal existence is given a meaning via the figure.41 It is no doubt a manifestation of technosubjectivity
symptomatic of late capitalism. Hence, the obscurity of the subject in the configuration of extinction results from the dislocation
of the subject by the technosubject functioning as a meaning-generating machine.
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Impact: Value to Life/Numbing
Nuclearism is psychically disastrous - numbing is deployed as a coping mechanism to the
flood of nuclear imagery, which sets the stage for escalatory violence as an attempt to
recapture meaning. This "death in life" sacrifices the subject to the altar of Nuclearism.
Finally, this summary of Lifton should take note of some of the psychic traits associated with nuclearism, the new totalism. Lifton sees
two major categories of these consequences: "Dislocation creates a special kind of uneasy duality around symbolization: a
general sense of numbing, devitalization, and absence of larger meaning on the one hand; and on the other, a form of image-
release, an explosion of symbolizing forays in the struggle to overcome collective deadness and reassert larger
connection."55 To take the latter one first, the "image-release" and flood of "symbolizing forays" characterize what Lifton labels as the Protean self of the
modern age. Like the figure in ancient mythology who changed shape at will, so the self nowadays seems embarked on an endless series
of experiments in seeking identity. Belief systems, careers, marriage partners, or lifestyles often are switched with bewildering ease. Fads come and
go, discordant ideas may be held simultaneously, or ever new personal experiences sought in unending quests for rebirth. Because one's outer, public
world is no longer coordinated with one's inner, symbolic world, a sense of absurdity prevails-and the best defense
mechanism becomes a tone of mockery affected towards every experience.56 It seems that ony old, stable societies are able to
breed durable personal identities in their members. But we moderns find ourselves overwhelmed by the nuclear threat, the cultural dislocation of our symbols,
and the flood of unrelated fragments of imagery from our mass communications. No wonder a person's role or identity may change as abruptly as turning the
channel switch on one's TV set! The other main category of effects of the Bomb on us all, "psychic numbing," moves in the reverse direction. Alongside the
excitation of multiple images and successive selfidentities- what Lifton calls "an explosion of symbolizing forays"-there is also an implosion.
That is, we find a widespread muting and repression of affect, a sense of inner emptiness and devitalization. Lifton first noted this
general "psychic shut-down" in his early research: "We thus encounter in both Hiroshima and concentration camp survivors, what can be called a pervasive
tendency toward sluggish despair-a more or less permanent form of psychic numbing which includes diminished vitality, chronic depression and constricted life
space, and which covers over the rage and mistrust that are just beneath the surface."57 But psychic numbing is not limited to victims of
catastrophe. In one degree or another similar reactions to death anxiety have been reported also in empirical studies of people
who earlier had taken part in 1950s nuclear air-raid drills, or in recent questionnaires given to school children.58 Assailed by images of
grotesque annihilation, the mind's protective mechanisms act quickly to block painful feelings or impressions. For those
present at, for instance, Hiroshima, it means the mind is telling itself something like "If I feel nothing, I cannot be threatened by the death all
around me.... I am not responsible. . . ." And for those not present back then, it means the mind sees to it that the trauma becomes
repressed, even "unimaginable."' 9 This numbing is a breakdown in the normal human symbolization process which in itself
is a miniature "death in life," a symbolic death of the self, or "knowledge without feeling." In turn this only perpetuates the
general malaise within a beleaguered society. "We can also speak of a profound symbolic gap characteristic of our age, a gap
between the capacity for technological violence on the one hand, and our much more limited capacity for moral
imagination on the other."6° It is ironic that in repressing pictures of mass death, the mind instead-and in devious ways-"contracts"
on the installment plan for an inward imitation of death.
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Impact: Violence
Nuclearism causes violence and environmental destruction, and exacerbates conflict
Accordingly, to situate nuclear technology requires considering the ways through which the global hierarchies of military
and economic power have come to create a larger cross-cultural psychological environment that tacitly accepts the
technology as the final arbitrator of power and prestige. As countries attempt to respond to this global order by actively participating in
nuclearism, as India and Pakistan have done, they inescapably incur unprecedented costs to the local populations and commit
violence regionally. In other words, like most universals, nuclearism is a costly and violent enterprise in regional terms, but it
outclasses all other universals both quantitatively and qualitatively. The material and psychological contingencies of
nuclearism have been powerful enough to generate an environment of their own across geographies, which I shall refer to
as nuclearism's "political ecology."
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Impact: Genocide
Nuclear posturing is based in a genocidal ideology which treats life as disposable - this
culminates in nuclear genocide
The United States and the Soviet Union have constructed vast genocidal systems, which they justify by the claim of
“deterrence.” A genocidal system is not a matter of a particular weapons structure or strategic concept so much as an overall constellation
of men, weapons, and war-fighting plans which, if implemented, could end human civilization in minutes and the greater part of human
life on the planet within days or even hours. Unlike any previous weapons or natural disasters, nuclear weapons could destroy much of the
earth’s animal and plant life as well, whether by the effects of the explosions, by the subsequent deadly radiation, or by creating a “nuclear
winter” brought about by changes in the earth’s climate owing to debris in the atmosphere which would block out the
sun’s rays. This genocidal system, then, could mean terminal genocide—recently labeled “omnicide,” or the destruction of all
life. For the “credibility,” or believability, of deterrence policy, as its proponents emphasize, requires genuine willingness to use the
weapons under certain conditions, such as actual or imminent enemy attack. Hence, deterrence policy gives rise not only to a genocidal
system but to a “genocidal mentality,” which can be defined as a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and,
according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations—millions, or tens or hundreds of millions, of people. And
that genocidal mentality can become bound up with the institutional arrangements necessary for the genocidal act.
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Impact: Nuclear War
Nuclearism makes nuclear use inevitable - the drive to construct and deploy nuclear
weapons entails preparation and calculation for their use, putting us constantly on the brink
of nuclear war
A nuclear war set off by computer error or miscommunication would be "an accident in name only" because the
genocidal ideology, institutions, and dynamic have long been operative and can be all too easily intensified to the ultimate
point. The release of a single nuclear weapon -- even the creation of circumstances under which such a weapon is likely to be released --
could well be the equivalent of the Nazi "crossing of the 'moral Rubicon' of mass murder." The key is the ideological-
institutional propulsion toward mass murder, toward the "blind alley" of mutual nuclear confrontation. We, too, "prepare for" genocide
-- by our long-held nuclearistic ideology and increasingly callous dismissal of human lives in order to maintain the
protective "nuclear umbrella." The existence of a dynamic weapons system -- a genocidal system -- is perpetuated in nuclearism by the simple facts of
technology. Whatever the safeguards taken against crossing that threshold, and these are extremely important, there can be no
certainty that the threshold will not be crossed so long as the weapons and the techno-bureaucratic structure
surrounding them remain prominent features of our landscape. To build and deploy the weapons in large numbers is to
prepare for their use, to prepare to cross the nuclear threshold. Or to put the matter another way, our nuclear weapons system creates a threshold
waiting to be crossed.
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Impact: Arms Races/Turns Prolif
Nuclearism makes global prolif inevitable - our obsession with the bomb spreads outwardly,
producing the drive for weapons to counter our own - this arms race creates a violent cycle
of pre-emption, threats, and nuclear escalation
Lifton '03 Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College and CUNY, Supowerpower Syndrome, 2003, p. 131-135
But President Bush and his advisers have expressed no such ambivalence about the weapons. His administration's nuclearism has
been overt and unfettered. His nuclear strategists have sought to discover ever more creative uses for the weapons. For instance, in their Nuclear Posture
Review of December 2001, they spoke of developing small nuclear warheads called "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators" (also known as "bunker busters") for
potential use against North Korea's underground caves. And more recently the administration has contested a ban on the use of low-yield nuclear weapons that
had been in effect since 1993, and encouraged American nuclear scientists to explore new generations of such weaponry whose lower yield would make them
more usable. They have also made plans for lofting nuclear and other advanced weaponry into the last demilitarized "frontier," that of space, and have indicated
that they are eager to resume the underground nuclear testing that has been in abeyance since 1992. The administration has, in fact, managed to give nuclear
weapons increasing value globally as the currency of power, its actions in the Middle East and East Asia have provoked Iran and North Korea to accelerate their
own nuclear pr~ grams and could, by a kind of domino effect, contribute to the nuclear arming of other countries, including Japan. This unapologetic nuclearism
has undoubtedly been a way of countering the superpower fear of vulnerability, and nowhere is that vulnerability more intolerable than in association with others'
nuclear weapons. The pattern is ominous because nuclear proliferation including the phenomenon of trickle-down nuclearism, is a reality
of the post-Cold War "second nuclear age." The Bush administration has been aware of this danger, but tends to focus on a policy of
"counter-proliferation, which includes the possibility of military attacks on countries that possess or are in the process of acquiring the
weapons and are deemed unstable or antagonistic to the United States. The administration has also threatened to use nuclear weapons on anyone who uses
weapons of mass destruction against the United States (a threat that "vas made to Iraq in the prewar months in connection with its possible use of chemical or
biological weapons). American leaders went further. They justified the preventive attack on Iraq with the claim that it was illegally stockpiling
weapons of mass destruction. And while there was certainly a grand imperial design behind the war, the superpower fear of others' weapons of mass destruction
was at issue as well. To be sure, the manipulative American presentations of "evidence" for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
(including the citing of crudely forged documents that supposedly revealed Iraqi uranium purchases in the African country of Niger) were largely a pretext
for an invasion the Bush administration had long been determined to carry out. But the need to preserve the illusion of
invulnerability also played its part, contributing to a self-proclaimed entitlement to head off imagined future dangers,
including the possibility that Saddam Hussein might provide al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons (although Iraq has had no functional nuclear program since the early
1990s). In that sequence, a declared "preemptive" war became a preventive war which in turn became a "counter-
proliferation" war. In this way the approach to the very real problem of nuclear proliferation was thoroughly militarized, and
itself rendered potentially nuclear. Ultimately, the only superpower finds it difficult to tolerate anyone else possessing such weapons, and no less
difficult to imagine a world in which it might surrender its own nuclear arsenal. As one American official was quoted as saying, when asked about proliferation,
"My ideal for the perfect number of nuclear-weapons states is one." Superpower nuclearism and "counter-proliferation," are, not
surprisingly, likely to have psychological and political effects quite different from those intended. Smaller nations at
odds with the United States, becoming painfully aware of their own vulnerability and their potential humiliation in the face
of a possible attack, are then drawn to their own version of nuclearism-to nuclear magic-as a source of power and pride. And they
can point to evidence for doing so: Iraq, lacking a nuclear program, was invaded; North Korea, with a relatively advanced one, was not.
Of course, such an approach could also hasten an American attack. Nuclearism is contagious, and the supernatural power it seems to
bestow is inseparable from a deepening fear of vulnerability. During the Cold War, this paradox of supernatural power and
profound vulnerability was the crux of the interaction between the United States and the Soviet Union. America's ever newer generations of nuclear
weapons and strategies made the Soviets feel sufficiently vulnerable to counteract them with no less threatening stockpiles and
strategies, which in turn intensified American feelings of vulnerability, which led to further stockpiling and more aggressive strategies until the
arsenals of the two superpowers reached absurd levels, quite capable of destroying planet Earth and more. Now, with just one superpower but many more actual
or aspiring nuclear nations, the process has become much more amorphous and considerably less manageable. Intolerant of its
own vulnerability, and dismissive of diplomatic arms-control approaches, the Bush administration is now on the lookout everywhere for weapons of mass
destruction- especially those actually or potentially in the hands of unfriendly nations or terrorist groups. Such weapons may be manufactured, purchased, or
stolen; or low-tech forms of attack may be mounted that are aimed specifically at the superpower's own nuclear weapons and energy
installations. The superpower, trapped in its syndrome, finds itself with little recourse but the endless use of force. Unmitigated
nuclearism combined with a quest for exclusive control of the nuclear arena can only enhance the weapons' standing
as a currency of power everywhere, creating a vicious circle of action and reaction from which there appears to be no exit. The seemingly
invincible nation can never rest, facing as it does an ever-widening, ever-escalating arena of threats, which span the world and could destroy it. More than any
other nation, the superpower is psychologically bedeviled by vulnerability.
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Impact: Extinction
Nuclearism produces the political and legal environment to authorize nuclear violence and
even human extinction - this makes their impacts inevitable
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. Thus we can say that nuclearism is responsible for a "legitimation crisis" within
which the political authorities of both the United States and the Soviet Union have official sanction, under certain conditions,
to act in ways that could bring about human extinction. Specific doctrines, such as that of mutual assured destruction (MAD)
are "formal statements" of "the de facto legitimacy of indiscriminate killing."
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Impact: Statism/Technology Bad
Ceding control of nuclear politics to the state reduces the population into a standing reserve
for legitimation and growth in the nuclear complex. Nuclearism sacrifices humanistic
considerations on the altar of technology.
The Indian newspapers generally failed to focus on the particularly local context of the entire test operation, which
included a completely unexpected, inconsiderate, and forcible evacuation by the Indian army of ground-zero villagers barely three hours before the blasts.
Villagers from Khetolai, Dholiya, Loharki, Latmi, and Bhadriyo settlements were ordered to move "for their own safety"--they were
inaccurately informed--"as the army was conducting artillery practice." 20 Evidently, the media did not consider this short-notice, non-
negotiable evacuation-under-false-pretext to violate the human rights of the local villagers: it was invariably explained away, on the margins of the event reports,
as part of the greatly successful secret operation pulled off by the government (apparently in defiance, and by making a fool, of the world body, particularly the
CIA!). The Indian media certainly did not find the evacuation at all as newsworthy or worthy of focused editorials as the
atomic blasts themselves, which had, by the [End Page 10] way, "caused a large mound of earth to rise into the air," creating a "thick blanket of dust
[over] nearby villages." 21 Incidentally, opinion articles in the various publications also did not address the plight of the villagers in any focused manner. Put in
terms of Rajni Kothari's masterly articulation of the "dispensability thesis of democracy," we are safe to conclude that the Indian media, just like the
state, inherently assumed the affected villagers to be "dispensable" members of the global technological order. 22
Hence, nuclearism, as Nandy's "cultural universal," can appropriately be considered one of the most revealing mechanisms or
moments of Kothari's "dispensability thesis of democracy," epitomizing the vision that "seeks to provide--to the total
exclusion of all humanist considerations--for the unhindered advance of technology that would integrate the world
into a single unified world political economy." 23 That nuke journalism retained quite a touch of the celebratory--and certainly did not venture
strongly enough on the local level to dampen the spirits in the post-Pokharan scenario--shows that the mainstream Indian media participated in
nuclearism rather actively, falling short of its genuine democratic responsibility to inform the public accurately and let
it share as passionately the sad social undercurrents behind this scientific-technological celebration. Not to be outclassed in this
respect, the international media too focused almost entirely on the diplomatic and defense-related concerns that the
Pokharan blasts generated, thereby ignoring them as a social-environmental event with very local human repercussions. The rural
and ill-informed evacuees, irrespective of their own subsequent participation in the post-test jubilation, remain "ecological refugees" (to use a Gadgil and Guha
coinage) who suffered neglect or had to undergo a strange patriotic glorification at the hands of the Indian media. 24 In short, both national and international
media inevitably became part of the global dynamics of nuclearism as they weighed the Indian nuclear tests predominantly for their military or strategic
relevance. 25
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Impact: Fear/Totalitarianism
Nuclearism produces a constant state of emergency and fear - this legitimates greater
concentration of power in the hands of military elites, making adventurism inevitable
Lifton and Falk '82 Robert Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and Richard Falk, Professor of
International Law at Princeton University, Indefensible Weapons, 1982, pp. 106-107
Underneath this superstructure that gradually extended its repressive reach out from Washington was a pretext for permanent
emergency. The red scare was the superficial justification, but far more profound was the structural effects of nuclear
weaponry and war planning. Only in peacetime can the relationship envisioned by democratic theory and constitutional
order be seriously enacted. Wartime conditions inevitably concentrate power in the presidency and exclude normal
kinds of accountability between government and citizenry. The longer a war lasts, the more atrophied become the
separation of powers, checks and balances, and citizen's rights that are the essence of Western democracy, Also during a war the military
sector gains in influence and stature, and its leaders move close to the very center of power. It was not surprising that such
prominent military figures as George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower moved easily into civilian leadership roles in the decade after 1945, or that after the
Korean War Douglas MacArthur returned to the United States as a deposed war hero who was looked upon as a natural aspirant to the presidency by those of
rightist persuasion. That is, even the prime commitment to civilian control of the governing process erodes in a wartime atmosphere.
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Alt: Theology of Peace
The alternative constructs a new theology out of reorientation within humanity - this
embraces the power of imagination and breaks from the mindless repetition of nuclearism.
It is common among those who study the psychosocial effects of the nuclear threat, to cite the words of Einstein, particularly at the beginning of speeches. " The
splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe . . . We shall
require a substantially new manner of thinking if [hu]mankind is to survive." I tend to think of this recitation of Einstein as a "spiritual"
act of positioning ourselves in our work; a kind of "ritual act" which, in the best sense of ritual, is not at all a mindless repetition, but is
a way of establishing order and making plain our human condition. Ordering our thoughts and comprehending our human
situation in a meaningful way is a ritual act basic to being human; it is not dependent on being "religious" in any traditional sense. Like
the philosopher Susanne Langer, I believe that "A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage. It is
prosaic to the point of total indifference, purely casual, devoid of that structure of intellect and feeling which we call 'personality'" (1942:290). Einstein's words are
ominous, to be sure. And yet, it appears to be in the nature of our thinking to render the ominous, common-place and familiar. We have an
extraordinary capacity to dull our thoughts, to become habituated and mesmerized in our thinking in a mindless way that
amounts to a detached, disembodied, "buzzing confusion." This cleavage in the mind of "Man" - this "splitting of Adam" - permits us to drift toward
the unspeakable and the unimaginable. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton refers to this mental "drift" as "psychic numbing," which he explains as
the blocking of feelings associated with images too painful to bear; or the blocking of images unacceptable to the human imagination. Psychic numbing, he says,
can also result from an inability to produce images of events that lie outside our experience-for example, a nuclear holocaust. Lifton believes that in response to
nuclear weapons, psychic numbing is "widespread" and even "natural." But as he has maintained for two decades, since first beginning work in this area with his
study of the survivors of Hiroshima, because we are human beings, we can reflect and think about our situation and change it. We need not acquiesce
in silence without protest.
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Alt: Imagine the Real
Our alternative is to imagine the real. Visualizing nuclear destruction through images and
political resistance refuses the spectacular presentation of nuclear weapons in the 1AC -
this must be the basis for any opposition to nuclear war.
Gusterson '04 Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, "Nuclear Tourism," Journal for Cultural
Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2004
The humanistic psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has argued that one
of our most important and difficult tasks in the nuclear age is to
“imagine the real” (1982). By this he means that, although we live in a situation where nuclear Footnote 4 continued As West and East In
all flatt maps—and I am one—are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.” Rhodes suggests, following through the theme of resurrection, that Oppenheimer
saw the bomb as a “weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind” (Rhodes 1988, pp. 571–72). NUCLEAR TOURISM 29 weapons could
kill millions of people and destroy civilization as we know it at any moment, it is hard to visualize in a meaningful way
the scale of a nuclear holocaust or even the destructive power of a single nuclear weapon. Since nuclear weapons are rarely
seen, except by those who take care of them, and the government often refuses even to confirm where they are stored, it is easy to forget that the weapons exist
at all. It is in order to break through this membrane of denial and help us all to “imagine the real” that antinuclear
activists have wanted to display photographs of Hiroshima, spill blood at the Trinity site, and carry banners
condemning the unseen but quite real testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Although many nuclear tourists do not at all share the anti-nuclear
activists’ politics, they too are impelled by an urge to “imagine the real.” How else to explain the need to walk through Oppenheimer’s house, to see and touch a
full-size replica of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and to stand in the crater created by the world’s first nuclear explosion? The thousands of nuclear tourists,
some who came from thousands of miles away, felt the need to drive into the middle of the desert at dawn, despite the almost complete lack of anything to see
there, in order to make the nuclear age real each in their own way. Once there, they prayed, hummed, protested, instructed their children, wandered back and
forth, or just stared blankly. And, despite the banner on the perimeter of the Trinity site, “More than just a photo op,” almost everyone took photographs—our
era’s favourite way to make experience real.
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Alt: Species Consciousness
Species consciousness is a discursively and psychologically significant shift in mindset that
replaces nuclearism with concern for others - individual action is key to create spillover to
policymakers
Lifton and Falk '91 Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and Richard Falk, Professor of
International Law at Princeton University, Indefensible Weapons, 1991, p. xvi
We know that leaders can be capable of turning away from nuclearism, if a powerful alternative to it can take shape. One
such alternative that is gaining momentum has to do with seeing the human species as the unit whose security is at
issue. 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 ecological 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. 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-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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Framework: Theology
Theology comes first - they should have to justify their adherence to the religious structure
of nuclearism. Other frameworks are inadequate in an age of nuclear weapons.
All these are consequences of nuclearism on the human psyche, which have been delineated by Lifton in his writings for two decades. Now, however, there is a
much wider recognition of these effects. Attestation has been added by medical and psychiatric research by John E. Mack, Michael J. Carey, and Jerome D.
Frank .69 A still broader audience has been reached by Jonathan Schell's descriptions of living a double life (that is, by trying to ignore the peril we secretly know
could at any time obliterate everything) and its pervasive effects on marriage, human relations, politics, and art.'° In a nuclear age, explains another
prominent writer, composing fiction is difficult now "that the story of any individual . . . may not be able to sustain an
implication for the collective fate."" And in his Albert Einstein Peace Prize speech, former ambassador George F. Kerman characterizes our
obsession with overkill: We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness
upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a
dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly along behind their Pied Piper. And the result is that today we have
achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to
defy rational understanding.72 So it defies rational understanding? But of course! Not because it is instinctual behavior, as supposedly is the case
with lemmings heading to the sea, but because it is religious behavior. This is the point that is so often overlooked by antinuclear
critics who shake their heads over the mindless futility of the arms race. Whether they realize it or not, they seriously overestimate the role of
rationality in human nature. Here Lifton's depth psychology marks a great improvement. But more is needed. What is required finally is a religious
diagnosis. For religion has always known that human beings will sacrifice reason and even life itself, if need be, for the
sake of repressing chaos and securing cosmic meaning for their restless lives. Even suicide can be a last ditch grasping at self-
vindication and defiance! Instead of puzzling over these lemming-like actions, we may gain more understanding as well as improve our
chances of averting disaster if we address nuclearism at last as an appealing and effective new religion." And so we now
move on to consider what religious studies as a discipline may have to contribute.
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Framework: Theology
The role of the judge should be to weigh competing theologies . War and violence occur out
of a drive to preserve meaning and order - only a theological framework can confront this
effectively, meaning we control the internal link to all of the case and K impacts.
Thus Chernus offers a significant exposition of the specifically religious and yet self-deceptive role of myth for our crisis. Moreover-and in marked contrast to anti-
nuclear critics such as Schell, Kaufman, and Lifton-Chernus does see a notable role as well for the church. Although making no claim to be a theologian, he
points out that, "while the churches have a unique problem in the nuclear age, they also have a unique opportunity to illuminate our
situation and respond creatively to it."84 Most anti-nuclear activity has come from a liberal ideological perspective. But there is a major failing
which liberals share, whether they are within the church or outside the church. That failing is an overconfidence in human reason and its
capacity to move people to realize and act upon their genuine self-interest. This prompts a liberal bent toward
intellectualizing, if not moralizing as well-in effect a doom and gloom scolding about how incompatible the Bomb is to
our survival or our morality. Then liberals puzzle over why their message has so little effect! The answer is, as we have
seen, that nuclearism is itself an enticing covert religion. It arises because most people in their heart of hearts would prefer-and
indeed demand- a sense of personal identity and cosmic purpose, over and above mere survival or morality. Even self destruction, in the last
analysis, is preferable to meaninglessness.85 The role of the church, therefore, ought to be in redirecting anti-nuclear efforts towards
deeper symbolic and even soteriological levels of communication. Chernus goes on to apply the same critique of rationalism to both
sides of the conventional debate over whether war has become incompatible with human survival. On the one hand there are the "defense intellectuals" in
Washington who, since the Kennedy administration, seek both to identify rational purposes for nuclear weapons and to design rational ways of using such
weapons for those purposes-a vicious circle between ends and means. "Abstract, technical, mathematical reason is the god at whose throne they worshipthough
the Bomb seems to be seated at this god's right hand."" On the other hand, there are the anti-nuclear critics of the defense intellectuals who claim that there can
be no rational ends or means for weapons of mass destruction. They say that escalation would be inevitable, and so warfare by the Superpowers has become
obsolete. Thereby, however, the critics admit that they share the same unspoken premise with their opponents: nuclear war is normally a rational activity! Still a
further form of rationalism emerged when the Reagan administration sought to allay public fears about its steep buildup in nuclear forces. The result has been
"the myth of rational balance,"87 in other words, a professed support for arms control as well as deterrence, as a dual pressure on the Soviets to come to terms.
We are asked simply to trust our experts, under whose benevolent and rational control the world can be kept in balanced tension indefinitely. In such a fashion, it
is claimed, "the weapons will save us from themselves."88 All of these assertions about the rational function or dysfunction of war, says Chernus,
only serve to ignore
the realities of what is actually its religious function. He illustrates this from the works of three authors who have impressed
him. James Aho,89 first of all, says that in every religion, war
has had the role of acting out some mythic scenario for the purpose of
preserving a sense of "nomos" or cosmic order. This in turn holds back what humanity has always dreaded the most: "anomie," chaos, a
final loss of orientation and sense of reality. In some cultures (especially Asian) war is an end in itself, a ritual combat that reenacts the structure of the cosmos.
Thereby war is play, in the sense of drama and a game. In other cultures (especially Semitic or Protestant) war is a means to an end, a purification of the world
from personified evil or anomie. Thereby war is work, in the sense of goal-oriented behavior with no limits on the means utilized to exterminate that evil. Thus, as
Chernus likewise agrees, all wars, both ancient and modern, fulfill deep hungers for imposing anew a sense of orderliness on the
stubborn irrationalities of life.
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Framework: Representations
Representations are significant - the rhetorical choices present in the 1AC shape our
understanding of our material reality to orient our decision calculus towards self-fulfilling
ends. Critical analysis of reps disrupts linguistic violence and produces better methods of
communication.
Doty ‘96 Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1996, pp. 5-6
This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of
inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal of
analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine how certain representations underlie the
production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. As Said (1979:
21) notes, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the
existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within
discourse. So, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real," though the march of troops across a piece of
geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when
"American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada" to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical
behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion," a "show of force," a "training
exercise," a "rescue," and so on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is
located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes
a series of dichotomies—thought/reality, appearance/essence, mind/matter, word/world, subjective/objective— that a critical genealogy calls
into question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. In
suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices I
am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a "reality" whose content has for the most part been defined by the
representational practices of the “first world”. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that
produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
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Framework: Discourse
The critique is a prior question to the plan text – what we think of as the “material” or “real”
world is actually a continual process of construction by competing discourses. The
discursive processes active in the 1AC inevitably reproduce the violence and danger that
national security discourse is intent on minimizing.
Grondin '04 David Grondin, assistant professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottowa, “(Re)Writing the “National Security State”,” Center for United
States Studies of the Raoul Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies, presented at the International Studies Association Convention, March 2004,
www.ciaonet.org/wps/rdc002/index.html
Given my poststructuralist inclinations, I do not subscribe to the positivistic social scientific enterprise which aspires
to test hypotheses against the “real world”. I therefore reject epistemological empiricism. Since epistemology is
closely intertwined with methodology, especially with positivism, I eschew naturalism as a methodology. I study discourses
and discursive practices that take shape in texts. This does not mean that there is no material world as such, only
that it must be understood as mediated by language, which in the end means that it is always interpreted once
framed by discourse (through the spoken word or in written form).2 “A discourse, then, is not a way of learning ‘about’ something out there in the ‘real
world’; it is rather a way of producing that something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable, and therefore,
meaningful. Discourse creates the conditions of knowing” (Klein quoted in George, 1994: 30). We consider “real” what we
consider significant: a discourse is always an interpretation, a narrative of multiple realities inscribed in a specific social or symbolic order.
Discursive representation is therefore not neutral; individuals in power are those who are “authorized” to produce “reality”, and
therefore, knowledge. In this context, power is knowledge and the ability to produce that which is considered “true”. A realist
discourse will produce the sociolinguistic conditions that will allow it to correspond, in theory as in practice, to
“reality”. Evidently, this “reality” will be nothing but the “realist discourse” that one has constituted oneself. This is why,
from a poststructuralist perspective, discourse may be considered as ontology3.
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Framework: Discourse
Discourse comes first - nuclearism expands its power through society by policing media of
communication - the impact is psychic numbing to violence. A framework that enables
critical inquiry of aff discursive method is key to solve.
Chaloupka '92 William Chaloupka, Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom,
1992, p. 17
Einstein was correct on oppression and conspiracy, but he was wrong on power. Nuclearism has found a way to spread that power
throughout society without acting. This is Jean Baudrillard's notion of contemporary power. "The nuclear threat is part of a 'soft' mode
of extermination, bit by bit, by deterrence, not at all an apocalyptic term."47 Such power implodes and leukemizes, in Baudrillard's metaphors; its focus is
inward. In this instance of power (which clarifies and exemplifies Foucault's controversial argument), there is no action, intention, or conspiracy. Never using its
weapons —indeed, founded on the notion that the best force is never used —power can infect everything. It is discursive in the sense suggested by
Derrida; this power is only spoken, never used. Outside history, beyond the world of things that have functions and uses, this is precisely poststructuralist power.
Baudrillard's alerts and Derrida's observation on textuality share a poststructuralist position on power. Earlier, Foucault had identified sexuality as an area of
activity that was supposedly repressed (perhaps even "unspoken") but was, in fact, pervasively, compulsively spoken. Indeed, that supposedly "natural" realm
of activity has been, he claimed, radically constituted in discourse. There are parallels with nukes. We speak of a
repressive relationship with nukes; we are said to have repressed our anger at the nuke, or our awareness of it. Lifton gave this
psychological phenomenon the name "numbing," which is one of the central theses of contemporary nuclear opposition. He concludes that this effect
is associated with a pervasive, social psychological environment within which we share a silence on a topic that, despite the silence, still concerns us greatly. The
form of a "nuclear criticism" response —that is, a political line that does not rely on "replacement totalities" —might be suggested by Foucault's studies on
sexuality and prison reform.48 Could it be that we have been talking about nukes constantly? The film Atomic Cafe exposed just this
compulsion, making our nuke fixation cute and archaic, but not missing the point that it was pervasive. Clearly, that compulsion survived the fifties and sixties
surveyed by the film. We evoke the nuke, all the time. As Derrida and Baudrillard note, we appropriate its metaphors constantly,
without irony. The terms reaction, critical mass, criticality, fallout, and disarm are a few examples. Foucault showed that the talk of sexuality corresponded
with a set of discursive practices that produced subjects, rather than only repressing some subject that existed before discourse. Again, there are parallels in
nuclear discourse. We reaffirm management, even if objectives are paradoxical. We reenact rituals of submission
and fatalism. We can now even imagine such a thing as "nuclear therapy."49 At times, the issue of teaching nukes has been nearly as
controversial as that of teaching sex.
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A2: Permutation
Critique must be the first step against nuclearism - sequence matters - the permutation
sustains nuclearism by advocating action not based in prior criticism of nuclear politics - this
sustains nuclearism.
Stopping to think, in order to ensure that we do not proceed "thoughtlessly" is the first of the many spiritual and psychological steps we
must take, if we hope to save ourselves and the world. To think is the first step in establishing a thoughtful "barrier" against national
policies that are based on a willingness to fight "a limited nuclear war." To choose not to think, and to keep this knowledge
from ourselves means, otherwise, to choose to be "thoughtless" (without thought) for the future of the world. And indeed, not surprisingly,
nothing appears to lend itself more to illusory thinking and to a certain stunning "thoughtlessness" than does our
relationship to those nuclear weapons which are the extraordinary creation of our own technological brilliance.
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A2: Realism/Deterrence Inevitable
This isn't responsive - their systems of violence are only inevitable because they aren't
asking the right questions. Critique of nuclearism opens the space for progressive political
action to solve the impacts.
The crux of a species-oriented policy lies in ending the confrontation of rival genocidal systems we call deterrence,
and replacing it with arrangements conducive to genuine security and peace. Michael McGwire....anticipating that the
“final defence of the deterrent dogmatist is to ask, ‘What would you put in its place?’“-..- declares, “The short answer is,
‘Nothing.’“His point is that “the immediate objective is to reduce the salience of deterrence dogma in the formulation of
policy,” so that it can be replaced by negotiation and diplomacy “enriched by a more subtle understanding of the
classic concepts of deterrence and reassurance, and by a deeper awareness of human fraility under stress in crises.”
McGwire speaks from species awareness when he adds, “We should recognize that it is world war, however it starts, not Soviet aggression, that poses the
greatest threat to all our people,” and should therefore “pay less attention to developing the military means to deter the onset of war,
and concentrate more on develop.. ing the political means of averting those situations that make war more likely.”
McGwire also points out that “mutual deterrence is an objective fact,” and that we need to reduce radically the existing number of nuclear weapons and “block. . .
new avenues for arms racing, rather than seek . . . to shape the arsenals to deter, or, if necessary, Control nuclear war.” There are many plans for radical nuclear
arms reduction, and for including conventional arms reduction as well: the all-important principle here is the well-being of all members of the human species in
formulating and carrying out such policies. Holding to that principle means mutual rejection of any Possibility of nuclear “exchange” as a means of dealing with
American Soviet or any other international conflict to negotiate aggressively to cajole or compete with one another, and at times to resort to economic pressures
but never to threaten—or have in place the means to threaten—the human species with nuclear extinction. We would have to put aside the present
preoccupation with maintaining the biggest nuclear stockpile and, together with all other countries, focus on the means by which
danger to all people might be averted. Within this common project, there exists a measure of alliance among all countries. And from that minimal
alliance, built as it is on a sense of shared fate, stronger forms of cooperation can develop. The principle is that “cooperation breeds cooperation” through “more
and better information about one another’s capabilities and intentions,” as well as “realistic empathy” in the form of appreciating the legitimacy of each other’s
interests. It is then possible for both parties to redefine both their interests and their policies.
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A2: Realism Inevitable
Inevitability is not responsive – the violence of realism is sustained by rhetorical choices like
those of the 1AC. You should reject their attempts to silence debate through threats of
supposed inevitability.
Peterson and Runyan ‘99 V. Spike Peterson, professor of political science at the University of Arizona, and Anne Runyan, professor of women’s
studies at Wright State University, Global Gender Issues, 1999, pp. 227-228
Avowedly modernist in orientation, realism claims to be rooted not in a theory of how international relations ought to work, but in a privileged reading of a
necessary and predetermined foreign policy environment. 28 In its orthodox form political realism assumes that international politics are and must be dominated
by the will to power. Moral aspirations in the international arena are merely protective coloration and propaganda or the illusions that move hopeless idealists.
What is most revealing about this assessment of human nature is not its negativity but its fatalism. There is little if
any place for human moral evolution or perfectibility. Like environmental determinism—most notably the social darwinism of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries—political realism presumes that human social nature, even if ethically deplorable, cannot be
significantly improved upon. From the stationary perspective of social scientific realism in its pure form, the fatal
environment of human social interaction can be navigated but not conquered. Description, in other words, is fate. All who
dare to challenge the order—Carter’s transgression—will do much more damage than good. The idealist makes a bad
situation much worse by imagining a better world in the face of immutable realities. As one popular saying among foreign policy
practitioners goes: “Without vision, men die. With it, more men die.” 70 (continued) The implications of this social philosophy are stark. Tremendous human
suffering can be rationalized away as the inevitable product of the impersonal international system of power relations.
World leaders are actively encouraged by the realists to put aside moral pangs of doubt and play the game of
international politics according to the established rules of political engagement. This deliberate limitation of interest
excuses leaders from making hard moral choices. While a moralist Protestant like Jimmy Carter sees history as a progressive moral struggle
to realize abstract ideals in the world, the realist believes that it is dangerous to struggle against the inexorable. The moral ambiguities of political
and social ethics that have dogged philosophy and statesmanship time out of mind are simply written out of the
equation. Since ideals cannot be valid in a social scientific sense, they cannot be objectively true. The greatest barrier to
engaging the realists in serious dialogue about their premises is that they deny that these questions can be seriously debated. First, realists teach a moral
philosophy that denies itself. There is exceedingly narrow ground, particularly in the technical vocabulary of the social sciences, for discussing the moral potential
of humanity or the limitations of human action. Yet, as we have seen in the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a philosophical perspective on these very questions is
imparted through the back door. It is very hard to argue with prescription under the guise of description. The purveyors of this
philosophical outlook will not admit this to themselves, let alone to potential interlocutors. [End Page 21] Second, and most importantly, alternative
perspectives are not admitted as possibilities—realism is a perspective that as a matter of first principles denies all
others. There is, as we have seen in the Carter narrative, alleged to be an immutable reality that we must accept to avoid disastrous consequences. Those
who do not see this underlying order of things are idealists or amateurs. Such people have no standing in debate because they do not see the intractable scene
that dominates human action. Dialogue is permissible within the parameters of the presumed order, but those who question
the existence or universality of this controlling scene are beyond debate.
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A2: Case Outweighs/Threats Are Real
Their impacts are epistemologically tainted by nuclearism - nuclear threat scenarios are
based on flawed assumptions about external actors and are self-fulfilling
Lal ’09 Prerna Lal, Post-Graduate Student in International Relations, “North Korea is Not a Threat: Unveiling Hegemonic Discourses,” 5 April 2009,
http://prernalal.com/2009/04/05/north-korea-is-not-a-threat-unveiling-hegemonic-discourses/
Tied to the race war schema, is the discourse of nuclearism, which refers to the ideology that nuclear weapons are instruments
of peace. Nukespeak in the form of MAD or the hype over so-called precision weapons by our leaders has had trickle-down effects to the
point of achieving a mental-wipe or historical amnesia of the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This
discourse effectively represents a war on history and subjugation of knowledges about the horrors of nuclear war and
fallout. Closely related to nuclearism is the issue of whiteness around nuclear weapons, the paternalistic presupposition that Western powers are the
responsible and rightful leaders on the issue, the racist ideology that nuclear weapons in the hands of an Islamic country or
“terrorist” spells end to world peace or catastrophe while it is perfectly alright for France, Britain, the United States, Russia, China and
now India, to have nuclear weapons. The epistemological assumptions of nuclearism are dangerous, besides being racist and
morally repulsive. The formation of a “nuclear club” and an exclusive right to possess nuclear weapons makes them a forbidden fruit and an issue of prestige,
thereby encouraging proliferation. Indeed, discourse around the North Korea and Iran nuclear buildup denotes that these countries see a successful
completion of the fuel cycle or the launching of a rocket as an issue of great prestige. There is absolutely nothing prestigious about owning
weapons of mass destruction, weapons that can end civilization. However, countries like North Korea and Iran can be forgiven for their
nuclearist mentality; after all, it is an implication of the discourse that has been perpetuated by the West, a discourse that has
become common knowledge and culture. Nuclearism must be addressed and put on the table to move past the current impasse over nuclear negotiations and
the non-proliferation regime. Without denouncing nuclear weapons and facing our moral conscience as the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons, we
cannot hope to avert nuclear proliferation and prevent ‘rogue states’ from going that route. ‘
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A2: Cede the Political
Individual action is key - we must reinstate hope into our personal politics to challenge the
mindset driving nuclearism and global violence
Species awareness means awareness of human choice: “This

is not the End of Time—unless we choose to make it so. We need not
accept the death sentence. . . . We
are not powerless.” By choosing instead a human future, we are—in the words of the Polish Solidarity
leader Adam Michnik—”defending hope.” And “hope is important. Perhaps more important than anything else.” Hope is greatly enhanced—as is
the acceptance of individual mortality—by the sense of reasserting the immortality of the species. The task is intensified by the psychological upheavals we can
expect in connection with the millennial transition of the year 2000. Whatever the millennial imagery, we must recognize that the hopeful future is
not an apocalyptic heavenly peace but rather expanded awareness on behalf of human continuity. This adaptation will not
eliminate people’s need to define themselves in relation to otherness, but it can begin to subsume that otherness to larger human
commonality. It must include struggles against widespread oppression and drastic human inequities by invoking the kind of “originality in political action” that
has taken place in the Solidarity movement in Poland—and in related movements in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria— and was so
cruelly frustrated in the student movement in China: “Political action that enlarges, rather than blights or destroys, human possibilities.” This species-
oriented approach would “defy the given models of defiance.” 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.
Alt solves - critical thought is itself a subversive act and has substantive implications. Our
act of critique opens the space for political action that doesn't subscribe to nuclearism.
"When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in," writes Arendt, "those who
think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action"
(1978:192). This notion, that thinking is in and of itself an action, has long been a part of the intellectual tradition of the West, especially among
philosophers and other professional thinkers. Foucault puts it eloquently: "Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or
reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing,
suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in
its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act" (1977:6). 336 Austin Reinventing Ourselves For Arendt and for others, the gap between
thinking and acting is false. Although, admittedly, Arendt did spend considerable time studying the relationship between thinking and willing, a task to
which she devoted herself wholeheartedly in the years just prior to her death. I shall not take up any of that argument here. Rather, I shall conclude by saying
that the purpose of this essay is an exceedingly modest one: to suggest that thinking is an inventive act of self-transformation. For if
thinking-especially public thinking and discourse-can be exercised and understood as a collective action which transforms
cultures, then perhaps we can close the credibility gap between thought and action, and move closer to ending the
arms race.
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A2: War Good
Violence is not an effective strategy to prevent violence - it reaffirms the behavior as
acceptable and productive.
Kappeler '95 Susanne, Professor at Cal-Berkeley and Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, pg 258
Resistance to violence however cannot consist of violence. Violence may change the direction of violence, invert the
roles of violator and victim, but it necessarily affirms the principle of violence, whatever else it may achieve. And it
adds new victims to the world — victims of our own making, not to mention more violent perpetrators, whose ranks
we have decided to join. While in extremity and under the threat of our lives we may not have any means other than
violence to secure our survival, most of us most of the time are not in such situations, though we glibly speak of
‘survival’. Instead, we would have ample opportunity in situations of no such threat to challenge the legitimacy of
violence and to practise alternatives — above all by deciding not to use violence ourselves.
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A2: Deterrence Solves
Deterrence theory assumes rational pursuit of self-interest that just doesn't exist under
nuclearism - symbolic dependency overwhelms technical reasoning
Kaufman's preferred theological method and heritage stem from the Enlightenment and its critical rationalism. So when he turns to
consider nuclear holocaust he assumes that after careful thought people must surely renounce such supreme irrationality. But
this procedure itself, Chernus might reply, resembles that confidence in technical reason and literal truth which actually
sustains our mythic fascination with nuclear weapons. Perhaps a comparison of the two writers in the last analysis must turn, not on their
ideas about God (for both are procedurally quite reticent to allow much to be said here), but instead on their concepts of human nature. Is the human self
relatively univocal, a rational self consciousness that is only secondarily restricted by passion, ambivalence, folly, or self-indulgence? Or is the human
self
a bundle of complexities which depends on symbolization to construct bridges within itself as well as to the outside
world, as it grapples with the tensions of finitude and self transcendence? Here I believe it is clearly Chernus who is both more faithful
to the Judeao-Christian vision, and more capable of advancing our understanding of the nuclear dilemma.
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AFF - Permutation
We should combine action to stop war with individual theological critique - solves policy
paralysis
In any case, by assuming God's inactivity (and probably God's impersonality as well), both Kaufman and Chernus throw the entire weight of responsibility for
solving the nuclear crisis on human shoulders. Quite apart from any unintended snub toward heavenly courts, this certainly results in a doctrine of humanity
heavy with the freightage of a popularized Pelagianism. The ideas of Pelagius, the fifth century reformer criticized by Augustine, have sometimes been called
"musty" religion: we must do what the urgency of the hour tells us we ought to, and so therefore we can. But-can we? It seems
to me that the Pauline-Augustinian critique of the law, a religion of rules, or any salvation by human will power, has never been satisfactorily answered by musty
activists, but only ignored. For the law or the cosmic "ought" condemns us to impotence and futility at the very time we try most
desperately to fulfill it. We all know, for example, the experience of "freezing up" when we feel both singled out and
overwhelmed with some enormous duty. Yet, on the other hand, we must grant that an extreme Augustinianism has overplayed this theme and thus
legitimated human passivity before the status quo. So Kaufman's allergic reaction is understandable. To put it rather too simply, the error in the traditional
Pelagian-Augustinian quarrels through centuries of church history has been the inability to conceive the possibility that both the divine will
and a human will might act concurrently yet without curtailing the full and free responsibility of each. There is, however,
precedence for this in the divine yet human will(s) of Jesus Christ, and in the New Testament experience of the Holy Spirit. It was not in benumbment, but at the
height of his powers (even for lively polemic!) that Paul could insist, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20a). Then there is a modern
example in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who from his prison cell in the closing months of World War II wrote movingly of "prayer and righteous ac tion" in their integral
unity.98 In these prison letters there are famous words about living responsibly in a secular "world come of age," even "as if" there were no God, but those letters
also contain a striking number of references to Providence! Bonhoeffer felt no sense of contradiction here, for the Lord of history summons human beings into
partnership with the divine will to shape the course of events.99 In the crisis of the 1980s, as well as those faced by Bonhoeffer and by first century Christians,
there should be no antithesis between Providence and human accountability. People of faith are called upon to act with conscious
responsibility, but also to trust that God continues to work in the world-perhaps concurrently, and certainly in ways we only
dimly comprehend. On this decisive point we return to Aukerman, for here his directly biblical perspective is also a surprisingly timely one. To the extent that
more analytical methods are unable to move beyond a stalemate of two selves, the divine and the human, as selfcontained entities, it is wiser to be content with
the language of dialogue and personhood. Aukerman's meditations avoid that peculiar modern dichotomy, combining instead a confidence in God's faithfulness
and providential care with a vision which can unlock human creativity and responsibility.
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AFF - No Impact
Nuclearism solves itself - imagery of nuclear weapons has powerful positive effects to produce social
change and check back nuclear violence
Chernus '91 Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at University of Colorado Boulder, Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear
Age, 1991, pp. 12-13
So it
is misleading to suggest that in 1945 there was a sudden break in the nation's image-making process triggered
by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, those bombings set off an immediate efflorescence of
images. While some of these were unfocussed fragments, some were creative attempts to discover coherent new images
commensurate with the new reality. Most notably, there was a widespread perception of the Bomb as a radically new
kind of weapon whose global destruction could harm its possessors as much as its targets. There were also early
images of the Bomb as a technological savior, an instrument of total domination, an unprecedented moral dilemma, and a turning
point in human history-a harbinger of apocalypse or utopia. All these images have persisted, with innumerable transformations, to the present
day. Lifton himself has shown that some of these images represent not a loss but a revival of a traditional mode of sym-bolic immortality. He groups such images
under the rubric of nuclearism, the belief that the Bomb can provide salvation and immortality. In nuclearism a very old religious form, death as the path to
resurrection, is applied to nuclear holocaust.
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AFF - Fear of the Bomb Good
They have it backwards - representations of nuclear war aren't psychologically numbing,
they're deeply terrifying - this fear prevents nuclear war from actually being started.
Futterman '94 Dr. J. A. H. Futterman, tech at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, "Meditations on the Morality of Nuclear Weapons Work, Obscenity and
Peace, 1994, http://www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke.html
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's deterrence of adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way
we think individually and culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens
states, [15] "History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow sectarian concerns without some
overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of Independence and the Civil War to forge the United States, World War I to create the League of Nations,
World War II to create the United Nations Organization and the European Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take
the wider view. Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we contemplate the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us
sufficient libidinal energy to resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blasé about the possibility of holocaust we are lost. As long as
horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can recognize that nothing is worth it. War becomes the
impossible option. Perhaps horror, the experience of horror, the consciousness of horror, is our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable
us to overcome the otherwise invincible attraction of war." Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that world-
historical warning shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless genuine
peace precludes it. We must build a future more peaceful than our past, if we are to have a future at all, with or without nuclear weapons — a fact we had better
learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather than
fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their personalities and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death — thus, the fear of
nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be what we require in order to become peaceful enough to survive
our future technological breakthroughs.[16]
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AFF - Fear of the Bomb Good
Fear of the bomb prevents nuclear weapon use - history proves
Harvard Nuclear Study Group '83 Living With Nuclear Weapons, 1983, p. 5
Why not abolish nuclear weapons? Why not cleanse this small plant of these deadly poisons? Because we cannot. Mankind’s nuclear innocence, once lost,
cannot be regained. The discovery of nuclear weapons, like the discovery of fire itself, lies behind us on the trajectory of history: it cannot be undone. Even if all
nuclear arsenals were destroyed, the knowledge of how to reinvent them would remain and could be put to use in any of a dozen or more nations. The
atomic fire cannot be extinguished. The fear of its use will remain a part of the human psyche for the rest of human
history. This fear is realistic and must not be forgotten. It can prevent complacency and produce prudence. It is almost
certain that such fears have served as the major restraint against the use of nuclear weapons since 1945. American and
Soviet leaders, even in the midst of confrontation have been most careful not to use the weapons at their command. Indeed,
they have seen to it that American and Soviet troops have not met in direct combat for fear that fighting might escalate to nuclear war. The longer this
situation continues, the more firmly the tradition of non-use is established.
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AFF - Calculation Good
Calculation is inevitable and good - we should attempt to make calculations to understand
their shortcomings - this forms the basis for producing new political methods
1992, pp. 137-138
The appeal to terror—in Helen Caldicott’s work, in films like televi¬sion’s “The Day After,” and even on bumper stickers and buttons—has been a main staple of
antinuclearist politics, a sober, anti-ironic terrorism of images. This is only the most recent, most desperate version of a po¬litical stance familiar in this century.
Liberals, conservatives, Marxists, Christians—all felt, all along, that they were dealing with the real, with reality. The gravity of that encounter meant that public
life would be formed in competitive narrations of sober, somber articulations of the necessary, the universal. As the real becomes less and less compelling a
mediator of disputes, the mood turns desperate. If the horror stories fail to hold attention, the logic of the situation dictates a negatively nihilistic diagnosis of
“human nature.” Citizens who seem oblivious to the stron¬gest warning call must be in the mold of Nero. The requirements imposed by the real—not the
deconstruction of those requirements—are the source of nihilism. The postmodern analysis is more compelling. Rather than a nihilistic subject,
somehow already burned by the nuke, we have subjects constituted in new ways. Political authority is still explicable,
even if shared convictions about reality become untenable. In a monarchy, subjects just knew that the king or queen embodied political authority—power was
vested in the monarch. Then, the antiroyalists we now call classical lib¬erals just knew that a scientific analysis of nature would liberate them from those old
fashioned monarchists. Then, the radicals who followed Marx just knew that the science of historical materialism represented reality, promising a future revolution
that would dissolve political authority. These last two form the base of modernity. These two great opponents —liberals and Marxists—have shared a privileged
certainty, which both ob¬tained from a shared, scientific base. The term “postmodern” implies that the era is ending, but it hardly signals the
demise of political power. No longer externalized in the body of the king or relations of production, or nature, power
becomes internalized. We started to create a new self, a new set of habits and practices that we use to identify
ourselves as individuals. We become calculators, seeing problems as opportunities to weigh costs and benefits,
knowing very well that any other kind of motivation will be suspect. Still, we continually find ourselves in situations that demand that great
decisions be made before we quite know the categories. Calculations require facts, but politics continually presents
situations without facts. That should tell us that we are not calculating machines, or at least we aren’t very good ones. And such contradictions begin to
promise a politics.
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AFF - Nuclear Planning Good
Making predictions about possible nuclear conflicts is key to prevent them
Harvard Nuclear Study Group '83 Living With Nuclear Weapons, 1983, p. 47
Nuclear war [sic] cannot be avoided simply by refusing to think about it. Indeed
The question is grisly, but nonetheless it must be asked.
the task of reducing the likelihood of nuclear war should begin with an effort to understand how it might start. When
strategists in Washington or Moscow study the possible origins of nuclear war, they discuss “scenarios,” imagined sequences of future events that
could trigger the use of nuclear weaponry. Scenarios are, of course, speculative exercises. They often leave out the political developments that might lead to
the use of force in order to focus on military dangers. That nuclear war scenarios are even more speculative than most is something for which we can be
thankful, for it reflects humanity’s fortunate lack of experience with atomic warfare since 1945. But imaginary as they are, nuclear scenarios can
help identify problems not understood or dangers not yet prevented because they have not been foreseen.
Imagining nuclear death is good - it promotes survival - the alt is just a denial of the reality
that nuclear war is a threat
Lenz '90 Millicent Lenz, assistant professor of science and policy at SUNY, Nuclear Age Literature for Youth, 1990, pp. 9-10
A summary of Frank’s thought in “Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race” notes how all people
have difficulty grasping the
magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a basic obstacle to
eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional impact. Since Americans have escaped the
devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and “nuclear weapons poised for annihilation in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or
touched,” we find it easy to imagine ourselves immune to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither
Victims nor Executioners of the inability of most people really to imagine other people’s death (he might have added “or their own”). Commenting on Camus,
David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this distancing from death’s reality is yet another aspect of our insulation from
life’s most basic realities. “We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are
killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding.” If we are to heed Camus’s call to refuse to be
either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of the death camps,
we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here, of course, that the literature of nuclear
holocaust can play a significant role. Without either firsthand experience or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence
of death machines and their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because “letting [the instruments of
destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions.” In most life-threatening situations, an organism’s
adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically, adapting ourselves to nuclear fear is counterproductive. We only seal our
doom more certainly. The repressed fear, moreover, takes a psychic toll.
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AFF - Technostrategic Discourse Good
Discussion of technical nuclear strategy is inevitable - their attempts to silence nuclear
discourse doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it invisible - this prevents critical response
1992, p. 9-10
Both Derrida’s insight and Schwenger’s anecdote invite the opening of a whole realm of oppositional activity, of which only a few examples now exist. The
premise of this genre (“speaking unspeakables”), as Derrida claims, may have been best realized before the nuclear era, in the literary texts of Mallarmé, Kafka,
or Joyce. But there have been contemporary attempts that nuclear criticism could address.26 One could imagine a comparison, for example, of two highly
publicized television films of the Reagan era, “The Day After” and the right-wing response to it, “Amer¬ika.” The level and ferocity of the response suggest that
“The Day After” broke a taboo. “Amerika” charges weakness, appeasement, and even col¬laboration, but these charges so completely miss their target that we
search for a better interpretation. Perhaps “The Day After” transgressed in a special way, and the only available way of responding was the arcane code of
anticommunism. The actual taboo it broke, it broke by speaking at all. At the same time, the activity of finding new ways to read (literary or cinematic)
texts about nukes must relate to the broader project of empowering responses if such activity is to fit within the antinuclear schema I
am discussing. Leaping over hypothetical psychological diagnoses to speak politically, such a development is not so hard to imagine. “Speaking the
unspeakable” has never been a happy entry into activism. Nuclear opponents have adopted any number of rhetorical strategies for overcoming this obstacle.
They argue that this “unspeakability” denotes an importance so huge that we must dissolve the reticence and disgust that is our “first reaction.” Or, alternatively,
they dissolve their political position into a therapeutic one, implying that the contemporary citizen would be healthier and less conflicted if she would admit and
confront the nuclear demon. In either case, the political use of unspeakability produces a paradoxical stance at odds with the naturalism of the survivalist,
species-interest position. This unacknowledged (unacknowledgeable) taste for paradox goes even a step further. Having bound themselves in multiple, endlessly
and effortlessly proliferating dilemmas, nuclear opponents then announce that it is their goal to impose the condition of “unspeakability” on
nuclear managers. The solution to the paradox of nuclear strategy is to silence strategists, such as Caspar Weinberger, who
dare to speak of limited nuclear war. This enforced silence has long since ceased to be uncomfortable for nuclear managers, who now clearly
understand that their control will proceed more satisfactorily when it is invisible. Opponents, then, have undertaken the
odd project of enforcing unspeakability, on the one hand, while also seeking to make nukes visible, thus making them controversial—a topic of
conversation.27 Such strategies have a validity, as I will discuss in a later chapter, but it is not necessarily the validity the opponents promote. Just making
the artifacts of nuclearism visible isn’t enough; they don’t speak for themselves. These artifacts—whether warheads or power plants
—surely offer little help out of the paradox of unspeakability that both veils and unveils them, and all the while also seems to expect a solution. Finding nukes not
only “speakable” but “fabulously textual,” nuclear criticism can respond to this odd political situation in part because many more strategic approaches
become possible once we move the response to paradox out of an ‘‘unspeakable discourse’’ and into a textual or literary context.
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AFF - A2: Technostrategic Discourse Bad
Attempts to silence technostrategic discourse deploys a method of "not speaking" that
reaffirms status quo nuclearism
1992, p. 11-12
When nuclear critics begin breaking the hold of this (inverted) injunction not to speak, we may begin to suspect that at least some
antinuclear approaches may have served the interests of contemporary, disciplinary power. When antinuclear
activists issued their calls to action, something was always amiss; their claims announced importance when no such
announcement was needed, given our obsession with nukes. The meaning of this "surplus denotation" should always
have been obvious; "not speaking" has conveniently covered the movement of control. It has directly served nuclear
managers whose discourse is so precarious, despite its importance and their evident confidence in it, that it cannot tolerate
discussion. In other words, the reconstruction has been initiated too soon, before the terms of debate were quite understood. Survival
worked poorly as a basis for reconstruction; something else —even closer to meaning, expression, and politics —had been at stake all along.
Having deeded control of the nuke to managers and technocrats, who assured us that their approach was structurally capable of dealing
with complexity, speed, and radical uncertainty, we discover —at the end of their line—that it was always their control that was at stake.
Politics reentered the scene at the unlikely hands of transitional figures like Reagan and Gorbachev, and the negotiability of the nuclear age almost instantly
became obvious to everyone.
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AFF - Cede the Political
Working within status quo political institutions is key to challenge nuclearism - privatizing
critique cedes the political sphere
Kovel '84 Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, 1984, pp. 164-166
The fact that history cannot be transcended except by means of the long view implies that there has been enough history for the long view to be taken. One
of
the peculiar features of the nuclear age, however, is that it threatens to snuff history out all at once. For example, once the U.S.
proves how technologic ally superior it is to the USSR by installing Pershing II missiles that can hit their target with an accuracy of 25 meters, after a six-minute
flight from their launching pad in Germany, then the latter, with its inferior computer, and frightful defensiveness, will probably resort to a “launch on warning”
strategy—an ambience that will quite probably ensure that history comes to an abrupt end. It is scenarios such as this which give antinuclear politics
a flavor all its own. We have already asserted that survival cannot in itself be more than a technocratic motivation for antinuclear politics, and that only a
a politics which would dignify life requires live
radical assault on the roots of the nuclear order will suffice. Now we face the contradiction that
people and intact institutions for its pursuit. We cannot build for a better world once the missiles are launched. They
must be stopped in their tracks. To do this, however, requires working with, if not within, established channels of change. And the blunt
fact is that people are not generally prepared at present to undertake a nonviolent antitechnocratic politics. Certainly, the contagion of nonviolence cannot be
taken for granted, and can be offset from many angels. Indeed, what strikes one even now, well into the surge of the peace movement, is the fragility of public
sentiment. For example, here is an episode form a campaign of exemplary nonviolence and imagination, the Women’s Peace Camp movement of Great Britain.
By campaigning next to missile installations, these women bear witness to nuclear atrocities. However, while they themselves are greatly strengthened through
their actions, “It is not clear,” says the New York Times (admittedly no friend of radical popular movements) of 26 August 1982, How much effect the camp have
had, even on nearby communities. Ms. Ax [one of the participants] conceded for example that her group had “some bad local reaction” when it laid 100,000
stones on the Newbury War Memorial on the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Sentiment in the town, some of her friends said,
had been turned away from them by the action of American military officials in making available to townspeople some facilities on the base, including a laundry, a
bowling alley and a discotheque. In other words, it is not very hard for the state to turn up the screws of nuclear terror, especially
considering its tremendous degree of control over institutions of popular culture. No criticism of this particular action is implied. But, whatever the long-range
implications for the nonviolent struggle, it would be foolish self-indulgence to ignore the many barriers it faces right now – and to forget that we may not have a
very long-range future before us. Nor is it very good nonviolent politics to privatize protest. This makes the overcoming of
fear a psychotherapeutic instead of a political act. Ultimately it fails in transcending Otherness, but only transfers this quality to one’s fellow
citizens who are not getting the point. And if it fails to gain enough time to develop the radical implications of its views, then nonviolent, antitechnocratic politics
has failed once and for all.
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AFF - A2: Discourse
Policy analysis should precede discourse – that's the most effective way to challenge power
Taft-Kaufman ‘95 Jill Taft-Kaufman, Speech prof @ CMU, 1995, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, “Other Ways”, p pq
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of
the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible
concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk
of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions
that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on
new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that
depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip
service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic
manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as
little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness:
phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed
histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the
postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against
the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and,
therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies : I can
think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only
recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are
appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what
else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive
is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or
symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on
the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides
the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that
create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized
groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez
(1992) states that "the
starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present
existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to
realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power
and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete
circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse
do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an
acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism,
homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are
no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and
homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and
attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how
power works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.
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AFF - A2: Species Consciousness Alt
Their focus on survival reaffirms the same metaphysical violence of nuclearism - the drive
towards an endgame of "peace" and "truth" necessitates apparatuses like the nuclear
machine to complete this universality, turning the K
1992, p. 3
Perhaps the central political metaphor of antinuclearists involves the appeal to survival of the human species as a principle
that can guide social and political response. But after Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth presented that case, the narrowness of this appeal began to draw
criticism. As Robert Jay Lifton has noted, the emergence of neo-Nazi survivalists is not without consequence for nuclear
opponents who have used the survival language so extensively themselves.3 Schell broadened his metaphors in The Abolition,4 and
nuclear opponents in general have tried to define survival in a way that is not individualist. Nonetheless, recent essays by political theorist George Kateb
bring even that modified project into question, finding within the "survival" position an indefensible replacement totality.5
Kateb's critique focuses on the political metaphysics implied by the survival position. To turn "existence" into a principle that could inform
action is to ignore many other philosophical commitments made in this century. The metaphysical privileging of existence
as key to a great and total meaning (that might motivate political action in a classically liberal framework) is unavailable "in an age when the
death of God has been announced with adequate plausibility." 6 Existence does not have systemic attributes
amenable to univocal judgments. At least some of us cannot accept the validity of revelation, or play on ourselves the Kantian trick of regarding
existence as if it were the designed work of a personal God, or presume to call it good, and bless it as if it were the existence we would have created if we had
the power, and think that it therefore deserves to exist and is justifiable just as it is. No: these argumentative moves are bad moves; they are transparent tricks.7
Kateb wants to articulate a defensible "attachment to existence" without relying on "any kind of totality." Existence cannot be justified by any
"internal" or human standard developed independently of a supposed divine authentication. That is to say, attachment
cannot be cultivated by way of a theology . . . or by way of a believable reconciliation to the facts of wickedness, suffering, waste, cruelty,
obscenity, and death. The universe . . . is without sponsorship; and existence on earth fails every test that is strenuously pressed. . . . What is needed is
precisely a mode that is content not to make the world —human and natural existence on earth —into a story, a picture, an order or a
pattern . . . that is, into a self-adequate totality or into a necessary part of a transcendent totality.8
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Impact: Hipsters
Nuclearism causes hipsters, seriously. Dislocation between fluid personal identity and
external image overload traps us in a drive to find the "next big thing," just so we can say we
don't care about the last one.
Finally, this summary of Lifton should take note of some of the psychic traits associated with nuclearism, the new totalism. Lifton sees two major categories of
these consequences: "Dislocation creates a special kind of uneasy duality around symbolization: a general sense of
numbing, devitalization, and absence of larger meaning on the one hand; and on the other, a form of image-release, an explosion
of symbolizing forays in the struggle to overcome collective deadness and reassert larger connection."55 To take the latter
one first, the "image-release" and flood of "symbolizing forays" characterize what Lifton labels as the Protean self of the modern age. Like the figure in ancient
mythology who changed shape at will, so the self nowadays seems embarked on an endless series of experiments in seeking
identity. Belief systems, careers, marriage partners, or lifestyles often are switched with bewildering ease. Fads come and go, discordant ideas may be held
simultaneously, or ever new personal experiences sought in unending quests for rebirth. Because one's outer, public world is no longer
coordinated with one's inner, symbolic world, a sense of absurdity prevails-and the best defense mechanism
becomes a tone of mockery affected towards every experience.56 It seems that ony old, stable societies are able to breed durable
personal identities in their members. But we moderns find ourselves overwhelmed by the nuclear threat, the cultural dislocation
of our symbols, and the flood of unrelated fragments of imagery from our mass communications. No wonder a person's role
or identity may change as abruptly as turning the channel switch on one's TV set!
65

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Many of the foreign

Noam Chomsky (1 982) has suggested that the

Species awareness means awareness of human choice: “This

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