Yes/No War
no war
counterforcing
counter-forcing solves escalation of wars
Mueller 09 – Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio
State University (John, “Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda” p. 8, Google
Books)
To begin to approach a condition that can credibly justify applying such extreme characterizations as societal annihilation, a full-out attack with hundreds, probably
Even in such extreme cases, the area actually devastated by the bombs' blast
and thermal pulse effective would be limited: 2,000 1-MT explosions with a destructive radius of 5 miles each would directly demolish
less than 5 percent of the territory of the United States, for example. Obviously, if major population centers were targeted, this sort
of attack could inflict massive casualties. Back in cold war days, when such devastating events sometimes seemed uncomfortably likely, a number of studies
were conducted to estimate the consequences of massive thermonuclear attacks. One of the most prominent of
these considered several probabilities. The most likely scenario--one that could be perhaps considered at least to begin to approach the rational--was
a "counterforce" strike in which well over 1,000 thermonuclear weapons would be targeted at America's ballistic missile silos,
strategic airfields, and nuclear submarine bases in an effort to destroy the country’s strategic ability to retaliate. Since
the attack would not directly target population centers, most of the ensuing deaths would be from radioactive
fallout, and the study estimates that from 2 to 20 million, depending mostly on wind, weather, and sheltering, would perish during
thousands, of thermonuclear bombs would be required.
the first month.15
deterrence
nuclear deterrence and unidirectional evolutionary trends check the impact
Tepperman 09 — Jonathan Tepperman, Deputy Editor of Newsweek, Member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, now Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, holds a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University,
an M.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University, and an LL.M. in International Law from New York
University, 2009 (“Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” The Daily Beast, August 28th, Available
Online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/08/28/why-obama-should-learn-to-love-thebomb.print.html, Accessed 01-27-2012)
A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more
dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists,
that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about
nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely
to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more important measures the U.S. government
can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic
and possibly undesirable. The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations.
First, nuclear
weapons have not been used since 1945 . Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear,
war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is,
especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at
UC Berkeley puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period,
there has not been any war among nuclear states." To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way—you need to start
by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to
do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it
wants at an acceptable price. Not
even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win. The
problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the
other side—and millions of innocents pay the price. Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war
obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to
ashes with the push of a button—and everybody knows it—the basic math shifts. Even the craziest
tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth
the effort . As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?" Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and
mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually
unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have
avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin America. But these never matched the
furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold
War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the nuclear
powers have scrupulously avoided direct combat,
and there's very good reason to think they always will. There have been some near misses, but a
close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuring—because in each instance, very different
leaders all came to the same safe conclusion. Take the mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13
days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon
stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that
they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war,
and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time." The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed
enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and
Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction
didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought
another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flareup, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an
Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly
similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in
each country did what they had to do to avoid it. Nuclear pessimists—and there are many—insist that even if this pattern has held in the past,
it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be
mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East
scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking
goes—and there's no deterring rogues. But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look
that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957,
Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died … the whole world
would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorism—but so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael
Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the
deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens. Yet when
push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear
suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen . For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical
regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war, has done deals with both
Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny,
impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it
reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These
countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they have a death
wish.
econ
No scenario for great power war – laundry list
Deudney and Ikenberry, 09– Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins AND Albert G. Milbank
Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University (Jan/Feb, 2009, Daniel Deudney
and John Ikenberry, “The Myth of the Autocratic Revival: Why Liberal Democracy Will Prevail,” Foreign
Affairs, NG)
This bleak outlook is based on an exaggeration of recent developments and ignores powerful countervailing factors and forces. Indeed, contrary to what the
revivalists describe, the
most striking features of the contemporary international landscape are the
intensification of economic globalization, thickening institutions, and shared problems of
interdependence. The overall structure of the international system today is quite unlike that of the nineteenth
century. Compared to older orders, the contemporary liberal-centered international order provides
a set of constraints and opportunities-of pushes and pulls-that reduce the likelihood of severe
conflict while creating strong imperatives for cooperative problem solving. Those invoking the nineteenth
century as a model for the twenty-first also fail to acknowledge the extent to which war as a path to conflict resolution and greatpower expansion has become largely obsolete. Most important, nuclear weapons have transformed
great-power war from a routine feature of international politics into an exercise in national suicide. With all of the
great powers possessing nuclear weapons and ample means to rapidly expand their deterrent forces, warfare among
these states has truly become an option of last resort. The prospect of such great losses has
instilled in the great powers a level of caution and restraint that effectively precludes major
revisionist efforts. Furthermore, the diffusion of small arms and the near universality of nationalism
have severely limited the ability of great powers to conquer and occupy territory inhabited by resisting
populations (as Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Iraq have demonstrated). Unlike during the days of empire building in the nineteenth century,
states today cannot translate great asymmetries of power into effective territorial control; at most, they
can hope for loose hegemonic relationships that require them to give something in return. Also unlike in the nineteenth century, today the density
of trade, investment, and production networks across international borders raises even more the
costs of war. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, to take one of the most plausible cases of a future
interstate war, would pose for the Chinese communist regime daunting economic costs, both
domestic and international. Taken together, these changes in the economy of violence mean that the
international system is far more primed for peace than the autocratic revivalists acknowledge.
miscalc
No miscalc or escalation—every crisis ever disproves and neither side would launch
Quinlan 9 (Michael, Former Permanent Under-Sec. State – UK Ministry of Defense, “Thinking about
Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects”, p. 63-69) *we don’t endorse gendered language
Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable momentum in a developing
exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what
the situation of the decisionmakers would really be. Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at
what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to call a halt. Both, given the
capacity for evasion or concealment which modem delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in reserve
significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted
earlier, whether newer nuclear-weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any substantial state with advanced technological
capabilities, and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in the development of forces.) As a result, neither
side can have any
predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on
copiously launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted
rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more dispassionate level.
Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that aggression could hope to seize.
A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon
destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a judgement that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use
it. If the attacked possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressor's own first use, this judgement
would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial possibility of the aggressor leaders'
concluding that their initial judgement had been mistaken—that the risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had
been seeking, and that for their own country's survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of NATO was
directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgement and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former aim
had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible
scenarios, that the chance of its working must be negligible. An
aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if nuclear war
developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply
hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes
them the less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask what is the alternative—it can only be surrender. But a more positive and hopeful answer lies in the fact
that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context. The context which concerned NATO during the cold war, for
example, was one of defending vital interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged, or would be less engaged. Certainty is
not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon
statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in coldwar Europe. If vital interests have been defined in a way that is dear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary, a credible basis
has been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that whatever might be indicated by theoretical
discussion of political will and interests, the military environment of nuclear warfare—particularly difficulties of communication and control—would drive escalation
with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as inevitably .so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if
the history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle 'When in doubt, lash out', the nuclear
revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is `If this goes on to the end, we are all ruined'.
Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose
them permanently incapable of framing arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military
commanders no widespread delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction. Many types of
weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as PALs incorporated to reinforce organizational ones.
There were multiple communication and control systems for passing information, orders, and
prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level of strategic exchange—which was only one of many
possible levels of conflict— an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why he necessarily should so judge. Even
then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general fail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use.
That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the arrangements which 1 a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in
some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous
inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption. The
likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never
zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so
calculable, it would not be uniquely fixed—it would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to
widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be
recognized. The first is that the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between nuclear-capable powers,
whoever may have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically
available to him options for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as
absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it
has a nuclear armoury of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The
exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if conflict does break out, for managing it, to a tolerable outcome--the only route, indeed, intermediate between
surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working out of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in deterring
potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit without
triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making the bigger, and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation
upon the aggressor volib wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. (The customary shorthand for this desirable posture used to be 'escalation
dominance'.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or
absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no
automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring
the safety
and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not
published, but such direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state,
with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics have nevertheless
from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether
war-prevention structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event
involving an unintended nuclear explosion—a technical disaster at a storage site, for example, Dr the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a
live nuclear warhead. The second is that of some event—perhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of
radar signals or computer systems—initiating a sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended.
No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an opposite extreme it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from
distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having happened for over sixty years). But
human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and weigh their
reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life. There
have certainly been, across the decades since 1945,
many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or
accidentally dropping the weapons they carried ( in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness
arrangements----it no longer is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic material. None
however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive
activity and deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts of this long experience would however be that the probability of
any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely low. It might be further noted that the mechanisms
needed to set off such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in a large number of ways the past sixty
years have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both the design and the handling
of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but
some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized detonation
have included early decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less developed, and
weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as substantial periods in which weapon
numbers were larger, deployments more widespread and diverse, movements more frequent, and
several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of
nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert sequences
for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by, indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In
none of these instances, it is
accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear launch--extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival
and more logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty years of experience presents
itself once more: that the probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards mistaken launch
is remote. Precisely because any nuclear-weapon possessor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch,
release sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly interposed as well as capping
the sequences. To convey that because a first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like
asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely offers any
ready example of major war started by accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-ofmagnitude increase in caution. It was occasionally conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized
launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a potential adversary. No such launch is known to have occurred
in over sixty years. The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did happen, the further hypothesis of it
initiating a general nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decisionmakers as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science
fiction.
trends
empirics and longitudinal trends – the world is entering a new era of great power
peace
Fettweis, 10 – Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs in the National Security Decision Making
Department at the U.S. Naval War College, holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Comparative
Politics from the University of Maryland-College Park, October 27, 2010 (Christopher J., Dangerous
Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace, Georgetown University Press, ISBN 978-158901-710-8, Chapter 4: Evaluating the Crystal Balls, p. 83-85)
The obsolescence-of-major-war vision of the future differs most drastically from all the others, including the neorealist, in its expectations of the future of
conflict in the international system. If
the post– Cold War world conformed to neorealist and other pessimistic
predictions, warfare ought to continue to be present at all levels of the system, appearing with
increasing regularity once the stabilizing influence of bipolarity was removed. If the liberal-constructivist vision is
correct, then the world ought to have seen not only no major wars, but also a decrease in the
volume and intensity of all kinds of conflict in every region as well. The evidence supports the
latter. Major wars tend to be rather memorable, so there is little need to demonstrate that there has been no such
conflict since the end of the Cold War. But the data seem to support the “trickledown” theory of
stability as well. Empirical analyses of warfare have consistently shown that the number of all
types of wars—interstate, civil, ethnic, revolutionary, and so forth— declined throughout the 1990s
and into the new century, after a brief surge of postcolonial conflicts in the first few years of that decade. 2 Overall levels of conflict tell only
part of the story, however. Many other aspects of international behavior, including some that might be
considered secondary effects of warfare, are on the decline as well. Some of the more important, if perhaps under
reported, aggregate global trends include the following: Ethnic conflict. Ethnonational wars for
independence have declined to their lowest level since 1960, the first year for which we have data. 3
Repression and political discrimination against ethnic minorities. The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland has
tracked a decline in the number of minority groups around the world that experience discrimination at the
hands of states, from seventy-five in 1991 to forty-one in 2003. 4 War termination versus outbreak. War termination
settlements have proven to be more stable over time, and the number of new conflicts is lower than
ever before . 5 Magnitude of conflict/battle deaths. The average number of battle deaths per conflict per year has
been steadily declining. 6 The risk for the average person of dying in battle has been plummeting
since World War II— and rather drastically so since the end of the Cold War. 7 Genocide. Since war is usually a necessary
condition for genocide, 8 perhaps it should be unsurprising that the incidence of genocide and other mass slaughters
declined by 90 percent between 1989 and 2005, memorable tragedies notwithstanding. 9 Coups. Armed overthrow
of government is becoming increasingly rare, even as the number of national governments is expanding along with the number of
states. 10 Would be coup plotters no longer garner the kind of automatic outside support that they
could have expected during the Cold War, or at virtually any time of great power tension. Third party
intervention. Those conflicts that do persist have less support from outside actors, just as the constructivists expected.
When the great powers have intervened in local conflicts, it has usually been in the attempt to bring a conflict to an end or, in the case of Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait, to punish aggression. 11 Human rights abuses. Though not completely gone, the
number of large scale abuses of human
rights is also declining. Overall, there has been a clear, if uneven, decrease in what the Human Security Centre calls “onesided violence against civilians” since 1989. 12 Global military spending. World military spending declined by
one third in the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 13 Today that spending is less than 2.5
percent of global GDP, which is about two-thirds of what it was during the Cold War. Terrorist attacks. In
perhaps the most counterintuitive trend, the number of worldwide terrorist incidents is far smaller than it was during the Cold War. If Iraq and South Asia
were to be removed from the data, a clear, steady downward trend would become apparent. There were 300 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1991, for
instance, and 58 in 2005. 14 International
conflict and crises have steadily declined in number and intensity
since the end of the Cold War. By virtually all measures, the world is a far more peaceful place than
it has been at any time in recorded history. Taken together, these trends seem to suggest that the rules by which international
politics are run may indeed be changing.
Yes War
1NC
War is possible--geopolitics
Ferguson 8 [Niall – Prof History @ Harvard. Hoover Digest, No 1 Winter 2008]
The risk of a major geopolitical crisis in 2007 is certainly lower than it was in 1914. Yet it is not so low as to lie
altogether beyond the realm of probability. The escalation of violence in the Middle East as Iraq
disintegrates and Iran presses on with its nuclear program is close to being a certainty, as are the
growing insecurity of Israel and the impossibility of any meaningful U.S. exit from the region . All may
be harmonious between the United States and China today, yet the potential for tension over trade
and exchange rates has unquestionably increased since the Democrats gained control of Congress.
Nor should we forget about security flashpoints such as the independence of Taiwan, the threat of
North Korea, and the nonnuclear status of Japan. To consign political risk to the realm of uncertainty
seems almost as rash today as it was in the years leading up the First World War . Anglo-German economic
commercial ties reached a peak in 1914, but geopolitics trumped economics. It often does.
Great power wars are possible—our DA proves its likely
Kagan 99 [Donald. Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics at Yale University “History Is Full Of
Surprises,” Survival, Volume 41, Number 2, Summer, p. 141]
Now having said all this, even if all these men were wrong, this does not mean that Michael Mandelbaum cannot be right. But it should inspire
some degree of modesty and caution. In fact Mandelbaum
is very cautious in the language that he uses. Major war
is not necessarily finished, he concedes. It's not dead , it's obsolete. This is a charming term that
seems to say more than it does, because that allows Mandelbaum to draw back from the more total
claims later on. A major war is unlikely but not unthinkable, which is to say he thinks it can happen. It
is obsolete, he writes, in the sense that it is no longer fashionable. To pick up the metaphor is to see
some of its limitations as well as its charm. Is war really a matter of fashion? And even if it is, don't we
have to face the fact that there are some people who choose to be unfashionable, and then there are
other people who have never heard of fashion in the first place? China and Russia are two cases to
which the writer points. He identifies the Taiwan Straits and the Russo-Ukrainian border as places
where wars may well break out, should they erupt anywhere. They are the 'potential Sarajevos of the
twenty-first century'. He is right. And, of course, it is this concession, however genuinely and
generously and modestly expressed, that gives away the game . Since there are at least two places
where major wars between great powers might well break out even today – and two are quite
enough – it seems to me that his entire thesis is undermined.
Breaking the nuclear taboo ensures escalation
Alagappa 9 [Muthiah. The Long Shadow, 2009, Pg 480-1]
Nuclear weapons cast a long shadow that informs in fundamental ways the strategic policies and
behavior of major powers (all but one of which possess nuclear weapons), their allies, and those states facing
existential threats. They induce caution and set boundaries to the strategic interaction of nuclear weapon states and
condition the role and use of force in their interactions. The danger of escalation limits military options in
a crisis between nuclear weapon states and shapes the purpose and manner in which military force is used. Although
relevant only in a small number of situations, these include the most serious regional conflicts that
could escalate to large-scale war. Nuclear weapons help prevent the outbreak of hostilities, keep
hostilities limited when they do break out, and prevent their escalation to major wars. Nuclear
weapons enable weaker powers to deter stronger adversaries and help ameliorate the effects of imbalance in
conventional military capability. By providing insurance to cope with unanticipated contingencies, they reduce
immediate anxieties over military imbalances and vulnerabilities. Nuclear weapons enable major powers to take a
long view of the strategic environment, set a moderate pace for their force development, and focus on other national
priorities, including mutually beneficial interaction with other nuclear weapon states. Although nuclear
weapons by themselves do not confer major power status, they are an important ingredient of power
for countries that conduct themselves in a responsible manner and are experiencing rapid growth in other dimensions
of power.
The magnitude of our impact means it should come first
Krieger 9 [David. President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. “Still Loving the Bomb after All These
Years” www.wagingpeace.org September 2009]
Jonathan Tepperman’s article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” provides
a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons “may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous….” Rather, in
Tepperman’s world, “The bomb may actually make us safer.” Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a
University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as “the leading ‘nuclear optimist.’” Waltz
expresses his optimism in this way: “We’ve now had 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent
Actually, there were a number of proxy
wars between nuclear weapons states, such as those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and some
near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltz’s logic is akin to observing a man falling
that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.”
from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64 floors without anything bad
happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that others should try it. Dangerous
logic !
Tepperman builds upon Waltz’s logic, and concludes “that all states are rational,” even though their leaders may have a lot of bad
qualities, including being “stupid, petty, venal, even evil….” He asks us to trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear
retaliation, because these weapons make “the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable.” Actually, he
is asking us to do
more than trust in the rationality of leaders; he is asking us to gamble the future on this proposition .
“The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling,” Tepperman argues, “it’s led to what’s known as the nuclear
peace….” But if this is a peace worthy of the name, which it isn’t, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization.
One
irrational leader with control over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a
global Hiroshima.
Tepperman celebrates “the iron logic of deterrence,” but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted in “iron
logic.” It is a theory based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must
communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the other
The longer that nuclear weapons
are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A with
impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the
incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and
countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out.
therefore precarious .
Most of the countries in the world reject the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that the
spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to prevent
the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in which some states possess
nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US,
Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted
this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of
nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even
unwise. If some additional states, including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldn’t be so bad “given the way that bombs
tend to mellow behavior.” Those who oppose Tepperman’s favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as “nuclear pessimists.”
These would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see nuclear weapons as
presenting an urgent danger to our security, our species and our future. Tepperman finds that when
viewed from his “nuclear optimist” perspective, “nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening.” “Nuclear peace,” he tells us,
“rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in
exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad – conventional war – won’t happen.” But
the “extremely bad” thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species . Yes, that would be serious.
He also doesn’t make the case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional
war would increase dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have
prevented wars, or would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear
war. As an ultimate celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a “survivable
second strike option.” Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security.
Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other nuclear
Do we really want
to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman?
weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack.
Nuclear deterrence fails– four reasons
Lieber & Press, 13 – Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, “Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation”, PASCC, Proquest, NG)
Unfortunately, the increasingly influential perspective in Washington and the broader analytical community rests on a weak understanding of the role that nuclear
weapons played during the Cold War, and it therefore overlooks the strategic continuities between the Cold War and the present. When one examines why NATO
once relied so heavily on nuclear weapons, the continuities between past and present become clear, and the policies of those countries that are “hold outs” against
the global campaign for nuclear arms reductions begin to make sense. In fact, nuclear deterrence will continue to be central to the conduct of international politics,
now and long into the future. Moreover, the
likelihood of intentional nuclear attacks - even against the United States - is
far higher than most scholars and analysts realize. In short, nuclear deterrence is likely to be quite difficult in the foreseeable future.
This report argues that the U.S. policy community has given too little attention to the problem of intra-war nuclear deterrence. Specifically, relatively weak but
nuclear-armed countries - including potential adversaries of the United States - will face intense pressures during conventional wars to use nuclear weapons
coercively to create a stalemate and avoid a calamitous military defeat. The United States has little experience at deterring intra-war nuclear escalation. It has
fought conventional wars against states with nuclear-armed allies, but never directly against a nuclear-armed adversary. That fact may soon change. Given the
United States’ global military commitments and the spread of nuclear weapons to potential U.S. adversaries, the United States could soon find itself engaged in
conventional operations against a regional nuclear-armed adversary. Regional
adversaries cannot match U.S. conventional
military power, and conventional defeat is often extraordinarily costly for adversary leaders and their regimes. Therefore,
regional adversaries face powerful incentives to employ nuclear weapons coercively to stalemate the
United States before suffering major battlefield defeats and the attendant catastrophic consequences.
This report makes four principal arguments: First, nuclear weapons are just as salient today as they were in the past.
During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were enormously valuable because one set of countries (members of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO) lacked the conventional military power to defend itself from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Nuclear weapons
allowed the “weak” side to deter the “strong” one. And had war erupted, nuclear
weapons would have given the weak side its
best hope of fighting the strong side to a stalemate. The Cold War is over, but the underlying conditions that
made nuclear weapons vital then still exist today. All that has changed are the seats at the table. In the
past the United States and its allies felt weak, and not surprisingly they tightly gripped their nuclear weapons. Today, most of those countries feel strong, and - not
surprisingly - nuclear weapons suddenly seem anachronistic to them. But the end of the Cold War did not make every country safe; in fact, many of America’s
potential adversaries face the same overarching problem today that NATO faced during the Cold War: how to deter and if necessary stalemate an adversary that
possesses overwhelming conventional military power. The platitude that nuclear weapons are not well suited to the security threats of the 21st century is incorrect;
it is more accurate to say that they are not well suited to the security problems that confront the United States in the 21st century. But
for those who
fear U.S. military might - or who fear other strong states - nuclear weapons are as helpful as they were
for NATO during the Cold War. Second, weak states face powerful incentives to use nuclear weapons if
they find themselves in a conventional war against a much stronger adversary. Scholars and policy analysts
who study deterrence often claim that no rational leader would use nuclear weapons against a country that
could respond in kind - let alone a country that could respond with far greater force. But this is incorrect. Analysts who make this claim
conflate the logic of peacetime deterrence with the logic of war. Leaders facing the prospect of
imminent defeat have compelling reasons to escalate coercively - with nuclear weapons - to bring
about a ceasefire. Coercive nuclear escalation by the weaker side forces the stronger side to choose among several options - all of which are grim. It is
because all of those options are unattractive that an adversary will be tempted to escalate in the first
place. Viewed through this lens, Pakistan may have powerful, rational reasons to use nuclear weapons if it is losing a conventional war to India; North Korea has
powerful reasons to use nuclear weapons coercively, rather than permit its enemies to prevail in a war. And Chinese leaders would face some of these same
incentives if their armed forces were suffering a humiliating defeat in a war in maritime East Asia. In short,
an escalatory strategy is coldblooded, but not far-fetched - indeed, it was NATO’s policy for nearly thirty years. Third, this report shows that
the logic of coercive nuclear escalation is well understood by countries around the world. Coercive
nuclear escalation is not a theoretical possibility; it is reflected in the defense plans and nuclear
employment doctrines of several nuclear-armed states. We identify the conditions under which states would be most likely to
build defense plans around doctrines of coercive nuclear escalation; we then sort nuclear-armed countries according to those conditions; finally, we show that
those states that should have adopted coercive nuclear doctrines (according to our argument) have actually done so. Fourth, this
report identifies
global “hotspots” where plausible conventional conflicts are most likely to trigger dangerous escalatory
dynamics. We posit a set of exacerbating conditions - including the prospect of conquest, regime change,
and the escalatory nature of certain military operations - which make escalation during conventional
war more likely, and then we use those conditions to distinguish the hotspots which pose high risks of escalation from those that pose lower levels of risk.
We find that most of the world’s most dangerous conflicts - i.e., those that create the greatest incentives for combatants to use nuclear
weapons -involve the United States: including war on the Korean Peninsula, conflicts in maritime East Asia, and (in the future) war in the Strait of
Hormuz. To be sure, an India-Pakistan conflict would trigger dangerous escalatory dynamics, but a South Asian conflict - which has appropriately attracted
considerable attention because of the grave risks of escalation - appears no more dangerous (and, in fact, may be less combustible) than several quite plausible
future U.S. wars . Why do so many other analysts reach a different conclusion about the likelihood of deliberate nuclear escalation? One possibility is that
scholars and other analysts typically think about peacetime nuclear deterrence (preventing a surprise nuclear
attack), rather than wartime deterrence (deterring nuclear escalation during conventional wars), the exception being the extensive literature on
escalation risks during an India-Pakistan war. But surprisingly, even scholars who understand the difficulty of deterring escalation during a conventional war when
applied to South Asian security dynamics, argue elsewhere that rational leaders would never use nuclear weapons against the United States. But if analysts believe
that Pakistan (the weak) could use nuclear weapons to prevent conventional defeat (even though Pakistan cannot win a nuclear war), why would the same analysts
dismiss the possibility that North Korea, or in the future Iran, or possibly China, would use nuclear weapons in an escalatory fashion against a strong nemesis?
AT: Democracy
Democracy doesn’t solve
Taner 2 [Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of
Citizenship and Public Affairs; Research Associate at Syracuse University’s global Affairs Institute;
Editorial Assistant, International studies Review – (Binnur Ozkececi-Taner, “The Myth of Democratic
Peace Theory: Theoretical and Empirical Shortcomings of The ‘Democratic Peace Theory’,” Turkish
School of international Relations, Vol. 1.3,
http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume1/number3/binnurozkececi.htm]
The discussion above suggests that the most important drawback of the "democratic peace" theory is
the essentialization of the political regime as the only factor contributing to international peace and
war. The 'democratic peace' theory underemphasizes, and most often neglects, the importance of
other domestic factors such as political culture,(35) degree of development, socio-economic and
military considerations,(36) the role of interest-groups and other domestic constituencies,(37)
strategic culture(38) among others in decision-making. In other words, it is easily the case that the
"democratic peace theory" lacks sensitivity to context and decision-making process. Although one should not
dispute the fact that domestic political structure/regime type is an important component of any analysis of war and peace, this should be seen
as only one of domestic variables, not necessarily the variable. Devoid of an analysis that gives respect to a number of other factors, superficial
and sweeping generalizations will leave many details in decision-making unaccounted for. Consequently, although
"democratic
peace" theory should not be discarded entirely, current emphasis on the importance of "democracy"
in eliminating bloody conflicts in the world should not blind scholars and policy circles alike to the fact
that "democratic peace" is theoretically and empirically overdetermined
AT: MAD
MAD fails
Cimbala 7 [Stephen. Prof Poli Sci @ Penn State. “Nuclear Proliferation and Deterrence in Asia: The
View from Vladivostok” Military Studies, Vol 20. 2007, Ebsco//GBS-JV]
There is no “magic number” of nuclear-armed states that guarantees a first use of nuclear weapons in
the twenty-first century. States will not become irrational on account of the possession of nuclear weapons: indeed, there is
some experience during and after the Cold War to suggest that states might become more careful, rather than less.
Many variables intrude here: including the intensity of regional rivalries; ethno-national and religious feelings; and, most immediately pertinent
to our concerns, the pros and cons for deterrence and crisis stability of the forces themselves.
Nevertheless, the propensity of
heads of state for committing military follies should never be underestimated: especially by students of history
and political science. The “rationalities” of states are not of the black box variety. States’ world views and
decision making processes are the product of internal as much as external forces. A U.S. model of
deterrence rationality may fail drastically in the imminent circumstances of a regional crisis . The strategic
reach of Russian or American nuclear forces against lesser nuclear powers should not be overestimated. Iranians with scores to
settle against Israel, Chinese intent upon annexation of Taiwan, or North Koreans seeking to
intimidate Japan and South Korea, may not believe U.S. threats of preemption or retaliation. Russia’s policy of providing air
defense missiles to Iran, increasing the difficulty of Israeli or American preemptive air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, ironically invites
the erosion of Russia’s own deterrence perimeter once the Iranians are nuclear capable. U.S.
intelligence cannot be guaranteed
to provide timely and accurate warning of nuclear attack by regional revisionist actors against neighbors: or
others. U.S. intelligence has not infrequently been the victim of strategic or operational-tactical military surprise by non-Western opponents:
from Pearl Harbor to 9–11. Timely
and accurate intelligence is even less likely on the intentions or capabilities
of non-state actors, compared to states. Intelligence on the best of days can give likelihoods and maybes for policy makers to mull over.
One of the major risks of nuclear weapons spread in Asia is the possibility that states with first strike vulnerable
nuclear forces will “use them or lose them” on the basis of faulty indications and warning.
AT: Rationality
Rationality doesn’t check
Mozley 98 [Rob. Prof Physics – Stanford.The Politics and Technology of Nuclear Proliferation 1998. Pg
15]
Kenneth N. Waltz, who over a decade ago published The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, has been very influentia1. 10 In
that paper he concluded that general proliferation would create a more stable situation among nations. His only
qualification of this argument is the suggestion that the proliferation be gradual. His paper is comprehensive in its discussion of the dangers of
proliferation. However, through
his best-case analysis of these dangers, he reached the conclusion that more
proliferation was better. Waltz's paper ignores the limitations of a generalization based on the single example of the Cold War. He is
not bothered by the knowledge that each situation of conflict is different. He assumes that all national decisions are made
rationally and that nations actually carry out the wishes of their leaders. He does not allow for errors,
incompetence, or insubordination. In the case of nuclear war, this omission is particularly significant .
In a situation in which a national leader does not want to start a conventional war, and finds that
some of his directives are being ignored by the national bureaucracy, he will generally have time,
measured in weeks, to correct any national actions he did not intend. If he is trying to correct actions that lead to
nuclear war, he may have only a few minutes.
AT: No Retaliation
Retaliation is the policy of every nuclear state—it is certain in the world of one nuke
Lindberg 4 [Tod, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy
Review, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB585.pdf 2004]
This focus of attention is important. It reminds us that there is no sense in which the possession of a “deterrent” automatically deters. We must
inquire into the mind of the party we wish to deter in order to determine whether deterrence is working.12 But in another sense, the focus is
incomplete. Before we spend too much time on the mind of the party meant to be deterred, we should focus on the details of what’s going on
in the mind of the party trying to do the deterring. If a deterrent works better because it is more credible, then the exercise of proving it
credible to the party one wishes to deter begins with the effort to persuade oneself that it is credible. Credibility begins at home. So we ask
ourselves the following question: What
would we do if someone launched an all-out nuclear attack on us? Or,
what would we do in certain horrendous circumstances short of all-out nuclear attack? The answer we
proffer is that we would unleash fury in return, up to the limit case, the complete annihilation of our
enemy. And we do a number of things to demonstrate our intention, first of all to ourselves. We build
an arsenal of vast power. We ensure that the inevitable vulnerabilities of any given component of it
are offset by capabilities in other components. We have the “triad;” the ability to deliver strategic nuclear weapons by landbased missile, by long-range bomber, or by submarine-based missile. We develop weapons systems across a wide range of
potential utility, from short-range nuclear artillery shells to intermediate-range missiles to
multiwarhead long-range missiles. We have explosive power at our disposal in all magnitudes of which nuclear weapons are
capable, from small charges for the local battlefield to the behemoth city incinerators of Armageddon.13 We have sought and achieved greater
and greater precision in our targeting, enabling us to reduce the size of our warheads while still ensuring that the targets we are seeking will be
destroyed. And we have “hardened” our nuclear facilities as well as command-communications-control (C3) links to the national command
authority in order to withstand the worst an enemy offers and yet be able to strike back.14 This is not just a matter of hardware, of course.
There is an extensive body of military doctrine on how use the weapons effectively. War games
simulate every imaginable contingency to test these doctrines. The U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air
Force Base in Nebraska, one of nine unified commands world wide, has 2,500 personnel and coordinates the nuclear warfighting capability of
personnel and equipment ranging in location from the White House and the Pentagon to Minuteman missile silos in Wyoming, Montana, and
North Dakota, to strategic submarine bases in Georgia and Washington, to communications satellites miles overhead.15 The literature of
military affairs journals takes up warfighting questions at the unclassified level and the Pentagon is full of classified studies on the subject, from
the January 10, 2002, “Nuclear Posture Review” on down. Beyond the capacity to wage nuclear war in response to a nuclear or other attack,
the United
States approaches the subject with a certain élan as well. Consider the mythos that has
grown up around the “football,” the satchel containing the nuclear attack codes that is carried by a
military officer who shadows the president of the United States at all times in case of surprise attack. Or
consider further the psychological testing of military personnel who have nuclear warfighting
responsibilities. We do not want a madman in close proximity to these weapons. Neither do we want someone unwilling, in a pinch, to
unleash incineration when ordered. All of this is very real. There is no doubt that the United States could unleash allout nuclear war. One day the drill could turn out to be the real thing and the hardware, personnel, doctrine, and élan (“yes, sir, it is
necessary, lawful, and just to fire this missile”) could come together as planned. The worst-case scenario of planners’ nightmares could simply
be the worst case―global devastation. We have ensured that all of this is entirely possible. We
set out to persuade others about
what we would do. But the first order of business in doing so is to persuade ourselves. It is not
surprising that we were able to do so, nor is the fact that we have done so very illuminating. Whenever we found
something that was less than convincing in our nuclear weaponry or our doctrine, we tried to replace
it or improve upon it. The problem is that while the apparatus is real, in relation to the central question―what would the United States
do if attacked in certain ways?―it is only a simulacrum, an elaboration of a central contention that could never be proved by the apparatus
because the construction of the apparatus presupposes it, namely, that we would retaliate with everything we have.
AT: No Escalation
One nuke is all it takes
Betts 2k [Richard Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia,
“Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism,” The Coming
Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff p. 82]
Quite opposite reactions are imaginable. The shock might jar sluggish statesmen into taking the danger seriously, cutting through diplomatic
shock might prompt panic and
a rush to stock up on WMD, as the possibility of use underlines the need for deterrent capability, or
the effectiveness of such weapons as instruments of policy One seldom-noticed danger is that breakage of the
taboo could demystify the weapons and make them look more conventional than our post-Hiroshima images of
them. It helps to recall that in the 1930s, popular images of conventional strategic bombing were that it would be
apocalyptic, bringing belligerent countries to their knees quickly. The apocalyptic image was fed by the German bombing of Guernica, a
comparatively small city in Spain. When World War II came in Europe, both British and Germans initially refrained from
bombing attacks on cities. Once city bombing began and gathered steam, however, it proved to be far
less decisive than many had expected. British and German populations managed to adjust and absorb it. Over time,
however, the ferocity of Allied bombing of Germany and Japan did approach the apocalyptic levels originally envisioned. In
short, dire assumptions about the awesomeness of strategic bombing deterred its initiation, but once initiated did not
prevent gradual escalation to the devastating level originally envisioned. Nuclear weapon inventories of countries
and military red tape, and undertaking dramatic actions to push the genie back in the bottle. Or the
like India and Pakistan are likely to remain small in number and yield for some time. According to press reports, by some U.S. estimates the
yields of the 1998 tests were only a few kilotons. If the first weapon detonated in combat is a low-yield device in a large city with uneven terrain
and lots of reinforced concrete, it might only destroy a small part of the city A bomb that killed 10,000 to 20,000 people would be seen as a
stunning catastrophe, but there are now many parts of the world where that number would be less than 1 percent of a city’s population. The
disaster could seem surprisingly limited, since in the popular imagination (underwritten by the results in the small and flimsy
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), nuclear weapons mean ‘one bomb, one city” Awful destruction that yet seems surprisingly limited could
prompt revisionist reactions among lay elites in some countries about the meaning of nuclear ordnance.
AT: Interdependence
Interdependence doesn’t solve
Jervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, “Theories of War in an Era of
Leading Power Peace”, American Political Science Review 96:1–14]
There are four general arguments against the pacific influence of interdependence. First, it is hard to go from
the magnitude of economic flows to the costs that would be incurred if they were disrupted, and even
more difficult to estimate how much political impact these costs will have, which depends on the
other considerations at play and the political context. This means that we do not have a theory that tells us the
magnitude of the effect. Second, even the sign of the effect can be disputed: interdependence can increase
conflict as states gain bar- gaining leverage over each other, fear that others will exploit them, and
face additional sources of disputes (Barbieri 1996; Keohane 2000, 2001; Waltz 1970, 1979, Chap. 7). These effects might not arise
if states expect to remain at peace with each other, however. Third, it is clear that interdependence does not guarantee
peace. High levels of economic integration did not prevent World War I, and nations that were much
more unified than any security community have peacefully dissolved or fought civil wars. But this
does not mean that inter- dependence is not conducive to peace. Fourth, interdependence may be
more an effect than a cause, more the product than a generator of expectations of peace and
cooperation. Russett and Oneal (2001, 136) try to meet this objection by correlating the level of trade in one
year, not with peace in that year, but with peace in the following one. But this does not get to the heart of the
matter since trade the year be- fore could be a product of expectations of future good relations.
AT: International Organizations
Organizations fail
Jervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, “Theories of War in an Era of
Leading Power Peace”, American Political Science Review 96:1–14]
International Organizations. Even those who argue for the pacifying effect of common memberships
in international organizations aver that the magnitude of this effect is relatively slight, at least in the
short run (Russett and Oneal 2001, Chap. 5), and so my discussion is brief. The causal mechanisms are believed to be
several: enhanced information flows, greater ability to solve problems peacefully, an increased stake in
cooperative behavior linked to the risk of being ex- cluded from the organization if the state behaves badly, and possibly a heightened sense of
common identity (Keohane 1984; much of the literature is summarized by Martin and Simmons 1998). Harder to pin down but perhaps most
important are processes by which joint membership alters states' conceptions of their interest, leading them to see it not only as calling for
cooperative reciprocations, but also as extending over a longer time- horizon and including benefits to others (Jervis 1999, 2001; March and
Olsen 1998).
The obvious reasons to doubt the importance of shared institutional membership are that
the incentives do not seem great enough to tame strong conflicts of interest and that membership
may be endogenous to common interests and peaceful relations. States that expect war with each
other are less likely to join the same international organizations and political conflicts that are the
precursors to war may destroy the institutions or drive some members out, as Japan and Germany
withdrew from the League of Nations during the 1930s. Even with a strong correlation and reasonable
con- trol variables, the direction of causality is difficult to establish.
AT: International Law
ILaw fails
Goldsmith and Posner 5 [American enterprise inst, book review, inst for public policy research
(“The Limits of International Law” Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner,
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/sugimoto/law.pdf]
As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law was as high as it had ever been—as high as it was at the
end of World War I and World War II, for example. We can conveniently use 9/11 as the date on which this optimism
ended, but there were undercurrents of pessimism even earlier. The UN played a relatively minor role in
bringing the conflicts in the Balkans to the end. Members of the Security Council could not agree on the use of force in
Kosovo, and the NATO intervention was thus a violation of international law. The various international criminal tribunals turned
out to be cumbersome and expensive institutions, they brought relatively few people to justice, and they
stirred up the ethnic tensions they were meant to quell. Aggressive international trade integration produced a violent backlash in
many countries. Treaty mechanisms seemed too weak to solve the most serious global problems , including
environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
AT: War is Slow
Prolif ensures rapid escalation
Cirincione 7 [Joe, Pres. Ploughshares Fund and Senior Fellow and Dir. Nuclear Policy – Center for
American Progress, National Interest, “Symposium: Apocalypse When?” November/December ln]
Let me be clear: Nuclear proliferation is a real danger. George Bush and John Kerry were correct when they agreed in a 2004
debate that it is the number one threat to America. The threat comes in four flavors. Most serious is nuclear
terrorism. As terrible as another 9/11 attack would be, a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city, kill hundreds of
thousands, wreck the economy and change the political life of the nation, perhaps permanently . Our number
one priority must be to make sure any further terrorist attack is non-nuclear. Second is the danger from existing arsenals.
There are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the planet several times over. Even a small regional war in
South Asia using one hundred weapons would trigger a nuclear winter that could devastate food crops around
the world. Accidental or unauthorized use is a real risk. Consider the September flight of a B-52 with six nuclear weapons
that the crew didn't know they had. If the most sophisticated command-and-control mechanism in the world fails to stop the unauthorized
possession of the equivalent of sixty Hiroshimas, what is going on in other nations? Third is the risk of new nuclear nations. I
agree with Mueller that the danger here is not that Iran or North Korea would use a nuclear bomb against America or their neighbors.
Deterrence is alive and well; they know what would happen next. Nor is it that these states would intentionally give a weapon they worked so
hard to make to a terrorist group they could not control. Rather it
is the risk of what could happen in the neighborhood:
a nuclear reaction chain where states feel they must match each other's nuclear capability . Just such a
reaction is underway already in the Middle East, as over a dozen Muslim nations suddenly declared interest in starting
nuclear-power programs. This is not about energy; it is a nuclear hedge against Iran. It could lead to a Middle East with not
one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, but four or five. That is a recipe for nuclear war. Finally, there is
the risk of the collapse of the entire non-proliferation regime. Kennedy was right to worry about ten,
fifteen or twenty nuclear nations. He did not make this number up. It was based on a 1958 NPT that warned that while there were
then only three nuclear nations (the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom), "within the next decade a large number of individual
countries could produce at least a few nominal-yield weapons." Indeed, several nations already had programs underway. Subsequent NPTs
confirmed the proliferation danger and the linkage to existing arsenals. Other nations' decisions on proceeding with programs, the intelligence
agencies concluded, were linked to "further progress in disarmament-aimed at effective controls and reduction of stockpiles." Kennedy
negotiated a limited nuclear test ban and began the process to get the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty completed by Lyndon
Johnson and ratified by Richard Nixon. This bipartisan dam held back the nuclear wave; its abandonment by the current
administration risks a return to the 1950s nuclear free-for-all .
AT: Try or Die
Default to short term impacts
Barnhizer 6 [David Barnhizer, 6, prof of law, cleveland st U, waking from sustainability’s “impossible
dream”, Geo int’l envtl law rev, ln]
We need to abandon the rhetoric of sustainability and adapt strategies of accountability. Accept the cliché
that politics is indeed the “art of the possible.” You can’t force reality into a controlled pattern. It is more important and more effective to
monitor conditions, create buffers against the worst consequences, and develop the means to adapt our behavior to events. Utopian strategies
are like King Canute ordering the unheeding tides to recede. There are too many unforeseeable variables and feedback loops with multiplier
effects. There are too many “butterflies” to capture in our data “nets” and projections. We are in the midst of a transformative Kondratiev
Wave that has been going on for about fifteen years and will last another two decades.192 We
cannot know its real costs and
consequences until it has dissipated and the new structure that is being created settles in. Even then
we will not be in a condition of stasis. We must improve our decision-making in order to cope with
this environment. We need to learn how to “ride the wave” of continual change and adaptation but this doesn’t mean we can’t do some
good things. There are some basic areas where we can create protective zones and produce some positive effects. These include issues of land
rights, social organization, food security, careful economic development, equity and human rights. Part of what is required is the abandoning of
false ideals such as sustainable development. Beyond that we need to focus on strategies involving what have been called “small wins.” This
needs to be based on the identification of what business strategist Kenichi Ohmae described as Key Factors for Success (KFS) and Key Factors
for Failure (KFF).193 These approaches—“small wins,” KFS and KFF—must be applied inside strategies aimed at specific systems based on an
analysis that I think of as Key Points of Leverage or, since we are using acronyms, KPL. In every situation there are key factors that provide
maximum leverage. There are others that lead to success or other paths of action that result in failure. Achieving goals requires honest and
simple strategies to which we can commit ourselves and that ordinary people can understand and implement within the constraints of existing
institutions. It
is important to concentrate on “small wins” that are achievable over a relatively short
period of time rather than anticipating a vast retooling of existing institutions and fundamental
changes in human behavior. Such transformational shifts would require that we collectively gain a
level of understanding beyond our capability. Even if we somehow changed our character and that of
our institutions special interests would remain that would sabotage the efforts. 194 Many of the governments
upon which we must rely to regulate effectively change composition frequently. New office holders often fail to understand
the reasons for pre-existing policies or they the policies as those of their opponents. A result is
weakening or abandonment of the effort.
AT: No conflicts/Waltz
Waltz is wrong– multiple empirical examples disprove
Lieber & Press, 13 – Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, “Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation”, PASCC, Proquest, NG)
Critics might concede that conventional wars between nuclear-armed adversaries would be highly escalatory, yet counter that such wars are
unlikely to occur in the first place. In fact, critics might say, the arguments that we present here about the dangers of wartime escalation are
exactly the reason that these conventional wars will not occur. As Kenneth Waltz argues, nuclear weapons do not merely deter nuclear attacks; they deter
conventional attacks as well. As he explains, launching a major conventional offensive against a nuclear-armed state would be foolhardy; yet, launching a limited
conventional attack would be equally senseless - as the small potential gains would be trivial compared to any residual risk of escalation. In short, critics might argue
that it is precisely because our arguments about the danger of escalation are correct that these wars will not happen. The lack of high-intensity conventional war
between two nuclear weapon states is evidence on the side of Waltz, but there
is worrisome evidence, as well. First, if Waltz is right
that the risk of nuclear escalation will reliably deter conventional attacks, then conventional attacks
on nuclear-armed countries should not occur - yet they do. In some cases these were highly limited conventional operations, in
locations whose geography limited the fighting (e.g., Kargil 1999; Falklands 19 82). But on other occasions, countries have launched major
conventional military operations that inflicted substantial losses on nuclear-armed adversaries, or
which threatened their vital interests. In 1950 China launched a major land attack against U.S. and
allied forces on the Korean Peninsula, dealing the United States a major defeat, denying the United States victory on
the Korean Peninsula, and killing thousands of U.S. military personnel. Whatever calculations led
China’s leaders to believe they could inflict such a serious defeat on the United States without
prohibitive risk of nuclear escalation surely does not resemble the line of reasoning - and the
overwhelming caution - that Waltz expects to observe in states facing nuclear-armed enemies. Further,
the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War reflects a level of
risk acceptance that does not jibe well with Waltz’s arguments. On October 6, five divisions of Syrian ground forces launched a
major surprise attack on Israeli defenses along the Golan Heights. The Syrian ground forces nearly broke through the Israeli line; at the worst moment for Israel,
roughly a dozen tanks stood in front of the Syrian Army - and there were no additional Israeli reserves between the Golan Heights and Tel Aviv. (Some accounts of
the war claim that Israel took steps during the war to prepare its nuclear arsenal in case the Syrian Army broke through.) Syria was fortunate: its attack on the Golan
Heights failed. But their
decision process does not match the level of caution one will require if conventional
wars against nuclear-armed states are to be banished. More recently, the apparent North Korean sinking of
a South Korean warship in 2010, or the North’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island near Seoul, could have
led to a substantial conventional response by Seoul - triggering war. Waltz’s view may correctly explain Seoul’s reluctance
to respond to those attacks with force; but it does not explain Pyongyang’s willingness to instigate violence and keep
walking along the edge of war. More broadly, the claim that the risk of catastrophe will reliably deter
conventional wars seems to contradict much of history. For most of history, starting a war meant
risking catastrophe. Leaders who lost surrendered not merely their crowns, but also their heads. In the
era of dynastic succession, defeat often meant that one’s children were killed as well to prevent future claims to rule.
Throughout history, those who led rebellions - against ancient empires, colonial powers, or even against modern occupiers - usually paid with their lives (and often
died gruesomely). And the populations on whose behalf the insurgents rebelled were sometimes slaughtered, to teach others not to emulate their disloyalty. In
more modern times, the
Japanese who planned Pearl Harbor understood that they were attacking a country
with ten times their economic power, and they understood that if the war went badly it meant
catastrophe for themselves and Japan. (They were right.) But despite those risks, the Japanese attacked. Germany’s leaders
understood that they were risking personal and national calamity when they invaded France, and
especially when they invaded the Soviet Union. But they attacked anyway. In 1980 Saddam Hussein
invaded Iran, a country with three times Iraq’s population - a gamble that nearly led to his overthrow
and death. If it were true that leaders do not start conventional wars if the possibility of catastrophe looms, human
history would be much more pacific. To be clear, we agree with the premise underlying Waltz’s argument: that conventional wars could only
occur between nuclear-armed states if leaders were willing to embrace major risks. He does not think that will happen; we see that occurring throughout the pages
of history. If leaders were not willing to take enormous risks, China and Syria would not have launched major ground attacks on nuclear-armed states, people would
have never rebelled against empires, and few of the major wars of the modern era would have occurred.
AT: weak countries will surrender
US involvement guarantees escalation
Lieber & Press, 13 – Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, “Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation”, PASCC, Proquest, NG)
THE LOGIC OF COERCIVE NUCLEAR ESCALATION The
core national security problem for many militarily weak countries is
to keep powerful enemies at bay. For weak countries, military defeat can be disastrous. In some
circumstances, battlefield losses are followed by conquest and harsh treatment of the defeated society : e.g., a
brutal occupation, the loss of sovereignty, or in rare cases genocide. But even when those terrible outcomes are not likely, war is often disastrous
for the leaders of the defeated. Military planners in weak states - particularly those with adversarial relations with
the United States (which has easily vanquished a half¬dozen military opponents since the end of the Cold War) - must, therefore, address a fundamental
straightforward: how
question: if war occurs, and conventional victory is impossible, what strategies might create a stalemate and avoid catastrophic defeat? Escalation and the Fate of
Enemy Leaders Although the United States has a long history of treating defeated enemy societies well - e.g., in Germany, Japan, and more recently Iraq - the
leaders of countries that recently fought the United States have suffered severe consequences . In 1989,
the United States conquered Panama and arrested its leader, Manuel Noriega. For most Americans, this short war is forgotten. For Noriega, it triggered a calamitous
reversal of fortune: he exchanged a life of power and riches for twenty-three years in prison - and counting. Saddam Hussein suffered a worse fate; he lost power,
he was humiliated, his sons were killed, and he was hanged in front of jeering enemies. Muammar Qaddafi spent his last days hiding from U.S.-supported rebels
before being caught cowering in a culvert. He was then beaten and shot to death. Dozens of Qaddafi loyalists, including his son, were also rounded up and executed.
Even leaders whose countries were never conquered - those that suffered only “limited” defeats often paid a high price. Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are still in prison in the Hague, where Serbia’s former leader, Milosevic, died
in detention. More broadly, studies demonstrate that leaders have a powerful, personal incentive to force a stalemate on
the battlefield rather than accept defeat. One study used data covering more than 80 years of
leadership changes around the world and found that those leaders who achieved a stalemate in a war
were nearly twice as likely to remain in power as those countries that suffered military defeat. Even more
tellingly, the leaders of countries who lost were approximately four times as likely to be punished exiled, jailed, or killed - as those who managed to achieve stalemate. Not only do leaders face great pressure to create
battlefield stalemate before they suffer irredeemable losses, they must do so quickly. A limited conventional defeat that
“merely” destroys a large fraction of a country’s military, or substantially degrades the institutions that ensure “government
control” (for example, the leadership’s security force, domestic intelligence services, internal security troops, and party militias), could trigger a
wartime or post-war coup. Even if the military and security services remain loyal, the war must end before they are too degraded to suppress
uprisings in the wake of the conflict. Furthermore, military operations - especially those conducted by the United States - Increasingly
involve intense campaigns against enemy command bunkers and other leadership sites, posing direct,
daily threats to the leaders, their key political allies, and their families. Leaders who see their military being destroyed, their security services
being savaged, and who have bombs raining down upon their command bunkers, may feel great pressure to halt the war as soon as
possible. In short, losing wars is often a terrible outcome. Sometimes it results in horrendous consequences for the defeated society. In the early decades of
the Cold War, West Europeans were understandably horrified by the notion of being conquered by the Soviet Union, losing their democratic institutions, and living
under a murderous Stalinist tyranny. Today, many Israelis believe that a military defeat at the hands of their neighbors would usher in another tragic era in Jewish
history - including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But even when the outcomes of war are unlikely to lead to mass societal suffering among the defeated, enemy
leaders (not just the supreme leader, but ruling party officials, military officers, and members of the domestic security services) rightly fear the consequences. The
critical message is this: America’s recent conflicts are considered “regional wars” in Washington; for adversaries there is nothing “regional” or “limited” about them.
For the weak, these are existential struggles. Escalation and the Role of Nuclear Weapons The leaders of weak states face life-and-death incentives to quickly halt
wars that are going badly for them.
But why are nuclear weapons needed for this mission? Several attributes of nuclear weapons
weapons are small and hence relatively easy to hide enhancing their chance of surviving the early stages of a conflict. Furthermore, not many nuclear weapons
need to survive: each bomb is so destructive that an adversary who can credibly threaten to deliver
even a few weapons against its enemy’s cities would possess a powerful coercive tool. Finally, modern
delivery systems - particularly ballistic missiles - allow states to deliver nuclear weapons to their target, even if its
make them uniquely useful for stalemating a stronger enemy. Nuclear
enemy controls the ground, air, and sea. In contrast, most conventional weapons become progressively
harder to deliver against enemy cities as the enemy gains the upper hand militarily, and they inflict
too little damage to shock the winning side into submitting to stalemate. Taken together, these three characteristics
mean that even a state on the verge of being vanquished can conceivably destroy the potential victor. The implication: nuclear weapons are the
ultimate weapon of the weak.
AT: States use other weapons
Nuclear weapons are the favored weapons of small states– three reasons
Lieber & Press, 13 – Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, “Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation”, PASCC, Proquest, NG)
Not only are nuclear weapons better suited for wartime coercion than conventional alternatives, there
are three other considerations that
make them more useful than other weapons that analysts worry may spread in the 21st century, including cyber, chemical, and biological
weapons. First, although popular culture frequently portrays nuclear weapons as uncontrollably destructive, their effects can be surprisingly
calibrated. Weapons designers have created nuclear weapons with widely varying “yields,” allowing mission planners to tailor a strike to create a huge area of
destruction or very little - whichever is desired. For example, the largest yield weapon in the current U.S. arsenal releases up to 1,200 kilotons of energy (80
Hiroshimas); the smallest U.S. nuclear weapon can be set to detonate with only roughly 0.3 kilotons of explosive power (2% of the Hiroshima bomb). The former
would create 250 times the destruction as the latter. Furthermore, by
selecting the altitude of detonation, targeters can choose
to create enormous amounts of radioactive fallout or virtually none. And perhaps most importantly - from the standpoint
of a weak state conducting a coercive campaign - nuclear weapons can be used either slowly or rapidly, or somewhere in
between: they can be used to destroy one city today and another tomorrow, or one today and a
dozen tomorrow. If fallout is avoided, damage can be meted out in distinct, painful episodes, facilitating
coercion. In our popular culture, nuclear weapons are incredibly blunt tools. Some high-yield weapons are. But compared to other instruments of coercion,
nuclear weapons offer desperate weak-state leaders tailored escalatory options. Another criterion that makes
nuclear weapons uniquely suitable for war-ending coercion: the utility of nuclear strikes is not nullified by first use. Once a cyber
weapon is used, the victim (and others) can learn from the computer code and eliminate key vulnerabilities - reducing the effectiveness of future weapons.
Similarly, in the aftermath of a biological weapons attack, the victim’s military forces and population would don gas masks and take other steps to reduce their
vulnerability to subsequent strikes. Within broader society, public health measures (for example, restrictions on travel and movement, the use of surgical masks,
heightened health monitoring, and the isolation of contagious individuals) would reduce the effectiveness of follow-on attacks. But, in contrast, the
initial
use of nuclear weapons would not nullify the nuclear arsenal to the degree that bio- or cyber-attacks
would. Unless the victim of the nuclear attack can reliably shoot down ballistic missiles, which remains a very difficult undertaking, a weak state can
use nuclear weapons coercively and still retain the ability to conduct future attacks. Finally, the effects of
nuclear weapons are far more predictable than cyber or bio weapons, an essential attribute for a leader who
needs to coerce an immediate end to fighting. Nuclear weapons are more predictable on at least three key dimensions: the
functioning of the weapon, the damage it will cause, and the timing of the effects. No one knows whether the
coercive effect of a nuclear, or biological, or a cyber attack would work, as we discuss below. But leaders under duress could at least be
confident that a well-tested nuclear weapon would function; would create a reasonably predictable
level of damage (as long as targeters selected a height of burst to prevent fallout); and would detonate at roughly the desired
time. By contrast, one cannot know whether a cyber weapon will infect the target computer system - or whether an infection would produce the desired
malfunctions - until the weapon is used. In many cases, no one can predict how long it will take for a cyber attack to disrupt the target computers, or assess the
unintended consequences of the malware infecting other computer systems. Similarly, biological weapons may take considerable time to spread, to incubate in
their victims, to be detected, and to be attributed - all of which must happen before an attack can generate a coercive effect. During wars, the
leaders of
the states on the losing side may face life-and-death pressure to rapidly force a ceasefire - even if their enemy
is not seeking to conquer them or impose regime change. Conventional weapons provide little leverage in this regard - most
of them become progressively more difficult for the weak to employ as the strong gains the upper
hand militarily, and they generally inflict too little damage to shock the strong state into submitting to
stalemate. When NATO faced an overwhelming conventional military threat, it did not plan to stalemate the Warsaw Pact using highly uncertain biological
weapons. If the challenge facing a leader is to stop a powerful aggressor immediately, then there is
currently no substitute for nuclear weapons.
Yes Extinction
1NC
Nuclear war causes extinction
Robock 11 [Alan – Prof Environmental Science @ Rutgers. “Nuclear Winter is a Real and Present
Danger” Nature, Vol 473. Summer 2011 Ebsco]
In the 1980s, discussion and debate about the possibility of a ‘nuclear winter’ helped to end the arms race between the United States and the
Soviet Union. As former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2000: “Models made by Russian and American scientists
showed that a
nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life
on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honour and morality, to act.” As a result, the number of nuclear
weapons in the world started to fall, from a peak of about 70,000 in the 1980s to a total of about 22,000 today. In another five years that
number could go as low as 5,000, thanks to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia,
signed on 8 April 2010. Yet the
environmental threat of nuclear war has not gone away. The world faces the
prospect of a smaller, but still catastrophic, nuclear conflict. There are now nine nuclear-weapons
states. Use of a fraction of the global nuclear arsenal by anyone, from the superpowers to India versus
Pakistan, still presents the largest potential environmental danger to the planet by humans. That
threat is being ignored. One reason for this denial is that the prospect of a nuclear war is so horrific on
so many levels that most people simply look away. Two further reasons are myths that persist among the general
public: that the nuclear winter theory has been disproved, and that nuclear winter is no longer a threat.
These myths need to be debunked. The term ‘nuclear winter’, coined by Carl Sagan and his colleagues in a 1983 paper1 in
Science, describes the dramatic effects on the climate caused by smoke from fires ignited by nuclear attacks on cities and industrial areas. In
using the best climate models available at the time, that if one-third of
the existing arsenal was used, there would be so much smoke that surface temperatures would
plummet below freezing around the world for months, killing virtually all plants and producing
worldwide famine. More people could die in China from starvation than in the nations actively bombing each other. As many countries
the 1980s my colleagues and I calculated,
around the world realized that a superpower nuclear war would be a disaster for them, they pressured the superpowers to end their arms race.
Sagan did a good job of summarizing the policy impacts2 in 1984: although weapons were continuing to be built, it would be suicide to use
them. The idea of climatic catastrophe was fought against by those who wanted to keep the nuclear-weapon industry alive, or who supported
the growth of nuclear arsenals politically3. Scientifically,
there was no real debate about the concept , only about
the details. In 1986, atmospheric researchers Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs appraising the
theory4 and highlighting what they saw as the patchiness of the effect. They coined the term ‘nuclear autumn’, noting that it wouldn’t be
‘winter’ everywhere in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. They didn’t mean for people to think that it would be all raking leaves and football
games, but many members of the public, and some pro-nuclear advocates, preferred to take it that way. The fight over the details of the
modelling caused a rift between Sagan and Schneider that never healed. When I bring up the topic of nuclear winter, people invariably tell me
that they think the theory has been disproved. But research continues to support the original concept. By
2007, models had began
to approximate a realistic atmosphere up to 80 kilometres above Earth’s surface, including the
stratosphere and mesosphere. This enabled me, and my coauthors, to calculate for the first time that smoke
particles would be heated by the Sun and lifted into the upper stratosphere, where they would stay
for many years5,6. So the cooling would last for much longer than we originally thought. DARK DAYS Many
of those who do accept the nuclear-winter concept think that the scenario applies only to a mass
conflict, on a scale no longer conceivable in the modern world. This is also false. A ‘small’ nuclear war
between India and Pakistan, with each using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (far less than 1% of the current
arsenal), if dropped on megacity targets in each country would produce climate change
unprecedented in recorded human history 5. Five million tonnes of black carbon smoke would be
emitted into the upper troposphere from the burning cities, and then be lofted into the stratosphere by the heat of the Sun.
Temperatures would be lower than during the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1400–1850), during which famine killed millions. For
several years, growing seasons would be shortened by weeks in the mid-latitudes (see ‘A decade of cooling). Brian Toon at the University of
Colorado in Boulder, Richard Turco at the University of California, Los Angeles, Georgiy Stenchikov at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, and I, all of whom were pioneers in nuclear-winter research in the 1980s, have tried, along with our students, to publicize our results.
We have published refereed journal articles, popular pieces in Physics Today and Scientific American, a policy forum in Science, and now this
article. But Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, perhaps the two most prominent foreign-policy magazines in English, would not even review
articles we submitted. We have had no luck getting attention from the US government. Toon and I visited the US Congress and gave briefings to
congressional staff on the subject two years ago, but nothing happened as a result. The US President’s science adviser John Holdren has not
responded to our requests — in 2009 and more recently — for consideration of new scientific results in US nuclear policy. The only interest at a
national level I have had was somewhat surreal: in September 2010, Fidel Castro summoned me to a conference on nuclear winter in Havana,
to help promote his new view that a nuclear conflict would bring about Armageddon. The next day, my talk — the entire 90
minutes including questions — was broadcast on nationwide television in prime time, and appeared on the front page of the two national
newspapers in Cuba. As in the 1980s, it is still too difficult for most people to fully grasp the consequences of a nuclear conflict. But it must be
grasped. We scientists must continue to push our results out to the public and to policymakers, so they can in turn push political will in the
direction of disarmament. Just as Gorbachev, armed with the knowledge of nuclear winter, helped to end the cold war, so too can the
politicians of today use science to support further reductions in arms. The New START treaty is not enough.
AT: Nukes = Small
Nukes would escalate
Kpreon 4 [Michael. President of the Stimson Center. “Limited War, Escalation Control, and the Nuclear Option in South Asia” 2004,
wwww.stimson.org //GBS-JV]
This kind of strategic analysis did not provide political leaders much comfort as to how escalation might be controlled up to and across the
nuclear threshold. Will strategists and military planners in South Asia have more success in developing a plausible theory of, and military plans
for, escalation control? Escalation
control presumed mutual agreement between nuclear rivals to fight for
limited stakes. As Brodie explained, “[T]he curtailing of our taste for unequivocal victory is one of the prices we pay to keep the physical
violence, and thus the costs and penalties, from going beyond the level of the tolerable.”5 Robert Osgood defined limited war as “part of a
general ‘strategy of conflict’ in which adversaries would bargain with each other through the medium of graduated military responses, within
assumed, of
course, that both nuclear-armed adversaries were willing to play by the same general rules – a condition,
the boundaries of contrived mutual restraints, in order to achieve a negotiated settlement short of mutual destruction.”6 This
as Osgood subsequently acknowledged, that did not apply during the Cold War. “One trouble with all strategies of local war in Europe,” he
wrote in 1979, “is that the Soviet Union has shown virtually no inclination to be a partner to them.”7 While US strategists were constructing
rungs along the escalation ladder, the Soviet General Staff was planning for a blitzkrieg across Europe. Another
reason why US
strategic thinkers failed to devise a plausible theory of escalation control during the Cold War was the
inherent difficulties in communicating with an adversary whose differences of view and objectives were so
great that they would result in conflict. If miscommunication with, or misreading of, an adversary lead to
conflict, this would suggest that communication to keep that war limited might also fail – assuming that
lines of communication remain intact. But, as Barry Posen has noted, “Inadvertent escalation may also result from the
great difficulty of gathering and interpreting the most relevant information about a war in progress and
using it to understand, control, and orchestrate the war.”8