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advantageThe threat of nuclear terror is real – multiple scenarios for loose nukes, a proven incentive, and feasibility exacerbate the probabilityBunn et. al 19 Matthew Bunn, Nickolas Roth, and William H. Tobey, January 2019, "Revitalizing Nuclear Security in an Era of Uncertainty," Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs – Harvard Kennedy School, [Matthew Bunn is a Professor of Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include nuclear theft and terrorism; nuclear proliferation and measures to control it; the future of nuclear energy and its fuel cycle; and policies to promote innovation in energy technologies. Before joining the Kennedy School in January 1997, he served for three years as an adviser to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the United States and the former Soviet Union, and directed a secret study for President Clinton on security for nuclear materials in Russia. Previously, Bunn was at the National Academy of Sciences, where he directed the two-volume study Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium. He is the winner of the American Physical Society's Joseph A. Burton Forum Award for "outstanding contributions in helping to formulate policies to decrease the risks of theft of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials," and the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Bethe Award for "science in service to a more secure world," and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee and a consultant to Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association. He is the author or co-author of more than 25 books and book-length technical reports (most recently Insider Threats), and over 150 articles in publications ranging from Science and Nuclear Technology to Foreign Policy and The Washington Post. He appears regularly on television and radio. Bunn holds a doctorate in technology, management, and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nickolas Roth is a Senior Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear security, and the nuclear policy-making process. Before coming to Harvard, he spent a decade in the NGO world working on nuclear policy. He served as a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he wrote extensively about long-term U.S. plans to modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile and its supporting industrial infrastructure. Mr. Roth also served as the Program Director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, where he helped create legislation to improve accountability and project management within the Department of Energy. Mr. Roth’s work has appeared in, or been cited by, media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Asahi Shimbun, Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Additionally, he has given presentations at the United Nations, nuclear non-Proliferation preparatory committee meetings, numerous universities around the country, and on C-Span. Mr. Roth has a B.A. in History from American University and a Masters of Public Policy from the University of Maryland. While at Maryland, he served as a research assistant for the Center for International and Security Studies’ Nuclear Materials Accounting Project. William Tobey was Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration from 2006-2009. There, he managed the U.S. government's largest program to prevent nuclear proliferation and terrorism by detecting, securing, and disposing of dangerous nuclear material. Mr. Tobey also served on the National Security Council Staff under three presidents, in defense policy, arms control, and counter-proliferation positions. He has participated in international negotiations ranging from the START talks with the Soviet Union to the Six Party Talks with North Korea. He also has ten years experience in investment banking and venture capital. He serves on the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine. He chairs the board of the World Institute for Nuclear Security.], https://www.belfercenter.org/NuclearSecurity2019, SJBE

- Also means virtual nukes doesn’t solve this advantage – terrorists would just steal the individual materials- HEU = highly enriched (extra dangerous) uranium

Means The most likely means for detonating a nuclear explosion would be theft of weapons-usable nuclear material, either HEU or plutonium. Several lines of evidence suggest that this is a serious concern. First, we have empirical evidence of past security failures for such material, as there are nearly 20 well- documented cases in the public record from 1992-2018 in which stolen plutonium or HEU has been seized . 21 While none of these incidents involved quantities large enough to make a nuclear weapon (though one attempted theft was in the ballpark), they constitute empirical confirmation of nuclear security failures resulting in loss of control of fissile material. Moreover, because in all but one of the cases the site from which the material was stolen has not been publicly confirmed, there can be no independent certainty that the leaks have been permanently plugged (indeed it is not clear that the missing material was even noticed at the facilities from whence it came). In some cases, the seized material

was described as a sample of a larger quantity for sale that was never recovered and which may still be available.22 While many of these cases occurred in the 1990s, when nuclear security was undermined by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, governments in Europe also seized stolen HEU or plutonium in 2003, 2006, 2010, and 2011. The absence of publicly disclosed seizures for seven years is encouraging, but it is too early to infer that the problem is solved. In addition to instances of nuclear theft, there have been also important security incidents in recent years indicating there continue to be threats to nuclear facilities around the world. In 2012, explosives were found under a truck at the Ringhals nuclear power plant, the largest in Sweden. Fortunately, the explosives were not connected to a detonator. 23 In 2013, two people scaled the fence at Belgium’s HEU research reactor, broke into the facility, and stole equipment.24 In 2014, a computer in the control room (though not one actually controlling the reactor) at Japan’s Monju

nuclear reactors was hacked.25 In 2016, the Belgian nuclear agency’s computer system was hacked and forced to briefly shut down.26 In 2017, Greenpeace activists twice penetrated security barriers at French nuclear power plants to protest nuclear energy and highlight what they asserted were

security weaknesses.27 Also in 2017, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. John Hyten, told Congress that recent incidents of unauthorized drones overflying both Navy and Air Force nuclear facilities “represent a growing threat to the safety and security of nuclear weapons and personnel.”28 Second, security assessments and tests continue to reveal important vulnerabilities, in the United States and elsewhere. At one nuclear facility in Europe, for example, a

clever adversary plan involving an insider bringing in explosives and the rest of the attack team arriving disguised as the emergency responders succeeded in totally penetrating the facility’s security system. 29 In the United States, failures to protect against adversary teams representing the design basis threat (DBT) occur more rarely than in past decades, but still happen. Moreover, in many countries, weaknesses exist in one or more of the five key areas of nuclear security described in this report, ranging from relying on only one or two measures to protect against insider threats rather than having a comprehensive program to

failing to carry out realistic tests of security performance to lack of any focused effort to assess and strengthen the staff’s security culture. Third, non-nuclear criminal thefts and terrorist attacks continue to occur that use tactics and capabilities that the security systems at many nuclear facilities would be hard-pressed to defend against —ranging from substantial teams of heavily armed , well-trained attackers , to insider conspiracies, to the use of vehicles such as helicopters to get past multiple layers of site security systems. 30 Fissile material is not the

only plausible target. In theory, it would also be possible for terrorists to attempt to steal a nuclear weapon from a state arsenal . Nuclear weapons, however, are large, countable objects that are generally very well secured (and often equipped with electronic locks or other

features that would make it difficult to detonate them without authorization, though thieves might ultimately be able to overcome those features or use the nuclear material in the weapon to build a bomb of their own).31 Unlike fissile material, there are no known cases of theft of a nuclear weapon. There have, however, been worrisome incidents. In the early 2000s, Colonel-General Igor Valynkin, then commander of the force that guards Russia’s nuclear weapons, confirmed two incidents involving terrorists carrying out reconnaissance at Russian nuclear weapon storage sites, and the Russian state newspaper reported two

more terrorists monitoring nuclear weapon transport trains—the most vulnerable part of the nuclear weapon life-cycle.32 In August 2007, “a breakdown in training, discipline , supervision, and leadership” 33 led to the unauthorized transfer of six nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base. (The bomber’s crew thought they were carrying only unarmed training missiles.) In the incident, “ the intricate system of nuclear checks and balances was either ignored or disregarded .”34 While it would not have been possible to arm or launch the missiles without launch

codes,35 the systems were outside of the special security procedures attendant to nuclear weapons for about 24 hours on the ground at Minot and Barksdale.36 And as described in the accompanying box, there have been a series of incidents in the last 15 years that suggest terrorist interest in, and some continuing security weaknesses at, bases where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored in Europe, though as far as is publicly known none of these incidents ever put those weapons at serious risk of theft or sabotage. As those incidents suggest, tactical nuclear weapons systems present a particular risk of theft, especially when they are

out of garrison. Pakistan and India are both fielding tactical nuclear weapons, and as will be discussed later in this report, the terrorist threat environment in both countries is severe, particularly in Pakistan. While neither India nor Pakistan have suffered major terrorist attacks on nuclear weapon storage facilities, in both countries, large terrorist teams with apparent insider help have succeeded in seiz ing portions of major military bases for hours at a time . Speaking of Pakistan in 2016, a White House official noted, “we’re concerned by the increased security challenges that accompany growing stockpiles, particularly [of]

tactical nuclear weapons that are designed for use on the battlefield. And these systems are a source of concern because they’re susceptible to theft due to their size and mode of employment.”37 The Trump Administration apparently concurs, as the 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment noted dryly that: “[Pakistan’s] new types of nuclear weapons will introduce new risks for escalation dynamics and security in the

region.”38 Motive The motive for nuclear terrorism is also well established. Forty years ago, terrorists may have wanted “a lot of people

watching, not a lot of people dead,” reasoning that their political objectives would be defeated by revulsion to mass casualties.39 Today, however, while it remains true that most terrorist groups have no interest

in the nuclear level of violence, a few do. The most dangerous types of terrorist organizations appear to be apocalyptic groups seeking to bring about the end of the world (such as the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo) and groups with

immense political ambitions, in some cases including the defeat of superpowers, for which very powerful weapons might be needed (such as al Qaeda, some Chechen terrorists, and the Islamic State). From the 9/11 attackers to Chechen rebels, who killed hundreds of children and their parents at a school in Beslan, Russia, to the Islamic State, which regularly televised its atrocities, it is clear that some terrorist groups seek to inflict as many casualties as possible, as cruelly as possible. Ours is an age of unlimited terrorist ambition. Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas in Matsumoto and in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and attempted to acquire both nuclear and biological weapons.40 Al Qaeda, whose leader declared acquisition of nuclear and chemical weapons to be a “religious duty,” had a focused nuclear weapons effort that reported directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri (now the group’s leader), included repeated attempts to get nuclear material and recruit nuclear expertise, and progressed as far as carrying out crude but sensible tests of conventional explosives for the nuclear program in the Afghan desert.41 Chechen terrorists planted a stolen radiological source in a Moscow park as a warning, repeatedly threatened to sabotage nuclear reactors—and, as noted earlier, reportedly carried out reconnaissance at both nuclear weapon storage sites and on nuclear weapon transport trains.42 So far, there is no public evidence of a focused Islamic State effort to acquire nuclear weapons, despite hints such as Islamic State operatives’ video monitoring of the private home of a top official of Belgium’s leading nuclear research center.43 Opportunity Opportunity, in the case

of nuclear terrorism, would be created by assembling the technical means to fabricate, transport, and detonate a device, once sufficient nuclear material or a weapon had been stolen. Government studies in multiple countries have concluded that sophisticated terrorist groups could plausibly make a crude nuclear device .44 Unfortunately, taking already-produced nuclear material and fashioning it into a bomb does not take a Manhattan Project.

As early as 1986, U.S. National Intelligence Estimates assessed that sophisticated terrorist groups would be capable of causing a nuclear explosion , were they able to steal sufficient fissile material or a state-produced weapon.45 Those conclusions were reinforced by a specific finding in October 2001 that building a crude nuclear weapon was “well within” al Qaeda’s capabilities

if it obtained sufficient fissile material.46 Some argue that an inability to organize a serious effort to accomplish the complex tasks necessary to effect a nuclear detonation—in addition to lack of access to fissile material—would be a serious barrier to a terrorist nuclear weapons effort, and there is undoubtedly some truth to this. The disruption caused by relentless military and covert operations against them has certainly made it more difficult for either al Qaeda or the Islamic State to pursue complex, sustained efforts like a nuclear program.

Independently, just one bomb triggers extinction and is an impact magnifier for everything else – conservative estimatesBunn and Roth 17 Matthew Bunn and Nickolas Roth, 9-28-2017, "The effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, [Matthew Bunn is a Professor of Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include nuclear theft and terrorism; nuclear proliferation and measures to control it; the future of nuclear energy and its fuel cycle; and policies to promote innovation in energy technologies. Before joining the Kennedy School in January 1997, he served for three years as an adviser to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the United States and the former Soviet Union, and directed a secret study for President Clinton on security for nuclear materials in Russia. Previously, Bunn was at the National Academy of Sciences, where he directed the two-volume study Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium. He is the winner of the American Physical Society's Joseph A. Burton Forum Award for "outstanding contributions in helping to formulate policies to decrease the risks of theft of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials," and the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Bethe Award for "science in service to a more secure world," and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee and a consultant to Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association. He is the author or co-author of more than 25 books and book-length technical reports (most recently Insider Threats), and over 150 articles in publications ranging from Science and Nuclear Technology to Foreign Policy and The Washington Post. He appears regularly on television and radio. Bunn holds a doctorate in technology, management, and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nickolas Roth is a Senior Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear security, and the nuclear policy-making process. Before coming to Harvard, he spent a decade in the NGO world working on nuclear policy. He served as a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he wrote extensively about long-term U.S. plans to modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile and its supporting industrial infrastructure. Mr. Roth also served as the Program Director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, where he helped create legislation to improve accountability and project management within the Department of Energy. Mr. Roth’s work has appeared in, or been cited by, media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Asahi Shimbun, Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Additionally, he has given presentations at the United Nations, nuclear non-Proliferation preparatory committee meetings, numerous universities around the country, and on C-Span. Mr. Roth has a B.A. in History from American University and a Masters of Public Policy from the University of Maryland. While at Maryland, he served as a research assistant for the Center for International and Security Studies’ Nuclear Materials Accounting Project.], https://thebulletin.org/2017/09/the-effects-of-a-single-terrorist-nuclear-bomb/, SJBE

Brighter than a thousand suns. Imagine a crude terrorist nuclear bomb —containing a chunk of highly enriched uranium just under the size of a regulation bowling ball, or a much smaller chunk of plutonium—suddenly detonating inside a delivery van parked in the heart of a major city. Such a terrorist bomb would release as much as 10 kilotons of explosive energy , or the equivalent of 10,000 tons of conventional explosives, a volume of explosives large enough to fill all the cars of a mile-long train. In a millionth of a second, all of that energy would be released inside that small ball of nuclear material, creating temperatures and pressures as high as those at the center of the sun. That furious energy would

explode outward, releasing its energy in three main ways: a powerful blast wave; intense heat; and deadly radiation. The ball would expand almost instantly into a fireball the width of four football fields, incinerating essentially everything and everyone within. The heated fireball would rise, sucking in air from below and expanding above, creating the mushroom cloud that has become the symbol of the terror of the nuclear age. The ionized plasma in the fireball would create a localized e lectro m agnetic pulse more powerful than lightning, shorting out communications and electronics nearby—though most would be destroyed by the bomb’s other effects in any case. (Estimates of heat, blast, and radiation effects in this article are drawn primarily from Alex Wellerstein’s “Nukemap,” which itself comes from declassified US government data, such as the 660-page

government textbook The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.) At the instant of its detonation, the bomb would also release an intense burst of gamma and neutron radiation which would be lethal for nearly everyone directly exposed within about two-thirds of a mile from the center of the blast . (Those who happened to be shielded by being inside, or having

buildings between them and the bomb, would be partly protected—in some cases, reducing their doses by ten times or more.) The nuclear flash from the heat of the fireball would radiate in both visible light and the infrared; it would be “brighter than a thousand

suns,” in the words of the title of a book describing the development of nuclear weapons—adapting a phrase from the Hindu epic the Bhagavad-Gita. Anyone who looked directly at the blast would be blinded. The heat from the fireball would ignite fires and horribly burn everyone exposed outside at distances of nearly a mile away . (In the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, visitors gaze in horror at the bones of a human hand embedded in glass melted by the bomb.) No one has burned a city on that scale in the decades since World War II, so it is difficult to predict

the full extent of the fire damage that would occur from the explosion of a nuclear bomb in one of today’s cities. Modern glass, steel, and concrete buildings would presumably be less flammable than the wood-and-rice-paper housing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the 1940s—but many questions remain, including exactly how thousands of broken gas lines might contribute to fire damage (as they did in Dresden during World War II). On 9/11, the buildings of the World Trade Center proved to be much more vulnerable to fire

damage than had been expected. Ultimately, even a crude terrorist nuclear bomb would carry the possibility that the countless fires touched off by the explosion would coalesce into a devastating firestorm , as occurred at Hiroshima. In a firestorm, the rising column of hot air from the massive fire

sucks in the air from all around, creating hurricane-force winds; everything flammable and everything alive within the firestorm would be consumed. The fires and the dust from the blast would make it extremely difficult for either rescuers or survivors

to see. The explosion would create a powerful blast wave rushing out in every direction. For more than a quarter-mile all around the blast, the pulse of pressure would be over 20 pounds per square inch above atmospheric pressure (known as “overpressure”), destroying or severely damaging even sturdy buildings. The combination of blast, heat, and radiation would kill virtually everyone in this zone. The blast would be accompanied by winds of many hundreds of miles per hour. The damage from the explosion would extend far beyond this inner zone of almost total death.

Out to more than half a mile, the blast would be strong enough to collapse most residential buildings and create a serious danger that office buildings would topple over, killing those inside and those in the path of the rubble. (On the other hand, the office towers of a modern city would tend to block the blast wave in some areas, providing partial protection from the

blast, as well as from the heat and radiation.) In that zone, almost anything made of wood would be destroyed: Roofs would cave in, windows would shatter, gas lines would rupture. Telephone poles, street lamps, and utility lines would be severely damaged. Many

roads would be blocked by mountains of wreckage. In this zone, many people would be killed or injured in building collapses, or trapped under the rubble; many more would be burned, blinded, or injured by flying debris. In

many cases, their charred skin would become ragged and fall off in sheets. The effects of the detonation would act in deadly synergy. The smashed materials of buildings broken by the blast would be far easier for the fires to ignite than intact structures. The effects of radiation would make it far more difficult for burned and injured people to recover .

The combination of burns, radiation, and physical injuries would cause far more death and suffering than any one of them would alone. The silent killer. The bomb’s immediate effects would be followed by a slow, lingering killer: radioactive fallout. A bomb detonated at ground level would dig a huge crater, hurling tons of earth and debris thousands of feet into the sky. Sucked into the rising fireball, these particles would mix with the radioactive remainders of the bomb, and over the next few hours or days, the debris

would rain down for miles downwind. Depending on weather and wind patterns, the fallout could actually be deadlier and make a far larger area unusable than the blast itself. Acute radiation sickness from the initial radiation pulse and the fallout would likely affect tens of

thousands of people. Depending on the dose, they might suffer from vomiting, watery diarrhea, fever, sores, loss of hair, and bone marrow depletion. Some would survive; some would die within days; some would take months to die. Cancer rates among the survivors would rise . Women would be more vulnerable than men—children and infants especially so. Much of the radiation from a nuclear blast is short-lived; radiation levels even

a few days after the blast would be far below those in the first hours. For those not killed or terribly wounded by the initial explosion, the best advice would be to take shelter in a basement for at least several days. But many would be too terrified to stay. Thousands

of panic-stricken people might receive deadly doses of radiation as they fled from their homes. Some of the radiation will be longer-lived; areas most severely affected would have to be abandoned for many years after the attack. The combination of radioactive fallout and

the devastation of nearly all life-sustaining infrastructure over a vast area would mean that hundreds of thousands of people would have to evacuate. Ambulances to nowhere. The explosion would also destroy much of the city’s ability to respond. Hospitals would be leveled, doctors and nurses killed and wounded, ambulances destroyed. (In Hiroshima, 42 of 45 hospitals were destroyed or severely damaged, and 270 of 300 doctors were killed.) Resources that survived outside

the zone of destruction would be utterly overwhelmed. Hospitals have no ability to cope with tens or hundreds of thousands of terribly burned and injured people all at once; the United States, for example, has 1,760 burn beds in hospitals nationwide, of which a

third are available on any given day. And the problem would not be limited to hospitals; firefighters, for example, would have little ability to cope with thousands of fires raging out of control at once. Fire stations and equipment would be destroyed in the affected area, and firemen killed, along with police and other emergency responders. Some of the first responders may become casualties themselves, from radioactive fallout, fire, and collapsing buildings. Over much of the affected area, communications would be

destroyed, by both the physical effects and the electromagnetic pulse from the explosion. Better preparation for such a disaster could save thousands of lives—but ultimately, there is no way any city can genuinely be prepared for a catastrophe on such a historic scale, occurring in a flash, with zero warning. Rescue and recovery attempts would be impeded by the destruction of most of the needed personnel and equipment, and by fire, debris, radiation, fear, lack of communications, and the immense scale of the disaster. The US military and the national guard could provide critically important capabilities—but federal plans assume that “no significant federal response” would be available for 24-to-72 hours. Many of those burned and injured would wait in vain for help, food, or water, perhaps for days. The scale of death and suffering. How many would die in such an event, and how many would be terribly wounded, would depend on where and when the bomb was detonated, what the weather conditions were at the time, how successful the response was in helping the wounded survivors, and more. Many estimates of casualties are based on census data, which reflect where people sleep at night; if the attack occurred in the middle of a workday, the numbers of people crowded into the office towers at the heart of many modern cities would be far higher. The daytime population of Manhattan, for example, is roughly twice its nighttime population; in Midtown on a typical workday, there are an estimated 980,000 people per square mile. A 10-kiloton weapon detonated there might well kill half a million people—not counting those who might die of radiation sickness from the fallout. (These effects were analyzed in great detail in the Rand Corporation’s Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack and the British Medical Journal’s “Nuclear terrorism.”) On a typical day, the wind would blow the fallout north, seriously contaminating virtually all of Manhattan above Gramercy Park; people living as far away as Stamford, Connecticut would likely have to evacuate.

Seriously injured survivors would greatly outnumber the dead, their suffering magnified by the complete inadequacy of available help. The psychological and social effects—overwhelming sadness, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, myriad forms of anxiety—would be profound and long-lasting. The scenario we have been describing is a groundburst. An airburst—such as might occur, for example, if terrorists put their bomb in a small aircraft they had

purchased or rented—would extend the blast and fire effects over a wider area, killing and injuring even larger numbers of people immediately. But an airburst would not have the same lingering effects from fallout as a groundburst, because the rock and dirt would not be sucked up into the fireball and contaminated. The 10-kiloton blast we have been discussing is likely toward the high end of what terrorists could plausibly achieve with a crude, improvised bomb, but even a 1-kiloton blast would be a catastrophic event, having a deadly radius between one-third and one-half that of a 10-kiloton blast. These hundreds of thousands of people would not be mere statistics, but countless individual stories of loss—parents, children, entire families; all religions; rich and poor alike—killed or

horribly mutilated. Human suffering and tragedy on this scale does not have to be imagined; it can be remembered through the stories of the survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only times in history when nuclear weapons have been used intentionally against human beings. The pain and suffering caused by those bombings are almost beyond human comprehension; the eloquent testimony of the Hibakusha—the survivors who passed through the atomic fire—should stand

as an eternal reminder of the need to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used in anger again. Global economic disaster. The economic impact of such an attack would be enormous . The effects would reverberate for so far and so long that they are difficult to estimate in all their complexity. Hundreds of thousands of people would be too injured or sick to work for weeks or months. Hundreds of thousands more would evacuate to locations far from their jobs. Many places of employment would have to be abandoned because of the radioactive fallout. Insurance

companies would reel under the losses; but at the same time, many insurance policies exclude the effects of nuclear attacks—an item insurers considered beyond their ability to cover—so the owners of thousands of buildings would not have the insurance payments needed to cover the cost of fixing them, thousands of companies would go bankrupt, and banks would be left holding an immense number of mortgages that would never be repaid. Consumer and investor confidence would likely be dramatically affected, as worried

people slowed their spending. Enormous new homeland security and military investments would be very likely. If the bomb had come in a shipping container, the targeted country—and possibly others—might stop all containers from entering until it could devise a system for ensuring they could never again be used for such a purpose, throwing a wrench into the gears of global trade for an extended period. (And this might well occur even if a shipping container had not been the means of delivery.) Even the far smaller 9/11 attacks are estimated to have caused economic aftershocks costing almost $1 trillion even excluding the multi-trillion-dollar costs of the wars that ensued. The cost of a terrorist nuclear attack in a major city would likely be many times higher. The most severe effects would be local, but the effects of trade disruptions, reduced economic activity, and more would reverberate around the world. Consequently, while some countries may feel that nuclear terrorism is only a concern for the countries most likely to be targeted—

such as the United States—in reality it is a threat to everyone, everywhere. In 2005, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that these global effects would push “tens of millions of people into dire poverty,” creating “a second death toll throughout the

developing world.” One recent estimate suggested that a nuclear attack in an urban area would cause a global recession , cutting global G ross D omestic P roduct by some two percent, and pushing an additional 30 million people in the developing world into extreme poverty . Desperate dilemmas. In short, an act of nuclear

terrorism could rip the heart out of a major city, and cause ripple effects throughout the world. The government of the country attacked would face desperate decisions: How to help the city attacked? How to prevent further attacks? How to respond or retaliate?

Terrorists —either those who committed the attack or others— would probably claim they had more bombs already hidden in other cities (whether they did or not), and threaten to detonate them unless their demands were met. The fear that this might be true could lead people to flee major cities in a large-scale, uncontrolled evacuation . There is very little ability to support the population of major cities in the surrounding countryside. The potential for widespread havoc and economic chaos is very real. If the detonation took place in the capital of the nation attacked, much of the government might be destroyed . A bomb in Washington, D.C., for example, might kill the President, the

Vice President, and many of the members of Congress and the Supreme Court. (Having some plausible national leader survive is a key reason why one cabinet member is always elsewhere on the night of the State of the Union address.) Elaborate, classified plans for “continuity of government” have already been drawn up in a number of countries, but the potential for chaos and confusion—if almost all of a country’s top leaders were killed—would still be enormous. Who, for example, could address the public on what the government would do, and what the public should do, to respond? Could anyone honestly assure the public there would be no further attacks? If they did, who would believe them? In the United States, given the practical impossibility of passing major legislation with Congress in ruins and most of its members dead or seriously injured, some have argued for passing legislation in advance giving the government emergency powers to act—and creating procedures, for example, for legitimately replacing most of the House of Representatives. But to date, no such legislative preparations have been made. In what would inevitably be a desperate effort to prevent further attacks, traditional standards of civil liberties might be jettisoned, at least for a time—particularly when people realized

that the fuel for the bomb that had done such damage would easily have fit in a suitcase. Old rules limiting search and surveillance could be among the first to go. The government might well impose martial law as it sought to control the situation, hunt for the perpetrators, and find any additional weapons or nuclear materials they might have. Even the far smaller attacks of 9/11 saw the US government authorizing torture of prisoners and mass electronic surveillance. And what standards of international order and law would still hold sway? The country attacked might well lash out militarily at whatever countries it thought might bear a portion of responsibility . (A terrifying description of the kinds of discussions that might occur appeared in Brian Jenkins’ book, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?) With the nuclear threshold already crossed in this scenario—at least by terrorists—it is conceivable that some of the resulting conflicts might escalate to nuclear use. International politics could become more brutish and violent, with powerful states taking unilateral action, by force if necessary, in

an effort to ensure their security. After 9/11, the United States led the invasions of two sovereign nations, in wars that have since cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, while plunging a region into chaos. Would the reaction after a far more devastating nuclear attack be any less? In particular, the idea that each state can decide for itself how much security to provide for nuclear weapons and their essential ingredients would likely be seen as totally unacceptable following such an attack. Powerful states

would likely demand that others surrender their nuclear material or accept foreign troops (or other imposed security measures) to guard it. That could well be the first step toward a more profound transformation of the international system. After such a catastrophe, major powers may feel compelled to more freely engage in preventive war, seizing territories they worry might otherwise be terrorist safe havens , and taking other steps they see as brutal but necessary to preserve their security. For this reason, foreign policy analyst Stephen Krasner has argued that “ conventional rules of sovereignty would be abandoned overnight .” Confidence in both the national security institutions of the country attacked and international institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, which had so manifestly failed to prevent the devastation, might erode . The effect on nuclear weapons policies is hard to predict: One can imagine new nuclear terror driving a new push for nuclear disarmament, but one could also imagine states feeling more

certain than ever before that they needed nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are the hammer of US imperialism Gerson 07 (Dr. Joseph Gerson, AFSC’s disarmament coordinator, director of programs in New England, and as director of the Peace and Economic Security Program, received his PhD in Politics and International Security Studies from the Union Institute and

College, 2007. “Deadly Connections: Empire and Nuclear Weapons.” Chapter 1 from Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World. https://epfwny.org/Convention/GersonChap1web.pdf)

EMPIRE AND TABOO In the last years of the Cold War, the historian Howard Zinn paid homage to George Orwell's insight that governments work to control the past in order to control the present and the future. He explained that "[I]f the American people are ... not given the information about the history of American intervention in the world, it is as if we were all born yesterday ... the president's speech on TV becomes the only fresh bit of information we have, and ... if he says 'Ah, we're in danger in the Caribbean, the Russians are threatening us here and there' without a sense of history you believe that." 11 Without an understanding of US history, especially the growth and development of

its empire, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Washington's subsequent practice of nuclear terrorism are incomprehensible. In fact , the US nuclear arsenal has been the "big stick" used by three generations of leaders to enforce US global dominance. Although many US Americans are subconsciously aware of the empire, which reached its zenith in the last years of the twentieth century, few acknowledge its existence. While most US Americans are ignorant of their nation's imperial history, it is widely understood in capitals and barrios around the world. Chandra Muzzafar, the renowned Malaysian political and religious scholar, described the US Empire and how it works in an open letter addressed to the heads of state gathered in Indonesia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. The 1955 Conference which launched the Non-Aligned Movement flailed colonialism and neocolonialism, and Muzaffar's 2005 letter chastised contemporary leaders' complicity with the US Empire, which he described in the following terms: global hegemony of the powerful is, perhaps, even more real today than it was in the past . The starkest manifestation of this is ... Washington's military hegemony. With 800 military

bases that gird the globe and a military dominance that stretches from the inner depths of the ocean to the outer reaches of space, how many other nations on earth argue that [they are] truly independent

and sovereign in the face of such formidable fire power? While its military might is the fulcrum of its global hegemony, Washington also seeks to maintain its dominance in other spheres. In international politics ... a government that challenges, even obliquely, a decision which is at the heart of Washington's foreign policy is bound to incur the wrath of the world's sole superpower. ... Washington is not adverse to subverting any economic move at the regional or international level which it perceives as inimical to the neo-liberal capitalist global structure that it helms. Through the information it provides and the entertainment it promotes, the US has also popularized a global culture which threatens to marginalize other value systems and worldviews .... While Washington is at the apex of this hegemonic global power structure, other capitals from London and Tel Aviv and Tokyo and Canberra are integral to it ... 12 Although Professor Muzaffar's analysis is consistent with thinking in the elite Council on Foreign Relations and with many neoconservatives who populated the second Bush presidency, it is not what most US Americans have in mind when they pledge allegiance to the flag or sing the national anthem at the beginning of the school day or at the start of sporting events. Why this disjunction? The sophisticated system of US censorship, selfdeception, conscious and unconscious national chauvinism, and insecurities within the media and academia have combined with the dishonesty of many politicians to make it difficult for US Americans to think freely or to see reality as it is experienced by others. Few are aware that the US today is more empire than democracy, or that since 1945 successive governments have prepared and

threatened nuclear attacks to expand and maintain the empire . 13 For nearly a century, until US neoconservatives began using the words "imperialism" and "empire" to describe the US project, these terms were 16 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 17

taboo in scholarly and political discourse, and in "polite circles." To use them resulted in marginalization and in many cases the loss of livelihood. This national self-deception, from the invasions of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, through World War II, Vietnam, and the invasions of Iraq, has made it difficult for most US Americans to understand their country's role in the world or the terrorism on which US global power and privilege are based. An intriguing aspect of elite and popular imperial denial is the fact that for years, in schools across the country, young people have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that as Rome was to Athens, so the US is to the British Empire. Left unstated is the reality that, as Zinn has written, "[w]hat the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad ... An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad."14 Recall that it was "democratic" Athens' insistence on maintaining its empire that resulted in the Peloponnesian War and Athens' subsequent decline. 15 For a century, many euphemisms were used to enforce this dual thinking and to cope with the taboo. As World War II drew to a close, the Council on Foreign Relations planned for the management of "The Grand Area.,,16 Throughout the Cold War, the terms "the free world" and "US sphere of influence" were used to refer to the US dominion. Late in the Cold War, when he found it necessary to refocus the thinking of the US foreign policy establishment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the founding Director of the Trilateral Commission and President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, was among the few in the US establishment to ignore the proscription. He began his article "America's New Geostrategy," in the journal Foreign Affairs, with the words: "The rumors of America's imminent imperial decline are somewhat premature."l? Scholars, including Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, Howard Zinn and others who named and analyzed the history of US Empire, have been recognized for their unique courage as well as for their exceptional scholarship. Not until the second Bush presidency, when Washington adopted the language of unilateralism and dispatched its legions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to consolidate US control over the world's oil supplies, did influential neoconservatives and liberals acknowledge their endorsement of the US imperial project. 18 Doing so earlier would have impeded popular mobilization in the first decades of the postcolonial era, and it would have undermined support for US foreign and military policies throughout the Third World and in Europe. However, as Niall Ferguson and others have argued, in the post-Cold War era, to preserve the empire it became necessary to affirm its existence and to draw DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS explicitly on the lessons and precedents of previous empires. In one of the first forays into normalizing the post-Cold War imperial discourse, Walter Russell Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, taught that the US was simply one of a long line of great nations and empires that "have been shining and stinking since the start of recorded history."19 From Iraq to Singapore and from the Bahamas to Diego Garcia, much of Pax Americana has been built on the ruins of Pax Britannica. Like the British, US governments "have excelled in discovering reasons that obligated them to conquer the world.,,2o This exceptional US destiny has been articulated across two centuries in the Monroe, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Bush Doctrines. It has been manifested through repeated wars and in more than 200 military "interventions," from Tangiers to Tokyo.21 Unlike the English, who were taught to value empire and were inspired to fight to maintain the imperium because, among other things, it kept down the price of tea,22 the US public was long insulated from the reality that the US Empire exists to serve the elite. In addition to ensuring profits by means of securing privileged access to other nations' raw materials, labor, markets, and technologies, empire has been seen as a way to maintain "social peace" within the country by providing jobs and thus ensuring economic security.23 The few who are still aware of the Lend-Lease Agreement with Britain or the wartime Anglo-American alliance, usually fail to note that Britain was saved from Nazi Germany by the US at the expense of its global empire. Similarly, few in the US know that the 1941-45 war against Japan grew out of two centuries of imperial competition for influence and control in China. That Chinese political culture continues to be profoundly influenced by the sufferings wrought in the course of this imperial history is shocking information for most US Americans. Amidst the denial, the US "national security" elite has presided over and led a complex imperial system, the broad outlines of which most literate US Americans have unconsciously internalized. As Mead explained in his seminal work Mortal Splendor, a first tier of nations has long shared the benefits and costs of Pax Americana. These 'junior partners" included Japan, the other G-7 nations, and Western European liberal democracies whose "opinions on important issues [were] usually solicited-if not always deferred to." A second tier of nations have been those "whose economic and political situations hover[ed] between first- and third-tier conditions": for example, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Korea, Greece, and Brazil. They have "enjoy[ed] much less freedom from external intervention in their domestic affairs" and were "more vulnerable to economic coercion" by Washington and by first-tier nations. At the bottom of the imperial pyramid are the Third and Fourth World nations of the Global South, countries such as El Salvador, 18 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 19 East Timor, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt, and Kuwait. They have had "minimal representation in the councils of empire," and their "national governments in many cases are solely the representatives of foreign powers."24 In addition to functioning on state-to-state levels, the system has been reinforced by complex international institutions including the United Nations, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, and more recently by the World Trade Organization. One of the central questions of the twenty-first century is what capitalist China's relationship to this system will be. While British imperial cultural influences and political models predominated in shaping the US imperial state and culture, it has been influenced by other forces. Though twice defeated in world wars, Prussian military culture found a host on the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean. To defeat Germany, US political culture, its military, and its society were transformed in ways that mimicked German models, including the creation of the military-industrial complex. Even in the early years of the Cold War, outgoing President Eisenhower found the forces of this complex so supversive of democracy that he warned the country about its "total influence ... in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal Government."25 The assumption of US superiority, righteousness, and munificence which are essential to a culture of dominance and empire are deeply ingrained. For decades, World War II was incessantly relived and mythologized on television and cinema screens in documentaries, dramas, and comedies. For baby-boomers, Sunday television began and ended with lessons and propaganda about US military prowess. The Army's The Big Picture greeted children at sunrise and the Navy's Victory at Sea was screened before bedtime. Recasting the war in the then still strong colonial settler mentality, the image of the US as the reluctant

but always successful warrior-nation came to movie theaters as Shane and High Noon, and was omnipresent as televised cowboy westerns. The message was clear: use of deadly force was as American as apple pie. Trend-setting Broadway musicals also provided archetypes through which US Americans came to understand themselves and their places in the world. Like the English and Germans before them, "Americans" were to see themselves as a superior people, with the

responsibility to refashion the world in their image, and when necessary to serve as the "world's policeman." Thus, in The King and T, our white English cousins introduced an Asian monarch to modernity. In South Pacific, US Americans were an anti-racist and civilizing force in a land where "Bloody Mary's chewing beetlenuts." And in Camelot, the play appropriated by the Kennedys to market themselves, US Americans were encouraged to dream what it would be like "If I Ruled the World." This megalomaniacal fantasy, later institutionalized as the post-Cold War doctrines of the "New World Order," DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS "full spectrum dominance," and "unilateralism" was so consistent with the times that it was recorded by many of the nation's leading crooners.26 The course of empire has its costs , or as Mead reminded readers, its stench.

People are killed , often brutally, and in great numbers . Racism is reinforced, and hatreds-sometimes enduring for generations or centuries-are created. Even the most powerful economies can be devastated and distorted in the course of preparing for and fighting endless wars. Democratic values, truth, and individual freedoms are the inevitable first casualties of war and empire. The war in Vietnam and secret bombing of Cambodia led inevitably to the constitutional crisis called "Watergate.'>27 A generation later, the shame of systematic torture in the "gulag" extending from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan was an unavoidable consequence of wars waged in alliances with warlords, monarchs, and dictators. Despite its rhetoric of freedom, US wars of intervention, its subversion of foreign governments, and its

support for military, dictatorial, and authoritarian regimes have been a function of US policy decisions. Two years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Kennan, author of the Cold War "containment doctrine," described the framework and goals of the US Empire in a 1948 TOP SECRET memorandum while serving as the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Department: We have

about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population .... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity .... We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction .... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.28 Half a century later, after Western Europe and Japan had recovered from wartime devastation, President Clinton echoed Kennan when he stated that "We have four percent of the world's population, and we want to keep 22 percent of the world's wealth.',29 This helps to explain why the first major commitment Clinton made on assuming the presidency was his promise not to cut the military's budget, despite the end of the Cold War. As demonstrated in Clinton's "divide-and-rule" approach to Europe and the publicly announced inspiration taken by senior figures in the second Bush administration from late nineteenth-century founders of the US Empire,30 the end of the Cold War marked a return to earlier imperial patterns. From Cuba 20 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 21 to China, US presidents again explained foreign and military policies in terms of access to markets, human rights, and the advance of civilization-much as their predecessors had done a century earlier. Once again, as the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote early in the twentieth century, there was "fighting in the Balkans."31 'US Marines returned to Haiti in the name of "democracy," while the CIA connived to restore oil-rich Venezuela to its "proper" role as a prize US estate. While turning a blind eye to client dictators and warlords, so-called "humanitarian" military interventions in Haiti, Kosovo, and East Timor served to expand or maintain US influence and to provide political legitimacy for the military establishment and its budget. Oil, however, remained "the prize." As oil-rich nations approached peak production and global demands for oil soared, the rhetoric of democracy was again used to mobilize the US Ame~can people for war and to mismanage generational political transitions in strategically

important Middle East nations. In the midst of this complex set of diplomacy and wars, Washington's ultimate enforcer remained "the bomb." A SUCCESSION OF IMPERIAL DOCTRINES As the end of the Cold War began to be anticipated, the Reagan administration prepared the way for the new era with a report and doctrine titled Discriminate Deterrence. Developed by the Pentagon's bipartisan Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, whose members included leading figures in the establishment-Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, General

Andrew Goodpaster, General John Vessey, Samuel Huntington, and others-the report called for a global strategy to ensure that the US remained the dominant global power for "the long term.,,32 The Commission's diagnosis and prescriptions were clear: Japan and Western Europe were beginning to challenge US global hegemony.33 The power of US "conventional" weapons was declining relative to several increasingly well-armed Third World nations, and as many as 40 countries could become nuclear weapons powers by the year 2010. To remain the world's dominant power,the US should no longer attempt to control developments in every part of the world. Instead, it recommended that US power and resources focus on three regions: the Persian Gulf (to control the world's oil supplies and the national economies dependent on that oil), the Mediterranean (to control Europe and the Middle East), and the Pacific Ocean (to control Japan and other emerging Asian-Pacific economies). As Washington faced difficult budget choices, the. Commission recommended that the Pentagon give priority to modernizing its nuclear arsenal, to increasing air- and sea-lift capabilities for rapid military intervention, and to investing in high-tech weaponry.34 DEADLY CONNECTIONS; EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS The "vision" for the 1990-91 "Desert Storm" war fought to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait and to create what Bush called a "New World Order" for the post-Cold War era was rooted in Discriminate Deterrence, but it also reflected a new docuine that was not articulated until after the war. Preparations for the war and the US assault were designed to achieve multiple goals: to reassert US control over Middle East oil reserves (the ')ugular vein" of global capitalism), to discipline US allies and reaffirm US military alliances, and to terrorize the world's nations in a "demonstration war." These objectives went well beyond Discriminate Deterrence's prescriptions. Under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Cheney and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz, a new doctrine was developed, the initial draft of which was leaked to the press shortly after the "Desert Storm" war. This "Defense Policy Guidance" bluntly described the Pentagon's dangerous and ambitious commitments: "Our first objective," it read, "is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival." Although the doctrine named North Korea as the focus of concerns in Asia, this was a euphemism for containing China's rising power. In the Asia-Pacific region, the report read, "we must maintain our status as a military power of the first magnitude."35 China was not explicitly named as a strategic competitor because doing so could have crystallized the emerging US-Chinese competition before Washington was prepared to do so. The Clinton years were less "a bridge to the twenty-first century" than the span between the two Bush presidencies. Although the Cheney-Wolfowitz' strategy document was ostensibly withdrawn after being leaked, it was never officially rescinded. In Asia, the Clinton administration worked to integrate China into the US-Japanese-dominated system through often conflicting commitments to diplomatic and economic engagement and military threats. To preserve US influence in Europe, Clinton and his senior advisors focused on providing new rationales for NATO to legitimize the continued presence of US forces-including nuclear weapons-across the continent. By working to expand both NATO and the European Union, it laid the foundation for playing what Donald Rumsfeld would later call "New Europe" against the "Old." In its final year, the Clinton Pentagon came up with a new slogan for an old ambition: "full spectrum dominance." In the traditions of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan, the new doctrine of escalation dominance spelled out the commitment to achieve and maintain the ability to dominate any nation, at any time, at any level of power-including firststrike nuclear attack. The Bush II-Cheney administration that followed brought new intensity to "full spectrum dominance." It also introduced a radically different, and di,sastrous, vision of how to run the empire. Its National Security 22 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 23 Statement echoed Francis Fukuyama's boast that the end of the Cold War marked the "end of history." The Statement declared that the US political and economic systems were the single model for prosperity. US military power so far exceeded that of any potential rival that the administration believed it could impose what Cheney termed "the arrangement for the twenty-first century."36 Instead of soliciting the opinions and support of "second-tier" nations, the Bush Doctrine stated that nations were "either for us or against us." Those who were "against us" would have to anticipate the consequences of US-enforced diplomatic and economic isolation and the devastations of US unilateral "shock and awe" military attacks and extended occupations. Going beyond Bush I's "New World Order," the Strategy Statement implicitly threatened both China and the European Union. Preemptive attacks, the doctrine stated, were warranted to prevent the emergence of potential regional or global rivals. Such rivals need not attack or threaten the US with attack to be destroyed. This openly articulated commitment to aggression was unprecedented in US history. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, most people in the US and elsewhere believed that the danger of nuclear war had been contained, if not completely eliminated. Unfortunately, US leaders continued to honor Roosevelt's admonition about the importance of carrying a "big stick." Despite the loss of the Soviet enemy and the International Court of Justice's ruling on the illegality of nuclear war, not to mention nuclear weapons abolition campaigns launched by retired senior US military officers and traditional peace movements, post-Cold War US governments continued to rely on implicit and explicit threats of nuclear attack to reinforce US power and ambitions. True, Bush Sr.'s 1991 decision to reduce the dangers of nuclear war by ordering redeployment of most tactical nuclear weapons to bases in the US, to which President Mikhail Gorbachev responded with reciprocal orders, did decrease the danger of nuclear war. And those who were led to believe that he supported a fissile material cut-off treaty also found it a source ofhope.37 These initiatives, however, were not the full picture. The "Desert Storm" victory over Iraq was made possible in part by the US nuclear terrorism that preceded it. A series of nuclear threats were communicated, orally and in writing, to Saddam Hussein and his foreign minister by President Bush, Vice-President Dan Quayle, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and UK Prime Minister John Major,38 and an estimated 700-1,000 nuclear weapons were deployed to the countries and seas surrounding Iraq. In a chilling example of how deeply nuclear war-fighting has been integrated into day-to-day military planning, General Norman Schwarzkopf forwarded a proposal for the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iraqi targets to the Pentagon for approvaL39 DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS With the deterioration of the Russian nuclear arsenal and its related infrastructure, President Clinton pressed the US

nuclear advantage. In response to the International Court of Justice's consideration of the legality of the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons and calls by retired generals and admirals to abolish nuclt~ar weapons, Clinton informed the world that nuclear weapons would remain "the cornerstone" of US policy. With this commitment, reinforced by his political insecurities, the Clinton administration backed away from efforts to negotiate a fissile material cutoff treaty, and the administration initiated no significant arms reduction negotiations. Throughout the Clinton era, 15,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons

remained on alert or were stockpiled for possible use.40 More dangerous was the Clinton administration's initial approach to North Korea, which was widely believed to have developed an undeclared arsenal of between two and four atomic bombs. Although North Korean missiles could not reach the US, South Korea and Japan were within range. Not comprehending that an impoverished but proud nation might not jump immediately to the US tune, Clinton, in 1994, continued the tradition of threatening North Korea with nuclear attack, and in doing so strayed perilously close to a nuclear cataclysm. Despite the apparently radical differences between Bush I's and Clinton's multilateralist approaches and Bush II's arrogant unilateralism, there was considerable continuity in nuclear doctrines. Counterproliferation policy was inaugurated as US policy in the Clinton Nuclear Posture Review, laying the foundation for Bush II's Strategic Proliferation Security Tnitiative, for the Bush-Cheney assault on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and for Bush II era nuclear threats against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The Clinton administration's and Congressional Democrats' support for "missile defense" research and development made possible Bush II's deployments of what Chinese officials warned was a shield to complement the Pentagon's first-strike nuclear swords. The Bush-Cheney administration's passion for and commitment to preparing and threatening first-strike nuclear wars were different and reminiscent of the first years of the Reagan presidency a generation earlier. To reinforce the imposition of Vice-President Cheney's "arrangement for the twenty-first century," the pre-inaugural recommendations of the neoconservative Project for the Twenty-First Century were rapidly transformed into national policy. In its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the Bush II administration reiterated its commitment to first-strike nuclear war-fighting, named seven nations as primary nuclear targets, and urged funding for the development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. It mandated accelerated preparations at the Nevada test site to ensure that new weapons and stockpiled warheads could reliably inflict nuclear holocausts in the future. 24 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 25 It also pressed expansion of the nuclear weapons laboratories to design and develop a new generation of nuclear weapons to reinforce US nuclear dominance through most of the twenty-first century. Although there were major differences between father and son, Bush Jr. followed in his father's tradition in at least one regard. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, Iraq was again threatened with nuclear attack.41 As in the past, these post-Cold War nuclear policies, preparations, and threats went largely unnoticed and unremarked. Instead, US nuclear consciousness was molded by alarms about "loose nukes" and the nuclear ambitions of "rogue" regimes. Some of these fears were legitimate. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, a major concern was that Ukraine's nuclear arsenal, inherited from the USSR, made it the world's third most powerful nuclear power. This, it was feared, would "force" Germany to become a nuclear state. India and Pakistan gate-crashed the nuclear club, and were briefly declared outlaw nations for refusing to surrender their newly demonstrated nuclear arsenals. On Russia's southern flanks, Ukraine and Kazakhstan each had more nuclear weapons than France, Britain, China, Pakistan, India, and Israel combined. North Korea did indeed have a nuclear weapons program, and it was widely feared that if Pyongyang demonstrated its nuclear capabilities, Japan, South Korea, and possibly Taiwan would follow. As is now well known, other fears were manufactured and manipulated to provide political cover and to mobllize US Americans for "regime change" wars in oil-rich nations. In a disinformation campaign that will undermine US credibility for decades to come, Bush II and his senior advisors mobilized the US and its allies for the invasion of Iraq with a series of lies about what proved to be Baghdad's nonexistent nuclear weapons program and an illusory stockpile of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Cheney announced that he was "convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon," and that "[t]he risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action." Condoleezza Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld testified that Saddam Hussein's "regime is determined to acquire the means to strike the U.S., its friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction." Iraq, he said, was "seeking nuclear weapons" and had "designs for at least two different nuclear devices." Bush repeated the British disinformation that Saddam Hussein could order an attack with weapons of mass destruction "within as few as forty-five minutes."42 With additional fears that weapons-grade plutonium was being smuggled from Russia through Germany and other countries, and with al-Qaeda seeking nuclear capabilities, leading Republicans and Democrats agreed that the greatest danger facing the US was the possibility of "terrorists ... gaining weapons of mass murder."43 DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS Obscured by this hysteria and misinformation was the fact that the US had become, as the New York Times editorialized, the "nuclear rogue" driving nuclear weapons proliferation, and that, as the Natural Resources Defense Council reported, the US was "faking

nuclear restraint.,,44 Missing from all but a few reports and editorials was the understanding that the Bush administration was "clear that nuclear weapons will remain the cornerstone of U.S. military power for the next fifty years."45 MYTHS OF NUCLEAR INNOCENCE AND THE

PRACTICE OF NUCLEAR TERRORISM For the vast majority of US Americans, nuclear weapons and nuclear war are distant abstractions , last used, we are repeatedly told, far away and long ago to win the war against Japan. Nuclear weapons are widely believed to have contained the Soviet Union. And, although most US Americans believe that the world would be more secure if no nation possessed nuclear weapons,46 the common belief is that as long as the "good guys" have the biggest, best, and most nuclear weapons, there is little in the nuclear realm to worry about. The "Mandarins of Power,"47 leading scholars who implicitly or explicitly serve the empire, have learned which

questions not to ask and bear considerable responsibility for this innocence and ignorance. With few notable exceptions,48 US nuclear weapons scholarship is marked by a fascination with the scientists who won the race to build the first atomic and hydrogen bombs; with so-called "deterrence" theory and the dynamics of the US-Soviet nuclear arms race; and in recent years with the dangers of "loose nukes." Most of the histories of the Manhattan Project and biographies of its Promethean priesthood (1. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest O. Lawrence, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and others) are framed in unconscious

patriotism, influenced by wartime propaganda, by assumptions about the legitimacy' of revenge, and by the lies spun by those most closely associated with the decision to eliminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The continuing debates about Oppenheimer's early flirtations with Depression-era Marxism and other scientists' collaborations with Senator Joe McCarthy often mask continuing and often covert debates about arms control, nuclear dominance, and abolition. Similarly, accounts of scientists' debates over whether the Japanese should have been warned before the bombings were ordered, whether a demonstration A-bombing of an atoll would have sufficed to win Japan's surrender, and how to control the bomb after the war reflect contention over the moral rectitude of the US. The most disturbing information about the dawn of the nuclear age has been consigned to an Orwellian memory hole. Absent are Truman's lies to 26 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB 27 himself and to others that the A-bombs would be used "so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children,"49 that the A-bombs were dropped "to save as many American lives as possible,"5o and that they were inflicted to "spare the Japanese people from utter destruction."51 Missing are the accounts of Japanese elite and governmental efforts to negotiate surrender prior to the A-bombings on the terms accepted by Truman after the atomic bombings. Finally, political histories of the Manhattan Project and of subsequent US nuclear war policies written within a US frame of reference devote scant attention to the human consequences of the Project's bombs: what actually happened to individuals and their families represented in the abstracted numbers: 40,000, 70,000, 100,000,21 O,OOO-and the survivors scarred physically

and mentally for life. Presented as necessary to "end the war," the mythology about the heroism of the scientists and the necessity of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings serve to legitimize continued preparations for nuclear war and thus to preserve US global dominance. A serious political motive lay behind the Air Force's campaign to sterilize the Smithsonian Museum's 50th anniversary commemoration

of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings and the subsequent "Enola Gay exhibit" at the Air and Space Museum in 2003. Had the museum included information about Admiral Leahy's and General Eisenhower's charges that "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing,"52 about Japanese efforts to surrender, and photographs of the ravaged bodies of Sumiteru Taniguchi and other Hibakusha, the legitimacy of the first atomic bombings would have been seriously undermined. This in turn would have raised yet more probing questions about the legitimacy of the "cornerstone" of subsequent US foreign and military policies. Einstein wrote that "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." This certainly describes what has passed for mainstream "scholarship" on post-Nagasaki US use of its nuclear arsenal. Until the post-Cold War era's focus on "loose nukes" and the Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs, most US nuclear weapons-related literature concentrated on the US-Soviet confrontation across divided Europe. For decades, the vast asymmetries of US and Soviet power were ignored.53 Instead, we were urged to "think the unthinkable" with Herman Kahn; to be educated about nuclear weapons and foreign policy by Henry Kissinger; to learn to live with nuclear weapons along with Albert Camesale and Samuel Huntington; to stem the tide with Glenn Seaborg; to decide with Joseph Nye whether we were nuclear hawks, doves, or owls; and to reduce-but not remove-the nuclear danger with McGeorge Bundy and Admiral Crowe. DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS This literature vastly exaggerated the deterrent roles of the US nuclear arsenal

while understating its offensive first-strike raison d'erre. As a result, most students and many scholars remain ignorant about the imperial purposes and functions of Washington's nuclear arsenals .54 Kept in the dark about the history of US preparations and threats to initiate nuclear wars, US citizens cannot fully engage in constitutional democracy or fulfill their unique role in preventing nuclear war, thus helping to ensure humanity's survival. TERRORISM NOT DETERRENCE It has long been commonly believed that deteITence is the primary role of the US nuclear arsenal. The truth is that the US nuclear arsenal has been at least as essential to maintaining the US Empire as it has been to popular conceptions of "deteITence." Most people properly understand deteITence as preventing nuclear attack by threatening a cataclysmic, nation-destroying, second-strike attack against the source of a nuclear attack on the US. But, in 2005, the Pentagon informed the world that this was not its understanding. Its unofficial Doctrinefor Joint Nuclear Operations dictated that "the central focus of deterrence is for one nation to exert such influence over a potential adversary's decision process that the potential adversary makes a deliberate choice to refrain from a COA [course of action]."55 In the 1950s and early 1960s this meant dictating the parameters of Soviet and Chinese support for Vietnam. Four decades later, consistent with the Bush Doctrine, it included preventing the emergence of Jivals to US regional and global dominance. With the exception of the relative US--Soviet nuclear parity from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the US has enjoyed a "dramatic imbalance of [ nuclear ] power ,"56 which it

has used to expand and to maintain its "Grand Area ." Much of the historical record remains hidden in classified government files, but the memoirs of presidents and their aides, the public record, and scholarly research reveal the damning and little explored history of US nuclear terrorism and extortion. The low points of this history are many: Truman's 1946 threat to annihilate Moscow if the Soviet Union failed to withdraw immediately from Azerbaijan province in northern Iran; Eisenhower's repeated nuclear threats during crises in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America; the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson's and Nixon's preparations and threats to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam and during Middle East wars; and the "Carter Doctrine," which threatened the use of "any means necessary" to retain control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. This history reveals that post-Cold War nuclear threats by the two Presidents Bush and Clinton reflected more continuity than change. Military EMPIRE AND THE BOMB DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS 29 28 doctrines changed from Eisenhower's "massive retaliation" to Kennedy's "flexible response," and from the Nixon and Carter Doctrines to "full spectrum dominance" and the Clinton and Bush Nuclear Posture Reviews, but the willingness to practice nuclear terrorism remained a constant. Before the Doctrinefor Joint Nuclear

Operations illuminated the arsenal's roles in enforcing dominance rather than deterrence, scholars documented that the Pentagon and its political allies had long exaggerated the Soviet nuclear threat to justify increased military spending and the acquisition of new weapons systems. They also demonstrated that Cold War presidents often joined in the charade to cover their anti-communist political flanks or to reduce the pressures they faced to launch disastrous foreign military interventions. Contrary to what the public was led to believe, Eisenhower knew that "If we were to release our nuclear stockpile on the Soviet Union, the main danger would arise not from retaliation but from fallout in the earth's atmosphere." Later, when the US had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, General David C. Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that mutual assured destruction (MAD) was not US policy, saying, "I think it is a very dangerous strategy. It is not the strategy that we are implementing today within the military ... I do not subscribe to the idea that we ever had it as our basic strategy."57 The US nuclear arsenal has, of course, served "deterrent" functions since the first Soviet nuclear explosion in 1949, including nuclear threats to ensure that Moscow respected the post-World War II

division of Europe. Deterrence has been a greater concern for lesser powers which have seen obtaining nuclear arsenals as a means of preventing possible attacks by greater nuclear powers . The Soviet Union built its nuclear arsenal to deter possible nuclear attacks by the US and Britain. China developed its arsenal to deter both the US and the Soviet Union (now Russia). While threatening Pakistan, India's nuclear program was primarily designed to counter the potential threat from China. And Pakistan's arsenal, developed with Chinese assistance, was built to deter India. France and Israel had slightly different motivations. Theforce defrappe reasserted the French claim to be a major power in the postcolonial era and provided the ultimate coin of postmodem sovereignty. Israel joined the club to augment its conventional military strength. And, in the late 1990s and in the first years of the twentyfirst century, both North Korea and Iran pursued their nuclear programs to insulate their nations from US (and in the case of Iran, Israeli) threats. The 1961 "Berlin Crisis" was long understood to be a textbook case of Cold War deterrence. The confrontation met the criteria of a US-Soviet clash in the heart of Europe. In fact, the resolution of the crisis was not a function of MAD, but a reflection of the radical asymmetry of nuclear power. It was illustrated by the readiness of the US to use nuclear threats to reinforce its power and influence by trumping what was a conventional Soviet military threat. Responding to growing West German economic vitality and political strength and to US nuclear weapons deployments in Germany, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded that a separate peace treaty be negotiated with East Germany. This implicitly threatened West Berlin's status as a divided city and Western access to the city which was, functionally, an island within East Germany. Kennedy countered with an uncompromising speech to communicate his "unalter?ble determination ... to maintain its position and rights in West Berlin."s8 While not a function of classical "nuclear deterrence," Khrushchev was deterred from following through on his demands. Like Kennedy, Khrushchev was well aware that the US could launch a "disarming first strike" against Soviet nuclear forces, and that the Pentagon knew where to find the Soviet Union's missile sites and could "catch them all on the ground." As Roger Hilsman, Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, later reported, "the whole Soviet ICBM [inter continental ballistic missile] system was ... obsolescent,"59 and its slow bomber fleet was no competition for the US Air Force. Being "rational actors," the Kremlin knew its limits and backed down in the face of Washington's overwhelming military power. Both the Kremlin and the Washington establishment took the wrong lessons from the debacle. A year later they faced off again in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was sparked in part by the US effort to overthrow Fidel Castro, but more by Khrushchev's desperate effort to equalize the imbalance of terror. With only four unreliable ICBMs and antiquated fleets of bombers and submarines, Khrushchev was in pursuit of a shortcut to nuclear parity and a deterrent force by secretly attempting to deploy intermediate range missiles in Cuba, well within striking range of the US. To preserve its nuclear dominance, to reinforce the Monroe Doctrine principle that Latin America lies within the US "sphere of interest," and to demonstrate that the US had the right to deploy missiles on the Soviet border, while the Soviet Union could not reciprocate; Kennedy and most senior advisors were willing to gamble with nuclear catastrophe. As Noam Chomsky has since reflected, there may not have been such another "moment of madness and lunacy in human history" as when Kennedy and his most senior advisors escalated the crisis, which they believed carried the probability of between a third and a half that the US would initiate nuclear war.6O By the mid-1970s, with the growth of the Soviet economy and after two decades devoted to building missile, submarine, and bomber forces needed to ensure the ability to launch devastating second-strike retaliatory attack, the Soviets achieved relative nuclear parity and the ability to inflict MAD. Yet,

as General Jones testified, MAD was not US policy. The Nixon 30 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS 31 administration pressed development ofTrident, MX, cruise, and Pershing II missile systems to restore US nuclear superiority.61 Almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, despite Washington's vast nuclear superiority, MAD still defines the parameters of US-Russian relations. China possesses a "minimum deterrent force" capable of annihilating Japan and of threatening death and destruction in the western US. Worse, with an estimated 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons on alert at any given moment,62 miscalculations by political leaders or simple accidents could eliminate life

on earth. With the end of the Cold War, new rationales have been needed to maintain and modernize the US nuclear arsenal. With the demise of the "Soviet threat," deterrence lost what little legitimizing power it had . Socialized to understand the dangers of nuclear war exclusively in terms of US-Soviet confrontation, US political leaders, arms control advocates, and many in traditional nuclear disarmament movements were disoriented. Anxious to address a real but less immediate danger, Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike focused on so-called "loose nukes" in Russia's deteriorating arsenal that could be

looted by the Russian Mafia or other non-state terrorists, including revolutionary Chechens or al-Qaeda. However, the genocidal US nuclear arsenal and the threat of MAD did not address these potential dangers. Threatening to savage the innocent people ofWajiristan in northwest Pakistan was unlikely to staunch whatever nuclear ambitions Osama Bin Laden might have had. President Bush presented his rationale in his 2002 State of the Union address. Civilization, he asserted, was threatened by an " axis of evil ": Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. His answer to these ostensible threats was

counterproliferation, including the threat of nuclear attacks. Although Bush's rhetoric bolstered popular support for the planned invasion of Iraq and served the neo-fascist stratagem of ruling through manipulation offear and lies, there was no evidence that any of these nations posed a serious or immediate threat to US security. OVERCOMING GEOPOLITICAL OBSTACLES Why is Washington wedded to its practice of nuclear terrorism? The answer lies at the intersections of technology, empire, and geopolitics. At the height of the Cold War, President Reagan enjoyed referring to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire," but nuclear telTorism has played a greater .role in maintaining Washington's empire than Moscow's. The Russian Empire under tsars, commissars, and now presidents has been comparatively compact. Its furthest realms are relatively accessible to the intimidating power of Moscow's repressive apparatus and "conventional" military forces. The US Empire is different. It extends from Mexico to the Middle East and from Berlin to Bangkok, thus posing greater challenges to deploying overwhelming US "conventional" military might to the furthest reaches of

its empire. In the years following World War II, President Eisenhower explained that "It would be impossible for the U nited States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains around the world ... did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use them when necessary."63 Two decades later, General Alexander Haig, Nixon's Chief of Staff and Reagan's Secretary of State, defended continued US reliance on nuclear telTorism by explaining that: Those in the West who advocate the adoption of a "no first use" policy seldom go on to propose that the United States reintroduce the draft, triple the size of its armed forces and put its economy on wartime footing. Yet in the absence of such steps, a pledge of no first use effectively leaves the West nothing with which to counterbalance the Soviet conventional advantages and geopolitical position ...64 Chomsky framed it more critically: Our

strategic nuclear weapons system provide s us with a kind of umbrella within which we can carry out conventional actions, meaning aggression and subversion, without any concern that it will be impeded in any fashion Harold Brown, who was the Secretary of Defense under Carter said that this is the core of our security system. He said that with this system in place , our conventional forces become "meaningful instruments of military and political power." That means that under this umbrella of

strategic nuclear weapons ... we have succeeded in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help

protect people who we are determined to attack . So ... if we want to overthrow the government of Guatemala ... or send a Rapid Deployment Force into the Middle East , or if we want to back a military coup in Indonesia ... if we want to invade Vietnam ... we can do this without too much concern that we'll be detelTed because we have this intimidating power that will threaten anyone who might get in our way.65 This was the military, strategic, and technological environment that led Truman to threaten Moscow's destruction in 1946 and to rattle his nuclear saber against China and North Korea. This asymmetry of power gave Eisenhower the confidence to threaten nuclear attacks against China and Russia during Taiwan crises and Middle East wars. In other cases, 32 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS 33 US presidents directed nuclear threats against "third-tier" nations in the South. As military doctrines changed from Eisenhower's "new look" massive retaliation to Kennedy's "flexible response" and Clinton's "full spectrum dominance," there was continuity in Washington's reliance on first-strike nuclear attacks to maintain the empire . Thus, even as the danger of thermonuclear exchanges abated in the

wake of the Cold War, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found it necessary to move the hands of the publication's Doomsday clock closer to midnight.66 While warning about the dangers of "loose nukes," al-Qaeda, and the "axis of evil," the first three post-Cold War presidents maintained and modernized the massive US nuclear arsenal. They pressed the development, and ultimately the deployment, of more "usable" firststrike nuclear weapons systems, and they prepared and threatened nuclear attacks against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Russia, and China.67 TOTAL WAR AND THE "EVIL THING" This history of the use of nuclear terrorism to enforce global empire raises deeper and more troubling questions which are intimated but not fully explored in the chapters that follow. As in any society, altruism and compassion have been essential to the US experience and its culture. Well into the late twentieth century, democratic seeds planted in the country's Declaration ofIndependence and Constitution grew to become more inclusive of society as a whole. But, as the continuing societal scars of the genocide of Native Americans, of slavery, of the nineteenth-century US colonial conquests, and as the continued exploitation of many workers and disregard for the poor testify, other forces have also long been active in US political life. Beliefs in US exceptionalism, superiority, and its "Manifest Destiny" to dominate were integral to political culture long before Albert Einstein signed Leo Szilard's fateful warning to President Roosevelt. The high point of US democracy, the post-World War II victories of the civil rights movement, came as President Kennedy recklessly risked hundreds of millions of lives during the Cuban Missile Crisis

and as the Johnson administration crossed what it understood to be a nuclear Rubicon with its massive escalation of the US war against Vietnam.68 These dualities cannot be ignored, and they have been compounded by the embrace of nuclear terrorism as state and national policy . Near-absolute power has corrupted almost absolutely. The novelist E. L. Doctorow put it well when he wrote: We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945 . It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture-its logic, its faith, its vision.69 The US, as a state and as a

society, was hardly innocent at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the mobilizations for and the fighting of two "world wars" transformed the nation in fundamental ways. Some were beneficial, such as Washington's contributions to the end of formal colonialism, hard-fought victories for racial and gender equality,70 and the GI Bill, which permitted returning veterans to obtain higher educations. However, other forces were also at work. Tragically, the decisions to fight Germany and Japan by means of "total" war-the industrialization of war-fighting and ultimately the race to build and use the atomic bomb-profoundly influenced US culture. They created a society which had more in common with the Kaiser's Germany and Fascist Italy than has generally been recognized. This transformation had still earlier roots. The American Civil War (1861-65) is seen by many as the beginning of "total war": the mobilization of the entire society and the targeting of the full range of the enemy's resources, including its industry, civilian population, and even its environment, in order to prevail. The Gatling gun, introduced during the Civil War, marked a revolution in murderous firepower. And Sherman's merciless march through Georgia included the destruction of Atlanta. Internationally, "total war" began within weeks of Germany's 1914 invasion of the Low Countries when a Zeppelin bombed Antwerp and shattered the foundations of centuries of international law. Soon, Zeppelins were bombing London, instilling fear among the British. Germans were not solely responsible for total war European-style. Shortly before assuming command of French forces, Marshal Foch implored: "You must henceforth go to the limits to find the aim of war. Since the vanquished party now never yields before it has been deprived of all means of reply, what you have to aim at is the destruction ofthose very means of reply."71 The philosopher and novelist Hermann Hesse understood where this would lead, warning that "[i]f the war goes on," it would destroy Western civilization's Enlightenment foundations. 72 President Franklin D. Roosevelt's dramatic wartime transformation was starkly illustrative of what US adoption of total war strategy did to the nation as a whole. In 1939, horrified by the air war that had begun in Europe, he urged Europeans to cease aerial bombardments of civilians, writing: The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of hostilities ... sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity. 34 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS 35 If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings ... will lose their lives. I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.73 Within three years, General Doolittle's bombers rained death on Tokyo to raise US morale, and the president was fully committed to using nuclear weapons to win the war.74 Roosevelt was not a full partner in Churchill's fire bombings of German cities, and he protested the fire bombing of Dresden. But, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, Roosevelt presided over the fire bombing of every major Japanese city except historic Kyoto and the four cities set aside as possible A-bomb targets. In the last months of World War II and the early years of the Cold War, German and Japanese scientists and engineers were recruited to help develop the US nuclear, missile, and germ warfare programs. Incendiary and chemical weapon attacks were soon used to obliterate much of Korea and Indochina, with the Vietnamese civilian death toll approaching 3 million.75 US research and development of hydrogen bombs, some 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, was begun because "the Germans were probably doing it."76 And, for half a century, the US has deployed and repeatedly threatened attacks with its strategic nuclear weapons, each with the capacity to kill more people than were annihilated in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka. This, in turn, undermined the values, structure, and practice of US democracy.

Richard Falk has written that "The roots of first strike planning exist so deep as to suggest that even the posts of President and Secretary of Defense and Senator have become largely ornamental in relation to national security

policy. Throwing 'the rascals' out, accordingly becomes a much more formidable task ... " At a still deeper spiritual level, the embrace of total and nuclear war has institutionalized what Hannah Arendt described as the "banality of evil.'>77 Evil is "wickedness" and "moral depravity," uncompromising terms that describe the practice of nuclear terrorism. In 1945 many of the country's most senior military officials understood that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary and violated the rules of war. Knowing that Truman was aware of Emperor Hirohito's efforts to surrender, it is difficult not to be shocked by his warning immediately following the Hiroshima bombing that "We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city ... If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.,,78 Leo Szilard, who had started it all with "Einstein's" letter, understood that "had Germany used atomic bombs on two allied cities, those responsible would have been 'sentenced ... to death at Nuremberg and hanged ... ' "79 Then came the hydrogen bomb. The General Advisory Committee of senior scientists and officials assembled to advise Truman on whether or not to develop the H-bomb presented two reports. The majority

report was clear that "a super-bomb should never be produced ... we see a unique opportunity of providing ... limitations on the totality of war and thus limiting the fear ... of mankind." The minority report went further, advising that the "weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity ... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light."8o When he left office, Eisenhower knew that US nuclear war plans included a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SlOP) that anticipated "the deaths of an estimated 360-525 million people." In the years that followed, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that a "reasonable goal" for nuclear war against the Soviet Union could be the destruction of 25 percent of its population (55 million people). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only 51 US strategic warheads would be needed to inflict such damage, yet Washington's arsenal numbered more than 10,000 such weapons. 81 Stating what should have been obvious, in 1996 the International Court of Justice (lCJ) ruled that the u~e and threatened use of nuclear weapons violate international law. Among the principles that the ICJ drew upon were that nuclear weapons are genocidal and potentially omnicidal; they cause indiscriminate harm to combatants and non-combatants alike and inflict unnecessary suffering; they violate the requirement that military responses be proportional; they destroy the ecosystem, thus endangering future generations; they violate international treaties outlawing the use of poison gas;

and they inflict unacceptable damage to neutral nations.82 The Pentagon has, in fact, adopted a doctrine that it believes could lead to "ultimate doom"-the end of human life. Its Clinton era "The Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence" commits the US to maintaining "a

capability to create a fear of national extinction " in the minds of those it seeks to intimidate . Chomsky has described this doctrine, which continues to shape 36 EMPIRE AND THE BOMB DEADLY CONNECTIONS: EMPIRE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS 37 US policy and practice, as among "the most horrifying documents I've ever read." It asserts that "we have to rely primarily on nuclear weapons because unlike other weapons of mass destruction ... the effects of nuclear weapons are immediate, devastating, overwhelming-not only destructive but terrifying .... We have to have a

national persona of irrationality with forces 'out of control' so we really terrify everybody."83 "Evil" can be better understood in intimate personal terms. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Hibakusha have long accused the US of using them as "guinea pigs." Many tearfully and angrily describe what happened to them during the months and years following the A-bombings when US doctors examined them, but offered these tormented survivors no medical care or treatment. In May 2000, Professor Shoji Sawada and Junko Kayashige, both Hiroshima Hibakusha, a Japanese Protestant minister, and their US hosts, met with Dr. Paul Seligman, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department ofEnergy. Dr. Seligman was responsible for overseeing all US studies on the health impacts of radiation. During the meeting, the Hibakusha's charge of being used as guinea pigs was explained to him, and he was asked if he could put this damning charge to rest. Seligman's response was immediate and unambiguous: "Oh no. We've used those studies for everything, including the design of new nuclear weapons."84 Hiroshima and Nagasaki Hibakusha are not the only ones to have been so abused. It has long been known that Japanese fishermen and the people of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands were intentionally exposed to fallout from the 1954 "Bravo" H-bomb test. More recently it has been learned that to prepare for possible future nuclear wars, the US and Japanese governments "withheld medical findings" from fishermen, and that a decades-long secret medical program, Project 4.1, was conducted to study the effects of radiation ingested from the environment. The study "included purposefully resettling people on lands highly contaminated by many of the 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the air, on land, and in the seas surrounding the Marshall Islands."85 Down-winders concentrated in Utah and Idaho, uranium miners, soldiers and sailors, and other citizens were also knowingly exposed to deadly radiation across the US. During the first three decades of the nuclear era, 23,000 US citizens were deliberately subjected to 1,400 radiation experiments, in most cases without their informed consent. These included mentally disabled children in institutional care who were fed plutonium with their breakfast cereal and soldiers ordered to march into the fallout of simulated battlefields to better prepare the Pentagon for war fighting in "nuclear environments." In 1993, when Clinton's newly appointed Secretary of the Department of Energy Hazel O'Leary revealed what she had learned about these abuses, she confessed that "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany."86 The former Soviet Union and other nuclear powers have committed similar crimes against their peoples and others. This history, including repeated and secret preparations and threats to initiate genocidal nuclear war, explains why the US people's "conception of government may itself be too antiquated."87 In this light, we need to ask if the US has truly been a "democracy" for the past 60 years. Decisions, even those that could have ended the country's national

existence and extinguished human existence, were taken without the knowledge or involvement of its people. Since the beginning of the nuclear age, senior elected and military officials have systematically withheld essential information about the domestic consequences of the country's nuclear weapons production program and about the use and threatened use of these genocidal and omnicidal weapons. Even Vice-President Truman was kept ignorant of the Manhattan Project until after he assumed the presidency. What, then, are the meanings and consequences of the existence of a secret and ultimately all-powerful state within a state? James Madison, US president from 1809 to 1817, had the answer: "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."88 Two centuries later, Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, confirmed that "The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality ... "89

advocacyThus, the plan – Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Check the doc for a list for what I’ll default to for spec unless you ask otherwise.For SPEC, if you need a list in the aff its here, but im willing to change it to what you need in cx

Enforcement: 93+2 Plan on https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/IAEAProtocoActor: States (see below)

States: All governments of countries that carry nuclear arsenals.

Eliminate: completely remove or get rid of (something).

Nuclear Arsenals: A weapon whose destructive power comes from nuclear energy; an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb.

SolvencyDisarming is key to solve.Beckman 17 [FiveThirtyEight writer [Milo, "We’re Edging Closer To Nuclear War," FiveThirtyEight, 5-15-17 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/were-edging-closer-to-nuclear-war/, accessed 12-12-19] // SJ AME

We’re Edging Closer To Nuclear War Experts are worried about India, Pakistan and North Korea .

The nuclear football — a black briefcase containing an illustrated menu of doomsday scenarios — follows President Trump everywhere he goes. Like every U.S. commander-in-chief since John F. Kennedy, Trump has the sole authority to empty the American nuclear arsenal on any target, at any time, for any reason. James Mattis, his secretary of defense, must authenticate the order before it reaches the Pentagon, but should Mattis refuse to do so in an attempt to prevent missiles from launching, Trump can simply fire him on the spot and replace him with someone who will carry the order out. “There is no procedural or institutional mechanism that can stop a president from giving an order to use nuclear weapons,” said Stephen Schwartz, editor and co-author of “Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940.” You can exhale, though: Most nuclear security experts I spoke to are not particularly worried by this aspect of the Trump presidency. They said that the risk of civilian-targeted nuclear weapon use has ticked up since 2015, but the causal pathway is a bit subtler than itchy fingers on the metaphorical red button. “I don’t know how this plays out,” said Rachel Bronson, executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “But he’s moving us into a much more uncertain time.” The trouble is, nuclear risks are hard to measure quantitatively. The small sample size (two bombs dropped, ever) and rapidly changing technological and diplomatic contexts don’t exactly lend themselves to simple mathematical modeling. While such models do exist, they are “mainly an exercise in structuring one’s thinking, not something that would provide a ‘right’ answer,” according to Matthew Bunn, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. But just because we can’t model our way to an exact answer doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and move on. Since so many lives are at stake, even a tiny increase in the probability that nuclear weapons will be used is a really big deal, and that remains true even if our best predictions are somewhat imprecise. Academics and diplomats who spend their careers studying nuclear weapons have a pretty good conception of the nature and magnitude of the risks — their back-of-the-envelope estimates are as good an answer as we have. And while some experts disagreed on the details, everyone I spoke to painted the same general picture. In short, a nuclear strike on a civilian target could realistically happen in one of two ways: Either tensions between two nuclear states rise to the point where a single miscommunication

or technical failure could trigger a launch; or, a terrorist organization could acquire nuclear weapons capabilities. So how likely is either scenario? State use of nuclear weapons is more likely than you think On the state side, there are a number of ongoing conflicts that could , in theory, go nuclear at any time. “Increasingly, some regional powers are relying on nuclear weapons for their day-to-day security against conventional conflict,”

said Vipin Narang, author of “Nuclear Strategies in the Modern Era.” “If they think that a conventional invasion is coming — whether it is or not — they may be worried that the nuclear forces that they rely on for their survival might be threatened … there may be what’s sometimes called a ‘use it or lose it’ situation.” The conflict that topped experts’ list of clashes to be concerned about is India-Pakistan. Both states have developed nuclear weapons outside the jurisdiction of the Non-Proliferation

Treaty, both states have limited capabilities, which may incentivize early use, and both states — though their public doctrines are intentionally ambiguous — are

known to have contingency plans involving nuclear first strikes against military targets. Then there’s North Korea, whose recent missile tests have brought renewed attention to the state’s nuclear weapons program, which has spurred international trade sanctions. The Korean War never officially ended, so North Korea is still technically facing the threat of a U.S.-backed South Korea, and nuclear weapons remain central to North Korea’s national defense strategy. Some experts believe that the seemingly erratic behavior of the Kim regime is in fact strategic: If you’re handcuffed to your adversary on top of a cliff, dancing erratically near the edge is a smart way to extract concessions. Beyond these two clear danger zones, several experts cited U.S.-Russia or Iran-Israel as distant third-place

threats to go nuclear, with one suggesting that U.S.-China could heat up in coming years as the situation in the South China Sea develops. In any of these active conflicts, we shouldn’t necessarily expect that fear of mutually

a ssured destruction will save the day. We can’t say with any confidence how likely a nuclear conflict is because we don’t know what a total war between two nuclear states would look like — we’ve never had one. “You’d like to

hope if there was some sort of conflict started, it would remain limited and conventional until people could tamp it down,” said David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But you can certainly imagine ways it would start to get out of control.” Nuclear terrorism is plausible, but difficult to pull off Similarly, just because there’s never been a nuclear terrorist attack doesn’t mean that it will never happen. In theory, if a non-state actor got ahold of enough fissile material — the active ingredient in nuclear weapons — it would be relatively easy for them to assemble and detonate a bomb, according to Robert Rosner, former chief scientist and laboratory director at Argonne National Laboratory. “You’d need some physicists who know what they’re doing,” Rosner said. “But based on what’s available in the public literature, you could go ahead and make a uranium bomb.”1 Detection and prevention at this point would be very difficult, Rosner says — a weapon could be assembled in a garage and smuggled in a standard box truck. Fortunately, fissile material is hard to come by. The processes used by states to develop fissile material — a diffusion plant or farm of specialized centrifuges for enriched uranium, a specialized reactor for plutonium-239 — would be prohibitively expensive for a non-state actor. Plus, due to their size (dozens of acres), these facilities are highly conspicuous and would likely be identified and destroyed before a terrorist cell could refine enough material to pose a threat. A terrorist with nuclear ambitions, then, would have to acquire existing fissile material from one of the nine nuclear states, which could happen in one of two ways. First, there’s open theft, either of fissile material or of a fully assembled weapon. This would likely require a firefight, according to Rosner — nuclear facilities have armed guards2 — which would alert authorities to the presence of a threat. Second, which is the likelier possibility according to several of the experts I talked to, is through the assistance of an insider: A double agent with terrorist sympathies could infiltrate a state’s nuclear apparatus and simply deliver a weapon to a non-state actor. On both counts, Pakistan again emerged as the consensus pick for the No. 1 cause for concern, largely due to its instability. “If the Pakistani state does collapse, it probably wouldn’t collapse in one big bang, but slowly become more and more dysfunctional,” said Ramamurti Rajaraman, professor emeritus of physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “If the dysfunctionality also happens in the nuclear weapons security apparatus of Pakistan … that I see as the biggest danger.” Finally, an act of nuclear terrorism would require the existence of a non-state actor that had both the organizational sophistication and the military ambition to entertain the prospect of nuclear violence. “I would say at the moment Al Qaeda and its various branches and ISIS are the main terrorist groups where … it’s at least within the realm of the plausible that they’d be able to do this,” said Bunn. “Compared to 2015, I’m at least modestly less worried about the Islamic State, in that they seem to have turned to very unsophisticated attacks … and are under huge pressure militarily.” Though most experts I spoke to considered both state and non-state risks to be serious and worthy of attention, a clear majority (four of the five who were willing to choose) thought that state use of nuclear weapons was more likely than use by terrorists. “I’m more worried about a nuclear state,” said Wright. “They have large numbers of these things; they’re worked into the war plans. They practice using them.” If a state uses a nuclear weapon, it’ll probably be by accident When you imagine state use, though, don’t think of a red-faced Trump or Kim launching a petty revenge strike. “Nobody’s going to wake up one morning and say, ‘Gee, today would

be a really great day for a nuclear war,’” Bunn said. These scenarios account for a tiny sliver of the probability that nuclear weapons will be launched at civilian targets. The real risk, embarrassingly enough, is accidental strikes. Amidst the chaos of an international crisis, global catastrophe could arise from a mere tech nological error — it only takes one falling domino to trigger an avalanche of self-defense responses , Bronson said. “We know the history. We know that conflict has the potential to

escalate quickly,” she said. “When we have huge arsenals on high alert, accidents can happen that can be very dangerous.” If this sounds more like “Dr. Strangelove” than reality, you may want to take a spin on the Wheel of Near Misfortune, where the Union of

Concerned Scientists shares stories of instances where the world only narrowly avoided a nuclear strike. There have been a shocking number of close calls , where a faulty reading

or hardware malfunction nearly provoked a nuclear response. Now swallow this: There’s nothing built into the system that has caused the coin to always come up heads so far. “We were prepared — and are still prepared — to use [nuclear] weapons at a moment’s

notice,” said Schwartz. “The fact that we didn’t is not necessarily proof that the system works so much as proof that we got very lucky.” If anything, we have reason to believe we won’t always be so lucky . “All of those incidents occurred during peacetime, so there were lots of indications that this is not normal,” said Schwartz. “If those kinds of incidents happen during a crisis, where everything is ratcheted up a few notches, and you’re already feeling kind of edgy, then not only are you perhaps convinced that it’s a real attack — as opposed to a glitch of some kind — but your system is geared to respond all the more rapidly.” Wright gave a more specific example: “If you couple … a conventional conflict that is escalating with an attack on U.S. satellites, so that the U.S. loses important communications and surveillance systems, those war games frequently go

nuclear.” Three recent international trends have raised the risk Humanity’s best recourse, if we (prudently) assume that accidents are inevitable, is to back away from

the edge of the cliff until we can afford a stumble or two without falling off. But we have not done this — quite the opposite. The experts I spoke to pinpointed three interlocking trends that they believe have brought us closer to the brink than we were in 2015.

First, the last two years have seen a sharp resurgence in ethnic and religious nationalism across the West,

with several countries deprioritizing postwar liberal values of international cooperation , pluralism, and freedom of trade and

migration in pursuit of national might and a coherent national identity. Marine Le Pen, president of the right-wing French nationalist party National Front, described these competing visions last November: “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin is radically different than that of Mr. Obama. As for me, the model that is defended by Vladimir Putin — which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity — is the one that I like.” Opinions vary on the domestic merits

of this political shift, but the experts I spoke to were unanimous in condemning this strain of anti-globalism and anti-multilateralism from the perspective of nuclear security. The main concern is that nationalist governments might “take measures to increase their survivability in ways that would not be particularly

conducive to global security ,” said Narang. “There is a reassessment of the security politics,” said Angela Kane, former high representative for disarmament affairs at the United Nations. “When you look at [the

election of President Trump], particularly coupled with the Brexit decision last year,” and the growing electoral strength of far-right parties “in the Netherlands, France, Germany — all of this brings an instability into the situation that people are greatly worried about.” International peace, after all, rests on a number of treaties and assumptions that are now being called into question. The recent political shifts are “certainly not conducive to the architecture we’ve worked within for the last 70 years or so,” Bronson said. “I

do think this is a much more dangerous world.” Second, the world’s strongest military power, under its new, more nationalist government, has signaled interest in renegotiating the security agreements that help ward off war — nuclear and conventional — in Europe and East Asia. “All of a sudden there is a questioning of the commitments that the United States has

made and the leading role that the United States has played in multilateral diplomacy,” said Kane. “It hasn’t been said so publicly, but … there’s been a realization that maybe the Europeans need to do a bit more for their own defense.” “We’ve seen this

movie before,” said Narang. “The Eisenhower administration went to tremendous lengths to establish essentially nuclear sharing agreements with [West] Germany … to stop them from getting the weapons … so that we and we alone could control nuclear use and

escalation.” Removing the nuclear umbrella and encouraging allies to go it alone can only complicate the picture. “The more countries that have nuclear weapons , the more nuclear weapons there are in the system, the more actors have the ability to use them …

the probability of use just accumulates ,” he said. Bunn put it bluntly: “It would be disastrous for the U.S. to withdraw its protection from these countries.” If there’s any cause for optimism on this

front, it’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who in 2016 criticized both President Obama and then-candidate Trump for their shared view of American allies as military “free riders.” On his first international trip as secretary of defense, Mattis went to Japan and South Korea to reassure leaders that American nuclear commitments remained strong. “There is apparently already a repositioning of the United States which is not exactly aligned with the statements that President Trump made initially,” said Kane. “That, to my mind, is also significant.” Whether Mattis can check the president’s instincts and preserve the “Washington playbook,” though, remains to be seen. “I do find comfort in the fact that Mattis is extremely experienced and has a lot of respect,” said Bronson. “But Mattis

is one voice in an administration with a lot of competing perspectives. It’s unclear how it will eventually be organized, or what the administration’s worldview will be.” The third trend is , in the context of nuclear weapon use, perhaps the

most significant: “The disarmament process has come to a halt,” said Rajaraman. The assertion that the U.S. will not renew the New START treaty, a bilateral agreement that limits Russian and American

stockpiles; the pending review of the 2015 deal that curbs Iran’s production of fissile material; Trump’s signals to other nuclear powers that the U.S. intends to expand and modernize its arsenal3 — this is not just talk. These are concrete actions that work directly against the program of nuclear disarmament, which has been progressing in fits and starts since the end of the Cold War. This matters.

International conflicts will flare up and fade away, but weapons stockpiles remain the underlying source of all nuclear dangers , state and

non-state. “Nuclear disarmament is the only way to get rid of the threat ,” said Kane. “That is simply not happening right now.”

FramingPhysicalism is true and leads to util – ignore non-material circumstances.Papineau 9 Papineau, David, "Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/naturalism/>.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the conservation of kinetic plus potential energy came to be accepted as a basic principle of physics (Elkana 1974). In itself this does not rule out distinct mental or vital forces, for there is no reason why such forces should not be ‘conservative’, operating in such a way as to compensate losses of kinetic energy by gains in potential energy and vice versa. (The term ‘nervous energy’ is a relic of the widespread late nineteenth-century assumption that mental processes store up a species of

potential energy that is then released in action.) However, the conservation of energy does imply that any

such special forces must be governed by strict deterministic laws : if mental or vital forces arose spontaneously, then there would be nothing to ensure that they never led to energy increases. During the course of the twentieth century received scientific opinion became even more restrictive about possible causes of physical effects, and came to reject sui generis mental or

vital causes, even of a law-governed and predictable kind. Detailed physiological research , especially in to nerve cells , gave no indication of any physical effects that cannot be explained in terms of basic physical forces that also occur outside living bodies. By the middle of the twentieth century, belief in sui generis mental or

vital forces had become a minority view. This led to the widespread acceptance of the doctrine now known as the ‘ causal

closure’ or the ‘causal completeness’ of the physical realm, according to which all physical effects can be accounted for by basic physical causes (where ‘physical’ can be understood as referring to some list of fundamental forces) non-physical causes of physical effects. As a result, the default philosophical view was a non-naturalist interactive pluralism which recognized a wide range of such non-physical influences, including spontaneous mental influences (or ‘determinations of the soul’ as they would then have been called). The nineteenth-century discovery of the conservation of energy continued to allow that sui generis non-physical forces can interact with the physical world, but required that they be governed by strict force laws. This gave rise to an initial wave of naturalist doctrines around the beginning of the twentieth century. Sui generis mental forces were still widely accepted, but an extensive philosophical debate about the significance of the conservation of energy led to a widespread recognition that any such mental forces would need to be law-governed and thus amenable to scientific investigation along with more familiar physical forces.[5] By the middle of the twentieth century, the acceptance of the casual

closure of the physical realm led to even stronger naturalist views. The causal closure thesis implies that any mental and

biological causes must themselves be physical ly constituted, if they are to produce physical

effects . It thus gives rise to a particularly strong form of ontological naturalism, namely the physicalist doctrine that any state that has physical effects must itself be physical. From the 1950s onwards, philosophers began to formulate arguments for ontological physicalism. Some of these arguments appealed explicitly to the causal closure of the physical realm (Feigl 1958, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). In other cases, the reliance on causal closure lay below the surface. However, it is

not hard to see that even in these latter cases the causal closure thesis played a crucial role. Thus, for example, consider J.J.C. Smart's (1958) thought that we should identify mental states with brain states, for otherwise those mental states would be "nomological danglers" which play no role in the explanation of behaviour. Or take David Lewis's (1966) and David Armstrong's (1968) argument that, since mental states are picked out by their causal roles, and since we know that physical states play these roles, mental states must be identical with those physical states. Again, consider Donald Davidson's (1970) argument that, since the only laws governing behaviour are those connecting behaviour with physical antecedents, mental events can only be causes of behaviour if they are identical with those physical antecedents. At first sight, it may not be obvious that these arguments require the causal closure thesis. But a moment's thought will show that none of these arguments would remain cogent if the closure thesis were not true, and that some physical effects (the movement of matter in arms, perhaps, or the firings of the motor neurones which instigate those movements) were not determined by prior physical causes at all, but by sui generis mental causes. Sometimes it is suggested that the indeterminism of modern quantum mechanics creates room for sui generis non-physical causes to influence the physical world. However, even if quantum mechanics implies that some physical effects are themselves undetermined, it provides no reason to doubt a quantum version of the causal closure thesis, to the effect that the chances of those effects are fully fixed by prior physical circumstances. And this alone is enough to rule out sui generis non-physical causes. For such sui generis causes, if they are to be genuinely efficiacious, must presumably make an independent difference to the chances of physical effects, and this in itself would be inconsistent with the quantum causal closure claim that such chances are already fixed by prior physical circumstances. Once more, it seems that anything that makes a difference to the physical realm must itself be physical. Even if it is agreed that anything with physical effects must in some sense be physical, there is plenty of room to debate exactly what ontologically naturalist doctrines follow. The causal closure thesis says that (the chance of) every physical effect is fixed by a fully physical prior history. So, to avoid an unacceptable proliferation of causes, any prima facie non-physical cause of a physical effect will need to be included in that physical history. But what exactly does this require? The contemporary literature offers a wide range of answers to this question. In part the issue hinges on the ontological status of causes. Some philosophers think of causes as particular events, considered in abstraction from any properties they may possess (Davidson 1980). Given this view of causation, a mental or other apparently non-physical cause will be the same as some physical cause as long as it is constituted by the same particular (or ‘token’) event. For example, a given feeling and a given brain event will count as the same cause as long as they are constituted by the same token event. However, it is widely agreed that this kind of ‘token identity’ on its own fails to ensure that prima facie non-physical causes can make any real difference to physical effects. To see why, note that token identity is a very weak doctrine: it does not imply any relationship at all between the properties involved in the physical and non-physical cause; it is enough that the same particular entity should possess both these properties. Compare the way in which an apple's shape and colour are both possessed by the same particular thing, namely that apple. It seems wrong to conclude on this account that the apple's colour causes what its shape causes. Similarly, it seems unwarranted to conclude that someone's feelings cause what that person's neuronal discharges cause, simply on the grounds that these are both aspects of the same particular event. This could be true, and yet the mental property of the event could be entirely irrelevant to any subsequent physical effects. Token identity on its own thus seems to leave it open that the mental and other prima facie non-physical properties are ‘epiphenomenal’, exerting no real influence on effects that are already fixed by physical processes (Honderich 1982, Yalowitz 2006 Section 6, Robb and Heil 2005 Section 5). These considerations argue that causation depends on properties as well as particulars. There are various accounts of causation that respect this requirement, the differences between which do not matter for present purposes. The important point is that, if mental and other prima facie non-physical causes are to be equated with physical causes, [any] non-physical properties must somehow be constituted by physical properties. If your anger is to cause what your brain state causes, the property of being angry cannot be ontologically independent of the relevant brain properties. So much is agreed by nearly all contemporary naturalists. At this point, however, consensus ends. One school holds that epiphenomenalism can only be avoided by type-identity, the strict identity of the relevant prima facie non-physical properties with physical properties. On the other side stand ‘non-reductive’ physicalists, who hold that the causal efficacy of non-physical properties will be respected as long as they are ‘realized by’ physical properties, even if they are not reductively identified with them. Type-identity is the most obvious way to ensure that non-physical and physical causes coincide: if exactly the same particulars and properties comprise a non-physical and a physical cause, the two causes will certainly themselves be fully identical. Still, type-identity is a very strong doctrine. Type identity about thoughts, for example, would imply that the property of thinking about the square root of two is identical with some physical property. And this seems highly implausible. Even if all human beings with this thought must be distinguished by some common physical property of their brains—which itself seems highly unlikely—there remains the argument that other life-forms, or intelligent androids, will also be able to think about the square root of two, even though their brains may share no significant physical properties with ours (cf. Bickle 2006). This ‘variable realization’ argument has led many philosophers to seek an alternative way of reconciling the efficacy of non-physical causes with the causal closure thesis, one which does not require the strict identity of non-physical and physical properties. The general idea of this ‘non-reductive physicalism’ is to allow that a given non-physical property can be ‘realized’ by different physical properties in different cases. There are various ways of filling out this idea. A common feature is the requirement that non-physical properties should metaphysically supervene on physical properties, in the sense that any two beings who share all physical properties will necessarily share the same non-physical properties, even though the physical properties which so realize the non-physical ones can be different in different beings. This arguably ensures that nothing more is required for any specific instantiation of a non-physical property than its physical realization—even God could not have created your brain states without thereby creating your feelings—yet avoids any reductive identification of non-physical properties with physical ones. (This is a rough sketch of the supervenience formulation of physicalism. For more see Stoljar 2001 Sections 2 and 3.) Some philosophers object that non-reductive physicalism does not in fact satisfy the original motivation for physicalism, since it fails to reconcile the efficacy of non-physical causes with the causal closure thesis (Kim 1993. Robb and Heil 2005 Section 6). According to non-reductive physicalism, prima facie non-physical properties are not type-identical with any strictly physical properties, even though they supervene on them. However, if causes are in some way property-involving, this then seems to imply that any prima facie non-physical cause will be distinct from any physical cause. Opponents of non-reductive physicalism object that this gives us an unacceptable proliferation of causes for the physical effects of non-physical causes—both the physical cause implied by the causal closure thesis and the distinct non-physical cause. In response, advocates of non-reductive physicalism respond that there is nothing wrong with such an apparent duplication of causes if it is also specified that the latter metaphysically supervene on the former. The issue here hinges on the acceptability of different kinds of overdetermination (Bennett 2003). All can agree that it would be absurd if the physical effects of non-physical causes always had two completely independent causes. This much was assumed by the original causal argument for physicalism, which reasoned that no sui generis non-physical state of affairs can cause some effect that already has a full physical cause. However, even if ‘strong overdetermination’ by two ontologically independent causes is so ruled out, this does not necessarily preclude ‘weak overdetermination’ by both a physical cause and a metaphysically supervenient non-physical cause. Advocates of non-reductive physicalism argue that this kind of overdetermination is benign, on the grounds that the two causes are not ontologically distinct—the non-physical cause isn't genuinely additional to the physical cause (nothing more is needed for your feelings than your brain states). There is room to query whether non-reductive physicalism amounts to a substantial form of naturalism. After all, the requirement that some category of properties metaphysically supervenes on physical properties is not a strong one. A very wide range of properties would seem intuitively to satisfy this requirement, including moral and aesthetic properties, along with any mental, biological, and social properties. (Can two physically identical things be different with respect to wickedness or beauty?) Supervenience on the physical realm is thus a far weaker requirement than that some property should enter into natural laws, say, or be analysable by the methods of the natural sciences. Indeed some philosophers are explicitly anti-naturalist about categories that they allow to supervene on the physical—we need only think of G.E. Moore on moral properties, or Donald Davidson and his followers on mental properties (Moore 1903, Davidson 1980). In response, those of naturalist sympathies are likely to point out that any viable response to the argument from causal closure will require more than metaphysical supervenience alone (Horgan 1993, Wilson 1999). Supervenience is at least necessary, if non-reductive physicalists are to avoid the absurdity of strong overdetermination. But something more than mere supervenience is arguably needed if non-reductive physicalists are to make good their claim that non-physical states cause the physical effects that their realizers cause. Metaphysical supervenience alone does not ensure this. (Suppose ricketiness, in a car, is defined as the property of having some loose part. Then ricketiness will supervene on physical properties. In a given car, it may be realized by a disconnected wire between ignition and starter motor. This disconnected wire will cause this car not to start. But it doesn't follow that this car's then not starting will be caused by its property of ricketiness. Most rickety cars start perfectly well.) So it looks as if the causal closure argument requires not only that non-physical properties metaphysically supervene on physical properties, but that they be natural in some stronger sense, so as to qualify as causes of those properties' effects. It is a much-discussed issue how this demand can be satisfied. Some philosophers seek to meet it by offering a further account of the nature of the relevant non-physical properties, for example, that they are second-order role properties whose presence is constituted by some first-order property with a specified causal role (Levin 2004). Others suggest that the crucial feature is how these properties feature in certain laws (Fodor 1974) or alternatively the degree of their explanatory relevance to physical effects (Yablo 1992). And reductive physicalists will insist that the demand can only be met by type-identifying prima-facie non-physical properties with physical properties after all.[6] There is no agreed view on the requirements for prima facie non-physical properties to have physical effects. This difficult issue hinges, inter alia, on the nature of the causal relation itself, and it would take us too far afield to pursue it further here. For the purpose of this entry, we need only note that the causal closure argument seems to require that properties with physical effects must be ‘natural’ in some sense that is stronger than metaphysical supervenience on physical properties. Beyond that, we can leave it open exactly what this extra strength requires. Some philosophers hold that mental states escape the causal argument, on the grounds that mental states cause actions rather than any physical effects. Actions are not part of the subject matter of the physical sciences, and so a fortiori not the kinds of effects guaranteed to have physical causes by any casual closure thesis. So there is no reason, according to this line of thought, to suppose that the status of mental states as causes of actions is threatened by physics, nor therefore any reason to think that mental states must in some sense be realized by physical states (Hornsby 1997, Sturgeon 1998). The obvious problem with this line of argument is that actions aren't the only effects of mental states. On occasion mental states also cause unequivocally physical effects. Fast Eddie Felsen's desire to move a pool ball in a certain direction will characteristically have just that effect. And now the causal closure argument bites once more. The snooker ball's motion has a purely physical cause, by the causal closure thesis. This will pre-empt Fast Eddie's desire as a cause of that motion, unless that desire is in some sense physically realized (Balog 1999, Witmer 2000). Other philosophers have a different reason for saying that mental states, or more particularly conscious mental states, don't have physical effects. They think that there are strong independent arguments to show that conscious states can't possibly supervene metaphysically on physical states. Putting this together with the closure claim that physical effects always have physical causes, and abjuring the idea that the physical effects of conscious causes are strongly overdetermined by both a physical cause and an ontologically independent conscious cause, they conclude that conscious states must be ‘epiphenomenal’, lacking any power to causally influence the physical realm (Jackson 1981; 1985. See also Chalmers 1995).[7] The rejection of physicalism about conscious properties certainly has the backing of intuition. (Don't zombies—beings who are physically exactly like humans but have no conscious life—seem intuitively possible?) However, whether this intuition can be parlayed into a sound argument is a highly controversial issue, and one that lies beyond the scope of this entry. A majority of contemporary philosophers probably hold that physicalism can resist these arguments. But a significant minority take the other side.[8] If the majority are right, and physicalism about conscious states is not ruled out by independent arguments, then physicalism seems clearly preferable to epiphenomenalism. In itself, epiphenomenalism is not an attractive position. It requires

us to suppose that conscious states, even though they are caused by processes in the physical world, have no effects on that world. This is a very odd kind of causal structure. Nature displays no other examples of such one-way causal intercourse between realms. By contrast, a physicalist naturalism about conscious states will

integrate the mental realm with the causal unfolding of the spatiotemporal world in an entirely familiar way. Given

this, general principles of theory choice would seem to argue strongly for physicalism over epiphenomenalism.[9] If we focus on this last point, we may start wondering why the causal closure thesis is so important. If general principles of theory choice can justify physicalism, why bring in all the complications associated with causal closure? The answer is that causal closure is needed to rule out interactionist dualism. General principles of theory choice may dismiss epiphenomenalism in favour of physicalism, but they do not similarly discredit interactionist dualism. As the brief historical sketch earlier will have made clear, interactionist dualism offers a perfectly straightforward theoretical option requiring no commitment to any bizarre causal structures. Certainly the historical norm has been to regard it as the default account of the causal role of the mental realm.[10] Given this, arguments from theoretical simplicity cut no ice against interactionist dualism. Rather, the case against interactionist dualism hinges crucially on the empirical thesis that all physical effects already have physical causes. It is specifically this claim that makes it difficult to see how dualist states can make a causal difference to the physical world. It is sometimes suggested that physicalism about the mind can be vindicated by an ‘inference to the best explanation’. The thought here is that there are many well-established synchronic correlations between mental states and brain states, and that physicalism is a ‘better explanation’ of these correlations than epiphenomenalism (Hill 1991, Hill and McLaughlin 1999). From the perspective outlined here, this starts the argument in the middle rather than the beginning, by simply assuming the relevant mind-brain correlations. This assumption of pervasive synchronic mind-brain correlations is only plausible if interactionist dualism has already been ruled out. After all, if we believed interactionist dualism, then we wouldn't think dualist mental states needed any help from synchronic neural correlates to produce physical effects. And it is implausible to suppose that we have direct empirical evidence, prior to the rejection of interactive dualism, for pervasive mind-brain correlations, given the paucity of any explicit examples of well-established neural correlates for specific mental states. Rather our rationale for believing in such correlations must be that the causal closure of the physical realm eliminates interactive dualism, whence we infer that mental states can only systematically precede physical effects if they are correlated with the physical causes of those effects. G.E. Moore's famous ‘open question’ argument is designed to show that moral facts cannot possibly be identical to natural facts. Suppose the natural properties of some situation are completely specified. It will always remain an open question, argued Moore, whether that situation is morally good or bad. (Moore 1903.) Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and

cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them .

Thus, the standard is maximizing expected wellbeing. Prefer:[1] Ethical frameworks must be theoretically legitimate. All frameworks are functionally topicality interpretations of the word ought so they must theoretically justified. Prefer our standard – a] Ground: Both debaters are guaranteed access to ground – Aff gets plans and advantages, while Neg gets disads and counterplans. Additionally, anything can function as an impact as long as an external benefit is articulated, so all your offense applies. b] Topic Education – util forces debates about what actually happens in the real world because we have to use empirics and analyze the consequences of the plan versus neg advocacy. Outweighs phil ed on reversibility: we can learn about Kant on other topics or at home but topical debate only happens now.[2] Pleasure and pain are the starting point for moral reasoning—they’re our most baseline desires and the only things that explain the intrinsic value of objects or actionsMoen 16, Ole Martin (PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo). "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267.

Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for

there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these

experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative. 2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are

heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then

proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further ; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask [a man] what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself .”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the

case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it

seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value . Although pleasure and pain thus seem to be good candidates for intrinsic value and disvalue, several objections have been raised against this suggestion: (1) that pleasure and pain have instrumental but not intrinsic value/disvalue; (2) that pleasure and pain gain their value/disvalue derivatively, in virtue of satisfying/frustrating our desires; (3) that there is a subset of pleasures that are not intrinsically valuable (so-called “evil pleasures”) and a subset of pains that are not intrinsically disvaluable (so-called “noble pains”), and (4) that pain asymbolia, masochism, and practices such as wiggling a loose tooth render it implausible that pain is intrinsically disvaluable. I shall argue that these objections fail. Though it is, of course, an open question whether other objections to P1 might be more successful, I shall assume that if (1)–(4) fail, we are justified in believing that P1 is true itself a paragon of freedom—there will always be some agents able to interfere substantially with one’s choices. The effective level of protection one enjoys, and hence one’s actual degree of freedom, will vary according to multiple factors: how powerful one is, how powerful individuals in one’s vicinity are, how frequent police patrols are, and so on. Now, we saw above that what makes a slave unfree on Pettit’s view is the fact that his master has the power to interfere arbitrarily with his choices; in other words, what makes the slave unfree is the power relation that obtains between his master and him. The difficulty is that, in light of the facts I just mentioned, there is no reason to think that this power relation will be unique. A similar relation could obtain between the

master and someone other than the slave: absent perfect state control, the master may very well have enough power to interfere in the lives of countless individuals. Yet it would be wrong to infer that these individuals lack freedom in the way the slave does; if they lack anything, it seems to be security. A problematic power relation can also obtain between the slave and someone other than the master, since there may be citizens who are more powerful than the master and who can therefore interfere with the slave’s choices at their discretion. Once again, it would be wrong to infer that these individuals make the slave unfree in the same way that the master does. Something appears to be missing from Pettit’s view. If I live in a particularly nasty part of town, then it may turn out that, when all the relevant factors are taken into account, I am just as vulnerable to outside interference as are the slaves in the royal palace, yet it does not follow that our conditions are equivalent from the point of view of freedom. As a matter of fact, we may be equally vulnerable to outside interference, but as a matter of right, our standings could not be more different. I have legal recourse against anyone who interferes with my freedom; the recourse may not be very effective—presumably it is not, if my overall vulnerability to outside interference is comparable to that of a slave— but I still have full legal standing.68 By contrast, the slave lacks legal recourse against the interventions of one specific individual: his master. It is that fact, on a Kantian view—a fact about the legal relation in which a slave stands to his master—that sets slaves apart from freemen. The point may appear trivial, but it does get something right: whereas one cannot identify a power relation that obtains uniquely between a slave and his master, the legal relation between them is undeniably unique. A master’s right to interfere with respect to his slave does not extend to freemen, regardless of how vulnerable they might be as a matter of fact, and citizens other than the master do not have the right to order the slave around, regardless of how powerful they might be. This suggests that Kant is correct in thinking that the ideal of freedom is essentially linked to a person’s having full legal standing. More specifically, he is correct in holding that the importance of rights is not exhausted by their contribution to the level of protection that an individual enjoys, as it must be on an instrumental view like Pettit’s. Although it does matter that rights be enforced with reasonable effectiveness, the sheer fact that one has adequate legal rights is essential to one’s standing as a free citizen. In this respect, Kant stays faithful to the idea that freedom is primarily a matter of standing—a standing that the freeman has and that the slave lacks. Pettit himself frequently insists on the idea, but he fails to do it justice when he claims that freedom is simply a matter of being adequately (and reliably) shielded against the strength of others. As Kant recognizes, the standing of a free citizen is a more complex matter than that. One could perhaps worry that the idea of legal standing is something of a red herring here—that it must ultimately be reducible to a complex network of power relations and, hence, that the position I attribute to Kant differs only nominally from Pettit’s. That seems to me doubtful. Viewing legal standing as essential to freedom makes sense only if our conception of the former includes conceptions of what constitutes a fully adequate scheme of legal rights, appropriate legal recourse, justified punishment, and so on. Only if one believes that these notions all boil down to power relations will Kant’s position appear similar to Pettit’s. On any other view—and certainly that includes most views recently defended by philosophers—the notion of legal standing will outstrip the power relations that ground Pettit’s theory.

[3] Actor specificity: util is the best for governments, which is the actor in the rez – multiple warrants:

[a] Governments must aggregate since every policy benefits some and harms others, which also means side constraints freeze action. [b] No act-omission distinction—governments are responsible for everything in the public sphere so inaction is implicit authorization of action: they have to yes/no bills, which means everything collapse to aggregation.[c] No intent-foresight distinction – the actions we take are inevitably informed by predictions from certain mental states, meaning consequences are a collective part of the will.[d] Actor-specificity comes first since different agents have different ethical standings. Takes out util calc indicts since they’re empirically denied and link turns them because the alt would be no action.

Underview[1] Presumption and permissibility flow aff. A] Theoretically- 13-7 rebuttal time skew and neg reactivity means 1) if we’re tied, I’ve done the better debating and 2) It’s fairer to give the aff the advantage of being able to win by eliminating all offense than the neg. B] Probability, 2 warrants: 1) We default to actions being right. To do otherwise would make actions that have no moral bearing such as breathing morally wrong, 2) We intuitively assume statements to be true than false – if I told you my name you’d assume that statement true unless there was some counter evidence to prove otherwise. [2] The role of the ballot is to determine the desirability of the world of the affirmative’s advocacy against the world of the negative’s advocacy. Prefer:

[A] Reciprocity – Comparative worlds is intrinsically reciprocal because it is the only role of the ballot that allows equal access to the advocacies of both sides while ROBs like truth testing have NIBs and a prioris and ROBs like rejecting oppression for a specific group only allow one side to have offense which creates a prep skew that comes first as it is a structural skew that controls access to the ballot.

[B] Intuition – When asked whether a policy would be good or not, one automatically resorts to what the world would look like rather than if the sentence is grammatically structured to be “true” or not making it intrinsic to our comparison skills in the real world.

[C] All other ROBs don’t take both substance and reps into account which makes comparative worlds a prerequisite to any other ROB as a) reps are a prerequisite to engaging in debate because toleration of bad discourse allows racism and threatening language which decreases participation and b) substance is the goal of debate – its why we have any post fiat offense and topics in the first place.

[3] 1AR theory is legit otherwise the neg can be infinitely abusive and there would be no way to check back against that. Comes first because it indicts the neg’s positions and skews my time allocation on other flows like T. 1AR theory is drop the debater – a 4 minute 1AR doesn’t have time to win both theory and substance – you must be punished. No RVI on 1AR theory- a] It would be impossible to check back against neg abuse because the 2NR could just spend 6 minutes railing on the theory debate and the aff couldn’t win. Also, No 2nr paradigm issues or 2nr theory because it would be impossible to check NC abuse since the 6 min 2N could go all in on theory making it impossible for the 3 min 2ar also resolvability, it’s extremely irresolvable and begs judge intervention since the judge has to evaluate the 2AR counter-interp which the neg can't respond[4] Affirming is harder – (a) there’s a 5.8% neg side bias (vbriefly) from 2014-2016 (b) there’s a 13-7 rebuttal time skew in favor the neg (c) the aff has to extend offense twice due to the 1ar and 2ar while the neg only has to once. Prefer structural weighing since they apply to each round - most likely to establish communal norms, and best for competing interps so it also precludes meta-theory.