Aff

1AC

1AC Framework
The standard is maximizing expected well-being.
1. Simple perception tells us that pleasure is good and pain is bad to
deny the value of such judgments undermines the basis for any
system of reasoning.
Nagel Thomas Nagel. The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press. 1986. pg
156-157
I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory [P]leasure is good and pain bad, no matter
whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in
a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which
themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just sensory experiences in
relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion.
Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as
subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back[ed] up by any further
reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure [it is a means to their
end], either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual
masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when
we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably
make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by
asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that [if] pleasure and pain have no value
of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take
aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from
outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just
because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether you can manage to
withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical reason makes any sense at all , so
that there is some judgment to withhold, it does not seem possible. If the general arguments
against the reality of objective reasons are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a
reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the
possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. Oddly enough, however, we can think of
a story that would go with such a denial. It might be suggested that the aversion to pain is a
useful phobiahaving nothing to do with the intrinsic undesirability of pain itselfwhich helps
us avoid or escape the injuries that are signaled by pain. (The same type of purely instrumental
value might be ascribed to sensory pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, and sex might be
regarded as having no value in themselves, though our natural attraction to them assists survival
and reproduction.) There would then be nothing wrong with pain in itself, and someone who
was never motivated deliberately to do anything just because he knew it would reduce or avoid
pain would have nothing the matter with him. He would still have involuntary avoidance
reactions, otherwise it would be hard to say that he felt pain at all. And he would be motivated to
reduce pain for other reasonsbecause it was an effective way to avoid the danger being
signaled, or because interfered with some physical or mental activity that was important to him.
He just wouldn't [Dis]regard[ing] the pain as itself something he had any reason to avoid, even
though he hated the feeling just as much as the rest of us. (And of course he wouldn't be able to
justify the avoidance of pain in the way that we customarily justify avoiding what we hate
without reasonthat is, on the ground that even an irrational hatred makes its object very
unpleasant!) There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal, but it seems nevertheless

insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having
an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to
the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is.
What seems to be going on here is that [W]e cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a
certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we
make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to
those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No
objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There
can be no reason to reject the appearances here.

2. Only utilitarianism can serve as the basis to legitimately justify

policy to the public. Government actions will inevitably lead to tradeoffs between citizens. The only justifiable way to resolve these
conflicts is utilitarianism.
Gary Woller [BYU Prof., An Overview by Gary Woller, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg.
10]

Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political
resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently,
public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay
the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking
some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental
preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs
among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the
public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers,
the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the
redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall
advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe
practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, [Also,] a priori moral principles provide
only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest
appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness
while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a
moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for
that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to
preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others,
although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological
principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant
irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be
implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover,
ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive
structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental
preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and
the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and
Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard
preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are
perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public
policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and
complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that

they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one
policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a
democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy
alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a
policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end
language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety
are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.

3. No act omission distinction for states since their implicit approvals

of actions still entail moral responsibility
Sunstein and Vermuele [Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The
University of Chicago Law School. Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The
Relevance of LifeLife Tradeoffs. JOHN M. OLIN LAW & ECONOMICS
WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005]
AJ
In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by
overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status
of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least
impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike
individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible
policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be
intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant
difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and
prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do
anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized
private actionfor example, private killingbecomes obscure when the government formally
forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully
discourage it.

4. If theres even a risk of ethical uncertainty, we should always

prioritize the survival of the human race to ensure future value.
Bostrom [Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School
University of Oxford. Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Global
Policy (2012)]
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at
existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me
elaborate. Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now
know at least not in concrete detail what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity;
we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed
profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great
option value in preserving and ideally improving our ability to recognize value and to steer
the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great
powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase
the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any
existential catastrophe.

1AC Prolif
Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and
nuclear terror safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens
them
Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editorin-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott
Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board
Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear
Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18,
http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proli
feration.html) LADI
Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange
turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack
has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market
trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has
spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these
dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations
break the rules , we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
The global nuclear order is changing. Concerns about climate change, the volatility of oil prices,
and the security of energy supplies have contributed to a widespread and still-growing interest
in the future use of nuclear power. Thirty states operate one or more nuclear power plants today,
and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some 50 others have
requested technical assistance from the agency to explore the possibility of developing their own
nuclear energy programs. It is certainly not possible to predict precisely how fast and how
extensively the expansion of nuclear power will occur. But it does seem probable that in the
future there will be more nuclear technology spread across more states than ever before . It will
be a different world than the one that has existed in the past.
This surge of interest in nuclear energy labeled by some proponents as "the renaissance in
nuclear power" is, moreover, occurring simultaneously with mounting concern about the
health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime , the regulatory framework that constrains
and governs the world's civil and military-related nuclear affairs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) and related institutions have been taxed by new worries, such as the growth in
global terrorism , and have been painfully tested by protracted crises involving nuclear
weapons proliferation in North Korea and potentially in Iran. (Indeed, some observers suspect
that growing interest in nuclear power in some countries, especially in the Middle East, is not
unrelated to Iran's uranium enrichment program and Tehran's movement closer to a nuclear
weapons capability.) Confidence in the NPT regime seems to be eroding even as interest in
nuclear power is expanding.
This realization raises crucial questions for the future of global security. Will the growth of
nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism?
Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more

widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and
Winter 2010) special issue of Ddalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It
depends.
On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear,
for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations
will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex
and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built?
Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states
or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for
enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to
produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs ? How can physical
protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new
entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents ? The
answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our
nuclear future.
The major political factors influencing the future of nuclear weapons are no less complex and no
less important. Will Iran acquire nuclear weapons; will North Korea develop more weapons or
disarm in the coming decade; how will neighboring states respond? Will the United States and
Russia take significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and if so, will the other nuclearweapons states follow suit or stand on the sidelines?
The nuclear future will be strongly influenced, too, by the success or failure of efforts to
strengthen the international organizations and the set of agreements that comprise the
system developed over time to manage global nuclear affairs. Will new international or regional
mechanisms be developed to control the front-end (the production of nuclear reactor fuel) and
the back-end (the management of spent fuel containing plutonium) of the nuclear fuel cycle?
What political agreements and disagreements are likely to emerge between the nuclear-weapons
states (NWS) and the non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS) at the 2010 NPT Review Conference
and beyond? What role will crucial actors among the NNWS Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt,
for example play in determining the global nuclear future? And most broadly, will the
nonproliferation regime be supported and strengthened or will it be questioned and weakened?
As IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has emphasized, "The nonproliferation regime
is, in many ways, at a critical juncture," and there is a need for a new "overarching multilateral
nuclear framework."1 But there is no guarantee that such a framework will emerge , and
there is wide doubt that the arrangements of the past will be adequate to manage our nuclear
future effectively.

It overwhelms barriers for expertise

Ackland 9 - Len Ackland, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism.,
(Weapons proliferation a big risk with nuclear power February 10, 2009,
http://www.cejournal.net/?p=903) LADI
As Tom Yulsman points out in his Feb. 5 posting, the tight connection between nuclear power
and nuclear weapons is seriously underplayed and often ignored in discussions about the socalled need for nuclear power to help meet energy demand while addressing global warming

concerns. (Issues including accidents, terrorism, high-level nuclear waste disposal and
economic costs are also important, but I wont deal with them in this brief commentary.) While
Tom mentions the concern over plutonium, which Ill return to momentarily in responding to
the questions from the commenter on the Feb. 5 post, remember that the convergence between
nuclear power and weapons occurs at two points in the nuclear fuel cycle the cradle-tograve process beginning with uranium mining and ending with nuclear waste or incredible
explosions. The first power-weapons crossover comes during uranium enrichment, after
uranium ore is milled to extract uranium in the form called yellow cake that is then converted
to uranium hexafluoride gas. Enrichment of the gas means increasing the amount of the fissile
uranium-235 isotope, which comprises 0.7 percent of natural uranium, to the 3-6 percent
needed to make fuel rods for commercial nuclear reactors. The same centrifuges (the modern
technology of choice) that separate the U-235 from the U-238 can be kept running until the
percentage of U-235 reaches about 90 percent and can be used for the kind of nuclear bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima. Enrichment low for nuclear power plants and high for bombs is at
the heart of the current controversy over Irans plans and capabilities. The second powerweapons crossover comes when low-enriched uranium fuel is burned in nuclear reactors,
whether military, civilian, or dual use. Neutrons produced in the chain reaction are captured by
the U-238 to form U-239 then neptunium-239 which decays into plutonium-239, the key fissile
isotope for nuclear weapons. Other plutonium isotopes, such as Pu-240, Pu-241, and Pu-242 are
also produced. The extent to which the uranium fuel elements are irradiated is called fuel
burnup. Basically, military reactors designed specifically to produce Pu-239 burn the fuel for
shorter periods, a few weeks, before the fuel rods are removed from the reactors in order to
minimize the buildup of Pu-240 and other elements. Commercial reactors, aimed at maximizing
the energy output in order to produce electricity, burn the fuel for a year or so before the fuel rod
assemblies are changed out. The used or spent fuel contains higher percentages of the
undesirable (for bomb builders) plutonium isotopes. Dual-use reactors, such as the one that
caused the Chernobyl accident in 1986, tend toward the shorter fuel burnup times. The
plutonium in the spent fuel is the 20,000 kilograms that the Federation of American Scientists
estimates is produced each year by the worlds currently operating 438 reactors. Other sources
estimate the amount of plutonium in spent fuel as much higher. For a good description of these
issues, see David Albright, et. al., Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World
Inventories, Capabilities and Policies, SIPRI, Oxford U. Press, 1997. Finally, before the
plutonium-239 created in nuclear reactors can be used in weapons, it must first be separated
from the uranium, transuranics and other fission products. This is done in reprocessing plants
and is often benignly referred to as plutonium recycling. Currently there are only a handful of
commercial reprocessing facilities, the one in France and the one in the United Kingdom having
operated the longest. Much of the plutonium extracted by these plants is mixed with uranium
and reused for nuclear fuel in commercial reactors. But reprocessing plants also exist in
countries using plutonium for nuclear weapons. Thus, North Korea , the most recent country
to join the nine-member nuclear weapons club, made weapons through its reprocessing
facility. The fact that a country like North Korea could accomplish the manufacture of nuclear
weapons should give pause to those who advocate nuclear power plants as an answer to global
warming. A plutonium economy and/or the presence of uranium enrichment facilities in many
nations around the world are dangerous prospects. Even accepting the arguments that life-cycle
analysis of nuclear plants which takes into account the emissions from mining, construction
and so forth puts them on a par with renewable energy sources in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions doesnt overcome their disadvantages. And the assurance from nuclear advocates that

the next generation of plants (Generation IV, still under development) will be more
proliferation resistant, isnt comforting given the technologists track record. And that still
would be a long way from proliferation proof.

Turns the environment DA proliferation overwhelms incentives for

civilian use of nuclear reactors
Li and Yim 13- Mang-Sung Yim is in the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Jun Li works at UNC Chapel Hill
(Examining relationship between nuclear proliferation and civilian nuclear power
development Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 66, July 2013, Pages 108
114http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197013000504) LADI
This paper attempts to examine the relationship between nuclear weapons proliferation and
civilian nuclear power development based on the history of Atoms for Peace Initiative. To
investigate the relationship, a database was established by compiling information on a country's
civilian nuclear power development and various national capabilities and situational factors.
The results of correlation analysis indicated that the initial motivation to develop civilian
nuclear power could be mostly dual purpose. However, for a civilian nuclear power program to
be ultimately successful, the study finds the role of nuclear nonproliferation very important. The
analysis indicated that the presence of nuclear weapons in a country and serious interest in
nuclear weapons have a negative effect on the civilian nuclear power program. The study
showed the importance of state level commitment to nuclear nonproliferation for the success of
civilian nuclear power development. NPT ratification and IAEA safeguards were very important
factors in the success of civilian nuclear power development. In addition, for a country's civilian
nuclear power development to be successful, the country needs to possess strong economic
capability and be well connected to the world economic market through international trade .
Mature level of democracy and presence of nuclear technological capabilities were also found to
be important for the success of civilian nuclear power program.

Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.

Kroenig 14 Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair at
Georgetown University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on
International Security at The Atlantic Council (The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It
Have A Future?, April 2014, http://www.matthewkroenig.com/The%20History%20of
%20Proliferation%20Optimism_Feb2014.pdf)
The spread of nuclear weapons poses a number of severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global
and regional instability, constrained freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received
extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals
of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of
nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Irans advanced nuclear
program. Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons,
the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare
once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the sixtyfive-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be nave to think that nuclear weapons will
never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns
like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the

Before reaching a
second-strike capability. In this context,
one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear
late Naughts.49 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime.
state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure

weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal,
given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating
counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold,
Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First,

the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel
might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Irans nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by
Israels aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the

state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal,

in this case Iran, might feel use em or loose em pressures . That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk
having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise
attack.50 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go
first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an IsraeliIranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack
from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war.

Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal
nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue
to hold in the future. Irans theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it
contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear
weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One
does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching
full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still

have conflicts of
interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a
limited nuclear war.51 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of
conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the
United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATOs conventional inferiority.52 As Russias
conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine.
Indeed, Russian

strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists
would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistans military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from
conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S.
superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a threat that leaves something to chance.53
They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to
force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.54 When we think about future nuclear
crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future

spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of

nuclear terrorism.55 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama
Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a religious duty for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear
weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.56 Unlike states, which can
crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism. The

be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S.
politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the
tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the
possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile
material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists,
but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that
Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state
would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a

new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might

be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists.
There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistans atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible
nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes
problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistans nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear
weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power.
The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a break
down in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Irans nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability: The spread of nuclear weapons also

emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct
military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an
incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons

provide a shield under which

states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the stability-instability
paradox maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of
nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after
controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states

are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon

less experience with nuclear

states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have

diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened
by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62

And, it increases conventional wars.

Kahl 7/9 associate professor in the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh
School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (Colin Kahl, How worried should U.S.
policymakers be about nuclear blackmail? Washington Post 7.09.14) LADI
But heres the problem from a policy-making perspective: regardless of whether nuclear weapons actually provide nuclear-armed states with greater
capabilities and opportunities to engage in effective coercion, new nuclear states appear to believe they do, at least for some period of time, and act
accordingly. At least some nuclear-weapons

states appear to think a nuclear deterrent shields them from large-scale

conventional retaliation from targets of coercion, tempting them to engage in more assertive military behavior
below the nuclear threshold, including conventional aggression, low-level violence, proxy attacks, terrorism and the initiation of crises. And this pattern
appears to hold even against stronger adversaries that enjoy nuclear superiority. During

the Cold War, for example, nuclear deterrence

discouraged large-scale conventional or nuclear war, but the superpowers engaged in several direct crises, as well as proxy wars
throughout the so-called Third World. Scholars posited that this was the result of a stability-instability paradoxin which the very stability created by
mutually assured destruction (MAD) generated

greater instability by making superpower provocations, disputes and

below the nuclear threshold seem safe. More recently, nuclear weapons have similarly made the Indian-Pakistani
rivalry more crisis-prone even as they discouraged large-scale war or a nuclear exchange. The historical record also strongly suggests that states
with revisionist aims become more aggressive both directly and through the use of proxies after acquiring nuclear
weapons, at least for some period of time. Less than six months passed between the August 1949 testing of the first Soviet
atomic bomb and Stalins green light to North Korean plans to invade South Korea. And, shortly
thereafter, Moscow encouraged Ho Chi Minh to intensify his offensive against the French in Indochina.
And, as Gavins research suggests, the development of thermonuclear weapons in 1955 and intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958 also
appear to have made Khrushchev more assertive, culminating in the 1958-1961 Berlin crisis. Similarly, five years after China
became a nuclear power, Mao Zedong authorized Chinese troops to attack Soviet border forces in 1969.
conflict

Archival evidence also suggests that Iraqs quest for nuclear weapons was in part driven by Saddam Husseins desire to use them as a cover for
conventional aggression against Israel. And, more recently, Pakistans emboldened support of anti-Indian terrorism and militancy and North

Koreas escalating provocations provide additional illustrations of the possible incentives and opportunities nuclear
weapons create to advance a revisionist agenda. Large-n quantitative studies on the emboldening effects of nuclear weapons have produced mixed
results. On average, nuclear weapon states appear no more (or less) likely to become involved in international militarized disputes, or to initiate these
disputes. But, with regard to interactions between nuclear states, Robert Rauchhaus finds that nuclear status increases the likelihood of low-level
militarized disputes, including threats and the limited use of force, even as it reduces the chances of large-scale war. Time and learning may also play a
key role. Michael Horowitz finds that the longer a state possesses nuclear weapons, the less likely it is to become involved in disputes. But new nuclear
powers appear to be more prone to involvement in militarized disputes in the initial period of time after developing nuclear weapons against all types of
states (including nuclear ones). In short, regardless of whether nuclear weapons are objectively useful or not in coercion, at least some nuclear
states especially those with revisionist ambitions seem to believe they are and act accordingly, even toward more nuclear-armed powerful
adversaries. And, in many cases, it is precisely this type of adventurism by adversaries that so worries U.S. policymakers. This was my experience
observing the Obama administrations deliberations on the potential dangers of Iranian nuclearization. U.S. officials believe Iranian nuclear acquisition
would embolden Tehran a state with both defensive and ideologically revisionist motivations to be even more assertive in supporting terrorism,
militancy and making coercive threats against its neighbors. They also fear that Iranian nuclearization would spark conventional and nuclear arms
racing by other regional powers. Together, these dynamics would make an already volatile Middle East even more difficult to police and manage,
requiring costly and complex U.S. deterrence and reassurance strategies and increasing the risk of irregular and conventional war.

Risk of nuclear terrorism is real and high now largest threat of

extinction
Bunn et al 14 [Matthew, Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, with Martin
Malin, Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, Nickolas Roth, Research
Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom, and William Tobey, Senior Fellow at the Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs, March, Advancing Nuclear Security: Evaluating
Progress and Setting New Goals, The Project on Managing the Atom, pg. 5-9/AKG]
Unfortunately, nuclear and radiological terrorism remain real and dangerous threats.1 The
conclusion the assembled leaders reached at the Washington Nuclear Security Summit and
reaffirmed in Seoul remains correct: Nuclear terrorism continues to be one of the most
challenging threats to international security. Defeating this threat requires strong
national measures and international cooperation given its potential global political, economic,

social, and psychological consequences.2 There are three types of nuclear or radiological
terrorist attack: Nuclear weapons. Terrorists might be able to get and detonate an
assembled nuclear weapon made by a state, or make a crude nuclear bomb from
stolen separated plutonium or HEU. This would be the most difficult type of nuclear terrorism
for terrorists to accomplishbut the devastation could be absolutely horrifying , with
political and economic aftershocks reverberating around the world. Dirty bombs. A far
simpler approach would be for terrorists to obtain radiological materialsavailable in hospitals,
industrial sites, and moreand disperse them to contaminate an area with radioactivity, using
explosives or any number of other means. In most scenarios of such attacks, few people would
die from the radiationbut the attack could spread fear, force the evacuation of many blocks of
a major city, and inflict billions of dollars in costs of cleanup and economic disruption. While a
dirty bomb attack would be much easier for terrorists to carry out than an attack using a
nuclear explosive, the consequences would be far lessan expensive and disruptive mess, but
not the heart of a major city going up in smoke. Nuclear sabotage. Terrorists could potentially
cause a Fukushima-like meltdown at a nuclear reactor or sabotage a spent fuel pool or
high-level waste store. An unsuccessful sabotage would have little effect, but a successful one
could spread radioactive material over a huge area. Both the scale of the consequences and the
difficulty of carrying out a successful attack would be intermediate between nuclear weapons
and dirty bombs. Overall, while actual terrorist use of a nuclear weapon may be the least likely of
these dangers, its consequences would be so overwhelming that we believe it poses the most
significant risk. A similar judgment drove the decision to focus the four-year effort on
securing nuclear weapons and the materials needed to make them. Most of this report will focus
on the threat of terrorist use of nuclear explosives, but the overall global governance framework
for nuclear security is relevant to all of these dangers. The danger of nuclear terrorism is driven
by three key factorsterrorist intent to escalate to the nuclear level of violence; potential
terrorist capability to do so; and the vulnerability of nuclear weapons and the materials needed
to enable terrorists to carry out such an attackthe motive, means, and opportunity of a
monstrous crime. Terrorist intent. While most terrorist groups are still focused on small-scale
violence for local political purposes, we now live in an age that includes some groups intent on
inflicting large-scale destruction to achieve their objectives. Over the past quarter century, both
al Qaeda and the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo seriously sought nuclear
weapons and the nuclear materials and expertise needed to make them. Al Qaeda had a
focused program reporting directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri (now head of the group), which
progressed as far as carrying out crude but sensible conventional explosive tests for the nuclear
program in the desert of Afghanistan. There is some evidence that North Caucusus
terrorists also sought nuclear weaponsincluding incidents in which terrorist teams were
caught carrying out reconnaissance on Russian nuclear weapon storage sites, whose locations
are secret.3 Despite the death of Osama bin Laden and the severe disruption of the core of al
Qaeda, there are no grounds for complacency . There is every reason to believe Zawahiri
remains eager to inflict destruction on a nuclear scale. Indeed, despite the large number of al
Qaeda leaders who have been killed or captured, nearly all of the key players in al Qaedas
nuclear program remain alive and at largeincluding Abdel Aziz al-Masri, an Egyptian
explosives expert who was al Qaedas nuclear CEO. In 2003, when al Qaeda operatives were
negotiating to buy three of what they thought were nuclear weapons, senior al Qaeda officials
told them to go ahead and make the purchase if a Pakistani expert with equipment confirmed

the items were genuine. The US government has never managed to determine who the
Pakistani nuclear weapons expert was in whom al Qaeda had such confidenceand what
he may have been doing in the intervening decade. More fundamentally, with at least two, and
probably three, groups having gone down this path in the past 25 years, there is no reason to
expect they will be the last. The danger of nuclear terrorism will remain as long as nuclear
weapons, the materials needed to make them, and terrorist groups bent on large-scale
destruction co-exist. Potential terrorist capabilities. No one knows what capabilities a secret cell
of al Qaeda may have managed to retain or build. Unfortunately, it does not take a
Manhattan Project to make a nuclear bombindeed, over 90 percent of the Manhattan
Project effort was focused on making the nuclear materials, not on designing and building the
weapons. Numerous studies by the United States and other governments have concluded
that it is plausible that a sophisticated terrorist group could make a crude nuclear
bomb if it got enough separated plutonium or HEU.4 A gun-type bomb, such as the weapon
that obliterated Hiroshima, fundamentally involves slamming two pieces of HEU together at
high speed. An implosion-type bomb, which is needed to get a sub-stantial explosive yield
from plutonium, requires crushing nuclear material to a higher densitya more complex task,
but still plausible for terrorists, especially if they got knowledgeable help. Many analysts argue
that, since states spend billions of dollars and assign hundreds or thousands of people to
building nuclear weapons, it is totally implausible that terrorists could carry out this task.
Unfortunately, this argument is wrong, for two reasons. First, as the Manhattan Project statistic
suggests, the difficult part of making a nuclear bomb is making the nuclear material. That is
what states spend billions seeking to accomplish. Terrorists are highly unlikely to ever be able to
make their own bomb materialbut if they could get stolen material, that step would be
bypassed. Second, it is far easier to make a crude, unsafe, unreliable bomb of uncertain yield,
which might be delivered in the back of a truck, than to make the kind of nuclear weapon a state
would want in its arsenala safe, reliable weapon of known yield that can be delivered by
missile or combat aircraft. It is highly unlikely terrorists will ever be able to build that kind of
nuclear weapon. Remaining vulnerabilities. While many countries have done a great deal to
strengthen nuclear security, serious vulnerabilities remain. Around the world, there are stocks of
nuclear weapons or materials whose security systems are not sufficient to protect against
the full range of plausible outsider and insider threats they may face. As incidents like the
intrusion at Y-12 in the United States in 2012 make clear, many nuclear facilities and
transporters still grapple with serious problems of security culture. It is fair to say that
every country where nuclear weapons, weapons-usable nuclear materials, major nuclear
facilities, or dangerous radiological sources exist has more to do to ensure that these items are
sustainably secured and accounted for. At least three lines of evidence confirm that important
nuclear security weaknesses continue to exist. First, seizures of stolen HEU and separated
plutonium continue to occur, including, mostly recently HEU seizures in 2003, 2006, 2010, and
2011.5 These seizures may result from material stolen long ago, but, at a minimum, they make
clear that stocks of HEU and plutonium remain outside of regulatory control. Second, in cases
where countries do realistic tests to probe whether security systems can protect against teams of
clever adversaries determined to find a weak point, the adversaries sometimes succeedeven
when their capabilities are within the set of threats the security system is designed to protect
against. This happens with some regularity in the United States (though less often than before
the 9/11 attacks); if more countries carried out comparable performance tests, one would likely
see similar results. Third, in real non-nuclear thefts and terrorist attacks around the world,

adversaries sometimes demonstrate capabilities and tactics well beyond what many nuclear
security systems would likely be able to handle (see the discussion of the recent Vstberga
incident in Sweden). Of course, the initial theft of nuclear material would be only the first step.
Adversaries would have to smuggle the material to wherever they wanted to make their bomb,
and ultimately to the target. A variety of measures have been put in place in recent years to try to
stop nuclear smuggling, from radiation detectors to national teams trained and equipped to deal
with nuclear smuggling casesand more should certainly be done. But once nuclear material
has left the facility where it is supposed to be, it could be anywhere, and finding and recovering
it poses an enormous challenge. The immense length of national borders, the huge scale of
legitimate traffic, the myriad potential pathways across these borders, and the small size and
weak radiation signal of the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb make nuclear smuggling
extraordinarily difficult to stop. There is also the danger that a state such as North Korea
might consciously decide to provide nuclear weapons or the materials needed to make them to
terrorists. This possibility cannot be ruled out, but there is strong reason to believe that such
conscious state decisions to provide these capabilities are a small part of the overall risk of
nuclear terrorism. Dictators determined to maintain their power are highly unlikely to hand
over the greatest weapon they have to terrorist groups they cannot control, who might well use it
in ways that would provoke retaliation that would remove the dictator from power forever.
Although nuclear forensics is by no means perfect, it would be only one of many lines of
evidence that could potentially point back to the state that provided the materials; no state could
ever be confident they could make such a transfer withoutbeing caught.6 And terrorists are
unlikely to have enough money to make a substantial difference in either the odds of regime
survival or the wealth of a regimes elites, even in North Korea, one of the poorest countries on
earth. On the other hand, serious risks would arise in North Korea, or other nuclear-armed
states, in the event of state collapse and as North Koreas stockpile grows, one could
imagine a general managing some of that stockpile concluding he could sell a piece of it and
provide a golden parachute for himself and his family without getting caught. No one knows the
real likelihood of nuclear terrorism. But the consequences of a terrorist nuclear blast would be
so catastrophic that even a small chance is enough to justify urgent action to reduce the risk. The
heart of a major city could be reduced to a smoldering radioactive ruin, leaving tens to hundreds
of thousands of people dead. The perpetrators or others might claim to have more weapons
already hidden in other major cities and threaten to set them off if their demands were not met
potentially provoking uncontrolled evacuation of many urban centers. Devastating
economic consequences would reverberate worldwide . Kofi Annan, while serving as
Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned that the global economic effects of a nuclear
terrorist attack in a major city would push tens of millions of people into dire poverty, creating
a second death toll throughout the developing world.7

1AC Meltdowns
Meltdowns are inevitable other models are flawed
Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of
Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German
research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor
accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily,
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) LADI
Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of
all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at
the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur
once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more
often than estimated in the past. The researchers also determined that, in the event of such a
major accident, half of the radioactive caesium-137 would be spread over an area of more than
1,000 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor. Their results show that Western Europe is
likely to be contaminated about once in 50 years by more than 40 kilobecquerel of caesium-137
per square meter. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an area is defined as
being contaminated with radiation from this amount onwards. In view of their findings, the
researchers call for an in-depth analysis and reassessment of the risks associated with nuclear
power plants. The reactor accident in Fukushima has fuelled the discussion about nuclear
energy and triggered Germany's exit from their nuclear power program. It appears that the
global risk of such a catastrophe is higher than previously thought, a result of a study carried out
by a research team led by Jos Lelieveld, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in
Mainz: "After Fukushima, the prospect of such an incident occurring again came into question,
and whether we can actually calculate the radioactive fallout using our atmospheric models."
According to the results of the study, a nuclear meltdown in one of the reactors in operation
worldwide is likely to occur once in 10 to 20 years. Currently, there are 440 nuclear reactors in
operation, and 60 more are planned. To determine the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown, the
researchers applied a simple calculation. They divided the operating hours of all civilian nuclear
reactors in the world, from the commissioning of the first up to the present, by the number of
reactor meltdowns that have actually occurred. The total number of operating hours is 14,500
years, the number of reactor meltdowns comes to four -- one in Chernobyl and three in
Fukushima. This translates into one major accident, being defined according to the
International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), every 3,625 years. Even if this result is conservatively
rounded to one major accident every 5,000 reactor years, the risk is 200 times higher than the
estimate for catastrophic, non-contained core meltdowns made by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission in 1990. The Mainz researchers did not distinguish ages and types of reactors, or
whether they are located in regions of enhanced risks, for example by earthquakes. After all,
nobody had anticipated the reactor catastrophe in Japan.

Contamination spreads rapidly no one is safe

Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of
Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German
research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor

accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily,

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) LADI
25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres
Subsequently, the researchers determined the geographic distribution of radioactive gases and
particles around a possible accident site using a computer model that describes Earth's
atmosphere. The model calculates meteorological conditions and flows, and also accounts for
chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The model can compute the global distribution of trace
gases, for example, and can also simulate the spreading of radioactive gases and particles. To
approximate the radioactive contamination, the researchers calculated how the particles of
radioactive caesium-137 (137Cs) disperse in the atmosphere, where they deposit on Earth's
surface and in what quantities. The 137Cs isotope is a product of the nuclear fission of uranium.
It has a half-life of 30 years and was one of the key elements in the radioactive contamination
following the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima. The computer simulations revealed that,
on average, only eight percent of the 137Cs particles are expected to deposit within an area of 50
kilometres around the nuclear accident site. Around 50 percent of the particles would be
deposited outside a radius of 1,000 kilometres, and around 25 percent would spread even
further than 2,000 kilometres. These results underscore that reactor accidents are likely to
cause radioactive contamination well beyond national borders. The results of the dispersion
calculations were combined with the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown and the actual density of
reactors worldwide to calculate the current risk of radioactive contamination around the world.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area with more than 40
kilobecquerels of radioactivity per square meter is defined as contaminated. The team in Mainz
found that in Western Europe, where the density of reactors is particularly high, the
contamination by more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter is expected to occur once in
about every 50 years. It appears that citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of
Germany run the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination, associated with the
numerous nuclear power plants situated near the borders between France, Belgium and
Germany, and the dominant westerly wind direction. If a single nuclear meltdown were to occur
in Western Europe, around 28 million people on average would be affected by contamination of
more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter. This figure is even higher in southern Asia, due
to the dense populations. A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people,
while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people. "Germany's exit
from the nuclear energy program will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination.
However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany's neighbours were to switch off
their reactors," says Jos Lelieveld. "Not only do we need an in-depth and public analysis of the
actual risks of nuclear accidents. In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated
phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered ," adds the atmospheric chemist.

Fukushima proves the damage to the environment and human health

is irreversible
Rosen 12 -- Dr Alex Rosen, University Clinic Dsseldorf, Department of General Pediatrics,
(Effects of the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns on environment and health March 9th, 2012,
https://www.ippnw.de/commonFiles/pdfs/Atomenergie/FukushimaBackgroundPaper.pdf)
LADI
The Thoku earthquake on March 11th, 2011 led to multiple nuclear meltdowns in the reactors
of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Northern Japan. Radioactive emissions from

the plant caused widespread radioactive contamination of the entire region. The vast majority of
the nuclear fallout occurred over the North Pacific, constituting the largest radioactive
contamination of the oceans ever recorded. Soil and water samples, as well as marine animals
have been found to be highly contaminated. Increased levels of radioactivity were recorded at all
radiation measuring posts in the Northern Hemisphere. Fallout contaminated large parts of
Eastern Honshu island, including the Tokyo metropolitan area. Within a 20 km radius, up to
200,000 people had to leave their homes. Outside of this evacuation zone, the radioactive fallout
contaminated more than 870 km2 of land, home to about 70,000 people who were not
evacuated. These people were exposed to harmful radioisotopes and now have an increased risk
to develop cancer or other radiation-induced diseases. Many people still live in areas with high
contamination. Food, milk and drinking water have been contaminated as well, leading to
internal radiation exposure. Most severely affected are children, as their bodies are more
susceptible to radiation damage. Preliminary tests have shown internal radioactive
contamination of children with iodine-131 and caesium-137. It is too early to estimate the extent
of health effects caused by the nuclear disaster. Taking into consideration the studies on
Chernobyl survivors and the findings of the BEIR VII report, scientists will be able to estimate
the effects once the true extent of radioactive emissions, fallout and contamination are better
studied. Large-scale independent epidemiological studies are needed in order to better help the
victims of this catastrophe. Claims by scientists affiliated with the nuclear industry that no
health effects are to be expected are unscientific and immoral .

Its the single greatest danger to the environment

Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard,
writes for pollution issues (Disasters: Nuclear Accidents http://www.pollutionissues.com/CoEa/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) LADI
Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters
have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster
poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide
geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived,
with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years. Concerns over potential
nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power.
Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent
radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source
or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to
these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having
thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to
cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for
potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and
bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is
deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.

Biodiversity loss risks extinction - ecosystems arent resilient or

redundant
Vule 13-School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University (Jeffrey V. Yule *, Robert J.
Fournier and Patrick L. Hindmarsh, Biodiversity, Extinction, and Humanitys Future: The
Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Human Population and Resource Use, 2 April
2013, manities 2013, 2, 147159) LADI
Ecologists recognize that the particulars of the relationship between biodiversity and community
resilience in the face of disturbance (a broad range of phenomena including anything from
drought, fire, and volcanic eruption to species introductions or removals) depend on context
[16,17]. Sometimes disturbed communities return relatively readily to pre-disturbance
conditions; sometimes they do not. However, accepting as a general truism that biodiversity is
an ecological stabilizer is sensible roughly equivalent to viewing seatbelt use as a good idea:
although seatbelts increase the risk of injury in a small minority of car accidents, their use
overwhelmingly reduces risk. As humans continue to modify natural environments, we may be
reducing their ability to return to pre-disturbance conditions. The concern is not merely
academic. Communities provide the ecosystem services on which both human and nonhuman
life depends, including the cycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen by photosynthetic organisms,
nitrogen fixation and the filtration of water by microbes , and pollination by insects. If
disturbances alter communities to the extent that they can no longer provide these crucial
services, extinctions (including, possibly, our own) become more likely. In ecology as in science
in general, absolutes are rare . Science deals mainly in probabilities, in large part because it
attempts to address the universes abundant uncertainties. Species-rich, diverse
communities characterized by large numbers of multi-species interactions are not immune to
being pushed from one relatively stable state characterized by particular species and
interactions to other, quite different states in which formerly abundant species are entirely or
nearly entirely absent. Nonetheless, in speciose communities, the removal of any single species
is less likely to result in radical change. That said, there are no guarantees that the removal of
even a single species from a biodiverse community will not have significant, completely
unforeseen consequences. Indirect interactions can be unexpectedly important to community
structure and, historically, have been difficult to observe until some form of disturbance
(especially the introduction or elimination of a species) occurs. Experiments have revealed how
the presence of predators can increase the diversity of prey species in communities, as when
predators of a superior competitor among prey species will allow inferior competing prey
species to persist [18]. Predators can have even more dramatic effects on communities. The
presence or absence of sea otters determines whether inshore areas are characterized by diverse
kelp forest communities or an alternative stable state of species poor urchin barrens [19]. In the
latter case, the absence of otters leaves urchin populations unchecked to overgraze kelp forests,
eliminating a habitat feature that supports a wide range of species across a variety of age classes.
Aldo Leopold observed that when trying to determine how a device works by tinkering with it,
the first rule of doing the job intelligently is to save all the parts [20]. The extinctions that
humans have caused certainly represent a significant problem, but there is an additional
difficulty with human investigations of and impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes.
Often, our tinkering is unintentional and, as a result, recklessly ignores the necessity of caution.
Following the logic inherited from Newtonian physics, humans expect single actions to have
single effects. Desiring more game species, for instance, humans typically hunt predators (in

North America, for instance, extirpating wolves so as to be able to have more deer or elk for
themselves). Yet removing or adding predators has far reaching effects. Wolf removal has led to
prey overpopulation, plant over browsing, and erosion [21]. After wolves were removed from
Yellowstone National Park, the K of elk increased. This allowed for a shift in elk feeding patterns
that left fewer trees alongside rivers, thus leaving less food for beaver and, consequently, fewer
beaver dams and less wetland [22,23]. Such a situation represents, in microcosm, the inherent
risk of allowing for the erosion of species diversity. In addition to providing habitat for a wide
variety of species, wetlands serve as natural water purification systems. Although the
Yellowstone region might not need that particular ecosystem service as much as other parts of
the world, freshwater resources and wetlands are threatened globally, and the same logic of
reduced biodiversity equating to reduced ecosystem services applies. Humans take actions
without considering that when tugging on single threads, they unavoidably affect adjacent areas
of the tapestry. While human population and per capita resource use remain high, so does the
probability of ongoing biodiversity loss. At the very least, in the future people will have an even
more skewed perspective than we do about what constitutes a diverse community. In that
regard, future generations will be even more ignorant than we are. Of course, we also experience
that shifting baseline perspective on biodiversity and population sizes, failing to recognize how
much is missing from the world because we are unaware of what past generations saw [11]. But
the consequences of diminished biodiversity might be more profound for humans than that. If
the disturbance of communities and ecosystems results in species losses that reduce the
availability of ecosystem services, human K and, sooner or later, human N will be reduced.

1AR

1AR Security K
Framework center debate on the hypothetical reduction of nuclear
energy. Weighing the aff is vital to predictable and fair engagement.
Security is not a speech act focus on its implications with policy
Balzacq 10 [Thierry, Constructivism and Securitization Studies,Forthcoming in Myriam
Dunn Cavelty & Victor Mauer, eds., Handbook of Security Studies (London: Routledge). May
2010]LADI
There are difficulties with this formulation, however. The upshot is that security cannot be
wholly self-referential; instead, it frequently executes a kind of reference though this might be
partial or biased (Nightingale and Cromby 2002: 705). Further, the claim that security is a
speech act may be intuitively strong, but it is theoretically restrictive and methodologically
unfruitful. In fact, what has often been taken to be the result of the performative use of the
concept security does not follow from that assumption. Rather, securitization results from other
unarticulated assumptions about securitys symbolic power. In other words, securitization is
a pragmatic act, i.e.: a sustained argumentative practice aimed at convincing a target
audience to accept, based on what it knows about the world, the claim that a specific
development is threatening enough to deserve an immediate policy to curb it. Thus, the CS view
can be called philosophical, while the pragmatic approach to securitization is termed
sociological. Conceptually, the two models were developed in parallel, the former in Denmark,
and the latter in Belgium, France, and the UK. Yet, given intensive cross- fertilizations, the
boundaries between these perspectives are now porous, and sometimes authors seem to move
from one model to another, without further clarification. However, differences between the two
persist that account for the differences in how security problems are examined. Put starkly, in
the CS model, philosophical speculations often triumph over sociological insights, which are at
best accorded cosmetic status. By contrast, in the second model, sociological elements subsume
philosophical premises. Whereas the philosophical model prefers poststructuralist methods, the
sociological view proposes a pluralist approach to securitization wherein discourse analysis
and process tracing work together.

Permutation do both the net benefit is ending nuclear energy.

Securitizing the environment incentivizes action
Veldman 12 (Robin Globus, PhD candidate @ the Univ. of Florida in Religion, Narrating
the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End Facilitates Moral Reasoning among
Environmental Activists, Ethics & the Environment, Vol. 17.1, Spring 2012, pgs 1-23)
As we saw in the introduction, critics

often argue that apocalyptic rhetoric induces feelings of

hopelessness or fatalism. While it certainly does for some people, in this section I will present evidence that
apocalypticism also often goes hand in hand with activism . Some of the strongest
evidence of a connection between environ- mental apocalypticism and activism comes from a national survey that
examined whether Americans perceived climate change to be dangerous. As part of his analysis, Anthony Leiserowitz
identified several interpre- tive communities, which had consistent demographic
characteristics but varied in their levels of risk perception. The group who perceived the risk to be the greatest,
which he labeled alarmists, described climate change using apocalyptic language, such as Badbadbadlike after nuclear war
no vegetation, Heat waves, its gonna kill the world, and Death of the planet (2005, 1440). Given such language, this would

seem to be a reasonable way to operationalize environmental apocalypticism .

If such apocalypticism encouraged

fatalism, we would expect alarmists to be less likely to have engaged in environmental behavior
compared to groups with moderate or low levels of concern. To the contrary, however, Leise- rowitz
found that alarmists were significantly more likely to have taken personal action
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (ibid.) than respond- ents who perceived climate
change to pose less of a threat. Interestingly, while one might expect such radical views to appeal only to a tiny minor- ity,
Leiserowitz found that a respectable eleven percent of Americans fell into this group (ibid). Further
supporting Leiserowitzs findings, in a separate national sur- vey conducted in 2008, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and
Leiserowitz found that a group they labeled the Alarmed (again, due to their high levels of concern about
climate change) are the segment most engaged in the issue of global warming . They are very
convinced it is happening, human- caused, and a serious and urgent threat. The Alarmed are already making changes
in their own lives and support an aggressive national response (2009, 3, emphasis added). This group was
far more likely than people with lower levels of concern over climate change to have engaged in con- sumer activism (by rewarding
companies that support action to reduce global warming with their business, for example) or to have contacted elected officials to
express their concern. Additionally, the authors found that [w]hen

asked which reason for action was most

important to them personally, the Alarmed were most likely to select preventing the destruction of most life on the planet (31%) (2009, 31)a finding suggesting that for many in this group it is
specifically the desire to avert catastrophe , rather than some other motivation, that encourages
pro-environmental behavior . Taken together, these and other studies (cf. Semenza et al. 2008 and DerKarabetia,
Stephenson, and Poggi 1996) provide important evidence that many of those who think environmental
problems pose a severe threat practice some form of activism, rather than giving way to fatalistic
resignation. National surveys give a good overview of the association between apocalypticism and activism among the general
public, but they do not provide sufficient ethnographic detail. To complement this broader pic- ture I now turn to case studies, which
provide greater insight into how adherents themselves understand what motivates their environmental behavior. When seeking a
subset of environmentalists with apocalyptic beliefs, the radical wing is an obvious place to look. For example, many

Earth
First!ers believe that the collapse of industrial society is inevitable (Taylor 1994). At the same time,
the majority are actively committed to preventing ecological disaster. As Earth First! cofounder Howie Wolke acknowl- edged, the two are directly connected: As ecological calamity unravels the living fabric of the Earth,
environmental radicalism has become both common and necessary (1989, 29).3 This logic underlies efforts to pre- serve wilderness
areas, which many radical environmentalists believe will serve as reservoirs of genetic diversity, helping to restore the planet after
industrial society collapses (Taylor 1994). In addition to encouraging ac- tivism to preserve wilderness, apocalyptic beliefs also
motivate practices such as monkeywrenching, or ecological sabotage, civil disobedience, and the more conventional paper
monkeywrenching (lobbying, engag- ing in public information campaigns to shift legislative priorities, or using lawsuits when these
tactics fail). Ultimately,

while there are disagree- ments over what strategies will best achieve their desired
goals, for most radical environmentalists, apocalypticism and activism are bound closely
together . The connection between belief in impending disaster and environ- mental activism holds true for Wiccans as well.
During fieldwork in the southeastern United States, for example, Shawn Arthur reported meeting dozens of Wiccans who professed
their apocalyptic millenarian beliefs to anyone who expressed interest, yet many others only quietly agreed with them without any
further elaboration (2008, 201). For this group, the coming disaster was understood as divine retribution, the result of an angry
Earth Goddess preparing to punish humans for squandering her ecological gifts (Arthur 2008, 203). In light of Gaias impending
revenge, Arthur found that Wiccans advocated both spiritual and material forms of activism. For example, practices such as Goddess
worship, the use of herbal remedies for healing, and awareness of the body and its energies were considered important for initiating
a more harmonious relationship with the earth (Arthur 2008, 207). As

for material activism, Arthur notes that the:

notion of environmental apocalypse played a key role in encouraging pro-environmental
behavior images of immanent [sic] ecological crisis and apocalyptic change often were
utilized as motivating factors for developing an environmentally and ecologically
conscious worldview ; for stressing the importance of working for the Earth through a variety of
practices, including environmental activism, garbage collecting, recycling, com- posting , and religious
rituals; for learning sustainable living skills; and for developing a special relationship with the world as a divine entity.
(2008, 212) What these studies and my own experiences in the environmentalist milieu4 suggest is that people who make a serious

commitment to engag- ing in environmentally friendly behavior, people

who move beyond making superficial

changes to making substantial and permanent ones, are quite likely to subscribe to some form of
the apocalyptic narrative . All this is not to say that apocalypticism directly or inevitably causes activism, or that
believing catastrophe is imminent is the only reason peo- ple become activists. However, it is to say that activism and
apocalypticism are associated for some people, and that this association is not arbitrary, for there
is something uniquely powerful and compelling about the apocalyptic narrative. Plenty of people will
hear it and ignore it, or find it implausible, or simply decide that if the situation really is so dire there is nothing they can do to
prevent it from continuing to deteriorate. Yet

to focus only on the ability of apocalyptic rhetoric to induce

apathy, indifference or reactance is to ignore the evidence that it also fuels quite the
opposite grave concern, activism, and sometimes even outrage. It is also to ignore the movements history.
From Silent Spring (Carson [1962] 2002) to The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al 1972) to The End
of Nature (McKibben 1989), apocalyptic arguments have held a prominent place within
environmental literature, topping best-seller lists and spreading the message far and wide that protecting the
environment should be a societal priority. Thus, while it is not a style of argument that will be ef- fective in convincing everyone to
commit to the environmental ca

Acting to stop proliferation is a moral imperative pragmatic action

is necessary and overwhelms problematic discourse
Ford 11 [Chris Ford, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He previously
served as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State, and General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
1/10/11, Havea and Have-Nots: "Unfairness in nuclear Weapons possession,"
www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=658]
First, however, lets provide some context. As I noted above, it is fascinating that in the long history of military technological
have/have not dynamics, the international politics of nuclear weaponry has acquired such a strong flavor of moral critique. To my
knowledge, after all, one did not see Xiongnu politics emphasizing how darned unfair it was of those nasty Chinese Emperors to
monopolize the presumed secrets of Chinas bingjia strategic literature. Nor does the unfairness of Byzantine efforts to control the
recipe for Greek Fire seem to have become a prevalent trope of Frankish or Persian diplomacy. Have

nots have surely

always coveted powerful tools possessed by the haves, or at least wished that the haves did
not possess them. It seems pretty unusual, however, for non-possessors to articulate such
understandable envy and resentment in the moral language of unfairness, and to assume that
this presumed injustice should motivate the haves to change their behavior . This argument seems to
be a curiously modern phenomenon. One might respond that the very specialness of nuclear weapons makes such a position
appropriate. After all, while a local monopoly on iron swords may have given the Vikings some advantage in skirmishes with Native
Americans in what the Norsemen called Vinland, such technological asymmetry was not strategically decisive. (Indeed, the Vikings
seem ultimately to have been pushed out of the New World entirely.) If iron had threatened to offer the Vikings an insuperable
advantage, would the Skraelings have been justified in developing a moral language of have/have not resentment that demanded
either the sharing of iron weaponry or Viking disarmament in the name of achieving a global iron zero? Im skeptical, but for the
sake of argument lets say maybe. The

argument that nuclear weapons are special, however, is a two-

edged sword. Perhaps they are indeed so peculiarly potent and militarily advantageous that their asymmetric possession
is sufficiently unfair to compel sharing or disarmament. Such an argument, however, sits only awkwardly to say
the least with the simultaneous claim by many advocates of the have/have not critique that nuclear weapons have no real utility
in the modern world and can therefore safely be abandoned by their possessors. After

all, it is hard to paint nuclear

weapons as being strategically decisive and useless at the same time . (If they are indeed useless,
the conclusion of unfairness hardly sounds very compelling. If they arent useless , however, it
may be appropriately hard to abolish them.) More importantly, any argument about the
destructively special character of nuclear weaponry cuts against the unfairness critique in that
it is this very specialness that seems to rob the have/have not issue of its moral relevance . Unlike iron

swords, the bingjia literature, Greek Fire, or essentially all other past military technologies the introduction of which produced
global control/acquisition dynamics, nuclear

weapons have introduced existential questions about the

future of human civilization which utterly swamp the conventional playground morality of
unfair have/have not competition. No prior technology held the potential to destroy humanity,
making nuclear weapons with the possible exception of certain techniques of biological weaponry a sui generis
case to which the conventional unfairness critique simply does not very persuasively apply. III.
Implications Let me be clear about this. The moral critique of nuclear weapons possession may yet speak to
the issue of whether anyone should have them. (This is not the place for a discussion of the feasibility of the
remedies proposed by the disarmament community, but let us at least acknowledge the existence of a real moral issue.) But this
matter has nothing to do with unfairness per se and to the extent that it purports to, one
should give it little credence. If indeed nuclear weapons do menace the survival of humanity, it
is essentially irrelevant whether their possession is unfairly distributed and it is certainly no
solution to make the global balance of weaponry more fair by allowing more countries to have
them. (Disarmament advocates hope to address the fairness problem by eliminating nuclear weapons, of course, but this is just
icing. Disarmament is almost never articulated as being driven primarily by fairness; the critical part of that argument is instead

the
fair/unfair dichotomy fails to speak intelligibly to the worlds nuclear dilemma. It isnt really about
fairness at all. Given the entanglement of nuclear weapons issues with quasi-existential questions
potentially affecting the survival of millions or perhaps even billions of people, moreover, it stands to reason that
an unfair outcome that nonetheless staves off such horrors is a perfectly good solution. On
this scale, one might say, non-catastrophe entirely trumps accusations of unfairness. Questions of
stability are far more important than issues of asymmetric distribution. This, of course, has powerful
implications for nonproliferation policy, because pointing out the hollowness of the unfairness argument as
applied to nuclear weapons suggests the moral sustainability of nonproliferation even if
complete nuclear disarmament cannot be achieved and the world continues to be characterized
by inequalities in weapons possession. We forget this at our collective peril. Dont get me wrong.
consequentialist, stressing the dangers that any nuclear weapons are said to present.) As a moral critique, in other words,

Unfairness arguments will presumably continue to have a political impact upon the diplomacy of nuclear nonproliferation, either
as a consequence of genuine resentment or as a cynical rationalization for the destabilizing pursuit of dangerous capabilities.
(Indeed, one might even go so far as to suspect that the emergence of the unfairness critique in modern diplomatic discourse is in
some sense partly the result of how morally compelling nonproliferation is, in this context, irrespective of the fairness of
have/have not outcomes. Precisely because the

moral case for nonproliferation-driven inequality is so

obvious and so compelling if such imbalance serves the interests of strategic stability , perhaps it was
necessary to develop a new rationale of fairness to help make proliferation aspirations seem more legitimate. Skraelings, one
imagines, did not need an elaborate philosophy of fairness in order to justify trying to steal iron
weapons; the desirability of such tools was simply obvious, and any effort to obtain them unsurprising and not in itself
condemnable.) But even in this democratic and egalitarian age, merely to incant the mantra of unfairness or to inveigh against
the existence of haves when there also exist have nots is not the same thing as having a compelling moral argument. Indeed, I
would submit that we

lose our moral bearings if we allow unfairness arguments to distract us from

what is really important here: substantive outcomes in the global security environment.
Unfairness, in other words, is an overrated critique, and fairness is an overrated destination. At least where
nuclear weapons are concerned, there are more important considerations in play . Let us not forget
this.

Threats real threat inflation would get our authors fired

Earl C. Ravenal 9, distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies @ Cato, is professor
emeritus of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He is an expert on NATO,
defense strategy, and the defense budget. He is the author of Designing Defense for a New
World Order. What's Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of America's Foreign
Policy. Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society 21.1 (2009) 21-75

My point is that virtually

every governmental role, and especially national-security roles, and

particularly the roles of the uniformed mili- tary, embody expectations of devotion to the national interest; rationality in the derivation of policy at every functional level; and objectivity in the treatment of parameters, especially
external parameters such as threats and the power and capabilities of other nations. Subrational models (such as public choice) fail to take into account even a partial dedication to the
national interest (or even the possibility that the national interest may be honestly
misconceived in more paro- chial terms). In contrast, an officials role connects the individual to
the (state-level) process, and moderates the (perhaps otherwise) self-seeking impulses of the individual.
Role-derived behavior tends to be formalized and codified; relatively transparent and at least
peer-reviewed , so as to be consistent with expectations; surviving the particular individual
and trans- mitted to successors and ancillaries; measured against a standard and thus corrigible;
defined in terms of the performed function and therefore derived from the state function; and
uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and even egregious aggrandizement are conspicuously
discouraged. My own direct observation suggests that defense decision-makers attempt to frame the
structure of the problems that they try to solve on the basis of the most accurate
intelligence . They make it their business to know where the threats come from. Thus,
threats are not socially constructed (even though, of course, some values are). A major reason for the rationality, and
the objectivity, of the process is that much security planning is done, not in vaguely undefined circum- stances that offer scope for idiosyncratic,
subjective behavior, but rather in structured and reviewed organizational frameworks. Non-rationalities (which are bad for understanding and

People are fired for presenting skewed analysis and for making
bad predictions. This is because something important is riding on the causal analysis and the
contingent prediction. For these reasons, public choice does not have the feel of reality to many
critics who have participated in the structure of defense decision-making. In that structure , obvious,
and even not-so-obvious,rent-seeking would not only be shameful; it would present a severe risk of
career termination . And, as mentioned, the defense bureaucracy is hardly a productive place for truly talented rent-seekers to
prediction) tend to get filtered out.

operatecompared to opportunities for personal profit in the commercial world. A bureaucrats very self-placement in these reaches of government testifies either to a sincere commitment to the national interest or to a lack of sufficient imagination to exploit
opportunities for personal profit.

No risk of endless war

Gray 7Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations
and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, graduate of the Universities of Manchester
and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly
with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute (Colin, July, The
Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A
Reconsideration, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf)
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most controversial policies
contain within them the possibility of misuse. In

the hands of a paranoid or boundlessly ambitious political leader,

prevention could be a policy for endless warfare. However, the American political system, with
its checks and balances, was designed explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive
from excessive folly. Both the Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly
that although the conduct of war is an executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public
attitudes. Clausewitz made this point superbly with his designation of the passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital
component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power can be, and indeed is often, abused, both personally and
nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the
option. One might argue that the easy success achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a
similarly rapid success against Saddam Husseins Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success can be habit forming. On
balance, claim seven is not persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth and power,
unused to physical insecurity at homenotwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crimeis vulnerable to

we ought not to endorse the argument that the

United States should eschew the preventive war option because it could lead to a futile, endless
search for absolute security. One might as well argue that the United States should adopt a defense policy and
develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland security approached in a narrowly geographical sense. Since a president
might misuse a military instrument that had a global reach, why not deny the White House even
the possibility of such misuse? In other words, constrain policy ends by limiting policys military
means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does have a certain elementary logic. It is the
opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy which includes the preventive option might
lead to a search for total security is not at all convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible, which
is one of the many reasons why popular democracy is the superior form of government . It would be absurd to permit the
fear of a futile and dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude prevention as a policy
option. Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against prevention is a stock favorite among
preventions critics. It should be recognized and dismissed for what it is, a debating point with
little pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always policy, must be nothing if not pragmatic.
demands for policies that supposedly can restore security. But

1AR Warming DA
Nuclear power isnt cost competitive
Neuhauser 16 (Alan Neuhauser Staff Writer, 3-30-2016, "Nuclear Power, Once Cheap,
Squeezed by Mounting Costs," US News & World Report,
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/nuclear-power-once-cheap-squeezed-bymounting-costs) LADI
But in the past decade, saddled by a cost crunch some experts say could threaten safety and
imperil the world's efforts to slow global warming, nuclear power has had a tougher time than
ever delivering on that promise. Natural gas has shouldered much of the blame: The fuel is
inexpensive and abundant, the power plants easy to build, the emissions relatively low.
Comparatively less attention, however, has been paid to nuclear plants themselves. From 20022014, the cost to run the nation's 99 nuclear reactors leapt by 28 percent, the industry's main
train group says. Fuel costs have climbed, but age is also a chief culprit: The plants are an
average 36 years old, requiring expensive and more frequent repairs. "It gets harder to keep
them running at the same price, even as competitors get cheaper and the market gets thinner,"
says Peter Bradford, a commissioner with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1977-1982
and a professor at Vermont Law School. Electricity markets flooded not only by cheap gas but
also new solar and wind paid as little as 2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity last year.
Nuclear plants at times needed a full cent more an additional 50 percent to break even.
There are caveats: Prices constantly fluctuate, certain plants run more efficiently than others,
and some are required to keep running even if it's expensive simply because there's so much
demand in the area. In places like the Midwest with plenty of wind turbines, electricity prices
can even go negative at night and in the early morning, when wind blows the hardest yet
demand is also at its lowest, encouraging plants to go offline.

Warming not real- recent temperatures show no increase

Happer 12
(William is a professor of physics at Princeton. Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again,
Wall Street Journal, 3/27/12,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html)
What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more
than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere,
compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly
global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly
less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979

No impact for a century IPCC agrees.

Ridley 15 Matt Ridley, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of
Medical Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Conservative Member of the House of Lords (UK), Author of several popular science books
including The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves and The Evolution of Everything:
How Ideas Emerge, former Science Editor at The Economist, former Visiting Professor at Cold

Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, holds a D.Phil. in Zoology from Magdalen College,
Oxford, 2015 (Climate Change Will Not Be Dangerous for a Long Time, Scientific American,
November 27th, Available Online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-changewill-not-be-dangerous-for-a-long-time/, Accessed 07-17-2016)
The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is
real, man-made and dangerous, as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or its a hoax, as Oklahoma
Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not
dangerous, at least not for a long time . This lukewarm option has been boosted by
recent climate research , and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For
example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree
that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and
contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private
Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted
funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing
electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year
from the effects of cooking over wood fires. In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) was predicting that if emissions rose in a business as usual way, which they
have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius
per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since,
temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or
satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term
forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7
degree C above the 19862005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade ,
in all scenarios , including the high-emissions ones. At the same time, new studies of climate
sensitivitythe amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 0.03
to 0.06 percent in the atmospherehave suggested that most models are too sensitive . The
average sensitivity of the 108 model runs considered by the IPCC is 3.2 degrees C. As Pat
Michaels, a climatologist and self-described global warming skeptic at the Cato Institute
testified to Congress in July, certain studies of sensitivity published since 2011 find an average
sensitivity of 2 degrees C. Such lower sensitivity does not contradict greenhouse-effect physics.
The theory of dangerous climate change is based not just on carbon dioxide warming but on
positive and negative feedback effects from water vapor and phenomena such as clouds and
airborne aerosols from coal burning. Doubling carbon dioxide levels, alone, should produce just
over 1 degree C of warming. These feedback effects have been poorly estimated , and almost
certainly overestimated , in the models. The last IPCC report also included a table
debunking many worries about tipping points to abrupt climate change. For example, it says
a sudden methane release from the ocean, or a slowdown of the Gulf Stream, are very
unlikely and that a collapse of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets during this century
is exceptionally unlikely . If sensitivity is low and climate change continues at the same
rate as it has over the past 50 years, then dangerous warmingusually defined as starting at 2
degrees C above preindustrial levelsis about a century away . So we do not need to rush
into subsidizing inefficient and land-hungry technologies, such as wind and solar or risk
depriving poor people access to the beneficial effects of cheap electricity via fossil fuels.

Climate change is not catastrophic their impacts exaggerate.

Tol 14 Richard Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, Professor of the
Economics of Climate Change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Member of the Academia
Europaeaa European non-governmental scientific association, served as Coordinating Lead
Author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and
Vulnerability, holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Operations
Research from the VU University Amsterdam, 2014 (Bogus prophecies of doom will not fix the
climate, Financial Times, March 31st, Available Online at
https://next.ft.com/content/e8d011fa-b8b5-11e3-835e-00144feabdc0, Accessed 07-15-2016)
Humans are a tough and adaptable species. People live on the equator and in the Arctic, in
the desert and in the rainforest. We survived the ice ages with primitive technologies. The idea
that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable. Climate change will
have consequences, of course. Since different plants and animals thrive in different climates, it
will affect natural ecosystems and agriculture. Warmer and wetter weather will advance the
spread of tropical diseases. Seas will rise, putting pressure on all that lives on the coast. These
impacts sound alarming but they need to be put in perspective before we draw conclusions
about policy. According to Mondays report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
a further warming of 2C could cause losses equivalent to 0.2-2 per cent of world gross domestic
product. On current trends, that level of warming would happen some time in the second half of
the 21st century. In other words, half a century of climate change is about as bad as losing one
year of economic growth. Since the start of the crisis in the eurozone, the income of the average
Greek has fallen more than 20 per cent. Climate change is not, then, the biggest problem facing
humankind. It is not even its biggest environmental problem. The World Health Organisation
estimates that about 7m [million] people are now dying each year as a result of air pollution.
Even on the most pessimistic estimates, climate change is not expected to cause loss of life on
that scale for another 100 years .

Neg

1NC

1NC Warming DA
Nuclear power is critical to stop catastrophic warming
Waldman 15 - Susanne, PhD in Risk Communication at Carleton University (Why we Need
Nuclear Power to Save the Environment http://energyforhumanity.org/climate-energy/neednuclear-power-save-environment/) LADI
The idea we might need nuclear power to save the environment may have seen farfetched thirty
years ago, at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But its an idea that more and more
scientists of all stripes as well as energy experts and even environmentalists are coming to share.
Last month, 75 biodiversity scientists signed an open letter imploring the environmental and
conservation communities to rethink idealistic opposition to nuclear energy , given the threats
to global ecosystems set in motion by climate change. This open letter follows in the wake of
another published a year ago in the New York Times by climate scientists with a similar
message: there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial
role for nuclear power. These scientists who study the earth and the life on it are concerned it is
too risky to rely solely on wind, solar and other so-called green power to replace fossil fuels,
which are still the fastest growing energy sources by a long shot. As these scientists point out,
renewable power sources would require enormous amounts of land, materials, and money to
meet the worlds current and growing energy needs. Wind and solar power are especially
problematic because they are intermittent and cant be dispatched to match demand. While the
quest is on for grid storage options, there has not yet been a significant storage breakthrough,
and any contribution it ends up making may only be modest. In the meantime other power
sources that can run full time are required to take up the slack. Options for doing so are limited
to fossil fuels, biomass that is comparatively bulky and limited in scale, hydro power that is
largely tapped out in some places, and nuclear power. The advantage of nuclear power is there is
no shortage of suitable sites and it is the most low-footprint form of power generation, taking
into account land use, materials, carbon footprint, and fuel density. History has shown the most
effective way to replace fossil fuel power over a 15-year-period is to build up nuclear. Ontarians,
who rely on nuclear plants to deliver roughly three-fifths of our power every day, and have
become coal-free, know this. So do people in France, where nuclear energy supplies around
three quarters of power needs. The problem is that as a complex form of technology, nuclear
plants are relatively pricey to build. Few have been constructed of late in the Western world,
during an era of cheap coal and gas, liberalized energy markets, cash-strapped governments,
and hyped-up renewables. Experienced work forces who can put them up quickly have become
hard to assemble on the fly. These patterns can alter, though, as people come to recognize that
once nuclear plants are up they can churn out steady carbon-free power for over half a
century . Moreover the power they provide is typically quite cheap and not sensitive to fuel
price volatility.

Nuclear power stops dangerous quantities of emissions

Biello 13 David, writes for the scientific American, Internally Cites James Hansen,
Professor at Columbia University (How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/)
LADI
In addition to reducing the risk of nuclear war, U.S. reactors have also been staving off another
global challenge: climate change. The low-carbon electricity produced by such reactors provides

20 percent of the nation's power and, by the estimates of climate scientist James Hansen of
Columbia University, avoided 64 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution. They
also avoided spewing soot and other air pollution like coal-fired power plants do and thus
have saved some 1.8 million lives. And that's why Hansen, among others, such as former
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, thinks that nuclear power is a key energy technology to fend off
catastrophic climate change. "We can't burn all these fossil fuels," Hansen told a group of
reporters on December 3, noting that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source they
will continue to be burned. " Coal is almost half the [global] emissions . If you replace
these power plants with modern, safe nuclear reactors you could do a lot of [pollution reduction]
quickly." Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record
occurred in France in the 1970s and 80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil
fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent
per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to
avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent
paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this
without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute
at Columbia University, where Hansen works.

Theres an unquestionable scientific consensus about warming.

Nuccitelli 16 Dana Nuccitelli, Climate Writer for the Guardian, Environmental Scientist
at Tetra Techa private environmental consulting firm, holds an M.A. in Physics from the
University of California-Davis and a B.A. in Astrophysics from the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, 2016 (Its settled: 90100% of climate experts agree on human-caused global
warming, Climate Consensus The 97%a Guardian blog about climate change, April 13th,
Available Online at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-percent/2016/apr/13/its-settled-90100-of-climate-experts-agree-on-human-caused-globalwarming, Accessed 07-15-2016)
There is an overwhelming expert scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.
Authors of seven previous climate consensus studies including Naomi Oreskes, Peter
Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, John Cook, myself,
and six of our colleagues have co-authored a new paper that should settle this question
once and for all . The two key conclusions from the paper are: 1) Depending on exactly how
you measure the expert consensus, its somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree
humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus
among publishing climate scientists. 2) The greater the climate expertise among those
surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming. [Graphic Omitted] Expert
consensus is a powerful thing. People know we dont have the time or capacity to learn about
everything, and so we frequently defer to the conclusions of experts. Its why we visit doctors
when were ill. The same is true of climate change: most people defer to the expert consensus of
climate scientists. Crucially, as we note in our paper: Public perception of the scientific
consensus has been found to be a gateway belief, affecting other climate beliefs and attitudes
including policy support. Thats why those who oppose taking action to curb climate change
have engaged in a misinformation campaign to deny the existence of the expert consensus.
Theyve been largely successful, as the public badly underestimate the expert consensus, in what
we call the consensus gap. Only 12% of Americans realize that the consensus is above 90%.

[Video Omitted] Consensus misrepresentations Our latest paper was written in response to a
critique published by Richard Tol in Environmental Research Letters, commenting on the 2013
paper published in the same journal by John Cook, myself, and colleagues finding a 97%
consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed literature. Tol argues that
when considering results from previous consensus studies, the Cook 97% figure is an outlier,
which he claims is much higher than most other climate consensus estimates. He makes this
argument by looking at sub-samples from previous surveys. For example, Dorans 2009 study
broke down the survey data by profession the consensus was 47% among economic geologists,
64% among meteorologists, 82% among all Earth scientists, and 97% among publishing climate
scientists. The lower the climate expertise in each group, the lower the consensus. [Graph
Omitted] Like several of these consensus surveys, Doran cast a wide net and included responses
from many non-experts, but among the experts, the consensus is consistently between 90% and
100%. However, by including the non-expert samples, its possible to find low consensus
values. The flaw in this approach is especially clear when we consider the most ridiculous subsample included in Tols critique: Verheggens 2015 study included a grouping of predominantly
non-experts who were unconvinced by human-caused global warming, among whom the
consensus was 7%. The only surprising thing about this number is that more than zero of those
unconvinced by human-caused global warming agree that humans are the main cause of
global warming. In his paper, Tol included this 7% unconvinced, non-expert sub-sample as a
data point in his argument that the 97% consensus result is unusually high. By breaking out all
of these sub-samples of non-experts, the critique thus misrepresented a number of previous
consensus studies in an effort to paint our 97% result as an outlier. The authors of those
misrepresented studies were not impressed with this approach, denouncing the
misrepresentations of their work in no uncertain terms. We subsequently collaborated with
those authors in this newly-published scholarly response, bringing together an all-star lineup
of climate consensus experts . The following quote from the paper sums up our feelings
about the critiques treatment of our research: Tols (2016) conflation of unrepresentative nonexpert sub-samples and samples of climate experts is a misrepresentation of the results of
previous studies, including those published by a number of coauthors of this paper. Consensus
on consensus In our paper, we show that including non-experts is the only way to argue for a
consensus below 90100%. The greater the climate expertise among those included in the
survey sample, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming. Similarly, if you
want to know if you need open heart surgery, youll get much more consistent answers (higher
consensus) if you only ask cardiologists than if you also survey podiatrists , neurologists ,
and dentists. Thats because, as we all know, expertise matters . Its easy to manufacture a
smaller non-expert consensus number and argue that it contradicts the 97% figure. As our new
paper shows, when you ask the climate experts, the consensus on human-caused global warming
is between 90% and 100%, with several studies finding 97% consensus among publishing
climate scientists. Theres some variation in the percentage, depending on exactly how the
survey is done and how the question is worded, but ultimately its still true that theres a 97%
consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on human-caused global warming. In fact,
even Richard Tol has agreed: The consensus is of course in the high nineties. Is the consensus
97% or 99.9%? In fact, some believe our 97% consensus estimate was too low. These claims are
usually based on an analysis done by James Powell, and the difference simply boils down to how
consensus is defined. Powell evaluated the percentage of papers that dont explicitly reject
human-caused global warming in their abstracts. That includes 99.83% of papers published
between 1991 and 2012, and 99.96% of papers published in 2013. In short, 97% of peer-reviewed

climate research that states a position on human-caused warming endorses the consensus, and
about 99.9% of the total climate research doesnt explicitly reject human-caused global
warming. Our two analyses simply answer different questions. The percentage of experts and
their research that endorse the theory is a better description of consensus. However, Powells
analysis is useful in showing how few peer-reviewed scientific papers explicitly reject humancaused global warming. In any case, theres really no question that humans are the driving force
causing global warming. The experts are almost universally convinced because the
scientific evidence is overwhelming . Denying the consensus by misrepresenting the research
wont change that reality. With all of the consensus authors teaming up to show the 90100%
expert consensus on human-caused global warming, and most finding 97% consensus among
publishing climate scientists, this paper should be the final word on the subject .

Global warming definitively causes extinction

Sharp and Kennedy 14 (Associate Professor Robert (Bob) A. Sharp is the UAE
National Defense College Associate Dean for Academic Programs and College Quality Assurance
Advisor. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Strategic Security Studies at the College
of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the U.S. National Defense University (NDU),
Washington D.C. and then as Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for
Strategic Studies, collocated with NDU. Most recently at NESA, he focused on security sector
reform in Yemen and Lebanon, and also supported regional security engagement events into
Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Qatar; Edward Kennedy is a renewable energy and
climate change specialist who has worked for the World Bank and the Spanish Electric Utility
ENDESA on carbon policy and markets; 8/22/14, Climate Change and Implications for
National Security, International Policy Digest,
http://intpolicydigest.org/2014/08/22/climate-change-implications-national-security/)
Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. If that whole time was to be reflected on a single one-year calendar then the dinosaurs died off
sometime late in the afternoon of December 27th and modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, or at around lunchtime on
December 28th. Therefore, human life on earth is very recent. Sometime on December 28th humans made the first fires wood fires
neutral in the carbon balance. Now reflect on those most recent 200,000 years again on a single one-year calendar and you might
be surprised to learn that the industrial revolution began only a few hours ago during the middle of the afternoon on December 31st,
250 years ago, coinciding with the discovery of underground carbon fuels. Over the 250 years carbon fuels have enabled tremendous
technological advances including a population growth from about 800 million then to 7.5 billion today and the consequent demand
to extract even more carbon. This has occurred during a handful of generations, which is hardly noticeable on our imaginary oneyear calendar. The

release of this carbon however is changing our climate at such a rapid rate that it
threatens our survival and presence on earth. It defies imagination that so much damage has been done
in such a relatively short time. The implications of climate change is the single most significant
threat to life on earth and, put simply, we are not doing enough to rectify the damage. This relatively
very recent ability to change our climate is an inconvenient truth; the science is sound. We know of the complex set of
interrelated national and global security risks that are a result of global warming and the velocity at
which climate change is occurring. We worry it may already be too late. Climate change writ large has informed few, interested
some, confused many, and polarized politics. It has already led to an increase in natural disasters including but
not limited to droughts, storms, floods, fires etc. The year 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to an American
Meteorological Society (AMS) report. Research suggests that climate

change is already affecting human

displacement; reportedly 36 million people were displaced in 2008 alone because of sudden natural disasters. Figures for 2010
and 2011 paint a grimmer picture of people displaced because of rising sea levels, heat and storms . Climate
change affects all natural systems . It impacts temperature and consequently it affects water and
weather patterns . It contributes to desertification, deforestation and acidification of the
oceans . Changes in weather patterns may mean droughts in one area and floods in another. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, sea

levels rise but perennial river water supplies are reduced because glaciers are retreating. As glaciers
and polar ice caps melt, there is an albedo effect, which is a double whammy of less
temperature regulation because of less surface area of ice present. This means that less absorption occurs and
also there is less reflection of the suns light. A potentially critical wild card could be runaway climate change due to
the release of methane from melting tundra. Worldwide permafrost soils contain about 1,700 Giga Tons of carbon, which is about
four times more than all the carbon released through human activity thus far. The

planet has already adapted itself to

change including a wide range of distinct geologic periods and multiple extinctions, and at a pace that it
can be managed. It is human intervention that has accelerated the pace dramatically : An
increased surface temperature, coupled with more severe weather and changes in water distribution
will create uneven threats to our agricultural systems and will foster and support the spread of
insect borne diseases like Malaria, Dengue and the West Nile virus. Rising sea levels will increasingly
threaten our coastal population and infrastructure centers and with more than 3.5 billion people half the planet
dramatic climate

depending on the ocean for their primary source of food, ocean acidification may dangerously undercut critical natural food systems
which would result in reduced rations. Climate change also carries significant inertia. Even if emissions were completely halted

the impact is not only to the environment,

water, coastal homes, agriculture and fisheries as mentioned, but also would lead to conflict and
thus impact national security . Resource wars are inevitable as countries respond,
adapt and compete for the shrinking set of those available resources . These wars have arguably
already started and will continue in the future because climate change will force countries to act for national
survival; the so-called Climate Wars. As early as 2003 Greenpeace alluded to a report which it claimed was commissioned by the
Pentagon titled: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security. It painted
a picture of a world in turmoil because global warming had accelerated. The scenario outlined was both abrupt
today, temperature increases would continue for some time. Thus

and alarming. The report offered recommendations but backed away from declaring climate change an immediate problem,
concluding that it would actually be more incremental and measured; as such it would be an irritant, not a shock for national
security systems. In 2006 the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Institute of Public Research convened

a board of 11
and admirals to assess National Security and the Threat to Climate Change .
Their initial report was published in April 2007 and made no mention of the potential acceleration of climate change. The team
found that climate change was a serious threat to national security and that it was: most likely to
senior retired generals

happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism. The team made recommendations from their analysis

Europe would experience some fracturing because of

border migration. Africa would need more stability and humanitarian operations provided by
the United States. The Middle East would experience a loss of food and water security (which) will
increase pressure to emigrate across borders. Asia would suffer from threats to water and the
spread of infectious disease. In 2009 the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to coordinate
across the intelligence community and to focus policy. In May 2014, CNA again convened a Military Advisory
Board but this time to assess National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change . The
report concludes that climate change is no longer a future threat but occurring right now and
the authors appeal to the security community, the entire government and the American people to not only build
resilience against projected climate change impacts but to form agreements to stabilize climate change and also to
integrate climate change across all strategy and planning . The calm of the 2007 report is replaced
of regional impacts which suggested the following.

by a tone of anxiety concerning the future coupled with calls for public discourse and debate because time and tide wait for no
man. The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to
stabilize climate change) and states that: Actions

by the United States and the international community have been

insufficient to adapt to the challenges associated with projected climate change. Strengthening resilience to climate
impacts already locked into the system is critical, but this will reduce long-term risk only if
improvements in resilience are accompanied by actionable agreements on ways to stabilize climate
change. The 9/11 Report framed the terrorist attacks as less of a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination. Greenpeaces

2003 account of the

Pentagons alleged report describes a coming climate Armageddon which to readers

was unimaginable and hence the report was not really taken seriously. It described: A world thrown into turmoil
by drought, floods, typhoons . Whole countries rendered uninhabitable . The capital of the
Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving
boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands
for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons . The CNA and
Greenpeace/Pentagon reports are both mirrored by similar analysis by the World Bank which highlighted not only the
physical manifestations of climate change, but also the significant human impacts that threaten to unravel
decades of economic development , which will ultimately foster conflict . Climate change
is the quintessential Tragedy of the Commons, where the cumulative impact of many individual actions (carbon emission in this
case) is not seen as linked to the marginal gains available to each individual action and not seen as cause and effect. It is
simultaneously huge, yet amorphous and nearly invisible from day to day. It is occurring very fast in geologic time terms, but in
human time it is (was) slow and incremental. Among environmental problems, it is uniquely global. With our planet and culture
figuratively and literally honeycombed with a reliance on fossil fuels, we face systemic challenges in changing the reliance across
multiple layers of consumption, investment patterns, and political decisions; it will be hard to fix!

1NC Security K
Prolif is an epistemological excuse for violence their discourse
wrecks alternative approaches and trades off with structural
violence
Woods 7 Matthew, PhD in IR @ Brown - Researcher @ Thomas Watson Institute of
International Relations [Journal of Language and Politics 6.1Unnatural Acts: Nuclear
Language, proliferation, and order, p. 116-7]
It is important to identify, expose and understand the successful creation of 'proliferation' as the
inevitable, uncontrollable and dangerous spread of nuclear arms because it changed the world in
innumerable ways. On one hand, it is the chief motivation for a wide array of cooperative
endeavors among states and the central rationale for the most successful arms control
agreement in modern history, the NPT. It inspired sacrifices that led to faith in our regard for
others and stimulated confidence in international law. On the other hand, it is the reason for an
unparalleled collection of international denial and regulatory institutions and it is the
omnipresent and ineliminable threat at the heart of our chronic , unremitting suspicion of
others. It is a cause of global inequality and double-standards among states and the progenitor
of the name and identity 'rogue state' (states that reject the whaling ban are not 'rogue states'). It
is a central element in world-wide toleration for human misery, such as starvation in North
Korea, and in public toleration for the clear deception and dissembling of government elites,
such as in the US. It is a vehicle in some media for racial stereotypes. The existence of
'proliferation' is a primary rationale among nuclear states for preserving and improving their
nuclear arsenals. And faith in the existence of 'Proliferation: most recently, brought about
i nvasion, war and continuing death in the Middle East. Every individual that fears it,
organization that studies it and state that strives to prevent it embraces 'proliferation' as a real
and known thing and, in part, orients their identity and behavior according to it . The
successful creation of 'proliferation' represents the creation of our common sense, our everyday
life and our natural attitude toward the nuclear world 'out there.' It is uncontestable and to
suggest otherwise that nuclear states might be to blame for any spread of nuclear arms, or that it
has actually been rare and so far benign or that it may even be beneficial (see a critical review of
this literature in Woods 2002) - is to invite derision and ostracism. The reality of 'proliferation'
is so massive and solidified that the essential role of (cell) proliferation in maintaining life and
health is virtually forgotten, overwhelmed, its positive meaning restricted to the doctor's office
and biology lab. In short, the creation of 'proliferation' is a textbook example of what some term
hegemony, the creation by a dominant group of a world that realizes its ideological preferences
while marginalizing other possibilities and co-opting subordinates.

Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and mass

violence against those deemed environmental threats also causes
political apathy which turns case
Buell 3 Frederickcultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at
Queens College and the author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186
Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems
to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective
opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation

by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan
extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a total
solution to the problems involved a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis
discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reichs infamous final
solution .55 A total crisis of societyenvironmental crisis at its gravestthreatens to translate
despair into inhumanist authoritarianism ; more often, however, it helps keep merely
dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expertled solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their
impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or
passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own , one
might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of
environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep
cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition:
the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn ones back on the
environment. This means, preeminently, turning ones back on natureon traditions of nature
feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the
different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is
thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnaturea
conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium.
Explorations of how deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and
dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based
environmental issues, not greater concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any
reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact
bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisiswith 1960s- and 1970s-style
environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse
as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from
serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has
turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent
features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the
imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and temporally predicted imminent total
meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate total solution . Thus
doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave temptation; and as
crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation increased to
refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal nature.

Vote negative to reject the 1ACs enframing and reevaluate

problematisation
Cheeseman & Bruce 96 (Graeme Cheeseman, Snr. Lecturer @ New South Wales, and
Robert Bruce, 1996, Discourses of Danger & Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9)
This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of
international relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as
traditional modes of theory and practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy
comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to give meaning to global changes reflects partly
the enclosed, elitist world of profession security analysts and bureaucratic experts, where entry
is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular, exclusionary language. The
contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord no privileged place to its

knowledge form as reality in debates on defense and security. Indeed, they believe that debate
will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluating of elite perspectives.
Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australias identity are both required and
essential if Australias thinking on defense and security is to be invigorated. This is not a
conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policy-makers and
their academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions , in familiar language and
format, to problems they pose. This expectation is itself a considerable part of the
problem to be analyzed. It is, however, a book about policy, one that questions how problems
are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the proposition that irreducible bodies of real
knowledge on defense and security exist independently of their context in the world, and it
demonstrates how security policy is articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that
knowledge, experts trained to recognize enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this
perspective, must accept such wisdom to remain outside of the expert domain, tainted by their
inability to comply with the rightness of the official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at
the least its image of the world, that needs to be problematised. If the critic responds
directly to the demand for policy alternatives , without addressing this image, he or she is
tacitly endorsing it . Before engaging in the policy debate the critics need to reframe the basic
terms of reference tradition of democratic dialogue. More immediately, it ignores postseventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good society must have within it
some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions based upon that knowledge
which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly different
connotation in contemporary liberal democracies, which during the Cold War, were proclaimed
different and superior to the totalitarian enemy precisely because they were institutional checks
and balances upon power. In short, one of the major differences between open societies and
their (closed) counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the critical
testing of the knowledge and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal
democratic principles. The latter tolerated criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For
some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific methods of inquiry and techniques of
falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism have lost much of their
allure, it means that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population must be
independent of the state and free to question its knowledge and power. One must be able to say
why to power and proclaim no to power. Though we do not expect this position to be accepted
by every reader, contributors to this book believe that critical dialogue is long overdue in
Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic trappings, Australias security
community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defense and security. This
book also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that informs
conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters
1 and 2, is to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy
prescription. The book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defense and
security to think critically about what they are reading, writing and saying; to begin to ask, of
their work and study, difficult and searching questions raised in other disciplines; to recognize,
no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what is involved in theory and practice is not the
ability to identify a replacement for failed models, but a realization that terms and concepts
state sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on are contested and problematic, and
that the world is indeterminate, always becoming what is written about it. Critical analysis
which shows how particular kinds of theoretical presumptions can effectively exclude vital areas

of political life from analysis has direct practical implications for policymakers, academics and
citizens who face the daunting task of steering Australia through some potentially choppy
international waters over the next few years. There is also much interest in the chapters for
those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has long been taken for granted
now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to find
meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why
readers will find no single, fully formed panacea for the worlds ills in general, or Australias
security in particular. There are none. Ever chapter, however in its own way, offers something
more than is found in orthodox literature, often by exposing ritualistic Cold War defense and
security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking. Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present
alternative ways of engaging in security and defense practice. Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8)
seek to alert policymakers, academics and students to alternative theoretical possibilities that
might better serve an Australian community pursuing security and prosperity in an uncertain
world. All chapters confront the policy community and its counterparts in the academy with a
deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints imposed by dominant traditions of
realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in the past characterized
exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as noted earlier, attention
needs to be paid to the words and the thought process of those being criticized. A close reading
of this kind draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they need to be recognized and
questioned. A sense of doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a necessary prelude to a
genuine search for alternative policies. First comes an awareness of the need for new
perspectives, then specific polices may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter, we
need to look not as much at contending policies as they are made for us but challenging the
discursive process which gives [favored interpretations of reality] their meaning and which
direct [Australias] policy/analytical/ military responses. This process is not restricted to the
small, official defense and security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War
Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses much of Australias academic defense and security
community located primarily though not exclusively within the Australian National University
and the University College of the University of New South Wales. These discursive processes are
examined in detail in subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make sense of a politics of
exclusion and closure which exercises disciplinary power over Australias security community.
They also question the discourse of regional security, security cooperation, peacekeeping and
alliance politics that are central to Australias official and academic security agenda in the
1990s. This is seen as an important task especially when, as it revealed, the disciplines of
International Relations and Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical
debates ranging across the social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found
in Australian defense and security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australias
public policies on defense and security are informed, underpinned, and. This book, then, reflects
and underlines the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Saids critical intellectuals. The
demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy makers frame of reference be accepted as the only
basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three thousand year old tradition commonly
associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western legitimized by a narrowlybased intellectual enterprise which draws strength from contested concepts of realism and
liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through policy-making processes. Contributors ask
whether Australias policy-makers and their academic advisers are unaware of broader
intellectual debates. Or resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and why? To
summarize: a central concern of this book is to democratize the defense and security

theory/practice process in Australia so that restrictions on debate can be understood and

resisted. This is a crucial enterprise in an analytical/ policy environment dominated by
particularly rigid variants of realism which have become so powerful and unreflective that they
are no longer recognized simply as particular ways of constituting the world, but as
descriptions of the real-as reality itself . The consequences of this (silenced) theory-aspractice may be viewed every day in the poignant, distressing monuments to analytical/policy
metooism at the Australian (Imperial) War Memorial in Canberra and the many other
monuments to young Australians in towns and cities around the country. These are the flesh and
blood installments of an insurance policy strategy which, tragically, remains integral to
Australian realism, despite claims of a new mature independent identity in the 1990s. This is
what unfortunately, continues to be at stake in the potentially deadly debates over defense and
security revealed in this book. For this reason alone, it should be regarded as a positive and
constructive contribution to debate by those who are the targets of its criticisms.

Representations must precede policy discussion they determine

what is politically thinkable.
Crawford 02 Neta, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument
and Change in World Politics, p. 19-21
Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level,
agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-argumentsregarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way
we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and
the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before
specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over
epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash
between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the
nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are
more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the good are contests over what it
is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature
of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of good so that we know good when we see it
and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common
are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to understand a
particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are
different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, Argument
and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world. For
example, is the war defensive or aggressive?. Defining and controlling representations and
images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a
particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international
law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve
mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments,
actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by
drawing vivid pictures of the reality through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation.
Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively represent situations in a way that makes sense. mimesis is a metaphoric or iconic argumentation
of the real. Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.
Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their
situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a constraint on

reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.

The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing
how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, the possibility of practices presupposes the
ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of
social actors and relationships, must already be in place. If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart
Thorson argue, politics involves the selective privileging of representations, it may not matter
whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate
accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how frames
affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are
thus crucial elements of political argument because an actors arguments about what to do will
be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as
Rodger Payne suggests, No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively
wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling. Hence framing is a metaargument.

1NC Meltdowns
Accidents are rare, nuclear power is the safest
Walsh 13 Bryan, Writes for Time (Nuclear Energy Is Largely Safe. But Can It Be Cheap?
http://science.time.com/2013/07/08/nuclear-energy-is-largely-safe-but-can-it-be-cheap/)
LADI
Is it safe? Thats what most people brought up on Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and The
Simpsons want to know about nuclear power. And for the most part, the answer is yes .
Accidents are rare, and those that have occurred including the partial meltdown in
Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 have resulted in few deaths. On a megawatt-per-megawatt basis,
nuclear kills fewer people than almost any other source of electricity especially compared with
air pollution from coal, the single biggest supplier of electricity in the U.S., which contributes to
the deaths of 14,000 Americans each year. And nuclear energy, unlike every other form of
electricity save hydro and renewables, doesnt contribute to man-made climate change.

Alternatives are worse

Waldman 15 - Susanne, PhD in Risk Communication at Carleton University (Why we Need
Nuclear Power to Save the Environment http://energyforhumanity.org/climate-energy/neednuclear-power-save-environment/) LADI
What about safety? The accident at Fukushima after the Japanese tsunami in 2011 has gripped
the world. Yet no one has died from radiation released, and the World Health Organization
anticipates no uptick in associated deaths will occur. By contrast, a million people die every year
of health problems caused by the pollution from coal. A dam break in China in 1971 killed over a
hundred thousand people. Rare earth mining for materials used in solar panel construction, EV
batteries and wind turbines is currently poisoning a chunk of inner Mongolia. There is no
absolutely risk-free, pollution free way to generate energy, as James Conca has pointed out in a
well-circulated article in Forbes, How Deadly is Your Kilowatt. But over its lifetime, Conca
points out, Nuclear has the lowest deathprint relative to the amount of energy it produces.
Meanwhile, safer meltdown-proof reactors are currently being developed around the world.
Choosing to build more nuclear power plants is going to require a mental shift for a lot of
people. In their letter, conservation scientists called for the environmental community to move
beyond idealistic perceptions of what is green and think practically about trade-offs around
energy. As the scientists suggest, no solution thats currently visible can match nuclears steady,
CO2-free power for keeping our world safe from biodiversity and climate impacts.

Biodiversity is resilient and inevitable

Sagoff 8 Mark, Senior Research Scholar @ Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy @
School of Public Policy @ U. Maryland, Environmental Values, On the Economic Value of
Ecosystem Services, 17:2, 239-257, EBSCO
Biodiversity represents nature's greatest largess or excess
species appear nearly as numerous as the stars the Drifters admired, except that "scientists have a
better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how many species there arc on
Earth."70 Worldwide the variety of biodiversity is effectively infinite ; the myriad species of plants
and animals, not to mention microbes that arc probably more important, apparently exceed our ability to
What about the economic value of biodiversity?
since

count or identify them. The "next" or "incremental" thousand species taken at random would not fetch
a market price because another thousand are immediately available , and another thousand after that. No
one has suggested an economic application, moreover, for any of the thousand species listed as threatened in
the United States.77 To defend these species - or the next thousand or the thousand after that - on economic
grounds is to trade convincing spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical arguments for bogus, pretextual, and

We do not know how many [plant] species

are needed to keep the planet green and healthy, but it seems very unlikely to be anywhere near the
more than quarter of a million we have now. Even a mighty dominant like the American chestnut, extending
disingenuous economic ones.78 As David Ehrenfeld has written,

over half a continent, all but disappeared without bringing the eastern deciduous forest down with it. And if we

what biologist is willing to find a value

- conventional or ecological - for all 600,000-plus species of beetles?7 * The disappearance in the wild
even of agriculturally useful species appears to have no effect on production. The last wild aurochs,
the progenitor of dairy and beef cattle, went extinct in Poland in 1742, yet no one believes the beef
industry is threatened. The genetic material of crop species is contained in tens of thousands of landraces
and cultivars in use - rice is an example - and does not depend on the persistence of wild ancestral types .
Genetic engineering can introduce DNA from virtually any species into virtually any other which allows for the unlimited creation of biodiversity. A neighbor of mine has collected about
turn to the invertebrates, the source of nearly all biological diversity,

4,000 different species of insects on his two-acre property in Silver Spring, Maryland. These include 500 kinds of
Lepidoptera (mostly moths) - half the number another entomologist found at his residence.80 When you factor
in plants and animals, the amount of "backyard biodiversity" in suburbs is astounding and far greater than you

Biodiversity has no value "at the margin" because nature provides far more of it than
anyone could possibly administer. If one kind of moth flies off, you can easily attract hundreds of
others.
can imagine.8'

Empirics disprove biodiversity loss impacts - their authors are

hysterics
Campbell 11 Hank Campbell is the creator of Science 2.0, a community of research
professors, post-docs, science book authors and Nobel laureates collaborating over scientific
projects. "I Wouldn't Worry About The Latest Mass Extinction Scare," Science 2.0, March 8,
http://www.science20.com/science_20/i_wouldnt_worry_about_latest_mass_extinction_scar
e-76989
mass extinction: Is it almost here?

You've seen it everywhere by now - Earth's sixth

and other articles discussing an article in Nature
(471, 5157 doi:10.1038/nature09678) claiming the end of the world is nigh. Hey, I like to live in important times. So do most people. And

is it real?

something so important it has only happened 5 times in 540 million years, well that is really special. But
Anthony Barnosky,
integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and first author of the paper, claims that if currently threatened species, those officially
classed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable, actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction

If you
know anything about species and extinction, you have already read one paragraph of my overview and seen the flaws
in their model. Taking a few extinct mammal species that we know about and then extrapolating that out to be
extinction hysteria right now if we don't do something about global warming is not good science. Worse, an integrative biologist is
could arrive in 3-22 centuries. Wait, what?? That's a lot of helping verbs confusing what should be a fairly clear issue, if it were clear.

saying evolution does not happen. Polar bears did not exist forever, they came into existence 150,000 years ago - because of the Ice Age.

Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore told a global warming skepticism site, I quit my life-long
subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in
February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme and " The fact that the study did make it through
peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted. Well, how did it make it through peer
review? Read this bizarre justification of their methodology; "If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction
is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us
clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm." Well,

greater extinctions occurred

when Europeans visited the Americas and in a much shorter time. And since we don't know how many species there are
now, or have ever been, if someone makes a model and claims tens of thousands of species are going extinct today, that sets off cultural alarms. It's
not science, though.

If only 1% of species have gone extinct in the groups we really know much about, that

is hardly a time for panic, especially if some 99 percent of all species that have ever existed we don't
know anything about because they...went extinct. And we did not. It won't keep some researchers, and the
mass media, from pushing the panic button. Co-author Charles Marshall, also an integrative biologist at UC-Berkeley wants to keep
the panic button fully engaged by emphasizing that the small number of recorded extinctions to date does not mean we are not in a crisis. "Just
because the magnitude is low compared to the biggest mass extinctions we've seen in half a billion years doesn't mean they aren't significant."

It's a double negative, bad logic and questionable science, though.

They dont access extinctionempirics prove
Jablonski 1 (Prof @ Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago Lessons
from the past: Evolutionary impacts of mass extinctions May 16.
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/10/5393.full//Donnie)
Mass extinctions have never entirely reset the evolutionary clock: even the huge losses at the end
of the Permian, which appear to have permanently restructured marine and terrestrial
communities, left enough taxa and functional groups standing to seed the recovery process
without the origin of new phyla (39). One key to understanding the past and future evolutionary
role of extinctions will involve the factors that permit the persistence of certain biological trends
or patternse.g., net expansion or contraction of clades or directional shifts in morphologyin
the face of extensive taxonomic loss and ecological disruption. Besides extinction, at least four
evolutionary patterns can be seen in the fossil record. These are: (i) unbroken continuity, (ii)
continuity with setbacks, (iii) survival without recovery (dead clade walking), and (v)
unbridled diversification.

1NC Prolif
Institutions check
NESG 5- Nuclear Energy Study Group, Members Include: Roger Hagengruber, Chair,
Nuclear Energy Study Group Director, John F. Ahearne Director, Ethics Programs, Sigma Xi
Vice Chair, Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee, Robert J. Budnitz Energy &
Environment Directorate, Ernest J Moniz Director of Energy Studies, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Thomas E. Shea Director of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Programs, Francis
Slakey, APS Advisor Associate Director of Public Affairs(Nuclear Power And Proliferation
Resistance: Securing Benefits, Limiting Risk, May 2005, A report by the Nuclear Energy Study
Group of the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs
https://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/proliferationresistance/upload/proliferation.pdf) LADI
The challenges to the non-proliferation regime are evident worldwide. Negotiations are under
way to persuade Iran to abandon a uranium enrichment program, heavy water production plant
and high-power research reactor that Iran claims are for civilian use but could easily be used to
produce high-enriched uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons. In North Korea,
negotiations continue on termination of its nuclear weapons program and the associated
reprocessing and enrichment activities. 8

Nuclear power doesnt cause prolif empirics prove, no means and

no motive
Harack 10 writes for vision of earth (Ben Harack, Does nuclear power lead to weapons
proliferation? September 5, 2010http://www.visionofearth.org/featured-articles/doesnuclear-power-lead-to-weapons-proliferation/) LADI
Not all used nuclear fuel material is suitable for bombs, particularly the materials found in spent
reactor fuel that has undergone a full cycle of use in a reactor. A variety of plutonium and
uranium isotopes, the usual materials used to form the core of a nuclear warhead, are found in
spent nuclear fuel. The issue is that they are quite difficult to separate from the rest of the
material. It possible to do, but not easy. Making a bomb out of used fuel is not a simple process.
Current techniques require sizable infrastructure for refining the fuel and extracting the
plutonium. This is the sort of industry that the United Nations Security Council keeps a
close eye on in the world today. There are very few nations with the scientific and industrial
base necessary to build this sort of industry who do not already have nuclear weapons or have
chosen to not create them. This is a point often missed by people who lobby against using
nuclear power or nuclear fuel reprocessing. They do not realize that a large part of the developed
world has both the technical affluence and the available physical resources to create nuclear
weapons and yet have chosen not to. The nuclear club, those nations who possess nuclear
weapons is only composed of The United States, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, China,
India, Pakistan, North Korea and probably Israel. There are many wealthy nations that possess
nuclear power plants who do not have nuclear weapons such as Canada, Germany, Japan,
Finland, South Korea and many others. For the full list see Wikipedias article on Nuclear
Power By Country. These countries have chosen to use their technical ability to create prosperity
rather than weapons. This is important because these countries demonstrate that it is by no

means a certainty that development of nuclear power technologies leads to availability of

weapons.

No prolif impact
Colin H. Kahl 13, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an associate
professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown Universitys Edmund A. Walsh School
of Foreign Service, Melissa G. Dalton, Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security,
Matthew Irvine, Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security, February, If
Iran Builds the Bomb, Will Saudi Arabia Be Next?
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AtomicKingdom_Kahl.pdf
*cites Jacques Hymans, USC Associate Professor of IR***
I I I . LESSONS FROM HISTOR Y Concerns over regional proliferation chains, falling nuclear dominos and nuclear tipping points are nothing new; indeed, reactive proliferation fears date back to the dawn
of the nuclear age.14 Warnings of an inevitable deluge of proliferation were commonplace from the 1950s to the 1970s, resurfaced during the discussion of rogue states in the 1990s and became even more
ominous after 9/11.15 In 2004, for example, Mitchell Reiss warned that in ways both fast and slow, we may very soon be approaching a nuclear tipping point, where many countries may decide to acquire nuclear
arsenals on short notice, thereby triggering a proliferation epidemic. Given the presumed fragility of the nuclear nonproliferation regime and the ready supply of nuclear expertise, technology and material, Reiss
argued, a single new entrant into the nuclear club could catalyze similar responses by others in the region, with the Middle East and Northeast Asia the most likely candidates.16 Nevertheless,

predictions of inevitable proliferation cascades have historically proven false (see The Proliferation Cascade Myth text box). In the
six decades since atomic weapons were first developed, nuclear restraint has proven far more common than nuclear proliferation, and cases of reactive proliferation have been exceedingly rare. Moreover, most

countries that have started down the nuclear path have found the road more difficult than
imagined , both technologically and bureaucratically, leading the majority of nuclear-weapons aspirants to reverse course. Thus, despite
frequent warnings of an unstoppable nuclear express,17 William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova astutely note that the train to date has been slow to pick up steam, has made fewer stops than anticipated,
and usually has arrived much later than expected.18 None of this means that additional proliferation in response to Irans nuclear ambitions is inconceivable, but the empirical record does suggest that regional
chain reactions are not inevitable. Instead, only certain countries are candidates for reactive proliferation. Determining the risk that any given country in the Middle East will proliferate in response to Iranian
nuclearization requires an assessment of the incentives and disincentives for acquiring a nuclear deterrent, the technical and bureaucratic constraints and the available strategic alternatives. Incentives and
Disincentives to Proliferate Security considerations, status and reputational concerns and the prospect of sanctions combine to shape the incentives and disincentives for states to pursue nuclear weapons.

Analysts predicting proliferation cascades tend to emphasize the incentives for reactive proliferation while ignoring or
downplaying the disincentives . Yet, as it turns out, instances of nuclear proliferation (including reactive proliferation) have
been so rare because going down this road often risks insecurity, reputational damage and economic
costs that outweigh the potential benefits.19 Security and regime survival are especially important motivations driving state decisions to proliferate. All else being
equal, if a states leadership believes that a nuclear deterrent is required to address an acute security challenge, proliferation is more likely.20 Countries in conflict-prone neighborhoods facing an enduring rival
especially countries with inferior conventional military capabilities vis--vis their opponents or those that face an adversary that possesses or is seeking nuclear weapons may be particularly prone to seeking a
nuclear deterrent to avert aggression.21 A recent quantitative study by Philipp Bleek, for example, found that security threats, as measured by the frequency and intensity of conventional militarized disputes, were
highly correlated with decisions to launch nuclear weapons programs and eventually acquire the bomb.22 The Proliferation Cascade Myth Despite repeated warnings since the dawn of the nuclear age of an
inevitable deluge of nuclear proliferation, such fears have thus far proven largely unfounded. Historically, nuclear restraint is the rule, not the exception and the degree of restraint has actually increased over
time. In the first two decades of the nuclear age, five nuclear-weapons states emerged: the United States (1945), the Soviet Union (1949), the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960) and China (1964). However, in
the nearly 50 years since China developed nuclear weapons, only four additional countries have entered (and remained in) the nuclear club: Israel (allegedly in 1967), India (peaceful nuclear test in 1974,
acquisition in late-1980s, test in 1998), Pakistan (acquisition in late-1980s, test in 1998) and North Korea (test in 2006).23 This significant slowdown in the pace of proliferation occurred despite the widespread
dissemination of nuclear know-how and the fact that the number of states with the technical and industrial capability to pursue nuclear weapons programs has significantly increased over time.24 Moreover, in the
past 20 years, several states have either given up their nuclear weapons (South Africa and the Soviet successor states Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine) or ended their highly developed nuclear weapons programs
(e.g., Argentina, Brazil and Libya).25 Indeed, by one estimate, 37 countries have pursued nuclear programs with possible weaponsrelated dimensions since 1945, yet the overwhelming number chose to abandon

the number of nuclear reversals has grown while the number

of states initiating programs with possible military dimensions has markedly declined .26 Furthermore especially since the Nuclear Non-

these activities before they produced a bomb. Over time,

Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into force in 1970 reactive proliferation has been exceedingly rare. The NPT has near-universal membership among the community of nations; only India, Israel, Pakistan and
North Korea currently stand outside the treaty. Yet the actual and suspected acquisition of nuclear weapons by these outliers has not triggered widespread reactive proliferation in their respective neighborhoods.
Pakistan followed India into the nuclear club, and the two have engaged in a vigorous arms race, but Pakistani nuclearization did not spark additional South Asian states to acquire nuclear weapons. Similarly, the
North Korean bomb did not lead South Korea, Japan or other regional states to follow suit.27 In the Middle East, no country has successfully built a nuclear weapon in the four decades since Israel allegedly built
its first nuclear weapons. Egypt took initial steps toward nuclearization in the 1950s and then expanded these efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s in response to Israels presumed capabilities. However, Cairo then
ratified the NPT in 1981 and abandoned its program.28 Libya, Iraq and Iran all pursued nuclear weapons capabilities, but only Irans program persists and none of these states initiated their efforts primarily as a
defensive response to Israels presumed arsenal.29 Sometime in the 2000s, Syria also appears to have initiated nuclear activities with possible military dimensions, including construction of a covert nuclear
reactor near al-Kibar, likely enabled by North Korean assistance.30 (An Israeli airstrike destroyed the facility in 2007.31) The motivations for Syrias activities remain murky, but the nearly 40-year lag between
Israels alleged development of the bomb and Syrias actions suggests that reactive proliferation was not the most likely cause. Finally, even countries that start on the nuclear path have found it very difficult, and
exceedingly time consuming, to reach the end. Of the 10 countries that launched nuclear weapons projects after 1970, only three (Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa) succeeded; one (Iran) remains in

the average time

required to complete a nuclear weapons program has increased from seven years prior to 1970 to about 17 years after 1970,
even as the hardware, knowledge and industrial base required for prolif eration has expanded to more and
progress, and the rest failed or were reversed.32 The successful projects have also generally needed much more time than expected to finish. According to Jacques Hymans,

more countries.33 Yet throughout the nuclear age, many states with potential security incentives to develop nuclear weapons have nevertheless abstained from doing so.34 Moreover, contrary to common
expectations, recent statistical research shows that states with an enduring rival that possesses or is pursuing nuclear weapons are not more likely than other states to launch nuclear weapons programs or go all
the way to acquiring the bomb, although they do seem more likely to explore nuclear weapons options.35 This suggests that a rivals acquisition of nuclear weapons does not inevitably drive proliferation decisions.
One reason that reactive proliferation is not an automatic response to a rivals acquisition of nuclear arms is the fact that security calculations can cut in both directions. Nuclear weapons might deter outside

leaders have to weigh these potential gains against the possibility that seeking nuclear
weapons would make the country or regime less secure by triggering a regional arms race or a preventive attack by outside
powers. Countries also have to consider the possibility that pursuing nuclear weapons will produce strains in strategic relationships with key
allies and security patrons. If a states leaders conclude that their overall security would decrease by building a bomb, they are not likely to do so.36 Moreover, although security considerations are often
threats, but

central, they are rarely sufficient to motivate states to develop nuclear weapons. Scholars have noted the importance of other factors, most notably the perceived effects of nuclear weapons on a countrys relative
status and influence.37 Empirically, the most highly motivated states seem to be those with leaders that simultaneously believe a nuclear deterrent is essential to counter an existential threat and view nuclear
weapons as crucial for maintaining or enhancing their international status and influence. Leaders that see their country as naturally at odds with, and naturally equal or superior to, a threatening external foe
appear to be especially prone to pursuing nuclear weapons.38 Thus, as Jacques Hymans argues, extreme levels of fear and pride often combine to produce a very strong tendency to reach for the bomb.39 Yet

here too, leaders contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons have to balance the possible increase to their prestige and influence against the normative and reputational costs associated with violating the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If a countrys leaders fully embrace the principles and norms embodied in the NPT, highly value positive diplomatic relations with Western countries and see membership in the
community of nations as central to their national interests and identity, they are likely to worry that developing nuclear weapons would damage (rather than bolster) their reputation and influence, and thus they
will be less likely to go for the bomb.40 In contrast, countries with regimes or ruling coalitions that embrace an ideology that rejects the Western dominated international order and prioritizes national self-reliance
and autonomy from outside interference seem more inclined toward proliferation regardless of whether they are signatories to the NPT.41 Most countries appear to fall in the former category, whereas only a small
number of rogue states fit the latter. According to one count, before the NPT went into effect, more than 40 percent of states with the economic resources to pursue nuclear programs with potential military
applications did so, and very few renounced those programs. Since the inception of the nonproliferation norm in 1970, however, only 15 percent of economically capable states have started such programs, and
nearly 70 percent of all states that had engaged in such activities gave them up.42 The prospect of being targeted with economic sanctions by powerful states is also likely to factor into the decisions of would-be
proliferators. Although sanctions alone proved insufficient to dissuade Iraq, North Korea and (thus far) Iran from violating their nonproliferation obligations under the NPT, this does not necessarily indicate that
sanctions are irrelevant. A potential proliferators vulnerability to sanctions must be considered. All else being equal, the more vulnerable a states economy is to external pressure, the less likely it is to pursue
nuclear weapons. A comparison of states in East Asia and the Middle East that have pursued nuclear weapons with those that have not done so suggests that countries with economies that are highly integrated
into the international economic system especially those dominated by ruling coalitions that seek further integration have historically been less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons than those with inwardoriented economies and ruling coalitions.43 A states vulnerability to sanctions matters, but so too does the leaderships assessment regarding the probability that outside powers would actually be willing to
impose sanctions. Some would-be proliferators can be easily sanctioned because their exclusion from international economic transactions creates few downsides for sanctioning states. In other instances, however,
a state may be so vital to outside powers economically or geopolitically that it is unlikely to be sanctioned regardless of NPT violations. Technical and Bureaucratic Constraints In addition to motivation to
pursue the bomb, a state must have the technical and bureaucratic wherewithal to do so. This capability is partly a function of wealth. Richer and more industrialized states can develop nuclear weapons more
easily than poorer and less industrial ones can; although as Pakistan and North Korea demonstrate, cash-strapped states can sometimes succeed in developing nuclear weapons if they are willing to make
enormous sacrifices.44 A countrys technical know-how and the sophistication of its civilian nuclear program also help determine the ease and speed with which it can potentially pursue the bomb. The existence of
uranium deposits and related mining activity, civilian nuclear power plants, nuclear research reactors and laboratories and a large cadre of scientists and engineers trained in relevant areas of chemistry and
nuclear physics may give a country some latent capability to eventually produce nuclear weapons. Mastery of the fuel-cycle the ability to enrich uranium or produce, separate and reprocess plutonium is
particularly important because this is the essential pathway whereby states can indigenously produce the fissile material required to make a nuclear explosive device.45 States must also possess the bureaucratic
capacity and managerial culture to successfully complete a nuclear weapons program. Hymans convincingly argues that many recent would-be proliferators have weak state institutions that permit, or even

rulers to take a coercive, authoritarian management approach to their nuclear programs. This approach, in
turn, politicizes and ultimately undermines nuclear projects by gutting the autonomy and professionalism of the very
scientists, experts and organizations needed to successfully build the bomb.46 Alternative Sources of Nuclear Deterrence Historically, the
encourage,

availability of credible security guarantees by outside nuclear powers has provided a potential alternative means for acquiring a nuclear deterrent without many of the risks and costs associated with developing an
indigenous nuclear weapons capability. As Bruno Tertrais argues, nearly all the states that developed nuclear weapons since 1949 either lacked a strong guarantee from a superpower (India, Pakistan and South
Africa) or did not consider the superpowers protection to be credible (China, France, Israel and North Korea). Many other countries known to have pursued nuclear weapons programs also lacked security
guarantees (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Switzerland and Yugoslavia) or thought they were unreliable at the time they embarked on their programs (e.g., Taiwan). In contrast, several

potential proliferation candidates appear to have abstained from developing the bomb at least partly because
of formal or informal extended deterrence guarantees from the U nited S tates (e.g., Australia, Germany, Japan, Norway, South Korea and Sweden).47 All
told, a recent quantitative assessment by Bleek finds that security assurances have empirically significantly reduced prolif eration proclivity
among recipient countries.48 Therefore, if a country perceives that a security guarantee by the United States or another nuclear power is both available and credible, it is less likely to pursue nuclear weapons in
reaction to a rival developing them. This option is likely to be particularly attractive to states that lack the indigenous capability to develop nuclear weapons, as well as states that are primarily motivated to acquire
a nuclear deterrent by security factors (as opposed to status-related motivations) but are wary of the negative consequences of proliferation.

New proliferants will have incentives to protect their weapons

Goldberg and Khanna, 2000 *Communications Director for AMGlobal Consulting.
**Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American
Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Expert on geopolitics, global governance,
and Asian and European affairs, and was most recently the Global Governance Fellow at The
Brookings Institution. He has worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland,
where he specialized in scenario and risk planning, and at the Council on Foreign Relations,
where he conducted research on terrorism and conflict resolution. (Jeremy and Parag.
Interview: Is Kenneth Waltz still M.A.D. about Nukes? Georgetown Journal of International
Affairs. Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000)
Waltz The new proliferants are mainly, but not entirely, weak states. Pakistan and India are
good examples of new nuclear powers that are going to have only a small number of nuclear
warheads. The United States has at least seven thousand strategic nuclear warheads. If you have
thousands of nuclear warheads* then you need elaborate bureaucracies to control the arsenal.
But if you have ten nuclear warheads or fifty, you are going to cherish those nuclear warheads.
You obviously feel that you need them, and therefore you have every reason to be very careful.
The accidents and nearaccidents that have taken place with nuclear warheads have been, as far
as I know, accidents on the part of the major nuclear powers and not the small ones. Journal So,
you do believe that these new proliferants of the future can be deterred? Waltz Well, that is a
different question. The United States and the Soviet Union developed peculiar ideas of nuclear
deterrence: namely that thousands of warheads are required for deterrence. That notion was
always crazy. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis our estimates were that the Soviet Union
had only about seventy true strategic systems. We had thousands. Were we deterred? Yes we
were. We did not strike at the nuclear warheads that the Soviet Union had in Cuba. The Air
Force was asked if they could hit and destroy all the targets. And remember that they were close
by, and there were not that many of them. The Air Force answered: We promise we can get 90

percent. Not enough. We were deterred. Now, nuclear weapons do not deter everybody from
doing everything. They do not deter forays. They do not deter, for example, Arab countries from
starting wars over the disputed terroritories. But they did dissuade the Egyptians and Syrians
from trying to divide Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They pulled back for fear that the
threat of the destruction of the Israeli State would prompt the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear
weapons deter threats to the vital interests of the state, and they have done so in every case that
comes to mind.

No impact every actor has incentives to overstate consequences

Farley 11, assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International
Commerce at the University of Kentucky, (Robert, "Over the Horizon: Iran and the Nuclear
Paradox," 11-16, www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/10679/over-the-horizon-iran-and-thenuclear-paradox)

But states and policymakers habitually overestimate the impact of nuclear weapons. This
happens among both proliferators and anti-proliferators. Would-be proliferators seem to expect
that possessing a nuclear weapon will confer a seat at the table as well as solve a host of minor
and major foreign policy problems. Existing nuclear powers fear that new entrants will act
unpredictably, destabilize regions and throw existing diplomatic arrangements into flux. These
predictions almost invariably turn out wrong; nuclear weapons consistently fail to undo the
existing power relationships of the international system. The North Korean example is
instructive. In spite of the dire warnings about the dangers of a North Korean nuclear weapon,
the region has weathered Pyongyangs nuclear proliferation in altogether sound fashion. Though
some might argue that nukes have enabled North Korea to engage in a variety of bad
behaviors, that was already the case prior to its nuclear test. The crucial deterrent to U.S. or
South Korean action continues to be North Koreas conventional capabilities, as well as the
incalculable costs of governing North Korea after a war. Moreover, despite the usual dire
predictions of nonproliferation professionals, the North Korean nuclear program has yet to
inspire Tokyo or Seoul to follow suit. The DPRKs program represents a tremendous waste of
resources and human capital for a poor state, and it may prove a problem if North Korea
endures a messy collapse. Thus far, however, the effects of the arsenal have been minimal. Israel
represents another case in which the benefits of nuclear weapons remain unclear. Although
Israel adopted a policy of ambiguity about its nuclear program, most in the region understood
that Israel possessed nuclear weapons by the late-1960s. These weapons did not deter Syria or
Egypt from launching a large-scale conventional assault in 1973, however. Nor did they help the
Israeli Defense Force compel acquiescence in Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. Nuclear weapons have
not resolved the Palestinian question, and when it came to removing the Saddam Hussein
regime in Iraq, Israel relied not on its nuclear arsenal but on the United States to do so -through conventional means -- in 2003. Israeli nukes have thus far failed to intimidate the
Iranians into freezing their nuclear program. Moreover, Israel has pursued a defense policy
designed around the goal of maintaining superiority at every level of military escalation, from
asymmetrical anti-terror efforts to high-intensity conventional combat. Thus, it is unclear
whether the nuclear program has even saved Israel any money. The problem with nukes is that
there are strong material and normative pressures against their use, not least because states that
use nukes risk incurring nuclear retaliation. Part of the appeal of nuclear weapons is their
bluntness, but for foreign policy objectives requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, they

are useless. As a result, states with nuclear neighbors quickly find that they can engage in all
manner of harassment and escalation without risking nuclear retaliation. The weapons
themselves are often more expensive than the foreign policy objectives that they would be used
to attain. Moreover, normative pressures do matter. Even outlaw nations recognize that the
world views the use of nuclear -- not to mention chemical or biological -- weapons differently
than other expressions of force. And almost without exception, even outlaw nations require the
goodwill of at least some segments of the international community. Given all this, it is not at all
surprising that many countries eschew nuclear programs, even when they could easily attain
nuclear status. Setting aside the legal problems, nuclear programs tend to be expensive, and
they provide relatively little in terms of foreign policy return on investment. Brazil, for example,
does not need nuclear weapons to exercise influence in Latin America or deter its rivals. Turkey,
like Germany, Japan and South Korea, decided a long time ago that the nuclear problem could
be solved most efficiently through alignment with an existing nuclear power. Why do
policymakers, analysts and journalists so consistently overrate the importance of nuclear
weapons? The answer is that everyone has a strong incentive to lie about their importance. The
Iranians will lie to the world about the extent of their program and to their people about the
fruits of going nuclear. The various U.S. client states in the region will lie to Washington about
how terrified they are of a nuclear Iran, warning of the need for strategic re-evaluation, while
also using the Iranian menace as an excuse for brutality against their own populations.
Nonproliferation advocates will lie about the terrors of unrestrained proliferation because they
do not want anyone to shift focus to the manageability of a post-nuclear Iran. The United States
will lie to everyone in order to reassure its clients and maintain the cohesion of the anti-Iran
block. None of these lies are particularly dishonorable; they represent the normal course of
diplomacy. But they are lies nevertheless, and serious analysts of foreign policy and
international relations need to be wary of them. Nonproliferation is a good idea, if only because
states should not waste tremendous resources on weapons of limited utility. Nuclear weapons
also represent a genuine risk of accidents, especially for states that have not yet developed
appropriately robust security precautions. Instability and collapse in nuclear states has been
harrowing in the past and will undoubtedly be harrowing in the future. All of these threats
should be taken seriously by policymakers. Unfortunately, as long as deception remains the rule
in the practice of nuclear diplomacy, exaggerated alarmism will substitute for a realistic
appraisal of the policy landscape.

No risk of nuclear terrorism---too many obstacles

John J. Mearsheimer 14, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political
Science at the University of Chicago, America Unhinged, January 2,
nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639?page=show
Am I overlooking the obvious threat that strikes fear into the hearts of so many Americans, which is terrorism? Not at
all. Sure, the United States has a terrorism problem . But it is a minor threat . There is no question we fell
victim to a spectacular attack on September 11, but it did not cripple the United States in any meaningful way
and another attack of that magnitude is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there has not
been a single instance over the past twelve years of a terrorist organization exploding a primitive
bomb on American soil, much less striking a major blow. Terrorismmost of it arising from domestic groupswas a
much bigger problem in the United States during the 1970s than it has been since the Twin Towers were toppled.
What about the possibility that a terrorist group might obtain a nuclear weapon? Such an occurrence

the chances of that happening are virtually nil . No nuclear-armed

state is going to supply terrorists with a nuclear weapon because it would have no control over how the
recipients might use that weapon. Political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state could in theory allow
terrorists to grab a loose nuclear weapon, but the United States already has detailed plans to deal with
that highly unlikely contingency. Terrorists might also try to acquire fissile material and build their
own bomb. But that scenario is extremely unlikely as well : there are significant obstacles
to getting enough material and even bigger obstacles to building a bomb and then
delivering it. More generally, virtually every country has a profound interest in making sure no
terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon, because they cannot be sure they will not be the target of
a nuclear attack, either by the terrorists or another country the terrorists strike. Nuclear terrorism, in short, is
not a serious threat . And to the extent that we should worry about it, the main remedy is to encourage and help other
would be a game changer, but

states to place nuclear materials in highly secure custody.

Terrorists have an incentive not to use WMDs undermines

perception and legitimacy
Forest 12 (James, PhD and Director of Terrorism Studies and an associate professor at the
United States Military Academy, Framework for Analyzing the Future Threat of WMD
Terrorism, Journal of Strategic Security, Volume 5, Number 4, Article 9, Winter 2012,
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=jss) **NOTE--CBRN weapon = chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon
The terrorist group would additionally need to consider whether a WMD attack would be
counterproductive by generating, for example, condemnation among the group's potential
supporters. This possible erosion in support, in turn, would degrade the group's political
legitimacy among its constituencies, who are viewed as critical to the group's long-term
survival. By crossing this WMD threshold, the group could feasibly undermine its popular
support, encouraging a perception of the group as deranged mass murders , rather than
righteous vanguards of a movement or warriors fighting for a legitimate cause.16 The
importance of perception and popular supportor at least tolerancegives a group reason to
think twice before crossing the threshold of catastrophic terrorism. A negative perception can
impact a broad range of critical necessities, including finances , safe haven ,
transportation logistics, and recruitment . Many terrorist groups throughout history have
had to learn this lesson the hard way; the terrorist groups we worry about most today have
learned from the failures and mistakes of the past, and take these into consideration in their
strategic deliberations. Furthermore, a WMD attack could prove counterproductive by
provoking a government (or possibly multiple governments) to significantly expand their efforts
to destroy the terrorist group. Following a WMD attack in a democracy, there would surely be a
great deal of domestic pressure on elected leaders to respond quickly and with a massive show of
force. A recognition of his reality is surely a constraining factor on Hezbollah deliberations about
attacking Israel, or the Chechen's deliberations about attacking Russia, with such a weapon.