Nuclear Fear K

1NC
Deterrence theory is the root cause of nuclear fear

making nuclear weapons a source of threat construction
Bondgraham 09 (Darwin, sociologist affiliated with UC Santa Barbara and a board member of
the Los Alamos Study Group. The Nuclear Threat, and Other Mystical Approaches of Arms Control. pgs
15-16, PN)
Critical examination of these concepts and what they mean to the established powers acting through them
reveals that these tropes stand to serve certain interests, to secure certain states, enrich certain sectors of
capital, and make others less secure, more impoverished. In some ways then, the
nuclear
threat is itself a threat mechanism . It not only does what it purports to do

identifying sources 15 of potential threatit serves to threaten the identified
sources and anything associated with them as antithetical to
humanity or civilization. The singular conception of the nuclear
threat furthermore serves to wash away meaningful differences
between states and peoples, threatening the fundamental right and
necessity for self-determination and self-definition of vital concepts
like security and liberty among the community of nations, and
more importantly within and beyond the state system. xl Deterrence
theory, the still accepted justification that the US and other nuclear
weapons states possess stockpiles in order to deter and dissuade
attacks against them, is at the root of the mystifying nuclear
threat concept . Instead of seeing deterrence as a mistake or misguided theory based on a failure
of our defense establishment to be honest with itself in its deliberations, if we instead
understand deterrence as an ideology used to legitimate a range of
other less noble, more imperially inspired goals, then the function of
the nuclear threat concept becomes clear. Nuclear weapons have
never solely or primarily been about deterring attacks. Instead, they have
always first and foremost been about projecting aggression through a
spectrum of power, moving from conventional limited war all the way to the logical extension of total
war, nuclear war.xli US nuclear weapons must be framed in the context of US military conquest and the
establishment of a kind of American empire over the last sixty years, and as Bruce G. Blair makes clear;
deterrence theorist value the

capacity for violence, particularly nuclear violence, for its implied
bargaining power. The ability to hurt the enemy forms the basis of a
nuclear diplomacy oriented to influencing behavior rather than
overcoming strength. Cast in this role, strategic forces are instruments of
threat, coercion, and intimidation rather than of military victory .xlii
the idea of military conquest is alien to deterrence. Instead,
Nuclear fear justifies extinction with the death of the

other
Masco 13 (Joseph P., Prof. of Anthropology and Social Sciences @ The University of Chicago,
Terror as normality Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(6), pp. 2632) //ZB
The SIOP target list would continue to grow through the 1980s, eventually including tens of thousands of
global targets and constituting a nuclear war system so complex that it is very likely that no single human
US ideologies of nuclear fear

constantly threaten to overwhelm the material evidence of danger,
and have become a core part of a now multigenerational commitment
to militarism for its own sake. The result is that the United States spends
as much as the rest of the world combined on military matters but
has not yet achieved security. War capacities and actions The constant slippages
being understood its internal logics or likely effects.
between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in the US political culture. The cultural
history of Cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, working with the
long-running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death, describes the problem of the nuclear age as
the impossibility of contemplating the truly remainderless event or the total end of the archive (1984:
27). For him, nuclear
war is fabulously textual because until it occurs all

you can do is tell stories about it, and because to write about it is to
politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus
performing a kind of counter- militarization and antinuclear practice.
In the early 1960s, the US nuclear war policy was officially known as
overkill, referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy targets (Rosen- berg,
1983). This overkill installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an
obliteration of the other with collective suicide . The means to an end here
constitutes an actual and total end, making the most immediate problem of the nuclear age the problem of
This
seems to be a fundamental problem in US national security culture - an
inability to differentiate the capacity for war with the act itself , or
differentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis.
alternatively to evaluate the logics of war from inside war. Today, space is filled with satellites offering
near-perfect resolution on the surface of the Earth and able to transmit those data with great speed and
What we
cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint on war itself - a
perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the reality of
conflict but also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that
support and enable it. Indeed, expert systems of all sorts - military, economic,
political, and industrial - all seem unable to learn from failure and instead in
the face of crisis simply retrench and remobilize longstanding and obviously damaging
precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning systems and missiles.
logics. War, for example, is not the exception but the norm in the United States today - which makes
we need to consider what it would take for Americans

to reassess not only the means to an end - that is, the tactics , the surges , the
counterinsurgencies , the preemptions, and surgical strikes - but also to
re-evaluate war itself. For what would it take today to consider an actual end to such ends?
peace extreme. So
The alternative is to recreate the policy of the 1AC on the

grounds of a defetishizing critique
Santana 9
(Anne Harrington de Santana, She has a PhD from Department of Political Science from University of
Chicago, U.S. Nuclear Policy and Fetishism of Force, 13 March 2009, PDF, [RA])
The success of a defetishizing critique is independent of the success of the positive prescriptions, although
defetishizing critique provides

explanations for phenomenon that theories derived from and tested by other
methods have not been able to explain , it does provide a
the inverse is not true. In so far as the method of
justification for adopting its epistemological and ontological

assumptions when generating new ideas . Rather than adopting the fiction of an
objective observer (and by observer I mean the community of people participating in social scientific
discourse) the nature of the dialectical relationship between subject and object means that the perspective
Finally, there is a
commitment to evaluating any policy prescription in light of its
effect on the system as a totality and measuring it against the
normative ends of emancipation from domination. As mentioned above, this
of the observer is necessarily enabled and constrained by the historical milieu.
dissertation proceeds with a defetishizing critique of Rational Deterrence Theory. However, in later
chapters, I argue that many of the arguments for disarmament adopt a similar kind of fetishized logic.
Recognizing the way in which the status of nuclear weapons as

fetish objects constrains our ability to think outside of the
alternatives of disarmament and deterrence may help open up new
policy alternatives. Those policy prescriptions should be made and
evaluated by considering the nuclear system as a whole, including
nuclear energy production, nuclear weapons, the control of fissile
materials and the international institutions established to structure
the relations between states . In the conclusion to my dissertation I evaluate some of the
current policy proposal in light of these methodological commitments.
2NC
Links
Nuke Fetishization
Their idea that Nuclear weapons can protect us is fueled
by a nuclear fetish which leaves us vulnerable
Santana 9
Defetishizing critique is a procedure of showing that what appears

as a given is in fact not a natural fact but a historically and socially
formed reality .4 In the case of U.S. nuclear policy I argue that the power of nuclear
weapons appears to be feature a natural of the physical object we
refer to as a nuclear weapon, but that power is actually produced
through the structured interaction of states as codified in international law. There
are important similarities between the pattern of behavior Karl Marx sought to identify with respect to
commodities and the pattern of behavior I identify here with respect to military force. Marx identified
identify nuclear weapons as

the mature expression of the fetishism of force. A mature fetish form
simultaneously embodies the logic of the system through which it is
produced and contradicts that same logic. In the case of commodity fetishism,
money as the mature expression of commodity fetishism; I
money completes the logic of the production of wealth through exchange and at the same time alienates
Nuclear weapons
complete the logic of maintaining national security through force
while at the same time leaving U.S. cities more vulnerable than ever
before. Defetishizing critique is also a procedure that reveals the unacknowledged presuppositions
the working class from that wealth through the commodification of labor.
that shape our social reality in the guise of objectivity. In a world where we as subjects are often very well
aware of the fact that what we treat as natural is in fact socially constructed, revealing the socially
constructed nature of an object amounts to little more than a statement of the obvious. The mystery lies in
explaining why we persist in behaving as if something that is socially constructed were in fact natural. That
there is something socially constructed about the power of nuclear weapons is fairly obvious. We all know
nuclear weapons arent actually the embodiment of power.

Although they are destructive, they are also a blunt instrument. Their
material effects (the scale of possible destruction, but also the environmental contamination and
prolonged health effects on a community) are such that actually using them is
unlikely to promote U.S. interests in any meaningful sense, especially given
the plethora of existing conventional alternatives; they have had little or no
discernable effect on the kind of military missions that the U.S. has
actually undertaken in places like Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
and Iraq . Even deterrence theorists acknowledge that there is something about nuclear
weapons that exceeds a materialist explanation .
very well that
Nuclear weapons complete the fetishism of force

Santana 9
fetishism of force is specific to the 19thand 20th century development of

the nation state, which culminated in the production of nuclear weapons
as its ultimate expression. Nuclear weapons became the
embodiment of an international form of social value, namely power. Although the
fetishism of force existed prior to the existence of nuclear weapons,
the existence of nuclear weapons represent the full development of
the fetishism of force in so far as they came to define and mediate the structure of the
international community. Likewise, Marx posits the exchange of commodities in a
barter economy as existing prior to the existence of money.
However, Capitalism is only fully formed once the existence of
money makes it possible for commodity fetishism to structure the
entire economic system. To understand the mechanism through which nuclear weapons
The
come to be produced and reproduced as fetish objects, viewing it through the lens of Pietzs model of
four
fetishism:
fetishism is useful. From his historical reconstruction of the idea of the fetish, Pietz derives
recurrent themes that are characteristic of the pattern of behavior known as

territoriality, historicality, reification, and personalizati on.
Pietz does not

take himself to be defining any truth of what fetishism is apart from the historical context of its
appropriation by various discourses and disciplines. He is endeavoring to make inductive generalizations
about what all of these manifestations of the concept share in common. That said, his articulation of the
four general themes relies heavily on the usage of the term with which his article is concernedthe
travelogues of Northern European traders and clerics visiting black Africa. As a result, the examples he
This
manifestation of fetishism emphasizes the relationship of the fetish
object to an individuals embodied experience . In my own explication of these
uses to illustrate his general categories privilege the European description of African fetishism.
categories, I privilege the structural nature of fetishism more particular to Marxs usage.
These social functions ensure nuclear development

Santana 9
As the culmination of the fetishism of force ,
nuclear weapons function as a fetish

object because their material form could be imagined and produced
in a manner consistent with the embodiment of a weapon. In so far as
the fetishism of force has at its heart the reification of social power
in the material technologies produced to enhance the use of force, the destructive capacity
of nuclear weapons is necessary for them to function as fetish
objects. However, the same way the materiality of money has no usevalue apart from its exchangevalue, the value of nuclear weapons reside in their threat (exchange) value
rather than their use-value . In essence, their material form is nothing
but a carrier of their social function .25 As material embodiments of social value their
value is not determined by physical properties in the same way that use-value is determined by properties
What is significant about their

material embodiment is that it is treated as if it were not subject to
the effects of time or the details of use . Money is treated as if it did not experience
such as color, taste, or destructiveness for instance.
nuclear arsenals are treated as if their

development and maintenance had no human or economic costs.
the wear and tear of physical exchange, and
Although individuals know very well that mechanisms exists to reproduce their material existence, as the
ultimate expression of the development of commodity fetishism and the fetishism of force respectively
both objects are treated as if they consisted of an immutable, indestructible substance, a sublime
material. Also like money, it is their scarcity that makes them an appropriate carrier of social value. The
degree of industrial and technological capability that is required to produce nuclear weapons makes them
available to a state with the necessary level of development, the same way a tank or an aircraft is. With
the progressive sophistication of industrialization, warfare developed into a contest of innovation and
productive capacity only possible in the context of a particular political and economic structure.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are the culmination of this dynamic. However, in so far as the destructive
potential of these weapons exceeds any conceivable human end, their use-value gave way to their threatvalue. In this sense the material properties of nuclear weapons are necessary, but not in their
particularity .
It does not so much matter what they can destroy because

the act of destruction will not contribute to the achieving the
desired ends, only compliance with the threat of destruction will
further those ends. The material properties of money function in a similar fashion, whether
that material is coin, paper, or plastic. The particularities are not necessary except that they conform to
certain standards that make them appropriate carriers of social value. In all cases, their material
embodiment allows for their quantity to be strictly controlled. The lack of control over that embodiment
placed on public display by states that have chosen to acquire nuclear weapons since enactment of the
Nonproliferation Treaty in 1967 provides a partial explanation for the international attention accorded to
even the limited achievements such as the North Korean test in 2006.
Nuke Mystification
The mystification of nuclear weapons forecloses critical
interrogation leading to a perpetuation of the hegemonic
power structures - only demystification creates political
opportunities to shift away from nuclear weapons
4-5, PN)
few subjects have been more

mythologically obscured than nuclear weapons. Mystification is a
process whereby power relations and their patterned consequences
become obscured by references to ideals and abstractions that have
little relevance to the former, except as a veil. In the most radical sense, an
analysis of mystification reveals how ideals and abstractions serve
as an impediment toward critical consciousness and a barrier to the
politicization of an issue. When a real thing or relationship is
mystified, it not only becomes impossible to resolve the tensions
manifested as epiphenomena, it is impossible to even acknowledge
the real thing or relationship at the source of a problem. In this sense,
mystical (non)explanations of nuclear weapons policy blatantly
benefit the leading nuclear weapons states and penalize weaker
non, or proto-nuclear states. They also empower anti-democratic
interests within nuclear weapons states and preclude public
participation in the politics of national security. Mystification can
be understood as several things. It can be viewed as an intentional-cynical
representation of a mythological world reality in order to maintain
hegemonic power by the nuclear weapons states. Relatedly, it can be
understood as a strategy to maintain control over the national
security state by certain interested parties within a nuclear weapons
state. It can also be viewed as a subliminal ideology that serves the
same functions but does not originate in conscious deliberations. Or, it
Although created in the forge of science and technology,
can be thought of as a collective mistake, a shortcoming due to the limits of the human mind to
comprehend the complexity and seriousness of nuclearism's existential stakes. Some political theorist
This
analysis approaches the problem of mystification as ideological deception,
both purposefully and subconsciously developed in political
discourse . Without denying the possibility of limits to our collective conscience, I emphasize forms of
define mystification only as deceit, excluding confusion, uncertainty, and forthright differences.
mystification as systematic and ever present deceptions because these are the most politically potent
If the leading discourses on nuclear weapons

are limited in ways that veil the main functions of these weapons
and the power-structures that perpetuate their existence,
demystified understandings can be articulated and mobilized by
non-nuclear states, and especially by social movements in order to
exercises in mystification to expose.
further the political work from below that will lead to meaningful
nuclear abolition . Finally, I am not claiming to have laid out a comprehensive list of mystical
approaches to arms control, nor an exhaustive critique in this essay. Far from it. Rather, I am making a
small effort upon a preexisting tradition of critical theory, one that I hope will be reinvigorated and built
upon by other dissatisfied arms control scholars, or a new generation of antinuclear, anti-imperial scholars.
Foreign policy elites use this mystification to justify

increasing nuclear capacities, making the military the
defender of democracy. That results in anti-democratic
practices because elites can go against public opinionLatin America interventions prove
7-9, PN)
In bluntly characterizing the US system of government as a

democracy, and especially by lumping the policy process that
governs military issues and nuclear weapons together with more
decidedly domestic issues, some that are in fact much more under
the influence of the public, the process governing nuclear weapons
is thoroughly mystified. Although few Americans, probably well less
than 1%, can explain how nuclear weapons policies are made (at least in
theoryxvii), we are to believe that they are made democratically and in
the best interest of the American people . Around this presumptive
democratic process appears a shell casing: repeated references to
the military's role as the defender of democracy, and nuclear
weapons as a central part of this defense. 7 Thus, not only is the
largest discretionary budget item of government with the greatest
independence from democratic structures and processesthe
military characterized as part and product of the whole democratic
system, it is then wrapped in an aura of unquestionable goodness
because it is said to protect the whole that somehow, some way
determines it. Amazingly, this is then extended to include nonnuclear
states within the US nuclear umbrella's deterrent/protective shadow,
a shadow in which democracy is said to grow and thrive. In contrast to the
monarchical forms of mystification that close off the political sphere to commoners by appealing to
higher powers beyond redoubt, our diminished democracy works toward similar ends, especially with
respect to the quasi-sacred Pentagon budget and war fighting supplemental spending packages, but by
a governing process insulated from meaningful

democratic participation is legitimated by a contradictory appeal to
its openness and sensitivity to the will of the people . This myth's
contradictions are plainly visible in the striking differences between
the actual foreign policies that have been promoted by elites, and
those that are most popular and resonant with the American public .
using an opposite mytho-logic:
We end up with invasions of Iraq and extended military occupation, torture memos, torture chambers and
secret prisons, military assistance to human rights abusing regimes, noninterventions in genocides,
seemingly unnecessary interventions, a bloated nuclear weapons arsenal, multi-billion dollar black
Quite often
large majorities are vehemently opposed.xix In some of these
projects, like US intervention in parts of Latin America in the 1980s,
the majority of the American people have been largely unaware and
severely misinformed of elite policy maker's means and ends .xx With
nuclear weapons we find ourselves in a situation in which the
American public favors abolition and has for quite some time, while
the foreign policy elite, military, and corporate interests engaged in
nuclear weapons contracting, are much more equivocal in their
opinions, leaning almost always to the long- 8 term possession of a
nuclear arsenal and even longer maintenance of a nuclear capacity .
xxi Furthermore, the public is mostly unaware of the detailed extent of US
nuclear war planning, the continued existence and shape of the
arsenal, and the fiscal and geographic footprint of the nuclear
weapons complex.xxii Few Americans know that more than $6 billion
is spent yearly on nuclear warhead R&D, and many billions more on
their delivery systems, and given the extremely abstract and
technocratic language surrounding these state objectives, how could they?
xxiii Political leaders and many arms control academics accept this situation as given, but since it
reveals anti-democratic processes and a mystified forms of
legitimation through non-explanation, should it not deserve
attention by those of us seeking answers to the transforming
threats of the nuclear age ?xxiv The foreign policy elite's response to this
budgets, and other longstanding state projects that have little public support.xviii
collective-cognitive dissonance includes social science efforts to explain and better facilitate the shaping of
focuses on straightforward
attempts to justify elite-leadership . Elites in government, corporate,
and academic spheres are lionized as possessing unique information
state secrets, expertise, disinterested vision, meritorious powers
and therefore said to be most capable of making the best decisions
regarding foreign affairs. Vulgar democracy, left to its own devices would lead to inaction and
public opinion through education and media, or else it
defeat, or so this logic goes.xxv Nevertheless, the concept of democracy is ultimately invoked not just as
the process by which US foreign policy is made, but even as the raison d'etre, the objective of preservation
using the US arsenal, when really this is no better than a raison d'etat.xxvi
Deterrence Theory
Deterrence theory is the root cause of nuclear fear
making nuclear weapons a source of threat construction
15-16, PN)
Critical examination of these concepts and what they mean to the established powers acting through them
reveals that these tropes stand to serve certain interests, to secure certain states, enrich certain sectors of
capital, and make others less secure, more impoverished. In some ways then, the
nuclear
threat is itself a threat mechanism . It not only does what it purports to do

serves to threaten the identified
sources and anything associated with them as antithetical to
humanity or civilization. The singular conception of the nuclear
threat furthermore serves to wash away meaningful differences
between states and peoples, threatening the fundamental right and
necessity for self-determination and self-definition of vital concepts
like security and liberty among the community of nations, and
more importantly within and beyond the state system. xl Deterrence
theory, the still accepted justification that the US and other nuclear
weapons states possess stockpiles in order to deter and dissuade
attacks against them, is at the root of the mystifying nuclear
threat concept . Instead of seeing deterrence as a mistake or misguided theory based on a failure
of our defense establishment to be honest with itself in its deliberations, if we instead
understand deterrence as an ideology used to legitimate a range of
other less noble, more imperially inspired goals, then the function of
the nuclear threat concept becomes clear. Nuclear weapons have
never solely or primarily been about deterring attacks. Instead, they have
always first and foremost been about projecting aggression through a
identifying sources 15 of potential threatit
spectrum of power, moving from conventional limited war all the way to the logical extension of total
war, nuclear war.xli US nuclear weapons must be framed in the context of US military conquest and the
establishment of a kind of American empire over the last sixty years, and as Bruce G. Blair makes clear;
deterrence theorist value the

capacity for violence, particularly nuclear violence, for its implied
bargaining power. The ability to hurt the enemy forms the basis of a
nuclear diplomacy oriented to influencing behavior rather than
overcoming strength. Cast in this role, strategic forces are instruments of
threat, coercion, and intimidation rather than of military victory .xlii
the idea of military conquest is alien to deterrence. Instead,
Deterrence theory is the mature expression of fetishism

of force
Santana 9
In so far as Rational Deterrence Theory provided the intellectual framework through which
Cold War
U.S. nuclear policy was legitimate d, it provides the most coherent statement of the
logic through which power came to be reified in the form of nuclear weapons . The rational
choice methodology of deterrence theory brackets questions of
preference formation, thereby eliminating any analysis of the
political discourse through which the nuclear weapons became
intelligible as a unique social form. Nuclear weapons are spoken of
as if the threat-value for which they were produced were deducible from their
material characteristics, as opposed to being derived from the structure of a hierarchical order codified in
The
logic through which power is reified in the form of nuclear weapons
can be understood as consisting of four elements which emerge sequentially, one building off
international intuitions such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Charter of the United Nations.
the other and culminating in the emergence of a contradiction between the embodiment of the fetish form
and the logic of its production: 1. A duality of value: Like commodities, which possess both a use-value and
an exchange-value, weapons have a fundamental duality in their structure of value. That duality is
described by their threat-value and their military use-value. This distinction is based on two different
Weapons are valuable because you can

threaten to attack with them in the hope that your opponent will
defer to your will rather than suffer the effects of an attack . Threat-value
behaviors in which an actor can engage.
is a structural form of value because it is derived from the interaction of two or more actors mediated by
the presence of the weapon. Weapons are also valuable because you can use them to exert destructive
force. Military use-value is linked more directly to the material characteristics of the weapon because it is
derived from an interaction between an actor and that weapon. 2. The treatment of a structural form of
Fetishism refers to the

practice of behaving as if an objects structural value-- its exchangevalue or its threat-value- - were derived from its material
characteristics, rather than from the structure of social interactions
mediated by the presence of that object. 3. The practice of production motivated by
value as if it were derived from the material properties of an object:
the structural value: In its mature form, fetishism refers not only to the practice of behaving as if an
objects structural value were derived from its material characteristics, but to a system of production in
which the manufacture of that object is motivated by the exploitation of its structural value independent of
The production of nuclear weapons for the purpose of

deterrence is the mature expression of a fetishism of force. 4. A
contradiction between the embodiment of the fetish form and the logic of its production: Nuclear
weapons complete the logic of maintaining national security through
force while at the same time leaving U.S. cities more vulnerable
than ever before
its use.
Nonproliferation
A focus on nonproliferation shifts away from disarmament
which results in the perpetuation of the nuclear stockpileeliminating the pretentious link between disarmament
and nonproliferation is key to challenge our approach to
nuclear weaponry
Falk 15 (Richard, an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton
University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local
campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board
of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Nuclear Challenge: 70 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1)
https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/the-nuclear- challenge-70- years-after- hiroshima-andnagasaki-1/, PN)
The liberal version of this deceptive Faustian Bargain is the claim that the NPT and nuclear disarmament
are complementary to one another, and should be linked in thought and action. The statist reasoning that
offers a rationale stresses the desirability of limiting the number of nuclear weapons states while efforts to
achieve nuclear disarmament move forward. Among the worlds most astute commentators on nuclear
weapons policy is Ramesh Thakur, who heads the Secretariat on the Asia Pacific Leadership Network for
Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament. In a recent article in The Japan Times [Link Nuclear
Disarmament and Nonproliferation Efforts, Aug. 12, 2015] Thakur tells us that there is an inalienable and
symbiotic link between nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. He regards [t]he key challenge..is to
how to protect the political gains and security benefits of the NPT, while also working around it to impart
momentum into the disarmament process leading to the total abolition of all nuclear weapons. From this
perspective, Thakur laments the failures of the nuclear weapons states to embrace this linkage in a
credible manner, and worries that non-nuclear states are threatening to disrupt the benevolent NPT regime
that he credits with greatly restricted the number of states possessing the bomb and has helped avoid any
recourse to the weaponry over the 70 years that have elapsed since Nagasaki: Globally,
more
and more countries are coming around to the conclusion that the
NPT is being used cynically by the nuclear powers not to advance
but to frustrate disarmament. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for the nonnuclear governments to reach this conclusion, or at least to acknowledge their disaffection in a public
The mind game played so well by the nuclear weapons states,

above all, the United States, rests on the proposition that the main
threat posed by the existence and possession of the weaponry is its
spread to additional states, not the weaponry itself, and certainly
not the nuclear weapons states themselves. This inversion of the real
priorities has shifted the policy focus away from disarmament for
decades and put the spotlight on proliferation dangers where it
doesnt belong, Iran being the current preoccupation resulting from
this way of thinking. The geopolitical discriminatory nature of this mind game is further
space.
revealed by the treatment of Israel, what Thakur calls The global double standards that are reinforced
by regional hypocrisy, in which all sides stayed studiously silent on Israels bombs. Sanctions and war
threats directed at Iran, silence and denial conferred on Israel. My disagreement with Thakur rests on his
central assertion of linkage. In my view,
the NPT regime has been posited for its
own sake (operationalizing the sensible global consensus that the fewer nuclear weapons states, the
better) but even more robustly, and here is the unacknowledged rub, as a long-term
alternative to nuclear disarmament . In other words, while it is
theoretically possible that the NPT regime could have been
established as a holding operation to give time for a nuclear
disarmament process to be negotiated and acted upon, it has been
obvious from an early stage that the government bureaucracies of

the leading nuclear powers had no intention of accepting an
arrangement that would deprive themselves of the bomb. What the
Faustian Bargain imposed was the false pretension that nuclear
disarmament was integral to the policy agenda of the nuclear
weapons states. From time to time political leaders, usually with sincerity,
express their commitment to nuclear disarmament. At various times, several
American presidents, including even Ronald Reagan, have affirmed their dedication to such a nuclear free
but after a flourish of

attention, nothing happens. Understanding why nothing happens is
the real challenge facing the global disarmament movement . It is here
that attention should be given to the ideologies of realist geopolitics
that shapes the worldview of the policy elites that control the
formation government policies and the supportive self-interested
bureaucracies deeply entrenched in the media, think tanks, weapons
labs, and private sector (the phenomenon Eisenhower flagged as the military-industrialcomplex in his Jan. 17, 1961 Farewell Address). It is these ideological and structural
factors that explain why nothing happens, and is never allowed to
happen. In what should have been treated as a startling confirmation of this disheartening assessment
future, most recently Barack Obama at his Prague speech in 2009,
occurred when four former top government officials with impeccable hard power realist credentials decided
a couple of years ago that the only way to uphold U.S. security dominance in the future was to abolish
nuclear weapons, even their eminence did not prevent their hard power arguments for nuclear
disarmament being shunted to one side by the nuclear weapons establishment. [See George P. Shultz,
William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons, Wall Street Journal,
Jan. 4, 2007; see also Shultz et al., Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation,Wall Street Journal,
Winning the mind game is a process that needs periodic

diversions from the actuality of the global apartheid approach to
nuclear weaponry that has never been seriously challenged , but is
deeply antithetical to Western professed repudiation of genocidal
tactics and ethos. When fears mounted of a breakdown in the bipolar standoff during the Cold
March 7, 2011.]
War there did take place a popular mobilization of opposition to nuclearism. The anti-nuclear movement
reached peaks in Europe after the scares of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and in response to some of
the weapons deployment decisions by NATO. (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND). The main ground
of anti-nuclear opposition was fear, although the most articulate leader of CND, E.P. Thompson expressed
antipathy to nuclear weapons and doctrine on essentially ethical grounds. Thompson argued on the basis
of an illuminating analysis that the culture that embraced the then prevailing policies of mutual deterrence
was already an active accomplice of Satan by its announced willingness to annihilate tens of millions of
innocent people should its will to survive as a state be tested by an unacceptable enemy provocation. [See
Notes on Exterminism: The Last Stage of Civilization, New Left Review I/121 , May-June 1980] It is
indicative that the governments of the nuclear weapons states, and here most notably again the United
States was most adamant, never were unequivocally willing to commit themselves to no first use policies
nuclear weapons were treated

as instrumental to foreign policy contingencies, and not tainted with
illegitimacy based on the supposed nuclear taboo. Nonproliferation was the
even in relation to non-nuclear adversaries. In other words,
most brilliant of all diversions from the transparent acknowledgement that, whatever rhetoric was used to
lead states never accepted nuclear disarmament as a

genuine goal of their foreign policy. Quite the contrary. All moves to manage
the arms race, including reductions in the size of nuclear arsenals
and arrangements about communications during times of crisis,
were also designed to reduce public fears of nuclear war and
thereby weaken anti-nuclear movementsfirst, through the message
the contrary, the
that steps were being taken to minimize risks of an unintended or

accidental nuclear war, and secondly, that these steps were steps on
a path leading to eventual nuclear disarmament. This double coded
message providing the policy rationale for arms control . Militarist
contributors to this process, raising their doubts about whether risks were in fact being reduced if military
options were being constrained by arms control measures. But it was the second element in the arms
control approach that enjoyed tacit and sometimes explicit bipartisan support in the United States where
The entire spectrum of policymaking elites

agreed that the enactment of nuclear disarmament was both
unrealistic and dangerous, and if a visionary president allowed his moral enthusiasm to get
this kind of debate mainly took place.
the better of him the backlash was swift and decisive as even Reagan found out after informally agreeing
with Mikhail Gorbachev at their Reykjavik summit in 1986 on a treaty framework that was premised on
getting to zero. In reaction, even liberal democrats in the political establishment chided Reagan for being
nave and insufficiently informed when he was blamed for mindlessly stepping across the invisible but
rigorously enforced red line that separates managerial arms control from transformational nuclear
disarmament. The lesson was learned, as the next presidential administration headed by George H.W.
Bush, adopted as a cautionary internal slogan no more Reykjaviks. The No of the American
establishment to nuclear disarmament could not be clearer, nor could the belligerent Yes to upholding by
war if necessary the NPT regime. With such an understanding, my disagreement with Ramesh Thakur
the time
is now ripe for the total de-linkage of nonproliferation from
disarmament with respect to nuclear weapons policy . Without such a
de-linkage false consciousness and confusion are unavoidable . It is
time to generate populist impatience with the refusal of decades by
government establishment to act on the basis of reason, ethics, and
prudence: this requires the adoption of policies truly committed to
the total abolition of nuclear weaponry in a period of not more than seven years.
becomes clear and fundamental, and to make it unmistakable, I would conclude by saying
The fetish of nuclear weapons defines our international

relations and the NPT codified the nuclear hierarchy
Santana 9
The hegemonic interpretation of the new technologies that had been

used to produce the atomic bomb was developed by a small group of men associated
with the RAND Corporation, and retrospectively unified under the label Rational Deterrence Theory. This
style of theorizing was carried out in the scientific manner that posits the existence of an objective
observer who is able to discern universal laws about the interaction of material objects and human
behavior. Both the position of the observer and the veracity of the laws are taken to exist outside history,
across all space and time .
Thus, the policy recommendations derived from

deterrence theory are imperatives that will exist as long as the
knowledge of nuclear weapons is available to humankind. The
identification of nuclear weapons as the ultimate expression of the fetishism of force belies the ahistorical
claims of Rational Deterrence Theory by locating the source of their power in the historically specific
structure of the international system .
The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) codified

the status of states with respect to their possession of nuclear
weapons . To be considered a nuclear weapon state, a state must
have tested nuclear weapons prior to January 1, 1967. The
establishment of the nuclear hierarchy is thereby fixed to a

particular moment in time. The hierarchy codified in the NPT also mirrors the structure of
the United Nations. The Charter of the United Nations deliberately privileges those five states that at the
end of World War II were considered to be great powers. Although not all five powers possessed nuclear
weapons at the time, the five recognized nuclear powers are also the five permanent members of the U.N.
Security Council.
As fetish objects, nuclear weapons thus mediate and

reproduce a structure of social relations defined historically by the
originating event of WWII.
Impact
War - Theory
The nuclear threat does not represent an existential
threat, but rather leads geopolitical violence that
transcends the nation-state and is caused by the
existence of nuclear weapons.
10-12, PN)
The mystifying aspects of NTI's work (as well as most other leading arms control
organizations) is best represented in its framing of the problems at hand.
The issue set by NTI and other leaders is a singular nuclear threat,
posed to a singular unified victim: the whole world, or
civilization, or global security. The problem here is that the existence of
nuclear weapons and radioactive materials cannot be said to pose
only, or primarily a singular threat. Nor can the threat facing
particular nationstates and different peoples in the nuclear age be
subsumed in a globalizing unified abstract. The existence of nuclear
weapons and nuclear materials creates a multiplicity of complex and
different threats to each and every nation and community. Furthermore,
the cataclysmic threat to all civilization most often and ominously
posed by NTI and other arms controllers is the least likely form of
violence resulting from the geopolitical power relations structured
by the existence of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons amplify a
whole spectrum of aggression and suffering. The specter of a mushroom cloud
rising over Manhattan or Washington D.C. is still only a hypothetical nuclear threat, while the
prospect of illegal preemptive war, invasion, and occupation, under
the guise of nonproliferation, to use only one obvious example, is a
proven threat to human security. Given the enormous number of
different and legitimate political differences and relationships that
exist between states, and the innumerable identities that transcend
the nation-state, there cannot be said to exist a singular nuclear
threat. The tendency to emphasize the existential threat to
mankind is both a holdover from the Cold War era when the
superpowers' plans to fight and win a full-scale nuclear war made
this extremist threat exceedingly likely. More so, it is a projection of the sole
remaining superpower's preoccupations with its asymmetrical weaknesses and insecurities upon the
majority of world's peoples who in fact do not share these insecurities. As a projection, it is a mystification
it is a direct deception and conceptual

barrier to the articulation of other nuclear and especially antinuclear definitions of human security. It obscures the obvious fact of many
different insecurities in the nuclear age and subsumes them into a
singular nuclear threat as defined by the US and other powerful weapons states. This
overbearing unification of real differences stands as a powerful
legitimating force for making concrete threats and making real on them by the
United States against nations that hypothetically threaten the singular
in service of hegemony. As a mystification
mystical concept of global security . Elaborating on Ronald Reagan's extra-terrestrial

parable, former Senator Sam Nunn, co-chair 11 and CEO of NTI, has explained that, when nuclear
weapons are at the fingertips of individuals and groups who are eager to use them to inflict massive
damage on humankind, President Reagan's question: "Wouldn't we come together to fight this threat?"
should be front and center for the United States, for Europe, for Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and
indeed, for the whole world.xxxi Language like this is very appealing because it appeals to our common
humanity. However, this discourse is necessarily based on the alienation and demonization of some states,
ethnic and religious groups, and communities. Reagan's quote is quite literal in this sense: [what if] all of
us discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space - from another planet [emphasis
added]. The problem with breaking complex political issues down in this way is that humankind is not
We are instead a world of humans, all alike, but
also profoundly different, flawed in our ways. In some sense we all
have a common interest in preventing the use of nuclear weapons,
just like we have a common interest in averting climatic disruption,
but there are not so common interests in the nuclear age.xxxiii
threatened by space aliens.
Nuclear fear normalizes the notion of extinction and

makes nuclear war possible
Masco 13 (Joseph P., Prof. of Anthropology and Social Sciences @ The University of Chicago,
Terror as normality Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(6), pp. 2632) //ZB
The Cold War nuclear stand-off installed existential threat as a core

structure of everyday US life, making nuclear fear the coordinating
principle of US geo-policy and a new psychosocial reality for citizens
increasingly connected via images of their own imminent death . Indeed,
few societies have prepared so meticulously for collective death as did Cold War America, while
simultaneously denying the possibility of an actual ending. The Cold War hysteria from 1957 to 1962 was a
moment of maximal danger (supported by constant civil defense drills) but also of new perspectives crucially those derived from outer space - that momentarily opened up multiple contingent and radically
For an anthropology of extremes, this period of the
Cold War can be approached as an ur-moment, foundational in terms of
the technology, theory, politics, and ambitions supporting the US
security state. In the immediate post- Cold War period, the Corona archives were declassified,
different security futures.
creating a vital new resource for Earth scientists studying climate change, but also for cultural historians
Interrogating this first period of global

nuclear danger via such documents raises questions about how one ends
the possibility of a total ending, as well as how a society pursuing
war as a normalized condition of everyday life should pause and
reflect on its own intellectual and psychosocial processes. Within modern
examining the terms of US militarism.
political theory, the means to an end has been embedded within the very concept of rationality, making
ends and means synonymous with progress, a perpetual engine of improving the infrastructures of everyday life as well as the morality of those living within it. Within this modernity - glossed here as the
application of reason to nature as progress - we have few efforts to theorize the reality or implication of
conceptual blockages or blind- nesses within the very notion of security. The assumption that instrumental
reason is not only a means to an end but an essential good structures a Euro-American modernity in which
superstition is set against the possibility of an unending technological progress (Horkheimer and Adorno,
2002). Instrumental reason has enabled our globalized, economized, technologized modernity, but it has
also installed a set of compensations for those events, desires, or biological facts that disrupt specific
By the mid-twentieth century, the products of

instrumental reason - the very means to an end - produced new forms of war
that ultimately challenged the survival of the species. The atomic
bomb stands as both a rational technology - produced via the combined work of
calculations of progress and profit.
physicists, engineers, chemists, industrialists, military planners, defense intellectuals, and civilian policy
makers -
and as a limit case to that instrumental reason (Edwards, 1996; Oakes,
In the early days of the nuclear age, some Manhattan Project scientists
hoped this new technology would be so terrible that it would simply
end the possibility of war (Federation of American Scientists, 1946). Instead, US war
planners built a global system for nuclear war that could end life itself
within a few minutes of actual conflict, and constantly pursued military action around the
world. What these technical experts were attempting to negotiate through
engineering is a basic relationship to death, a perverse project of building ever more
destructive machines in the name of security. Indeed, displacing the
threat of one machine (the bomb) with another (the bomb) became the basis
for deterrence theory, a way of organizing and containing the
thought of death by expanding technological systems. Cold War
planners managed the threat of nuclear war through constant
proliferation - of weapons, delivery systems, images, theories, and calculations. Through this
1994).
proliferation, planners pursued a program of intellectual compensation for the confrontation with a new
Americans learned (through military planning and

civil defense drills) how to be committed to total war as a
precondition for everyday life while locating death as exterior to the
nation, even as the war machine grew ferociously in its technological capacities. This
represents a distinctive national-cultural achievement: a notion of
security that brings collective death ever closer in an attempt to fix
its location with ever more precision.
kind of death. In the process,
War Empirics
The discourse of nuclear fear leads to preemptive wars,
imperialism, and other atrocities
Masco 13 (Joseph Masco, PhD, UC San Diego 1999, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social
Sciences at University of Chicago, writes and teaches courses on science and technology, U.S. national
security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. He is the author of The Nuclear
Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), which
won the 2008 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the 2006 Robert
K. Merton Prize from the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology of the American Sociology
Association. His work as been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, The John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. His current work examines the evolution of the national security state in the United States,
with a particular focus on the interplay between affect, technology, and threat perception within a national
public sphere. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 278-281) //ZB
Reclaiming the emotional history of the atomic bomb is crucial today,

as nuclear fear has been amplified to enable a variety of political projects
at precisely the moment American memory of the bomb has become
impossibly blurred. In the United States, nuclear fear has recently been used to
justify preemptive war and unlimited domestic surveillance, a worldwide
system of secret prisons, and the practices of rendition, torture, and
assassination. But what today do Americans actually know or remember of
the bomb? We live not in the ruins produced by Soviet ICBMs, but rather in the
emotional ruins of the Cold War as an intellectual and social project.
The half-century-long project to install and articulate the nation through
contemplating its violent end has colonized the present. The
terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington in 2001 may have produced a political
consensus that the Cold War is over and a formal declaration of a counterterrorism project.52 But
reactions to those attacks were structured by a multigenerational state

project to harness the fear of mass death to divergent political and
military industrial agendas. By evoking the image of the mushroom cloud
to enable the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush appealed directly to
citizens nuclear fear, a cultural product of the very Cold War nuclear stand-off he formally
disavowed in inaugurating the new counterterrorist state. The mushroom-cloud imagery, as well as the
totalizing immediacy of the threat in his presentation, worked to
redeploy a cultural memory of apocalyptic nuclear threat (established
during the four decades of the Soviet-American nuclear arms race) as part of the new war
on terror. The new color-coded terrorist warning system ( first proposed by Project
East River in 1952 to deal with Soviet bombers) and the Homeland Security Administrations transformation of shampoo bottles on planes into a totalizing threat are
official efforts to install and regulate fear in everyday life .53 In this regard,
the war on terror has been conducted largely as an emotionalmanagement campaign in the United States, using the tropes and
logics developed during the early Cold War to enable a new kind of American
geopolitical project. The war on terror redirects but also reiterates the American assumptions
about mass violence and democracy I have explored in this essay. If the September 11 attacks on
New York and Washington felt strangely familiar to many U.S. citizens, it was because
American society has been imaginatively rehearsing the destruction
of these cities for over three generations: in the Civil Defense
American
campaigns of the early and late Cold War, as well as in the Hollywood
blockbusters of the 1990s, which destroyed these cities each summer with increasing nuance and
detail. The genealogy of this form of entertainment is traumatic; it goes back to
the specific way in which the United States entered the nuclear age
with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the
speci c propaganda campaigns informing nuclear threat throughout
the Cold War. Indeed, the ease with which the 9/11 attacks were nationalized as part of a nuclear
discourse by the second Bush administration has much to do with this legacy.54 Not coincidentally, the two
graphic measures of nuclear blast damage most frequently used during the Cold War were the Pentagon
and the New York City skyline.55 Figures 8.8 and 8.9, for example, are taken from the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission (aec) campaign to document the size of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test from 1952.
Fourteen true-to-scale versions of the Pentagon, identified by the aec as the largest building in the world,
are placed inside the blast crater (the former Elugelab Island) to document its size, while the New York
The events
of 9/11 were easily nationalized and transformed into a nuclear
discourse precisely because our security culture had imagined and rehearsed
attacks on Washington and New York for generations, and because the specific
symbols in the attacksthe Pentagon and the tallest building in the New York skylinewere
also used by the nuclear state for three generations as part of its emotionalmanagement strategy. The second Bush administration, in other words, mobilized a
well-established logic of nuclear attack to pursue its policy
objectives, translating discrete, nonnuclear threats into the
emotional equivalent of the Cold War nuclear crisis. For a nation
that constructs itself via discourses of ruination, it should not be a
surprise to see the exportation of ruins on a global scale . As President
Musharraf clearly understood, the with us or against us logics of the Bush
administration in 2001 left no ambiguity about the costs of Pakistan
not aligning with the sole global superpower. The threat to reduce
Pakistan to a Stone Age ruin is the alternative, international
deployment of nuclear fear, constituting a U.S. promise to reduce
the country to a prenational, pre-technological state. Thus, the United
States enters the twenty-first century as a nation both fascinated and
traumatized by nuclear ruins. It transforms real and imagined mass
death into a nationalized space, and supports a political culture that
believes bombing campaigns can produce democracy abroad . It is
simultaneously terrorized by nuclear weapons and threatens to use them. The U.S. military
both wages preemptive war over nascent weapons of mass
destruction programs and is preparing to build a new generation of
U.S. nuclear weapons.56 American society is today neither atomic bomb proof nor capable
skyline is used to demonstrate the vast horizontal and vertical scope of the detonation.
of engaging nuclear technologies as a global problem of governance. Instead, U.S. citizens live today in the
emotional residues of the Cold War nuclear arms race, which can only address them as fearful docile
bodies. Thus, even in the twenty- first century, Americans remain caught between terror and fear, trapped
in the psychosocial space defined by the once and future promise of nuclear ruins.
The discourse of nuclear fear leads to preemptive wars,

imperialism, and other atrocities
public sphere. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 278-281) //ZB
Reclaiming the emotional history of the atomic bomb is crucial today,

as nuclear fear has been amplified to enable a variety of political projects
at precisely the moment American memory of the bomb has become
impossibly blurred. In the United States, nuclear fear has recently been used to
justify preemptive war and unlimited domestic surveillance, a worldwide
system of secret prisons, and the practices of rendition, torture, and
assassination. But what today do Americans actually know or remember of
the bomb? We live not in the ruins produced by Soviet ICBMs, but rather in the
emotional ruins of the Cold War as an intellectual and social project.
The half-century-long project to install and articulate the nation through
contemplating its violent end has colonized the present. The
terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington in 2001 may have produced a political
consensus that the Cold War is over and a formal declaration of a counterterrorism project.52 But
reactions to those attacks were structured by a multigenerational state

project to harness the fear of mass death to divergent political and
military industrial agendas. By evoking the image of the mushroom cloud
to enable the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush appealed directly to
citizens nuclear fear, a cultural product of the very Cold War nuclear stand-off he formally
disavowed in inaugurating the new counterterrorist state. The mushroom-cloud imagery, as well as the
totalizing immediacy of the threat in his presentation, worked to
redeploy a cultural memory of apocalyptic nuclear threat (established
during the four decades of the Soviet-American nuclear arms race) as part of the new war
on terror. The new color-coded terrorist warning system ( first proposed by Project
East River in 1952 to deal with Soviet bombers) and the Homeland Security Administrations transformation of shampoo bottles on planes into a totalizing threat are
official efforts to install and regulate fear in everyday life .53 In this regard,
the war on terror has been conducted largely as an emotionalmanagement campaign in the United States, using the tropes and
logics developed during the early Cold War to enable a new kind of American
geopolitical project. The war on terror redirects but also reiterates the American assumptions
about mass violence and democracy I have explored in this essay. If the September 11 attacks on
New York and Washington felt strangely familiar to many U.S. citizens, it was because
American society has been imaginatively rehearsing the destruction
of these cities for over three generations: in the Civil Defense
campaigns of the early and late Cold War, as well as in the Hollywood
blockbusters of the 1990s, which destroyed these cities each summer with increasing nuance and
detail. The genealogy of this form of entertainment is traumatic; it goes back to
the specific way in which the United States entered the nuclear age
with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the
speci c propaganda campaigns informing nuclear threat throughout
American
the Cold War. Indeed, the ease with which the 9/11 attacks were nationalized as part of a nuclear
discourse by the second Bush administration has much to do with this legacy.54 Not coincidentally, the two
graphic measures of nuclear blast damage most frequently used during the Cold War were the Pentagon
and the New York City skyline.55 Figures 8.8 and 8.9, for example, are taken from the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission (aec) campaign to document the size of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test from 1952.
Fourteen true-to-scale versions of the Pentagon, identified by the aec as the largest building in the world,
are placed inside the blast crater (the former Elugelab Island) to document its size, while the New York
The events
of 9/11 were easily nationalized and transformed into a nuclear
discourse precisely because our security culture had imagined and rehearsed
attacks on Washington and New York for generations, and because the specific
symbols in the attacksthe Pentagon and the tallest building in the New York skylinewere
also used by the nuclear state for three generations as part of its emotionalmanagement strategy. The second Bush administration, in other words, mobilized a
well-established logic of nuclear attack to pursue its policy
objectives, translating discrete, nonnuclear threats into the
emotional equivalent of the Cold War nuclear crisis. For a nation
that constructs itself via discourses of ruination, it should not be a
surprise to see the exportation of ruins on a global scale . As President
Musharraf clearly understood, the with us or against us logics of the Bush
administration in 2001 left no ambiguity about the costs of Pakistan
not aligning with the sole global superpower. The threat to reduce
Pakistan to a Stone Age ruin is the alternative, international
deployment of nuclear fear, constituting a U.S. promise to reduce
the country to a prenational, pre-technological state. Thus, the United
States enters the twenty-first century as a nation both fascinated and
traumatized by nuclear ruins. It transforms real and imagined mass
death into a nationalized space, and supports a political culture that
believes bombing campaigns can produce democracy abroad . It is
simultaneously terrorized by nuclear weapons and threatens to use them. The U.S. military
both wages preemptive war over nascent weapons of mass
destruction programs and is preparing to build a new generation of
U.S. nuclear weapons.56 American society is today neither atomic bomb proof nor capable
skyline is used to demonstrate the vast horizontal and vertical scope of the detonation.
of engaging nuclear technologies as a global problem of governance. Instead, U.S. citizens live today in the
emotional residues of the Cold War nuclear arms race, which can only address them as fearful docile
bodies. Thus, even in the twenty- first century, Americans remain caught between terror and fear, trapped
in the psychosocial space defined by the once and future promise of nuclear ruins.
The inability of the nuclear stockpile to create security

results in a self-fulfilling prophecy of violence- Iraq proves
13-14, PN)
In a world in which two states (US and Russia) possess ~95% of nuclear weapons, four other states (UK,
France, China, and Israel) possess smaller advanced nuclear weapons stockpiles, two states (India and
Pakistan) have small but growing stockpiles and weapons technologies, and one (North Korea) has a
rudimentary capability and handful of nuclear devices, while the rest of the world adjusts their
conventional military force structures to these nuclear weapons states' larger commanding footprints,
what is the efficacy of referring to a singular nuclear threat ? Would

it not make more sense to refer to the multitude of non-nuclear
threats engendered by the complexity of the nuclear age, most of

these threats not involving the detonation of atomic weapons, but
rather the violence, war, and suffering constantly being caused in
the presence of these unusable weapons and their failure to
create security ? Furthermore, after the unilateralist invasion of Iraq
by the United States in 2003, based largely on the discredited claim
that Saddam Hussein's regime was pursuing a Saddamite bomb,
does it make any sense at all to prioritize mankind's
[humankinds] interests in averring nuclear war? xxxvi We have already
seen devastating wars and mass human suffering either cynically or
ignorantly in the name of nonproliferation. Does this not constitute a
more realistic sort of nuclear threat, the threat of massive violence
against a nonnuclear state by another state that claims it may, one
day, somehow, go nuclear? The mystical nuclear threat constructs
a seemingly universal threat source by directly and monopolistically
associating proliferation with would-be nuclear states and dark
terrorists forces. Both are presented almost always as non-white,
Muslim or Asian . What's not obvious here is the definition of threat, a word that we are left to
accept within these extremely constricted cases. The dominant definition of threat in the
contemporary arms control scholarship uncritically follows that which is provided by the US
political leadership: a source of potential danger, injury, or death. The
meaning threat cannot and should not be restricted to this curious definition. Another
definition of threat is that it is an expression of an intention to inflict pain, injury,
violence, and punishment. I have emphasized the differences here in italics. The prevailing
definition locates potential threat source, while the latter identifies concrete, verifiable
threat statements and actions. The latter definition is more in agreement with prevailing legal
interpretations of threat.
Warming
The fear of a nuclear war trades off with efforts to deal
with climate change
Masco 8
(Joseph P. Masco, he has a PhD from Department of Anthroplogy and Social Sciences from University of San
Diego, Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis, 14 November 2008, PDF, [RA])
In other words, the Katrina as Hiroshima discourse is an act of translation, rather than misrecognition. As
the 1950s, 1980s, and 2000s have all witnessed politically

charged moments in the United States in which the dangers posed
by climate change and nuclear weapons were transposed . The terms of the
we have seen,
U.S. as a superpower largely depend on the ability of the state to monopolize a discourse of risk, and to
the atomic bomb has been an extraordinary instrument of

state power. In declaring war on terror in 2001, the Bush Administration did not declare war on all
terror but rather the more specific fear of the wmd. Today, climate
change directly competes with the wmd as primary planetary
threat, and demands a different political response. The tools for
fighting climate change are in fact diametrically opposed to those
informing the war on terror for a global response to CO2 emissions requires
political cooperation , economic and technological change , a shared vision of
ecological sustainability, and a willingness to substitute global
concerns for national interests. Rather than sustaining a militaryindustrial economy, engaging climate change requires a new form of
global governance . Returning to the synthetic forest of 1953 (see Figure 1) we can see in the
this end
fury of the nuclear blast a possible counter-narrative to the national security state, one grounded not in
weapons but in a relationship towards the biosphere. For the lesson of these bent and broken trees is that
The value of the 1953

synthetic forest is that it marks not only the power of the bomb, but
the fragility of nature; it marks not only a new kind of global project
to mediate international relations via nuclear technologies, but also
the effects of industry on the biosphere . The mistaken lesson from 1953 is that war
if enough industrial force is applied to nature, it will break.
fighting and civil defense were all that were at stake in these experiments; for indeed, the nuclear blast
that transformed 145 ponderosa pines into blades of grass blowing in an unnatural wind is but the most
explicit manifestation of an industrial transformation of the natural world. The power of the bomb has been
not only to link science and the state in a way that recognizes this fact, but also, to distort American
political culture so that only international state threats are currently capable of mobilizing collective social
action. To attend to the shrinking artic ice caps or the intensifying weather patterns is to reject the idea of
a national security and replace it with a planetary vision of sustainability. Thus, the time may be politically
ripe to harness the cultural example of the bomb to a new project: to mobilize the image of a fragile and
radically changing biosphere to a new kind of Manhattan Project, one that does not pursue a narrow
national advantage or the constitution of external enemy, but rather seeks to secure the biosphere
itself.34 The technoscientific questions are profound and not reliant on a military posture, while the need
to integrate states and diverse environmental problems as objects of collective responsibility offers a new
A core problem in U.S. political culture today

is that all politics is pursued via an extremely narrow concept of
threat and national advantage , both legacies of Cold War state- and nation-building. But
means of coordinating global order.
the melting
ice caps, the intensifying hurricanes, and the dying coral reefs of
today is that more profound changes are at hand, and that
securing the biosphere requires nothing less than a post-national
vision of American power.
the lessons of the synthetic forest from 1953 reiterated in the disappearing frogs,
Warming outweighs Nuclear War

Masco 8
(Joseph P. Masco, he has a PhD from Department of Anthroplogy and Social Sciences from University of San
Diego, Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis, 14 November 2008, PDF, [RA])
studies of large-scale nuclear war (5000- to 10,000-MT yields) have estimated

that there would be 750 million immediate deaths from blast alone ; a
total of about 1 .1 billion deaths from the combined effects of blast, fire, and
radiation ; and approximately an additional 1.1 billion injuries requiring medical
attention. Thus, 30 to 50 percent of the total human population could be
immediate casualties of nuclear war . The vast majority of the casualties
would be in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the United States, the
U.S.S.R., Europe and Japan . These enormous numbers have typically been taken to define
the full potential catastrophe of such a war. New evidence presented here, however, suggests
that the longer term biological effects resulting from climatic
changes may be at least as serious as the immediate one. Climactic
effects would be at least as serious. This portrait of mass death relies
on an understanding of nuclear war built up over nearly four
decades of U.S. military planning and civil defense, a security discourse that frequently
identified nuclear war itself as the unthinkable.
Recent
Security Failure
Nuclear weapons provide no material protection and
causes security to fail
Santana 9
The third theme is personalization. By this Pietz is referring to the
material fetish as an
object established in an intense relation to and with power over the
desires, actions, health, and self-identity of individuals whose personhood
is conceived as inseparable from their bodies.26 Conceptualizations of fetishism often stress either the
structural/social dimension of the fetish to the exclusion of the relationship of the fetish object to the
individual body or vice versa. Thus, this dimension largely falls out of the structural form of fetishism Marx
articulates. It is, however, an important aspect of the African religious practice that Peitz describes. For
instance, he points out that one of the ways that the fetish was distinguished from the idol is that the
fetish was worn on the body and believed to have tangible effects, such as the ability to heal.27 In so far
the possession of nuclear weapons is constitutive of the identity

of states within the hierarchy of the international system, they act
on the self-identity of states. In so far as they are treated as if they were the
embodiment of power, they act on the desire of states. Most importantly , the possession of
nuclear weapons works on the body of the state to provide security.
However, the security they provide is much like the healing effect of
a trifle. Nuclear weapons provide no material protection against
attack. It requires that an opponent believe in the credibility of a
retaliatory threat. The security they provide operates at the level of
belief which may or may not correspond to the level of reality.
as
Alt Extensions
Affinity Politics
Affinity politics is key to stop the reproduction of
hegemonic security
Davis 15 (Sasha, Professor of Geography and Environmental Science @ University of Hawaii at Hilo,
The Empires Edge: Militarization, Resistance and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific, pg. 22- 3, PN)
the affinity-seeking power of the newest social

movements operates differently from hegemony-seeking forms of
activism. As Day (2005) suggests, traditional forms of social movements have
been oriented toward taking over the machinery of domination so that
their will (allegedly a more just one) can then dominate. This orientation leads to
organizing tactics whereby groups seeking to impose hegemony
exploit the energy of movements to build political machines (parties)
or to bend the will of other individuals and groups toward favored
agendas. This political strategy merely attempts to exchange one
form of domination for another and to switch the class of individuals
that command the heights of a hierarchy. On a national scale this approach
can be exemplified by countries going from capitalist domination to
a Leninist-style dictatorship of the proletariat, or from an exploitative colonial
As far as tactics,
government run by corrupt colonial officials to an exploitative postcolonial government run by corrupt
it might be enacted as a political

candidate or party showing up at a protest merely to gain adherents
and promote an agenda. Practitioners of affinity politics would hold
that this quest for hegemony does not overcome relationships of
dominationit just re- produces them . Solidarity based on affinity is
different. It is solidarity without attempt to channel or organize
others. It is a desire for non-universalizing, non- hierarchical, noncoercive relationships based on mutual aid and shared ethical
commitments (Day, 2005, p. 9). It comes from a space of recognizing that nobody is more or less qualified, more or less pure, more or less able
to speak, than others. Affinity politics is based on holding solidarity
with others , regardless of differences, for the purpose of undoing relationships of domination not
just out there but between activists as well. It is not just an outcome or goal, but
rather a commitment to a process. This approach is strong within
antimilitarization activist groups at local levels and also repeats from island to island.
While the movements are not devoid of attempts at hegemony-based organizing, there are
strong commitments to consensus decision making, local autonomy,
solidarity, and being watchful of relationships of domination within
and between activist circles. These approaches are nurtured and
supported within these newest social movements not just because they are
niceties that garnish the main thrust of antimilitarization activism
(getting the military off the islands), but because they are absolutely intrinsic to
the larger project of redefining security away from militarized
notions toward person-centered views of genuine security. This
kind of security comes not only from limiting the power of the state through protests or the removal of
indigenous officials. On a more local scale
a vision of and ability to produce the cultural,

economic, and political processes and institutions that can maintain genuine security in
militarization, but from
place. These methods of organizing and communicating in activist circles are not just tactics for winning a
political battle, but the foundations of different forms of being that actively supplant those of the state-
While the slow work of building these networks of affinity

may not be as noticeable or flashy as people cutting fences and
getting dragged away by police, they are every bit as indispensable
for creating a world where security comes from a nity and
connection rather than domination and military violence.
centered society.
Scholarship Key
Scholarship is key to shed light on US nuclear internal
struggles and policy formation- only that creates
solutions to solve proliferation
19-20, PN)
There is also a lack of attention on the fragmented political forces in

the United States that create pressures for vertical proliferation. For
example, the institutional interests and lobbying power of the two US
nuclear warhead design laboratories does not appear to be an
acceptable research subject. When issues like these do receive any critical attention, they
are rarely linked to the forms of horizontal proliferation at the international level, except insofar as the
political leadership and its academic advisers consider how to
present an image of US restraint so as to legitimate aggressive
nonproliferation policies and avoid the appearance of hypocrisy. As an academic and
journalistic subject, the proliferation networks of Pakistan and North Korea are over-examined.
Anthropological research and political science have been utilized in

very critical and enlightening ways to examine the causes of interagency and inter-personal power struggles within 19 Pakistan leading to the
proliferation of technologies through atomic brokers. Numerous studies have illuminated the competing
political factions, self-interested institutions, entrepreneurial scientists, engineers and corporations within
The centripetal
dynamics within Pakistan are well studied. Relatedly, there seems to
be little legitimacy to studies which would turn the same critical
lens on centripetal forces operating in the US. Surely the United States
nuclear weapons complex is not magically free of similar fragmented
political forces, institutional struggles, corruption and subversion as
we see in other regimes?li The absence of scholarship examining this would
imply so , however. Research into the various corporate, state,
university, and military agencies with often differing political and
economic interests in the US nuclear weapons programs would shed
immense amounts of light on the US policy formation process , for
example. Insofar as this type of research would illuminate the sociological
forces influencing US nuclear posture, the composition of the weapons complex, and
civil-military relations, it would provide solutions the problem of vertical
proliferation and offer new solutions to the problem of horizontal
proliferation. Of course this would all require engagement with the most
avoided subject of research in arms control scholarship: empire. Almost
entirely to avoid candid discussions of empire, politicians and scholars have
elaborated a constricted discourse on nonproliferation.
Nonproliferation, in this sense, is the mystified stand-in for what should
otherwise be a forthright conversation on the foreign relations of nations in a highly
these nations that have subverted centralized control of atomic weapons.
unequal capitalist world system, dominated by the US, a state whose military budget is approximately as
large as the rest of the world's combined.lii
Debate Key
Using public spaces like debate forces people to be
confronted with the mystery and stigma of nuclear
weapons
public sphere. The Billboard Campaign: The Los Alamos Study Group and the Nuclear Public Sphere,
2005, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/17/3/487.citation) //ZB
the nuclear weapons complex has always

maintained two extreme attributes: phenomenal cost and social
invisibility. While seemingly opposed, these aspects are actually reinforcing, a structural effect of
In the domestic realm of U.S. politics,
compartmentalized secrecy, patronage networks, and an implicit nuclear security consensus among policy
between 1940 and 1996 the

United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons. This
makes the bomb the third largest federal expenditure since 1940 ,
ranking just after nonnuclear military spending and Social Security accounting for roughly
eleven cents out of every federal dollar spent (Schwartz 1998: 3). Yet despite this
makers. Stephen Schwartz (1998) has documented that
colossal investment and the widespread distribution of nuclear production, testing, and waste sites across
most Americans have little or no knowledge of

the historical or continuing investments in weapons of mass
destruction by the United States. It remains a disturbing truth that today most
Americans can say more about Iraqs nuclear ambitions (which, in 2003,
were the target of the first explicit policy of preemptive warfare in U.S. history) than those of the
United States. Most would be surprised to learn that the 1990s witnessed not a
postCold War movement away from nuclear weapons but rather the
establishment of a new nuclear status quo in the United States, one
requiring a massive reinvestment in the nuclear program. Nuclear weapons budgets at the
national laboratories, for example, have exceeded their Cold War averages since
1995 and have doubled since 1998. In short, the most active nuclear weapons program
on the planet is in the United States, and much of that nuclear infrastructure is
located in New Mexico. For New Mexicans committed to disarmament and
peace activism, the dilemma of the postCold War period has thus been how to
engage this resurgent U.S. nuclear project in a way that breaks the
structures of silencing and patronage that keep Americas investments in
weapons of mass destruction from public view. Beginning in 1998, visitors to
New Mexico could encounter one of the most direct and imaginative efforts to
engage New Mexicos nuclear economy simply by driving out of the
Albuquerque International Airport. Positioned on the main exit route
from the airport, a large billboard confronted motorists with an image of a
rainbow-enhanced desert and the words (see g. 1): Welcome to New
the continental United States,
Mexico: Americas Nuclear Weapons Colony. Seeking to

defamiliarize the desert landscape through shock, the billboard both
evokes and inverts the familiar portrait of New Mexico as the Land
of Enchantment, a zone of pristine nature and exotic culture. A Web site address on the
billboardwww.lasg.orgserves as both a signature and an invitation for viewers to learn more about the
scale of the U.S. nuclear project in New Mexico (which includes two of the three national weapons
laboratories, the largest missile testing range in the continental United States, the largest arsenal of U.S.
By recontextualizing a
centrally located commercial space, the billboard challenges
residents and visitors alike to recognize an invisible presence in New
Mexico, one that colonizes the austere beauty of the landscape with
the nuclear science, toxicity, and militarism of a global superpower
(see Masco 1999, 2004). The Welcome sign was merely the first salvo in an
ongoing billboard campaign orchestrated by the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), a
nonproliferation and peace activism group formed in the waning days of the Cold
War. As one of the most vocal nuclear watchdog groups in New Mexico, the LASG has
vigorously challenged the postCold War consolidation of nuclear weapons
science at Los Alamos National Laboratory while promoting public education
about the accruing environmental effects of the nuclear complex. In a
nuclear weapons, and the most active U.S. nuclear waste dumps).
December 2003 discussion in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Greg Mello, the cofounder and director of the
the billboards started as a response to a lack of

public conversation about the evolution of the nuclear complex in New
LASG, explained to me that
Mexico at the end of the 1990s. They were also a reaction to the high cost and episodic nature of
newspapers, radio, and television. Billboards could make a long-term, highly visible statement at, as Mello
Billboards thus offered a new kind of

political space that could perform a complex set of ideological tasks
in an economical manner. From the start, the goals of the LASG billboard project
have been to puncture the normality of the nuclear economy by
linking New Mexicos two leading industriestourism and nuclear
weaponsand to present a stable and highly visible space for political
dissent and nuclear critique. For Mello, the project is also intended to slow
down the media space in order to encourage public contemplation in a largely
commuter and tourist economy, thereby transforming New Mexicos
road culture into a new conceptual space for political critique. As part of
calculates it, one-tenth of a cent per viewer.
a larger activist effort in New Mexico to use the tourists to get rid of the plutonium, or the plutonium to
get rid of the tourists, the LASG project, as described by Mello, is interested in provoking a more
enlightened form of tourism, one that could ultimately contribute to the LASGs environmental and
Placed for maximum visibility along the main

thoroughfares and highways that connect Albuquerque to Santa Fe and ultimately Los
Alamos, the LASG billboards speak directly to occupants of the twentyfive thousand cars that travel Interstate 25 daily. Mello told me that the LASG
nonproliferation efforts.
initially had specific audiences in mind for the billboard campaign, namely, laboratory management (Los
Alamos National Laboratory is a Department of Energy institution managed by the University of California),
state and federal politicians, and particularly new recruits to the weapons program who might be visiting
By visually disrupting the assumed social consensus on

the role of the nuclear economy in New Mexico, the LASG seeks to
document for policy makers and employees evidence of local
resistance and hope for an alternative nuclear future. The billboard
project is also a direct response to decreasing access to policy
makers and laboratory personnel after a brief period of postCold War openness. After a series of
on job interviews.
security scandals at Los Alamos (see Masco 2002), expanding secrecy within the nuclear complex has
forced activists to seek an alternative public sphere to mobilize for change.

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1NC

Deterrence theory is the root cause of nuclear fear

threat is itself a threat mechanism . It not only does what it purports to do

deterrence theorist value the

Nuclear fear justifies extinction with the death of the

US ideologies of nuclear fear

war is fabulously textual because until it occurs all

differentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis.

we need to consider what it would take for Americans

The alternative is to recreate the policy of the 1AC on the

defetishizing critique provides

the inverse is not true. In so far as the method of

justification for adopting its epistemological and ontological

of the observer is necessarily enabled and constrained by the historical milieu.

Recognizing the way in which the status of nuclear weapons as

Defetishizing critique is a procedure of showing that what appears

identify nuclear weapons as

nuclear weapons arent actually the embodiment of power.

Nuclear weapons complete the fetishism of force

fetishism of force is specific to the 19thand 20th century development of

recurrent themes that are characteristic of the pattern of behavior known as

Pietz does not

These social functions ensure nuclear development

nuclear weapons function as a fetish

What is significant about their

such as color, taste, or destructiveness for instance.

nuclear arsenals are treated as if their

the wear and tear of physical exchange, and

It does not so much matter what they can destroy because

few subjects have been more

If the leading discourses on nuclear weapons

exercises in mystification to expose.

Foreign policy elites use this mystification to justify

In bluntly characterizing the US system of government as a

a governing process insulated from meaningful

threat is itself a threat mechanism . It not only does what it purports to do

deterrence theorist value the

Deterrence theory is the mature expression of fetishism

Weapons are valuable because you can

behaviors in which an actor can engage.

Fetishism refers to the

value as if it were derived from the material properties of an object:

The production of nuclear weapons for the purpose of

The mind game played so well by the nuclear weapons states,

the NPT regime has been posited for its

obvious from an early stage that the government bureaucracies of

but after a flourish of

Winning the mind game is a process that needs periodic

nuclear weapons were treated

lead states never accepted nuclear disarmament as a

that steps were being taken to minimize risks of an unintended or

The entire spectrum of policymaking elites

The fetish of nuclear weapons defines our international

The hegemonic interpretation of the new technologies that had been

Thus, the policy recommendations derived from

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) codified

establishment of the nuclear hierarchy is thereby fixed to a

As fetish objects, nuclear weapons thus mediate and

it is a direct deception and conceptual

mystical concept of global security . Elaborating on Ronald Reagan's extra-terrestrial

Nuclear fear normalizes the notion of extinction and

The Cold War nuclear stand-off installed existential threat as a core

different security futures.

Interrogating this first period of global