Yes/No War

no war
 counterforcing
counter-forcing solves escalation of wars
Mueller 09 Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio
State University (John, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda p. 8, Google
Books)

To begin to approach a condition that can credibly justify applying such extreme characterizations as societal annihilation, a full-out attack with
Even in such extreme cases, the area actually
hundreds, probably thousands, of thermonuclear bombs would be required.
devastated by the bombs' blast and thermal pulse effective would be limited: 2,000 1-MT explosions with a destructive radius of 5
miles each would directly demolish less than 5 percent of the territory of the United States , for example. Obviously, if
major population centers were targeted, this sort of attack could inflict massive casualties. Back in cold war days, when such devastating events
sometimes seemed uncomfortably likely, a number of studies were conducted to estimate the consequences of massive
thermonuclear attacks. The most likely scenario--one that could
One of the most prominent of these considered several probabilities.
be perhaps considered at least to begin to approach the rational-- was a "counterforce" strike in which well over 1,000 thermonuclear
weapons would be targeted at America's ballistic missile silos, strategic airfields, and nuclear submarine bases in an effort
to destroy the countrys strategic ability to retaliate. Since the attack would not directly target population
centers, most of the ensuing deaths would be from radioactive fallout, and the study estimates that from 2 to 20 million,
depending mostly on wind, weather, and sheltering, would perish during the first month.15
 deterrence
nuclear deterrence and unidirectional evolutionary trends check the impact
Tepperman 09 Jonathan Tepperman, Deputy Editor of Newsweek, Member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, now Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, holds a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University,
an M.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University, and an LL.M. in International Law from New York
University, 2009 (Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb, The Daily Beast, August 28th, Available
Online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/08/28/why-obama-should-learn-to-love-the-
bomb.print.html, Accessed 01-27-2012)

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world
more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and
transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a
mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character
for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort.
There are more important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the
name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly undesirable. The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents
nuclear weapons have not been used
of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First,
since 1945 . Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess
them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the
20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, "We now
have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been
any war among nuclear states." To understand whyand why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same wayyou need to start by
recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend
to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can
Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win .
get what it wants at an acceptable price.
The problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the
other sideand millions of innocents pay the price. Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war
obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to
ashes with the push of a buttonand everybody knows it the basic math shifts. Even the craziest
tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not
worth the effort . As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?" Why indeed? The iron logic of
deterrence and m utually a ssured d estruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear
peace : the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's
major powers have avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin
America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to
nuclear powers have
70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the
scrupulously avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they always will. There
have been some near misses, but a close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuringbecause
in each instance, very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion . Take the mother of all
nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each
threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war
would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe
for the first time." The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war,
then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars
after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen
their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war,
despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flare-
up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly,
an Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking
was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a
nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each country did what they had to do to avoid it. Nuclear pessimistsand there are manyinsist that
even if this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear
wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never
missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the
destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would
welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goesand there's no deterring rogues. But
are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv,
but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared
that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died the whole world would become
socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorismbut so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael
Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible
for the deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens. Yet when
push came to shove, their regimes balked at
nuclear suicide , and so would today's international bogeymen . For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is
limited, and the clerical regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war,
has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't
win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is
survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and
countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in
Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These
their behavior suggests they have a death wish.
 econ
No scenario for great power war laundry list
Deudney and Ikenberry, 09 Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins AND Albert G. Milbank
Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University (Jan/Feb, 2009, Daniel Deudney and
John Ikenberry, The Myth of the Autocratic Revival: Why Liberal Democracy Will Prevail, Foreign Affairs,
NG)

This bleak outlook is based on an exaggeration of recent developments and ignores powerful countervailing factors and forces. Indeed, contrary
to what the revivalists describe, the most striking features of the contemporary international landscape are the
intensification of economic globalization , thickening institutions , and shared problems of
interdependence . The overall structure of the international system today is quite unlike that of the nineteenth
century. Compared to older orders, the contemporary liberal-centered international order provides a
set of constraints and opportunities-of pushes and pulls-that reduce the likelihood of severe
conflict while creating strong imperatives for cooperative problem solving . Those invoking the nineteenth
century as a model for the twenty-first also fail to acknowledge the extent to which war as a path to conflict resolution and
great-power expansion has become largely obsolete . Most important, nuclear weapons have
transformed great-power war from a routine feature of international politics into an exercise in national suicide .
With all of the great powers possessing nuclear weapons and ample means to rapidly expand their deterrent forces,
warfare among these states has truly become an option of last resort. The prospect of such great
losses has instilled in the great powers a level of caution and restraint that effectively precludes
major revisionist efforts. Furthermore, the diffusion of small arms and the near universality of
nationalism have severely limited the ability of great powers to conquer and occupy territory inhabited by
resisting populations (as Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Iraq have demonstrated). Unlike during the days of empire building in the
nineteenth century, states today cannot translate great asymmetries of power into effective territorial
control; at most, they can hope for loose hegemonic relationships that require them to give something in return. Also unlike in the nineteenth
century, today the density of trade , investment , and production networks across international
borders raises even more the costs of war. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, to take one of the most
plausible cases of a future interstate war, would pose for the Chinese communist regime daunting
economic costs, both domestic and international. Taken together, these changes in the economy of
violence mean that the international system is far more primed for peace than the autocratic revivalists
acknowledge.
 miscalc
No miscalc or escalationevery crisis ever disproves and neither side would launch
Quinlan 9 (Michael, Former Permanent Under-Sec. State UK Ministry of Defense, Thinking about
Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-69) *we dont endorse gendered language

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting , the supposition of inexorable momentum in a developing
exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what
the situation of the decisionmakers would really be. Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at what
was going on. Both would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to call a halt . Both, given the
capacity for evasion or concealment which modem delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in reserve
significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail use-or-lose pressures . (It may be more open to question, as noted
earlier, whether newer nuclear-weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any substantial state with advanced
neither side can have any
technological capabilities, and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in the development of forces.) As a result,
predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on
copiously launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted
rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more
dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that aggression
could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must therefore be doing so (once given that it
cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a judgement that the possessor would be found lacking in the
will to use it. If the attacked possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressor's own first use, this
judgement would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial possibility of the aggressor
leaders' concluding that their initial judgement had been mistaken that the risks were after all greater than whatever prize
they had been seeking, and that for their own country's survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of
NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgement and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a
reappraisal. The former aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to work. But there was no ground
An aggressor state would itself be
for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the chance of its working must be negligible.
at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of
physically defeating the enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature
of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them the less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask what is the alternativeit can only be
surrender. But a more positive and hopeful answer lies in the fact that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a
political context. The context which concerned NATO during the cold war, for example, was one of defending vital interests against a postulated
aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged, or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest
is a legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the
key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital
interests have been defined in a way that is dear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary, a credible basis has
been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that whatever might be indicated by theoretical
discussion of political will and interests, the military environment of nuclear warfareparticularly difficulties of communication and controlwould drive
escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as inevitably .so for every possible level and
setting of action. Even if the history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle 'When in
doubt, lash out', the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is `If this
Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for both, it would be
goes on to the end, we are all ruined'.
perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted,
NATO gave its military commanders no widespread delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction.
Many types of weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as PALs incorporated to reinforce
organizational ones. There were multiple communication and control systems for passing information,
orders, and prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level of strategic exchange
which was only one of many possible levels of conflict an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why
he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it
remained possible to operate on a general fail-safe presumption:
no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the arrangements which 1 a nuclear-weapon
possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume
The likelihood of
escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption.
escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never
be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixedit would stand to vary hugely with
circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would
always have to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that the risk of escalation to large-scale
nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and
whoever may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him options for
applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely
unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it
has a nuclear armoury of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an inescapable burden also upon the
aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if conflict does break out, for managing it, to a tolerable outcome--the only route, indeed,
intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working out of plans to exploit escalation
risk most effectively in deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography,
politics, and available resources so permit without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making
the bigger, and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor volib wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender.
(The customary shorthand for this desirable posture used to be 'escalation dominance'.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing
them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and
cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse
Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons
outright pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation
plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such direct evidence as
there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state, with the inevitable occasional
failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of
accident involving nuclear weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-prevention structures entailing
their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended
nuclear explosiona technical disaster at a storage site, for example, Dr the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live nuclear
warhead. The second is that of some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of
radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had
truly intended. No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an opposite extreme it is absurd to claim,
as has been heard from distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having
happened for over sixty years). But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels
There have
between those theoretical limits and weigh their reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life.
certainly been, across the decades since 1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons , from transporters
skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried ( in past days when such carriage
was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements----it no longer is) . A few of these accidents may have released into the
nearby environment highly toxic material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation . Some commentators suggest that this
reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts of this long
experience would however be that the probability of any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely low. It
might be further noted that the mechanisms needed to set off such an explosion are technically demanding, and
that in a large number of ways the past sixty years have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for
both the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in which, after the cold war, some of the
factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has come
through entirely without accidental or unauthorized detonation have included early decades in which knowledge was
sketchier, precautions were less developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as
well as substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments more widespread and
diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more
tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is
understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by,
indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In
none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear
launch--extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival and more logical inference from hundreds of
events stretching over sixty years of experience presents itself once more: that the probability of initial
misinterpretation leading far towards mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear-weapon
possessor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release sequences have many steps, and human
decision is repeatedly interposed as well as capping the sequences . To convey that because a first step was prompted the
world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service
History anyway scarcely offers any ready example of major war started by
game, that he was nearly beaten in straight sets.
accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase in caution. It was
occasionally conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery
system in the direction of a potential adversary. No
such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years . The
probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general nuclear
exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decision-makers as pages 63-4 have
brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction.
 trends
empirics and longitudinal trends the world is entering a new era of great power peace
Fettweis, 10 Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs in the National Security Decision Making
Department at the U.S. Naval War College, holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Comparative
Politics from the University of Maryland-College Park, October 27, 2010 (Christopher J., Dangerous
Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace, Georgetown University Press, ISBN 978-1-
58901-710-8, Chapter 4: Evaluating the Crystal Balls, p. 83-85)

The obsolescence-of-major-war vision of the future differs most drastically from all the others, including the neorealist, in its expectations of the
If the post Cold War world conformed to neorealist and other
future of conflict in the international system.
pessimistic predictions, warfare ought to continue to be present at all levels of the system, appearing
with increasing regularity once the stabilizing influence of bipolarity was removed. If the liberal-constructivist vision is
correct, then the world ought to have seen not only no major wars, but also a decrease in the volume
and intensity of all kinds of conflict in every region as well. The evidence supports the latter. Major wars
tend to be rather memorable, so there is little need to demonstrate that there has been no such conflict since
the end of the Cold War. But the data seem to support the trickledown theory of stability as
well. Empirical analyses of warfare have consistently shown that the number of all types of wars
interstate, civil, ethnic, revolutionary, and so forth declined throughout the 1990s and into the new
century, after a brief surge of postcolonial conflicts in the first few years of that decade. 2 Overall levels of conflict tell only part of the story,
however. Many other aspects of international behavior, including some that might be considered
secondary effects of warfare, are on the decline as well. Some of the more important, if perhaps under reported,
aggregate global trends include the following: Ethnic conflict. Ethnonational wars for independence have
declined to their lowest level since 1960, the first year for which we have data . 3 Repression and political
discrimination against ethnic minorities. The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland has tracked a decline in
the number of minority groups around the world that experience discrimination at the hands of states, from
seventy-five in 1991 to forty-one in 2003. 4 War termination versus outbreak. War termination settlements have
proven to be more stable over time, and the number of new conflicts is lower than ever before . 5
Magnitude of conflict/battle deaths. The average number of battle deaths per conflict per year has been steadily
declining. 6 The risk for the average person of dying in battle has been plummeting since World War II
and rather drastically so since the end of the Cold War. 7 Genocide. Since war is usually a necessary condition for
genocide, 8 perhaps it should be unsurprising that the incidence of genocide and other mass slaughters declined by
90 percent between 1989 and 2005, memorable tragedies notwithstanding. 9 Coups. Armed overthrow of
government is becoming increasingly rare, even as the number of national governments is expanding along with the number
of states. 10 Would be coup plotters no longer garner the kind of automatic outside support that they
could have expected during the Cold War, or at virtually any time of great power tension. Third party
intervention. Those conflicts that do persist have less support from outside actors , just as the constructivists expected.
When the great powers have intervened in local conflicts, it has usually been in the attempt to bring a conflict to an end or, in the case of Iraqs
invasion of Kuwait, to punish aggression. 11 Human rights abuses. Though not completely gone, the number of large scale
abuses of human rights is also declining. Overall, there has been a clear, if uneven, decrease in what the
Human Security Centre calls one-sided violence against civilians since 1989. 12 Global military spending. World
military spending declined by one third in the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 13 Today that
spending is less than 2.5 percent of global GDP, which is about two-thirds of what it was during the
Cold War. Terrorist attacks. In perhaps the most counterintuitive trend, the number of worldwide terrorist incidents is far smaller than it
was during the Cold War. If Iraq and South Asia were to be removed from the data, a clear, steady downward trend would become apparent.
There were 300 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1991, for instance, and 58 in 2005. 14 International conflict and crises have
steadily declined in number and intensity since the end of the Cold War. By virtually all measures, the
world is a far more peaceful place than it has been at any time in recorded history. Taken together, these
trends seem to suggest that the rules by which international politics are run may indeed be changing .
Yes War
 1NC
War is possible--geopolitics
Ferguson 8 [Niall Prof History @ Harvard. Hoover Digest, No 1 Winter 2008]
The risk of a major geopolitical crisis in 2007 is certainly lower than it was in 1914. Yet it is not so low as to lie
altogether beyond the realm of probability. The escalation of violence in the Middle East as Iraq
disintegrates and Iran presses on with its nuclear program is close to being a certainty, as are the growing
insecurity of Israel and the impossibility of any meaningful U.S. exit from the region . All may be
harmonious between the United States and China today, yet the potential for tension over trade and
exchange rates has unquestionably increased since the Democrats gained control of Congress. Nor
should we forget about security flashpoints such as the independence of Taiwan, the threat of North
Korea, and the nonnuclear status of Japan. To consign political risk to the realm of uncertainty seems
almost as rash today as it was in the years leading up the First World War . Anglo-German economic
commercial ties reached a peak in 1914, but geopolitics trumped economics. It often does.

Great power wars are possibleour DA proves its likely

Kagan 99 [Donald. Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics at Yale University History Is Full Of
Surprises, Survival, Volume 41, Number 2, Summer, p. 141]
Now having said all this, even if all these men were wrong, this does not mean that Michael Mandelbaum cannot be right. But it
should inspire some degree of modesty and caution. In fact Mandelbaum is very cautious in the language that he
uses. Major war is not necessarily finished, he concedes. It's not dead , it's obsolete. This is a charming
term that seems to say more than it does, because that allows Mandelbaum to draw back from the more
total claims later on. A major war is unlikely but not unthinkable, which is to say he thinks it can happen. It
is obsolete, he writes, in the sense that it is no longer fashionable. To pick up the metaphor is to see some
of its limitations as well as its charm. Is war really a matter of fashion? And even if it is, don't we have to
face the fact that there are some people who choose to be unfashionable, and then there are other
people who have never heard of fashion in the first place? China and Russia are two cases to which the
writer points. He identifies the Taiwan Straits and the Russo-Ukrainian border as places where wars may
well break out, should they erupt anywhere. They are the 'potential Sarajevos of the twenty-first century'.
He is right. And, of course, it is this concession, however genuinely and generously and modestly
expressed, that gives away the game . Since there are at least two places where major wars between
great powers might well break out even today and two are quite enough it seems to me that his
entire thesis is undermined.

Breaking the nuclear taboo ensures escalation

Alagappa 9 [Muthiah. The Long Shadow, 2009, Pg 480-1]
Nuclear weapons cast a long shadow that informs in fundamental ways the strategic policies and
behavior of major powers (all but one of which possess nuclear weapons), their allies, and those states facing
existential threats. They induce caution and set boundaries to the strategic interaction of nuclear weapon states and
condition the role and use of force in their interactions. The danger of escalation limits military options in a
crisis between nuclear weapon states and shapes the purpose and manner in which military force is used. Although
relevant only in a small number of situations, these include the most serious regional conflicts that could
escalate to large-scale war. Nuclear weapons help prevent the outbreak of hostilities, keep hostilities
limited when they do break out, and prevent their escalation to major wars. Nuclear weapons enable
weaker powers to deter stronger adversaries and help ameliorate the effects of imbalance in conventional military
capability. By
providing insurance to cope with unanticipated contingencies, they reduce immediate
anxieties over military imbalances and vulnerabilities. Nuclear weapons enable major powers to take a long view of
the strategic environment, set a moderate pace for their force development, and focus on other national priorities, including
mutually beneficial interaction with other nuclear weapon states. Although nuclear weapons by
themselves do not confer major power status, they are an important ingredient of power for countries that
conduct themselves in a responsible manner and are experiencing rapid growth in other dimensions of power.

The magnitude of our impact means it should come first

Krieger 9 [David. President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Still Loving the Bomb after All These
Years www.wagingpeace.org September 2009]

Jonathan Teppermans article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,
provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous.
Rather, in Teppermans world, The bomb may actually make us safer. Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth
Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as the leading nuclear
optimist. Waltz expresses his optimism in this way: Weve now had 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. Its striking and
against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states. Actually, there
were a number of proxy wars between nuclear weapons states, such as those in Korea, Vietnam and
Afghanistan, and some near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltzs logic is akin
to observing a man falling from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64
floors without anything bad happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that
others should try it. Dangerous logic ! Tepperman builds upon Waltzs logic, and concludes that all states are
rational, even though their leaders may have a lot of bad qualities, including being stupid, petty, venal, even evil. He asks us to
trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear retaliation, because these weapons make the costs of war
obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Actually, he is asking us to do more than trust in the rationality of leaders;
he is asking us to gamble the future on this proposition . The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured
destruction is so compelling, Tepperman argues, its led to whats known as the nuclear peace. But if this is a peace worthy of
One irrational leader with control
the name, which it isnt, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization.
over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a global Hiroshima.
Tepperman celebrates the iron logic of deterrence, but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted in iron logic. It is a theory
based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must
communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the
other countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out. The longer that nuclear
weapons are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A
with impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the
incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and
therefore precarious . Most of the countries in the world reject the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that
the spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in
which some states possess nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires
the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear
disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.
Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear
weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even unwise. If some additional states,
including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldnt be so bad given the way that bombs tend to mellow
behavior. Those who oppose Teppermans favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as nuclear pessimists. These
would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see nuclear weapons as presenting an
urgent danger to our security, our species and our future . Tepperman finds that when viewed from his nuclear
optimist perspective, nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. Nuclear peace, he tells us, rests on a scary
bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger
chance that something very bad conventional war wont happen . But the extremely bad thing he
asks us to accept is the end of the human species . Yes, that would be serious. He also doesnt make the
case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional war would increase
dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have prevented wars , or
would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war. As an ultimate
celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a survivable second
strike option. Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security.
Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other
nuclear weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack. Do
we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr.
Tepperman?

Nuclear deterrence fails four reasons

Lieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

Unfortunately, the increasingly influential perspective in Washington and the broader analytical community rests on a weak understanding of the role
that nuclear weapons played during the Cold War, and it therefore overlooks the strategic continuities between the Cold War and the present. When
one examines why NATO once relied so heavily on nuclear weapons, the continuities between past and present become clear, and the policies of
those countries that are hold outs against the global campaign for nuclear arms reductions begin to make sense. In fact, nuclear deterrence will
the likelihood of intentional nuclear
continue to be central to the conduct of international politics, now and long into the future. Moreover,
attacks - even against the United States - is far higher than most scholars and analysts realize. In short, nuclear
deterrence is likely to be quite difficult in the foreseeable future. This report argues that the U.S. policy community has given too little attention to the
problem of intra-war nuclear deterrence. Specifically, relatively weak but nuclear-armed countries - including potential adversaries of the United States -
will face intense pressures during conventional wars to use nuclear weapons coercively to create a stalemate and avoid a calamitous military defeat.
The United States has little experience at deterring intra-war nuclear escalation. It has fought conventional wars against states with nuclear-armed
allies, but never directly against a nuclear-armed adversary. That fact may soon change. Given the United States global military commitments and the
spread of nuclear weapons to potential U.S. adversaries, the United States could soon find itself engaged in conventional operations against a regional
nuclear-armed adversary. Regional
adversaries cannot match U.S. conventional military power, and conventional
defeat is often extraordinarily costly for adversary leaders and their regimes. Therefore, regional adversaries face powerful
incentives to employ nuclear weapons coercively to stalemate the U nited States before suffering major
battlefield defeats and the attendant catastrophic consequences. This report makes four principal arguments: First,
nuclear weapons are just as salient today as they were in the past . During the Cold War, nuclear weapons
were enormously valuable because one set of countries (members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO) lacked the
conventional military power to defend itself from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Nuclear weapons allowed the weak side to deter the
nuclear weapons would have given the weak side its best hope of fighting the
strong one. And had war erupted,
strong side to a stalemate. The Cold War is over, but the underlying conditions that made nuclear weapons vital
then still exist today. All that has changed are the seats at the table. In the past the United States and its allies felt weak,
and not surprisingly they tightly gripped their nuclear weapons. Today, most of those countries feel strong, and - not surprisingly - nuclear weapons
suddenly seem anachronistic to them. But the end of the Cold War did not make every country safe; in fact, many of Americas potential adversaries
face the same overarching problem today that NATO faced during the Cold War: how to deter and if necessary stalemate an adversary that possesses
overwhelming conventional military power. The platitude that nuclear weapons are not well suited to the security threats of the 21st century is incorrect;
But for those
it is more accurate to say that they are not well suited to the security problems that confront the United States in the 21st century.
who fear U.S. military might - or who fear other strong states - nuclear weapons are as helpful as they
were for NATO during the Cold War. Second, weak states face powerful incentives to use nuclear weapons if
they find themselves in a conventional war against a much stronger adversary . Scholars and policy analysts
who study deterrence often claim that no rational leader would use nuclear weapon s against a country that could
respond in kind - let alone a country that could respond with far greater force. But this is incorrect. Analysts who make this claim
conflate the logic of peacetime deterrence with the logic of war. Leaders facing the prospect of imminent
defeat have compelling reasons to escalate coercively - with nuclear weapons - to bring about a
ceasefire. Coercive nuclear escalation by the weaker side forces the stronger side to choose among several options - all of which are grim. It is
because all of those options are unattractive that an adversary will be tempted to escalate in the first place.
Viewed through this lens, Pakistan may have powerful, rational reasons to use nuclear weapons if it is losing a conventional war to India; North Korea
has powerful reasons to use nuclear weapons coercively, rather than permit its enemies to prevail in a war. And Chinese leaders would face some of
these same incentives if their armed forces were suffering a humiliating defeat in a war in maritime East Asia. In short ,
an escalatory strategy
is cold-blooded, but not far-fetched - indeed, it was NATOs policy for nearly thirty years. Third, this report shows
that the logic of coercive nuclear escalation is well understood by countries around the world . Coercive
nuclear escalation is not a theoretical possibility; it is reflected in the defense plans and nuclear
employment doctrines of several nuclear-armed states. We identify the conditions under which states would be most likely to
build defense plans around doctrines of coercive nuclear escalation; we then sort nuclear-armed countries according to those conditions; finally, we
this report
show that those states that should have adopted coercive nuclear doctrines (according to our argument) have actually done so. Fourth,
identifies global hotspots where plausible conventional conflicts are most likely to trigger dangerous
escalatory dynamics. We posit a set of exacerbating conditions - including the prospect of conquest, regime
change, and the escalatory nature of certain military operations - which make escalation during
conventional war more likely, and then we use those conditions to distinguish the hotspots which pose high risks of escalation from those
that pose lower levels of risk. We find that most of the worlds most dangerous conflicts - i. e., those that create the greatest
incentives for combatants to use nuclear weapons -involve the United States: including war on the Korean Peninsula, conflicts in maritime
East Asia, and (in the future) war in the Strait of Hormuz. To be sure, an India-Pakistan conflict would trigger dangerous escalatory dynamics, but a
South Asian conflict - which has appropriately attracted considerable attention because of the grave risks of escalation - appears no more dangerous
(and, in fact, may be less combustible) than several quite plausible future U.S. wars . Why do so many other analysts reach a different conclusion
scholars and other analysts typically think about
about the likelihood of deliberate nuclear escalation? One possibility is that
peacetime nuclear deterrence (preventing a surprise nuclear attack), rather than wartime deterrence (deterring nuclear
escalation during conventional wars), the exception being the extensive literature on escalation risks during an India-Pakistan war. But surprisingly,
even scholars who understand the difficulty of deterring escalation during a conventional war when applied to South Asian security dynamics, argue
elsewhere that rational leaders would never use nuclear weapons against the United States. But if analysts believe that Pakistan (the weak) could use
nuclear weapons to prevent conventional defeat (even though Pakistan cannot win a nuclear war), why would the same analysts dismiss the possibility
that North Korea, or in the future Iran, or possibly China, would use nuclear weapons in an escalatory fashion against a strong nemesis?
 Diversionary Theory
War stimulates nationalism and generates a rally-around-the-flag effect
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, member of MIT's
program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies (Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security,
Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ

Wars still mobilize national sentiments, and create a heightened emotional state with an
intensified sense of community and sharing. Even the threat of war or the display of force brings out
such feelings. The nationalization and integration of modern societies sketched above reinforces and amplifies
these sentiments, and their instant dissemination and multiple reflection in the media does so even
more.26 A short, small war, ending in victory at little cost in blood or treasure, by mobilizing just these
sentiments, can stdl produce political gains for the leaders who initiate it. The recent FalklandsMalvinas War
produced a substantial gain for Prime Minister Thatcher, and the United States intervention in Grenada-hardly a war-a similar one
for President Reagan. But such wars may be hard to choose successfully .

State failure makes diversionary wars highly likely

Oakes 6 B.A. in Political Science from Davidson and Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio
State University (Amy, Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland
Islands, Security Studies, July-September 2006, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.431-463,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410601028354)//BZ
Domestic unrest is necessary for a diversionary conict.4 Such unrest can represent a fundamental challenge
to the continued legitimacy, capacity, and even the existence of a state, as European communist leaders
discovered at the end of the 1980s. In the face of such a threat, leaders can instigate an international conict out of
a desire to (1) distract the attention of the public from social, political, or economic issues; (2) rally the
populace behind the government by whipping up nationalist sentiment; (3) shift blame for domestic
political, economic, or social problems to an external scapegoat; or (4) demonstrate the governments
competence in foreign policy after a series of domestic public policy failures.5 Diversionary conicts, therefore,
are dened by the nature of the leaders motivation to use force, not by whether they do in fact successfully divert public attention
from domestic problems or increase popular support for the imperiled government. In fact, like the debtor who heads to the casino,
diversionary conicts often serve only to make the governments problems worse. Although diversionary wars often fail, in
the right circumstances, they can represent a reasonable policy response. The logic of diversionary conflict is
straightforward:when the domestic situation becomes unstable, leaders have less to lose from
choosing a risky military policy . In such a situation, doing nothing looks certain to produce losses for the
regime, while gambling through war at least offers the hope of turning things around. Leaders know that defeat in war will
probably signal the end of the regime, but the disgruntled crowds outside the presidential palace look
likely to signal the end of the regime also. As Arno Maver contends, beleaguered governments are particularly
inclined to advocate external war for the purpose of domestic crisis management even if the chances for
victory are doubtful [and] in spite of the high risks involved .

Resource scarcity and economic stress makes war the only possible scapegoat
Oakes 6 B.A. in Political Science from Davidson and Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio State
University (Amy, Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland Islands, Security Studies,
July-September 2006, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.431-463,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410601028354)//BZ

It is right to be skeptical about the reasoning behind the launch of diversionary conicts but if most of the
options on the policy menu are unavailable then it might be perfectly rational . For this reason, the risky
gamble of diversionary war is more likely to be undertaken by impoverished governments that are running
out of solutions to their mounting domestic problems. While leaders may prefer simply quashing their opposition to
diverting attention, states with access to few resources often do not possess the capability to engage in
repressive internal policing.21 Similarly, while leaders may prefer trying to resolve internal troubles by enacting reforms to the
smoke and mirrors of foreign adventure, low extractive capacity states may be unable to pay for sufficient political
and especially economic changes to satisfy domestic opponents . Thus, through a process of policy
elimination, governments with low extractive capacity are more likely to be tempted to initiate a diversionary conict.

Diversionary theory likely AND trumps interdependence WWII proves

Copeland 96 Associate Professor of International Relations Theory at the University of Chicago
(Dave, Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations, International
Security, Spring 1996, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 5-41)//BZ
Rosecrance is reluctant to acknowledge realist concerns, perhaps because to do so would imply that dependent states might be
more willing to go to war, as realists maintain, while Rosecrance is arguing that they are less willing to do. This points to a critical
distinction between liberalism and realism that illuminates the liberal understanding of why wars ultimately
occur. For liberals, interdependence does not have a downside that might push states into war , as realists
contend. Rather, interdependence is seen to operate as a restraint on aggressive tendencies arising
from the domestic or individual levels. If interdependence becomes low, this restraint is taken away, allowing
the aggressive tendencies to dominate. To borrow a metaphor from Plato: for liberals, interdependence operates like the
reins on the dark horse of inner passions; it provides a material incentive to stay at peace, even when there are internal
predispositions towards aggression. Remove the reins, however, and these passions are free to roam as
they will." This point becomes clearer as one examines Rosecrance's explanations for the two World Wars. World War 11, for
Rosecrance, was ultimately domestically driven. The main aggressors saw war as a means to cope with the
upheavals flowing from "social discontent and chaos" and the "danger of left-wing revolutions"; given these
upheavals, it is "not surprising that the territorial and military-political system [i.e., warl emerged as an
acceptable alternative to more than one state." Connecting the Second World War to causes arising from the unit
level in the First World War, he continues: "If Germany, Italy, and Japan did not fulfill their territorial ambitions at
the end of World War I, they might develop even more nationalistic and solidaristic regimes and try
again."" With trade and therefore interdependence at low levels in the 1930s, "economics offered no alternative possibility"; it failed
to provide what he later refers to as a "mitigat[ingI" or "restraining" influence on unit-level motives for war?'
 Accidents/Miscalc
Accidental launch is highly likely malfunctions, accidents, deteriorating systems
Helfand et. al 98 Co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and a past
president of the organization's U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility (Ira, Accidental Nuclear
War A PostCold War Assessment, The New England Journal of Medicine, 1998,
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199804303381824#t=article) //BZ

Although many people believe that the threat of a nuclear attack largely disappeared with the end of the
Cold War, there is considerable evidence to the contrary.10 The United States and Russia no longer confront
the daily danger of a deliberate, massive nuclear attack, but both nations continue to operate nuclear forces as though
this danger still existed. Each side routinely maintains thousands of nuclear warheads on high alert .
Furthermore, to compensate for its weakened conventional armed forces, Russia has abandoned its no first use
policy.11 Even though both countries declared in 1994 that they would not aim strategic missiles at each other, not even one
second has been added to the time required to launch a nuclear attack: providing actual targeting (or retargeting) instructions is
simply a component of normal launch procedures.12-14 The default targets of U.S. land-based missiles are now the
oceans, but Russian missiles launched without specific targeting commands automatically revert to previously programmed
military targets.13 There have been numerous broken arrows (major nuclear-weapons accidents) in the past,
including at least five instances of U.S. missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear devices flying over or
crashing in or near the territories of other nations.15,16 From 1975 to 1990, 66,000 military personnel involved in the
operational aspects of U.S. nuclear forces were removed from their positions. Of these 66,000, 41 percent were removed because
of alcohol or other drug abuse and 20 percent because of psychiatric problems.17,18 General George Lee Butler, who as
commander of the U.S. Strategic Command from 1991 to 1994 was responsible for all U.S. strategic nuclear forces, recently
Any
reported that he had investigated a dismaying array of accidents and incidents involving strategic weapons and forces.19
nuclear arsenal is susceptible to accidental, inadvertent, or unauthorized use .20,21 This is true both
in countries declared to possess nuclear weapons (the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and China)
and in other countries widely believed to possess nuclear weapons (Israel, India, and Pakistan). The combination of
the massive size of the Russian nuclear arsenal (almost 6000 strategic warheads) and growing problems in Russian control
systems makes Russia the focus of greatest current concern. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia's nuclear
command system has steadily deteriorated. Aging nuclear communications and computer networks
are malfunctioning more frequently, and deficient early-warning satellites and ground radar are more
prone to reporting false alarms.10,22-24 The saga of the Mir space station bears witness to the problems of aging Russian
technical systems. In addition, budget cuts have reduced the training of nuclear commanders and thus their proficiency in operating
nuclear weapons safely. Elite nuclear units suffer pay arrears and housing and food shortages , which
contribute to low morale and disaffection. New offices have recently been established at Strategic Rocket Forces bases to
address the problem of suicide25 (and unpublished data). Safeguards against a nuclear attack will be further degraded if the
Russian government implements its current plan to distribute both the unlock codes and conditional launch authority down the chain
of command. Indeed, a recent report by the Central Intelligence Agency, which was leaked to the press, warned that some Russian
submarine crews may already be capable of authorizing a launch.26 As then Russian Defense Minister Igor Rodionov warned last
year, No one today can guarantee the reliability of our control systems. . . . Russia might soon reach the threshold beyond which its
rockets and nuclear systems cannot be controlled.24 A particular danger stems from the reliance by both Russia and the United
States on the strategy of launch on warning the launching of strategic missiles after a missile attack by the enemy has been
detected but before the missiles actually arrive. Each country's procedures allow a total response time of only 15
minutes: a few minutes for detecting an enemy attack, another several minutes for top-level decision making, and a
couple of minutes to disseminate the authorization to launch a response .27,28 Possible scenarios of an accidental
or otherwise unauthorized nuclear attack range from the launch of a single missile due to a technical malfunction to the launch of a
massive salvo due to a false warning. A strictly mechanical or electrical event as the cause of an accidental launch, such as a stray
spark during missile maintenance, ranks low on the scale of plausibility.29 Analysts also worry about whether computer defects in
the year 2000 may compromise the control of strategic missiles in Russia, but the extent of this danger is not known. Several
authorities consider a launch based on a false warning to be the most plausible scenario of an accidental
attack.20,29 This danger is not merely theoretical. Serious false alarms occurred in the U.S. system in
1979 and 1980, when human error and computer-chip failures resulted in indications of a massive Soviet
missile strike.10,30 On January 25, 1995, a warning related to a U.S. scientific rocket launched from Norway
led to the activation, for the first time in the nuclear era, of the nuclear suitcases carried by the top Russian
leaders and initiated an emergency nuclear-decision-making conference involving the leaders and their top
nuclear advisors. It took about eight minutes to conclude that the launch was not part of a surprise nuclear strike by Western
submarines less than four minutes before the deadline for ordering a nuclear response under standard Russian launch-on-
warning protocols.10,24,27 A missile launch activated by false warning is thus possible in both U.S. and
Russian arsenals. For the reasons noted above, an accidental Russian launch is currently considered the
greater risk.
 Resource Wars
Resource scarcity is the most rational reason for conflict
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of California, San Diego
(Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence and International Conflict, International
Organization, Spring 2001, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Explanations for war are legion. However, work by James Fearon and others shows that most purposive theories of war are
internally inconsistent in that they do not account for the behavior of interest.40 Fearon points out that theories of war
commonly conflate the motives for conflict with the choice of method for conflict resolution . Costly
contests involve at least two elements. First, there is zero-sum competition for an excludable good.41
States differ over issues or territory that each cannot possess simultaneously . Second, states choose a
settlement method. The choice of method is non-zero-sum. Transaction costs deprive "winners" of
benefits and increase the burden for "losers" so that all are better off selecting methods that minimize
costs. Since war is expensive, fighting makes sense only if equivalent settlements cannot be obtained
using cheaper methods. A theory of war, then, explains why efficient settlements are at times unobtainable ex ante. Fearon
follows Geoffrey Blainey in arguing that wars result from uncertainty about conditions likely to influence eventual settlements as well
as incentives states have to misrepresent these conditions.42 States possess private information about strategic
variables (capabilities, resolve, and so on). If states could credibly share private information, efficient ex ante bargains
could be identified. Instead, uncer- tainty provides weak or unresolved states an opportunity to conceal
weakness even as competition creates incentives to bluff. States "pool," claiming to be resolved and
capable regardless of their true nature. Such "cheap talk" claims do not allow observers to differentiate resolved or
capable opponents from the weak or unre- solved. Only by imposing costly contests-by fighting or similar acts-can
states distinguish resolute opponents from those seeking to bluff. States fight largely because they
cannot agree on bargains that each prefers to what each expects to obtain from fighting .

Resource scarcity and economic stress makes war the only possible scapegoat
Oakes 6 B.A. in Political Science from Davidson and Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio State
University (Amy, Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland Islands, Security Studies,
July-September 2006, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.431-463,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410601028354)

It is right to be skeptical about the reasoning behind the launch of diversionary conicts but if most of the
options on the policy menu are unavailable then it might be perfectly rational . For this reason, the risky
gamble of diversionary war is more likely to be undertaken by impoverished governments that are running
out of solutions to their mounting domestic problems. While leaders may prefer simply quashing their opposition to
diverting attention, states with access to few resources often do not possess the capability to engage in
repressive internal policing.21 Similarly, while leaders may prefer trying to resolve internal troubles by enacting reforms to the
smoke and mirrors of foreign adventure, low extractive capacity states may be unable to pay for sufficient political
and especially economic changes to satisfy domestic opponents . Thus, through a process of policy
elimination, governments with low extractive capacity are more likely to be tempted to initiate a diversionary conict.
 AT: Democracy
Democracy doesnt solve
Taner 2 [Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political science at Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School of
Citizenship and Public Affairs; Research Associate at Syracuse Universitys global Affairs Institute;
Editorial Assistant, International studies Review (Binnur Ozkececi-Taner, The Myth of Democratic
Peace Theory: Theoretical and Empirical Shortcomings of The Democratic Peace Theory, Turkish
School of international Relations, Vol. 1.3,
http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume1/number3/binnurozkececi.htm]

The discussion above suggests that the most important drawback of the "democratic peace" theory is the
essentialization of the political regime as the only factor contributing to international peace and war . The
'democratic peace' theory underemphasizes, and most often neglects, the importance of other domestic
factors such as political culture,(35) degree of development, socio-economic and military considerations,
(36) the role of interest-groups and other domestic constituencies ,(37) strategic culture(38) among others
in decision-making. In other words, it is easily the case that the "democratic peace theory" lacks sensitivity to
context and decision-making process. Although one should not dispute the fact that domestic political structure/regime
type is an important component of any analysis of war and peace, this should be seen as only one of domestic variables, not
necessarily the variable. Devoid of an analysis that gives respect to a number of other factors, superficial and sweeping
generalizations will leave many details in decision-making unaccounted for. Consequently, although "democratic peace"
theory should not be discarded entirely, current emphasis on the importance of "democracy" in eliminating
bloody conflicts in the world should not blind scholars and policy circles alike to the fact that "democratic
peace" is theoretically and empirically overdetermined
 AT: MAD
MAD fails
Cimbala 7 [Stephen. Prof Poli Sci @ Penn State. Nuclear Proliferation and Deterrence in Asia: The
View from Vladivostok Military Studies, Vol 20. 2007, Ebsco//GBS-JV]

There is no magic number of nuclear-armed states that guarantees a first use of nuclear weapons in the
twenty-first century. States will not become irrational on account of the possession of nuclear weapons: indeed, there is
some experience during and after the Cold War to suggest that states might become more careful, rather than less.
Many variables intrude here: including the intensity of regional rivalries; ethno-national and religious feelings; and, most immediately
Nevertheless, the
pertinent to our concerns, the pros and cons for deterrence and crisis stability of the forces themselves.
propensity of heads of state for committing military follies should never be underestimated:
especially by students of history and political science. The rationalities of states are not of the black box variety.
States world views and decision making processes are the product of internal as much as external
forces. A U.S. model of deterrence rationality may fail drastically in the imminent circumstances of a regional
crisis. The strategic reach of Russian or American nuclear forces against lesser nuclear powers should not be overestimated .
Iranians with scores to settle against Israel, Chinese intent upon annexation of Taiwan, or North Koreans
seeking to intimidate Japan and South Korea, may not believe U.S. threats of preemption or retaliation. Russias policy of
providing air defense missiles to Iran, increasing the difficulty of Israeli or American preemptive air strikes against Irans nuclear
facilities, ironically invites the erosion of Russias own deterrence perimeter once the Iranians are nuclear capable. U .S.
intelligence cannot be guaranteed to provide timely and accurate warning of nuclear attack by regional
revisionist actors against neighbors: or others. U.S. intelligence has not infrequently been the victim of strategic or operational-
tactical military surprise by non-Western opponents: from Pearl Harbor to 911. Timely and accurate intelligence is even
less likely on the intentions or capabilities of non-state actors , compared to states. Intelligence on the best of days
can give likelihoods and maybes for policy makers to mull over. One of the major risks of nuclear weapons spread in Asia is
the possibility that states with first strike vulnerable nuclear forces will use them or lose them on the basis
of faulty indications and warning.
 AT: Rationality

Leaders are irrational war can generate personal benefit that doesnt affect the population
Chiozza and Goemans 4 Assistant Professor Vanderbilt University and Associate Professor at
University of Rochester (Giacomo and Hein, International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still
"Ex Post" Inefficient?, American Journal of Political Science, July 2004, Vol. 48. No. 3, pp. 604-619,
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/1519919.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true)
In an important article, Fearon (1995) sought to provide answers for what he called the fundamental puzzle of
war: the occurrence of war in spite of its costliness. Central to his argument is the claim that" [a]s long as both
sides suffer some costs for fighting, then war is always inefficient ex post " for rational unitary-actors (383).
War is inefficient ex post because the pie to be divided between the opponents will be smaller after the war than it was before the
war. He proposed three mechanisms to explain why, when war is negative-sum, rational unitary-actors may be un-
able to reach agreements that avoid war . Specifically: (1) private information and incentives to
misrepresent one's capabilities, resolve, or anticipated costs of war, (2) commitment problems, and (3) issue
indivisibilities. Nevertheless, Fearon explicitly acknowledged that his focus on "rational unitary-actor explanations" addressed
only one of three types of arguments that could explain the occurrence of costly wars. The first of these two alternative types of
arguments claims that leaders are sometimes, or even always, irrational. Such arguments currently are poor
candidates for systematic examination. The second alternative, however, is not. As Fearon noted, " war
may be rational for...
leaders if they will enjoy various benefits of war without suffering costs imposed on the
population." It deserves emphasis to note that he continued "I believe that 'second-image' mechanisms of this sort are very
important empirically..." (379, fn. 1). If leaders enjoy "various benefits of war" which more than off- set their costs, then
war is obviously no longer ex post inefficient for the opposing leader s, and Fearon's three mechanisms are no
longer sufficient to explain war. In- stead, new mechanisms could come to the fore, perhaps explaining why, when, and which
leaders enjoy "various benefits of war" that more than offset its costs.

Rationality doesnt check

Mozley 98 [Rob. Prof Physics Stanford.The Politics and Technology of Nuclear Proliferation 1998. Pg
15]

Kenneth N. Waltz, who over a decade ago published The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, has been very
influentia1. 10 In that paper he concluded that general proliferation would create a more stable situation among
nations. His only qualification of this argument is the suggestion that the proliferation be gradual. His paper is comprehensive in its
discussion of the dangers of proliferation. However, through his best-case analysis of these dangers, he reached the
conclusion that more proliferation was better . Waltz's paper ignores the limitations of a generalization based on the single
example of the Cold War. He is not bothered by the knowledge that each situation of conflict is different. He assumes that all
national decisions are made rationally and that nations actually carry out the wishes of their leaders. He
does not allow for errors, incompetence, or insubordination. In the case of nuclear war, this omission is
particularly significant. In a situation in which a national leader does not want to start a conventional war,
and finds that some of his directives are being ignored by the national bureaucracy, he will generally have
time, measured in weeks, to correct any national actions he did not intend. If he is trying to correct actions that
lead to nuclear war, he may have only a few minutes.
 AT: No Retaliation
Retaliation is the policy of every nuclear stateit is certain in the world of one nuke
Lindberg 4 [Tod, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy
Review, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB585.pdf 2004]
This focus of attention is important. It reminds us that there is no sense in which the possession of a deterrent automatically
deters. We must inquire into the mind of the party we wish to deter in order to determine whether deterrence is working.12 But in
another sense, the focus is incomplete. Before we spend too much time on the mind of the party meant to be deterred, we should
focus on the details of whats going on in the mind of the party trying to do the deterring. If a deterrent works better because it is
more credible, then the exercise of proving it credible to the party one wishes to deter begins with the effort to persuade oneself that
it is credible. Credibility begins at home. So we ask ourselves the following question: What would we do if someone
launched an all-out nuclear attack on us? Or, what would we do in certain horrendous circumstances
short of all-out nuclear attack? The answer we proffer is that we would unleash fury in return, up to the
limit case, the complete annihilation of our enemy. And we do a number of things to demonstrate our
intention, first of all to ourselves. We build an arsenal of vast power. We ensure that the inevitable
vulnerabilities of any given component of it are offset by capabilities in other components . We have the triad;
the ability to deliver strategic nuclear weapons by land-based missile, by long-range bomber, or by submarine-based missile. We
develop weapons systems across a wide range of potential utility, from short-range nuclear artillery shells
to intermediate-range missiles to multiwarhead long-range missile s. We have explosive power at our disposal in all
magnitudes of which nuclear weapons are capable, from small charges for the local battlefield to the behemoth city incinerators of
Armageddon.13 We have sought and achieved greater and greater precision in our targeting, enabling us to reduce the size of our
warheads while still ensuring that the targets we are seeking will be destroyed. And we have hardened our nuclear facilities as well
as command-communications-control (C3) links to the national command authority in order to withstand the worst an enemy offers
and yet be able to strike back.14 This is not just a matter of hardware, of course. There is an extensive body of military
doctrine on how use the weapons effectively. War games simulate every imaginable contingency to test
these doctrines. The U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, one of nine unified
commands world wide, has 2,500 personnel and coordinates the nuclear warfighting capability of personnel and equipment ranging
in location from the White House and the Pentagon to Minuteman missile silos in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, to strategic
submarine bases in Georgia and Washington, to communications satellites miles overhead.15 The literature of military affairs
journals takes up warfighting questions at the unclassified level and the Pentagon is full of classified studies on the subject, from the
January 10, 2002, Nuclear Posture Review on down. Beyond the capacity to wage nuclear war in response to a nuclear or other
attack, the United States approaches the subject with a certain lan as well. Consider the mythos that has
grown up around the football, the satchel containing the nuclear attack codes that is carried by a military
officer who shadows the president of the United States at all times in case of surprise attack. Or consider
further the psychological testing of military personnel who have nuclear warfighting responsibilities . We do
not want a madman in close proximity to these weapons. Neither do we want someone unwilling, in a pinch, to unleash incineration
when ordered. All of this is very real. There is no doubt that the United States could unleash all-out nuclear war .
One day the drill could turn out to be the real thing and the hardware, personnel, doctrine, and lan (yes, sir, it is necessary, lawful,
and just to fire this missile) could come together as planned. The worst-case scenario of planners nightmares could simply be the
worst caseglobal devastation. We have ensured that all of this is entirely possible. We set out to persuade others about
what we would do. But the first order of business in doing so is to persuade ourselves. It is not surprising
that we were able to do so, nor is the fact that we have done so very illuminating. Whenever we found something
that was less than convincing in our nuclear weaponry or our doctrine, we tried to replace it or improve
upon it. The problem is that while the apparatus is real, in relation to the central questionwhat would the United States do if
attacked in certain ways?it is only a simulacrum, an elaboration of a central contention that could never be proved by the
apparatus because the construction of the apparatus presupposes it, namely, that we would retaliate with everything we have.
 AT: No Escalation
One nuke is all it takes
Betts 2k [Richard Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia,
Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism, The Coming
Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff p. 82]
Quite opposite reactions are imaginable. The shock might jar sluggish statesmen into taking the danger seriously, cutting through
diplomatic and military red tape, and undertaking dramatic actions to push the genie back in the bottle. Or the shock might
prompt panic and a rush to stock up on WMD, as the possibility of use underlines the need for deterrent
capability, or the effectiveness of such weapons as instruments of policy One seldom-noticed danger is that
breakage of the taboo could demystify the weapons and make them look more conventional than our post-
Hiroshima images of them. It helps to recall that in the 1930s, popular images of conventional strategic bombing were
that it would be apocalyptic, bringing belligerent countries to their knees quickly. The apocalyptic image was fed by the
German bombing of Guernica, a comparatively small city in Spain. When World War II came in Europe, both British and
Germans initially refrained from bombing attacks on cities. Once city bombing began and gathered steam,
however, it proved to be far less decisive than many had expected . British and German populations managed to
adjust and absorb it. Over time, however, the ferocity of Allied bombing of Germany and Japan did approach the
apocalyptic levels originally envisioned. In short, dire assumptions about the awesomeness of strategic bombing deterred
its initiation, but once initiated did not prevent gradual escalation to the devastating level originally
envisioned. Nuclear weapon inventories of countries like India and Pakistan are likely to remain small in number and yield for
some time. According to press reports, by some U.S. estimates the yields of the 1998 tests were only a few kilotons. If the first
weapon detonated in combat is a low-yield device in a large city with uneven terrain and lots of reinforced concrete, it might only
destroy a small part of the city A bomb that killed 10,000 to 20,000 people would be seen as a stunning catastrophe, but there are
now many parts of the world where that number would be less than 1 percent of a citys population. The disaster could seem
surprisingly limited, since in the popular imagination (underwritten by the results in the small and flimsy cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki), nuclear weapons mean one bomb, one city Awful destruction that yet seems surprisingly limited could prompt
revisionist reactions among lay elites in some countries about the meaning of nuclear ordnance.
 AT: Interdependence
Interdependence doesnt solve
Jervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, Theories of War in an Era of
Leading Power Peace, American Political Science Review 96:114]

There are four general arguments against the pacific influence of interdependence. First, it is hard to go from
the magnitude of economic flows to the costs that would be incurred if they were disrupted, and even
more difficult to estimate how much political impact these costs will have, which depends on the other
considerations at play and the political context. This means that we do not have a theory that tells us the magnitude of
the effect. Second, even the sign of the effect can be disputed: interdependence can increase conflict as
states gain bar- gaining leverage over each other, fear that others will exploit them, and face additional
sources of disputes (Barbieri 1996; Keohane 2000, 2001; Waltz 1970, 1979, Chap. 7). These effects might not arise if states
expect to remain at peace with each other, however. Third, it is clear that interdependence does not guarantee
peace. High levels of economic integration did not prevent World War I, and nations that were much more
unified than any security community have peacefully dissolved or fought civil wars. But this does not
mean that inter- dependence is not conducive to peace. Fourth, interdependence may be more an effect
than a cause, more the product than a generator of expectations of peace and cooperation . Russett and
Oneal (2001, 136) try to meet this objection by correlating the level of trade in one year, not with peace in that
year, but with peace in the following one. But this does not get to the heart of the matter since trade the year be- fore
could be a product of expectations of future good relations.

Interdependence doesnt solve non-military conflicts and short-term trade causes war
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of California, San Diego
(Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence and International Conflict, International
Organization, Spring 2001, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
However, "theoretically, liberalism does not specify what types of conflict are most likely to decrease in the
presence of high levels of interdependence."'6 Gartzke and Dong-Joon Jo find that while liberal dyads are less
likely to engage in militarized conflict, they have more nonmilitarized conflicts.'7 Mark J. Gasiorowski finds
that short-term capital flows increase conflict while trade reduces conflict.'8 Gasiorowski and Mary Ann
Tetreault emphasize that the quantitative literature measures not interdependence but interconnectedness.'9 Trade flows
alone may not be an optimal measure of interdependence . Other recent work directly challenges the validity of
research on the trade-conflict nexus. Using a measure of interdependence based on the salience of trade, Katherine protect their
interests, these states are more easily constrained from balancing against revisionist states with which they
share economic relations. If confrontations arise, revisionist states may threaten to disrupt economic relations,
increasing opportunity costs for status quo states.
 AT: International Organizations
Organizations fail
Jervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, Theories of War in an Era of
Leading Power Peace, American Political Science Review 96:114]

International Organizations. Even those who argue for the pacifying effect of common memberships in
international organizations aver that the magnitude of this effect is relatively slight, at least in the short run
(Russett and Oneal 2001, Chap. 5), and so my discussion is brief. The causal mechanisms are believed to be several:
enhanced information flows, greater ability to solve problems peacefully , an increased stake in cooperative
behavior linked to the risk of being ex- cluded from the organization if the state behaves badly, and possibly a heightened sense of
common identity (Keohane 1984; much of the literature is summarized by Martin and Simmons 1998). Harder to pin down but
perhaps most important are processes by which joint membership alters states' conceptions of their interest, leading them to see it
not only as calling for cooperative reciprocations, but also as extending over a longer time- horizon and including benefits to others
(Jervis 1999, 2001; March and Olsen 1998). The obvious reasons to doubt the importance of shared institutional
membership are that the incentives do not seem great enough to tame strong conflicts of interest and that
membership may be endogenous to common interests and peaceful relations. States that expect war with
each other are less likely to join the same international organizations and political conflicts that are the
precursors to war may destroy the institutions or drive some members out, as Japan and Germany
withdrew from the League of Nations during the 1930 s. Even with a strong correlation and reasonable
con- trol variables, the direction of causality is difficult to establish.
 AT: International Law
ILaw fails
Goldsmith and Posner 5 [American enterprise inst, book review, inst for public policy research (The
Limits of International Law Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner,
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/sugimoto/law.pdf]

As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law was as high as it had ever beenas high as it was at
the end of World War I and World War II, for example. We can conveniently use 9/11 as the date on which this optimism
ended, but there were undercurrents of pessimism even earlier. The UN played a relatively minor role in
bringing the conflicts in the Balkans to the end. Members of the Security Council could not agree on the use of force in
Kosovo, and the NATO intervention was thus a violation of international law. The various international criminal tribunals
turned out to be cumbersome and expensive institutions, they brought relatively few people to justice, and
they stirred up the ethnic tensions they were meant to quell. Aggressive international trade integration produced a violent
backlash in many countries. Treaty mechanisms seemed too weak to solve the most serious global problems,
including environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
 AT: War is Slow
Prolif ensures rapid escalation
Cirincione 7 [Joe, Pres. Ploughshares Fund and Senior Fellow and Dir. Nuclear Policy Center for
American Progress, National Interest, Symposium: Apocalypse When? November/December ln]

Let me be clear: Nuclear proliferation is a real danger. George Bush and John Kerry were correct when they agreed in a
2004 debate that it is the number one threat to America. The threat comes in four flavors. Most serious is nuclear
terrorism. As terrible as another 9/11 attack would be, a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city, kill hundreds of
thousands, wreck the economy and change the political life of the nation , perhaps permanently. Our number
one priority must be to make sure any further terrorist attack is non-nuclear. Second is the danger from existing arsenals.
There are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the planet several times over. Even a small regional
war in South Asia using one hundred weapons would trigger a nuclear winter that could devastate food crops
around the world. Accidental or unauthorized use is a real risk. Consider the September flight of a B-52 with six
nuclear weapons that the crew didn't know they had. If the most sophisticated command-and-control mechanism in the world fails to
stop the unauthorized possession of the equivalent of sixty Hiroshimas, what is going on in other nations? Third is the risk of
new nuclear nations. I agree with Mueller that the danger here is not that Iran or North Korea would use a nuclear bomb
against America or their neighbors. Deterrence is alive and well; they know what would happen next. Nor is it that these states
would intentionally give a weapon they worked so hard to make to a terrorist group they could not control. Rather it is the risk of
what could happen in the neighborhood: a nuclear reaction chain where states feel they must match each
other's nuclear capability. Just such a reaction is underway already in the Middle East , as over a dozen Muslim
nations suddenly declared interest in starting nuclear-power programs. This is not about energy; it is a nuclear hedge against Iran. It
could lead to a Middle East with not one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, but four or five. That is a recipe
for nuclear war. Finally, there is the risk of the collapse of the entire non-proliferation regime . Kennedy
was right to worry about ten, fifteen or twenty nuclear nations. He did not make this number up. It was based on a
1958 NPT that warned that while there were then only three nuclear nations (the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom),
"within the next decade a large number of individual countries could produce at least a few nominal-yield weapons." Indeed, several
nations already had programs underway. Subsequent NPTs confirmed the proliferation danger and the linkage to existing arsenals.
Other nations' decisions on proceeding with programs, the intelligence agencies concluded, were linked to "further progress in
disarmament-aimed at effective controls and reduction of stockpiles." Kennedy negotiated a limited nuclear test ban and began the
process to get the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty completed by Lyndon Johnson and ratified by Richard Nixon. This
bipartisan dam held
back the nuclear wave; its abandonment by the current administration risks a return to the
1950s nuclear free-for-all .
 AT: Try or Die
Default to short term impacts
Barnhizer 6 [David Barnhizer, 6, prof of law, cleveland st U, waking from sustainabilitys impossible
dream, Geo intl envtl law rev, ln]

We need to abandon the rhetoric of sustainability and adapt strategies of accountability . Accept the clich that
politics is indeed the art of the possible. You cant force reality into a controlled pattern. It is more important and more effective to
monitor conditions, create buffers against the worst consequences, and develop the means to adapt our behavior to events. Utopian
strategies are like King Canute ordering the unheeding tides to recede. There are too many unforeseeable variables and feedback
loops with multiplier effects. There are too many butterflies to capture in our data nets and projections. We are in the midst of a
transformative Kondratiev Wave that has been going on for about fifteen years and will last another two decades.192 We cannot
know its real costs and consequences until it has dissipated and the new structure that is being created
settles in. Even then we will not be in a condition of stasis. We must improve our decision-making in order
to cope with this environment. We need to learn how to ride the wave of continual change and adaptation but this doesnt
mean we cant do some good things. There are some basic areas where we can create protective zones and produce some positive
effects. These include issues of land rights, social organization, food security, careful economic development, equity and human
rights. Part of what is required is the abandoning of false ideals such as sustainable development. Beyond that we need to focus on
strategies involving what have been called small wins. This needs to be based on the identification of what business strategist
Kenichi Ohmae described as Key Factors for Success (KFS) and Key Factors for Failure (KFF).193 These approachessmall
wins, KFS and KFFmust be applied inside strategies aimed at specific systems based on an analysis that I think of as Key Points
of Leverage or, since we are using acronyms, KPL. In every situation there are key factors that provide maximum leverage. There
are others that lead to success or other paths of action that result in failure. Achieving goals requires honest and simple strategies to
which we can commit ourselves and that ordinary people can understand and implement within the constraints of existing
institutions. It is important to concentrate on small wins that are achievable over a relatively short period of
time rather than anticipating a vast retooling of existing institutions and fundamental changes in human
behavior. Such transformational shifts would require that we collectively gain a level of understanding
beyond our capability. Even if we somehow changed our character and that of our institutions special
interests would remain that would sabotage the efforts . 194 Many of the governments upon which we must rely to
regulate effectively change composition frequently. New office holders often fail to understand the reasons for pre-
existing policies or they the policies as those of their opponents. A result is weakening or abandonment of
the effort.
 AT: No conflicts/Waltz
Waltz is wrong multiple empirical examples disprove
Lieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

Critics might concede that conventional wars between nuclear-armed adversaries would be highly escalatory, yet counter that such wars
are unlikely to occur in the first place. In fact, critics might say, the arguments that we present here about the dangers of wartime
escalation are exactly the reason that these conventional wars will not occur. As Kenneth Waltz argues, nuclear weapons do not merely deter nuclear
attacks; they deter conventional attacks as well. As he explains, launching a major conventional offensive against a nuclear-armed state would be
foolhardy; yet, launching a limited conventional attack would be equally senseless - as the small potential gains would be trivial compared to any
residual risk of escalation. In short, critics might argue that it is precisely because our arguments about the danger of escalation are correct that these
wars will not happen. The lack of high-intensity conventional war between two nuclear weapon states is evidence on the side of Waltz, but there is
worrisome evidence, as well. First, if Waltz is right that the risk of nuclear escalation will reliably deter
conventional attacks, then conventional attacks on nuclear-armed countries should not occur - yet they
do. In some cases these were highly limited conventional operations, in locations whose geography limited the fighting (e.g., Kargil 1999; Falklands 19
82). But on other occasions, countries have launched major conventional military operations that inflicted
substantial losses on nuclear-armed adversaries, or which threatened their vital interests . In 1950 China
launched a major land attack against U.S. and allied forces on the Korean Peninsula , dealing the United States a
major defeat, denying the United States victory on the Korean Peninsula, and killing thousands of U.S. military
personnel. Whatever calculations led Chinas leaders to believe they could inflict such a serious defeat on
the United States without prohibitive risk of nuclear escalation surely does not resemble the line of
reasoning - and the overwhelming caution - that Waltz expects to observe in states facing nuclear-armed
enemies. Further, the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War reflects a
level of risk acceptance that does not jibe well with Waltzs arguments. On October 6, five divisions of Syrian ground
forces launched a major surprise attack on Israeli defenses along the Golan Heights. The Syrian ground forces nearly broke through the Israeli line; at
the worst moment for Israel, roughly a dozen tanks stood in front of the Syrian Army - and there were no additional Israeli reserves between the Golan
Heights and Tel Aviv. (Some accounts of the war claim that Israel took steps during the war to prepare its nuclear arsenal in case the Syrian Army broke
their decision process does not match the level of
through.) Syria was fortunate: its attack on the Golan Heights failed. But
caution one will require if conventional wars against nuclear-armed states are to be banished . More recently,
the apparent North Korean sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010, or the Norths shelling of
Yeonpyeong Island near Seoul, could have led to a substantial conventional response by Seoul -
triggering war. Waltzs view may correctly explain Seouls reluctance to respond to those attacks with force; but it does not explain
Pyongyangs willingness to instigate violence and keep walking along the edge of war. More broadly, the claim
that the risk of catastrophe will reliably deter conventional wars seems to contradict much of history. For
most of history, starting a war meant risking catastrophe. Leaders who lost surrendered not merely their
crowns, but also their heads. In the era of dynastic succession, defeat often meant that ones children were killed as
well to prevent future claims to rule. Throughout history, those who led rebellions - against ancient empires, colonial powers, or even against modern
occupiers - usually paid with their lives (and often died gruesomely). And the populations on whose behalf the insurgents rebelled were sometimes
the Japanese who planned Pearl Harbor
slaughtered, to teach others not to emulate their disloyalty. In more modern times,
understood that they were attacking a country with ten times their economic power, and they understood
that if the war went badly it meant catastrophe for themselves and Japan . (They were right.) But despite those risks, the
Japanese attacked. Germanys leaders understood that they were risking personal and national calamity when
they invaded France, and especially when they invaded the Soviet Union. But they attacked anyway. In
1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, a country with three times Iraqs population - a gamble that nearly
led to his overthrow and death. If it were true that leaders do not start conventional wars if the possibility of
catastrophe looms, human history would be much more pacific. To be clear, we agree with the premise underlying Waltzs argument:
that conventional wars could only occur between nuclear-armed states if leaders were willing to embrace major risks. He does not think that will
happen; we see that occurring throughout the pages of history. If leaders were not willing to take enormous risks, China and Syria would not have
launched major ground attacks on nuclear-armed states, people would have never rebelled against empires, and few of the major wars of the modern
era would have occurred.
 AT: weak countries will surrender
US involvement guarantees escalation
Lieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

THE LOGIC OF COERCIVE NUCLEAR ESCALATION The core national security problem for many militarily weak countries is
straightforward: how to keep powerful enemies at bay. For weak countries, military defeat can be disastrous. In some
circumstances, battlefield losses are followed by conquest and harsh treatment of the defeated society : e.g., a
brutal occupation, the loss of sovereignty, or in rare cases genocide. But even when those terrible outcomes are not likely, war is often
disastrous for the leaders of the defeated. Military planners in weak states - particularly those with adversarial
relations with the United States (which has easily vanquished a halfdozen military opponents since the end of the Cold War) - must,
therefore, address a fundamental question: if war occurs, and conventional victory is impossible, what strategies might create a stalemate and avoid
catastrophic defeat? Escalation and the Fate of Enemy Leaders Although the United States has a long history of treating defeated enemy societies well
the leaders of countries that recently fought the United States have
- e.g., in Germany, Japan, and more recently Iraq -
suffered severe consequences. In 1989, the United States conquered Panama and arrested its leader, Manuel Noriega. For most
Americans, this short war is forgotten. For Noriega, it triggered a calamitous reversal of fortune: he exchanged a life of power and riches for twenty-
three years in prison - and counting. Saddam Hussein suffered a worse fate; he lost power, he was humiliated, his sons were killed, and he was
hanged in front of jeering enemies. Muammar Qaddafi spent his last days hiding from U.S.-supported rebels before being caught cowering in a culvert.
He was then beaten and shot to death. Dozens of Qaddafi loyalists, including his son, were also rounded up and executed. Even leaders
whose countries were never conquered - those that suffered only limited defeats - often paid a high
price. Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are still in prison in the Hague, where Serbias former leader, Milosevic, died in detention.
More broadly, studies demonstrate that leaders have a powerful, personal incentive to force a stalemate on the
battlefield rather than accept defeat. One study used data covering more than 80 years of leadership
changes around the world and found that those leaders who achieved a stalemate in a war were nearly
twice as likely to remain in power as those countries that suffered military defeat. Even more tellingly, the
leaders of countries who lost were approximately four times as likely to be punished - exiled, jailed, or
killed - as those who managed to achieve stalemate. Not only do leaders face great pressure to create battlefield stalemate
before they suffer irredeemable losses, they must do so quickly. A limited conventional defeat that merely destroys a
large fraction of a countrys military, or substantially degrades the institutions that ensure government control (for example, the
leaderships security force, domestic intelligence services, internal security troops, and party militias), could trigger a wartime or post-
war coup. Even if the military and security services remain loyal, the war must end before they are too degraded to suppress uprisings in the wake
of the conflict. Furthermore, military operations - especially those conducted by the United States - Increasingly involve intense
campaigns against enemy command bunkers and other leadership sites, posing direct, daily threats to the
leaders, their key political allies, and their families. Leaders who see their military being destroyed, their security services being savaged, and
who have bombs raining down upon their command bunkers, may feel great pressure to halt the war as soon as possible . In
short, losing wars is often a terrible outcome. Sometimes it results in horrendous consequences for the defeated society. In the early decades of the
Cold War, West Europeans were understandably horrified by the notion of being conquered by the Soviet Union, losing their democratic institutions,
and living under a murderous Stalinist tyranny. Today, many Israelis believe that a military defeat at the hands of their neighbors would usher in another
tragic era in Jewish history - including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But even when the outcomes of war are unlikely to lead to mass societal
suffering among the defeated, enemy leaders (not just the supreme leader, but ruling party officials, military officers, and members of the domestic
security services) rightly fear the consequences. The critical message is this: Americas recent conflicts are considered regional wars in Washington;
for adversaries there is nothing regional or limited about them. For the weak, these are existential struggles. Escalation and the Role of Nuclear
Weapons The leaders of weak states face life-and-death incentives to quickly halt wars that are going badly for them .
But why are nuclear
weapons needed for this mission? Several attributes of nuclear weapons make them uniquely useful for stalemating a stronger enemy.
Nuclear weapons are small and hence relatively easy to hide - enhancing their chance of surviving the
early stages of a conflict. Furthermore, not many nuclear weapons need to survive: each bomb is so
destructive that an adversary who can credibly threaten to deliver even a few weapons against its
enemys cities would possess a powerful coercive tool. Finally, modern delivery systems - particularly ballistic
missiles - allow states to deliver nuclear weapons to their target, even if its enemy controls the ground, air,
and sea. In contrast, most conventional weapons become progressively harder to deliver against enemy
cities as the enemy gains the upper hand militarily, and they inflict too little damage to shock the winning
side into submitting to stalemate. Taken together, these three characteristics mean that even a state on the verge of being vanquished
can conceivably destroy the potential victor. The implication: nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of the weak.
 AT: States use other weapons
Nuclear weapons are the favored weapons of small states three reasons
Lieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl
G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives
And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

Not only are nuclear weapons better suited for wartime coercion than conventional alternatives,there are three other considerations
that make them more useful than other weapons that analysts worry may spread in the 21st century, including cyber, chemical,
and biological weapons. First, although popular culture frequently portrays nuclear weapons as uncontrollably destructive, their effects can be
surprisingly calibrated. Weapons designers have created nuclear weapons with widely varying yields, allowing mission planners to tailor a
strike to create a huge area of destruction or very little - whichever is desired. For example, the largest yield weapon in the current U.S. arsenal
releases up to 1,200 kilotons of energy (80 Hiroshimas); the smallest U.S. nuclear weapon can be set to detonate with only roughly 0.3 kilotons of
by selecting the
explosive power (2% of the Hiroshima bomb). The former would create 250 times the destruction as the latter. Furthermore,
altitude of detonation, targeters can choose to create enormous amounts of radioactive fallout or virtually
none. And perhaps most importantly - from the standpoint of a weak state conducting a coercive campaign - nuclear weapons can be
used either slowly or rapidly, or somewhere in between: they can be used to destroy one city today and
another tomorrow, or one today and a dozen tomorrow. If fallout is avoided, damage can be meted out in
distinct, painful episodes, facilitating coercion. In our popular culture, nuclear weapons are incredibly blunt tools. Some high-yield
weapons are. But compared to other instruments of coercion, nuclear weapons offer desperate weak-state leaders tailored
escalatory options. Another criterion that makes nuclear weapons uniquely suitable for war-ending coercion: the utility of nuclear
strikes is not nullified by first use. Once a cyber weapon is used, the victim (and others) can learn from the computer code and eliminate
key vulnerabilities - reducing the effectiveness of future weapons. Similarly, in the aftermath of a biological weapons attack, the victims military forces
and population would don gas masks and take other steps to reduce their vulnerability to subsequent strikes. Within broader society, public health
measures (for example, restrictions on travel and movement, the use of surgical masks, heightened health monitoring, and the isolation of contagious
individuals) would reduce the effectiveness of follow-on attacks. But, in contrast, the initial use of nuclear weapons would not
nullify the nuclear arsenal to the degree that bio- or cyber-attacks would. Unless the victim of the nuclear attack can
reliably shoot down ballistic missiles, which remains a very difficult undertaking , a weak state can use nuclear weapons
coercively and still retain the ability to conduct future attacks . Finally, the effects of nuclear weapons are far
more predictable than cyber or bio weapons, an essential attribute for a leader who needs to coerce an immediate
end to fighting. Nuclear weapons are more predictable on at least three key dimensions: the functioning of the weapon, the
damage it will cause, and the timing of the effects. No one knows whether the coercive effect of a nuclear, or biological, or a cyber
attack would work, as we discuss below. But leaders under duress could at least be confident that a well-tested nuclear
weapon would function; would create a reasonably predictable level of damage (as long as targeters selected a
height of burst to prevent fallout); and would detonate at roughly the desired time . By contrast, one cannot know whether a cyber
weapon will infect the target computer system - or whether an infection would produce the desired malfunctions - until the weapon is used. In many
cases, no one can predict how long it will take for a cyber attack to disrupt the target computers, or assess the unintended consequences of the
malware infecting other computer systems. Similarly, biological weapons may take considerable time to spread, to incubate in their victims, to be
the leaders of the
detected, and to be attributed - all of which must happen before an attack can generate a coercive effect. During wars,
states on the losing side may face life-and-death pressure to rapidly force a ceasefire - even if their enemy is not
seeking to conquer them or impose regime change. Conventional weapons provide little leverage in this regard - most of
them become progressively more difficult for the weak to employ as the strong gains the upper hand
militarily, and they generally inflict too little damage to shock the strong state into submitting to stalemate .
When NATO faced an overwhelming conventional military threat, it did not plan to stalemate the Warsaw Pact using highly uncertain biological
weapons. If
the challenge facing a leader is to stop a powerful aggressor immediately, then there is currently
no substitute for nuclear weapons.
Yes Extinction
 1NC
Nuclear war causes extinction
Robock 11 [Alan Prof Environmental Science @ Rutgers. Nuclear Winter is a Real and Present
Danger Nature, Vol 473. Summer 2011 Ebsco]
In the 1980s, discussion and debate about the possibility of a nuclear winter helped to end the arms race between the United
States and the Soviet Union. As former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2000: Models made by Russian
and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely
destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honour and morality, to act. As
a result, the number of nuclear weapons in the world started to fall, from a peak of about 70,000 in the 1980s to a total of about
22,000 today. In another five years that number could go as low as 5,000, thanks to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New
START) between the United States and Russia, signed on 8 April 2010. Yet the environmental threat of nuclear war has
not gone away. The world faces the prospect of a smaller, but still catastrophic, nuclear conflict. There are
now nine nuclear-weapons states. Use of a fraction of the global nuclear arsenal by anyone, from the
superpowers to India versus Pakistan, still presents the largest potential environmental danger to the
planet by humans. That threat is being ignored. One reason for this denial is that the prospect of a
nuclear war is so horrific on so many levels that most people simply look away. Two further reasons are myths
that persist among the general public: that the nuclear winter theory has been disproved, and that nuclear
winter is no longer a threat. These myths need to be debunked . The term nuclear winter, coined by Carl Sagan and
his colleagues in a 1983 paper1 in Science, describes the dramatic effects on the climate caused by smoke from fires ignited by
using the best climate models
nuclear attacks on cities and industrial areas. In the 1980s my colleagues and I calculated,
available at the time, that if one-third of the existing arsenal was used, there would be so much smoke
that surface temperatures would plummet below freezing around the world for months, killing virtually all
plants and producing worldwide famine. More people could die in China from starvation than in the nations actively
bombing each other. As many countries around the world realized that a superpower nuclear war would be a disaster for them, they
pressured the superpowers to end their arms race. Sagan did a good job of summarizing the policy impacts2 in 1984: although
weapons were continuing to be built, it would be suicide to use them. The idea of climatic catastrophe was fought against by those
who wanted to keep the nuclear-weapon industry alive, or who supported the growth of nuclear arsenals politically3.
Scientifically, there was no real debate about the concept , only about the details. In 1986, atmospheric
researchers Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs appraising the theory4 and highlighting what
they saw as the patchiness of the effect. They coined the term nuclear autumn, noting that it wouldnt be winter everywhere in the
aftermath of a nuclear attack. They didnt mean for people to think that it would be all raking leaves and football games, but many
members of the public, and some pro-nuclear advocates, preferred to take it that way. The fight over the details of the modelling
caused a rift between Sagan and Schneider that never healed. When I bring up the topic of nuclear winter, people invariably tell me
that they think the theory has been disproved. But research continues to support the original concept. By 2007, models had
began to approximate a realistic atmosphere up to 80 kilometres above Earths surface, including the
stratosphere and mesosphere. This enabled me, and my coauthors, to calculate for the first time that smoke
particles would be heated by the Sun and lifted into the upper stratosphere, where they would stay for
many years5,6. So the cooling would last for much longer than we originally thought. DARK DAYS Many of
those who do accept the nuclear-winter concept think that the scenario applies only to a mass conflict, on
a scale no longer conceivable in the modern world. This is also false. A small nuclear war between
India and Pakistan, with each using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (far less than 1% of the current arsenal), if
dropped on megacity targets in each country would produce climate change unprecedented in
recorded human history 5. Five million tonnes of black carbon smoke would be emitted into the upper
troposphere from the burning cities, and then be lofted into the stratosphere by the heat of the Sun. Temperatures would
be lower than during the Little Ice Age (14001850), during which famine killed millions. For several years, growing
seasons would be shortened by weeks in the mid-latitudes (see A decade of cooling). Brian Toon at the University of Colorado in
Boulder, Richard Turco at the University of California, Los Angeles, Georgiy Stenchikov at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
New Jersey, and I, all of whom were pioneers in nuclear-winter research in the 1980s, have tried, along with our students, to
publicize our results. We have published refereed journal articles, popular pieces in Physics Today and Scientific American, a policy
forum in Science, and now this article. But Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, perhaps the two most prominent foreign-policy
magazines in English, would not even review articles we submitted. We have had no luck getting attention from the US government.
Toon and I visited the US Congress and gave briefings to congressional staff on the subject two years ago, but nothing happened as
a result. The US Presidents science adviser John Holdren has not responded to our requests in 2009 and more recently for
consideration of new scientific results in US nuclear policy. The only interest at a national level I have had was somewhat surreal: in
September 2010, Fidel Castro summoned me to a conference on nuclear winter in Havana, to help promote his new view that a
nuclear conflict would bring about Armageddon. The next day, my talk the entire 90 minutes including questions
was broadcast on nationwide television in prime time, and appeared on the front page of the two national newspapers in Cuba. As in
the 1980s, it is still too difficult for most people to fully grasp the consequences of a nuclear conflict. But it must be grasped. We
scientists must continue to push our results out to the public and to policymakers, so they can in turn push political will in the
direction of disarmament. Just as Gorbachev, armed with the knowledge of nuclear winter, helped to end the cold war, so too can
the politicians of today use science to support further reductions in arms. The New START treaty is not enough.

Extreme nuclear existential threat food insecurity and US-Russian war exacerbates
conflict
Germanos, 13 (Andrea, staff writer at Common Dreams, Nuclear War Could Mean 'Extinction of the
Human Race, Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/10-2, 10-2-13)

A war using even a small percentage of the world's nuclear weapons threatens the lives of two billion
people, a new report warns. "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive
casualties on a global scalefar more than we had previously believed ," said Dr. Ira Helfand. (Photo: jonathan mcintosh/cc/flickr) The
findings in the report issued by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) are based on studies by climate scientists that show how nuclear
war would alter the climate and agriculture, thereby threatening one quarter of the world's population with famine. Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? offers an updated edition to the groups' April of 2012
report, which the groups say "may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited nuclear war." "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive casualties on a
global scalefar more than we had previously believed," Dr. Ira Helfand, the reports author and IPPNW co-president, said in a statement. As their previous report showed, years after even a limited nuclear war,
production of corn in the U.S. and China's middle season rice production would severely decline, and fears over dwindling food supplies would lead to hoarding and increases in food prices, creating further food
insecurity for those already reliant on food imports. The updated report adds that Chinese winter wheat production would plummet if such a war broke out. Based on information from new studies combining
reductions in wheat, corn and rice, this new edition doubles the number of people they expect to be threatened by nuclear-war induced famine to over two billion. "The prospect of a decade of widespread hunger
and intense social and economic instability in the worlds largest country has immense implications for the entire global community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will

The crops would be impacted, the report explains, citing previous studies, because of
be matched by similar declines in other wheat producing countries," Helfand stated.

the black carbon particles that would be released, causing widespread changes like cooling temperatures,
decreased precipitation and decline in solar radiation . In this scenario of famine, epidemics of infectious diseases
would be likely, the report states, and could lead to armed conflict . From the report: Within nations where famine is
widespread, there would almost certainly be food riots, and competition for limited food resources might
well exacerbate ethnic and regional animosities. Among nations, armed conflict would be a very real possibility as
states dependent on imports attempted to maintain access to food supplies. While a limited nuclear war would bring dire
circumstances, the impacts if the world's biggest nuclear arms holders were involved would be even worse . "With

a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible not certain, but possible
extinction of the human race," Helfand told Agence-France Presse. In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate
nuclear weapons," Helfand stated. (Photo: MAPWcommunications/cc/flickr)"In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving
somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this will dwarf anything we've ever seen ,"
Helfand told the news agency. As Helfand writes, the data cited in the report "raises a giant red flag about the threat to humanity posed." Yet, as Dr. Peter Wilk, former national executive director of PSR writes in

threat is of our own creation." As a joint statement by 124 states delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in October stated: " It is in the
an op-ed today, the "

interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any
circumstances." "Countries around the worldthose who are nuclear-armed and those who are notmust
work together to eliminate the threat and consequences of nuclear war ," Helfand said. In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate
nuclear weapons.

Models prove nuclear war destroys the environment smoke kills crop and starts an ice
age
Robock and Toon 12 Professor of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, and
Professor/Founding chair in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of
Colorado (Alan and Brian, Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, 2012, Vol. 68, pp. 66-74, http://thewe.biz/thewe_/_/pdf/climate-impact-of-nuclear-
war.pdf)

Modern climate models not only show that the nuclear winter theory is correct, but also that the effects would
last for more than a decade (Robock et al., 2007a, 2007b) because of an unexpected phenomenon: Smoke would rise
to very high altitudes near 40 kilometers (25 miles) where it would be protected from rain and would take
more than a decade to clear completely. As a consequence, the smokes climate impacts would be more
extreme than once thought. For example, the new models show that a full-scale nuclear conflict, in which 150 million
tons of smoke are lofted into the upper atmosphere, would drastically reduce precipitation by 45 percent on a global
average while temperatures would fall for several years by 7 to 8 degrees Celsius on average and would
remain depressed by 4 degrees Celsius after a decade (Robock et al. 2007). Humans have not experienced
temperatures this low since the last ice age (Figure 2). In important grain-growing regions of the
northern mid-latitudes, precipitation would decline by up to 90 percent , and temperatures would
fall below freezing and remain there for one or more years . The number of weapons needed to initiate
these climate changes falls within the range of arsenals planned for the coming decade (Toon et al., 2008).

Even the smallest nuclear conflict drastically alters the climate and kills billions
Robock and Toon 12 Professor of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, and
Professor/Founding chair in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of
Colorado (Alan and Brian, Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, 2012, Vol. 68, pp. 66-74, http://thewe.biz/thewe_/_/pdf/climate-impact-of-nuclear-
war.pdf)

The United States and Russia are not the only countries capable of wreaking worldwide climate havoc.
All of the nuclear states except North Korea, with its relatively small arsenal if involved in a nuclear war, have the
destructive power needed to alter the global environment (Robock et al., 2007b). It is not correct to
assume that the effects of a regional war would be contained within a limited zone . For example,
consider a nuclear war in South Asia involving the use of I00 Hiroshima-size weapons . In these simulations,
more than five million tons of smoke is lofted to high altitude , where it absorbs sunlight before the light can
reach the lower atmosphere (Toon et al.. 2oo7b). As a result, surface temperatures fall and precipitation declines
(Robock et al... 2007b). The calculated results show a 10 percent global drop in precipitation, with the largest losses in the low
latitudes due to failure of the monsoons. Our climate model also shows global average temperatures colder than any
experienced on Earth in the past 1,ooo years and growing seasons shortened by two to three weeks in
the main mid- latitude agricultural areas of both hemi- spheres . These effects persist for several years, which
would threaten a significant fraction of the world's food supply, perhaps jeopardizing a billion people who
are now only marginally fed as it is (Helfand. 2o12). New simulations of the effects of these climate changes on crop
production predict reductions of soybean and corn production in the US Midwest, and of rice production in China, of 20 percent for
several years and I0 percent even after a decade (Ozdogan et al.. 2012: Xia and Robock, 2012).
 AT: Nukes = Small
Nukes would escalate
Kpreon 4 [Michael. President of the Stimson Center. Limited War, Escalation Control, and the Nuclear Option in South Asia
2004, wwww.stimson.org //GBS-JV]

This kind of strategic analysis did not provide political leaders much comfort as to how escalation might be controlled up to and
across the nuclear threshold. Will strategists and military planners in South Asia have more success in developing a plausible theory
of, and military plans for, escalation control? Escalation control presumed mutual agreement between nuclear
rivals to fight for limited stakes. As Brodie explained, [T]he curtailing of our taste for unequivocal victory is one of the prices
we pay to keep the physical violence, and thus the costs and penalties, from going beyond the level of the tolerable.5 Robert
Osgood defined limited war as part of a general strategy of conflict in which adversaries would bargain with each other through
the medium of graduated military responses, within the boundaries of contrived mutual restraints, in order to achieve a negotiated
settlement short of mutual destruction.6 This assumed, of course, that both nuclear-armed adversaries were
willing to play by the same general rules a condition, as Osgood subsequently acknowledged, that did not apply during
the Cold War. One trouble with all strategies of local war in Europe, he wrote in 1979, is that the Soviet Union has shown virtually
no inclination to be a partner to them.7 While US strategists were constructing rungs along the escalation ladder, the Soviet
General Staff was planning for a blitzkrieg across Europe. Another reason why US strategic thinkers failed to devise a
plausible theory of escalation control during the Cold War was the inherent difficulties in communicating with
an adversary whose differences of view and objectives were so great that they would result in conflict. If
miscommunication with, or misreading of, an adversary lead to conflict, this would suggest that
communication to keep that war limited might also fail assuming that lines of communication remain intact. But, as
Barry Posen has noted, Inadvertent escalation may also result from the great difficulty of gathering and
interpreting the most relevant information about a war in progress and using it to understand, control, and
orchestrate the war.8