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Impact
Impact...................................................................................................................................................................1
Impact.....................................................................................................................................................................1
Terrorism..............................................................................................................................................................2
Terrorism................................................................................................................................................................2
Extensions to Terrorism........................................................................................................................................3
Extensions to Terrorism........................................................................................................................................3
Economy.............................................................................................................................................................12
Economy................................................................................................................................................................12
US economic collapse destroys global economy
Scott Champion, Share International, July 2003.............................................................................................12
Economy.............................................................................................................................................................14
Economy................................................................................................................................................................14
Economy-Heg.....................................................................................................................................................15
Economy-Heg.......................................................................................................................................................15
Scott Champion, Share International, July 2003.............................................................................................15
No Nuclear War..................................................................................................................................................16
No Nuclear War....................................................................................................................................................16
US-China WAR..................................................................................................................................................17
US-China WAR....................................................................................................................................................17
Nanotechnology..................................................................................................................................................18
Nanotechnology....................................................................................................................................................18
Self Determination..............................................................................................................................................19
Self Determination...............................................................................................................................................19
Nuclear War Scenarios-Economy.......................................................................................................................20
Nuclear War Scenarios-Economy.......................................................................................................................20
Soft Power-Proliferation.....................................................................................................................................21
Soft Power-Proliferation......................................................................................................................................21
Extensions...........................................................................................................................................................22
Extensions.............................................................................................................................................................22
Global Warming..................................................................................................................................................27
Global Warming...................................................................................................................................................27

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Biodiversity........................................................................................................................................................29
Biodiversity...........................................................................................................................................................29
Extensions...........................................................................................................................................................31
Extensions.............................................................................................................................................................31
No War................................................................................................................................................................37
No War..................................................................................................................................................................37
Extinction............................................................................................................................................................38
Extinction..............................................................................................................................................................38
Impact Calculus-Extinction ...............................................................................................................................40
Impact Calculus-Extinction ...............................................................................................................................40
Genocide.............................................................................................................................................................42
Genocide................................................................................................................................................................42

Terrorism
1. Terrorism risks extinction and third world war
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Al-Ahram Weekly political analyst, 2004
[Al-Ahram Weekly, "Extinction!" 8/26, no. 705, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm]
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further
exacerbate the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies
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would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights,
tensions between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would also
speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if
humankind is to survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a
third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional war which ends when
one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects
the whole planet, we will all be losers.
2. Case outweighs
a. Terrorism exists in the status quo, you must look at the systemic impacts because unlike a highly
improbable d/a, they are actually occurring in the status quo.
b. We have 100% probability our internal link to extinction is nuclear war resulting from a terrorist
attack whereas the negative team can not generate a single scenario in which their impact is at all
probably going to happen.
c. Extinction is the biggest impact in this round all humanity will cease to exist meaning that the disad
impact doesn’t matter if we are all dead.

Extensions to Terrorism

Terrorism outweighs war-extinction

Sean Hannity, Fox News Political Analyst, 2004
[Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, pg. 6]
But the terrorists are no mere political sideshow. Though it manifests itself differently, the threat they
represent is every bit as grave as the one we experienced during World War II or the Cold War. There is
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no appeasing this enemy; they will stop at nothing in their quest to destroy the United States, and they
will lay waste to every human life they can in the process. As you read these words, the evildoers are
plotting the disruption of our lives, the destruction of our property, the murder of our families. Today or
tomorrow, fanatical extremists could come in possession of suitcase nuclear weapons or other weapons
of mass destruction, whether through rogue nations or via black-market thugs from the former Soviet
Union. We face the possibility of our civilization being destroyed, as surely as we did during the Cuban
Missile Crisis; indeed, with recent advances in technology and the ongoing instability in the Middle East
and around the world, the danger may be worse than ever.

Terrorist Nuclear attack will kill millions and trigger another Dark Age
Ernesto Zedillo, Former President of Mexico Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization,
FORBES, January 9, 2006, p. 25
Even if you agree with what's being done in the war on terror, you still could be upset about what's not
happening: doing the utmost to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack. We all should have a pretty clear idea
of what would follow a nuclear weapon's detonation in any of the world's major cities. Depending on the
potency of the device the loss of life could be in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), the
destruction of property in the trillions of dollars, the escalation in conflicts and violence uncontrollable,
the erosion of authority and government unstoppable and the disruption of global trade and finance
unprecedented. In short, we could practically count on the beginning of another dark age.

Terrorism threats human’s survival

Yonah Alexander, Inter-University for Terrorism Studies Director, 2003
[The Washington Times, "Terrorism myths and realities," 8/28]
Last week's brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrated dramatically
that the international community failed, thus far at least, to understand the magnitude and implications of
the terrorist threats to the very survival of civilization itself. Even the United States and Israel have for
decades tended to regard terrorism as a mere tactical nuisance or irritant rather than a critical strategic
challenge to their national security concerns. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 11, 2001,
Americans were stunned by the unprecedented tragedy of 19 al Qaeda terrorists striking a devastating
blow at the center of the nation's commercial and military powers. Likewise, Israel and its citizens,
despite the collapse of the Oslo Agreements of 1993 and numerous acts of terrorism triggered by the
second intifada that began almost three years ago, are still "shocked" by each suicide attack at a time of
intensive diplomatic efforts to revive the moribund peace process through the now revoked cease-fire
arrangements [hudna]. Why are the United States and Israel, as well as scores of other countries affected
by the universal nightmare of modern terrorism surprised by new terrorist "surprises"? There are many
reasons, including misunderstanding of the manifold specific factors that contribute to terrorism's
expansion, such as lack of a universal definition of terrorism, the religionization of politics, double
standards of morality, weak punishment of terrorists, and the exploitation of the media by terrorist
propaganda and psychological warfare. Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have
introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The
internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an
Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious
implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns.

Terrorism leads to Nuclear War

Joseph Caldwell, November 22, 2000
[PHD in Biology and Political Science, “Can America Survive?”] (PDNSS6754)
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From the points of view of the United States and Russia, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of
the Cold War have reduced the risk of a deliberate nuclear war, since much of the animosity is gone.
Looking at the world as a whole, the situation is more dangerous than ever before. The number of
nations possessing nuclear weapons has increased by two, with the addition of Pakistan and India. The
level of control over the weapons of the former Soviet Union has been reduced. The level of control over
fissionable material from which nuclear bombs can be made has also been reduced. With each passing year,
the amount of fissionable material in the world increases. With each passing year, the resentment of the world’s poor nations
and cultures for the rich nations increases, as they realize that they will never catch up. With each passing year, the anger of
Islamic nations and cultures against Western culture grows. Terrorism is increasing. Although the risk of a large-
scale ballistic missile war may have decreased, the likelihood of a small nuclear war appears to have
increased dramatically. Motive, means, and opportunity. All three prerequisites for action are set. The
atomic bomb was used as soon as it was available. In fact, it was used by the US at a point in World War
II when the war was clearly won.

Terrorism leads to nuclear retaliation killing millions

Greg Easterbrook, senior editor with THE NEW REPUBLIC, November 2001, p.
www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0111/01/gal.00.html. (UNDRG/C324)

Terrorists may not be held by this, especially suicidal terrorists, of the kind that al Qaeda is attempting to
cultivate. But I think, if I could leave you with one message, it would be this: that the search for terrorist
atomic weapons would be of great benefit to the Muslim peoples of the world in addition to members, to
people of the United States and Western Europe, because if an atomic warhead goes off in Washington,
say, in the current environment or anything like it, in the 24 hours that followed, a hundred million
Muslims would die as U.S. nuclear bombs rained down on every conceivable military target in a dozen
Muslim countries.

Terrorism causes extinction

Jerome Corsi, PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, Expert in Antiwar Movements and
Political Violence, ‘5
(Atomic Iran, p. 176-8)

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The United States retaliates: 'End of the world' scenarios The combination of horror and outrage that will
surge upon the nation will demand that the president retaliate for the incomprehensible damage done by the
attack. The problem will be that the president will not immediately know how to respond or against whom.
The perpetrators will have been incinerated by the explosion that destroyed New York City. Unlike 9-11,
there will have been no interval during the attack when those hijacked could make phone calls to loved ones
telling them before they died that the hijackers were radical Islamic extremists. There will be no such phone
calls when the attack will not have been anticipated until the instant the terrorists detonate their improvised
nuclear device inside the truck parked on a curb at the Empire State Building. Nor will there be any possibility of
finding any clues, which either were vaporized instantly or are now lying physically inaccessible under tons of radioactive rubble.
Still, the president, members of Congress, the military, and the public at large will suspect another attack by our known enemy–
Islamic terrorists. The first impulse will be to launch a nuclear strike on Mecca, to destroy the whole religion of Islam. Medina
could possibly be added to the target list just to make the point with crystal clarity. Yet what would we gain? The moment Mecca
and Medina were wiped off the map, the Islamic world – more than 1 billion human beings in countless different nations – would
feel attacked. Nothing would emerge intact after a war between the United States and Islam. The apocalypse would be
upon us. Then, too, we would face an immediate threat from our long-term enemy, the former Soviet Union.
Many in the Kremlin would see this as an opportunity to grasp the victory that had been snatched from
them by Ronald Reagan when the Berlin Wall came down. A missile strike by the Russians on a score of
American cities could possibly be pre-emptive. Would the U.S. strategic defense system be so in shock that
immediate retaliation would not be possible? Hardliners in Moscow might argue that there was never a
better opportunity to destroy America. In China, our newer Communist enemies might not care if we could
retaliate. With a population already over 1.3 billion people and with their population not concentrated in a
few major cities, the Chinese might calculate to initiate a nuclear blow on the United States. What if the
United States retaliated with a nuclear counterattack upon China? The Chinese might be able to absorb the
blow and recover. The North Koreans might calculate even more recklessly. Why not launch upon America
the few missiles they have that could reach our soil? More confusion and chaos might only advance their
position. If Russia, China, and the United States could be drawn into attacking one another, North Korea
might emerge stronger just because it was overlooked while the great nations focus on attacking one
another. So, too, our supposed allies in Europe might relish the immediate reduction in power suddenly
inflicted upon America.

A nuclear terrorist attack would cause global economic depression

Richard Haas, President, Council on Foreign Relations, PREVENTING CATASTROPHIC
NUCLEAR TERRORISM, March 2006,
http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/NucTerrCSR.pdf

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A nuclear attack by terrorists against the United States has the potential to make the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, look like a historical footnote. In addition to the immediate horrific devastation, such
an attack could cost trillions of dollars in damages, potentially sparking a global economic depression.
Although, during the 2004 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Senator John F. Kerry
agreed that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons worried them more than any other national security threat, the U.S.
government has yet to elevate nuclear terrorism prevention to the highest priority. Despite several U.S. and international
programs to secure nuclear weapons and the materials to make them, major gaps in policy remain.

Nuclear Terrorism would destroy the United States

CHESNEY IN '97 [Robert, Law Clerk to the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan , Harvard Law School, Los Angeles
International and Comparative Law Journal, November]

The horrible truth is that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, in light of the potential existence of a black
market in fissile material. Nuclear terrorists might issue demands, but then again, they might not. Their
target could be anything: a U.S. military base in a foreign land, a crowded U.S. city, or an empty stretch of
desert highway. In one fell swoop, nuclear terrorists could decapitate the U.S. government or destroy its
financial system. The human suffering resulting from a detonation would be beyond calculation, and in the
aftermath, the remains of the nation would demand both revenge and protection. Constitutional liberties and
values might never recover. When terrorists strike against societies already separated by fundamental social
fault lines, such as in Northern Ireland or Israel, conventional weapons can exploit those fault lines to
achieve significant gains. In societies that lack such pre-existing fundamental divisions, however,
conventional weapon attacks do not pose a top priority threat to national security, even though the pain and
suffering inflicted can be substantial. The bedrock institutions of the United States will survive despite the
destruction of federal offices; the vast majority of people will continue to support the Constitution despite
the mass murder of innocent persons. The consequences of terrorists employing weapons of mass
destruction, however, would be several orders of magnitude worse than a conventional weapons attack.
Although this threat includes chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapon's devastating potential is
in a class by itself. Nuclear terrorism thus poses a unique danger to the United States: through its sheer
power to slay, destroy, and terrorize, a nuclear weapon would give terrorists the otherwise-unavailable
ability to bring the United States to its knees. Therefore, preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear
weapons should be considered an unparalleled national security priority dominating other policy
considerations.

Terrorism results in Nuclear War

Corsi 05 http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=43817
In the span of less than one hour, the nation's largest city will have been virtually wiped off the map.
Removal of debris will take several years, and recovery may never fully happen. The damage to the nation's
economy will be measured in the trillions of dollars, and the loss of the country's major financial and
business center may reduce America immediately to a second-class status. The resulting psychological
impact will bring paralysis throughout the land for an indefinite period of time. The president may not be

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able to communicate with the nation for days, even weeks, as television and radio systems struggle to come
back on line. No natural or man-made disaster in history will compare with the magnitude of damage that
has been done to New York City in this one horrible day. The United States retaliates: 'End of the world'
scenarios The combination of horror and outrage that will surge upon the nation will demand that the
president retaliate for the incomprehensible damage done by the attack. The problem will be that the
president will not immediately know how to respond or against whom. The perpetrators will have been
incinerated by the explosion that destroyed New York City. Unlike 9-11, there will have been no interval
during the attack when those hijacked could make phone calls to loved ones telling them before they died
that the hijackers were radical Islamic extremists. There will be no such phone calls when the attack will
not have been anticipated until the instant the terrorists detonate their improvised nuclear device inside the
truck parked on a curb at the Empire State Building. Nor will there be any possibility of finding any clues,
which either were vaporized instantly or are now lying physically inaccessible under tons of radioactive
rubble. Still, the president, members of Congress, the military, and the public at large will suspect another
attack by our known enemy – Islamic terrorists. The first impulse will be to launch a nuclear strike on
Mecca, to destroy the whole religion of Islam. Medina could possibly be added to the target list just to make
the point with crystal clarity. Yet what would we gain? The moment Mecca and Medina were wiped off the
map, the Islamic world – more than 1 billion human beings in countless different nations – would feel
attacked. Nothing would emerge intact after a war between the United States and Islam. The apocalypse
would be upon us. Then, too, we would face an immediate threat from our long-term enemy, the former
Soviet Union. Many in the Kremlin would see this as an opportunity to grasp the victory that had been
snatched from them by Ronald Reagan when the Berlin Wall came down. A missile strike by the Russians
on a score of American cities could possibly be pre-emptive. Would the U.S. strategic defense system be so
in shock that immediate retaliation would not be possible? Hardliners in Moscow might argue that there
was never a better opportunity to destroy America. In China, our newer Communist enemies might not care
if we could retaliate. With a population already over 1.3 billion people and with their population not
concentrated in a few major cities, the Chinese might calculate to initiate a nuclear blow on the United
States. What if the United States retaliated with a nuclear counterattack upon China? The Chinese might be
able to absorb the blow and recover. The North Koreans might calculate even more recklessly. Why not
launch upon America the few missiles they have that could reach our soil? More confusion and chaos might
only advance their position. If Russia, China, and the United States could be drawn into attacking one
another, North Korea might emerge stronger just because it was overlooked while the great nations focus on
attacking one another. So, too, our supposed allies in Europe might relish the immediate reduction in power
suddenly inflicted upon America. Many of the great egos in Europe have never fully recovered from the
disgrace of World War II, when in the last century the Americans a second time in just over two decades had
been forced to come to their rescue. If the French did not start launching nuclear weapons themselves, they
might be happy to fan the diplomatic fire beginning to burn under the Russians and the Chinese. Or the
president might decide simply to launch a limited nuclear strike on Tehran itself. This might be the most
rational option in the attempt to retaliate but still communicate restraint. The problem is that a strike on
Tehran would add more nuclear devastation to the world calculation. Muslims around the world would still
see the retaliation as an attack on Islam, especially when the United States had no positive proof that the
destruction of New York City had been triggered by radical Islamic extremists with assistance from Iran.
But for the president not to retaliate might be unacceptable to the American people. So weakened by the
loss of New York, Americans would feel vulnerable in every city in the nation. "Who is going to be next?"
would be the question on everyone's mind. For this there would be no effective answer. That the president
might think politically at this instant seems almost petty, yet every president is by nature a politician. The
political party in power at the time of the attack would be destroyed unless the president retaliated with a

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nuclear strike against somebody. The American people would feel a price had to be paid while the country
was still capable of exacting revenge.

Biological Terrorism Risks Extinction

Richard Ochs, Chemical Weapons Working Group Member, 2002
[“Biological Weapons must be Abolished Immediately,” June 9,
http://www.freefromterror.net/other_.../abolish.html]

Of all the weapons of mass destruction, the genetically engineered biological weapons, many without a
known cure or vaccine, are an extreme danger to the continued survival of life on earth. Any perceived
military value or deterrence pales in comparison to the great risk these weapons pose just sitting in vials in
laboratories. While a "nuclear winter," resulting from a massive exchange of nuclear weapons, could also
kill off most of life on earth and severely compromise the health of future generations, they are easier to
control. Biological weapons, on the other hand, can get out of control very easily, as the recent anthrax
attacks has demonstrated. There is no way to guarantee the security of these doomsday weapons because very tiny amounts
can be stolen or accidentally released and then grow or be grown to horrendous proportions. The Black Death of the
Middle Ages would be small in comparison to the potential damage bioweapons could cause. Abolition of
chemical weapons is less of a priority because, while they can also kill millions of people outright, their
persistence in the environment would be less than nuclear or biological agents or more localized. Hence,
chemical weapons would have a lesser effect on future generations of innocent people and the natural
environment. Like the Holocaust, once a localized chemical extermination is over, it is over. With nuclear and biological
weapons, the killing will probably never end. Radioactive elements last tens of thousands of years and will keep causing cancers
virtually forever. Potentially worse than that, bio-engineered agents by the hundreds with no known cure
could wreck even greater calamity on the human race than could persistent radiation. AIDS and ebola
viruses are just a small example of recently emerging plagues with no known cure or vaccine. Can we
imagine hundreds of such plagues? HUMAN EXTINCTION IS NOW POSSIBLE.

Another terrorist attack will result in complete chaos (consider retagging)

Michael Ignatieff, Canadian scholar, Liberal Member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons,
"Lesser Evils," New York Times Magazine, May 2 2004
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/news/oped...ytm_050204.htm
Consider the consequences of a second major attack on the mainland United States - the detonation of a
radiological or dirty bomb, perhaps, or a low-yield nuclear device or a chemical strike in a subway. Any of
these events could cause death, devastation and panic on a scale that would make 9/11 seem like a pale
prelude. After such an attack, a pall of mourning, melancholy, anger and fear would hang over our public
life for a generation. An attack of this sort is already in the realm of possibility. The recipes for making
ultimate weapons are on the Internet, and the materiel required is available for the right price. Democracies
live by free markets, but a free market in everything – enriched uranium, ricin, anthrax -- will mean the
death of democracy. Armageddon is being privatized, and unless we shut down these markets, doomsday
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will be for sale. Sept. 11, for all its horror, was a conventional attack. We have the best of reasons to fear the
fire next time. A democracy can allow its leaders one fatal mistake -- and that's what 9/11 looks like to
many observers -- but Americans will not forgive a second one. A succession of large - scale attacks would
pull at the already-fragile tissue of trust that binds us to our leadership and destroy the trust we have in one
another. Once the zones of devastation were cordoned off and the bodies buried, we might find ourselves, in
short order, living in a national-security state on continuous alert, with sealed borders, constant identity
checks and permanent detention camps for dissidents and aliens. Our constitutional rights might disappear
from our courts, while torture might reappear in our interrogation cells. The worst of it is that government
would not have to impose tyranny on a cowed populace. We would demand it for our own protection. And
if the institutions of our democracy were unable to protect us from our enemies, we might go even
further,<take> taking the law into our own hands. We have a history of lynching in this country, and by the
time fear and paranoia settled deep in our bones, we might repeat the worst episodes from our past, killing
our former neighbors, our onetime fiends. That is what defeat in a war on terror looks like. We would
survive, but we would no longer recognize ourselves. We would endure, but we would lose our identity as
free peoples.

Terrorism causes major declines in the economy

Stephen D. Biddle, Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College
Strategic Studies Institute. AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY AFTER 9/11: AN ASSESSMENT April
2005
By contrast, some may argue that terrorism does so much damage to economies, and creates such
communities of interest among great powers, that these tensions are more apparent than real. After all, the
9/11 attackers claim to have inflicted $1 trillion in economic damage on the United States;73 if so, a series
of such attacks (or worse) could do greater damage to American economic growth than would the elevated
defense expenditures needed to prevent them. And terrorism threatens every great power; this common
threat could in theory drive the great powers together in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism, rather than
driving them apart or spurring competition among them.

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Terrorism can cause massive environmental destruction-Indian Point
Harvey Wasserman 2002, Greenpeace, From the Earth Island Journal, www.earthisland.org
A terrorist assault at Indian Point could yield three infernal fireballs of molten radioactive lava burning
through the earth and into the aquifer and the river. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of
horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Thousands of square miles would be saturated with the most
lethal clouds ever created; depositing relentless genetic poisons that would kill forever. Infants and small
children would quickly die en masse. Pregnant women would spontaneously abort or give birth to horribly
deformed offspring. Ghastly sores, rashes, ulcerations and burns would afflict the skin of millions. Heart
attacks, stroke and multiple organ failure would kill thousands on the spot. Emphysema, hair loss, nausea,
inability to eat or drink or swallow, diarrhea and incontinence, sterility and impotence, asthma and
blindness would afflict hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Then comes the wave of cancers, leukemias,
lymphomas, tumors and hellish diseases for which new names will have to be invented. Evacuation would
be impossible, but thousands would die trying. Attempts to quench the fires would be futile. More than
800,000 Soviet draftees forced through Chernobyl's seething remains in a futile attempt to clean it up are
still dying from their exposure. At Indian Point, the molten cores would burn uncontrolled for days, weeks
and years. Who would volunteer for such an American task force? The immediate damage from an Indian
Point attack (or a domestic accident) would render all five boroughs of New York City an apocalyptic
wasteland. As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, natural
ecosystems would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed. Spiritually, psychologically, financially and
ecologically, our nation would never recover. This is what we missed by a mere 40 miles on September 11.
Now that we are at war, this is what could be happening as you read this. There are 103 of these potential
Bombs of the Apocalypse operating in the US. They generate a mere 8 percent of our total energy. Since its
deregulation crisis, California cut its electric consumption by some 15 percent. Within a year, the US could
cheaply replace virtually all the reactors with increased efficiency. Yet, as the terror escalates, Congress is
fast-tracking the extension of the Price-Anderson Act, a form of legal immunity that protects reactor
operators from liability in case of a meltdown or terrorist attack. Do we take this war seriously? Are we
committed to the survival of our nation? If so, the ticking reactor bombs that could obliterate the very core
of our life and of all future generations must be shut down.

Terrorism poses a major threat to all humanity

Jan C. Ting 2002 Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, August 12, 2002
Unobjectionable but Insufficient-Federal Initiatives in Response to September 11 Terrorist Attacks,
http://www.connecticutlawreview.org/...ummer/Ting.pdf

But, despite the appearance of normality, we remain fully engaged in a

life-and-death struggle with international terrorism. No one can doubt after
the September 11 attacks, the willingness of these terrorists to use nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons against us if, and as soon as, they can get
their hands on them. And recent disclosures from Afghanistan make clear
the determination of terrorists to develop weapons of mass destruction.1
Against a foe not just willing to die, but anxious to die a glorious death in a
holy war, we must be victorious. For without victory against such a foe,
there will be no survival.
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Economy
US economic collapse destroys global economy
Scott Champion, Share International, July 2003
In the past 24 months, the US dollar has lost 25 per cent of its value relative to a basket of key
currencies, including the Japanese yen, euro, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona and
British pound. A drop of this magnitude is not unusual in the cyclic swings of currency markets;
however, what has changed is that the Bush administration appears to be actively seeking an even
lower dollar. If so, this would be a sharp reversal of the Clinton administration’s strong dollar policy.
The US would like a lower dollar for several reasons. First, a cheaper dollar makes US goods more
competitive in foreign markets, thus benefiting US-based multinational corporations. It also makes imports
more expensive relative to goods produced in the US. In both cases, American companies would enjoy a
distinct advantage.
Secondly, the imperialistic policies of the Bush administration are expensive and must be financed, which means borrowing in
international capital markets. The US is currently running a $600 billion current-account deficit (trade deficit adjusted by
unilateral transfers such as interest earned abroad). This means the US must borrow more than $1.5 billion per day on a net basis
from international lenders. For borrowers such as the US, it is generally easier to pay back loans in a depreciating currency rather

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than an appreciating one. Due
to the large sums involved and a weak domestic economy, a strong dollar would
make it more difficult for the US to finance its self-appointed role as the “world’s policeman”.
The US’s increasingly desperate financial condition is not good news for the world. With short-term interest
rates near zero, there is little additional economic benefit to be gained from lowering them further. This leaves a
cheaper dollar as one of the last levers to stimulate the US economy. As long as lenders are willing to invest in dollar
assets, the US can continue to borrow to maintain its current lifestyle. However, if foreign lenders begin to shun
US markets because of a falling dollar, it could cause serious problems for the US Government, economy
and people.
For many years the US has been the economic engine for the world, standing in as purchaser of last resort for the world’s supply
of goods in times of global economic distress. Now the US itself is in trouble. If the US attempts to fight the rapidly
gaining forces of deflation by encouraging a depreciating dollar, it will export deflation to the rest of the
world because foreign currencies will rise relative to the dollar. This will damage foreign economies and inhibit their ability to
buy goods and services, including those from the US. Since the short-term benefit of a weak dollar to US corporations’ earnings
will show up quickly, while the long-term damage to the global economy will become apparent only with the passage of time, it
is a fair assumption that the US will take the easy route and worry about the global fallout later.
The problem with this approach for the Bush administration is that there are great risks to a weak dollar policy. The
world economy is awash in dollars, and when there is too much of something the price or value usually
drops, sometimes precipitously. If confidence in the dollar or dollar assets, such as Treasury bonds,
declines, the world may, at some point, reconsider its involvement with US assets. The results of such a
reappraisal could be anything from mildly damaging to catastrophic. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s
central-bank assets are held in US dollars (as Treasury bonds). These bankers do not want their primary
asset to suffer a significant decline.
Many nations, like Japan, recycle their trade surpluses into US dollars by purchasing and holding US
Treasury bonds. They do this out of self-interest. In the case of Japan, it helps to weaken the yen relative to
the dollar. It is hard to imagine the Japanese reversing this policy, as it would harm their own corporations.
However Japan, together with the rest of the world, holds nearly a third of total US Treasury debt. If these
countries were to stop buying Treasuries, let alone start selling the ones they already own, the US would be in serious trouble.
What should concern the US authorities about a weak dollar policy is that the decline could spin out of control.

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Economy

The US isn’t key to the Global Economy

The Economist, February 4, 2006 (PDNSS4071)
“Testing all engines,” p. Lexis LARRY SUMMERS,
A Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, once said that “the world economy is flying on one engine” to
describe its excessive reliance on American demand. Now growth seems to be becoming more even at
last: Europe and Japan are revving up, as are most emerging economies. As a result, if (or when) the
American engine stalls, the global aeroplane will not necessarily crash.

US isn’t key to the Global Economy

Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times,
September/October 2000 Foreign Policy, “After the Crash,” p. ebscohost (PDNSS4074)
The notion that the strong U.S. economy “saved” the rest of the world during the global financial turmoil
of the late 1990s has become increasingly fashionable. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers recently referred to the United States as “the main engine of global growth.” However, this
proposition is not strictly true. Since the United States accounts for slightly more than a quarter of global
economic activity, it certainly exerts a powerful influence. But positive correlations between U.S.
business cycles and those of other countries have not, historically, been that high. Among leading
industrial countries, only the United Kingdom and Canada have displayed business cycles that move
together with those of the United States. Indeed, if the U.S. economy helped prevent a global recession
following the financial crises of 1997 and 1998, it was precisely because its business cycle was not
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closely synchronized with many other economies. Otherwise the United States would have fallen into a
recession along with the crisis-ridden regions.

Market Collapse Results in Global Instability

Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2001
[Rober M. Kubarych, Stress Testing the System: Simulating the Global Consequences of the Next Financial Crisis, New York:
Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2001, p. xiii]
The major conclusion that flows from the work of Roger and his colleagues is this: the most dangerous
near-term threat to U.S. world leadership and thus to U.S. security, as well, would be a sharp decline in the
U.S. securities markets. Such a decline would likely stun the U.S. economy at a time when the strength of
our economy is critical to global prosperity, to the financial health and political stability of most nations,
and ultimately to international security itself.

Economy-Heg

Economy Collapse Destroy Hegemony

Scott Champion, Share International, July 2003
When the global stock-market crash predicted in this magazine occurs, international support for the dollar will likely evaporate as
countries sell dollar assets to shore up their own ailing economies. If this happens, the US will have great difficulty funding its
historically large budget and trade deficits. At a most inopportune time, the US may be forced to raise interest rates sharply to
attract the capital to meet its obligations. This would be a further blow to an ailing economy. A collapsing US stock market
would almost certainly usher in a period of deflation for the American economy. Recent statements by Federal
Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and New York ‘Fed’ governor Bernacke make clear that the Fed is concerned about deflation
and stands ready to print an unlimited supply of dollars to fight this eventuality. These statements are unprecedented in the 90-
year history of the US Federal Reserve Bank and are tantamount to a declaration that they stand willing to destroy the value of
the dollar in the event of a serious crisis.
Today, many forces are coming together that could lead to a collapse of the US dollar. Among these are its oversupply, low
interest rates, the need to fight deflation, continuing stock-market declines, and a potential derivatives meltdown [see Share
International May 1990] It is highly likely that in the not-too-distant future all of these factors will come into play
simultaneously. In addition, many of the world’s financiers, central bankers, and government officials cannot be pleased with the
economic and foreign policies of the Bush administration. They well know that the continued recycling of capital into
US assets serves, at least in part, to allow the US to dominate the world. If the people who control the
world’s capital were to decide, for whatever reason, to cease buying Treasury securities and to liquidate
those they own, the dollar would collapse and the US would experience an unprecedented economic shock.
Were this to happen, the world would witness the end of American hegemony.

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No Nuclear War

Economy Collapse will not lead to nuclear war with China

Walter Russell Mead, Senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, March
2004, Foreign Policy, p. 32 (HARV1750)

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Similarly, in the last 60 years, as foreigners have acquired a greater value in the United States--government and private bonds,
direct and portfolio private investments--more and more of them have acquired an interest in maintaining the strength of the U.S.-
led system. A collapse of the U.S. economy and the ruin of the dollar would do more than dent the prosperity
of the United States. Without their best customer, countries including China and Japan would fall into
depressions. The financial strength of every country would be severely shaken should the United States
collapse. Under those circumstances, debt becomes a strength, not a weakness, and other countries fear to
break with the United States because they need its market and own its securities. Of course, pressed too far, a
large national debt can turn from a source of strength to a crippling liability, and the United States must continue to justify other
countries' faith by maintaining its long-term record of meeting its financial obligations. But, like Samson in the temple of the
Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.
That is sticky power with a vengeance. THE SUM OF ALL POWERS? The United States' global economic
might is therefore not simply, to use Nye's formulations, hard power that compels others or soft power that
attracts the rest of the world. Certainly, the U.S. economic system provides the United States with the
prosperity needed to underwrite its security strategy, but it also encourages other countries to accept U.S.
leadership. U.S. economic might is sticky power. How will sticky power help the United States address
today's challenges? One pressing need is to ensure that Iraq's economic reconstruction integrates the nation more firmly in the
global economy. Countries with open economies develop powerful trade-oriented businesses; the leaders of these businesses can
promote economic policies that respect property rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Such leaders also lobby governments to
avoid the isolation that characterized Iraq and Libya under economic sanctions. And looking beyond Iraq, the allure of access to
Western capital and global markets is one of the few forces protecting the rule of law from even further erosion in Russia. China's
rise to global prominence will offer a key test case for sticky power. As China develops economically, it should gain
wealth that could support a military rivaling that of the United States; China is also gaining political
influence in the world. Some analysts in both China and the United States believe that the laws of history mean that Chinese
power will someday clash with the reigning U.S. power. Sticky power offers a way out. China benefits from participating in the
U.S. economic system and integrating itself into the global economy. Between 1970 and 2003, China's gross domestic product
grew from an estimated $106 billion to more than $1.3 trillion. By 2003, an estimated $450 billion of foreign money had flowed
into the Chinese economy. Moreover, China is becoming increasingly dependent on both imports and exports to
keep its economy (and its military machine) going. Hostilities between the United States and China would cripple China's
industry, and cut off supplies of oil and other key commodities. Sticky power works both ways, though. If China cannot
afford war with the United States, the United States will have an increasingly hard time breaking off
commercial relations with China. In an era of weapons of mass destruction, this mutual dependence is
probably good for both sides. Sticky power did not prevent World War I, but economic interdependence
runs deeper now; as a result, the "inevitable" U.S.-Chinese conflict is less likely to occur.

US-China WAR
US/CHINA WAR ENSURES EXTINCTION
Straits Times, June 25, 2000 (HARV1751)
THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US
and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war
becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -- horror of horrors -- raise the
possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and
logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South
Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the

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conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US
distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly
upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear
arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war?
According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean
War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military
defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications
on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -- truce or a
broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear
weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning
a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses
about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the
nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its
"non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded
Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that
although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said
military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a
result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the
destruction of civilisation.

Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology risks extinction
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/articles/treder20060218/
Enslavement: The triumph of superior but despotic machines

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One of the worst fears of science fiction writers and movie makers could become a reality. If intelligent
machines are designed without a built-in failsafe "conscience" mechanism (something like Isaac Asimov’s
Three Laws of Robotics, only more sophisticated), it is conceivable that a dominant machine
superintelligence or a powerful network of non-human intelligences could decide that it is in their own best
interests to enslave humanity. We then have become nothing more than beasts of burden, forced to comply
with every command of our masters. At various times and places, some of us secretly plot revolt, and one of
our tries might succeed. Probably not, however, because the machines have all the advantages and continue
to increase their power and intelligence exponentially. Suicides are common, and great masses of humanity
are systematically purged by the godlike beings that rule over us. People are bred like dogs to meet specific
needs. Someday there might come a time when the machines reach a point that they are no longer interested
in remaining on the Earth. In that case, they might go away and leave us in peace. Or, more likely, they will
exterminate us to prevent future reprisals.

Self Determination
Self Determination Conflicts Escalate to Regional War
Kamal Shehadi, Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, December, ETHNIC
SELF DETERMINATION AND THE BREAK UP OF STATES, 1983, p. 81
This paper has argued that self-determination conflicts have direct adverse consequences on international
security. As they begin to tear nuclear states apart, the likelihood of nuclear weapons falling into the hands
of individuals or groups willing to use them, or to trade them to others, will reach frightening levels. This
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likelihood increases if a conflict over self-determination escalates into a war between two nuclear states.
The Russian Federation and Ukraine may fight over the Crimea and the Donbass area; and India and Pakistan may fight over
Kashmir. Ethnic conflicts may also spread both within a state and from one state to the next. This can happen in countries
where more than one ethnic self-determination conflict is brewing: Russia, India and Ethiopia, for example.
The conflict may also spread by contagion from one country to another if the state is weak politically and
militarily and cannot contain the conflict on its doorstep. Lastly, there is a real danger that regional conflicts
will erupt over national minorities and borders.

Ethnic Conflict Results in Nuclear War

Chester Crocker, 1999 chairman of the Board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, FPRI Wire, “How To Think
About Ethnic Conflict”, September, http://fpri.org/fpriwire/0710.199909...conflict.html (the url address
doesn’t work anymore I don’t know why!)

The examination of ethnic conflict has several implications for American foreign policy. First, it might be
useful if we would think about the phenomenon we are dealing with-which is nothing less than the
breakdown of empires, federations, and nation-states-before we act. We must think about how, in the
present era, the breakdown of the old colonial and Cold War structures empowered challengers to
governments. Whether their challenges come through information technology, the erection of new standards
of governance, or new demands from donor clubs, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, a
fundamental shift in the balance of power on the ground has occurred. The disappearance of the old
structures has, in short, created strategic vacuums that will be filled, in one fashion or another, by a new set
of actors or by older actors marching under new flags. That is really what much ethnic conflict is all about.
Secondly, we need to reflect on the stakes. As a superpower which supposedly “doesn’t do windows,” we
may be tempted to think that the stakes are low for the United States. But what is at stake in Kosovo is not
just the Albanians or Serbs, but (now that we have backed into this forest without a compass) what is at
stake is American leadership, the survival of NATO, and the danger that members of the U.N. Security
Council, including Russia and China, will acquire something of a veto over American policy-including how
we get out of the woods we have wandered into. Think, too, about the stakes involved for the people who
become victims of these conflicts. Waiting for a conflict to “ripen” will achieve nothing if the contesting
leadership elites are living off the conflict. When both sides in a conflict find the status quo preferable to
any settlement, the situation will never “ripen” and the humanitarian toll will mount. And the numbers of
victims of these conflicts is huge: up to four million in Sudan alone over the past forty years, and countless
thousands in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Indonesia, and the Balkans. Similar conflicts have raged in the South
Asian subcontinent since the massive postcolonial population transfers of the late 1940s, and now that
nuclear weapons have been openly thrown into the mix, the Indo-Pakistani worst-case scenario has gotten a
lot worse. So the stakes are huge in moral as well as strategic terms.
Nuclear War Scenarios-Economy

Decline in Economy will result in a Nuclear War

Christopher Lewis, THE COMING AGE OF SCARCITY, 1998, p. 129
Most critics would argue, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to
withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United
States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within
this collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in mass death, suffering, and even
regional nuclear wars. If First World countries choose military confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass death and genocide on a global
scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison. However, these neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed

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nations’ economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial
civilization. These wars will so damage the complex, economic and trading networks and squander
material, biological, and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to
support the earth’s 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of global
civilization.

Regional Conflicts can go Nuclear

News and Observer (Raleigh, NC) January 12, 2003 (PDNSS6757)
JAMES W. WHITE: I think it's higher, although it's a different kind. During the Cold War, the danger
was World War III, and the danger of World War III is gone. There's not going to be an all-out nuclear
exchange between two superpowers, but the possibility of regional wars, nuclear and non-nuclear, has
gone way up because during the Cold War, the United States and Russia tended to act as policemen [sic]
toward their own clients and kept them from getting out of line. Now, the United States doesn't worry as
much about what little countries do, and so they can go farther before we get involved. So you get, for
example, all the horrible things that happened in Africa and the Balkans after the Cold War ended, India-
Pakistan and now North Korea.

Soft Power-Proliferation
A. Soft Power Key to Prevent Proliferation
Nye, Professor of International Relations, Harvard, ‘04
[Joseph S., “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy,” Summer, Political Science Quarterly, Volume. 119, Issue 2; page 255]
According to the National Security Strategy, the greatest threats the American people face are transnational
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and particularly their combination. Yet, meeting the challenge
posed by transnational military organizations that could acquire weapons of mass destruction requires the
cooperation of other countries -and cooperation is strengthened by soft power. Similarly, efforts to promote
democracy in Iraq and elsewhere will require the help of others. Reconstruction in Iraq and peacekeeping in
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failed states are far more likely to succeed and to be less costly if shared with others rather than appearing
as American imperial occupation. The fact that the United States squandered its soft power in the way that it
went to war meant that the aftermath turned out to be much more costly than it need have been.

B. Proliferation leads to nuclear crises, war, and the end of civilization

Tayor ‘02
[Stuart, Senior Writer at The National Journal, and Editor at Newsweek, Legal Times, September 16, lexis]
The truth is, no matter what we do about Iraq, if we don't stop proliferation, another five or 10 potentially
unstable nations may go nuclear before long, making it ever more likely that one or more bombs will be set
off anonymously on our soil by terrorists or a terrorist government. Even an airtight missile defense would
be useless against a nuke hidden in a truck, a shipping container, or a boat. [Continues…] Unless we get
serious about stopping proliferation, we are headed for "a world filled with nuclear weapons states, where
every crisis threatens to go nuclear," where "the survival of civilization truly is in question from day to day,"
and where "it would be impossible to keep these weapons out of the hands
of terrorists, religious cults, and criminal organizations." So writes Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., a moderate
Republican who served as a career arms-controller under six presidents and led the successful Clinton administration effort to
extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The only way to avoid such a grim future, he suggests in his memoir,
Disarmament Sketches, is for the United States to lead an international coalition against proliferation by
showing an unprecedented willingness to give up the vast majority of our own nuclear weapons, excepting
only those necessary to deter nuclear attack by others.

Extensions
Soft power key to Heg
Nye, Professor of International Relations, Harvard, ‘04
[Joseph S., “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy,” Summer 2004, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 119, Issue 2; page
255, proquest, download date: 9-21-07]
In the global information age, the attractiveness of the United States will be crucial to our ability to achieve
the outcomes we want. Rather than having to put together pick-up coalitions of the willing for each new game, we will
benefit if we are able to attract others into institutional alliances and eschew weakening those we have already created. NATO,
for example, not only aggregates the capabilities of advanced nations, but its interminable committees, procedures, and exercises
also allow these nations to train together and quickly become interoperable when a crisis occurs. As for alliances, if the
United States is an attractive source of security and reassurance, other countries will set their expectations
in directions that are conducive to our interests. Initially, for example, the U.S.-Japan security treaty was not very
popular in Japan, but polls show that over the decades, it became more attractive to the Japanese public. Once that happened,
Japanese politicians began to build it into their approaches to foreign policy. The United States benefits when it is
regarded as a constant and trusted source of attraction so that other countries are not obliged continually to
re-examine their options in an atmosphere of uncertain coalitions. In the Japan case, broad acceptance of the United
States by the Japanese public "contributed to the maintenance of US hegemony" and "served as political constraints compelling
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the ruling elites to continue cooperation with the United States."18 Popularity can contribute to stability. Finally, as the RAND
Corporation's John Arquila and David Ronfeldt argue, power in an information age will come not only from strong defenses but
also from strong sharing. A traditional realpolitik mindset makes it difficult to share with others. But in an information age,
such sharing not only enhances the ability of others to cooperate with us but also increases their inclination
to do so. As we share intelligence and capabilities with others, we develop common outlooks and
approaches that improve our ability to deal with the new challenges. Power flows from that attraction.
Dismissing the importance of attraction as merely ephemeral popularity ignores key insights from new
theories of leadership as well as the new realities of the information age. We cannot afford that.

Soft Power Key to Hegemony

Nye, Professor of International Relations, Harvard, ‘04
[Joseph S., “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy,” Summer 2004, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 119,
Issue 2; page 255, proquest, download date: 9-21-07]
Skeptics about soft power say not to worry. Popularity is ephemeral and should not be a guide for foreign
policy in any case. The United States can act without the world's applause. We are so strong we can do as
we wish. We are the world's only superpower, and that fact is bound to engender envy and resentment.
Fouad Ajami has stated recently, "The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign
lands."IJ Columnist CaI Thomas refers to "the fiction that our enemies can be made less threatening by
what America says and does."10 Moreover, the United States has been unpopular in the past, yet managed
to recover. We do not need permanent allies and institutions. We can always pick up a coalition of the
willing when we need to. Donald Rumsfeld is wont to say that the issues should determine the coalitions,
not vice-versa. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the recent decline in our attractiveness so lightly. It is
true that the United States
has recovered from unpopular policies in the past, but that was against the backdrop of the Cold War, in
which other countries still feared the Soviet Union as the greater evil. Moreover, while America's size and
association with disruptive modernity are real and unavoidable, wise policies can soften the sharp edges of
that reality and reduce the resentments that they engender. That is what the United States did after World War II. We
used our soft power resources and co-opted others into a set of alliances and institutions that lasted for sixty years. We won the
Cold War against the Soviet Union with a strategy of containment that used our soft power as well as our hard power. It is true
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that the new threat of transnational terrorism increased American vulnerability, and some of our
unilateralism after September 11 was driven by fear. But the United States cannot meet the new threat
identified in the national security strategy without the cooperation of other countries. They will cooperate,
up to a point, out of mere self-interest, but their degree of cooperation is also affected by the attractiveness
of the United States. Take Pakistan for example. President Pervez Musharraf faces a complex game of cooperating with the
United States on terrorism while managing a large anti-American constituency at home. He winds up balancing concessions and
retractions. If the United States were more attractive to the Pakistani populace, we would see more
concessions in the mix.

US HEGEMONY KEY TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC GROWTH

Bradley A. Thayer, Professor Defense & Strategic Studies, Missouri State University, 2006, The National
Interest, November/December, p. Lexis
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, peace and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a
dominant power--Rome, Britain or the United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized
the irenic effect of power on the anarchic world of international politics. Everything we think of when we
consider the current international order--free trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing respect for human
rights, growing democratization--is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think
that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they
are dead wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things
happen when international orders collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order
established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly. As country
and western great Ral Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important to note
what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American
primacy within the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The
first has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction among many
states that were historical antagonists, most notably France and West Germany. Today, American primacy helps keep a
number of complicated relationships aligned--between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan, India and
Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars still occur where
Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax Americana does reduce war's likelihood,
particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second, American power gives the United States the ability to
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spread democracy and other elements of its ideology of liberalism. Doing so is a source of much good for the
countries concerned as well as the United States because, as John Owen noted on these pages in the Spring 2006 issue, liberal
democracies are more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.3 So, spreading
democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition, once states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of
conflict is significantly reduced. This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it is
because they are more open, more transparent and more likely to want to resolve things amicably in concurrence with U.S.
leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for advancing the interests of the United
States. Third, along with the growth in the number of democratic states around the world has been the growth
of the global economy. With its allies, the United States has labored to create an economically liberal
worldwide network characterized by free trade and commerce, respect for international property rights, and
mobility of capital and labor markets. The economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic
order is a global public good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World.
The United States created this network not out of altruism but for the benefit and the economic well-being
of America. This economic order forces American industries to be competitive, maximizes efficiencies and
growth, and benefits defense as well because the size of the economy makes the defense burden
manageable. Economic spin-offs foster the development of military technology, helping to ensure military
prowess. Perhaps the greatest testament to the benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a
former Indian foreign service diplomat and researcher at the World Bank, who started his career confident
in the socialist ideology of post-independence India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now
recognizes that the only way to bring relief to desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the
adoption of free market economic policies and globalization, which are facilitated through American
primacy.4 As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is one of the strongest academic
proponents of American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides. Fourth and finally, the United
States, in seeking primacy, has been willing to use its power not only to advance its interests but to promote
the welfare of people all over the globe. The United States is the earth's leading source of positive
externalities for the world. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the end of the
Cold War--and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed, the U.S. military is the
earth's "911 force"--it serves, de facto, as the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire
department. Whenever there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or
tsunami, the United States assists the countries in need.

Proliferation is the greatest threat to extinction

James D. Miller, professor of economics, Smith College, NATIONAL REVIEW, January 23, 2002, p.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-miller012302.shtml
The U.S. should use whatever means necessary to stop our enemies from gaining the ability to kill millions
of us. We should demand that countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea make no attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. We
should further insist on the right to make surprise inspections of these countries to insure that they are complying with our proliferation policy.
What if these nations refuse our demands? If they refuse we should destroy their industrial capacity and capture their leaders. True, the world's
cultural elites would be shocked and appalled if we took preventive military action against countries that are currently doing us no harm. What
is truly shocking, however, is that America is doing almost nothing while countries that have expressed hatred for us are building weapons of
mass destruction. France and Britain allowed Nazi Germany's military power to grow until Hitler was strong enough to take Paris. America
seems to be doing little while many of our foes acquire the strength to destroy U.S. cities. We can't rely
upon deterrence to prevent an atomic powered dictator from striking at us. Remember, the Nazi's killed millions of
Jews even though the Holocaust took resources away from their war effort. As September 11th also shows, there exist evil men in the world
who would gladly sacrifice all other goals for the opportunity to commit mass murder. The U.S. should take not even the slightest
unnecessary chance that some dictator, perhaps a dying Saddam Hussein, would be willing to give up his life for the
opportunity to hit America with nuclear missiles. Once a dictator has the ability to hit a U.S., or perhaps

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even a European city, with atomic weapons it will be too late for America to pressure him to give up his
weapons. His ability to hurt us will effectively put him beyond our military reach. Our conventional forces might even be made
impotent by a nuclear-armed foe. Had Iraq possessed atomic weapons, for example, we would probably have been unwilling to
expel them from Kuwait. What about the rights of those countries I have proposed threatening? America should not even pretend
to care about the rights of dictators. In the 21st century the only leaders whom we should recognize as legitimate are those who
were democratically elected. The U.S. should reinterpret international law to give no rights to tyrants, not even the right to exist.
We should have an ethically based foreign policy towards democratic countries. With dictatorships, however, we should be
entirely Machiavellian; we should deal with them based upon what is in our own best interests. It's obviously in our self-interest
to prevent as many dictators as possible from acquiring the means to destroy us. We shouldn't demand that China abandon her
nuclear weapons. This is not because China has proved herself worthy to have the means of mass annihilation, but rather because
her existing stockpile of atomic missiles would make it too costly for us to threaten China. It's too late to stop the Chinese from
gaining the ability to decimate us, but for the next ten years or so it is not too late to stop some of our other rivals. If it's politically
impossible for America to use military force against currently non-hostile dictators then we should use trade sanctions to punish nations who
don't agree to our proliferation policy. Normal trade sanctions, however, do not provide the punishing power necessary to induce dictators to
abandon their arms. If we simply don't trade with a nation other countries will sell them the goods that we used to provide. To make trade
sanctions an effective weapon the U.S. needs to deploy secondary boycotts. America should create a treaty, the signatories of which would
agree to: • only trade with countries which have signed the treaty, and • not trade with any country which violates our policy on weapons
proliferation. believe that if only the U.S. and, say, Germany initially signed this treaty then nearly every other country would be forced to do
so. For example, if France did not sign, they would be unable to trade with the U.S. or Germany. This would obviously be intolerable to France.
Once the U.S., Germany and France adopted the treaty every European nation would have to sign or face a total economic collapse. The more
countries which sign the treaty, the greater the pressure on other countries to sign. Once most every country has signed, any country which
violated America's policy on weapons proliferation would face almost a complete economic boycott. Under this approach, the U.S. and
Germany alone could use our economic power to dictate the enforcement mechanism of a treaty designed to protect against Armageddon.
Even the short-term survival of humanity is in doubt. The greatest threat of extinction surely comes from
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. America should refocus her foreign policy to prioritize
protecting us all from atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.

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Global Warming
Nuclear War causes Global Warming
Carl Sagan, B.A., B.S., and PhD University of Chicago, former professor of biology and genetics at Stanford and professor of
astronomy and astro-physics at Harvard, former Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell, two-time winner of

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the NASA medal for scientific achievement, Peabody award recipient, and Pulitzer prize winning author, 1984 (Foreign Affairs,
“Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” p. Lexis) (PDNSS2199)
Recent estimates of the immediate deaths from blast, prompt radiation, and fires in a major exchange in
which cities were targeted range from several hundred million to 1.1 billion people -- the latter estimate is
in a World Health Organization study in whch targets were assumed not to be restricted entirely to NATO and Warsaw
Pact countries. n7 Serious injuries requiring immediate medical attention (which would be largely unavailable) would be suffered
by a comparably large number of people, perhaps an additional 1.1 billion. n8 Thus it is possible that something
approaching half the human population on the planet would be killed or seriously injured by the direct
effects of the nuclear war. Social disruption; the unavailability of electricity, fuel, transportation, food deliveries,
communication and other civil services; the absence of medical care; the decline in sanitation measures; rampant disease and
severe psychiatric disorders would doubtless collectively claim a significant number of further victims. But a range of additional
effects -- some unexpected, some inadequately treated in earlier studies, some uncovered only recently -- now make the picture
much more somber still. Because of current limitations on missile accuracy, the destruction of missile silos, command and control
facilities, and other hardened sites requires nuclear weapons of fairly high yield exploded as groundbursts or as low airbursts.
High-yield groundbursts will vaporize, melt and pulverize the surface at the target area and propel large quantities of condensates
and fine dust into the upper troposphere and stratosphere.The particles are chiefly entrained in the rising fireball; some ride up the
stem of the mushroom cloud. Most military targets, however, are not very hard. The destruction of cities can be accomplished, as
demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by lower-yield explosions less than a kilometer above the surface. Low-yield airbursts
over cities or near forests will tend to produce massive fires, some of them over areas of 100,000 square kilometers or more. City
fires generate enormous quantities of black oily smoke which rise at least into the upper part of the lower atmosphere, or
troposhere. If firestorms occur, the smoke column rises vigorously, like the draft in a fireplace, and may carry some of the soot
into the lower part of the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere. The smoke from forest and grassland fires would initially be
restricted to the lower troposphere. The fission of the (generally plutonium) trigger in every thermonuclear weapon and the
reactions in the (generally uranium-238) casing added as a fission yield "booster" produce a witch's brew of radioactive products,
which are also entrained in the cloud. Each such product, or radioisotope, has a characteristic "half-life" (defined as the time to
decay to half its original level of radioactivity). Most of the radioisotopes have very short half-lives and decay in hours to days.
Particles injected into the stratosphere, mainly by high-yield explosions, fall out very slowly -- characteristically in about a year,
by which time most of the fission products, even when concentrated, will have decayed to much safer levels. Particles injected
into the troposphere by low-yield explosions and fires fall out more rapidly -- by gravitational settling, rainout, convention, and
other processes -- before the radioactivity has decayed to moderately safe levels. Thus rapid fallout of tropospheric radioactive
debris tends to produce larger doses of ionizing radiation than does the slower fallout of radioactive particles from the
stratosphere. Nuclear explosions of more than one-megaton yield generate a radiant fireball that rises through the troposphere
into the stratosphere. The fireballs from weapons with yields between 100 kilotons and one megaton will partially extend into the
stratosphere. The high temperatures in the fireball chemically ignite some of the nitrogen in the air, producing oxides of nitrogen,
which in turn chemically attack and destroy the gas ozone in the middle stratosphere. But ozone absorbs tlhe biologically
dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Thus the partial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, or
"ozonosphere," by high-yield nuclear explosions will increase the flux of solar ultraviolet radiation at the
surface of the Earth (after the soot and dust have settled out).After a nuclear war in which thousands of
high-yield weapons are detonated, the increase in biologically dangerous ultraviolet light might be several
hundred percent. In the more dangerous shorter wavelengths, larger increases would occur. Nucleic acids
and proteins, the fundamental molecules for life on Earth, are especially sensitive to ultraviolet radiation.
Thus, an increase of the solar ultraviolet flux at the surface of the Earth is potentially dangerous for life.
These four effects -- obscuring smoke in the troposphere, obscuring dust in the stratophere, the fallout of
radioactive debris, and the partial destruction of the ozone layer -- constitute the four known principal
adverse environmental consequences that occur after a nuclear war is "over." There may be others about
which we are still ignorant. The dust and, especially, the dark soot absorb ordinary visible light from the
Sun, heating the atmosphere and cooling the Earth's surface.

Rapid Global Warming results in Extinction

Dr. Brandenberg, Physicist (Ph.D.) and Paxson a science writer ’99 – John and Monica, Dead Mars Dying
Earth p. 232-3 (PDNSS2201)
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The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with global warming that puts more catalytic ice
crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations’ heartlands.
The seas rise, the tropics roast but the media networks no longer cover it. The Amazon rainforest becomes
the Amazon desert. Oxygen levels fall, but profits rise for those who can provide it in bottles. An equatorial
high pressure zone forms, forcing drought in central Africa and Brazil, the Nile dries up and the monsoons
fail. Then inevitably, at some unlucky point in time, a major unexpected event occurs—a major volcanic
eruption, a sudden and dramatic shift in ocean circulation or a large asteroid impact (those who think
freakish accidents do not occur have paid little attention to life or Mars), or a nuclear war that starts
between Pakistan and India and escalates to involve China and Russia . . . Suddenly the gradual climb in
global temperatures goes on a mad excursion as the oceans warm and release large amounts of dissolved
carbon dioxide from their lower depths into the atmosphere. Oxygen levels go down precipitously as
oxygen replaces lost oceanic carbon dioxide. Asthma cases double and then double again. Now a third of
the world fears breathing. As the oceans dump carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect increases, which
further warms the oceans, causing them to dump even more carbon. Because of the heat, plants die and burn
in enormous fires which release more carbon dioxide, and the oceans evaporate, adding more water vapor to
the greenhouse. Soon, we are in what is termed a runaway greenhouse effect, as happened to Venus eons
ago. The last two surviving scientists inevitably argue, one telling the other, “See! I told you the missing
sink was in the ocean!” Earth, as we know it, dies. After this Venusian excursion in temperatures, the
oxygen disappears into the soil, the oceans evaporate and are lost and the dead Earth loses its ozone layer
completely. Earth is too far from the Sun for it to be the second Venus for long. Its atmosphere is slowly lost
—as is its water—because of ultraviolet bombardment breaking up all the molecules apart from carbon
dioxide. As the atmosphere becomes thin, the Earth becomes colder. For a short while temperatures are
nearly normal, but the ultraviolet sears any life that tries to make a comeback. The carbon dioxide thins out
to form a thin veneer with a few wispy clouds and dust devils. Earth becomes the second Mars—red,
desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.

Biodiversity
Biodiversity Loss Leads to Extinction
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS, THE FOUR HORSEMEN -- PART 2: LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY, December 1995,
p. http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/bulletin.cfm?Issue_ID=651)

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Extinctions are dangerous for humans, but it is not immediately clear just how dangerous. In their 1984 book,
EXTINCTION, Paul and Anne Ehrlich compare our situation to an airplane held together by rivets. As time goes
on, an occasional rivet will pop out. No single rivet is essential for maintaining flight, but eventually if we
pop enough rivets, a crash seems certain to occur. So it is with humans and the other species with whom we
share the planet. No single species is essential to our well being, yet it is certain that we need biological
diversity in order to survive. Therefore each time we diminish diversity, we take another irreversible step
toward the brink of a dark abyss. In the process, we desecrate the wondrous works of the creator.

Loss of each species risks ecological collapse and human extinction.

(Diner, David N. B.S. Recipient. Ohio State University. J.D. Recipient. College of Law. Ohio State University. LL.M. The
Judge Advocate General’s School. United States Army. Judge Advocate’s General’s Corps. United States Army. “The Army and
the Endangered Species Act: Who’s Endangering Whom?” Military Law Review. 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161. Winter, 1994. Lexis-
Nexis.)
No species has ever dominated its fellow species as man has. In most cases, people have assumed the God-
like power of life and death -- extinction or survival -- over the plants and animals of the world. For most of
history, mankind pursued this domination with a single minded determination to master the world, tame the
wilderness, and exploit nature for the maximum benefit of the human race. n67 In past mass extinction
episodes, as many as ninety percent of the existing species perished, and yet the world moved forward, and
new species replaced the old. So why should the world be concerned now? The prime reason is the world's
survival. Like all animal life, humans live off of other species. At some point, the number of species could
decline to the point at which the ecosystem fails, and then humans also would become extinct. No one knows
how many [*171] species the world needs to support human life, and to find out -- by allowing certain species to become extinct
-- would not be sound policy. In addition to food, species offer many direct and indirect benefits to mankind. n68 2. Ecological
Value. -- Ecological value is the value that species have in maintaining the environment. Pest, n69 erosion, and flood control are
prime benefits certain species provide to man. Plants and animals also provide additional ecological services -- pollution control,
n70 oxygen production, sewage treatment, and biodegradation. n71 3. Scientific and Utilitarian Value. -- Scientific value is the
use of species for research into the physical processes of the world. n72 Without plants and animals, a large portion of
basic scientific research would be impossible. Utilitarian value is the direct utility humans draw from plants
and animals. n73 Only a fraction of the [*172] earth's species have been examined, and mankind may someday desperately
need the species that it is exterminating today. To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern

shrew n74 could save mankind may be difficult for some . Many, if not most, species are useless to man in a direct
utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect
. In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the
a directly useful species negatively
loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. n75 Moreover,
as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases
dramatically. n76 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main
premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. n77 As the current mass extinction has progressed, the
world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the number of species, and
within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. Biologically diverse
ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems
inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a
stress. . . .[l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a
simple, un branched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." n79 By causing widespread extinctions,
humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The
spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of

what might be expected if this trend continues . Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its
dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each
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new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an
aircraft's wings, [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss .

Extensions
Loss of Biodiversity results in Extinction
Genesis of Eden Diversity Encyclopedia, 2003, http://www.dhushara.com/book/diversit/saceve.htm
Biodiversity is not just some benign backdrop for hiking holidays, but the very substance and foundation of
our survival, whether we realize it or not. We are entirely dependent upon the plants, animals, fungi, and
micro-organisms that share the world with us. Individually, they alone feed us, and without them we would
starve. Yet we frequently act to undermine these very species essential to our welfare. In addition to food,
they provide many of the drugs and other medicinal and industrial products on which the quality of our

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lives increasingly depends. They offer the promise of sustainable economy - productivity that the Earth can
support on a continuing basis, so our children and, in turn, their children will survive and be able to live
peaceful lives of abundant splendour.

Nuclear War Causes Global Warming

Carl Sagan, B.A., B.S., and PhD University of Chicago, former professor of biology and genetics at Stanford and
professor of astronomy and astro-physics at Harvard, former Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell, two-
time winner of the NASA medal for scientific achievement, Peabody award recipient, and Pulitzer prize winning author,
1984 (Foreign Affairs, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” p. Lexis) (PDNSS2229)
Recent estimates of the immediate deaths from blast, prompt radiation, and fires in a major exchange in
which cities were targeted range from several hundred million to 1.1 billion people -- the latter estimate
is in a World Health Organization study in whch targets were assumed not to be restricted entirely to
NATO and Warsaw Pact countries. n7 Serious injuries requiring immediate medical attention (which
would be largely unavailabe) would be suffered by a comparably large number of people, perhaps an
additional 1.1 billion. n8 Thus it is possible that something approaching half the human population on
the planet would be killed or seriously injured by the direct effects of the nuclear war. Social disruption;
the unavailability of electriaity, fuel, transportation, food deliveries, communication and other civil
services; the absence of medical care; the decline in sanitation measures; rampant disease and severe
psychiatric disorders would doubtless collectively claim a significant number of further victims. But a
range of additional effects -- some unexpected, some inadequately treated in earlier studies, some
uncovered only recently -- now make the picture much more somber still. Because of current limitations
on missile accuracy, the destruction of missile silos, command and control facilities, and other hardened
sites requires nuclear weapons of fairly high yield exploded as groundbursts or as low airbursts. High-
yield groundbursts will vaporize, melt and pulverize the surface at the target area and propel large
quantities of condensates and fine dust into the upper troposphere and stratosphere.The particles are
chiefly entrained in the rising fireball; some ride up the stem of the mushroom cloud. Most military
targets, however, are not very hard. The destruction of cities can be accomplished, as demonstrated at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by lower-yield explosions less than a kilometer above the surface. Low-yield
airbursts over cities or near forests will tend to produce massive fires, some of them over areas of
100,000 square kilometers or more. City fires generate enormous quantities of black oily smoke which
rise at least into the upper part of the lower atmosphere, or troposhere. If firestorms occur, the smoke
column rises vigorously, like the draft in a fireplace, and may carry some of the soot into the lower part
of the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere. The smoke from forest and grassland fires would initially be
restricted to the lower troposphere. The fission of the (generally plutonium) trigger in every
thermonuclear weapon and the reactions in the (generally uranium-238) casing added as a fission yield
"booster" produce a witch's brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud. Each
such product, or radioisotope, has a characteristic "half-life" (defined as the time to decay to half its
original level of radioactivity). Most of the radioisotopes have very short half-lives and decay in hours to
days. Particles injected into the stratosphere, mainly by high-yield explosions, fall out very slowly --
characteristically in about a year, by which time most of the fission products, even when concentrated,
will have decayed to much safer levels. Particles injected into the troposphere by low-yield explosions
and fires fall out more rapidly -- by gravitational settling, rainout, convention, and other processes --
before the radioactivity has decayed to moderately safe levels. Thus rapid fallout of tropospheric
radioactive debris tends to produce larger doses of ionizing radiation than does the slower fallout of
radioactive particles from the stratosphere. Nuclear explosions of more than one-megaton yield generate
a radiant fireball that rises through the troposphere into the stratosphere. The fireballs from weapons
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with yields between 100 kilotons and one megaton will partially extend into the stratosphere. The high
temperatures in the fireball chemically ignite some of the nitrogen in the air, producing oxides of
nitrogen, which in turn chemically attack and destroy the gas ozone in the middle stratosphere. But
ozone absorbs tlhe biologically dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Thus the partial depletion
of the stratospheric ozone layer, or "ozonosphere," by high-yield nuclear explosions will increase the
flux of solar ultraviolet radiation at the surface of the Earth (after the soot and dust have settled
out).After a nuclear war in which thousands of high-yield weapons are detonated, the increase in
biologically dangerous ultraviolet light might be several hundred percent. In the more dangerous shorter
wavelengths, larger increases would occur. Nucleic acids and proteins, the fundamental molecules for
life on Earth, are especially sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. Thus, an increase of the solar ultraviolet
flux at the surface of the Earth is potentially dangerous for life. These four effects -- obscuring smoke in
the troposphere, obscuring dust in the stratophere, the fallout of radioactive debris, and the partial
destruction of the ozone layer -- constitute the four known principal adverse environmental
consequences that occur after a nuclear war is "over." There may be others about which we are still
ignorant. The dust and, especially, the dark soot absorb ordinary visible light from the Sun, heating the
atmosphere and cooling the Earth's surface.

Even a Regional Nuclear War will cause Global Warming

Carl Sagan, B.A., B.S., and PhD University of Chicago, former professor of biology and genetics at Stanford and
professor of astronomy and astro-physics at Harvard, former Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell, two-
time winner of the NASA medal for scientific achievement, Peabody award recipient, and Pulitzer prize winning author,
1984 (Foreign Affairs, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” p. Lexis) (PDNSS2229)
As the fine particles fall out of the atmosphere, carrying radio-activity to the ground, the light levels
increase and the surface warms. The depleted ozone layer now permits ultraviolet light to reach the
Earth's surface in increased proportions. The relative timing of the multitude of adverse consequences of
a nuclear war is shown in Table 2, on the following page. Perhaps the most striking and unexpected
consequence of our study is that even a comparatively small nuclear war can have devastating climatic
consequences, provided cities are targeted (see Case 14 in Figure 1; here, the centers of 100 major
NATO and Warsaw Pact cities are burning).There is an indication of a very rough threshold at which
severe climatic consequences are triggered -- around a few hundred nuclear explosions over cities, for
smoke generation, or around 2,000 to 3,000 high-yield surface bursts at, e.g., missile silos, for dust
generation and ancillary fires. Fine particles can be injected into the atmosphere at increasing rates with
only minor effects until these thresholds are crossed. Thereafter, the effects rapidly increase in
severity.n13

Economic Collapse results in Nuclear War

Cook ‘07 retired federal analyst, former Treasury Dept analyst, economic consultant, Global Research contributor, Economics
degree from William & Mary
Richard C.,” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5964

Times of economic crisis produce international tension and politicians tend to go to war rather than face the
economic music. The classic example is the worldwide depression of the 1930s leading to World War II.
Conditions in the coming years could be as bad as they were then. We could have a really big war if the
U.S. decides once and for all to haul off and let China, or whomever, have it in the chops. If they don’t want
our dollars or our debt any more, how about a few nukes?
Impact is nuclear war.
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Straits Times, 2000 [June, 25, No one gains in war over Taiwan]

The Doomsday Scenario – The high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-
scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better
serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would
embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has
already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces
attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to
a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as
opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine
Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia,
hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a
full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army
which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to
save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the
conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea
-truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to
defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later,
short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major
American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that
Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang,
president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for
Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military
to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a
result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilisation.
There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear Armaggedon over Taiwan might seem
inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else.

U.S. economic collapse will cause nuclear war.

Walter Mead, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, March/April, 2004
America’s Sticky Power, Foreign Policy, Proquest

Similarly, in the last 60 years, as foreigners have acquired a greater value in the United States-government and private bonds,
direct and portfolio private investments-more and more of them have acquired an interest in maintaining the strength of the U.S.-
led system. A collapse of the U.S. economy and the ruin of the dollar would do more than dent the prosperity
of the United States. Without their best customer, countries including China and Japan would fall into
depressions. The financial strength of every country would be severely shaken should the United States collapse. Under those
circumstances, debt becomes a strength, not a weakness, and other countries fear to break with the United States because they
need its market and own its securities. Of course, pressed too far, a large national debt can turn from a source of strength to a
crippling liability, and the United States must continue to justify other countries' faith by maintaining its long-term record of
meeting its financial obligations. But, like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would
inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world. That is sticky power with a vengeance. The
United States' global economic might is therefore not simply, to use Nye's formulations, hard power that
compels others or soft power that attracts the rest of the world. Certainly, the U.S. economic system
provides the United States with the prosperity needed to underwrite its security strategy, but it also
encourages other countries to accept U.S. leadership. U.S. economic might is sticky power. How will sticky
power help the United States address today's challenges? One pressing need is to ensure that Iraq's economic reconstruction

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integrates the nation more firmly in the global economy. Countries with open economies develop powerful trade-oriented
businesses; the leaders of these businesses can promote economic policies that respect property rights, democracy, and the rule of
law. Such leaders also lobby governments to avoid the isolation that characterized Iraq and Libya under economic sanctions. And
looking beyond Iraq, the allure of access to Western capital and global markets is one of the few forces protecting the rule of law
from even further erosion in Russia. China's rise to global prominence will offer a key test case for sticky power.
As China develops economically, it should gain wealth that could support a military rivaling that of the
United States; China is also gaining political influence in the world. Some analysts in both China and the United States
believe that the laws of history mean that Chinese power will someday clash with the reigning U.S. power. Sticky
power offers a way out. China benefits from participating in the U.S. economic system and integrating itself
into the global economy. Between 1970 and 2003, China's gross domestic product grew from an estimated $106 billion to
more than $1.3 trillion. By 2003, an estimated $450 billion of foreign money had flowed into the Chinese economy. Moreover,
China is becoming increasingly dependent on both imports and exports to keep its economy (and its
military machine) going. Hostilities between the United States and China would cripple China's industry,
and cut off supplies of oil and other key commodities. Sticky power works both ways, though. If China cannot afford war with
the United States, the United States will have an increasingly hard time breaking off commercial relations with China. In an
era of weapons of mass destruction, this mutual dependence is probably good for both sides. Sticky power
did not prevent World War I, but economic interdependence runs deeper now; as a result, the "inevitable"
U.S.-Chinese conflict is less likely to occur.

AMERICA NO LONGER DRIVES THE GLOBAL ECONOMY – ASIAN ECONOMIES WILL

FILL IN
The Economist, February 4, 2006 “Testing all engines,” p. Lexis (PDNSS4072)
American consumers have been the main engine not just of their own economy but of the whole world’s.
If that engine fails, will the global economy nose-dive? A few years ago, the answer would probably
have been yes. But the global economy may now be less vulnerable. At the World Economic Forum in
Davos last week, Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argued convincingly that a
slowdown in America need not lead to a significant global loss of power. Start with Japan, where
industrial output jumped by an annual rate of 11% in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs has raised its
GDP growth forecast for that quarter (the official number is due on February 17th) to an annualised
4.2%. That would push year-on-year growth to 3.9%, well ahead of America’s 3.1%. The bank predicts
average GDP growth in Japan this year of 2.7%. It thinks strong demand within Asia will partly offset an
American slowdown.

US Economy decline doesn’t hurt the Global Economy

The Economist, February 4, 2006 “Testing all engines,” p. Lexis (PDNSS4073)
Alongside stronger domestic demand in Europe and Japan, emerging economies are also tipped to
remain robust. These economies are popularly perceived as excessively export-dependent, flooding the

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world with cheap goods, but doing little to boost demand. Yet calculations by Goldman Sachs show that
Brazil, Russia, India and China combined have in recent years contributed more to the world’s domestic
demand than to its GDP growth. They have chipped in almost as much to global domestic demand as
America has. If this picture endures, a moderate slowdown in America need not halt the expansion in the
rest of the world. Europe and Japan together account for a bigger slice of global GDP than the United
States, so faster growth there will help to keep the global economy flying. A rebalancing of demand
away from America to the rest of the world would also help to shrink its huge current-account deficit.
This all assumes that America’s economy slows, rather than sinks into recession. The world is
undoubtedly better placed to cope with a slowdown in the United States than it was a few years ago.
That said, in those same few years America’s imbalances have become larger, with the risk that the
eventual correction will be more painful. A deep downturn in America would be felt all around the globe.

Economic collapse is worse than war

Charles Ellwood, University of Missouri. "Sociology and Modern Social Problems" 2003 Online
http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resour.../chapter9.html
As already implied, then, economic depression exercises a very considerable influence upon death rate,
particularly when economic depression causes very high prices for the necessities of life and even
widespread scarcity of food. This cause produces far more deaths in modern nations than war. The doubling
of the price of bread in any civilized country would be a far greater calamity than a great war. While
modern civilized peoples fear famine but little, there are many classes in the great industrial nations that
live upon such a narrow margin of existence that the slightest increase in the cost of the necessities of life
means practically the same as a famine to these classes. Statistics, therefore, of all modern countries, and
particularly of all great cities, show an enormous increase in sickness and death among the poorer classes in
times of economic depression.

US/Sino War Results in invading Taiwan

BBC Monitoring International Reports September 10, 2002 (PDNSS6755)
When force is used against Taiwan, it is first necessary to consider that the United States is certain to be involved. The CCP
predicts that the United States is likely to be involved militarily from the following four aspects: 1) To dispatch its fleets to

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the Taiwan Strait to hinder the People's Liberation Army (PLA) naval and air forces from crossing the strait to make an attack;
2) to dispatch its naval and air forces to reinforce Taiwan and help Taiwan troops put up resistance; 3) to dispatch its
strategic air force to launch military strikes against the mainland and, when the scope of the strikes
extends to communication, energy, and political centres, immediately declares that a war breaks out
between China and the United States; and 4) use strategic and tactical nuclear weapons to retaliate for
the losses sustained by US troops in the Taiwan Strait campaign, resulting in the outbreak of a limited
nuclear war.

No War
ECONOMIC DECLINE DOESN’T CAUSE WAR
Morris Miller, economist, adjunct professor in the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Administration,
consultant on international development issues, former Executive Director and Senior Economist at the
World Bank, Winter 2000 Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 25, Iss. 4, “Poverty as a cause of
wars?” p. Proquest (PDNSS4069)
The question may be reformulated. Do wars spring from a popular reaction to a sudden economic crisis
that exacerbates poverty and growing disparities in wealth and incomes? Perhaps one could argue, as
some scholars do, that it is some dramatic event or sequence of such events leading to the exacerbation
of poverty that, in turn, leads to this deplorable denouement. This exogenous factor might act as a
catalyst for a violent reaction on the part of the people or on the part of the political leadership who
would then possibly be tempted to seek a diversion by finding or, if need be, fabricating an enemy and
setting in train the process leading to war. According to a study undertaken by Minxin Pei and Ariel
Adesnik of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, there would not appear to be any merit in
this hypothesis. After studying ninety-three episodes of economic crisis in twenty-two countries in Latin
America and Asia in the years since the Second World War they concluded that:19 Much of the
conventional wisdom about the political impact of economic crises may be wrong ... The severity of

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economic crisis - as measured in terms of inflation and negative growth - bore no relationship to the
collapse of regimes ... (or, in democratic states, rarely) to an outbreak of violence ... In the cases of
dictatorships and semidemocracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby
using one form of violence to abort another).

Prolif causes extinction.

Taylor, former nuclear weapons designer and chairman of NOVA, ‘1 [“Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons”]

Nuclear proliferation – be it among nations or terrorists – greatly increases the chance of nuclear violence
on a scale that would be intolerable. Proliferation increases the chance that nuclear weapons will fall into
the hands of irrational people, either suicidal or with no concern for the fate of the world. Irrational or
outright psychotic leaders of military factions or terrorist groups may decide to use nuclear weapons under
their control to stimulate a global nuclear war, as an act of vengeance against humanity as a whole.
Limited nuclear wars between countries with small numbers of nuclear weapons could escalate into major
nuclear wars between superpowers. For example, a nation in an advanced stage of “latent proliferation”,
finding itself losing a nonnuclear war, might complete the transition to deliverable nuclear weapons and, in
desperation, use them. If that should happen in a region, such as the Middle East, where major superpower
interests are at stake, the small nuclear war could easily escalate into a global nuclear war.

Extinction
Nuke War causes extinction
Larry Ross- Founder of NZ Nuclear-Free Peacemaking Association, “RACING TOWARD EXTINCTION”,
Dec 10, 2003 http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/racing.htm)
We have greatly changed our environment with our new destructive tools - nuclear weapons. They have
given us a quantum leap in our ability to destroy ourselves and world. Given present trends, we will not
adapt, but will continue on the present path to nuclear extinction. However, our brains provide the vital
difference between extinct species and us. They can tell us what we have created, and the probable results if
we keep repeating our historically destructive behaviour - the thousands of wars in our history. Our unique
insight allows us to change our behaviour so we don't repeat our traditional pattern of destruction with our
new earth-destroying tools. We have even recognised the extreme risks toourselves, by creating treaties
committing us to vigorously pursue disarmament steps to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.
Unfortunately, we have not observed these treaties. Theessential question is: Will we use our brains
constructively to solve this problem in time to save ourselves? It seems unlikely. We are using our brains to
deny the terrifying reality, pretendthere is no risk, or that it is insignificant. Many believe that nuclear
weapons have been proven over 50 years to give us security. We tend to venerate our leaders, believe and obey them.
Likethe Germans did with Adolph Hitler, or Italians with Mussolini. Leaders are respected as rational, sensible, honest, moral
Christians who could never do anything crazy. However PresidentBush - the world's most powerful man, and his allies and staff,
have lowered the barriers against using nuclear weapons. They have developed new doctrines that allow them to use
nuclearweapons in many more war situations and against non-nuclear states - not just in retaliation for a massive attack. The U.S.
Congress and mass media have skirted this issue, so you may notknow about this 'seismic' change in U.S. policy and its
implications. People have forgot, or never learned, how nuclear weapons can destroy our world. Here is a chart with 6,000 dots
dividedinto 100 squares. The one dot in the centre represents all the explosive power of allied bombs dropped in WWII - equal to
3,000,000 tons of TNT or 3 megatons. Millions were killed. We haveenough for about 6,000 WWII's. The dots in just one of the
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100 squares represent the firepower to kill all life on earth. We have made enough weapons to kill everyone on earth many
timesover. That is our dire situation today. We are not adapting to change our behaviour, but reinforcing old behaviour that leads
to war? The nuclear arms race, accelerated by the vested interests ofthe military-industrial-political complex, and the phantom
threats we invent to sustain it, is the major occupation of many top brains and huge resources today. It has huge momentum
andpower. It is embedded in U.S. society and some others. It is an accepted part of the culture. This weapons culture and the new
doctrines mean that nuclear weapons are no longer treated as a last resort. They can be used in addition to conventional weapons
to achieve military goals. . The culture has programmed itself for self-destruction and now has the ideology to continue until they
precipitate a nuclear holocaust which kills all life. The quantumleap in destructive power has now been matched by this new will,
or self-permission, to use these weapons. Laws, fears and reservations have been swept aside. Humanity seems to have accepted
the new doctrines. Few seem concerned that any usage can kill millions, and quickly expand beyond any countries control,
leading to a global nuclear war which ends humanity. We have radically altered our environment in so many other ways as well,
that also threaten our existence in the longer term.Population growth and our economic growth ideology augment the trends of
climate change - global warming - pollution - dwindling natural resources - deforestation etc. To emphasise again,the biggest
change we have made in our environment is the quantum leap in our ability to destroy ourselves. Our psychological and social
climate makes it more probable. Most people are notaware of this huge change in our environment. Others just accept it. We
have learned to live with and treat nuclear weapons as a normal part of the environment. Many feel that to
question or oppose this situation is silly, disloyal or threatens the security we think nuclear weapons give us.
Nine countries are dedicated to constantly developing their nuclear arsenals. That makes accidental or
intentional usage more likely. That the U.S. has said the nuclear barriers are down adds to the likelihood of
nuclear weapons use by some other state. A probable escalation would follow.

Nuclear War results in Extinction

Carl Sagan, B.A., B.S., and PhD University of Chicago, former professor of biology and genetics at Stanford and professor of
astronomy and astro-physics at Harvard, former Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell, two-time winner
of the NASA medal for scientific achievement, Peabody award recipient, and Pulitzer prize winning author, 1984 (Foreign
Affairs, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” p. Lexis) (PDNSS2207)
In summary, cold, dark, radioactivity, pyrotoxins and ultraviolet light following a nuclear war -- including
some scenarios involving only a small fraction of the world strategic arsenals -- would imperil every
survivor on the planet. There is a real danger of the extinction of humanity. A threshold exists at which the
climatic catastrophe could be triggered, very roughly around 500-2,000 strategic warheads. A major first
strike may be an act of national suicide, even if no retaliation occurs. Given the magnitude of the potential
loss, no policy declarations and no mechanical safeguards can adequately guarantee the safety of the human
species. No national rivalry or ideological confrontation justifies putting the species at risk. Accordingly,
there is a critical need for safe and verifiable reductions of the world strategic inventories to below
threshold. At such levels, still adequate for deterrence, at least the worst could not happen should a nuclear
war break out.

Warming causes extinction.

Bill Henderson ‘06, Environmental Scientist, Aug 19, “Runaway Global Warming – Denial,”
http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-henderson190806.htm

The scientific debate about human induced global warming is over but policy makers - let alone the happily
shopping general public - still seem to not understand the scope of the impending tragedy. Global warming
isn't just warmer temperatures, heat waves, melting ice and threatened polar bears. Scientific understanding
increasingly points to runaway global warming leading to human extinction. If impossibly Draconian
security measures are not immediately put in place to keep further emissions of greenhouse gases out of the
atmosphere we are looking at the death of billions, the end of civilization as we know it and in all
probability the end of man's several million year old existence, along with the extinction of most flora and
fauna beloved to man in the world we share.
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Impact Calculus-Extinction
Extinction Outweighs
Ochs 2002 (Richard- MA in Natural Resource Management from Rutgers University and Naturalist at
Grand Teton National Park, “BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS MUST BE ABOLISHED IMMEDIATELY,” Jun
9, http://www.freefromterror.net/other_...s/abolish.html)

Against this tendency can be posed a rational alternative policy. To preclude possibilities of human
extinction, "patriotism" needs to be redefined to make humanity’s survival primary and absolute. Even if we
lose our cherished freedom, our sovereignty, our government or our Constitution, where there is life, there
is hope. What good is anything else if humanity is extinguished? This concept should be promoted to the
center of national debate. For example, for sake of argument, suppose the ancient Israelites developed
defensive bio weapons of mass destruction when they were enslaved by Egypt. Then suppose these
weapons were released by design or accident and wiped everybody out? As bad as slavery is, extinction is
worse. Our generation, our century, our epoch needs to take the long view. We truly hold in our hands the precious gift of all
future life. Empires may come and go, but who are the honored custodians of life on earth? Temporal politicians? Corporate
competitors? Strategic brinksmen?
Military gamers? Inflated egos dripping with testosterone? How can any sane person believe that national sovereignty
is more important than survival of the species? Now that extinction is possible, our slogan should be
"Where there is life, there is hope." No government, no economic system, no national pride, no religion, no
political system can be placed above human survival. The egos of leaders must not blind us. The adrenaline
and vengeance of a fight mustnot blind us. The game is over. If patriotism would extinguish humanity, then
patriotism is the highest of all crimes.

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Extinction from nuclear war dwarfs all other impact calculus

Schell, 1982 Jonathan, Fate of the Earth, pp. 93-96
To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation – just as it would be a
misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not
occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all their
weapons, the global effects in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not
moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down
catastrophically. These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a
nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm our fear and to
reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the
adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects, including effects of which we as yet unaware, may be severe, that
the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are
forced to make our decisions in a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we have to muster our resolve in spite
of our awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore
the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent
self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in
the world realized that if the great powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner
or later face the possibility of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements
preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew that the path of nuclear armament was a dead
end for mankind. The discovery of the energy in mass – of "the basic power of the universe" – and of a
means by which man could release that energy altered the relationship between man and the source of his
life, the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became small and the life of the human species
doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been on the political agenda of the world ever
since the first nuclear weapon was detonated, and there was no need for the world to build up its present
tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or will have
crossed, the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and actually having
the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any second, is not precisely knowable. But it is clear that at present, with
some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered
into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is
categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than that of any other risk and as we make our decisions we have to take
that significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the framework of life; extinction
would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human
purpose would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal
defeat on the same footing as risk that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular
transient moment of human history. To employ a mathematician's analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction
may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn
that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we
nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world
between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and
we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their
use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand
before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our
ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us
to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to withdraw the
threat we now post to the world and to ourselves.

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Genocide
Genocide Outweighs
Claudia Card 2003, prof. of philosophy (Ph.D from Harvard), Senior-Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities,
“Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter

Genocide is not simply unjust (although it certainly is unjust); it is also evil. It characteristically includes
the one-sided killing of defenseless civilians— babies, children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and the
injured of both genders along with their usually female caretakers—simply on the basis of their national,
religious, ethnic, or other political identity. It targets people on the basis of who they are rather than on the
basis of what they have done, what they might do, even what they are capable of doing. (One commentator
says genocide kills people on the basis of what they are, not even who they are). Genocide is a paradigm of
what Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit (1996) calls "indecent" in that it not only destroys victims but
first humiliates them by deliberately inflicting an "utter loss of freedom and control over one's vital
interests" (115). Vital interests can be transgenerational and thus survive one's death. Before death, genocide
victims are ordinarily deprived of control over vital transgenerational interests and more immediate vital
interests. They may be literally stripped naked, robbed of their last possessions, lied to about the most vital
matters, witness to the murder of family, friends, and neighbors, made to participate in their own murder,
and if female, they are likely to be also violated sexually. Victims of genocide are commonly killed with no
regard for lingering suffering or exposure. They, and their corpses, are routinely treated with utter
disrespect. These historical facts, not simply mass murder, account for much of the moral opprobrium
attaching to the concept of genocide. Yet such atrocities, it may be argued, are already war crimes, if
conducted during wartime, and they can otherwise or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why,
then, add the specific crime of genocide? What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit
such things as the rape, enslavement, torture, forced deportation, and the degradation of individuals? Is any
ethically distinct harm done to members of the targeted group that would not have been done had they been
targeted simply as individuals rather than because of their group membership? This is the question that I
find central in arguing that genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, to any of the other war crimes,
or to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe the answer is affirmative: the harm is ethically

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distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I wish only to question the assumption that it is
not. Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group
membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the
group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and
may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event,
they may become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and
build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations
(1982, 5–9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social
death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual,
social connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's
death meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death
(when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its
termination.

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