Power is a fluid set of relations with no stable demarcation.

It
is constitutive of our specific actions and cannot be avoided.
Its relational nexus is the basis for subject formation.
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and P. Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics. Harvester Press, 1983.
Foucault' s account of power is not intended as a theory. That is, it is not meant as a context-
free, ahistorical, objective description. Nor does it apply as a generalization to all of history.
Rather, Foucault is proposing what he calls and which he opposes to theory. He says, "If one
tries to erect a theory of power one will always be obliged to view it as emerging at a
given place and time and hence to deduce it, to reconstruct its genesis. But if power is in
reality an open, more-or-Iess coordinated (in the event, no doubt, ill-coordinated) cluster
of relations, then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis which
makes possible an analytic of relations of power" (CF 199). Toward this end Foucault
presents a series of propositions about power in The History of Sexuality, and he has extended
some of these ideas in his afterword to our book. These propositions are really cautionary
rules of thumb, rather than theses which have been spelled out. First, power relations are "
nonegalitarian and mobile." Power is not a commodity, a position, a prize, or a plot; it is
the operation of the political technologies throughout the social body. The functioning of
these political rituals of power is exactly what sets up the nonegalitarian, asymmetrical
relations. It is the spread of these technologies and their everyday operation, localized
spatially and temporally, that Foucault is referring to when he describes them as "mobile." If
power is not a thing, or the control of a set of institutions, or the hidden rationality to
history, then the task for the analyst is to identify how it operates. The aim, for Foucault, "is
to move less toward a theory of power than toward an analytics of power: that is, toward a
definition of a specific domain formed by power relations and toward a determination of the
instruments that will make possible its analysis" (HS 82). Foucault' s aim is to isolate ,
identify, and analyze the web of unequal relationships set up by political technologies
which underlies and undercuts the theoretical equality posited by the law and political
philosophers . Bio-power escapes from the representation of power as law and advances
under its protection. Its " rationality" is not captured by the political languages we still speak.
To understand power in its materiality, its day to day operation, we must go to the level of
the micropractices, the political technologies in which our practices are formed. Foucault's
next proposals follow from this first one. Power is not restricted to political institutions.
Power plays a " directly productive role;" "it comes from below;" it is multidirectional,
operating from the top down and also from the bottom up. We have seen that political
technologies cannot be identified with particular institutions. But we have also seen that it is
precisely when these technologies find a localization within specific institutions (schools,
hospitals, prisons), when they "invest" these institutions, that bio-power really begins its
take-off. When the disciplinary technologies establish links between these institutional
settings, then disciplinary technology is truly effective . It is in this sense that Foucault says
power is productive; it is not in a position of exteriority to other types of relationships.
Although relationships of power are imminent to institutions, power and institutions are not
identical. But neither are their relationships merely pasted-on, superstructural detail. For
example, the school cannot be reduced to its disciplinary function. The content of Euclid' s
geometry is not changed by the architecture of the school bUilding. However, many other
aspects of school life are changed by the introduction of disciplinary technology (rigid
scheduling, separation of pupils, surveillance of sexuality, ranking, individuation and so on).
Power is a general matrix of force relations at a given time, in a given society. In the
prison, both the guardians and the prisoners are located within the same specific
operations of discipline and surveillance, within the concrete restrictions of the prison's
architecture. Though Foucault is saying that power comes from below and we are all
enmeshed in it, he is not suggesting that there is no domination. The guards in Mettray
prison had undeniable advantages in these arrangements; those who constructed the
prison had others ; both groups used these advantages to their own ends. Foucault is not
denying this. He is affirming, however, that all of these groups were involved in power
relations, however unequal and hierarchical, which they did not control in any simple sense.
For Foucault, unless these unequal relations of power are traced down to their actual
material functioning, they escape our analysis and continue to operate with unquestioned
autonomy, maintaining the illusion that power is only applied by those at the top to those
at the bottom. Domination, then, is not the essence of power. When questioned about class
domination, Foucault gives the example of social-welfare legislation in France at the end of
the nineteenth century . Obviously he does not deny the realities of class domination. Rather,
his point is that power is exercised upon the dominant as well as on the dominated; there is a
process of self-formation or autocolonization involved. In order for the bourgeoisie to
establish its position of class domination during the nineteenth century, it had to form itself
as a class. As we have seen, there was first a dynamic exercising of strict controls primarily
on its own members . The technologies of confession and the associated concern with life,
sex, and health were initially applied by the bourgeoisie to itself. Bio-power was one of the
central strategies of the self-constitution of the bourgeoisie. It was only at the end of the
century that these technologies were applied to the working class. Foucault says, One could
say that the strategy of moralisation (health campaigns , workers ' housing, clinics, etc .) of
the working class was that of the bourgeoisie. One could even say that it is this strategy
which defined them as a class and enabled them to exercise their domination. But, to say
that the' bourgeoisie at the level of its ideology and its projects for economic reform, acting
as a sort of real and yet fictive subject, invented and imposed by force this strategy of
domination, that simply cannot be said. (CF 203) Unless the political technologies had already
successfully taken hold at the local level, there would have been no class domination. Unless
the political technologies had succeeded in forming the bourgeoisie in the first place, there
would not have been the same pattern of class domination. It is in this sense that Foucault
views power as operating throughout society. This leads us to what is probably Foucault's
most provocative proposal about power. Power relations, he claims, are "intentional and
nonsubjective." Their intelligibility derives from this intentionality. "They are imbued,
through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a
series of aims and objectives" (BS 95). At the local level there is often a high degree of
conscious decision making, planning, plotting and coordination of political activity. Foucault
refers to this as "the local cynicism of power." This recognition of volitional activity enables
him to take local level political action fairly literally; he is not pushed to ferret out the secret
motivations lying behind the actors' actions . He does not have to see political actors as es
sentially hypocrites or pawns of power. Actors more or less know what they are doing when
they do it and can often be quite clear in articulating it. But it does not follow that the
broader consequences of these local actions are coordinated. The fact that individuals make
decisions about specific policies or particular groups jockey for their own advantage does not
mean that the overall activation and directionality of power relations in a society implies a
subject. When we analyze a political situation, " the logic is perfectly clear, the aims
decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them" (BS 95). This is the insight, and this is the problem.
How to talk about intentionality without a subject, a strategy without a strategist? The
answer must lie in the practices themselves. For it is the practices, focused in technologies
and innumerable separate localizations, which literally embody what the analyst is seeking to
understand. In order to arrive at "a grid of intelligibility of the social order ... one needs to be
nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure ; neither is it a certain
strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical
relationship in a particular society" (J-lS 93). There is a logic to the practices. There is a push
towards a strategic objective, but no one is pushing. The objective emerged historically,
taking particular forms and encountering specific obstacles, conditions and resistances. Will
and calculation were involved. The overall effect, however, escaped the actors' intentions, as
well as those of anybody else. As Foucault phrased it, " People know what they do; they
frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do
does" (personal communication). This is not a new form of functionalism. The system is not in
any way in equilibrium; nor is it, except in the most extended of senses, a system. There is no
inherent logic of stability. Rather, at the level of the practices there is a directionality
produced from petty calculations, clashes of wills, meshing of minor interests. These are
shaped and given a direction by the political technologies of power. This directionality has
nothing inherent about it and hence it cannot be deduced. It is not a suitable object for a
theory. It can, however, be analyzed, and this is Foucault's project. Foucault' s refusal to
elaborate a theory of power follows from his insight that theory only exists and is only
intelligible when it is set against and among particular cultural practices. This is perhaps why
he so often restricts his general comments on power. Instead he has presented a systematic
analysis of technologies of power for which he claims a certain significance and generality,
although as a characterization these comments still appear to be rather all-encompassing and
mysterious. Let us therefore return to Foucault's analysis of disciplinary technology as
exemplified in Bentham' s Panopticon, to see how this normalizing power works and what
general inferences can be drawn from this analysis
Genealogy is necessary to deconstruct historical interactions
with power at a specific level - it must be THE center point of
the discussion - it is key for resistance and restructuring.
Medina, José. "Toward a Foucaultian epistemology of resistance: counter-memory, epistemic
friction, and guerrilla pluralism." Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9-35.
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is
never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. < [There is] a multiplicity of points of
resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.
These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no
single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case.1 In
order to understand the diversity and heterogeneity of forms of resistance, we need to
understand the positionality and relationality of social agents in networks of power relations.
Foucault insists that ‚resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power‛ and
that in order to understand how resistance works, we need to understand ‚the strictly
relational character of power relations.‛ 2 Although this is often obscured by the widely
assumed opposition between power and resistance, the Foucaultian analysis of power and
resistance makes clear that these are internally related terms, and that resistance is not
something that is exerted from outside power, but within it. One of Foucault’s great
achievements is his critique of traditional conceptions of power as something repressive, top-
down, and homogeneous or monolithic. By contrast, Foucault makes clear that there are
irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous forms of power flowing in every direction within the
social fabric, and offering multiple points of resistance. Resistance is a complicated and
heterogeneous phenomenon that defies unification and explication according to abstract and
rigid principles of subversion. Our cognitive, affective, and political lives are caught up in
various tensions among multidirectional relations of power/resistance. Our ways of thinking,
feeling, and acting become empowered and disempowered in specific respects, as they are
formed and remained inscribed within the different networks of power relations and the
different forms of resistance that shape our lives in various (and not always fully coherent)
ways. Struggles of resistance should be studied in their specificity, but without thereby
renouncing investigation of their connections, intersections, and points of convergence and
divergence. In this paper I want to address the question of what a critical epistemology that
places bodies of knowledge and ignorance—especially historical knowledge and ignorance—in
the context of power networks and struggles of resistance has to offer. The central goal of
this paper is to show the emancipatory potential of the epistemological framework underlying
Foucault’s work. More specifically, I will try to show that the Foucaultian approach places
practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations in such a way that
possibilities of resistance and subversion are brought to the fore. When our cultural practices
of remembering and forgetting are interrogated as loci where multiple power relations and
power struggles converge, the first thing to notice is the heterogeneity of differently situated
perspectives and the multiplicity of trajectories that converge in the epistemic negotiations
in which memories are formed or de-formed, maintained alive or killed. The discursive
practices in which memory and oblivion are manufactured are not uniform and harmonious,
but heterogeneous and full of conflicts and tensions. Foucault invites us to pay attention to
the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that
try to control a given field. Different fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain
particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle
among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others
are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that
vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences
and memories that are erased or hidden in the mainstream frameworks that become
hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated
knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the margins and
rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic
discourses. Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a
precarious subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and
impossible to detect by those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic
exclusions. And with the invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for
resistance and subversion go unnoticed. The critical and emancipatory potential of
Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging established practices of remembering and
forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore
the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices have foreclosed. The critical task of the
scholar and the activist is to resurrect subjugated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or
forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of
subjugated knowledges.4 In order to be critical and to have transformative effects,
genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are critical interventions
that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives (e.g. official
histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc). Such insurrections
involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of tapping into
the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insur- rection
requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects
whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may
not be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the
epistemic table (i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their
marginalized perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and
established frameworks become open to con- testation. On the other hand, the scholars and
activists aiming to produce insurrectionary interventions could not get their critical activity
off the ground if they did not draw on past and ongoing contestations, and the lived
experiences and memo- ries of those whose marginalized lives have become the silent scars of
forgotten struggles. As I will try to show in detail in what follows, what makes the Foucaultian
genealogical approach specifically critical is its capacity to facilitate insurrections of
subjugated knowledges. In section 1, I will explain how exactly critical genealogies contribute
‚to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free,‛ 5 so that insurrectionary struggles
against coercive epistemic closures are revived. Critical genealogies contribute to the
production of counter-histories, which are centered around those experiences and memories
that have not been heard and integrated in official histories. The counter-histories that
critical genealogies can produce are possible because there are people who remember against
the grain, people whose memories do not fit the historical narratives available. Counter-
histories feed off such countermemories and at the same time transform them, revitalizing
practices of countermemory and offering them new discursive resources to draw on. The
critical goal of genealogy is to energize a vibrant and feisty epistemic pluralism so that
insurrectionary struggles among competing power/knowledge frameworks are always
underway and contestation always alive. In section 2, I elucidate the specific kind of
epistemic pluralism underlying Foucaultian critical genealogies. I argue that this is not just
any kind of epistemic pluralism but a particularly radical and dynamic one: what I term a
guerrilla pluralism. I argue that a commitment to guerrilla pluralism is what guides the role of
scholars/activists as facilitators of insurrections; and I contrast this particularly combative
kind of pluralism with other epistemological pluralistic approaches to memory and knowledge
of the past which have been prevalent in American philosophy. Finally, in section 3, I will lay
out what Foucaultian genealogy and the guerrilla pluralism that supports it have to offer to
contemporary epistemologies of ignorance in race theory and standpoint theory. Although the
Foucaultian approach has often been viewed as antithetical to standpoint epistemology (since
it destabilizes and calls into question standpoints as problematic cultural artifacts), I will
show that there is an interesting and rich convergence between the Foucaultian genealogical
critique of standpoints and the self-interrogation of standpoints recently developed in critical
race theory and feminist theory.

Analysis centered around questions of ontology sever from

political actions – they are confined to theories based on the
given world, rather than engaging in pragmatic actions and
forego concrete change in favor of ontological a prioris.
Prefer - the AC’s view of political does not commit itself to
encompassing ontologies but processes and how they change
throughout history to develop natures of the political. BUCK-
MORSS
[Susan Buck-Morss. “Commu nist Ethics.” Commonist Ethics, 10 May 2013,
http://susanbuckmorss.info/text/commonist-ethics/] RECUT LHP JW
The First Point: Politics is not an ontology. The claim that the political is always ontological
needs to be challenged.1 It is not merely that the negative the case — that the political is
never ontological2 (as Badiou points out, a simple negation leaves everything in place3).
Instead, what is called for is a reversal of the negation: The ontological is never political. It
follows that the move from la politique (everyday politics) to le politique (the very meaning
of the political) is a one-way street. With all due respect to Marcel Gauchet, Chantal Mouffe,
Giorgio Agamben, and a whole slew of others, the attempt to discover within empirical
political life (la politique) the ontological essence of the political (le politique) leads theory
into a dead end from which there is no return to actual, political practice. There is nothing
gained by this move from the feminine to the masculine form. The post-metaphysical project
of discovering ontological truth within lived existence fails politically. It fails in the socially
disengaged Husserlian-Heidegerian mode of bracketing the existenziell to discover the
essential nature of what “the political” is. And it fails in the socially critical, post-
Foucauldian mode of historicized ontology, disclosing the multiple ways of political being-in-
the-world within particular, cultural and temporal configurations. This is not news. From the
mid-1930s on, it was Adorno’s obsessive concern, in the context of the rise of fascism, to
demonstrate the failure of the ontological attempt to ground a philosophy of Being by starting
from the given world, or, in Heideggerian language, to move from the ontic, that is, being
[seiend] in the sense of that which is empirically given, to the ontological, that which is
essentially true of existence (Dasein as the “a priori structure” of “existentially”4). Adorno
argued that any ontology derived (or reduced5) from the ontic, turns the philosophical
project into one big tautology.6 He has a point, and the political implications are serious.
Ontology identifies. Identity was anathema to Adorno, and nowhere more so than in its
political implications, the identity between ruler and ruled that fascism affirmed. Indeed,
even parliamentary rule can be seen to presuppose a striving for identity, whereby consensus
becomes an end in itself, regardless of the truth content of that consensus.7 It is not that
Heidegger’s philosophy (or any existential ontology) is in-itself fascist (that would be an
ontological claim). Rather, by resolving the question of Being before subsequent political
analyses, the latter have no philosophical traction. They are subsumed under the ontological
a prioris that themselves must remain indifferent to their content.8 Existential ontology is
mistaken in assuming that, once “the character of being” (Heidegger) is conceptually
grasped, it will return us to the material, empirical world and allow us to gather its diversities
and multiplicities under philosophy’s own pre-understandings in ways adequate to the
exigencies of collective action, the demands of actual political life. In fact, the ontological is
never political. A commonist (or communist) ontology is a contradiction in terms. But, you
may ask, did not Marx himself outline in his early writings a full ontology based on the
classical, Aristotelian claim that man is by nature a social animal? Are not the 1844
manuscripts an elaboration of that claim, mediated by a historically specific critique, hence
an extended, social ontology of man’s alienation from nature (including his own) and from his
fellow man? Yes, but in actual, political life, this ontological “man” does not exist. Instead,
we existing creatures are men and women, black and brown, capitalists and workers, gay and
straight, and the meaning of these categories of being is in no way stable. Moreover, these
differences matter less that whether we are unemployed, have prison records, or are in
danger of being exported. And no matter what we are in these ontic ways, our beings do not
fit neatly into our politics as conservatives, anarchists, evangelicals, Teaparty-supporters,
Zionists, Islamists, and (a few) Communists. We are social animals, yes, but we are also anti-
social, and our animal natures are thoroughly mediated by society’s contingent forms. Yes,
the early Marx developed a philosophical ontology. Nothing follows from this politically.
Philosopher-king-styled party leaders are not thereby legitimated, and the whole thorny issue
of false consciousness (empirical vs. imputed/ascribed [zugerechnectes] consciousness)
cannot force a political resolution. At the same time, philosophical thought has every right –
and obligation — to intervene actively into political life. Here is Marx on the subject of
intellectual practice, including philosophizing: But again when I am active scientifically, etc,
— when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others
–- then I am social, because I am active as a man [human being9]. Not only is the material of
my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is
active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I
make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. 10 Again,
no matter how deeply one thinks one’s way into this ontological generalization, no specific
political orientation follows as a consequence. It describes the intellectual work of Heidegger
and Schmitt every bit as much as it does that of Marx or of us ourselves. For Marx, ontological
philosophy was only the starting point in a lifelong practice of scientific thinking that
developed in response to the historical events surrounding him. Through the trajectory of his
work, the entire tradition of Western political philosophy took a left turn away from
metaphysics and toward an engagement with the emerging social sciences — economics,
anthropology, sociology, psychology — understood not in their positivist, data-gathering or
abstract-mathematical forms, but as sciences of history — not historicality, historicity,
historicism or the like, but concrete, material HISTORY. With this hard-left turn (which is an
orientation that may or may not involve elements from “the linguistic turn,” the “ethical
turn,” the “aesthetic turn”), political philosophy morphs into social theory done reflectively,
that is, critically. It becomes critical theory. When Marx said thinking was itself a practice, he
meant it in this sense. He did not then ask: what is the ontological meaning of the being of
practice. Instead, he tried to find out as much as he could about the socio-historical practices
of actual human beings in his time. So the question Marx’s early writings leaves us with is
this: How do we turn this social — we could say in a descriptive way, socialist — fact of our
work, and our consciousness of this work as social beings, into a commonist practice? How are
we to conceive of a commonist ethics? Not by the phenomenological reduction to some
essence of what it is to be a social being: i.e., a caring being, a being-to-death, a being-with,
etc., as Heidegger proposed, but rather, by an analysis, a becoming-conscious of the specific
society, the specific cares, the specific deaths that are simultaneous with our own, not
common in the sense of the same as ours (experiences are very unequal in today’s society),
but as happening to others who share, in common, this time and this space — a space as big
as the globe and a time as actual as now.

Genealogies lead us to engage in material reform to mediate

modern power relations away from tyrrany.
[An Interview of Michel Foucault. Conducted by Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl, et al. “The Ethic of
Care for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” 20 Jan. 1984.]
Q: The care for self, you said, is in a certain fashion the care for others. The care for self is in
this sense also always ethical. It is ethical in itself. MF: For the Greeks it is not because it is
care for others that it is ethical. Care for self is ethical in itself, but it implies complex
relations with others, in the measure where this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for
others. That is why it is important for a free man, who behaves correctly, to know how to
govern his wife, his children and his home. There, too, is the art of governing. Ethos implies
also a relation with others to the extent that care for self renders one competent to occupy a
place in the city, in the community or in interindividual relationships which are proper-
whether it be to exercise a magistracy or to have friendly relationships. And the care for self
implies also a relationship to the other to the extent that, in order to really care for self, one
must listen to the teachings of a master. One needs a guide, a counsellor, a friend someone
who will tell you the truth. Thus, the problem of relationship with others is present all along
this development of care for self. Q: The care for self always aims at the good for others. It
aims at a good administering of the area of power which is present in all relationships, i.e., it
tends to administer it in the sense of non-domination. In this context, what can be the role of
the philosopher, of the one who cares for the care of others? MF: Let us take for example
Socrates. He is the one who hails people in the street or young boys in the gymnasium, by
saying to them: Are you concerned with yourself? A god has charged him with that. That is his
mission and he will not abandon it, even at the moment when he is threatened by death. He
is truly the man who cares for others. That is the particular position of the philosopher. But
let us say it simply: in the case of the free man, I think that the assumption of all this
morality was that the one who cared for himself correctly found himself, by that very fact, in
a measure to behave correctly in relationship to others and for others. A city in which
everyone would be correctly concerned for self would be a city that would be doing well, and
it would find therein the ethical principle of its stability. But I don’t think that one can say
that the Greek who cares for himself should first of all care for others. This theme will not
come into play, it seems to me, until later. One must not have the care for others precede
the care for self. The care for self takes moral precedence in the measure that the
relationship to self takes ontological precedence. Q: Can the care for self, which possesses a
positive ethical sense, be understood as a sort of conversion of power? MF: A conversion, yes.
It is in fact a way of controlling and limiting. For, if it is true that slavery is the big risk to
which Greek liberty is opposed, there is also another danger, which appears at first glance as
the opposite of slavery: the abuse of power. In the abuse of power, one goes beyond what is
legitimately the exercise of power and one imposes on others one’s whims, one’s appetites,
one’s desires. There we see the image of the tyrant or simply of the powerful and wealthy
man who takes advantage of his power and his wealth to misuse others, to impose on them
undue power. But one sees-at least that is what the Greek philosophers say-that this man is in
reality a slave to his appetites. And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his [of]
power correctly, i.e., by exercising at the same time his power on [the] himself. And it is the
power over self which will regulate the power over others. Q: Does not the care for self,
released from the care for others, run the risk of &dquo;absolutizing itself&dquo;? Could not
this &dquo;absolutization&dquo; of care for self [can’t] become a kind of exercise of power
on others, in the sense of domination of the other? MF: No, because the risk of dominating
others and exercising over them a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not
care for one’s self and that one has become a slave to his desires. But if you care for yourself
correctly, i.e., if you know ontologically what you are, if you also know of what you are
capable, if you know what it means for you to be a citizen in a city, to be the head of a
household in an oikos, if you know what things you must fear and those that you should not
fear, if you know what is suitable to hope for and what are the things on the contrary which
should be completely indifferent for you, if you know, finally that you should not fear death,
well, then, you cannot abuse your power over others. There is therefore no danger. This idea
will appear much later, when love of self will become suspect and will be seen as one of the
possible roots of diverse moral faults. In this new context, the care for self will have as its
primary form, the renunciation of the self. You discover this in a fairly clear fashion in the
Treatise on Virginity of Gregory of Nyssa, where you find the notion of care for self
&dquo;epimeleia heauton&dquo; defined essentially as renunciation of all worldly
attachments. It is the renunciation of all that could be love of self, attachment to a worldly
self. But I believe that in Greek and Roman thought the care for self cannot in itself tend to
this exaggerated love of self which would, in time, come to neglect others or worse still,
abuse the power that one can have over them. Q: Then it is a care for self which, thinking of
itself, thinks of others? MF: Yes, absolutely. The one who cares for self, to the point of
knowing exactly what are his duties as head of a household, as husband or father, will find
that he has relationships with his wife and children which are as they should be. Q: But does
not the human condition, in the sense of its finiteness, play there a very important role? You
have spoken of death. If you are not afraid of death, you cannot abuse your power over
others. It seems to us this problem of finiteness is very important: fear of death, fear of
finiteness, of being hurt: all these are at the heart of care for self.. , MF: Of course. And that
is where Christianity, in introducing salvation as salvation beyond this life, will somehow
unbalance or at least upset the whole theme of care for self. Although and I recall it once
more-seeking one’s salvation will be precisely renunciation. With the Greeks and the Romans,
on the other hand, beginning from the fact that one cares for self in his own life and that the
reputation which we will have left behind is the only after-death with which we preoccupy
ourselves-care for self can then be entirely centered on one’s self, on what one does, on the
place one occupies among others. It can be totally centered on the acceptance of death
which will be most evident in later Stoicism-even up to a certain point almost become a
desire for death. It can be, at the same time, if not care for others, at least a care for one’s
self which will be beneficial to others. It is interesting to note in Seneca, for example, the
importance of the theme: let us hasten to grow old, let us hasten to the appointed time
which will permit us to rejoin our selves. This sort of moment before death, where nothing
more can happen, is different from the desire for death that we find among Christians, who
expect salvation from death. It is like a movement to articulate one’s existence to the point
where there would be nothing else before it but the possibility of death. Q: We would now
like to shift to another subject. In your courses at the Coll6ge de France, you have talked
about the relationships between power and knowledge. Now you talk
abouttherelationsbetweensubjectandtruth.Isthereacom- plementarity between the two sets
of ideas: power/knowledge and subject/truth? MF: My problem has always been, asI said in
the beginning, the problem of the relationship between subject and truth. How does the
subject enter into a certain game of truth? My first problem was, how is it, for example, that
beginning at a certain point in time, madness was considered a problem and the result of a
certain number of processes-an illness de- pendent upon a certain medicine? How has the mad
subject been placed in this game of truth defined by knowledge or a medical model? And it is
in doing this analysis that I noticed that, contrary to what had been somewhat the custom at
that time-around the early sixties-it was not in talking simply about ideology that w e could
really explain that phenomenon. In fact, there were practices-essentially the major practice
of confinement which had been developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century and
which had been the condition for the insertion of the mad subject in this game of truth-which
sent me back to the problem of institutions of power, much more than to the problem of
ideology. So it was thatI was led to pose the problem knowledge/power, which is not for me
the fundamental problem but an instrument allowing the analysis-in a way that seems to me
to be the most exact- of the problem of relationships between subject and games of truth. Q:
But you have always refused that we speak to you about the subject in general? MF: No I had
not refused I perhaps had some formulations which were inadequate. What I refused was
precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the subject-as could be done in
phenomenology and in existentialism-and that, beginning from the theory of the subject, you
come to pose the question of knowing, for example, how such and such a form of knowledge
was possible. What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself, in such and
such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a certain number
of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a
priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships which can exist
between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth,
practices of power and so forth. Q: That means that the subject is not a substance? MF: It is
not a substance; it is a form and this form is not above all or always identical to itself. You do
not have towards yourself the same kind of relationships when you constitute yourself as a
political subject who goes and votes or speaks up in a meeting, and when you try to fulfill
your desires in a sexual relationship. There are no doubt some relationships and some
interferences between these different kinds of subject but we are not in the presence of the
same kind of subject. In each case, we play, we establish with one’s self some different form
of relationship. And it is precisely the historical constitution of these different forms of
subject relating to games of truth that interest me. Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at
NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on October 8, 2012 122 Q: But the mad subject, the ill, the
delinquent-perhaps even the sexual subject-was the subject which was the object of
theoretical discourse, a subject shall we say passive while the subject of which you have been
speaking for the last two years in your course at the Coll6ge de France is an active subject,
politically active. The care for self concerns all these problems of practical politics, of
government, etc. It would seem that there has been a change in your thinking, a change not
of perspective but of the problematic. MF: If it is true, for example, that the constitution of a
mad subject can in fact be considered as the result of a system of coercion-that is the passive
subject-you know full well that the mad subject is not a non-free subject and that the
mentally ill constitutes himself a mad subject in relationship and in the presence of the one
who declares him crazy. Hysteria, which was so important in the history of psychiatry and in
the mental institutions of the nineteenth century, seems to me to be the very illustration of
the way in which the subject constitutes himself as mad. And it is not altogether a
coincidence that the important phenomena of hysteria have been studied exactly where there
was a maximum of coercion to compel these individuals to consider themselves mad. On the
other hand and inversely, I would say that if now I am interested, in fact, in the way in which
the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of self, these practices
are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that
he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture,
his society and his social group. Q: There would seem to be a sort of lack in your problematic,
namely, the concept of a resistance to power. That would presuppose a very active subject,
very careful for self and of others and politically and philosophically sophisticated. MF: That
brings us back to the problem of what I mean by power. I hardly ever use the word power and
if I do sometimes, it is always a short cut to the expression I always use: the relationships of
power. But there are ready made patterns: when one speaks of power, people think
immediately of a political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the master facing
the slave, and so on. That is not at all what I think when I speak of relationships of power I
mean that in human relations, whatever they are-whether it be a question of communicating
verbally, as we are doing right now, or a question of a love relationship, an institutional or
economic relationship-power is always present: I mean the relationships in which one wishes
to direct the behavior of another. Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN
UNIV LIBRARY on October 8, 2012 123 These are the relationships that one can find at
different levels, under different forms: these relationships of power are changeable relations,
i.e., they can modify themselves, they are not given once and for all. The fact, for example,
that I am older and that at first you were intimidated can, in the course of the conversation,
turn about and it is I who can become intimidated before someone, precisely because he is
younger. These relations of power are then changeable, reversible and unstable. One must
observe also that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or
the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on
which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of
power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain
form of liberty. Even though the relation of power may be completely unbalanced or when
one can truly say that he has all power over the other, a power can only be exercised over
another to the extent that the latter still has the possibility of committing suicide, of jumping
out of or of killing the other. That means that in the relations of power, there is necessarily
the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance-of violent
resistance, of escape, of ruse, of strategies that reverse the situation-there would be no
relations of power. This being the general form, I refuse to answer the question that I am
often asked: But if power is everywhere, then there is no liberty I answer: if there are
relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom everywhere.
Now there are effectively states of domination. In many cases the relations of power are fixed
in such a way that they are perpetually asymetrical and the margin of liberty is extremely
limited. To take an example, very paradigmatic to be sure: in the traditional conjugal
relation in the society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we cannot say that there
was only male power; the woman herself could do a lot of things: be unfaithful to him,
extract money from him, refuse him sexually. She was, however, subject to a state of
domination, in the measure where all that was finally no more than a certain number of tricks
which never brought about a reversal of the situation. In these cases of domination-economic,
social, institutional or sexual-the problem is in fact to find out where resistance is going to
organize. Will this be, for example, a working class which is going to resist political
domination-in the trade union, in the party-and under what form-a strike, a general strike, a
revolution, a parliamentary struggle? In such a situation of domination, one must answer all
these questions in a very specific fashion, in function of the kind and the precise form of
domination. But the statement: You see power everywhere, hence there is no place for
liberty, seems to me to be absolutely incomplete. One cannot impute to me the idea that
power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for
freedom. Q: A short while ago you were talking about the free man and the philosopher, as if
they were two different modalities of care for self. The philosopher’s care for self would have
a certain specificity and is not mistaken for that of the free man. MF: I would say that it is a
question of two different positions in the care for self, rather than two forms of the care for
self. I think that care for self is the same in its form, but in intensity, in degree of zeal for
self-and hence in zeal for others as well-the position of the philosopher is not that of any free
man. Q: Is that where one could expect a fundamental connection between philosophy and
politics? MF: Yes, of course. I think that the relationships between philosophy and politics are
permanent and fundamental. It is certain that if one takes the history of the care for self in
Greek thought, the relationships to politics is obvious. Under a very complex form: on the one
hand, you see Socrates, for example-as well as Plato in the Alcibiades, as in Xenophon in the
Memorabilia, who calls out to young people, Hey, you, you want to become a political person,
you want to govern the city, you therefore want to take care of others but you did not even
take care of yourself, and if you do not take care for yourself, you will be a bad leader In that
perspective, the care for self appears like a pedagogical, moral and also ontological
condition, for the constitution of a good leader. To constitute one’s self as a subject who
governs implies that one has constituted himself as a subject having care for self. But, on the
other hand, you see Socrates who says in the Apology, I, I hail everybody, because everybody
must occupy himself with himself But he immediately adds, In doing this, I render the
greatest service to the city and rather than punish me, you should reward me more than you
reward a winner of the Olympic games There is then a very strong affinity between philosophy
and politics which will later develop itself, when the philosopher, in fact, will have not only
the care of the soul of the citizen but also that of the prince.

Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is embracing care for self
through genealogy.
Impact calc:
1] All neg offense must link to a counter-genealogy that engages with
mine. Making blanket observations about the world or policy actions
through fiat without gaining the perspective of a genealogy dooms any
normative project to failure and fails to engage in our analytics of
power. Simply reading historical examples of a problem is not a
genealogy; genealogies examine change over time to uncover how
power transformed and constituted itself in society. Else, analysis is
pointless since it fails to reveal how to engage in a reconstruction of
the present.
2] The standard is not purely consequentialist: (a) care for self
requires cultivating liberty of others and acknowledges that power can
never be reduced but instead tamed by a principle commitment to
non-domination and (b) the standard proves power is inevitable, so it’s
not a question of minimizing it but instead mediating our orientation
towards it.

Advocacy

Thus, I advocate the resolution, Resolved: States ought to

eliminate their nuclear arsenals. I’ll spec in CX.

Nuclear arsenals created a political culture of mass destruction,

serving as the foundation for global warfare. It inculcates decision-
makers into a political ideology that legitimates the worst abuses of
power.
Boggs 17 – (Carl, Professor of Social Sciences @ National University in LA; 2017; Rethinking
Security in the Twenty-First Century; Ch 4: The American Nuclear Warfare State; p. 41-58)
The end of World War II, marked by the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
ushered in a new era of mass destruction as human warfare would forever be overshadowed
by the prospects of nuclear barbarism. For triumphant American military power, the historic
atomic breakthrough signified the very greatness and exceptionalism of a national tradition
driven by its proclaimed mission of bringing freedom and democracy to a strife-ridden world.
The Bomb represented nothing less than a thoroughgoing revolution in military affairs—and of
course global affairs—amounting to an awesome spectacle of US technological prowess and
superiority, a confirmation of its unique status on the international scene. Although world
opinion in general viewed the Bomb as an instrument of barbarism, for US leaders it would be
embraced as a benevolent source of perpetual global hegemony, a guarantee of superpower
domination. Well before the 1945 armistice was signed aboard the USS Missouri, FDR and
other American statesmen made clear their goal of a US-controlled postwar order enforced by
its singular possession of a doomsday weapon. The Bomb would go a long way toward securing
their long-term economic and geopolitical agendas, starting with the capacity to dominate
worldwide financial and industrial markets.
Viewed from this vantage point, the Bomb as ultimate weapon of mass destruction—product
of a well-funded scientific-military elite working at the Manhattan Project—would completely
alter the trajectory of American politics as it would for the rest of the globe. This elite was
created through an unprecedented constellation of forces: governmental, corporate,
academic, and military. What has been called “big science,” headed by such academics as
Ernest Lawrence at U.C., Berkeley, would serve as underpinning of the world’s most
ambitious nuclear program—a regimen that would recruit thousands of well-trained scientists,
technicians, and managers dedicated to the health of the warfare state.1
The new scientific-military elite would continue to operate as a matrix of dynamic interests
within the evolving warfare state, defined by a militarized economy, imperial executive, and
broadened international reach. Since the Bomb would be central to the postwar US power
structure— though never acknowledged as such—its stupendous (“Godlike”) destructive force
was something to be celebrated, though of course still feared. After all, Truman had glorified
this new marvel of warfare in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where
some 200,000 innocent and defenseless civilians had been incinerated. For the USA, at least,
birth of the nuclear age meant not only acceptance but glorification of mass murder as
national policy.
While US government decision-makers involved in the historic decision to use atomic weapons
against Japan never expressed much guilt or sorrow, many scientists at the time (and later)
could not escape pangs of conscience. In a 1947 speech, J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of
the Manhattan Project, referred to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the most
horrible instances of mass-destructive force ever used in human warfare. To date no
American leader or spokesperson has ever issued an apology for the savagery that had no
military logic or political rationale. The entirely hapless civilians targeted in August 1945
were sacrificed on the altar of crude superpower ambitions.
That nuclear legacy has remained very much alive in Washington across the postwar years,
constituting an important pillar of American military strategy as outlined in a series of
Nuclear Posture Review documents.2 In fact, despite its constant moralistic lecturing of other
nations about the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), the USA not only continues
to modernize, stockpile, and deploy its huge nuclear arsenal but has in fact widely used
multiple instruments of mass destruction, including economic sanctions (Cuba, Iraq,
Yugoslavia, Iran), saturation bombing (Germany, Japan, Korea, Indochina), and chemical
warfare (Vietnam). The USA alone among nations has employed all four of these WMD
strategies—widely and repeatedly. This particular hypocrisy seems endemic to a power
structure, whether presided over by Democrats or Republicans, that has long been happy to
invoke the special privilege of superpower hegemony.
A “Godlike Power”
Throughout the postwar era the USA has stood as the biggest champion of WMD in the world—
producing, stockpiling, deploying, and indeed using more of this weaponry than all other
nations combined. It remains the only state to embrace nuclear arsenals as a linchpin of its
military strategy, a vital element of its goal of international supremacy. In this context,
apocalyptic notions of mass destruction have entered the elite political culture, representing
a kind of national ideology consistent with American exceptionalism.
As Robert J. Lifton observes, since the Manhattan Project US leaders set out to create a
“godlike nuclear capacity” that would empower them to shape history.3 Despite a recurrent
American fixation on realism in foreign affairs, the Pentagon has embellished spectacles of
modern warfare involving unfathomable levels of violence and destruction—spectacles going
back to the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan. From that juncture Washington viewed the
atomic era as a great revolution in the history of warfare, unleashing fantasies and
possibilities that, it was hoped, could never be matched by any other nation. As an ideology,
therefore, nuclearism came to affirm a mode of military conduct involving what Lifton calls a
“shared psychological energy pressing toward cruelty and killing.”4 From the moment the
first bomb was detonated at Almagordo, nuclear weaponry was understood by its architects to
be nothing short of “God’s power unleashed”—a sentiment captured in Roland Joffe’s
excellent 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy. Many believed (though some later recanted) the
mission of Enola Gay to obliterate Hiroshima fit God’s preference, following a deity-
sanctioned Manifest Destiny.
From the early postwar years, as Lifton emphasizes, nuclear ideology underpinned American
superpower ambitions, serving as a basis of self-definition, a “currency of power.”5 This shift
corresponded to an increasingly militarized society endemic to the warfare state, shaped by
what C. Wright Mills referred to as the “higher immorality” of the leadership stratum. For
Mills, “the higher immorality is a systemic feature of the American elite, its general
acceptance an essential feature of the mass society.”6 To the extent that nuclear ideology
meant embracing the prospects of mass destruction—that is, indiscriminate violence against
civilian populations and related targets—the political culture was destined to veer toward
ethical bankruptcy. In this context, as Mills noted, moral discourse around such familiar
virtues as peace, democracy, and progress was emptied of substance, corroded by the hulking
presence of the warfare state. Referring at least in part to the debilitating impact of atomic
politics, Mills wrote, “America … appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power
as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon
world reality.”7
John Dower has characterized birth of the nuclear age in terms of “Hiroshima as Code”—an
awesome spectacle of warfare in the service of American superiority, goodness, and
exceptionalism.8 The Bomb obviously meant that millions of innocent, defenseless civilians
would be targeted—a form of barbarism—yet the enormous power of this super weapon would
ultimately transcend all moral concerns. Put differently, unlimited wanton military attacks on
non-combatants, ordinarily prohibited within the rules of war, would now be both tolerable
and in some manner glorified, consistent with President Truman’s response in 1945. Whether
nuclear weapons would actually be used, their very availability helped forge a new military
doctrine that US leaders (unique among nations) seemed perfectly happy to embrace. It is
hardly surprising, therefore, to find Washington having repeatedly blocked UN efforts to
declare these weapons illegitimate and illegal.
The postwar evolution of atomic politics, above all for the USA, allowed for certain
normalization of nuclearism—an ideology that made its peace with the prospects of mass
destruction, or total war. Apocalyptic violence, when employed for noble ends (defeating
Communism, fighting terrorism, spreading democracy), was to be valued, integral to what
Dower calls “idealistic annihilation” that was already widespread during World War II.9 Dower
writes: “… the war that culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also recognized as the onset
of an epoch in which slaughter from the air became routine.”10 It is worth noting here that
the USA carried out aerial terrorism throughout the postwar years (in Korea, Indochina, Iraq)
without ever resorting to nuclear weapons. What Hiroshima and Nagasaki legitimated did not
have to be concretely replicated in order to bring apocalyptic violence to the world.
US aerial warfare against the Japanese, including saturation bombings of Tokyo and dozens of
other cities as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raises another dimension of such military
combat: it can easily involve a form of exterminism that targets hated racial groups, above all
non-white populations. Dower looks closely at US efforts to completely destroy Japan—a
“barbarism from the skies” adhering to no limits or restraints which, in the end, victimized
mostly civilians. The racism was so extreme that distinctions between combatants and non-
combatants, leaders and ordinary civilians, had largely vanished; the entire country,
inhabited by primitive and evil “Japs,” was open terrain for mass killing. American hatred of
the Japanese had indeed reached near-genocidal proportions.11 Given such racial animosity,
the decision to use the Bomb in 1945 most likely came with little if any guilt or ambivalence.
Much the same would be true of later aerial terrorism waged by the USA in Korea, Indochina,
and Iraq.
At the same time, the new WMD would be associated with the virtues of modernity, with
industrial and technological progress that, in turn, would be aligned with American
exceptionalism. Doomsday warfare would be the first, and most awesome, manifestation of
technowar. In the years after 1945 the USA would energetically produce new cycles of nuclear
weapons as it prepared for literally hundreds more Hiroshimas, driven by a keen sense of
national pride; some combination of Yellow and Red perils would have to be fought, after all.
The new era of military combat would be overwhelmingly technological, remote, impersonal,
and of course far less risky for the attacker, hugely convenient for blocking out the immense
criminality involved. The victims in this scenario were nowhere to be seen. As World War II
gave rise to super weapons and apocalyptic thinking, it also generated a new, enlarged
stratum of technological-military elites that would champion the Bomb, its culture, and the
ideology of nuclearism. The advent of technowar brought a historic convergence of science,
technology, industry, government, and the military within the warfare-state framework. High-
level technology permitted a more full-blown military strategy, a battlefield without limits,
where international law would be regarded as something of a nuisance. Once nuclear weapons
had been used, the concept of total war would follow quickly and more seamlessly— as it did
throughout postwar US global behavior.
The mostly forgotten Korean War reveals this trajectory in stark relief: three years of US
warfare on the peninsula were carried out with few limits or constraints—total war geared to
annihilation of the enemy, infused with the harshest racism, the arrogance of technowar, and
a fanatical drive to defeat Communism. Douglas MacArthur and other military leaders in the
field were prepared to destroy nearly every civilian target in Korea, hoping to break a
desperate stalemate. WMD in the form of atomic bombs was seriously considered, and WMD in
the form of both chemical and biological warfare was indeed used, though for the most part
not effectively.12 As Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman note: “The objective was not
territory; it was to wear down, exhaust, and if necessary annihilate the enemy. It was a
strategy carried over from World War II, with antecedents in the education and mindset of US
officers dating from the Civil War.”13 With frustration mounting from 1951 to 1953, the USA
quickly embraced a high-tech war of attrition with little concern for rules of engagement. In
1952 American pilots systematically bombed civilian populations, agriculture, hydroelectric
plants, irrigation dams, and every conceivable infrastructural target—actions judged as war
crimes by the Geneva Protocols.
At this point, according to Endicott and Hagerman, “Moral qualms about using biological or
atomic weapons had been brushed aside by top leaders, and biological warfare might dodge
the political bullet of adverse public and world opinion if it were kept secret enough….”14 US
pilots had already relied extensively on napalm, incendiary devices, and fragmentation
bombs, against both civilian and military targets. In December 1952 the Joint Chiefs of Staff
supported Truman’s readiness to use atomic weapons in Korea, against both Korean and
Chinese forces, a prospect narrowly avoided by late movement toward cease-fire. The USA
did in fact resort to biological weapons, though briefly and without much success, believing
(as Endicott and Hagerman write) that “the spread of debilitating or deadly diseases could
reasonably be expected to create panic among the masses of Chinese and North Korean….”15
All this was possible at a time when American political and military leaders had embraced a
strategy of total war already inspired by events at the end of World War II.
This same mentality, or ideology, would infuse US military conduct during the Vietnam War:
mass killing would be considered normal, and atrocities routine, owing to the achievements of
technowar.16 The ethos of an unlimited, and merciless, war of attrition inherited from the
Good War and Korea would be enthusiastically adopted by the new stratum of liberal,
enlightened war planners in Washington. In such personae as Robert McNamara and Henry
Kissinger could be seen the merger of scientific principles, technological innovation,
managerial expertise, and military ambitions—the ultimate expression of rationalized
warfare. A great virtue of technowar, whether in the case of WMD or other systems, was its
facile sidestepping of moral concerns; the world revolved around new manifestations of
power and technology that could decisively shape history. In Vietnam, as is well known, the
common use of saturation bombing, search-and-destroy missions, napalm, chemical agents,
anti-personnel bombs, and torture was motivated by systematic “idealistic annihilation.” In
more than a decade of military aggression the USA dropped the equivalent of 700 atomic
bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—a source of massive death and destruction by any
rational measure. As William Gibson notes, the result here—again influenced by the
modalities of World War II—amounted to a highly refined production mode of warfare.17
Beyond the culture of militarism as such, the postwar years witnessed the growth of a
uniquely American form of nuclearism—a belief in total war that came out of the Manhattan
Project. At the elite level, this belief is saturated with a worship of WMD, of what WMD
represents and can achieve in advancing the interests of imperial power. In this context, the
emergence of what Joel Kovel calls “nuclear state terrorism” has become a normalized
feature of American political life, an instrument that requires no actual usage to exert its
devastating effects.18 The very presence of a massive, constantly modernized nuclear arsenal
is enough to empower those at the summits of power. As the ultimate expression of
technowar, moreover, this weaponry takes on a certain self-perpetuating logic within the
matrix of industrial and technological progress.
From the start of the Manhattan Project, American nuclear ambitions took on the character of
apocalyptic violence combined with Godlike power—the most awesome expression of
modernity. Atomic politics still possesses that ideological definition, with all its messianic
vision. Several decades ago Herbert Marcuse theorized the historical linkage of technology,
domination, and violence, in which the warfare state and mass killing had become entirely
“rational” within the prevailing ideology.19 Technological rationality, in war as elsewhere,
was now the standard measure of thought and behavior, its own “closed universe of
discourse.” More recently, Chris Hedges set forth the same argument, though more bluntly:
“The employment of organized violence means one must, in fact, abandon fixed and
established values.”20 Hedges goes further, referring specifically to American nuclear policy:
“Washington wants ‘more options’ with which to confront contingencies ‘immediate,
potential, and unexpected,’ for smaller but more effective mega-tonnages to be deployed.
This flirtation with weapons of mass destruction is a flirtation with our own obliteration, an
embrace again of Thanatos.”21 This embrace of mass extermination by means of apocalyptic
warfare has emerged as one of the most enduring legacies of World War II.
This legacy has been not only destructive in new and more horrific ways but self-destructive
within the framework of crude national interests. To this point, Henry Giroux writes:
Pearl Harbor enabled Americans to view themselves as the victims but then assume the
identity of perpetrators and become willfully blind to the United States’ own escalation of
violence and injustice. Employing both a poisonous racism and a weapon of mad violence
against the Japanese people, the US government imagined Japan as the ultimate enemy, and
then pursued tactics that blinded the American public to its own humanity and in doing so
became its own worst enemy by turning against its most cherished democratic principles.22
Giroux adds that, in the aftermath of Hiroshima, “embrace of the atomic age altered the
emerging nature of state power, gave rise to new forms of militarism, put American lives at
risk, created environmental hazards, produced an emergent surveillance state, furthered the
politics of state secrecy, and put into play a series of deadly diplomatic crises, reinforced by
the logic of brinkmanship and a belief in the totality of war.”23 There is currently no sign
that such frightening trends are likely to be reversed.
Global nuclear policy locks in the logic of arms control based
upon nuclear masculinist and orientalist assumptions that
make racist violence inevitable – it demarcates the Global
South as “irrational” and justifies conquest -- disarmament is
the only ethical way to challenge this logic

Biswas, 2016 [Shampa Biswas is Paul Garrett Professor of Political Science at Whitman
College. Finger on the Nuclear Button: Gender, Responsibility and Nuclear Custodianship,
SHAMPA BISWAS, AUG 24 2016, 1445 VIEWS, https://www.e-ir.info/2016/08/24/finger-on-the-
nuclear-button-gender-responsibility-and-nuclear-custodianship/. ]
The question of responsible custodianship of nuclear weapons has had a long history when
considering who should or should not have access to nuclear weapons on the international
stage. Indeed, assumptions about rational versus emotional fingers on the nuclear button are
in a sense embedded within the nuclear non-proliferation regime. One can begin with the
shining star of this regime – the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – whose primary
purpose is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons beyond a small club of states that
had developed and tested a weapon before 1967. That leaves five states – US, Russia, UK,
France, and China – not coincidentally the veto-wielding permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council, as the only legitimate custodians of nuclear weapons.[5] Much has
been made about Article VI of that treaty that urges (but does not require) this exclusive
nuclear club to work towards disarmament, but it is clear that none of the five nuclear
weapons states has shown any inclination to eliminate their stockpiles. Rather, each of them
considers nuclear weapons an integral aspect of their strategic doctrines. Together they
possess over 16,000 nuclear weapons, of which US and Russian stockpiles account for 93
percent. Indeed, occasional gestures toward disarmament that appear to emerge from
powerful nuclear states like the US eventually get pushed aside toward an argument for
retaining custody of nuclear weapons. In fact, in that other nuclear triad of “disarmament,
arms control, and nonproliferation”, US policy has entirely ignored disarmament, has put
some efforts toward arms control[6], and has focused the bulk of its efforts on non-
proliferation.[7] Disarmament, in other words, is a goal always deferred in favor of an
argument for making sure that the right fingers are on the nuclear button.
Let me provide two examples. President Obama’s lofty words that dreamed aloud of a world
without nuclear weapons in a famous speech delivered at Prague early in his career were
followed shortly after by a trillion-dollars investment in a ten-year modernization of the US
nuclear weapons cache. If one were to make any predictions on the basis of Hillary Clinton’s
foreign policy positions and record, arguably more militaristic than Obama, in a context in
which she is being depicted as an heir to the Obama legacy, there is little cause to be
optimistic about the possibility of US nuclear disarmament under a Clinton presidency. In a
similar vein, the “gang of four” – a group of former politicians and policy makers who were at
one times fierce defenders of nuclear weapons and have now emerged as an unconventional
group of disarmament activists – made a surprisingly strong statement arguing for universal
nuclear disarmament, only to walk it back in due course to reiterate the need for the US to
maintain its deterrent capacity.[8] Why can’t the “nuclear five” ever get rid of their
weapons? What presumptions about rationality and irrationality as it exists in the world end
up servicing an argument for continued US fingers on the nuclear button?
“Nuclear Orientalism” is the term that Hugh Gusterson uses to describe the widely shared
perception of third world or non-Western nuclear irrationality vis-à-vis presumptions of the
safe and reliable possession of nuclear weapons by Western nuclear democracies (Gusterson,
1999). Gusterson points to the pervasiveness of these characterizations in media coverage and
respected journals, as well as amongst politicians, policy makers, and even nuclear scientists
– despite all the evidence of safety mishaps and near-accidents among existing nuclear
weapons states (Gusterson, 1999). In many such accounts, a feminized third world given over
to impulse and passion that cannot be trusted to exercise restraint stands against a (male)
West thoroughly in charge and in control.[9] A different kind of patriarchal discourse has
attributed the possession of nuclear weapons themselves as potent signs of masculine virility,
marking the boundaries of a powerful self from weak, feminine others (Cohn, 1987, 1993).[10]
This sort of emotional attachment to nuclear weapons may, in part, explain why nuclear
disarmament is so hard to put into practice. In other words, gendered assumptions thoroughly
suffuse nuclear discourse – and the custodianship of nuclear weapons has produced both a
kind of masculinist nationalism that generates a deep investment in their retention by
existing nuclear weapons and also claims about paternalist guardianship by responsible
custodians that keeps such weapons exclusive.
What is important to point out here is that anxieties about nuclear custodianship in the hands
of non-Westerners deflects attention from the belligerent foreign policies and practices of
powerful nuclear states, sometimes in direct response to proliferation concerns. Indeed, a
group of scholars and commentators have explicitly called on the US to not just retain but
also fortify its nuclear weapons arsenals to keep at bay the unpredictable, inscrutable and
potentially undeterrable stalwarts and rogues of “the second nuclear age. For such thinkers,
the functioning of deterrence requires the sort of enlightened Western thinking utterly
lacking among unenlightened non-Western states. (Payne, 1996; Bracken, 2012). This, then,
become the basis for an argument for not just for keeping US fingers on the nuclear button,
but for a far more aggressive policy to seek nuclear primacy, urging the Obama administration
to invest in useable nuclear weapons (Liber and Press 2006, 2009, 2011) In the end, it appears
that in a world where (gendered) assumptions about non-Western irrationality and
unpredictability run so deep, the case for US/Western nuclear weapons possession will always
remain compelling, and disarmament can forever be postponed.
But how might US custodianship of nuclear weapons look from the more feminized parts of
the world? Thus, for instance, those who have been on the short end of US interventionism in
Iraq or Libya recently may not feel particularly comforted by US custody of nuclear weapons,
whether the finger on that button be that of Trump or Clinton. Perhaps Iran’s desire for
nuclear weapons was not just an emotional, prideful response to its declining global status as
argued in some quarters, but made rational sense when considered from a realist geostrategic
perspective that would see its security needs as a response to its encirclement by US military
presence all around its borders. From the perspective of non-nuclear weapons states who are
not allies or friends of the mighty US or fans of its muscular foreign policy, the choice
between an impulsive male Presidential candidate who is arguing for a more nativist, insular
approach to foreign policy and a rational, experienced female Presidential candidate with a
record of military interventionism may not seem like much of a choice at all.
In other words, what is occluded by a discourse of fear about the nuclear irrationality of third
world or non-Western states is a scrutiny of the alleged “rationality” of the legitimate
custodians of nuclear weapons, and especially the US. On what basis should we trust the
rational restraint of the only country in the world to have ever used an atomic weapon, that
continues to be an aggressive and interventionist global power with the most expansive string
of military bases around the world, that spends more on its military than the next twenty
countries in the world, and who, disarmament rhetoric aside, continues to possess 4,670
nuclear warheads, far in excess of anything that it needs as a credible deterrent force against
any power in the world?[11] If temperament wasn’t our barometer for responding to the
question of who should have his or her finger on the nuclear button, perhaps we can start
asking more pointed questions about whether and how much access to nuclear weapons any
US president should have. I would like to raise three such questions here:
Rather than focus on the madness of a political aspirant for President, we might be better
served by asking how mad it is that the leader of an aggressive state with such enormous
killing power has no effective checks on the use of nuclear weapons. That the US President
can launch a nuclear attack unilaterally, whether to attack or retaliate, without any legal
requirement to check with Congress or even the State Department is an issue that needs
vigorous public discussion.
Rather than evince shock at Donald Trump’s questions about why the US cannot use nuclear
weapons, perhaps it may be useful to discuss why the US, unlike some other nuclear weapons
states, refuses to adopt a “no first-use” policy. Some have urged President Obama to adopt
such a policy before he departs from office in a few months.
Rather than rest assured that a calm and collected Hillary Clinton has her finger on the
nuclear button, perhaps we need to ask why the US has so many nuclear weapons in the first
place, many on hair-trigger alert, and how much damage, in human lives and resources,
continues to be wrought just from that possession. The dangers of nuclear weapons lie not
just in their possible future use, but also in their enormous opportunity costs in the present
and the toxicity their production and maintenance discharges in the bodies of workers and the
environments of communities that house nuclear projects far into the future (Masco, 2006;
Hecht, 2012; Krupar, 2013).
In many ways, a focus on temperament is a distraction from the really important policy issues
that pertain to the US nuclear weapons program – issues on which the Presidential candidates
have had very little of substance to say. Unfortunately, the small window to discuss such
issues that appeared to have opened as a result of Clinton’s convention speech and some of
Trump’s outrageous comments was a truly missed opportunity to open up a serious debate
about the role of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War world, the ethics of maintaining such a
lethal force with long term toxic consequences, and the possibilities for nuclear disarmament
in such a world. Fortunately, there is much we can learn from feminist theory in asking these
kinds of more serious and consequential questions (Cohn and Ruddick, 2004).
Conclusion
There is considerable reason to worry about Donald Trump as US president with easy access to
one of the deadliest forces in the world. But neither should we rest assured with Hillary
Clinton’s fingers on the nuclear button. Indeed, if we set aside discussions of (gendered)
temperamental suitability to exercise nuclear control, we might be able to focus much more
on Hillary Clinton’s own foreign policy record, and even more so on the larger imperial history
of a United States that now stands in a post-Cold War world as a singularly powerful state
with a mighty war machine at its disposal. If we set aside our expectations for women leaders
to meet the masculinist standards of state leadership – whether that be demonstrating the
requisite level of aggression or proving the ability to exercise rationality – perhaps we may
begin to ask political candidates for public office much more substantive feminist questions
on the possibilities for disarmament, the conditions for peace, and the pathways to justice.

And, nuclear deterrence sanctions a permanent state of emergency

that shuts down deliberation and results in endless state violence
Lichterman 9—lawyer and the principal research analyst for the Western States Legal
Foundation (Andrew, Deterrence, Torture, Power, 7 April 2009,
http://disarmamentactivist.org/2009/04/07/deterrence-torture-power)

The headlines tell us that President Obama is committed to working towards a nuclear
weapons-free world. As is always the case in such matters, we would do well to look at the
fine print. We should not expect that the United States, or any other country, will give up its
nuclear weapons anytime soon. “This goal,” Obama tells us, “will not be reached quickly–
perhaps not in my lifetime.” Further, he says, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the United
States will maintain an “effective arsenal to deter any adversary.” In this, the justification
for nuclear weapons remains the same: the elites of every nuclear-armed country always have
insisted that nuclear weapons are only for “deterrence.” With enough nuclear weapons still in
existence to destroy civilization and to damage irreparably all life on earth, its time to take a
closer look at “deterrence.” In significant ways, the discourse of nuclear “deterrence”
resembles the discourse of torture. We can understand this parallel better if we substitute
the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture,” as the Bush regime attempted to
do (with some success, as manifested in widespread use of the term, often without criticism,
in the mainstream news media). The difference is that the success of those in power at
placing the notion of “deterrence” at the core of nuclear weapons discourse has been far
greater than the Bush regime’s effort to place the notion of “enhanced interrogation” at the
center of discourse about torture. This is likely so because torture has existed for a very long
time across a vast range of human experience, and hence is a well-known and relatively well-
understood horror–opaque only to those in populations that have not in living memory been on
the receiving end of it. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, still are a new part of the
collective human story, and were created and remain closeted still within powerful,
secretive, institutions. Hence their perceived character and meaning have been subject to
planful manipulation from the very moment of their creation. Elite efforts to define nuclear
weapons–and to limit permissible meanings we may give to them–have been so successful that
we have no easily available alternative to “deterrence.” We don’t even have our own word
for the permanent presence of nuclear weapons in our lives. So we must first solve the
equation: “enhanced interrogation techniques” is to “torture” as “deterrence” is to
“_______.” The horrors of nuclear weapons use are so great that it is hard to come up with an
appropriate phrase. Constant threat of genocide and ecocide? (too clinical, lacks the deep
reference in the concretely rooted collective imaginary of “torture”). “Hell on earth?” (Too
abstract and theological, also completely omits the element of human intention that is at the
core of whatever the permanent, constant brandishing of nuclear weapons by largely
unaccountable elites for decades on end really means). We can find our starting point,
perhaps, in clues that suggest my analogy is appropriate. The intention of the Bush regime’s
rhetorical move–calling torture “enhanced interrogation”–was to encapsulate the justification
for an inherently awful, degrading, and unjustifiable practice in its new name. If this “move”
is successful, then the purpose, the intention, behind torture will simply be assumed, rather
than discussed. The “purpose” of “enhanced interrogation” obviously is to “obtain
information.” Once this is accepted, the metaphorical battle is quite nearly won. And if the
“information” to be obtained can be portrayed as essential to “national security” (another
self-justifying phrase in great need of disaggregating), the battle is virtually over. So too with
“deterrence.” The word itself presumes not attack, but defense. It is implicitly passive,
unless one linguistically and politically disaggregates it to reveal its terrorist roots. And if one
accepts that the purpose of nuclear weapons is only to defend against attack, the purposes of
nuclear weapons (and the intentions of those who control them) are already assumed, and
assumed to be in the general interest of the nation-state that “possesses” the nuclear
weapons. The only question left is whether deterrence “works,” and actually makes a country
or the world (again assuming without scrutiny or debate that everyone has the same interests)
“safer.” Here too, if this rhetorical move is successful, the argument is nearly over, and
readily subject to pacification (another neologism whose real meaning is its opposite) via
traditional rhetorical moves and tools of the powerful: deployment of legions of experts
claiming privileged access to knowledges too complex and obscure for ordinary folk to
understand and to secret “information,” and if necessary attacks on the “patriotism” of any
who nonetheless persist in raising questions. There are other parallels between the discourses
of torture and constant- nuclear-weapons-threat (my clunky temporary stand-in for
“deterrence”). Both abound with–and place at the center of popular discourse justifying these
practices–empirically unlikely, even fantastic, narratives of existential threat, and protection
against it by selfless (if secretive) public servants (yet another self-justifying phrase). For
torture, there is the captured terrorist who has hidden the ticking time bomb, for nuclear
weapons, there is the ever-present possibility of a bolt from the blue nuclear attack. And
today, these two narratives converge: the ticking time bomb is nuclear, and anyone who
would oppose our nuclear weapons with their own presumptively is a terrorist–and might give
them a bomb. Actual, everyday uses of torture and constant-nuclear-weapons-threat–to
intimidate and silence entire populations, to provide what American generals call the
ultimate ‘top cover’ backing world-wide wars of aggression to sustain a global empire–remain
largely unmentionable in a discourse where “reasonable” experts and politicians talk of
“enhanced interrogation” and “deterrence.” And even the central–and continuing–
confrontation among nuclear-armed states is misrepresented in an increasingly dangerous and
contradictory kind of circular reasoning unconsciously engaged in even by many advocates of
nuclear disarmament. The possibility of wars among the most powerful states–the kind of
wars that in modern times have been precipitated by the kind of broad, complex, economic
and political crisis that we face again today–are treated as extremely unlikely, largely
because most policy experts believe at some level that “deterrence works.” And yet we have
not faced a moment in which the fundamental drivers of conflict among the most powerful
states have been present–competition over key resources, intensifying political tension within
states over wealth distribution, and general collapse of a prevailing “normal” order of
international economic and political relationships–since before the dawn of the nuclear age.
Wars among “great powers” are presumed to be largely obsolete–but this assumption is due in
large part to a belief in deterrence rooted in the particular geopolitical conditions and
experience of a Cold War nuclear confrontation rooted largely in ideology and the existence
of the weapons themselves. The dangers presented by thousands of nuclear weapons in the
hands of “great powers” thus are implicitly discounted, and most in the “arms control and
disarmament community” remain comfortable talking about plans for nuclear disarmament in
which truly meaningful progress–reduction to global nuclear weapons numbers below
civilization-destroying numbers–is largely aspirational, a hazy distant goal many years, or even
decades, in the future. The result is that dominant opinion among experts and political
leaders generates policy debate that viewed with even a smidgen of historical perspective
appears increasingly absurd–and absurdly dangerous. President Obama’s White House web site
tells us that “the gravest danger to the American people is the threat of a terrorist attack
with a nuclear weapon and the spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous regimes.” White
House Web Site, “The Agenda: Foreign Policy,” accessed March 25, 2009. In this view, nuclear
weapons that don’t yet exist are more dangerous then the thousands that already are in the
hands of elites who today face growing threats to their hold on power–concrete social
conflicts that also are euphemized myriad ways, from “global instability” to “populist anger”
–unseen for a generation. The hand that controls nuclear weapons is no different from the
hand the tortures. The hood of the torturer and of those who threaten us all with death by
nuclear annihilation must be removed, their true faces revealed. The legal historian Robert
Cover wrote that “The torturer and victim do end up creating their own terrible ‘world,’ but
this world derives its meaning from being imposed upon the ashes of another. The logic of
that world is complete domination, though the objective may never be realized.” Robert
Cover, “Violence and the Word,” (1986) 95 Yale L.J. 1601,1603 The practice of constant-
nuclear-weapons-threat carries this logic to its existential, its apocalyptic, limit, a world in
which those who strive to wield absolute power impose their will by threatening to reduce
the world of all who stand in their way to literal, rather than metaphorical, ashes. This will to
absolute power is the abiding purpose of those who wield both torture and nuclear weapons.
Both torture and nuclear threat are intended to emphasize through terror that transcends all
reason that the victim–or potential victim–is utterly vulnerable, and that the hand that wields
the power of ultimate violence is not, is invulnerable, all powerful. The intention–and the
effect–is to sustain a world in which most are powerless but some hold great power, most are
poor but a few hold great wealth, most are vulnerable but a few can at least convince
themselves that for the duration of their time here on earth they are not. It is a story that
those who wield this power tell us is as old as human history–implying as well that it will be
with us always, that it is our inescapable fate. Insisting upon the eternal presence of
boundless violence in that way only obscures the immense scale and reach of the particular
horrors of our chosen modernity. “But even if things have always been so,” Theodor Adorno
observed, “although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in
India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror
nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its forms outdoes the old.” Adorno
concludes that “He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs
to cold-hearted contemplation but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference
between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without
end.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, E.F.N. Jephcott,
trans. (London: NLB, 1974) pp.234-235. Adorno wrote in the wake of a cataclysmic global war,
with the age of nuclear weapons just beginning, and a world of constant-nuclear-threat still
in the future. What has become clear is that humanity can not long survive a global order of
things in which “terror without end” lies at the center of power, with those who rule most of
us in most places still deploying limitless violence to keep things as they are. The conditions
for another global cataclysm are quickening. Our technologies have brought us to the point
where we can destroy ourselves and much of the chain of life that sustains us either quickly
with nuclear weapons, or slowly simply by staying on the course that those in power insist
upon, and insist on “defending” with a spectrum of violence that extends from the midnight
knock on the door through the torture chambers to the incineration of cities, lands, and
peoples. Even Martin Luther King’s call for “nonviolence or nonexistence” no longer is
enough, now it also must be democracy or nonexistence, a full and final recognition of our
collective vulnerability and our interdependence, one world, with every voice heard equally,
or none.

This genealogy unmasks the environmental and health

violence of non-proliferation regime
Joffe 01, director of the West Asia Environmental Security Project (AH Joffe, Disarmament
Diplomacy, February, http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd54/54joffe.htm)

This paper contends that the issue of the environmental consequences of producing weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) constitutes a significant lacuna in existing non-proliferation
regimes and security thinking. Remedying this omission will have important practical and
symbolic significance. In many sectors of the international community there is growing
realisation that 'security' can no longer be defined in primarily military or economic terms
which focus on the geopolitical entities of nation states, imperial structures, and ideological
divisions. Environmental degradation is a global phenomenon that affects the health of human
populations, local and regional economies, and the stability of nations. Transborder pollution,
resource depletion leading to ethnic or national conflict, and often migration, reductions in
health and life expectancy, and economic dependence on polluting, inefficient extractive or
manufacturing industries, are among the problems being confronted by societies around the
world. Environmental security is simultaneously a security and human rights issue.1
Important subsets of environmental security are the consequences of WMD production, and
military industries generally. The local and international impact of these industries is
particularly great, aside from the real or potential impact of their finished products. Obvious
examples are the radionuclides and chemicals involved in WMD, but beyond these lie a vast
range of precursor chemicals, as well as solvents, reactants, and other byproducts, solid
millings and tailings, gaseous emissions, and prosaic wastes such as used filters, gloves, and
photographic developing solutions. Other military industries involved in production of
conventional weapons produce an equally wide variety of wastes, as do 'formerly used
defence sites' (FUDS) which may be only marginally less toxic and persistent than WMD
production. Non-proliferation regimes have focussed almost exclusively on restricting or
reducing the products, that is, the weapons themselves, without taking into account the
consequences of production. Programmatic discussions of the future of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty have similar emphases.2 This reticence reflects the conventional structure of
institutionalised negotiations between state actors which regard the balance of power within
the international system as the overriding issue. Introducing environmental issues into non-
proliferation thinking has apparently been regarded as a distraction from core concerns.
Another explanation is that except for recent disarmament initiatives such as START process,
where specific technical guidelines are agreed upon, environmental consequences of WMD
production have been addressed by portions of the national security state partitioned from
those negotiating arms control treaties.3 The experience of first- and second-generation
proliferants, however, has shown that this compartmentalised perspective is shortsighted.
States around the world are being confronted with the need to clean up the consequences of
WMD production. Regardless of whether weapons were or are ultimately produced, the
environmental consequences persist and worsen for a wide spectrum of countries, ranging
from the major WMD powers, through threshold, undeclared, self-declared and thwarted WMD
states, to states which have voluntarily renounced WMD production, and even to those states
which considered but rejected a WMD option.4

Disarmament is critical to anti-colonial mobilization –

resistance to militant forms of white supremacy requires
continued international momentum toward the prohibition of
weapons
Intondi ‘18 (Vincent, Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Race,
Justice & Community Engagement, and Coordinator for History and Political Science at
Montgomery College in Takoma Park, “The Dream of Bandung and the UN Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY, pp. 1-4)
In December 1954, five newly independent Asian countries (Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia
and Pakistan) announced plans for a conference of African, Asian and Middle Eastern states.
On 19 April 1955, for the first time in history, 29 nations of Asia and Africa gathered in
Bandung, Indonesia, and declared that ‘freedom and peace are interdependent’. The Asian-
African Conference or the Bandung Conference, as the gathering became known, highlighted
the need to eliminate European colonialism, white supremacy and nuclear weapons
(Lieberman 2000, 138; Fraser 2003, 115; Castledine 2009, 51). Delegates at the Bandung
Conference declared that nuclear weapons threatened the human race and that disarmament
was imperative to save mankind from ‘wholesale destruction’. Nuclear disarmament was ‘an
absolute necessity for the preservation of peace’ and it was their ‘duty’ to bring about
nuclear disarmament. Delegates requested the United Nations and all concerned countries to
prohibit the production, testing and use of nuclear weapons as well as establish international
control to ensure this outcome (NAACP Papers 1955).
The Baltimore Afro-American reported that there was a real possibility the Conference could
be the birthplace of a workable and honourable plan for world peace: ‘Amid all the rattling of
nuclear weapons, if it [Bandung Conference] does no more than hold out a slim hope for this
greatest of all human desires, all mankind could rejoice and call it blessed’ (NAACP Papers
1955). Sixty-two years later that ‘slim-hope’ came to fruition, when 23 of the original 29
nations of the Bandung Conference joined approximately 100 other countries at the United
Nations to vote for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
It is no surprise that many of the states supporting the treaty have majority non-white
populations. Indeed, since 1945, states with majority non-white populations and individuals
throughout the African diaspora have actively advocated for nuclear disarmament, often
connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality and liberation movements
around the world. While this position is not monolithic, as China, North Korea, Pakistan and
India have all produced nuclear weapons, support for the TPNW keeps with the overall trend
when one considers the passage and ratification of the treaties of Tlatelolco (Treaty for the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean) and Pelindaba (African
Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty). This intervention will briefly examine the links between
race, colonialism and the nuclear ban treaty.
On 1 March 1954, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb, code-named ‘Bravo’, on the
north-western corner of Bikini atoll. A flash of blinding light illuminated the area as a fireball
of intense heat shot skyward at a rate of 300 miles an hour. Within minutes, an enormous
cloud filled with radioactive debris rose more than 20 miles and generated winds hundreds of
miles per hour. The gusts blasted the surrounding islands and stripped the branches and
coconuts from the trees. The explosion sent sand, coral, plant and sea life from Bikini’s reef
and the surrounding lagoon waters high into the air. A little over an hour after the explosion,
23 fishermen aboard the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru (‘Lucky Dragon No. 5ʹ)
watched in awe as radioactive dust began to fall on them. The men aboard the ship were
oblivious to the fact that the ash was fallout from the hydrogen bomb test. Shortly after, the
men’s skin began to itch as they vomited from the fallout. One man, Aikichi Kuboyama, died 6
months later. Three to four hours after the blast, the same ashy dust began to rain down onto
the 64 people on Rongelap atoll (located about 125 miles east of Bikini) and also onto the 18
people residing on Ailinginae atoll. The thermonuclear weapon test was about a thousand
times more powerful than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(Higuchi 2008, 334).
From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.
While it has been decades since the last nuclear test, research continues to illustrate the
horrific and long-lasting effects these tests have had on the land, residents and culture of the
Marshall Islands. Moreover, as Dan Zak (2015) writes, ‘[t]his is not something one gets over
quickly’. Analysing the suffering residents of the Marshall Islands have endured, it is no
wonder that in 2012, the Marshall Islands formally came out in support of the nuclear
weapons ban. Writing to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN),
Christopher Loeak, President of the Marshall Islands, declared (2012) that ‘the world should
never allow suffering and devastation resulting from nuclear testing to be visited upon the
human race, ever [...] the Republic of the Marshall Islands pledges its full support for this
important cause’.
The Marshall Islands are not alone. From nuclear testing on Native American lands to uranium
mining in the Congo, people of colour have continuously been the victim of environmental
racism and ‘nuclear colonialism’, which is why many African nations enthusiastically support
the TPNW.
In the summer of 1959, France announced plans to test a nuclear weapon in the Sahara.
Frightened and angered, many Africans saw the French test as another form of European
colonialism. Those who lived in Ghana feared that nuclear fallout would devastate their cocoa
industry, a vital source of national revenue. The independent states of Africa asked France to
cancel the test plans and the United Nations passed a resolution urging France to abandon the
test. France ignored the pleas and argued that unless other nuclear powers gave up their
weapons, it had to proceed (Daily Defender 1959a, 4; Daily Defender 1959b, 10; Daily
Defender 1958, 10).
A year earlier, Ghana hosted the Conference of Independent African States. It resolved that
‘nuclear testing should be suspended, means taken to reduce the arms race, and called for
African representation in international arms control agencies’ (Plummer 2013, 69). The next
year, Ghana established the Ghanaian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Ghana CND,
along with British and American activists, most notably the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin,
attempted multiple times to stop French nuclear test, even physically laying their bodies on
the line. However, in early 1960, France exploded several nuclear bombs in Africa (Anderson
1997, 219–20; Sutherland and Meyer 2000, 36–7; Carter 1977, 128; Taylor 1988, 161; Bennett
2003, 23).
After the French tests, Kwame Nkrumah, the revolutionary leader who had led Ghana’s fight
for independence and was Ghana’s first president, focused his energy on organising a special
All-African Conference to coordinate action against further nuclear tests and to develop
ongoing forms of peace activism in Africa. The Ghanaian Government planned the Conference
on Positive Action for Peace and Security in Africa, in Accra in April 1960. The meeting
brought together overseas peace groups with representatives of African governments,
liberation movements and union federations and drew prominent pacifists from around the
world (Willoughby 1960; Carter 1977, 140; Wittner 2007). Nkrumah declared that the threat
of nuclear weapons was of the utmost importance. The African leader reassured delegates in
his opening address that they had come to Accra ‘first to discuss and plan future action to
prevent further use of African soil as a testing ground for nuclear weapons’ (Allman 2008, 93–
4).
Ralph Abernathy, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.’s top aide in the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, joined with advocates of armed struggle such as Frantz Fanon to unanimously
applaud the activists who tried to stop the nuclear tests and urged further protests against
nuclear testing (Allman 2008, 93–4; Carter 1977, 140; Wittner 2007). In June, a week-long
assembly on disarmament convened in Accra. ‘The World Without the Bomb’ conference
included 130 participants from non-aligned countries and formed the Accra Assembly. Two
years later, Haile Selassie and Kwame Nkrumah openly objected to the Soviet Union’s plan to
test a nuclear weapon. In a message sent to Soviet ambassador A.V. Budakhov, Selassie
stated, ‘We have learned with dismay of the Soviet Union’s stated intention to explode a 50-
megaton bomb on October 31. We must express to your excellency our deep concern with the
potential consequences for those who find themselves in its path’. Nkrumah also expressed
‘deep concern’ over the plans and asked Nikita Khrushchev to reconsider (Daily Defender
1961, 8).
From nuclear weapons testing to uranium mining and from the actual use of nuclear weapons
to the mere threat of use, race, colonialism and nuclear weapons, all have been inextricably
linked since 1945. One could argue that these links have never been clearer. Indeed, as much
of the non-white world joins together to ban nuclear weapons, the United States and other
nuclear-armed states ignore, boycott and act as if this historic treaty will have no
consequences. However, one only needs to look at what happened to land mines, chemical
weapons and cluster munitions to predict what the future holds for these horrific weapons.
The passage of the TPNW has shown what is possible when nations and committed individuals
join together for peace, and while it did not abolish nuclear weapons, it has edged the world
a bit closer to the dream set at the Bandung Conference: a world without racism, colonialism
and nuclear weapons.

Disarmament demands generate other forms of resistance –

nukes undergird surveillance, but organized pressure on the
state has been empirically effective at reducing nuclear threats
– that a full rejection of reform or futurity ignores the
proximate violence of the status quo.
Brian Martin 12. Professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
“Reform - when is it worthwhile?” Anarchist Studies, Vol. 20, Iss. 2, 55-71.
Opposition to nuclear weapons
If war is the health of the state, nuclear weapons are the health of state terror: the very
threat of nuclear attack is a type of state terrorism.23 Nuclear weapons were at the core of
the cold war. Leaders of dominant nuclear states still use the alleged nuclear threat from
some enemy state - Iraq, Iran, and others - as justification for their own arsenals and for
repressive policies including surveillance of the population and criminalisation of internal
dissent on national security.
Ever since the development of nuclear weapons, peace campaigners have opposed them.
There have been two major mobilisations against nuclear weapons, the first in the late 1950s
and early 1960s and the second in the early 1980s. At other times the issue has not had the
same prominence, yet many campaigners have continued efforts against the nuclear threat.
Lawrence Wittner, in his comprehensive study of anti-nuclear-weapons campaigning,24 argues
that movements have had a crucial impact on governments: when there is little opposition,
states proceed with greater nuclear deployment, whereas public protest has restrained
government leaders. To the extent that antibomb campaigning has prevented nuclear war, or
reduced the risk, it has made a vital contribution to struggles for a better world, because
nuclear war, as well as causing massive devastation to humans and the environment, could
also usher in a much more repressive world order.25 The terrorist attacks on 9/1 1 provided
the pretext for a massive expansion of the security state; a nuclear attack, even if relatively
limited, would offer a far stronger rationale.
One limitation of anti-bomb campaigning is that it targets just one manifestation of the
military system, namely a particular type of weapon. Getting rid of nuclear weapons would be
a tremendous benefit to the world, but it would not remove the threat of war. Indeed, it
could be argued that as long as military systems exist - with their deployment of science and
technology for warfare - then nuclear weapons, or some other advanced method of
destruction and killing, will remain as a threat. It is worth remembering that far more people
were killed through aerial bombing with conventional explosives in World War II than from the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In this context, anti-bomb campaigning is best seen not solely in terms of its immediate goal
of getting rid of nuclear weapons, but more deeply as a means for mobilising support for
other demands to restrain and shrink military systems. Campaigning against nuclear weapons
is valuable on its own if it reduces the risk of nuclear war; depending on the style and
orientation of the campaigning, such campaigning may or may not help move towards
alternatives to military systems.
Two aspects of campaigning are relevant. One is the nature of demands. Much anti-bomb
campaigning is oriented to governments, in the form of appeals for controlling or reducing
arsenals. The underlying assumption is that governments can provide a solution to the
weapons threat. Of course, governments are the cause of the threat in the first place and will
only act under pressure. The second aspect of campaigning is getting people involved in
actions that question and challenge government policy - being out in the streets in a mass
rally changes people's understandings of themselves and the world, even if their nominal
demand for change is limited.
Conscription Conscription serves the state, especially in times of war, by ensuring a large pool
of soldiers and by instilling military discipline. Accordingly, antiwar activists have long
campaigned against conscription. Resistance to conscription, as well as keeping men (and, in
some places, women) out of the military, is potent symbolically, showing it is possible to
resist state agendas. Refusal to serve in armies is often linked to wider popular resistance to
wars, for example during the US government's war in Indochina.26 As populations become
more affluent, conscription becomes more difficult for governments to sustain, leading to a
gradual shift to volunteer armies.27 Many so-called volunteers are those who have few other
career options due to class, ethnicity or education: the volunteers can be considered
economic conscripts. In countries where conscription continues, anti-conscription efforts play
a crucial role in challenging the power of the military and the state. Where conscription has
been abolished, there is another frontier: opposing recruitment and empowering soldiers to
challenge military authority. The key point here is that where conscription exists, challenging
it is a challenge to the state, but when conscription has been abolished, new sorts of
campaigns are needed to challenge the military. Facets of reform In summary, in assessing
campaigns against military systems in relation to the longterm goal of a world without state
military forces, several factors should be considered. * Reforms may cither streamline the
military or question its existence. * Reform efforts that involve participation in campaigning
can contribute to greater questioning and action down the track. * The military may or may
not be able to adapt to the reform. ELECTORAL POLITICS The usual perspective is that
'democracy' means a system of voting for representatives who perform the decision-making
functions of government. Democracy in this sense is seen by its supporters as clearly superior
to autocracy; many see it as the ideal or best possible form of government. Anarchists, on the
other hand, advocate a more participatory form of democracy, with governments and
bureaucracies being replaced by self-management in which people collectively make
decisions about their lives. The most common anarchist model involves delegates and
federations: at the level of small organisations, for example a workplace or local community,
people make decisions in an open forum; decisions at higher levels are made by recallable
delegates elected from the lower levels. There are some other self-management models, such
as forms of village self-government in India and Sri Lanka called sarvodaya,28 and a system
involving random selection of community members for decision-making groups dealing with
specific tasks, called demarchy.29 Compared to these participatory alternatives, the standard
system in most countries is better described as representative government. 'Democracy' is a
misleading label because it implies rule by the people; representative government involves
rule by elected representatives.30 For those who support forms of self-management as
alternatives to representative government, participating in conventional electoral politics is
working within the system. Gorz emphasises that non-reformist reforms involve a struggle
that is wider than parliament and political parties.31 Some of the modes of participation
strengthen the system whereas others challenge it and help lay the basis for alternatives. I
consider here three arenas for activity: advocating different policies, running for office, and
voting. Pressure group politics Citizens regularly appeal to and campaign for governments to
adopt their preferred policies. This includes individuals writing letters to politicians and
advocacy groups holding public meetings, rallies and blockades. All sorts of issues can be
involved, from disability provisions to nanotechnology policy. So routine is this sort of
pressure group politics that its absence is a reliable indication of autocracy. The question is,
to what extent does this sort of activity contribute to moving from electoral politics to a
more participatory political system? A pessimistic perspective would be that any sort of
activity designed to pressure the government simply reinforces the usual assumption that
government is essential to society, indeed that government is the solution to social problems,
even when government is part of the problem. But this one-dimensional assessment ignores
the potential for empowerment by attempting to participate in policy matters. At an
elementary level, participating in public debates gives experience in engagement. It often
reflects dissatisfaction with elements of the status quo and involves a heightened expectation
of change and improvement. On some issues and occasions, governments meet expectations,
but in many cases they do not. Some individuals may be demoralised and withdraw, others
may increase their efforts and yet others may become disillusioned with the system and start
thinking about alternatives. Another important factor is experiences in campaigning groups.
Some policyreform groups are structured hierarchically, rather like government itself. But
others are more participatory, especially collectives within social movements. In summary,
pressure group politics operates within the political system - typically representative
government - and thus may reinforce assumptions about the naturalness of the system. On the
other hand, the methods by which pressure groups operate can provide experiences and
develop skills that in some cases can be used to challenge the system. Running for office
Becoming a candidate in an election is certainly to be part of the system of electoral politics.
Is this automatically a sell-out in relation to changing the system? Not necessarily. Some
candidates and parties at the local level use campaigns as processes of mobilisation. It is also
possible to use a campaign to encourage people to question conventional politics, for example
by campaigning on behalf of a satirically named party such as the Abolish Political Parties
Party. There is always a possibility - or a risk - of being elected. Can an elected
representative contribute to bringing about participatory alternatives to electoral politics? In
principle, this is possible. Elected officials can take the initiative to undertake community
consultations, listening posts, consensus forums, citizens' juries and a host of other
participatory processes that empower citizens.32 This occurs, but only rarely. Another
possibility is for an elected official to serve as a resource base for community activists,
providing facilities for gathering information, photocopying, making posters and holding
meetings. However, even when elected officials promote and support greater participation,
there can be a tension with such efforts serving as channels for developing electoral support.
In summary, running for office and becoming an elected official almost always reinforce the
system of electoral politics, but it is possible to use these processes to promote greater
participation and even to stimulate alternatives. However, this happens only occasionally: the
electoral arena contains strong incentives to work within the system rather than transform it.
Voting Anarchists have long argued about whether to vote, at least in some elections.33
Those opposed to voting say that it reinforces the system of electoral rule, giving it
legitimacy. Those who support voting often accept this point but say that, on some occasions,
the outcome of the election is so important - for example, preventing the election of a
dictatorial candidate - that voting is better than abstaining. In most countries, voting is
voluntary. Those who refuse to vote as a matter of principle are usually small in number
compared to those who don't vote because they don't care enough. In these circumstances,
refusing to vote has minimal political impact. On the other hand, some anarchists actively
campaign against voting: they use elections as an opportunity to raise questions about the
system of electoral politics. So the question is less about whether to vote and more about
whether to campaign against voting and, more generally, to promote questioning of
representative government. In a few countries such as Australia and Brazil, voting is
compulsory; to be more precise, it is compulsory to attend a polling station and cast a ballot.
Refusing to do this is a type of civil disobedience and can be used as a way of challenging the
system of voting.34 The main limitation of the do-not-vote position is that it does litde to
create awareness of participatory alternatives to electoral politics. How to link anti-voting
efforts with promoting direct democracy needs more attention. For anarchists who
participate in the electoral process, supporting progressive candidates and positions, one
disadvantage is reinforcing the legitimacy of the system. Another is burnout by campaigners:
so much effort is put into getting elected that afterwards there is reduced energy for ongoing
activity, including pressure group efforts to hold politicians accountable. When preferred
candidates lose, this is disheartening; when they win, many campaigners feel the job is over,
although it has long been observed that progressive governments often disappoint the people's
movements that helped get them elected.35 The implication is that electoral campaigning, to
be more effective in the long run and to help lay the foundation for alternatives, needs to
mesh with ongoing campaigns. It needs to be more about issues and methods than about
candidates. However, this is hard to achieve in the midst of the usual election- time focus on
the question of who will be elected. Facets of reform On the basis of this brief examination of
three efforts in relation to electoral politics, here are some key considerations relevant to
reform. * Campaigning and action groups are organised with greater or less participation,
giving differing degrees of experience in self-management. * Officials within the political
system can take steps towards alternatives, though very few do so. * Some efforts contribute
to questioning the system whereas others do not. CONCLUSION
Those who challenge the system and pursue radical alternatives sometimes make a simple
distinction between reform and revolution: as the saying goes, if you're not part of the
solution, you're part of the problem. In this dichotomous picture of social change, reform is
useless or worse, because it perpetuates or even strengthens the system that needs to be
replaced.
This picture denigrates nearly all efforts to make the world a better place. Going beyond the
reform-revolution dichotomy, André Gorz usefully distinguished between two types of reform,
reformist and non-reformist. Some types of reform, he argued, have the potential to build
greater capacity, commitment and momentum towards radical alternatives.

Voting aff deconstructs Eurocentric notions of “order” and “fairness”

to create a global culture of prosperity apart from colonialism.
Chung, 14: “Postcolonial Perspectives on Nuclear NonProliferation” University of Notre
Dame Australia, http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/ISSS%20Austin
%202014/Archive/253053b8-52cd-4251-8a5d-1dd0163cb460.pdf

Liberal ideology legitimates domination over the Global South. This can be observed via
liberal Western discourse on nuclear proliferation as it “legitimates the nuclear monopoly of
the recognised nuclear powers,” (Gusterson 1999, p. 115). Much like neorealism, rationality
and objectivity is arbitrarily assigned to the West, while the Global South or ‘Third World’ is
considered to be subjective, irrational, or even ‘rogue’ and therefore incapable of the
responsibility of a nuclear arsenal. The inherent Eurocentricism in liberal ideology directly
results in a “taken-for-granted politics that sides with the rulers, with the powerful, with the
imperialists, and not with the downtrodden, the weak, the colonised, or the post-colonised,”
(Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 344) For example, Iran has been demonised by the United States
since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when citizens of the Islamic Republic laid siege to the US
embassy compound in Tehran, and took fifty-two American hostages for 444 days (Zenko
2012). Their suspected nuclear weapons program and alleged sponsorship of terrorism have
deemed them a ‘rogue state’ (BBC 2001; Munoz 2012). US President Obama issued a warning
to Iran in a September 2012 speech to the UN General Assembly, stating unequivocally, “The
United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…It would
threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations and the stability of the global
economy,” (ABC News 2012). North Korea, an NPT non-signatory and nuclear state is
perceived to pursue “alien objectives which are normative anathema to the rest of the
‘civilised’ international system,” leading to the assumption that the North Korean state is
acting fundamentally outside the norms of the global community, and is therefore clearly a
“rogue state” (Smith 2000, p. 115). Nicholas Eberstadt wrote that, “the North Korean regime
is the North Korean nuclear problem,” (Smith 2000, p. 118). Page 9 of 12 These Eurocentric
and racist assumptions in liberal IR theory have led to obvious and problematic ‘double
standards’ and inequities in the treatment of non-Western states, exacerbated by the existing
Northern dominated nuclear non-proliferation regime. While Iran has suffered debilitating
economic sanctions over suspicions of an unconfirmed clandestine nuclear weapons program,
Israel, one of only four NPT non-signatories, and the sole state in the Middle East that
actually possesses nuclear weapons, has remained free from any meaningful, significant, or
even symbolic international oversight (Steinbach 2011, p. 34). Warren Kozak (2012)
epitomises the unashamed and blatant Eurocentricism of the liberal Western perspective on
the issue of nuclear proliferation: “Few people lost a wink of sleep over the American nuclear
monopoly in the 1940sand when the Saudis or Syrians or Egyptians have turned off their lights
over the past half-century, the last worry on their minds has been being blown to bits by an
Israeli nuclear bomb…the sound mind understands that [Israel], the only stable democracy in
the Middle East, is also one of its few rational actors.” Conclusion As remarked by E. H. Carr
in 1977, “[t]he study of international relations in English speaking countries is simply a study
of the best way to run the world from positions of strength,” (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 349).
I find the Eurocentric nature of international relations, institutions, treaties, and the elitism
of the nuclear non-proliferation regime to be an unjustifiable concentration of power in the
hands of a very few at the expense of the vast majority of the world. The current nuclear
non-proliferation regime merely serves to reinforce and perpetuate logics of colonial violence
and inequality. In my opinion, as per the India’s nuclear policy, the only fair and just security
solution is the following: “in a world of nuclear proliferation lies either in global disarmament
or in the exercise of the principle of equal and legitimate security for all,” (Singh 1998, p.
41). There are those who believe that a world free of all nuclear weapons presents one of the
greatest security achievements, including President Ronald Reagan who suggested to Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 that the United States and the Soviet Union mutually
commit to a nuclear-weapon free world (Blechman & Bollfrass 2008, p. 569). The famous
‘Gang of Four’, consisting of George P. Schultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam
Nunn, are all dedicated to a world free of nuclear weapons, and believe that there are
pragmatic and feasible measures of achieving security for all, without the need for nuclear
weapons of enormous and inhumane destructive power (Daadler and Lodal 2008; Schultz et al.
2007). Their vision has been endorsed by “no less than two-thirds of all living former
secretaries of state, former secretaries of defense, and former national security advisers,”
(Daadler & Lodal 2008, p. 81). There is an ideal attraction to the ‘logic of zero’ in that it
fulfils our global need for security without compromising on equality for all nations. In the
words of Daadler & Lodal (2008, p. 95): Page 10 of 12 “It will take a real commitment, at the
highest levels beginning with the United States, to turn the logic of zero into a practical
reality. Many obstacles remain along this path, but it is important that Washington take the
lead in setting out on that journey.” Ronald Reagan described nuclear weapons as, “totally
irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth
and civilisation,” (Schultz et al. 2007, p. 2). If our collective civilisation has truly reached a
stage of enlightenment and cosmopolitanism, then surely there must be a way to resolve
regional and global confrontations between states, without the need for nuclear weapons.
Human civilisation need not stand idly by and allow the needs of the many to be swept aside
by the needs of the few. Global nuclear disarmament is the only foreseeable future where we
can achieve a peaceful and secure world, free of the shackles of colonial dominance and
inequality.