1AC

1AC
Modernity is structured by a telos of limitless acceleration, as the United States has
responded to inevitable failures in governance by seeking to harness war machine
speed on behalf of the state. That project is terminally doomed to fail, because no
system of control can ever hope to achieve total perfection. But the attempt
inexorably drives thoughtless acceleration, as the state ceaselessly pursues the ability
to employ total force at any point at any time.
Glezos’13 |Simon Glezos is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of
Victoria, in Victoria, BC, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in political theory and international relations from The Johns
Hopkins University. “The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world” Routledge, 2012.
Page 76-81. Footnote 29 included in curly braces. Print. Edited for ableist language|KZaidi

Just as nomads invent the war-machine, ‘the war machine invents speed’ (354). Here we are transitioning to speed in the
specific sense which we developed in Chapter 1, as defined by the coming of the new. Its temporal axis
is marked by futurity and its spatial axis by exteriority. The war-machine embodies these principles.
Temporally, the war-machine always seeks to spring up unexpectedly, serving as an irruption of the
new.13 It travels in secrecy. Indeed, it invents secrecy, thus betraying and overturning the projected order of
events (354). This provides us with an important insight into Clausewitz’s fog of war. According to Virilio (and the proponents
of the RMA), the fog of war is a technical problem, the result of the physical occultation of the
battlespace, or inefficient lines of communication. Deleuze’s linking of speed and futurity to the war-
machine shows that the ‘twilight’ in which war takes place is the result of real uncertainty, of the in-
principle unpredictability of the battle. The ‘fog of war’ is thus the fog of the New; the opacity of
futurity to our knowing gaze. There is an ineradicable blindness [obliviousness] in battle, because there is
an ineradicable blindness [obliviousness] in time (which the speed of battle brings out in explicit and
violent ways).

In addition to this temporal element of the war-machine ‘[i]t

is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war
machine as itself a pure form of exteriority’ (354). The nomadic war-machine forms, and populates, a
smooth space of travel. This is inherent in the very idea of nomadism. The nomad moves through space without
trying to possess or enclose it. As we saw, this is the spatial logic of speed:

Speed and absolute movement are not without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the
smooth space that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed the war machine, it was by
inventing absolute speed, by being ‘synonymous’ with speed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 386)

The war-machine’s invention of, and reliance on, speed goes against the nature of the state apparatus.
Where the state desires order and control, war brings a chaos and unpredictability. Deleuze and Guattari note
that war brings ‘a furor to bear against sovereignty’ (352). To this we should add, an exteriority against an interiority, and a
futurity against a present. Sun Tzu is right. Speed is ‘the essence of war’. But not just insofar as military
adversaries are always trying to surpass each other’s velocities. Rather, the practice of war requires a
particular way of moving, a particular way of being in the world, embodied in the idea of speed which we
developed in Chapter 1. To be good at war, one must learn to move at speed, to be comfortable with an
uncertain future and with an open geometry, things which unsettle the state-form.14
The State recognizes the utility and power of speed and the war-machine. It therefore tries to acquire
both, but in a way that is consonant with its interiorizing principles of functioning: Gravity, gravitas, such is the
essence of the State. It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement,
even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become
the relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’ going from one point to another in a striated space . In
this sense, the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate
speed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 386) The state apparatus attempts to transform the speed of the war-
machine, and the power and violence which are its product, into a movement and a velocity, into a
relative speed (the offence secondary to the defence, the attack secondary to the fortress or the trench ).
It seeks to organize and discipline the unpredictable excesses of the war-machine , while retaining the element
of surprise it can produce in facing an opponent. Thus we frequently see states rejecting new accelerative technologies, and
returning to older more territorial forms of warfare (the lead-up to World War II provides a wealth of such examples, with the French reliance
on the Maginot line for protection, and the British military’s rejection of the initial components of Blitzkrieg developed at Salisbury Plain).

Deleuze and Guattari note that, while ‘the war machine invents speed and secrecy … there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy
that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily’ (354). We
might, then, derive value from a distinction between two
modalities of speed: a war-machine-speed and a state-speed.15 State-speed can be (relatively) safely
incorporated into the state apparatus’ organizing project, whereas war-machine-speed poses a threat
to its logics. However, as we saw earlier, the unpredictability of speed is its tendential essence. In the attempt to
use it, the state-form runs the risk of either (1) bending it too much to the will of the state and thus
draining it of the power it was supposed to provide or (2) leaving it too unpredictable, threatening the
order which is at the heart of the state apparatus. Indeed, in the long run, all states face one or
another of these possibilities when they appropriate the war-machine.

From this account of the functioning of the war-machine, we can see why it is not necessarily consonant
with the state apparatus, which is based around principles of interiority and enclosure. Thus, when the
state attempts to acquire a war-machine, it is not a linear evolution, as it is in the Virilian narrative. There is an
essential rupture and reconstitution of the war-machine:

The State does not appropriate the war machine without giving even it the form of relative movement :
this was the case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the
stumbling block and parry by which absolute vertical movement was broken. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 386)16

Though this marks the same point of transition which Virilio identifies – the production of the fortress as organization of space – for Virilio this
is the origination of war, the discovery which organizes primitive violence into modern war (Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 12). For Deleuze and
Guattari, this is a point of mutation, a change in the fundamental rules of the game. They agree with Virilio that the beginning of the state-form
of war is the introduction of the ‘brake’ of the fortress. However, this does not serve to organize violence into war, but rather marks a shift
from war-machine-speed to state-speed, organizing excessive speeds into velocities and making war a
calculation of relative velocity between armies. The fortress, and its interiorizing architecture, the
phalanx and its rectilinear geometry, Frederick the Great’s transformation of the mob of the army into
his clockwork military, Jomini’s development of scientific strategy, industrial war’s rationalization of
logistics; all are attempts to take the chaotic energy, the indiscipline of the war-machine, of the pack,
the horde, the raiding party, and make it useful to the state apparatuses. The state military apparatus is thus
a strange mutant or hybrid creature, a machine defined according to its speed, its futurity and exteriority, yet constrained and
degraded into an apparatus functioning according to a velocity, and hence a temporal and spatial interiority. This, says Deleuze, is one of the
reasons why the state is so leery of the military apparatus.17

The worldwide war-machine

The contemporary world is not organized wholly by the opposition between the state apparatus and the
war-machine, however. Against the interiority of the state, Deleuze and Guattari say we also see the emergence of ‘huge
worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large
measure of autonomy in relation to the State (for example, commercial organizations of the “multinational” type, or
industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.)’ (1987: 360). One
such ecumenical machine is the evolution of the state military apparatuses into what Deleuze and Guattari call a
‘worldwide war-
machine’ (421). We can begin to think of this worldwide war-machine in terms of its similarity to the
globalitarian state. It too arises when the military apparatus acquires hegemony over the state
apparatus:

This is the point at which Clausewitz’sformula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that politics is the
continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the order of the words as if they could be
spoken in either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the
State, having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes
charge of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 421)

From one perspective, the

worldwide war-machine is the re-emergence of the war-machine at the global
level, having passed through the state apparatus, and having gained a taste for enclosure and interiority.
From another, it is the totalization of the state-form, breaking free of its territorial specificity and recapitulating itself as a universal movement,
occupying a smooth space. Thus, on
the one hand, the worldwide war-machine begins to emerge ‘when and
where the state loses control of the institutions of war which it originally founded in order to ground its
sovereignty’ (Reid 2003: 82). On the other hand, the worldwide war-machine can, due to its continued
attachment to the state apparatus’ principles of enclosure and interiority, be considered as ‘within the
remit of the evolution of the state form’ (82).

There are twostages to this globalization and totalization of the state military apparatus. The first is from within a
particular territorial militarization of the state apparatus in the form of fascism; the state which ‘makes
war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421). Here the military
apparatus makes of itself a war-machine anew, and puts the state in its service, and in the service of
war. However, this is only an early stage of this process of the inversion of the state and military
apparatuses:

[T]he second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the
peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to
surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The
war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than objects or means
adapted to that machine. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421)

We can see the symmetry with Virilio’s globalitarian state, which too produces a global military state
which seeks to enclose and control the earth, through the production of a complete and perpetual state
of peace/terror.
This concept of a smooth space which seeks to ‘control or envelop’ might seem a little confusing or paradoxical, given that we have previously
discussed the smooth space of speed as the space of exteriority. However, we must remember that ‘smooth spaces are not in themselves
liberatory’ (500). A useful entryway into this idea of a controlling smooth space is through Deleuze’s work ‘Postscript on the Societies of
Control’. That essay details the decline of Foucault’s disciplinary society wherein power was based explicitly on the striation of space (Foucault
1995: 148). Deleuze argues that the static
structures of the table, grid and mould are being replaced by the more
dynamic and mobile – though by no means less controlling – formations of the ‘modulation’ and the
‘code’ (Deleuze 1992: 4–5). Just like Virilio’s globalitarian state, which comes about through the shift from defence to offence, and from
fortress to attack, the worldwide war-machine comes about by deterritorializing the state military apparatus,
making it a sort of ‘fleet-in-being’ capable of springing up at any point on the globe, rather than being
tied to national boundaries and to the black holes of sovereign power.

If we return to our discussion of the RMA,

we can see how it provides a technical blueprint for the worldwide war-
machine. The advocates of the RMA want to move away from conceiving of armed forces as large-scale, industrial bodies, organized at
divisional levels and focused on territorial holdings, in favour of a focus on special forces organizations, small, flexible and precise war parties,
suggesting a kind of re-emergence of the pack or band at the local or tactical level, thus implying the further hegemony of the war-machine
over the military apparatus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 352). RMA theorists explicitly look to the speed, secrecy and rhizomatic organization of
the nomadic tribe for inspiration.18 Indeed, in some cases, supporters of the RMA in the military have been known to attempt to use the
theories of Deleuze and Guattari on the war-machine to inform their tactical and strategic operations (Weizman 2007). This
use of local
packs and bands is then bolstered by the use of aerial bombardment, directed with exacting precision by
an optical network of satellites, turning the whole earth into a smooth, targetable space. The RMA then
produces a military apparatus capable of springing up and striking ‘at any point’. The dream of the
RMA is thus a dream of the complete and total integration of the war-machine into the state
apparatus. They imagine a rapidly approaching time when the speed, secrecy and rhizomatic mode of
organization of the war-machine are at the beck and call of the state apparatus, directed by its vision
and working towards its plans for organization, control and enclosure.

It is because of this aim to organize and control that we should not think of the worldwide war-machine
simply as a nomad war-machine operating at a new scale. The nomad war-machine’s travel through the
state apparatus changes it in fundamental ways. Its attachment to the principles of interiority and
discipline put fundamental limitations on its abilities (as well as providing it with avenues for unparalleled force). For
example, the worldwide war-machine can never fully recapture war-machine-speed, it can only push state-
speed to its extreme. Why should I say this, when the ability to spring up at any point is exactly what defined the speed of the nomadic
war-machine? Because the speed of the nomadic war-machine is tied to its unexpectedness, its secrecy, the way in
which it comes from without (exteriority). The world-wide war-machine, by contrast, is able to spring up at any
point because its velocity makes it potentially omnipresent. It is, in fact stationary, making the world move around it (a
‘polar inertia’ [Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 64]). It does not come from without, as the nomad war-machine does, because it is always already
‘there’. It freezes the globe in the velocity of its movement, just as it does in the omniscience of its sight. And of this, it makes no secret. It is its
proudest accomplishment, and much of its control comes from trumpeting this claim.

Now, the instantiation of the worldwide war-machine in a particular location may produce the surprise
and newness which we associate with speed. But this is no contradiction, since speed and velocity are
intertwined phenomena, and state-speed does partake of some of the surprise and newness of speed in
its ‘pure’ form. But this surprise and newness, this speed, are only ever relative. The worldwide war-machine seeks
control, and hence whatever exteriority and futurity it creates are always in the service of, and
reterritorialized on, a plane of interiority and an extended present.
Indeed, as an element which seeks to escape its interiorizing drive, the nomad war-machine is as opposed to the worldwide war-machine as it is
to the state apparatus. This might give us some insight into why it is that all of the RMA’s anti-Clausewitzian techniques are also anti-war-
machine techniques. Their attempt to cut through the fog of war is also the attempt to break the secrecy of
the war-machine, to know its plans and its future. The attempt to overcome friction and produce
flexible and mobile forces is an attempt to match the speed of the war-machine, to be able to meet it in
its own smooth space. When discussing the worldwide war-machine, Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘we have seen it put its
counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice’ (1987: 422).
The only difference now is that proponents of the RMA believe that they have developed technologies that are
so sophisticated they cannot be caught by surprise even once. But then, so have so many others.
The smooth space of the worldwide war-machine is not just extensive (i.e. the overcoming of state boundaries) but also
intensive. It insinuates the practices of war into all elements of the social and political assemblage. It
involves a progressive militarization of the state apparatus, the transition of the state’s mechanisms of discipline (for example
the police or prisons [418]) into extensions of the military apparatus’ mechanisms of control .19 It also means an

intensification of the concept of war, of what war may be used for. When the state apparatus sought to acquire the war-
machine, it was to act only in the breach, in the time of emergency, under the watchful eye of sovereignty. Deleuze and Guattari, concurring with Virilio, see the

coming of the worldwide war-machine as also the coming of the permanent state of emergency, the
movement beyond particular times of war, against particular enemies, to a generalized state of
peace/war:

We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have
seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or
instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of
enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the ‘unspecified enemy’. ( Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 422)

That teleology is fundamental to the nuclear age. First came the atomic bomb in 1945,
equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Then came the hydrogen bomb in 1952, equivalent
to 10 million tons of TNT. Now, we are engaged in pursuit of ever-more-immediate
delivery systems; warheads ever-more-usable for tactical warfighting; and systems
ever-more-capable of a decapitating first-strike. This attempt to violently impose total
territorialization can only end one way: extinction.
Glezos’13 |Simon Glezos is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of
Victoria, in Victoria, BC, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in political theory and international relations from The Johns
Hopkins University. “The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world” Routledge, 2012.
Page 76-81. Footnote 29 included in curly braces. Print|KZaidi

The intransigence of the city and the rebellion of various war-machinic, guerrilla, nationalist and
terrorist organizations are a source of constant frustration to the worldwide war-machine. As Virilio recounts
in exquisite detail, the Cold War, and its coupled deterrence machine, served to provide the foundation for a global
order of control: ‘Absolute unity is what deterrence aims toward. Deterrence has begun to realize this
Pure State’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 161). The Cold War and deterrence took us out of the first phase of the
worldwide war-machine, the fascist machine, and into ‘a form of peace more terrifying still’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 421), where control was achieved through a bivalent unity. The grand meta-narrative of east
versus west, overshadowed by the constant threat of mutually assured destruction, provided an order
of control and organization throughout the first, second and third worlds. With the end of the Cold War, this sheen of
duality was no longer necessary, and the unitary worldwide war-machine of the ‘New World Order’ took
over, supported by the technological narrative of the RMA, and the politico-ethical narrative of the new
military humanism.27 The success of the First Gulf War was hailed as the beginning of a new era in
global military politics. However, the Gulf War was not the test of the new regime that it appeared to be. First of all, as Chris Hables
Gray points out, ‘[h]igh technology can be defeated, but it takes organization, loyalty, patience, political
acumen, intelligence (in both senses), popular support, and allies. Saddam had few of these’ (1997: 40). The
first test of the New World Order had been a rigged one, technologically speaking. What is more, the
goal of the Gulf War was not a complete supplanting of the Iraqi state. At this stage the worldwide war-
machine was still content to have its actions mediated through more traditional state apparatuses.
However, in recent years, in Kosovo, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Chechnya and
in countless other places, the worldwide war-machine has attempted to reach its highest potential, to
fully subsume the work of the state apparatus into itself, to completely reverse ‘Clausewitz’s formula’
and make politics entirely a continuation of war by other means. And it has been repeatedly frustrated in its attempts
to do so. This is not to say that it has been defeated. The worldwide war-machine is simply too powerful to be
defeated (at least in the classically Clausewitzian sense of being disarmed and unable to fight anymore [von
Clausewitz 1976: 77]). Nor is it to say that countless people have not died in conflicts since the end of the Cold War. Nor is it even to say that
the worldwide war-machine has failed to establish military political control throughout wide swaths of the world. Rather, it
is to say that
the worldwide war-machine continues to fail, in an absolute sense, to create ‘a smooth space that now
claims to control, to surround the entire earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421). It seeks absolute control, but
everywhere resistance crops up:

[T]he very conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital
(resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack,
unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines. The definition of the
Unspecified Enemy testifies to this: ‘multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent … of the moral, political subversive or economic
order, etc.,’ the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422)

At root, warand the tactics of the war-machine are ill suited to do the things which the worldwide war-
machine wants them to do. The worldwide war-machine wishes to use a technology of exteriority to
achieve a state of interiority. Again, this is not to say that this endeavour will fail all the time. As we
know, state formations can acquire a war-machine and use it to their own ends. The worldwide war-
machine does succeed occasionally (indeed, perhaps most of the time) in using these techniques as a
means of control. However, unlike the state, whose logic of interiority is also tied to a logic of
particularity, and thus can allow some lines of flight to escape, the worldwide war-machine is totalizing.
It, by definition, cannot allow escape. And yet it does not have the tools to stop it. The more tightly it
grasps, the more it ensures something will escape.

However, there is still a terrifying hope for the worldwide war-machine. The worldwide war-machine has enormous
power and velocity at its disposal, and yet is consistently frustrated in its attempt to ‘reform a smooth
space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth’ (421). And if it cannot achieve this smooth
space in the form of a productive political control, it might decide to seek it in the form of a destructive
annihilation. This is the push towards total war, which is concomitant with the move from the state
military apparatus to worldwide war-machine. Total war ‘is not only a war of annihilation but arises
when annihilation takes as its “center” not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire
population and its economy’ (421). At various lower-level conflicts we see the use of destructive
mechanisms to annihilate areas where productive political control is unfeasible: defoliation in the
Vietnam War, aerial bombing in Kosovo, the use of helicopter gunships and clusterbombing in urban
terrain in Fallujah and Basra (Hills 2004: 242). Increasingly, the motto of the worldwide war-machine has
been that old Vietnam slogan-cum-Zen koan ‘We had to burn the village to save it’. And as various
enemies continue to discover more and more ways to evade and resist the worldwide war-machine’s
efforts at total control, the frustration mounts, and destruction is increasingly considered an
appropriate tactic to achieve supposedly productive ends.

In returning to our discussion of the blind-spots in the RMA’s synoptic vision, we

see how frustration can turn to destruction.
Graham describes the sense of frustration inherent in the military at the befuddlement of its advanced
technologies: ‘How unfair for the enemy to withdraw into protected capsules deep underground when
the United States has so expensively developed the technologies of geosynchronised annihilation for
surface and open warfare!’ (Graham 2004b: 19). And thus, if the people of the world will not submit to
surveillance and control, the worldwide war-machine will do whatever is necessary to drag them
kicking and screaming into the light, even if that means crossing thresholds of
destruction which up until now had been considered sacrosanct: George Bush’s 2002
Nuclear Posture Review suggest that the US will soon restart nuclear testing and that it is also
considering a first strike nuclear policy. Frustrated that their conventional ‘bunker busting’ bombs
cannot penetrate deep into the protected underground spaces built deep into the bedrock within
alleged ‘rogue nations’, the US regime is planning a new range of nuclear weapons. (Graham 2004b: 19)

Graham goes on to say that ‘[w]ith

such legitimization a major R&D programme is now in full swing to develop
nuclear “bunker busting” bombs that will allow instant annihilation of any (alleged) bunker complex,
anywhere in the world, within a very short time of targeting’ (19–20). The increasing support for the idea
of nuclear weapons as a viable tactical weapon can be seen in a variety of different conflicts.28 And
though this rise in the US’s willingness to use nuclear weapons was undoubtedly influenced by the downfall of the Soviet Union, at the same
time nuclear proliferation should, in principle, have taken up the deterrent slack, as it were. However, whereas
the US–Soviet
deterrent dyad served to maintain a global space of control, the current proliferation of nuclear
weapons merely increases the possibility of resistance to the worldwide war-machine and the striation
of the smooth space it desires. In this case, nuclear war may be more useful to the worldwide war-
machine than a state of uneasy deterrence.

We noted earlier that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the first phase of the worldwide war-machine is the fascist
phase, which prefigures a second, post-fascist phase of global-level ‘peace’ (1987: 421). This notes the way in which
the fascist state and the worldwide war-machine are conceptually linked, because in both cases the war-
machine, or its equivalent in the form of a state military apparatus, inverts the relation of power and
subordinates political control to military control. Elsewhere, in their writing on fascism, Deleuze and Guattari describe the
way in which the fascist state can become the suicidal state, an unreterritorializable line of flight, preferring
to destroy itself rather than see its vision of purity and control be lost.29 {‘Paul Virilio’s analysis strikes as entirely
correct in defining fascism … by the notion of the suicidal State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an
undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of absolute war
whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 231).} Now, the war-
machine also builds itself lines of flight; it is a deterritorializing machine. But it is also metamorphosis machine. It
engages in an absolute deterritorialization, but it then engages in a reterritorialization (Patton 2000: 116). Its
comfort with the smooth space of exteriority allows it to do that. (We will discuss the war-machine’s status as
metamorphosis machine further on p. 82.) But the coming of the worldwide war-machine initiates a line of flight with
no resources to reterritorialize it. Its totalizing and interiorizing drive makes it incapable of
metamorphosis. In this case, the worldwide war-machine always runs the risk of becoming subject to a
pure death drive:
The line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its
valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition … like suicide, double suicide, a way out that turns the
line of flight into a line of death. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229)

This is the result of ‘a war machine that no longer has anything but war as its object and would rather
annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction’ (231). Deleuze and Guattari note the interesting fact that it is Virilio
himself who ‘puts us on this trail’ with his account of the suicidal state (231). However, by
creating the connection between the
suicidal fascist state and the post-fascist worldwide war-machine, Deleuze and Guattari make us aware
of a bleaker situation than even Virilio envisioned. For Virilio, the globalitarian state is in a sort of steady
terminal state. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari describe an essential tension in the worldwide war-
machine, which seeks to create a smooth space of interiority and produce a productive political
organization through violent destructive means. Deleuze and Guattari see the spectre of the line of
flight becoming a line of death, of absolute deterritorialization without the possibility of
reterritorialization. Nuclear war provides a way for the production of a global and totalizing smooth
space. If the worldwide war-machine cannot have the peace of order, then it might very well be willing
to accept the peace of death. The worldwide war-machine is, or always has the potential to be, a broken
metamorphosis machine, which can only transform us into one thing: corpses. ‘It is precisely when the
war machine has reached the point that it has no other object but war, it is when it substitutes
destruction for mutation, that it frees the most catastrophic changes. Mutation is in no way a
transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation’ (230). In this sense, the
worldwide war-machine can achieve the goal of turning the earth into a zero degree Body without
Organs. No longer an organism. No longer anything.

Resistance
And so we see that the case of the worldwide war-machine is both more terrifying and more hopeful than Virilio advances in the theory of the
globalitarian state. Virilio’s globalitarian state is totalizing and absolute, encompassing the world through a state of pure war. It is perfect and
perfecting. It can, in principle, continue indefinitely. Virilio is aware of the totalizing destruction that the globalitarian state can unleash, but it is
not his central concern, nor does he think that it is inherent to its functioning (indeed, one gets the feeling it would be the result of a
breakdown or failure of the system). According to Virilio, ‘[t]he [nuclear] weapon’s serious danger is not that it could explode tomorrow, that
there could be five million deaths, but that for thirty years it has been destroying society’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 58). Contrary to this,
Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the worldwide
war-machine as inherently unbalanced. It carries within it a
central tension, a paradox which can only be resolved, in principle, through utter destruction. It is a
(dys)functioning line of flight that can really only end in death. However, while this contradiction is what
makes it so dangerous, it is also what gives us hope. This tension means that there are holes in its
armour. It means it may be possible to combat it.

It guarantees compression of decision-times and automation of decision, producing

accidents and inadvertent nuclear war.
Glezos’13 |Simon Glezos is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of
Victoria, in Victoria, BC, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in political theory and international relations from The Johns
Hopkins University. “The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world” Routledge, 2012.
Page 51-52. Print|KZaidi

Virilio’s idea of how speedbreaks down the spatial logic of the territorial state should, I hope, be clear. As speed
obliterates space, the idea of a political community bounded on a logic of territorial enclosure becomes
obsolete. Virilio notes the breakdown of the territorial logic in favour of a generalized spatial ‘[p]roximity, the
single interface between all bodies, all places, all points of the world’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 65). As people
increasingly have the potential to live and travel globally, a political, social or cultural attachment to a territorial space becomes a less effective
way of organizing political identity. In addition to this spatial challenge, the
dromocratic revolution levels a challenge against
the temporal logic of the territorial state as well. Virilio states that in the era of the territorial state ‘political
space … existed in a given political duration. Now speed – ubiquity, instantaneousness – dissolves
“political space” or rather displaces it’ (63).

The speed of technology dissolves the duration of the territorial state in two ways. The first is by
decreasing the time of political decision-making. As we noted in Chapter 1, with the dromocratic revolution came an
acceleration of the pace of events, requiring a streamlining and centralization of the decision-making
process. As Virilio puts it, the reduction of the margin of maneuver due to the progress of the means of
communicating destruction causes an extreme concentration of responsibilities for the solitary
decision-making that the Chief of Staff has become. (Virilio 1977: 148–9)

The nuclear revolution brings this process to its extreme, with a margin of decision-making so small that,
even if compressed to only one person, she will still not have enough time to make up her mind. The
decision must therefore be prepared ahead of time and, in a sense, automated, creating a constant
deferred state of total war.3

Before we go thinking this is some sort of over-the-top hyperbole or elaborate metaphor, we should
note that writers such as Manuel De Landa have done excellent work in cataloguing the various and
continuing attempts at military automation (1991: 87). In one of the most disturbing examples of this, in Pentagon war-
gaming sessions simulating nuclear conflicts (intended to develop nuclear strategies) the Pentagon
replaced human participants with computer simulations because the human participants persisted in an
‘illogical’ refusal to ‘push the button’ (87). Nuclear planning and war-fighting are thus increasingly carried
out without human input:

Dynamic efficiency is the State machine’s primary quality, and the nuclear State, the ultimate stage of
dromological progress, ensures the concept’s cohesion thanks to the strategic calculator. Faced with and
boarded by this ultimate war machine stands the last military proletarian, the henceforth will-less body of the President of
the republic, supreme commander of a vanished army. (Virilio 1977: 129)

AND that will only get worse. New technologies, digitized infrastructures and
increasingly complex relationships all ensure that remaining committed to unchecked
acceleration will culminate in thermonuclear cyberwar.
Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko’19 |Nick Dyer-Witheford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty
of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant
Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication (SFU). “Cyberwar and Revolution:
Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism.” March, 2019. Page 151-156|KZaidi

As we have argued, from 1945 on, thehegemonic status of the United States, as the world’s chief capitalist power, was intrinsically
related to the development of computers and networks. The role of digital systems in its military–
industrial complex, initially tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, spread through other aspects of its war-making
system as well as through the general economy. In both aspects, it contributed to the United States’s eventual Cold War victory. In the aftermath of that victory,
the United States continued to develop its digital military capacities into the ever more direct weaponization of network, creating the technological– human
assemblages of what is today referred to as cyberwar. The scope of NSA global surveillance and sabotage programs and the sophistication of the Stuxnet

nuclear centrifuge-destroying malware are only the most manifest instances of this process, which is
today an integral part of a wider upgrade of U.S. military capacities that ties together a nuclear primacy
with the militarization of space and drone warfare. Accompanying and spurring on this process is the additional dynamic of
cyberwar adoption by the forces antagonistic to the global dominance of the United States and its allies .
These antagonists include the defeated socialist powers, Russia and China, now paradoxically resurrected as capitalist competi- tors in the world
market, or, in the case of North Korea, surviving in a macabre afterlife of state socialism. They also include the forces of militant Islamic jihadism, beckoned into
existence by the West as an anti- communist ally, only to become its opponent in the long war on terror. All
these actors converge on the
militarization of digital networks. Many observers today see a moment that recapitulates the decline of previous imperial hegemons within the
global capitalist system—Spain, Holland, Britain—and parallels the moments of extreme instability as old powers and new contenders confront each other.7 The
rise of cyberwar
is part of this tumult and quite possibly a precursor and preparation for widening and
intensifying conflict. Schematically, we can envisage three potentially intertwining trajectories such a process might take:

1. Network degradation. Alexander Klimburg (2017) outlines the possibility of a “darkening web” characterized by
persistent and gradually intensifying cyberwar between states and between states and terrorist movements conducted in a
variety of regis- ters. Security breaches, aggressive malware, and botnet attacks proliferate. Digital industrial
sabotage and critical infrastructure attacks begin to multiply, as do the accidental runaway effects of
cyberweapons. Networks are deeply and chronically infected with computational propaganda, fake news, and viral
mis- and disinformation. In response to adversarial incursions, states inten- sify algorithmic surveillance,
censorship, and preemptive virtual policing. Cybersecurity provisions become increasingly mandatory and elaborate.
Attribution problems, falsification of evidence, and the overlap between military and intelligence forces and criminal networks create a
chaotic digital twilight of hacking and trolling, botnets and viruses, malware, surveillance, and bugs, shutdowns, blocking,
and filtering, in which uncertainties exacerbate suspi- cions and hostilities, altogether making the internet increasingly
impossible to use. In short, the “darkening web” is what already exists now, only more so. One of the cofounders of Twitter, Evan Williams,
offered his diagnosis, suggesting that “the Internet is broken” (Streitfeld 2017). But maybe it’s not. Maybe the internet is finally what it was
always meant to be. Maybe it is perfect, but not for us, the excommunicated user-subjects. For cyberwar.

2. Hybrid escalations. Similarly rooted in the present is the likeli- hood that the simultaneous virtual and kinetic conflicts, such
as the Syrian civil war, the fighting in Donbas, and the many branches of the war on terror, continue and break out in new regions, bring- ing
ever higher levels and varieties of cyberweapons, deployed for purposes ranging from intelligence gathering, battlefield surveil- lance, and

munitions delivery to sabotage of enemies’ domestic and military resources. The use of drones and other semi- or fully
automated weapons systems expands and takes new direc- tions, such as the development of swarms of small autonomous

vehicles—“slaughterbots” (Economist 2017a)—for house-to-house fighting in ruined cities. The biometric and networked
tracking of refugees created by such conflicts, and the control and inter- diction of their entry to affluent fortressed homelands, becomes a major
activity of the nation-state security apparatus. Because present hybrid wars are also in large part proxy wars, where local battlefield
actors are directly or indirectly supported by major powers, they are charged with the possibility of abrupt collisions

between the most powerful militaries on the planet.

3. “Thermonuclear cyberwar.” We borrow this phrase from Erik Gartzke and Jon Lindsay (2017), who are among several authors currently pointing
to a renewed and dangerous rendezvous be- tween cyber- and nuclear weaponry. The last decade of debates between defense intellectuals about cyberwar has
split those who see digital attacks a new equivalent of nuclear weapons, capable of disabling whole societies through critical infrastructure at- tacks, and skeptics
who deride such anxieties as hyperbolic and implausible. But “cyber” and “nuke” are not separate. As we have seen, they were
twinned at the moment of conception, with the development of each dependent on the other. And the
connec- tion is not just historical; it is current. Now cyberwar weaponry is part of a new approach to nuclear war

fighting, the left-of-launch approach. Early ventures in antiballistic missile defense, such as Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative,
depended on shooting down swarms of missiles as they plunged through the atmosphere toward their target. Left of launch, in contrast, aims to

“strike an enemy missile before liftoff or during the first seconds of flight,” using “cyber strikes,
electronic warfare and other exotic forms of sabotage” (Broad and Sanger 2017). This doctrine was incubated during the Obama
administration and inherited by the Trump presidency. Advocates of the left-of-launch nuclear strategy present it as a defensive measure. However, the

doctrine destabi- lizes basic premises of deterrence that have, since 1945, restrained nuclear weapon
use (Cimbala 2017). Deterrence depends on a dread faith by all parties that both their own and their enemies’ nuclear weapons will work. The possibility
that nuclear weapons systems might be secretly disabled raises prospects both of overconfidence (trusting
one can sabotage an opponent’s system) or panicked preemption (fearing left-of-launch attacks on one’s own nukes and falling into a “use ’em or
lose ’em” mind-set). More generally, control and command of nuclear weapons depend on communication systems

whose collapse in a crisis situation could have catastrophic results.8 The origin of the internet lay in the U.S. attempt to
ensure continuance of such systems in the event of nuclear war; now the weaponization of the internet itself constitutes a possible cause of nuclear war.

The specter of the nuclear intrinsically requires a tautological system of rationality to

maintain narrative coherence of deterrence and declaratory policy. Faith in the
metaphysical providence of the rational world is a dangerous epistemic commitment
that makes the asymmetric acceleration of military doctrines inevitable.
Bousquet and Grove’20 |Antoine Bousquet is the Director of Studies in Political Science at the
Swedish Defence University. Jairus Grove has a PhD in International Relations/Political Theory from
Johns Hopkins (2011) and is the Political Science Department Chair at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.
“The best of all possible nuclear worlds (or how Matthew Kroenig learned to stop worrying and love the
bomb)” New Perspectives, 28(1), 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20908461|KZaidi

Underlying the entire book is an insistence on the rational character of the ‘logic’ of American nuclear strategy
that steadfastly holds at arm’s length the possibility of a much more messy and terrifying reality. Kroenig writes that ‘any serious
analysis of nuclear strategy must begin by looking straight into the abyss of nuclear catastrophe . Few do’
(2018: 39). Yet does Kroenig really do so himself? Or does he rather take refuge in the prophylactic of apodictic reason? Only
in a world where the munificent providence of reason is sovereign over the possibility of
miscalculations, accidents and self-fulfilling security dilemmas can one ignore how the aggressive
pursuit of nuclear superiority by Washington will induce a state of fearful vulnerability in Moscow and
Beijing and with it corresponding counter-measures.

We need not speculate about how this will play out; history provides us with all the evidence we require. During the
Cold War, fear of a ‘bolt from the blue’ attack that would ‘decapitate’ its civilian leadership or gravely
deplete its second-strike capability prompted the United States to move towards a ‘ launch-on-warning’
policy. Such a posture mandated a retaliatory strike as soon as enemy missiles were detected in the air rather than when they had begun
landing. This potentially left policymakers with less than 15 minutes to decide on an order to launch their
nuclear arsenal and seal the fate of millions. Considered alongside the well-documented fallibility of early warning systems, the
unfathomable pressure placed on a decision maker in such a scenario has led many analysts to identify a
frightful risk of accidental nuclear war in such a policy (Blair, 1993).1 Today, there remains considerable
ambiguity surrounding the precise posture of either the United States or Russia in this area. What cannot be
doubted, however, is that a situation of marked nuclear superiority by one side would greatly incentivise the
other to place its forces on a hair-trigger alert in a bid to buttress its deterrent.

The other rational course of action for an adversary unable to keep up with the development of a high-
precision counterforce arsenal is to move towards a policy of indiscriminate nuclear targeting. As Raymond
Aron (1965: 259) astutely observed, ‘each doctrine breeds its dialectical antithesis in the thinking of the
opponent’. Thus Russia has pointedly let it be known since 2015 that it is developing a nuclear torpedo
that revives the Cold War weapon design of the cobalt bomb so as to produce large amounts of radioactive fallout that
would contaminate wide areas of the North American coastline for decades (BBC News, 2015). Whether this weapon system
actually exists or not at present – and the usual caveats apply here – the signal being sent by Moscow is
clear. If the United States pursues a policy of nuclear superiority through a new generation of high-
precision weapons that could disarm Russia in a first strike, the logical deterrent response is to make its
own weapons as dirty and indiscriminate as possible. This is the very same implacable logic underlying the ‘doomsday
machine’ imagined by Leo Szilard and Herman Kahn and later famously satirised in Dr Strangelove.2

It is now well established that the Soviets assembled in the 1980s a nuclear command and control system
equipped with a highly automated capability known as Dead Hand that would ensure retaliation in the
event that the country’s leadership was incapacitated (Hoffman, 2009). While it seems that plans for full automation were
never adopted and that some degree of human oversight was always maintained, the underlying
pressure that gave rise to such designs remains. Indeed, widely touted technological developments are likely
to only ratchet it up again. Hypersonic delivery vehicles flying at up to 20 times the speed of sound (Smith,
2019), space-based weapons capable of taking out early warning satellites (Rogoway, 2018) and stealth cruise
missiles less vulnerable to radar detection (Wesigerber, 2019) all threaten to compress decision time further.
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are simultaneously giving new impetus to schemes for
automation, even prompting some commentators to advocate unironically the adoption of an
‘American Dead Hand’ (Lowther and McGiffin, 2019). Faced with the acceleration of our weapon systems and
shrinking window of human agency, we cannot but be reminded of Paul Virilio’s foreboding warning of
the ‘total accident’ ‘gestating within the acquisition of absolute speed’ (Virilio and Armitage, 2001: 146).

It is not the case that Kroenig wholly neglects the issue of accidental war, however. Indeed, it is actually central to his conception of
brinksmanship. He allows early on that ‘nuclear war is not entirely in the collective control of the participants,
but could result from accident or inadvertent escalation’ and that, since nuclear war is so devastating
that the threat of its deliberate initiation generally lacks credibility, states can only threaten to increase
its risk through exercises in brinksmanship ‘that could spiral out of control and result in catastrophe’
(2018: 20). In sum, it is the very possibility of accident that makes nuclear brinksmanship practicable with
the upper hand accruing to the side that has the least to lose from its eventuality. Yet incredibly,
having established that accidental war is the most likely scenario for a nuclear exchange, Kroenig
subsequently pays no attention to this problem despite the fact the brinkmanship he endorses
evidently increases its probability for all the reasons mentioned above.
What sense to give to such an apparently breezy negligence for the dangers attendant to the pursuit of nuclear supremacy? Is it that Kroenig is
reconciled with the eventual failure of deterrence so long as American superiority ensures it comes out at the happier end of the ‘meaningful
variation in the expected cost of nuclear war’ (2018: 16)? Bernard Brodie’s sardonic observation that ‘whether the survivors be many or few, in
the midst of a land scarred and ruined beyond all present comprehension, they should not be expected to show much concern for the further
pursuit of political-military objectives’ would seem here apposite for anyone tempted to strategise beyond such a cataclysm (Brodie 1957:
1118). Yet rather than attribute such callousness to him, we privilege here the hypothesis that Kroenig
radically underestimates
nuclear risk, ultimately underpinned by little more than faith in the metaphysical providence of a
rational world.

While Kroenig theoretically acknowledges the possibility that a brinkmanship crisis will end in ‘disaster’ , the scant
regard he affords to that eventuality along with his wilful neglect of the variables that might precipitate such an
event suggest an unwavering confidence in the constancy of rational decision-making and the reliable
de-escalation of such crises through a sober recognition by all parties of their respective stakes and
vulnerabilities. It is on that basis that he can advocate a policy of nuclear superiority for the ‘coercive
advantage’ it provides, thereby implicitly making the case for wielding such advantage in future games
of nuclear chicken made all the more alluring for the seeming certainty of outcome promised. Indeed, we
encounter throughout the book a markedly one-sided assessment of nuclear risk in which the compelling logic of
deterrence trumps every time alarmist fears about the costs and perils of a hawkish nuclear posture. Yet when it really comes
down to it, Kroenig’s ultimate objection to the suggested downside risks of ‘upsetting strategic stability,
provoking unwinnable arms races, fueling nuclear proliferation, and draining the defense budget’ is the
very fact of the United States’ pursuit of nuclear advantage (2018: 190). Quite simply, if such a policy was not rationally
beneficial, why would a rational state have persisted with it? It is at this point that we glimpse the tautology at the heart

of Kroenig’s argumentation. Nuclear superiority is rational because it is pursued by a

rational state. And why is the United States rational? Because the United States
pursues nuclear superiority.
The pathology of power

There is of course another explanation. In his book The Nerves of Government, Karl Deutsch (1963) identifies what he calls the pathology of power.
According to Deutsch, the amassing of material power allows states to absorb mistakes rather than learn from
them. The more powerful a state becomes, the less likely it is to be compelled to learn from its errors.
When asymmetries in power become extreme (e.g. the post-Cold War unipolar moment), states risk becoming
increasingly disconnected from their environmental awareness – their capacity to learn – and making decisions
based solely on the recursively solipsistic thinking that takes place in the windowless silos of scenario
planners that more and more resemble the perverse nuclear clergy of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Could any theory more adequately account for the lethal foreign policy blunders of the United States in the last 60 years? In the case of nuclear

strategy, the imbalance is even starker. Despite hundreds of nuclear accidents (Schlosser, 2014), a few severe
near-miss geopolitical crises, and the squandering of the post-Cold War moment, the United States to
date has not incurred any significant costs for its mistakes and oversights. However, in the high stakes game of nuclear
risk, an N of 1 can change the data set radically. Unlike conventional wars, a nuclear war, even one,

would reverse every single statistical inference. And then would we learn? Or would the survivors be
too busy envying the dead to care?

The tragedy of misplaced confidence, strategic miscalculation and epistemological hubris premised on
absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence is that the learning curve facing us is not merely
steep but potentially fatal. While the short-term benefits of nuclear superiority to the United States can certainly be substantiated
with empirical evidence, which Kroenig does aptly, a different perspective opens up when one extends the temporal horizon of possibility. Let
us allow that Kroenig is right about the gains his strategic recommendation can make in the next 5 years. Maybe good fortune grants these
gains again for another decade. How about the next 50 years? Or 100? Projecting
policy recommendations into the
speculative realm of the next century may seem absurd until you consider how Kroenig’s argument
forecloses any possibility, much less desirability, of nuclear reductions or relinquishment of first use, let
alone wholesale disarmament.

The past is not prologue, and you should feel uneasy. As the future increasingly
collapses into the present, prediction and control are becoming ever-more-fraught,
and systems increasingly prone to non-linear collapse. It is try-or-die to decelerate.
Beck 16 – Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary
Culture, U of Westminster

John Beck, “The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know,” Ch. 1 in Cold War Legacies: Systems,
Theory, Aesthetics, John Beck and Ryan Bishop (eds.), Edinburgh UPress: 2016, pp. 35-37
The future used to be fate, meaning that the ‘not yet’ is a fact of the time to come that is inaccessible to human beings (though not for want of
trying) but known to the gods. Modernity’s demolition job on fate repositioned the future as something produced by human
action, something shaped and defined in the present. Once the future is considered as something made rather than something
given, it can become an opportunity, making room for the possibility of the ascending temporal arc of progress. The notion of futurity is a
crucial aspect of the ideology of progressive modernity, rooted in a commitment to the accumulation
of information and the acquisition of knowledge, and to the economic and social transformations made possible by
scientific and technological innovation and discovery. As change accelerates, however, uncertainty tends to
increase since the temporal gap between a knowable present and an unknowable future continues to
shrink. While the rate of change remains moderate and there is enough data from the past, future
outcomes can be calculated probabilistically. But when the future is no longer a continuation of the
past, and as change multiplies, the accumulation of past information is no longer helpful. Cut adrift from
precedent, the horizon of the future gets closer, no longer a space of empty potentiality but rapidly
filling up with the unresolved problems of the present. As the space of anticipation contracts, the
chance of being able to think beyond the increasingly shorter term becomes ever more difficult.

The invention of nuclear weapons made a decisive cut into time. More precisely, weapons of mass destruction, especially once they were
powerful and plentiful enough to guarantee the destruction of life on earth if even a fraction of their number was ever to be used, contracted
and stretched the future at the same time. An automated missile launch could
bring the world to an end in an instant,
radically stopping time, but the uncertainty as to when that instant might come prolonged the seeming
inevitability of its occurrence for an indeterminate amount of time. Just as the discovery of fossils recalibrated the
measurement of Earth’s past, revealing the planet to be older, and human life less significant, than had once been thought, so too did nuclear
weapons deepen an understanding of futurity precisely by foreclosing on its inevitability. The
post-nuclear-war future might
indeed be long, but humanity would remain only as dinosaur bones compressed by the rubble of the
present.

The Cold War, then, inaugurates a new mode of thinking about the future, both as an existential limit
point that could be radically compressed into the present, and as a challenge. The nature of the
challenge was precisely to forestall nuclear catastrophe by attempting to calculate if and when a deadly
strike might occur and what, if any, the response might be. The cold aspect of the Cold War in large part refers to the
temporal freeze instantiated by the threat of mutually assured destruction, an ice age of geopolitical paralysis even as techno-modernity goes
into developmental overdrive. Forecasting and what has become known as futurology or futures research were born out of this contradiction
in an attempt to deploy scientific rationality, in a sense, against itself: the methods used to invent the end of the world
were to be used to calculate ways to save it.

While the particular challenges of the Cold War have dissipated, forecasting and futures research have developed into a core industry,
underpinning business and finance, government and policy in all areas of life. The markets, of course, are driven by speculation on the future;
so is climate policy. As computational power expands, so does the reach of futures research, where big data promises to deliver increasingly
fine-grained simulations of all manner of possible outcomes. Futures research is still preoccupied with catastrophe, though the most likely
threats are now financial and climatic, yet there is a real sense, as with Cold War deterrence policy, that modelling
the future feeds
directly into the dangerous idea of the present as the pivot of history. Market jitters generate turbulence that
confirms the jitters; global-warming scenarios demand immediate action. The present is never a period of repose during
which future prospects can be coolly rehearsed. Instead, as in Cold War thinking, future-oriented
reflection often taps into, and perpetuates, a toxic combination of anticipatory inertia and hysterical
urgency. The kind of future the Cold War invented was a future that shapes its own past (that is, the
present). This is as it must be, since the form of all forecasts is shaped in the here-and-now and by the
limits of our calculations. Yet it may well be that the most deadly future out there is not the one on the horizon
but the one we forecast, since this is the future we live with now.
Nuclear deterrence is not reformable. An order founded on threatening extinction-
level revenge strikes inherently increases semiotic instability, and even a single
mistake would mean the end of all life. Externally—that regime intrinsically drives
mass depoliticization, naturalizes fascist violence, and wrecks value-to-life.
Gardiner’22 |Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at
the University of Warwick. “Nuclear Weapons and Extinction as Progress” new formations: a journal of
culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, 2022, pp. 66-83 (Article). Doi: 10.3898/NewF:107-8.04.2022|KZaidi

For Sagan, it was only during the fears of the later Cold War, or what Ćirković describes as a ‘resurgence of
catastrophism after 1980’, that nuclear extinction could be considered in its full scientific seriousness
(Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe, p275; The Great Silence, pp170-71). Adapting cosmic precarity, Sagan drew on new research
stressing the coincidence of factors leading to the appearance of life, an issue wrestled with by astrobiologists since,
and highlighted the responsibility of sapient species on extinction paths.36 Nuclear weapons were paradigm-altering in that
they underscored the ‘vast difference between the extinction of much human life’ and ‘the death of
every person on Earth (as now seems possible)’ (Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe, p275). The responsibility of humanity was now
to consider an omnicide that was, as Moynihan describes, difficult to comprehend morally. If a limited lifespan for Earth’s sapient species was
assumed, cosmicprecarity would make greater awareness of space a responsible step. ‘Space
expansionism’ is easy to caricature – Faustian exuberance, geopolitical rivalries, the projection of
inequality onto the cosmos – but during deterrence’s crisis phases, this had to be set against an
apparent naturalisation of omnicide (X-Risk, p413, pp384-85, p424).37 For Sagan, a loss of interest in space might
signal the ascendancy of nihilistic consumerism, and so the acceptance of an extinction logic: light
pollution obscures our sense of smallness and arranges the world around utility – the Lockean empiricist conduit
to commercial empire (and, as it happens, a common point of Japanese critique before the country’s disciplining with ‘light weapons’) (Pale
Blue Dot, pp263-65; The Great Silence, pp103-4).38 Sagan’s consideration of nuclear omnicide was joined by Jonathan Schell’s hit book The
Fate of the Earth (1982), which moved from a consideration of the mechanics of bio-technological collapse to the stakes of human extinction,
which for Schell, crucially, we are already living as the consumerist promise of the ‘death of death’ (The Fate of the
Earth, p8, p29, p69, pp79-85, pp93-94, pp107-119, p166). Recalling the Lockean conversion of embodied time to productive time, and lying
strangely close to Paul Virilio and even Jean Baudrillard, Schell describes how nuclear
weapons have made extinction-level
violence immanent (The Fate of the Earth, pp155-187). Deterrence signals the demand for biological life to
automate itself out of existence, as lives are rationalised by the productive imperative. Nuclear war is
one form of this extinction awareness, but, as in Malm or Morton, it has structured our experience for
much longer.

The Euro-American ‘victory’ of the 1980s, moreover, seemed to make the nuclear-backed ‘operational
world’ unassailable, as the ideal of the market sublimation of politics became the overarching metaphor
for social organisation, and an overtly neo-Smithian civility was conjoined to nuclear realism. The nuclear commercial
empire itself now oddly claimed ‘ecological’ credentials: where early 1970s ecological cybernetics had
warned over the effects of ‘explosive’ positive feedback loops – population, pollution, species
extinctions – radical neoliberals repurposed this to demand the removal of blocks to positive feedback ,
understood as market penetration. In a thinking most associated with the influence of Friedrich Hayek, politics, or the interference with the
naturally empowering growth of individual property, was always despotic and had to be eviscerated, effectively
raising automation over human agency.39 The pivotal Stepping Stones project (1975-78), for example, identified obstacles to
‘real increases in added value’ – trade unions, in effect – and demanded a radical restatement of the liberal rule of law as the ultimate arbiter of
conflict: deterrence,
then, would live on as much as a threat to domestic politics as to any external state. 40
With the removal of collective decisions, positive feedback would enter a ‘permanent explosion’, the
conditions precisely registered by nuclear deterrence (and one with a neat metaphor in the financial deregulation known
as the ‘Big Bang’).41 Again, because knowing-and-owning founded a natural historiography, it could acquire the status of a secular metaphysics;
so in 1984 Virilio
described an ‘assumption of cybernetics into the heavens’, and the role of nuclear
weapons as to affirm the ascendancy of quantification (War and Cinema, p2, p7; Knowing Nukes, p27). As a
substantial body of psychological research showed, living with hair-trigger nuclear deterrence also
proliferated a sense of helplessness before the total threat, and so a de facto decollectivisation (as
well as an anxiety that would in fact make survival harder in an actual nuclear war) (A Say in
the End of the World, p188).

Deterrence, moreover, demanded a constant and universally comprehensible threat of retaliation, or

the eternal communication of what was ultimately subjective self-interest. Heuser describes the projection of a
market logic of self-maximisation onto the Soviet Union during the worst Cold War crises ; but in this
she echoes the ideal of universal clear representation (rhetorical ‘perspicuity’) that had characterised
the Scottish Enlightenment and had been described by Smith and others: totally clear communication meant a totally
clear representation of objects for exchange; and as Akira Mizuta Lippit says, the nuclear weapon destroys shadowy
uncertainty (The ‘Stepping Stones’ Programme, p95, p104).42 An effect of the evisceration of the negative and the unknowable, one now
often stressed in the field of critical transparency studies – is to make critique impossible, since difference must be
constantly converted to knowable objects (Speed and Politics, pp136-145; Knowing Nukes, p76, p117).43 This is one
legacy of the spectral survival of deterrence after the Cold War ‘victory’. The embrace of untrammelled positive
feedback, or endless growth towards biological extinction, found a strange echo in the 1990s-2000s English
adaptation of the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea of capital’s powers of ‘deterritorialisation’: millennial accelerationism may
seem an intellectual oddity now, but its lauding of the unimpeded feedback loop is worth noting for its tellingly nuclear imagery –
modernity meant removing the ‘control rods’ of tradition and collective belonging to unleash a chain
reaction.44 (Or, returning to Watt, a ‘negative feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine “governor” or a thermostat – functions to keep
some state of a system in the same place... [but we endorse] the contrary trend’).45 Extinction-level weapons in this sense are
Morton’s ‘weird cybernetic system, a primitive artificial intelligence of a sort’ (Hyperobjects, p5). In fact desires for
‘transhuman extinction’ to outrun species limitations boomed as early as the 1920s – and the idea that nuclear war might be necessary as a
corrective appears as early as Wells’s extraordinarily The World Set Free (1914), in which onlyan apocalypse brings the
benevolent scientific dictatorship a wayward humanity needs (The Eerie Silence, p155).46 The point here is not just that
millennial English accelerationism was always pointing towards a kind of ‘Deleuzian Thatcherism’, but also that extinction-range
deterrence itself derived from an ‘automated ethics’ Morton and others associated with ‘ the end of the
world’ (Knowing Nukes, p107).47

Thus the odd situation in which nuclear weapons only reached their full potential after the Cold War,
when they seemed to lose ‘crisis’ status and become immanent and permanent, helping to abstract
collective action and ‘end history’.48 Extinction-level weapons, demanding a paradoxical ‘non-
violence’, work best when invisible, standing quietly as the horizon of all conflict, and normalising a
‘shared’ self-interest (A Say in the End of the World, p197). Not only did Anglo-American deterrence not disappear after the Cold War,
the US nuclear arsenal in fact peaked after 2000.49 Well into the 2000s, Tony Blair acknowledged that Trident
was useless while claiming it was indispensable – letting go of a nuclear deterrent, for at least 50 years,
would be ‘too big a risk’, a telling wording for a technology responsible for the majority of
anthropogenic near-extinction events, mostly through sheer accident (Trident and British Identity, p6).50 The
subsequent rebuilding of global stocks pre-dated, though was amplified by, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A 2021 Nuclear Information Service paper shows an increasing, and increasingly diffuse, sense of global nuclear threat
leading to the Anglo- American pursuit of the W93 warhead – but also identifies a need to build up the
‘US nuclear industrial base’ as a major motivating factor (Extreme Circumstances, p40). Accelerationism, like critical
transparency studies, has a point that ethical considerations can become increasingly distant under data overload: much of the global
nuclear buildup of the past half-decade or so has been buried under official crises. Nuclear defence, like
climate change, has attracted a simultaneous widespread awareness of immediate threat while
undermining the loss of agency needed to address it (Crash and Burn).51 ‘Living with extinction’ can then
dovetail into a kind of ethical performativity. Since the Cold War, nuclear-armed powers
have had to continually proclaim their determination to perform an extinction-
level revenge strike, while knowing that this proclamation is both senseless and
increases an overall semiotic instability that actually increases the chances of
extinction (The Transparency of Evil).52 Contra the rhetorical ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment and the 1990s spread of ‘exchange’
into all relationships, there is no universalism of communication that really makes

deterrence non-violent (A Say in the End of the World, p229; No Apocalypse). This is more obvious, of course, with the
current rearming, and debates, for example, about what early 2022 Russian threats really meant. (Moreover, the Russian threat to Ukrainian
nuclear power stations echoes an earlier North Atlantic entanglement between ‘power too cheap to meter’ and a hidden aim of fulfilling a
demand for fissile material).53 As
deterrence has fallen, the possibility of ‘tactical’ use as an extinction trigger
appears difficult for a ‘world’ that associated deterrence with the virtues of a worldly commercial
empire.

I am suggesting, then, that weapons have long been bound together with the eclipse of collective political
action. Total weapons are absolutely progressive, in the ingrained terms of the extraction of individual property: they
include entire populations as stakeholders, they ‘democratise’ war by putting all citizens on the
battlefield, and they are instrumental to a sense of loneliness before the rule of law. During the long post-Cold
War period, nuclear hegemony even became oddly entangled with ‘inclusion’ understood as a market
imperative; or as William Chaloupka describes, nuclear weapons evidence a long state instrumentalisation of
active bodies (The Evolution of Strategy, p442). The Anthropocene itself might be understood as a naturalisation
of the dedication of bodies to productivity; still, the Anthropocene as a concept risks reducing
geological deep time to ‘operational’ terms, as numerous nuclear war dramas show. In the iconic nuclear docu-drama Threads
again, stone reasserts its agency, pathways are reordered by rubble, and life is subjected to fallout – a term suggesting both an interruption of
human dominion and ‘unintended, unarticulated consequence’, or the end of the evaluative regime (Knowing Nukes, p34).54 Natural to
the empiricist world, nuclear weapons are an extinction-range accident waiting to happen.

Unchecked fascism in the U.S. will uniquely destabilize nuclear deterrence. That
directly risks extinction AND is emblematic of the broader dangers.
Hymans 22 – Associate Professor of Int’l Relations, USC
Dr. Jacques E. C. Hymans, Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, “Comment on Meier and Vieluf's
‘Upsetting the Nuclear Order: How the Rise of Nationalist Populism Increases Nuclear Dangers,’” The
Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 28, Iss. 1-3 (Sept. 2022): 44-51, DOI:10.1080/10736700.2022.2093512
Oliver Meier and Maren Vieluf’s “Upsetting the nuclear order: how the rise of nationalist populism increases nuclear dangers” is an important,
agenda-setting article that will shape the future course of nuclear scholarship. Meier and Vieluf define nationalist populists as people whose
identity rests on a stark black–white contrast not only with perceived external enemies,1 but also with perceived internal enemies and, above
all, with the country’s political-administrative “establishment” (p. 6). In Meier and Vieluf’s view, this populist-versus-establishment battle is
prudence and professionalism shown by the nuclear-weapon states have allowed the
relevant to deterrence because the
world to go on living with nuclear weapons for three-quarters of a century. However, if populists in one or more of
those states grab the nuclear portfolio for themselves, deterrence instability is sure to follow. Meier and Vieluf put it
this way: “In the nuclear world, this destabilization of institutions is particularly significant. The nationalist-populist assault weakens the
influence of those who are supposed to act as ‘guardians of the arsenals.’ The influence of nationalist-populist leaders on nuclear-weapon
policies also has grown” (p. 10).

In this essay, I offer a constructive critique of Meier and Vieluf’s key claim that nationalist populists are dangerous because they push aside
traditional nuclear and defense establishments. I agree with Meier and Vieluf that the
rise of nuclear-armed populists is
profoundly dangerous for the future of human civilization. But we need to avoid the trap of zero-sum thinking,
according to which any point against the populists becomes a point in favor of the establishments (or vice versa).

Questioning Meier and Vieluf’s faith in the establishment

Meier and Vieluf suggest that the traditional nuclear and defense establishments have so far contained the ever-present
potential for nuclear war by institutionalizing a “nuclear order built on the principled acceptance of a logic of restraint by the nuclear-weapon
states” (p. 2). But such an interpretation of nuclear history is hard to square with the findings of a large scholarly literature that the
superpowers’ establishments were actually significant drivers of the strategic competition and arms racing that caused many tense moments
during the Cold War. Far from demonstrating a “principled acceptance of a logic of restraint,” the establishments made the
Cold War more dangerous, more costly, and more long-lasting than it needed to be.2

The so-called “guardians of the arsenals” were also

less than reliable during Cold War nuclear crises. The Cuban
Missile Crisis would almost certainly have gone nuclear if either John F. Kennedy or Nikita Khrushchev had
let the generals take the lead.3 A variety of technical and organizational mishaps almost caused it to
go nuclear anyway.4 Meanwhile, the establishments unfairly tarred their critics in the peace and disarmament movements as
“populists,” as Meier and Vieluf also point out (p. 9). Actually, those 45activists ended up greatly contributing to the peaceful end of the Cold
War, an outcome that the establishments had considered unrealistic.5

Fast-forward now to the 2001–2009 George W. Bush administration in the United States. The Bush team was Republican foreign-policy
establishment through and through. President Bush’s own father had been president and, before that, head of the Central Intelligence Agency;
his vice president, Dick Cheney, was a former secretary of defense; his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had already served as secretary
of defense under President Gerald Ford; and so on. But these rock-solid establishment figures did most of the things that Meier and Vieluf list
as being consequences of nationalist populism.

The Bush administration withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and deployed technologically immature missile-defense systems
despite clear warnings from Russia and China that they would not take such provocations lying down. It refused to continue the Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty negotiations with Russia, thereby undercutting the possibility that the administration’s unilateral nuclear-stockpile reductions
would generate mutual trust.6 It casually tossed aside nonproliferation norms for a strategic marriage of convenience with India, resulting in a
further acceleration of New Delhi’s already rapid pace of nuclear-weapons construction.7 And, most egregiously, it used flimsy intelligence
findings of illicit Iraqi nuclear and other weaponsof-mass-destruction programs to justify a full-scale invasion of that country against the better
judgment of the International Atomic Energy Agency, three nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council, and most of the
rest of the world, including staunch American allies such as Germany.8 The combination of US unilateralism and bungling in Iraq ended up
exacerbating the very problems of Islamist terrorism and nuclear proliferation that the war had been intended to solve. As former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright put it in 2007, “The lesson out of Iraq has been if you don’t have nuclear weapons you get invaded and if you do have
nuclear weapons you don’t get invaded.”9

Worse still, even after the high costs of Bush’s policies for US and global security had become glaringly obvious,10 most establishment
Republicans still ardently embraced Bush’s foreign-policy approach. The only major Republican presidential candidates who denounced Bush’s
Iraq War misadventure were fringe populist figures: Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016.11 Meier and Vieluf portray the
establishment’s consistency of thought and action as a blessing, but it can also be a curse.

In Meier and Vieluf’s depiction, nationalist populists are like the 16-year-old who asks for the keys to the family car to take friends out on a
Saturday night. I agree that it is dangerous to let them do so. But in this case, the parents—or, to borrow Meier and Vieluf’s term,
“guardians”—have also compiled a very long record of driving infractions. For their own and others’ safety, they need to get rid of the car.

Building on Meier and Vieluf’s accounting of the dangers of populism

I have argued that nuclear-armed

establishments are more dangerous than Meier and Vieluf suggest. Now I will also argue
that nuclear-armed populists are dangerous for even more reasons than Meier and Vieluf enumerate.

Meier and Vieluf’s article does not do enough with its basic definition of nationalist
populism as a black–white oppositional
stance toward internal as well as external enemies. If we take that definition seriously, it becomes apparent that the biggest
problem stemming from the rise of populists is not that they might ignore the advice of traditional nuclear and defense establishments and
behave carelessly toward foreign powers. The biggest problem is that populism is
a gateway drug to internal political
violence, revolution, and civil war.12 And, perhaps needless to say, serious domestic upheaval in a nuclear
power also increases the likelihood of a nuclear incident of some kind.

Perhaps the first-ever populist government in history was led by the Jacobin faction that drove the French Revolution forward from
1792 to 1794.13 The Jacobins expressed a radical populist faith in the power of “redemptive violence” by
“the people.” 14 They made war both inside and outside France. To quote historian Brian Singer, the Jacobins’
violence was directed neither “at a well-defined enemy” nor “at some limited, short-term end, but to the
creation of a new regime, a new humanity.” 15 In short, they wanted to raze the old world to the ground—or die
trying. The Jacobins’ favorite metaphor for their violence was lightning, which materializes from out of nowhere to simultaneously destroy
and enlighten the dark world it strikes. Their interest in lightning was not only metaphorical; Jacobin ideologues such as Jean-Paul Marat were
serious students of the new science of electricity.16 France and the world are lucky that nuclear physics was not very far
advanced in the Jacobins’ day.

None of the contemporary nuclear-armed populist leaders listed by Meier and Vieluf is a modern-day Jacobin. Most
populists are merely unprincipled con artists who prey on atomized and insecure sections of the public, manipulating them to gain
personal wealth and power. Even so, the language of populism is the language of revolution and civil war, and pretend
revolutionaries can easily be carried along by the tide of social resentments that they have
irresponsibly stirred up. Take, for instance, Trump and his followers’ dismal trajectory to January 6,
2021. We need to consider worst-case scenarios.

Trump did not actually want a civil war in the United States, but his rhetoric emboldened the not-so-small number of Americans who do. A
rigorous time-series analysis found that Trump’s presidential run in 2016 was associated with an abrupt,
statistically significant, and durable increase in violent attacks by domestic far-right extremists.17 For
instance, the leading ideologist of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, James Mason, wrote in July 2017, “I am not ashamed to
say that I shed a tear of joy at [Trump’s] win.” 18 Far from standing back and standing by, Mason preached direct action to
“accelerate” the onset of a society-purifying race war that he believed would push the Trump administration into
embracing full-blown fascism. In May 2017, an Atomwaffen member, National Guard veteran, and onetime physics major named Brandon
Russell was arrested for plotting to attack the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, among other targets. Police later also
found traces of thorium and americium in Russell’s bedroom.19

The domestic divisions fomented by populists do not have to arrive at their logical end point of revolution
and civil war to increase deterrence instability and the chances of a nuclear incident. Below I elaborate three
more specific hypotheses on the deterrence consequences of internally divisive populist governments. The hypotheses are speculative, but they
logically follow from the definition of populism and should therefore serve as useful points for further discussion of Meier and Vieluf’s core
idea.

Hypothesis 1. Populists are likely to be insensitive to nuclear threats to the political strongholds of their
domestic opponents. Meier and Vieluf observe that the credibility of US extended-deterrence promises to America’s allies suffered
massively under the Trump administration. That is certainly true, but the question of whether the United States would be
willing to trade “Pittsburgh for Paris” (p. 19) has been around for decades. The new problem that populism creates is
that even homeland deterrence starts to suffer from the same credibility dilemmas as extended deterrence. In addition to the “Pittsburgh for
Paris” question, we
now also have to ask whether a populist administration in Washington would be willing to trade
Pittsburgh for Portland.

In a country where populist leaders revel in dividing society against itself, deterrence theory’s standard
assumption that a nuclear threat to any part of the homeland will be treated as a threat to the whole
homeland can no longer be taken for granted.20 Whatever the president’s true intentions, foreign
powers could potentially calculate that they will not be punished for striking at certain targets within the
country’s borders.21 For instance, the longest-range North Korean missile that is currently operational, the Hwasong-14, has enough range
for a nuclear attack against Seattle but not Mar-a-Lago. 22 Would the same president who formally designated Seattle as an
“anarchist jurisdiction” in an attempt to starve it of federal dollars be greatly concerned by a credible threat of a North Korean strike against it?
23 Probably—but is “probably” a good enough answer for homeland deterrence credibility?

Another dimension of this same hypothesis has to do with the precise locations where populists choose to install military installations that are
likely to become nuclear targets. During the Nixon administration, the objections of congressional Democrats to the planned construction of
Sentinel anti-ballistic-missile facilities near their political strongholds such as Boston and Seattle led Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to move
the projects to less populated areas.24 President Nixon believed that he needed to work constructively with the Democrats on core national
security issues. By contrast, a
populist president would love to see his political opponents sweating the targets
he put on their backs.25

Populists in power may even be slow to help their political opponents’ regions recover from an actual
nuclear attack. There is a lesson for nuclear analysts in the Trump administration’s intentional slow-walking of
congressionally mandated emergency aid to the US territory of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017,
one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history.26 Having long held a low opinion of Puerto Ricans,
Trump reportedly told his chief of staff and budget director that he “did not want a single dollar going
to Puerto Rico.” 27 Would Trump have been any more helpful if the island had been hit by a man-made bomb instead of a natural one?
Maybe if Puerto Rico could do something for him in return, which leads to the second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2. Populists are likely to exploit their control over homeland deterrence to demand political
concessions from their domestic political opponents. At the heart of populism is a disrespect for the principle of
equal application of the laws. Instead, governance becomes a pure power game, and populist rulers notably
exploit crises as opportunities to bring domestic political opponents to their knees. There is every reason
to assume that a populist in full command of the nuclear and defense establishment would similarly take
advantage of a nuclear crisis to conduct such a shakedown. In other words, populists in power will charge a high price for
adequately responding to nuclear threats against their domestic opponents’ political strongholds.

Let us continue with the example of the

Trump administration. The mass-destructive COVID-19 pandemic offers a highly
relevant analogy for thinking about the internal political dynamics of a potential nuclear crisis under populist rule. Public-administration
scholars have labeled Trump’s governing approach as “chaotic transactional federalism,” a cynical power system that “removes any vestige of
certainty as decisions are shaped based on a desire to reward or punish other political actors, or left to subnational actors entirely. Expertise
matters very little in these political, partisan transactions.” 28 In line with this, Trump
responded to the COVID-19 crisis by pitting
the 50 states against each other in bidding wars for vital medical supplies and for his political favor.29 The president
publicly criticized Vice President Mike Pence for reaching out to all the state governors in his role as the coordinator of the national pandemic
response, telling the press that he wanted Pence to deal only with those governors who were sufficiently “appreciative.” 30 Trump
administration officials were even blunter in private. Trump’s son-in-law and closest adviser Jared Kushner reportedly said that New
York
Governor Andrew Cuomo “didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE [personal protective equipment] for his
state … . His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” 31 Trump’s response to the Democratic governors’ pleas for PPE to defend
against the virus was essentially the same as his response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pleas for weapons to defend against
Russia: “I would like you to do us a favor though.” 32

The hypothesis that

populists will demand concessions from their domestic political opponents in exchange for issuing nuclear-
deterrent threats on their behalf may
at first glance appear to be only a matter of internal politics, but the
distractions caused by internal political wrangling could greatly affect the denouement of a time-
sensitive nuclear crisis. Foreign powers could also be tempted to initiate a nuclear crisis precisely in
order to intensify their adversary’s domestic divisions. In addition, when facing the double burden of a nuclear
threat and simultaneous shakedown by the president, politicians from disfavored regions would likely
appeal to friendly elements of the military for assistance. That possibility tees up the third hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3. The establishment’s reaction to populism is likely to increase deterrence instability at least as
much as the actions of the populists themselves. Meier and Vieluf’s article implies that the fate of the world
hangs on the establishment’s ability to keep populist fingers off the nuclear button. But the
establishment’s effort to fend off the populists could itself dramatically increase deterrence instability,
for instance by sowing confusion about the chain of command. This hypothesis is not mere speculation.
Reacting to widespread fears that Trump might be tempted to launch a nuclear attack against China or
another country after his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, in January 2021, General Mark Milley, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly worked the phone lines to reassure key people at home and abroad that
he personally would not allow the president to do anything of the sort. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is
legally outside the chain of command for the execution of the president’s military strategy. Indeed, neither he nor
anyone else has the legal authority to prevent a determined president from launching a nuclear strike.33
Yet Milley told Pelosi, “The president alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t make the decision
alone. One person can order it, several people have to launch it.” 34 Essentially, Milley was saying that if push came to shove,
the military would mutiny. Meier and Vieluf seem to think that Milley did the right thing (pp. 15–16). Maybe so, but he also set an
ominous precedent.

As I mentioned at the outset, these comments are simply intended to spark further discussion about the important issues raised by Meier and
Vieluf’s stimulating article. I would be relieved to discover that I
am being overly pessimistic about humanity’s chances of
survival with either the establishments or the populists in charge of nuclear arsenals. But the more I study the
issue, the more pessimistic I become.

Our relationship to speed ought not be deterministic. We reject the attempt to

perfectly striate all space through force—a fundamentally unattainable goal which
necessitates endless acceleration in the attempt. That nuanced approach is critical in
the 21st century.
Glezos’21 |Simon Glezos is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of
Victoria, in Victoria, BC, Canada. Ph.D. in political theory and international relations from The Johns Hopkins
University. “Speed and Micropolitics: Bodies, Minds, and Perceptions in an Accelerating World” Routledge Taylor
and Francis, 2021. Page 12-13. Print|KZaidi

Again, this does not mean an uncritical embrace of accelerative technologies. It means, rather, an approach
which refuses to presume a fundamental or necessarily ‘human’ pace which requires a unilateral
deccelerationist stance. Indeed, if at times this text seems to be more of a ‘pro-speed’ manifesto, this is only because, as Sharma
points out, it is fighting against a more broadly ‘anti-speed’ tendency in the literature. But this should not be
mistaken for an uncritical or unthinking accelerationism. Indeed, at several points throughout the text, I will point to
either specific contexts in which we might wish to reject or challenge accelerative technologies, as well
as provide general theoretical rubrics which might help us to judge the value and desirability of certain
types of technological change.
This rejection of an ‘either/or’ response to the question of speed and poli- tics is another case in which
our historical approach to speed is enlightening. Recognizing the reoccurring engagement with the political problem of speed
throughout human history helps to show the insufficiency of either a pro- or anti-speed approach. It shows the way
in which anti-speed accounts’ nostalgia for the slowness of the past was rarely experienced by the actual
participants of those periods themselves. And for those who wish a vision of social acceleration as tied
to a vision of human progress, we see how repeated human societies articulate questions of speed in
terms of danger and violence.
Ultimately what this means is that, in
interrogating the question of speed and politics, we must go beyond fast
and slow. We must refuse to see it as a matter of either embracing speed or negating it but rather
developing a nuanced and complex account of the ways in which social acceleration shapes bodies,
minds, communities, and futures, and develop theories and tools which can tell us when we might
want to accelerate and when we want to slow down, when we want to embrace speed and when we
want to reject it.

Thus, The United States should disarm its nuclear arsenal by decelerating its nuclear
forces.
The bomb is an example par excellence of the unrestrained drive to always achieve
perfect annihilative force everywhere. Only the aff restores stability to the system.
Virilio’09 |Paul Virilio is a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. “High-Speed
Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity” The State of Emergency. Edited by Hartmut Rosa and William
E. Scheurman. Print|KZaidi

In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current
context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the
end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating
destruction) will not limit strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in
maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone still allows us to gain fractions
of seconds, which gain is indispensable to any freedom of action. As General Fuller wrote, “When the combatants
threw javelins at each other, the weapon’s initial speed was such that one could see it on its trajectory and parry its effects with one’s shield.
But when the javelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible.” Impossible to move one’s body out of
the way, but possible if one moved out of the weapon’s range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield
—pos- sible, in other words, through space and matter.

Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the supersonic speeds of assault leaves so little
time for detection, identification and response that in the case of a surprise attack the supreme
authority would have to risk abandoning his supremacy of decision by authorizing the lowest echelon of
the defense system to immediately launch anti-missile missiles. The two political superpowers have
thus far preferred to avoid this situation through negotiations, renouncing anti-missile defense at the
same time.

Given the lack of space, an active defense requires at least the material time to intervene. But
these are the “war materials” that
disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive
defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaton powers of nuclear weapons than in a
series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically
effective—for at least a little while longer, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation
of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vector by constantly improv- ing its
performances has now totally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen. General Ailleret points this out in his history of
weapons by stating that the definition of arms programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional
warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a
“field.” The
invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the
scene of battle, the final frontier.
The opposing sides can easily ban bacteriological, geodesic or meteoro- logical warfare. In reality, what
is currently at stake with strategic arms lim- itation agreements (SALT I) is no longer the explosive but
the vector, the vector of nuclear deliverance, or more precisely its performances. The reason for this is simple:
where the molecular or nuclear explosive’s blast made a given area unfit for existence, that of the
implosive (vehicles and vectors) suddenly reduces reaction time, and the time for political decision, to
nothing. If over thirty years ago the nuclear explosive completed the cycle of spatial wars, at the end of
this century the implosive (beyond politically and eco- nomically invaded territories) inaugurates the
war of time. In full peaceful coexistence, without any declaration of hostilities, and more surely than by
any other kind of conflict, rapidity delivers us from this world. We have to face the facts: today, speed
is war, the last war.

It’s try-or-die to de-banalize politics via a political imaginary of disarmament.

Otherwise, extinction.
Gardiner’22 |Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at
the University of Warwick. “Nuclear Weapons and Extinction as Progress” new formations: a journal of
culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, 2022, pp. 66-83 (Article). Doi: 10.3898/NewF:107-8.04.2022|KZaidi

LIVING WITH EXTINCTION AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE POLITICAL

In some sense, then, the drive to extinction-range weapons has been bound up with a sense of a virtuous
liberal overcoming of physical conflict, even if nukes’ ‘actual physicality’ at times reappears, as in the late
Cold War scare and the current Russian crisis. The relative invisibility of extinction-level weapons after the Cold War,
I have suggested, helped to revive a naturalistic ethos of individual competition; and indeed one key
source of value has became the identification and denunciation of an ever-expanding idea of violence, a
phenomenon enabled paradoxically by the background of ‘non-violent’ extinction range weapons. Weapons to end war were
originally typically perceived as protecting commercial empire and reducing relationships to an
arithmetic and ‘automating’ ethics. Nuclear deterrence extended this, and nuclear immanence aimed
effectively to eviscerate all agency outside of the narrow progressivism of productivity and
consumption. The strange disappearance of discussion of nuclear extinction, then, and the extraordinary
fall in fiction and drama depicting nuclear war, is bound to the step-down in tensions after the 1990s, but it
also signals the success of total weapons’ depoliticisation, helping to account for the way much left-wing
activism has tended to bleed into ‘evaluative’ identity issues.

In part this is down to a simple failure of the old commercial empire to fully swallow the idea that its
progress is not universal. Nuclear deterrence was created and maintained either by Anglo-American
powers or by powers in some way drawn into an evaluative-arithmetic telos, like the later Soviet Union. Over recent years China
has been one of the most enthusiastic nuclear re-armers, expanding ICBM potential with of up to 400
new and extremely fast MIRVable DF41 missiles – in turn, of course, providing a rationale for US nuclear
hawks.55 This would leave the question of how to provincialise or pluralise this ghostly remnant of
universalised progress. It might also mean accepting that much post-Cold War Euro-American activism has become co-
opted by an evaluative ethics that can be absorbed into self-interest, and has been fairly quiet on nuclear realism.
Long before the recent rearmaments, thinking about extinction was also often concerned with the dead end of
capitalist realism as a question of meaningful survival. Moynihan describes a ‘human eclipse’ deriving from a ‘hijack, by
superstimuli, of our most base desires and compulsions’, the rise of an affirmation-seeking self incapable of collective effort.56 One of
Moynihan’s sources here – a 2014 paper by Nunn, Guy and Bell – speculates that for any species at a certain level of development, spiralling
individual rewards might overcome survival instincts, meaning that a normal species trajectory is
material achievement followed by extinction (Spinal Catastrophism, pp278-79).57 In this sense the rise of rational self-
interest might always cause sapient species to collapse – and nuclear weapons stand as one expression
of this (Spinal Catastrophism, pp273-75; The Great Silence, p223).58 Such a runaway positive-feedback loop of individual
reward has been described by Byung-Chul Han as a ‘pornocracy’: constant affirmation is provided for
the isolated subject, at the cost of losing critical (‘negative’) thinking, or acknowledging the shadowy world beyond subjective desire
(The Transparency Society). Tellingly, when Schell casts around for a language to describe omnicide, he brackets pornography and
nuclear war as ‘obscene’ (The Fate of the Earth, p158).

The extraordinary challenge of worldwide control of extinction-range weapons might then ask Euro-
American actors to think again about decoupling political action from an automation of self-interest
with extinction as its telos. The idea that capital can be understood as a counter-biological arithmetic
reward cycle is familiar enough; it is harder to disentangle a personal dulling to nuclear war in a post-
1990s creep of collective action towards individual identity values open to bureaucratic or machinic
control – or the day-to-day working of a loss of collective action in the face of existential threat. Such a dulling of
existential risk is nicely depicted by Adam McKay’s 2021 film Don’t Look Up, in which astronomers’ warnings of impending world- ending
catastrophe sink into a quagmire of media-political narcissism.59 The
invisibility of the nuclear sublimation of political
action, though, is surely now waning. In the 2020s we have a better perspective on the post-Cold War
‘great forgetting’ described by nuclear commentators including Benoît Pelopidas and Jonathan Hogg – the way the
serious depictions of nuclear war gave way to distanced, off-stage, or tangential plot devices in fluffy films or
TV.60 Nuclear violence, writers like Pelopidas powerfully stress, must again be understood as visceral
and real.

So if for a while nuclear war seemed a somewhat niche extinction risk, it has not only been recognised
as a growing threat, it is also, I have suggested, ripe to be seen as fundamental to the hampering of
political action. The long imagination of nuclear weapons has both given a wider awareness of
anthropogenic existential threats much of its conceptual framework, and shown liberal commercial
empire as itself carrying the seeds of extinction. The ‘great forgetting’ was partly down to simple disavowal, partly
governmental concealment, and partly the usefulness of nuclear realism in propping up a narrowed
version of progressivism which tends to background the constant extinction threat. Nuclear weapons’ long history of
near-extinction encounters – some fairly well-known (the ‘Petrov Save’, for example), many more
forgotten or effectively concealed – might in other times be expected to dominate political discourse , and
with an appreciation of the ‘real violence’ of nuclear weapons such a memory may indeed soon be recovered (Too Close for Comfort). Benjamin
Noys’s critique of how accelerationism had to squash desire into a narrow understanding of the economy can be adapted to a critique of the
way empiricism has had to squash progress into an eighteenth-century form, dependent on the intertwining of extraction, exchange and civility
(Crash and Burn).
The narrowing of the person to the owning subject promises political agency, but it also
drags a nihilistic acceptance of extinction along with it – another point being made by Japanese philosophy, pre-
Hiroshima.61

A mini-genre within the nuclear cultural imagination from the 1930s but resurging during the 1980s collapse of the Soviet Union, wondered
about a failing regime falling into the hands of a desperate hardliner ready to resort to annihilation. The
echoes in 2022 are clear, yet this is not limited to volatile autocrats . It is quite imaginable that in the future an embattled
Pax Americana would turn to extinction-range weapons to stop the global rot of the narrowed version of
progress described above. As shown by transatlantic reports of the turn of the 2020s, threats are now understood to be
complex and multipolar, and yet even during the millennial lull there was a shocking lack of political imagination
concerning real steps towards a post-nuclear weapons world. From a global ‘low’ of around 13,000 warheads, or
2,500MT – itself much higher than the TTAPS threshold for a nuclear winter extinction event – numbers across both recognised and non-
ratifying powers have risen sharply, and the (Enlightenment) ideal of clear deterrence communication has palpably collapsed.62 The
lack of
consideration of nuclear extinction after the 1990s is understandable, but needs urgent rethinking.
Nuclear weapons were the ‘first’, and remain one of the most intractable, anthropogenic extinction
threats. Even if a huge collective effort were to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, nukes
would be waiting at the other end, smaller, hugely proliferated, and, at some point, doomsday-level.
Ćirković bleakly restates the classical expectation that all ‘civilisations self-destruct on a short timescale upon the
discovery of nuclear weapons’ (The Great Silence, p179). I have suggested that attending to this sense of inevitability
means understanding nuclear violence as violence, but also its role as part of a promise to ascend from a
barbaric political world to an arithmetic operational world. The
point is not just that
nuclear disarmament should be added back into a portfolio of protest, but
also that nuclear immanence has exerted a banalising force on political
action as such. Conversely, popular refusal of nuclear deterrence has been shown by Heuser and
others to be closely intertwined with rises in the imagination of political change. If
2020s nuclear brinkmanship seems like a reality check, this is surely in part because nuclear immanence
was accepted for too long, and had an important role in a progressivism prone to unconscious alliances
with capitalist realism. Conceiving of nuclear violence is counter-intuitive, but it may also bring a
reorientation of the scope of political action.

The ontological and epistemic investment in status-quo politics of acceleration makes

extinction inevitable.
Allan 18 – Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins
Bentley Allan, Scientific Cosmology and International Orders, 2018, pp. 278-282

For many thinkers, the possibility that we are living in a new geological era has cosmological significance. Latour
argues that we are in
the midst of a counter- Copernican revolution.38 Alexandre Koyré famously argued that the Copernican
revolution created a cosmological shift by leading a movement from the closed to the infinite universe.39 In
Copernicus’ universe, the Earth was transformed from a finite, temporal epicentre into a whirling celestial body in an endless universe.
Latour has suggested that the ecological sciences and the discovery of global warming are returning our
attention from the infinite, endless heavens back to the finite Earth.40 The Earth is no longer a rock like
any other, but an active, dynamic planet with “tipping points” and “planetary boundaries.”41 In this
sense, the anthropocene is of cosmological significance because it redefines humanity’s relationship to
the planet, time, and the universe. First, the ecological sciences introduce new ontological and epistemic
elements by reconceptualizing physical processes. The newly intimate Earth is not governed by the
classical laws of linear mechanism, but by the nonlinear dynamism of the complexity sciences. Since
these processes are only partially knowable and predictable, the anthropocene challenges rationalist
and modernist epistemic ideas. If the Earth is not fully knowable then it is not fully controllable.

Second, the anthropocene forces a fundamental reconceptualization of time.42 By embedding humans

in geologic time, the anthropocene narrative broadens time horizons. Situating humanity within long time
horizons in turn alters our understanding of politics by parochializing the present. In geologic time, we
are called to see the present industrial order as a moment in a long history of human– energy– agricultural–
political configurations.43 The anthropocene might also reconfigure our perceptions of how temporal
processes unfold. The Enlightenment historical sciences were linear. By contrast, ecology and complexity
theory depict a world of active, nonlinear, and chaotic processes.44 The dominant temporality in Earth
systems would not then be the linear development of the Darwinian cosmology, but a dynamic
interplay of organic and inorganic matters. Indeed, the anthropocene may require us to grapple with
multiple, overlapping temporalities that collide to produce unexpected outcomes.45
The arrival of the anthropocene also disrupts our understandings of what it means to be human.46 Humanity is no longer, as in Darwinian
naturalism, a species like any other, subject to the laws of nature. Instead, the idea of humanity as a geological force presents complex
questions about the role of humans vis- à- vis the Earth. For some, the central meaning of the anthropocene is that humans are overwhelming
and dominating the Earth.47 This way of framing things shows the anthropocene story is bound up with rationalist and modernist beliefs about
how humans have exerted control over nature. To be sure, the anthropocene concept is usually invoked in order to induce humility, but it still
contributes to the sense that humans are a dominant force apart from and over nature. On the other hand, for some, the
ongoing
ecological crisis presents a direct challenge to the modernist idea that humans ever controlled or dominated
nature.48 Instead, the anthropocene highlights the insignificance of human life in the long- run of the
planet and the universe, the uncontrollable, unpredictable dynamic flows of Earth systems, or the
impotence of humans to confront the very problems they induced. On this view, climate change,
precipitous declines in biodiversity, global patterns of soil degradation, and other ecological problems
call into question the long- term viability of global industrial civilization premised upon the domination of land, air, sea,
and space.

Thus, the anthropocene contains two distinct cosmological narratives about scientific and
technological progress that were also prominent in the Cold War. In the Cold War, the awesome,
destructive power of nuclear weapons highlighted both human mastery and the fragility of humanity at
the hands of its own creation. In the anthropocene, the destructive power of industrial civilization itself
is at issue. This continuity is not a surprise given that the global environmental movement emerged in
the 1970s, in part, as a rejection of the rationalist hubris of the nuclear age. Environmentalists then
worked to highlight the dangers of a scientific and technological modernity that had reached its
apotheosis in a seemingly unending arms race. It is appropriate then that the Anthropocene Working
Group has identified the first nuclear blasts as the best candidate for a stratigraphic marker to start the
anthropocene.49

The rise of anthropocene thinking in political discourses is likely not just because of its clear and important cosmological implications. States,
international organizations, multinational corporations, epistemic
communities, and other international associations
will have to engage with and deploy ecological thinking. As cascading environmental crises create
security problems, intensify food shortages, threaten existing infrastructure, and so on, political
associations will increasingly take up ecological thinking in the social and natural sciences in order to
deal with serious problems. The ecological sciences are now transnational, and so we can expect for
these ideas to circulate horizontally into many states simultaneously. So in the theoretical vocabulary I developed
above, a cosmological shift could enter the associational basis of international order through a horizontal change. The
American hegemon, as yet, has resisted taking up anthropocene ideas and imposing them on others. It is possible
that after a major environmentally induced conflict, the United States, another hegemon, or a hegemonic bloc could build an
imposed ecological order on other states. But to do this, ongoing associational changes will have had to
generate a cosmological backdrop that could orient associations towards common ecological purposes.

In short, the anthropocene introduces a constellation of new cosmological elements that could be used to
redefine state purpose: it transforms humanity’s place in the universe by returning humanity to Earth;
it redefines the character of the physical elements of the universe in nonlinear, dynamic, and complex terms; it places
humanity within geologic time and structures nonlinear narratives of nature; it undermines
representations of human mastery over nature. Taken together, these seem to offer the resources for a
serious challenge to the growth imperative and the modernist ethos more broadly. Moreover, ecological crises are likely to
inspire many associations to take up anthropocene thinking. However, this does not guarantee that a cosmological shift is imminent. As we
have seen, what Scott calls the
high modernist imperative entered international politics in the middle of the
twentieth century.50 Thereafter, the core purpose of the state underlying international order has been
to harness the power of science and technology in order to advance economic development. The
anthropocene concept could be used to challenge the modernist narrative that scientific and
technological development drives unending progress. But it is not clear what alternative purpose anthropocene thinking
pushes us towards. What should the ends of politics in the anthropocene be? Latour orients us to “fiddling and fixing.”51
Connolly recommends a micropolitics of entangled engagement.52 But these do not revise the fundamental purpose of the state defined as the
goals for which we expect state power to be used. For Biermann, the anthropocene merely necessitates more and better global governance.53
That it may simply require an adjustment in means rather than ends. These are not radical challenges to
the purpose of the state that would require a shift away from growth or productivism.

Moreover, the meaning of the anthropocene will be contested. Recall the anthropocene contains a modernist impulse: humanity has and can
control the forces of Earth. But
although the Cold War contained both modern and anti- modern cosmological
narratives, it reinforced modernism in international order rather than challenged it. So although the
anthropocene could be used to challenge the cosmological content of international discourses , that is
a contingent possibility that depends on political contestation. Many states and political elites will
attempt to extend modernist purposes into the anthropocene. As we saw in the case of quantum mechanics, the
development of cosmological shifts is not entirely exogeneous to politics. There is a danger the anthropocene could
be appropriated for the purposes of extending state control over nature and society.

So, while the anthropocene idea challenges the narrative that humans, and thus the state, can exert control over reality, there is a possibility
that the development of the natural sciences will be pushed in a different direction. For example, military agencies throughout the world have
already taken an active interest in climate-induced conflict and proposals for geoengineering.54 The transformation of climate change and
other ecological problems into security problems could create demand for a particular kind of natural and social knowledge. The military,
already an active player in the production of knowledge, could steer the development of anthropocene knowledge in a
modernist
direction. This would promote the view that humans must take conscious control over planetary
processes. If that happens, then the radical possibilities introduced by anthropocene thinking would be
muted and there would not be a cosmological shift that generated purposive change in international
order. Nonetheless, as we have seen, there are other ongoing intellectual and political movements that could counter
these trends and destabilize the growth- based order. The future of cosmology in international order is likely to
emerge from a process of political contestation bound up with cosmological conflict and hegemonic transition.
Social Science as a Vocation

This book suggests that social scientists play a central role in the patterns of knowledge production and
contestation shaping the future of cosmology and international order. As I noted above, in each empirical case social
scientists operated as brokers translating knowledge from the natural sciences into political goals and purposes. This finding cuts against
the Weberian distinction between facts and values in the social sciences. As such, it creates a new way
to understand reflexivity and postpositivism in the social sciences.
In his vocation lectures, Weber exhorts scientists of all kinds to refrain from making evaluations or advocating for their personal opinions in
their role as scientists.55 One of Weber’s arguments is that it is impossible to derive values from facts because one cannot use scientific
methods to adjudicate or evaluate between ideals.56 Thus, presenting evaluations in the guise of science is dishonest and impractical.
However, Weber does allow science an important public role in “the discussion of what means to choose in order to achieve an end that has
been definitely agreed.”57 For Weber, science can and should serve as a technical means to solve problems. This is bound up with his
arguments about rationalization. Weber suggests that science drained meaning from politics because he views science primarily as technical or
causal beliefs.
By contrast, I have argued that science operates as a powerful cosmological force that infuses international politics with meaning and purpose.
The cases examined here show that the deployment of scientific ideas as means can change ends. When
agents deploy scientific or
social scientific knowledge, they also import representational constraints and cosmological elements in
linked semantic networks. This has unintended effects that can produce new purposes. Thus, scientific and
social scientific discourses are more than technical means that help political actors achieve their goals .
They place humanity in the cosmos and constitute the ends actors pursue.

Because this is true for both natural and social knowledge, this study challenges the idea that social scientists are neutral observers of
the world that they study. Rather, simply by articulating facts, social scientists participate in the construction of values in political discourses.
This conclusion may strike social scientists as counterintuitive. Many social scientists are rightly sceptical of their ability to shape policy directly.
Indeed, as the literature on ideational change reviewed above suggests, experts
are only likely to have major short- run
effects on policy under highly specific conditions. However, the argument here shows that over the long run,
social and political knowledge operates as a form of productive power that structures the discursive
landscape of politics.58 This indirect route to political relevance means that social scientists have an
important role in politics. But that role is less likely to arise from specific technical or causal beliefs
than from the ontological, epistemic, and cosmological presuppositions that they channel into political
conversations. Social scientists reproduce certain ideas that are then disseminated through teaching,
government service, and forays into the public sphere. Social scientific ideas are then picked up,
recombined, and institutionalized in unintended and unpredictable ways.

From this vantage point, the deployment of scientific ideas within the social sciences takes on new significance.
Appropriations of physics, biology, and mathematical modelling in IR and other social sciences cannot help but reproduce and disseminate
ontological, epistemic, and cosmological elements that will have broader effects on goals and purposes. Thus, social
scientists should
be attentive to and critical of their appropriations of scientific ideas.59 As we have seen, these ideas come with
representational constraints and discursive slopes that tend to reproduce some ways of seeing and
valuing the world.

If indeed cosmological developments are central to the politics of the future, then the articulation of
new cosmologies is an important political task. As such, social scientists may have a duty not just to be critical
of their own cosmological views, but to participate in the construction of new cosmologies. After all, such
cosmologies will shape the future of international order in an age of ecological crisis and economic
transition. In the tradition of curious cosmologists from Petty to Smith to Solow, the work of social scientists today should include the
creative recombination of ideas from a variety of discourses to articulate and defend new purposes.60

Your role is to challenge the implicit certainty of control in the nuclear age.
Overconfidence is death.
Pelopidas’20 |Benoît Pelopidas, Ph.D in Politics, Sciences Po (Paris)/ University of Geneva. Holds the chair of
excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). Affiliate of the Center for International Security and
Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. He is the Principal Investigator of a 1.5 million euros project
on nuclear weapons choices, funded by the European Research Council. “Power, luck, and scholarly
responsibility at the end of the world(s)” International Theory (2020), 12, 459–470
doi:10.1017/S1752971920000299. Footnote 42 and 43 included in curly braces|KZaidi

In that respect, the path to extinction exceeds the dichotomy between control power and protean power. Indeed, control
power will
have failed and produced such massive, fast, and irrepressible forms of violence that there will not be
channels of possibility left. The implicit certainty that control and protean power cover the whole
spectrum of power makes omnicidal nuclear war unthinkable a priori and does not take the second unknowable
seriously. It is written as though we knew that we would survive or as though we should act as if we will.
This survivability bias is characteristic of the discipline of social sciences and, surprisingly, much less present in the general
public.35 It still implicitly maintains that existing power structures are compatible with and possibly
responsible for the survival of our civilization and species.

My invitation to readers and students of protean power would be to adopt

its effort at mobilizing imagined futures in a
way that makes luck and accidents thinkable and extend it one step further to the possibilities of
civilization collapse and extinction which, so far, remain beyond the remit of our field. In other words, avoid a survivability
bias.

Scholarly responsibility at the end of the world(s)

The unknowability of the timing of nuclear war and its effects makes it possible that thermonuclear war
will end the species before this paper goes to print but also that we avoid it until the death of the sun. In this context, claims of
knowing and scoping possible nuclear futures appear as the ultimate acts of power.36 As suggested by the
authors, scholarly responsibility no longer lies in predicting; expert power does. As scholars and
educators, we are uniquely placed to recreate expert accountability and expose what the available
bets on the future are, instead of reproducing overconfidence in our survivability. This can be done on behalf
of our fellowcommunity members, whatever the scale of the community, future, past, or present.

Exercising this responsibility would start with identifying the sources of overconfidence in the controllability
and predictability of those futures as well as relabelling the claims of knowing the future as bets.37 Such bets are
underpinned by lessons of the past, imagined futures, specific meanings embedded in the categories
used, sociotechnical assemblages and value choices. Picturing them as certainties is certainly inadequate
because it underestimates how limited and contested existing knowledge about past nuclear crises is,
it obfuscates the value choices on which those supposed certainties are based and it assumes that the
effects of the policies preferred by those experts will work perfectly and that we can know that for sure
in advance. In doing so, it removes space for political judgment, deliberation, and choice without
taking responsibility for such a move.
Protean power, its critique of control power and predictability and invocation of the constitutive effects of imagined futures help us think about
the possibility of unprecedented accidents and push back against institutional claims of control over the
present and the future.38 It also helps us avoid the temptation of presentism, which commonly distorts our thinking about responsibility.

This effort of imagination should

move one step further and take seriously the possibility of collapses and ends
of humanity as well as radical change of power structures along the way. Indeed, protean power does not seem to
have yet overcome that survivability bias which has been present in the field. It connects to a discourse of resilience which simply negates the
possibility of an end and makes the condition of vulnerability unproblematic.39

This effort of imagination invites us to re-engage with normativity and utopia.40 Asserting a form of scholarly
responsibility requires us to reflexively assert the fundamental normative underpinning of scholarship
associated with existential dangers as opposed to convoluted obfuscations in the name of detachment
and objectivity. Moreover, in the nuclear weapons realm, given the potential for devastation of this technology,
the radical unacceptability of catastrophic failure of nuclear deterrence and the leap into the future
that modernization programmes are asking us to make, we cannot escape utopia: we can either bet on
nuclear weapons technology never failing or only failing in non-catastrophic ways in the next seven
decades or on radical measures of nuclear disarmament and the possibility to invent new ones down to levels under the
nuclear winter threshold, before nuclear war happens.41 There is no third alternative. While often portrayed
as a repetition of the past 70 years of successful nuclear control, the current bet on another 70 years of
absence of unintended nuclear explosion should be called a technological utopia given that such a
record of control of nuclear weapons technology has not been achieved. This becomes clear as soon as
one takes lucky cases seriously and realizes that the public record of such cases is incomplete. The second utopia would mean
dismantling a smaller number of nuclear warheads than we have during the 10 years between 1986 and 1996 but, as we get to low numbers,
challenges of trust and stability may intensify to the point that pessimists call it utopian.42 {Zia Mian and Moritz Kütt have shown that the
dismantlement of existing arsenals is technically possible within 10 years in light of what has been achieved so far (Mian
and Kütt 2019).} As a result, there is no non-utopian course of action if utopian means unusually challenging or
unprecedented.43 {Calls for ‘realism’ in nuclear weapons policy are the other name of managerialism
and calls for status quo. They hope to delay the moment when we have to confront the challenges I have
just outlined and overestimate their ability to deliver on their promise as discussed above (Meyn 2018). Scholars who
conceptualize nuclear realism such as Sylvest and van Munster are doing so in an attempt to reclaim the notion of realism. I do not think they
would disagree with what I presented as a utopian imperative. They would simply call it realism.} In that respect, protean power would be an
apt concept to study the ongoing attempts at inventing nuclear disarmament.44
2AC
 Case
It causes extinction – no new defense.
Kallenborn 22 – Research Affiliate, Unconventional Weapons & Technology Division, National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism; and honored by the U.S. Army
Training & Doctrine Command as a “Mad Scientist”

Zachary Kallenborn, also a Policy Fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government and national
security consultant, Giving an AI control of nuclear weapons: What could possibly go wrong?, 2022,
https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/giving-an-ai-control-of-nuclear-weapons-what-could-possibly-go-
wrong/

If artificial intelligences controlled nuclear weapons, all of us could be dead.

That is no exaggeration. In 1983, Soviet Air Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was
monitoring nuclear early warning systems, when the computer concluded with the highest confidence
that the United States had launched a nuclear war. But Petrov was doubtful: The computer estimated
only a handful of nuclear weapons were incoming, when such a surprise attack would more plausibly
entail an overwhelming first strike. He also didn’t trust the new launch detection system, and the radar
system didn’t have corroborative evidence. Petrov decided the message was a false positive and did
nothing. The computer was wrong; Petrov was right. The false signals came from the early warning
system mistaking the sun’s reflection off the clouds for missiles. But if Petrov had been a machine,
programmed to respond automatically when confidence was sufficiently high, that error would have
started a nuclear war.

Militaries are increasingly incorporating autonomous functions into weapons systems, though as far as
is publicly known, they haven’t yet turned the nuclear launch codes over to an AI system. Russia has
developed a nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered torpedo that is autonomous in some not publicly known
manner, and defense thinkers in the United States have proposed automating the launch decision for
nuclear weapons.

There is no guarantee that some military won’t put AI in charge of nuclear launches; International law
doesn’t specify that there should always be a “Petrov” guarding the button. That’s something that
should change, soon.

How autonomous nuclear weapons could go wrong. The huge problem with autonomous nuclear
weapons, and really all autonomous weapons, is error. Machine learning-based artificial intelligences—
the current AI vogue—rely on large amounts of data to perform a task. Google’s AlphaGo program beat
the world’s greatest human go players, experts at the ancient Chinese game that’s even more complex
than chess, by playing millions of games against itself to learn the game. For a constrained game like Go,
that worked well. But in the real world, data may be biased or incomplete in all sorts of ways. For
example, one hiring algorithm concluded being named Jared and playing high school lacrosse was the
most reliable indicator of job performance, probably because it picked up on human biases in the data.

In a nuclear weapons context, a government may have little data about adversary military platforms;
existing data may be structurally biased, by, for example, relying on satellite imagery; or data may not
account for obvious, expected variations such as imagery in taken during foggy, rainy, or overcast
weather.

The nature of nuclear conflict compounds the problem of error.

How would a nuclear weapons AI even be trained? Nuclear weapons have only been used twice in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and serious nuclear crises are (thankfully) infrequent. Perhaps inferences can
be drawn from adversary nuclear doctrine, plans, acquisition patterns, and operational activity, but the
lack of actual examples of nuclear conflict means judging the quality of those inferences is impossible.
While a lack of examples hinders humans too, humans have the capacity for higher-order reasoning.
Humans can create theories and identify generalities from limited information or information that is
analogous, but not equivalent. Machines cannot.

The deeper challenge is high false positive rates in predicting rare events. There have thankfully been
only two nuclear attacks in history. An autonomous system designed to detect and retaliate against an
incoming nuclear weapon, even if highly accurate, will frequently exhibit false positives. Around the
world, in North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, test missiles are fired into the sea and rockets are launched
into the atmosphere. And there have been many false alarms of nuclear attacks, vastly more than actual
attacks. An AI that’s right almost all the time still has a lot of opportunity to get it wrong. Similarly,
with a test that accurately diagnosed cases of a rare disease 99 percent of the time, a positive
diagnosis may mean just a 5 percent likelihood of actually having the disease, depending on
assumptions about the disease’s prevalence and false positive rates. This is because with rare diseases,
the number of false positives could vastly outweigh the number of true positives. So, if an autonomous
nuclear weapon concluded with 99 percent confidence a nuclear war is about to begin, should it fire?

In the extremely unlikely event those problems can all be solved, autonomous nuclear weapons
introduce new risks of error and opportunities for bad actors to manipulate systems. Current AI is not
only brittle; it’s easy to fool. A single pixel change is enough to convince an AI a stealth bomber is a dog.
This creates two problems. If a country actually sought a nuclear war, they could fool the AI system
first, rendering it useless. Or a well-resourced, apocalyptic terrorist organization like the Japanese cult
Aum Shinrikyo might attempt to trick an adversary’s system into starting a catalytic nuclear war. Both
approaches can be done in quite subtle, difficult-to-detect ways: data poisoning may manipulate the
training data that feeds the AI system, or unmanned systems or emitters could be used to trick an AI
into believing a nuclear strike is incoming.
The risk of error can confound well-laid nuclear strategies and plans. If a military had to start a nuclear war, targeting an enemy’s own nuclear systems with gigantic force would be a good way to go to limit retaliation. However, if an AI launched a nuclear weapon in error, the decisive opening salvo may be a pittance—a single nuclear weapon aimed at a less than ideal target. Accidentally nuking a major city might provoke an overwhelming nuclear retaliation because the adversary would still have all its missile silos, just not its city. Some have nonetheless argued that
autonomous weapons (not necessarily autonomous nuclear weapons) will eventually reduce the risk of error. Machines do not need to protect themselves and can be more conservative in making decisions to use force. They do not have emotions that cloud their judgement and do not exhibit confirmation bias—a type of bias in which people interpret data in a way that conforms to their desires or beliefs. While these arguments have potential merit in conventional warfare, depending on how technology evolves, they do not in nuclear warfare. As strategic deterrents,
countries have strong incentives to protect their nuclear weapons platforms, because they literally safeguard their existence. Instead of being risk avoidant, countries have an incentive to preemptively launch under attack, because otherwise they may lose their nuclear weapons. Some emotion should also be a part of nuclear decision-making: the prospect of catastrophic nuclear war should be terrifying, and the decision made extremely cautiously. Finally, while autonomous nuclear weapons may not exhibit confirmation biases, the lack of training data and real-world test
environments mean an autonomous nuclear weapon may experience numerous biases, which may never be discovered until after a nuclear war has started. The decision to unleash nuclear force is the single most significant decision a leader can make. It commits a state to an existential conflict with millions—if not billions—of lives in the balance. Such a consequential, deeply human decision should never be made by a computer. Activists against autonomous weapons have been hesitant to focus on autonomous nuclear weapons. For example, the International
Committee of the Red Cross makes no mention of autonomous nuclear weapons in its position statement on autonomous weapons. (In fairness, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control’s 2009 statement references autonomous nuclear weapons, though it represents more of the intellectual wing of the so-called “stop killer robots” movement.) Perhaps activists see nuclear weapons as already broadly banned or do not wish to legitimize nuclear weapons generally, but the lack of attention is a mistake. Nuclear weapons already have broad established norms
against their use and proliferation, with numerous treaties supporting them. Banning autonomous nuclear weapons should be an easy win to establish norms against autonomous weapons. Plus, autonomous nuclear weapons represent perhaps the highest-risk manifestation of autonomous weapons (an artificial superintelligence is the only potential higher risk). Which is worse: an autonomous gun turret accidently killing a civilian, or an autonomous nuclear weapon igniting a nuclear war that leads to catastrophic destruction and possibly the extinction of all humanity?
Hint: catastrophic destruction is vastly worse. Where autonomous nuclear weapons stand. Some autonomy in nuclear weapons is already here, but it’s complicated and unclear how worried we should be. Russia’s Poseidon is an “Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo” according to US Navy documents, while the Congressional Research Service has also described it as an “autonomous undersea vehicle.” The weapon is intended to be a second-strike weapon used in the event of a nuclear conflict. That is, a weapon intended to ensure a
state can always retaliate against a nuclear strike, even an unexpected, so-called “bolt from the blue.” An unanswered question is: what can the Poseidon do autonomously? Perhaps the torpedo just has some autonomous maneuvering ability to better reach its target—basically, an underwater cruise missile. That’s probably not a big deal, though there may be some risk of error in misdirecting the attack. It is more worrisome if the torpedo is given permission to attack autonomously under specific conditions. For example, what if, in a crisis scenario where Russian
leadership fears a possible nuclear attack, Poseidon torpedoes are launched under a loiter mode? It could be that if the Poseidon loses communications with its host submarine, it launches an attack. Most worrisome: The torpedo has the ability to attack on its own, but this possibility is quite unlikely. This would require an independent means for the Poseidon to assess whether a nuclear attack had taken place, while sitting far beneath the ocean. Of course, given how little is known about the Poseidon, this is all speculation. But that’s part of the point: understanding how
another country’s autonomous systems operate is really hard. Countries are also interested in so-called “dead hand systems.” Dead hand systems are meant to provide a back-up, in case a state’s nuclear command authority is disrupted, or killed. A relatively simple system like Russia’s Perimeter might delegate launch authority to a lower-level commander in the event of a crisis and specific conditions like a loss of communication with command authorities. But as deterrence experts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGuffin argued in a 2019 article in War on the Rocks, the
United States should consider “an automated strategic response system based on artificial intelligence.” The authors reason the decision-making time to launch nuclear weapons has become so constrained, that an artificial intelligence-based “dead hand” should be considered, despite, as the authors acknowledge, the potential for numerous errors and problems the system would create. Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, former leader of the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, shot the proposal down immediately: “You will find no stronger proponent of
integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” But Shanahan retired in 2020, and there is no reason to believe the proposal will not come up again. Perhaps next time, no one will shoot it down. What needs to happen. As allowed under Article VIII of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a member state should propose an amendment to the treaty requiring all nuclear weapons states to always include humans within decision-making chains on the use of
nuclear weapons. This could require diplomacy and might take a while. In the near term, countries should raise the issue when the member states next meet to review the treaty in August 2022 and establish a side-event focused on autonomous nuclear weapons issues during the 2025 conference. Even if a consensus cannot be established at the 2022 conference, countries can begin the process of working through any barriers in support of a future amendment. Countries can also build consensus outside the review conference process: Bans on autonomous nuclear
weapons could be discussed as part of broader multilateral discussions on a new autonomous weapons ban. The United States should be a leader in this effort. The congressionally-appointed National Security Commission on AI recommended humans maintain control over nuclear weapons. Page 12 notes, “The United States should (1) clearly and publicly affirm existing US policy that only human beings can authorize employment of nuclear weapons and seek similar commitments from Russia and China.” Formalizing this requirement in international law would make it far
more robust. Unfortunately, requiring humans to make decisions on firing nuclear weapons is not the end of the story. An obvious challenge is how to ensure the commitments to human control are trustworthy. After all, it is quite tough to tell whether a weapon is truly autonomous. But there might be options to at least reassure: Countries could pass laws requiring humans to approve decisions on the use of nuclear weapons; provide minimum transparency into nuclear command and control processes to demonstrate meaningful human control; or issue blanket bans on
any research and development aimed at making nuclear weapons autonomous.

Now, none of this should suggest that any fusion of artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons is
terrifying. Or, more precisely, any more terrifying than nuclear weapons on their own. Artificial
intelligence also has applications in situational awareness, intelligence collection, information
processing, and improving weapons accuracy. Artificial intelligence may aid decision support and
communication reliability, which may help nuclear stability. In fact, artificial intelligence has already
been incorporated in various aspects of nuclear command, control, and communication systems, such as
early warning systems. But that should never extend to complete machine control over the decision to
use nuclear weapons.
Means you should start from a PRESUMPTION OF FALSITY for their impacts –
conjunction fallacy
Yudkowsky’06 |Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence “Cognitive biases
potentially affecting judgment of global risks” Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and
Milan CirkovicDraft of August 31, 2006. Eliezer Yudkowsky(yudkowsky@singinst.org)|KZaidi

The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts. Two independent sets of professional
analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the
probability of "A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union,
sometime in 1983" or "A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations
between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983". The second set of analysts responded with
significantly higher probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1983.) In Johnson et. al. (1993), MBA students at Wharton were
scheduled to travel to Bangkok as part of their degree program. Several groups of students were asked how much they were willing to pay for
terrorism insurance. One group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the flight from
Thailand to the US. A second group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the round-trip
flight. A third group was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance that covered the complete trip to Thailand. These
three groups responded with average willingness to pay of $17.19, $13.90, and $7.44 respectively. According to probability theory,
adding additional detail onto a story must render the story less probable. It is less probable that Linda is a feminist
bank teller than that she is a bank teller, since all feminist bank tellers are necessarily bank tellers. Yet human psychology seems to
follow the rule that adding an additional detail can make the story more plausible. People might pay
more for international diplomacy intended to prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an
engineering project to defend against nanotechnological attack from any source. The second threat
scenario is less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful because it is more vague. More valuable
still would be strategies which make humanity harder to extinguish without being specific to nanotechnologic threats - such as colonizing space,
or see Yudkowsky (this volume) on AI. Security
expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in
New Orleans) that the U.S. government was guarding specific domestic targets against "movie-plot
scenarios" of terrorism, at the cost of taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that
could respond to any disaster. (Schneier 2005.)
 ICJ
SAY NO and DELAY—Absent fiat, the U.S. will obviously refuse. AND, the case takes
years.
Iran International, 21
Iran International with reporting by Reuters, World Court To Hear Sanctions Dispute Filed By Iran
Against United States, 3 February 2021, https://iranintl.com/en/iran-in-brief/world-court-hear-
sanctions-dispute-filed-iran-against-united-states?page=79

Other U.S. objections to the case were also dismissed, meaning Iran's claim will now move on to a
hearing on the merits. A final decision would be likely to take several more years.

The ICJ’s rulings are binding, but it has no power to enforce them, and the United States and Iran are
both among a handful of countries to have ignored its decisions.

EVEN IF they agree to hear it, the ICJ won’t require the plan. CP already
happened, and the Court was too split to give a real answer.
Stricker 23 – Military Professor of Int’l Law, U.S. Naval War College & Director for Expeditionary
Operations, U.S. Marine Corps

Lt. Col. Brent Stricker, Stockton Center for International Law, CONTAINING THE BOMB, 2023,
https://shorturl.at/eqsMP

The legality of the use of nuclear weapons is an unsettled issue. The International Court of Justice issued
an advisory opinion stating the threat or use of nuclear weapons must be examined under the United
Nations Charter Article 2(4) prohibition on the use of force and Article 51’s right of self-defense.3 The
Court could not “conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful
or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense in which the very survival of the state was at
stake.”4

these days the ICJ would refuse to hear the case altogether, citing lack of jurisdiction—
Monetary Gold principle. Plus judicial reluctance, plus state practice.
Gilder 21 – Ph.D. & Lecturer in Law, U of London
Alexander Gilder, “Where next for Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty following the
Marshall Islands’ cases?,” Wisconsin International Law Journal, Vol. 38 (2021),
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3786089

The ICJ’s Reluctance to Adjudicate Nuclear Weapons

The ICJ’s interpretation of Article VI in Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons has
created a quandary - a quandary which
could have been but was not resolved by the Marshall Islands cases. The quandary is that the pactum de
contrahendo created by the ICJ in 1996 arguably cannot be successfully adjudicated without further clarification
from the Court on the exact nature of Article VI. The potential negative consequences of interpreting Article VI as a pactum de contrahendo
have not been fully expounded. Perhaps this stems from how Professor Andrea Bianchi suggests academics engage in a “professional ritual of
analyzing the judgment as if it were a ‘holy writ’.” 96 Nevertheless, this section breaks down two major issues with the ICJ’s interpretation of
Article VI, looking at where multilateral obligations can be adjudicated and the Monetary Gold principle.

We know from the above discussion that the obligation under Article VI to negotiate in good faith to disarm rests
with all state parties to the NPT.97 However, a result of the Court not adjudicating the merits has been
the implication that the Court could only adjudicate nuclear disarmament if all nuclear weapon states
are party to the proceedings.98 Indeed, in the UK’s preliminary objections, it was asserted to the Court that “[t]he Marshall Islands’
allegations go beyond the generic, however, to a range of more specific contentions that directly and individually engage the essential interests
of other States.”99 International lawyers know well the thorny nature of the ICJ’s jurisdiction, and the
possibility of all nuclear weapon states accepting jurisdiction either through recognising the compulsory
jurisdiction of the Court or through the doctrine of forum prorogatum are slim.100 China, Russia, France,
and the US have not made declarations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court and declined
to accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction for the proceedings instituted by the Marshall Islands in 2014. Adjudication of
the NPT is not a new issue with Ford recognising in 2007 that the good faith of one state party cannot result in the success
of negotiations, and therefore one state party cannot be held responsible for the failure of negotiations.101

What is most confusing about the ICJ’s stance on Article VI is that it is simply illogical to conclude the Article implies an end result, but then for
multiple judges, discussed below, to speculate the Court would be unable to adjudicate such a multilateral obligation without all nuclear
weapons states present. Black-Branch recognises the true question of admissibility of Marshall Islands was whether the Court could consider
only one state’s conduct without assessing adherence to good faith of other nuclear weapon states.102 The UK suggested that the stance of
other nuclear weapon states “bear no material difference” from the position of the UK, and the other nuclear weapon states are counterparties
to the various agreements under which the Marshall Islands alleges violations of Article VI.103 Therefore, the ICJ could not evaluate the UK’s
actions without passing judgment on the actions of other states.

The issue was discussed by Judge Peter Tomka in his separate opinion in the Marshall Islands case.104 Tomka
recognises the reality that where nuclear weapons are concerned a state will not disarm unilaterally and
place itself at risk.105 Tomka was therefore “convinced that the Court cannot meaningfully engage in a
consideration of the United Kingdom’s conduct when other States – whose conduct would necessarily also be at
issue – are not present before the Court to explain their positions and actions.” 106 It may be true that the
Marshall Islands appreciated this possible outcome by filing cases against all the nuclear weapons states, but that does not detract from the
fact adjudication of Article VI is now placed in a difficult position.

B. THE RELEVANCE OF MONETARY GOLD

The Court’s reluctance to wade into multilateral obligations stems from the Monetary Gold principle. The
principle prevents the ICJ from passing judgment on contentious cases where the interests of third parties,
states not party to the current contentious case, are engaged.107 Under the principle the Court cannot
take a decision which would undertake “an evaluation of the lawfulness of the conduct of another State
which is not a party to the case.” 108 In Phosphate Lands in Nauru, Australia argued the Court could not adjudicate the responsibility of
Australia without also passing judgment on the responsibility of the UK and New Zealand, who were jointly the designated administering
authorities of Nauru, alongside Australia.109 The ICJ rejected Australia’s contention and found Monetary Gold did not prevent the Court from
exercising jurisdiction as Nauru’s claim was specifically about the responsibility of Australia, who was in actuality the state in control of the
administration.110

In its preliminary objections, the UK relied heavily on Monetary Gold as a method of excluding the
admissibility of the case on the basis that the other nuclear weapon states had not accepted the ICJ’s
jurisdiction. 111 The UK suggested the Court could distinguish from Phosphate Lands in Nauru, as the UK was “not, in any real sense, the
only object of the Marshall Islands’ claim.”112 Following the logic of Monetary Gold, the Court could not make an order
requiring the UK (or India and Pakistan for that matter) to conclude negotiations to disarm as there would be
no practical way for one nuclear weapon state to achieve this. The UK described the Marshall Islands’ claim as not based
on the relationship between the UK and Marshall Islands, but instead a claim concerning the UK and its relationship with the other nuclear
weapon states.113 The UK therefore set out its own practical limitations, and suggested the Court would need to narrow any order made to fit
squarely in the limitations of the UK’s unilateral capabilities.114
Perm: Do the plan on the basis that it’s required by the ICJ. The 1996 ruling already
provides a basis! The counterplan looks like us making them do what we want, when
we want it, which turns the net-benefit. BUT, the perm solves
McGinnis 9 – Professor, Northwestern Law
Medellin and the Future of International Delegation, 118 Yale L.J. 1712, June, Lexis
One might argue that the better analogy for some forms of international delegations is not to administrative agencies but to non-Article III
courts. For instance, if
Congress gives direct effect to the ICJ's interpretation of a treaty [*1726] and makes that
interpretation binding in the United States, it would appear to be delegating power to a court, rather than
to an administrative agency, both because the ICJ has the trappings of a court and because the ICJ would be given authority to
interpret the law rather than exercise discretion. Nevertheless, I am not sure that this is a better analogy. Within our
domestic regime, we do not regard the actions of courts in interpreting a law as a delegation of legislative or executive power because of the
position of courts in our system of separation of powers. But international institutions are not defined by the separation of powers of our polity,
and thus there is no assurance that institutions labeled courts will behave the way courts do within our system. In particular, federal
courts in the United States are defined by characteristics, such as life tenure and a democratic appointment process, that may not
characterize international courts. Moreover, judges on international courts may come from traditions that do not recognize or at least honor a
distinction between discretion and formal obligation. n44

BUT, the mere attempt will link-turn the net-benefits.

Grossman 17 – Associate Professor, U of Baltimore Law; served as Legal Advisor to the Government of
Chile before the ICJ in Maritime Dispute (Peru v. Chile) (2017)

Nienke Grossman, “Solomonic Judgments and the International Court of Justice,” Ch. 2 in Legitimacy
and International Courts, pub. 2018, pp. 43-45

The term “Solomonic” dates to the Biblical story of King Solomon. Two women each claimed to be the
mother of the same infant, and the king declared it should be cut in half.4 Although King Solomon used this
provisional judgment to determine the identity of and grant custody to the biological mother, Solomonic judgments are generally understood
as the “split-the-baby” provisional approach. Solomonic or compromise judgments reject the winner-take-all approach that characterizes
most modern common law adjudication.5 Rather than recognizing legal rights or duties as belonging to one party alone, a Solomonic court finds
ways to split the issues or allocate remedies somewhat evenly. A Solomonic judgment may represent a point within a set of reasonable legal
outcomes whereby the Court has awarded each of the litigating parties some, but not all, of what they seek. On the other hand, sometimes
Solomonic courts may prioritize pleasing and displeasing the litigating parties in relatively equal amounts over deciding
disputes in strict accordance with the relevant law. They may prize Solomonism over law.

Peru v. Chile is not the Court’s first judgment deemed “Solomonic”. Rather, the term is frequently used to describe ICJ
judgments. 6 [Footnote 6] 6 See, e.g, V. Dimitrijevic and M. Milanovic, ‘The strange story of the Bosnian Genocide case’, Leiden Journal
of International Law 21 (2008), 85 (discussing the Bosnian Genocide case); L. F. Damrosch, ‘The impact of the Nicaragua case on the court and
its role: harmful, helpful or in between?’, Leiden Journal of International Law 25 (2012),145 (referring to Bosnian Genocide and Oil Platforms
case); ‘Testing the Effectiveness of the International Court of Justice: The Nuclear Weapons Case’, American Society of International
Law Proceedings 91 (1997), 8 (analyzing the Nuclear Weapons case); Tom Ginsburg and Richard McAdams, ‘Adjudicating in Anarchy: An
Expressive Theory of International Dispute Resolution’, William & Mary Law Review 45 (2004), n. 247 (discussing the Haya de la Torre case). 7 D.
Bodansky, ‘The Concept of Legitimacy in International Law’, in R. Wolfrum and V. Roben (eds.), Legitimacy in International Law (Berlin: Springer-
Verlag, 2008), p. 313; A. Buchanan and R. Keohane, ‘The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions’, in L. H. Meyer (ed.), Legitimacy, Justice
and Public International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 29; Daniel Bodansky, ‘The Legitimacy of International
Governance: A Coming Challenge for International Environmental Law?’, American Journal of International Law 93 (1999), 604. [End FN] The
implications of Solomonic decision-making for the Court’s legitimacy, however, are under-explored. A
legitimate court possesses justified authority, and its rulings are worthy of respect and ought to be followed, even when against the perceived
interests of a particular party. Normatively legitimate courts possess the “right to rule,” while sociologically legitimate courts are perceived to
have it.7 While normative legitimacy is prescriptive and derived from philosophical and theoretical approaches, sociological legitimacy is
agent-relative, dynamic and subjective.8 Source-, procedure- and result-oriented factors may affect the legitimacy of an
institution.9 This Chapter explores the relationship between legitimacy and Solomonic judgments. It
suggests that Solomonic decisionmaking is a potential danger to the normative legitimacy of the ICJ when it
exceeds the scope of States’ delegated authority and because it is inherently biased against parties with significantly stronger legal cases.
Judgments aimed at splitting the baby may result in unsound legal reasoning, and they do not assist
those normatively addressed to better comply with the law.10 The perception that the Court is acting in
a Solomonic fashion, even when it may not be, may harm its sociological legitimacy, or States’
perceptions of its justified authority when it detracts from the Court’s adjudicatory function. On the other
hand, perceptions that the Court is making decisions that are rooted in law and also Solomonic may enhance the Court’s effectiveness, and
thereby, sociological legitimacy.
 Deterrence
Deterrence wrong: no causal link between nukes and peace, can’t overcome CnC
issues, makes states risk-prone, and luck.
Pelopidas’15 |Benoît Pelopidas, Ph.D in Politics, Sciences Po (Paris)/ University of Geneva. Holds the
chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). Affiliate of the Center for International
Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. He is the Principal Investigator of a 1.5 million
euros project on nuclear weapons choices, funded by the European Research Council. “A Bet Portrayed
as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons.” James Goodby; George
Shultz. The War That Must Never Be Fought. Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence, Hoover Press, pp.5-55,
2015, 9780817918453. ffhal-03394041f|KZaidi

Earlier in the chapter, I asked whether

seventy years is a high enough standard of evidence for us to surrender
our fate to nuclear weapons forever. In brief, we don’t know what caused the lack of war between great
powers. Several answers compete. So far, we have decided to trust one answer that would cost millions
of lives if it were proven wrong because there is no foreseeable protection against a nuclear strike.125 We will
never reach a level of certainty that makes this policy choice as obvious as some claim it to be.126 The critique of the
goal of a world without nuclear weapons raising the specter of the return of great-power war has to face this uncertainty. It must also face the
mixed record of nuclear weapons as peacemakers.

Not only is the reliance on nuclear deterrence a bet portrayed as a certainty in practice if not in words,
but this bet considerably overestimates the peace-keeping capacities of this strategy. Nuclear
deterrence has, at times, favored more risk-prone behavior in a series of cases, does not avoid
organizational and command-and-control problems, and has not been sufficient to keep the peace in a
series of critical situations.

The idea that reaching a world without nuclear weapons will “unleash the dogs of war” is unconvincing.

We cannot and will not know for sure what kept peace in the last seven decades. Looking for certainties and
silver bullets is what makes the nuclear peace hypothesis so appealing. What we know is that the long peace was limited in
time and space, that luck played a significant role that cannot be replaced by deterrence, that we might not yet
know the full extent of its role due to persisting secrecy about nuclear-weapons related accidents and
that nuclear deterrence as a strategy created more risk-prone behavior on the part of the nuclear
possessors and did not ultimately prevent nuclear-armed states from fighting a war.

Alt causes and conventional solves.

Pelopidas’15 |Benoît Pelopidas, Ph.D in Politics, Sciences Po (Paris)/ University of Geneva. Holds the
chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). Affiliate of the Center for International
Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. He is the Principal Investigator of a 1.5 million
euros project on nuclear weapons choices, funded by the European Research Council. “A Bet Portrayed
as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons.” James Goodby; George
Shultz. The War That Must Never Be Fought. Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence, Hoover Press, pp.5-55,
2015, 9780817918453. ffhal-03394041f|KZaidi

These three arguments

for acquiring and keeping nuclear arsenals rest on the power of these weapons to
deter an action, whether a great-powers war, nuclear proliferation, or invasion of and regime change in
weaker nations. But deterrence of such an action is most often based on the credibility of a set of national
capabilities that include all the non-nuclear assets of a nation, including its credibility as an ally.
Therefore, deterrence should not be identified with nuclear weapons and defined by them as has
become the habit, almost unconsciously.11 The added deterrent value of nuclear weapons,12 rather
than their deterrent value per se, has to be reexamined, keeping in mind that conventional weapons
and other factors (economic, as an example) can have a deterrent effect with a much higher credibility
of actual use.13

The DA misunderstands China’s risk calculus – 50 years of history prove they will be
patient if there is a risk of failure.
Klare 23 – The Nation’s defense correspondent, professor emeritus of peace and world-security
studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association.

Michael Klare, March 17 2023, “Are We Manufacturing a Taiwan Crisis Over Nothing?” The Nation,
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-crisis-china-invasion/

Add in one other factor. China’s leaders seem to have concluded that time is on their side—that the
Taiwanese people will, eventually, voluntarily decide to unite with the mainland. This approach is
spelled out in Beijing’s recent white paper, “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New
Era,” released last August by the Taiwan Affairs Office of the PRC’s State Council. As China grows
increasingly prosperous, the paper argues, the Taiwanese—especially young Taiwanese—will see ever
greater benefits from unification, diminishing the appeal of independence, or “separatism.”

“China’s development and progress, and in particular the steady increases in its economic power,
technological strength, and national defense capabilities, are an effective curb against separatist
activities,” the paper states. “As more and more compatriots from Taiwan, especially young people,
pursue their studies, start businesses, seek jobs, or go to live on the mainland.… the economic ties and
personal bonds between the people on both sides run deeper…leading cross-Straits relations towards
reunification.”

And keep in mind that this is not a short-term proposition but a strategy that will take years—even
decades—to achieve success. Nevertheless, most of that white paper’s content is devoted not to
military threats—the only parts of the paper to receive coverage in the West—but to bolstering
bilateral trade and increasing China’s economic appeal to young Taiwanese. “Following the path of
socialism with Chinese characteristics, the mainland has improved its governance and maintained long-
term economic growth,” it asserts. “As a result, the overall strength and international influence of the
mainland will continue to increase, and its influence over and appeal to Taiwan society will keep
growing.”

In such a take-it-slow approach surely lies a recognition that military action against Taiwan could prove
a disaster for China. But whatever the reasoning behind such planning, it appears that Chinese leaders
are prepared to invest massive resources in persuading the Taiwanese that reunification is in their best
interests. Whether or not such a strategy will succeed is unknown. It’s certainly possible that a
Taiwanese preference for political autonomy will outweigh any interest in mainland business
opportunities, but with Beijing banking so heavily on the future in this manner, a military assault seems
far less likely. And that’s something you won’t hear these days in an ever more belligerent Washington.
Multiple factors thump invasion – Xi won’t take the risk.
Adlakha 23 – professor of Chinese at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Vice-chairperson and
honorary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.

Hemant Adlakha, January 20 2023, “10 Reasons Xi Won’t Attack Taiwan Anytime Soon,” The Diplomat,
https://thediplomat.com/2023/01/10-reasons-xi-wont-attack-taiwan-anytime-soon/

Both in the government work report presented by the outgoing Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to the NPC
on March 5 and in the CPPCC work report presented by its chairman Wang Yang the previous day, the
Taiwan issue, including unification, was downplayed in a surprisingly uncharacteristic manner. This
deemphasizing was particularly significant when viewed in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
which had started just a week before the convening of the Two Sessions.

Remember, within days of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, the media and many observers
globally started arguing that Taiwan could be the next Ukraine, with China playing the role of Russia.
Interestingly, the cross-strait affairs analysts in Taiwan did not agree.

Most Taiwanese analysts were down-to-earth and realistic in interpreting the rhetoric coming from the
2002 Two Sessions. The Two Sessions were absolutely forthcoming in that China did not consider
Taiwan and Ukraine comparable. On March 7, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi further dismissed the
comparison between the Taiwan question and the Ukraine issue as “baseless speculation.” Second, and
perhaps related, compared to previous years, the Two Sessions in March 2022 were remarkable for
downplaying the discussion on Taiwan.

Internationally respected IR professor Hamada Koichi , who once served as special advisor to former
Prime Minister Abe Shinzo of Japan, also observed that Xi is well aware that the forceful subjugation of
Taiwan could well end up backfiring. “At a time when China is under severe economic pressure and
growth is slowing sharply, this is the last thing it [the Chinese Communist Party] needs,” Hamada
opined.

It’s undeniable that the unification of Taiwan with mainland China has been an integral component of
Xi’s signature “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” goal. Yet some scholars maintain Beijing has no
intention of forcing unification now or anytime soon. One recent commentary with a focus on the
escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait put it plainly: “We have simply forgotten the number of times
when the Xi Jinping administration has threatened to reunify China and Taiwan, even by use of force, if
necessary. But one thing is clear – China won’t invade Taiwan.”

According to Professor Deng Yuwen, a council member of China’s Reform and Development Institute,
rather than launching an invasion, “China will choose to put pressure on Taiwan using a combination of
methods to promote unification… It may launch more preferential policies and try to initiate discussion
on a ‘one country, two systems’ framework with Taiwan’s ruling and opposition parties.”

Here are 10 practical constraints making it highly unlikely that China will resort to using force.

First, a war between even a small country and a big power today is not only expensive but also not an
easy walkover for the bigger side, as Russian President Vladimir Putin is finding out. With the war in
Ukraine soon to complete one year of fighting, what is notable is that Ukraine has been able to sustain
itself despite having a much smaller GDP and a weaker military than Russia.

Second, with China’s export markets drying up in Europe and the United States, the Chinese real estate
crisis deepening further, the World Bank and the IMF predicting a gloomy economic growth outlook of
1.7 percent and 2.7 percent respectively, the immediate key priority for the Chinese leadership is not to
use force in the Taiwan Strait but to strengthen the economy. China’s economy is struggling in the
midst of a pressure campaign waged against it by the United States. At the same time, the Chinese
economy is also slowing down sharply under the mounting pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic,
especially following the CCP regime’s reversal of the zero COVID policy. Under such circumstances, it
would be foolhardy on the part of Xi, or the CCP, to burden the national economy by taking on the
enormous expense of a war.

Third, regardless of the fact that Xi has locked down a third five-year term, his goal to consolidate a
power base within the party is far from accomplished. It is often the case that more control only breeds
more paranoia among authoritarian leaders. The fear of being unable to keep forced unification a short-
term exercise might be acting as a potent deterrent for Xi – especially as Putin has already paid a heavy
political price for the war in Ukraine.

Fourth, though Xi will be in favor of waging a quick war on the cheap, that may not be within his control.
There is always a risk that conflict will escalate into “total war” – a phrase that became popular to
describe the situation in World War II, as each side used every possible resource to destroy their
opponent.

Fifth, Taiwan and Ukraine cannot be compared in military strength – Taiwan is armed to the teeth.
Unlike Ukraine’s steppe-like fertile plains and plateaus, Taiwan consists of over 100 islands. Taiwan’s
outer islands are dotted with missiles, rockets, and artillery guns. In addition, Taiwan’s granite hills are
home to tunnels and bunker systems.

Sixth is the possibility of U.S. involvement in. While officially Washington maintains “strategic ambiguity”
on the question whether it would defend Taiwan militarily if needed, none other than President Joe
Biden himself has repeatedly answered directly in the affirmative. Amid the China-U.S. competition it
seems more and more likely that Washington cannot afford to allow Beijing a free hand in any military
campaign against Taiwan.

Seventh is the Japan dimension. The current Japanese government under Kishida has followed up on
signals from the late Prime Minister Abe that Tokyo would help to defend Taiwan. Abe once said, “A
Taiwan contingency is a contingency for Japan.” The Kishida government’s push for a more muscular
defense role in the region is believed to be in part motivated by the potential for a Taiwan contingency.

Eighth, according to a Hong Kong-based expert on Chinese politics, Xi will be well aware of the West’s
solidarity during the Ukraine crisis The European Union is China’s major trading partner. Running afoul
of it, as well as the United States and Japan, would be dangerous for a leader who knows he must raise
living standards at home.

Ninth, Taiwan may not have been included in a series of recent U.S. multilateral security and trade
initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region but the island is perceived as integral to defense mechanisms such
as the Quad, AUKUS, etc. For example, the Quad insists on maintaining the status quo in the Indo-Pacific
region. Hence, not only Japan but India and Australia might come to the rescue of Taiwan. In such a
scenario, China might not want to risk facing three big military powers together.

Last but not least is the ASEAN factor. ASEAN has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and their
bilateral trade is set to achieve the target of $1 trillion in a couple of years. Yet Southeast Asian
governments are growing wary of China too. In a recent speech, the former Singapore foreign minister
George Yeo said: “No country in ASEAN is going to turn down opportunities that come their way in
China, but every country worries that too great a dependence on China will constrain our autonomy of
action.” It is highly unlikely Beijing would resort to an action that will force countries in Southeast Asia to
see China as an enemy.

Claims that “Xi wants to complete the task within his term of office” may be true. But there is no doubt
that all of Xi’s predecessors – from Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao – also
wanted to complete unification. All of them ultimately decided the internal and external conditions
were not right. Xi, so far, has come to the same conclusion.

Conflicting U.S. messages reinforce ideas that we will refuse to defend Taiwan.
Blanchette 23 – Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Jude Blanchette and Ryan Hass, February 2 2023, “To Deter Beijing, What the United States Says
Matters,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://www.csis.org/analysis/deter-beijing-
what-united-states-says-matters

There are geopolitical issues where open debate, even among senior officials in the U.S. government
and military, might well be healthy, even positive. Groupthink, as we’ve learned repeatedly in the past,
can be dangerous. But when it comes to the prospect for war with China, the world’s second largest
economy with a formidable military and a growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, the lack of coherence
in messaging coming from the U.S. military not only undermines the credibility of public messaging and
but it also erodes the United States’ ability send clear, precise, and credible deterrence signals Beijing.

For the sake of its deterrence of China and to ensure its credibility to key allies and partners, its time the
United States begin speaking with one voice on the risk Beijing poses to Taiwan.

Few doubt that Chinese leader Xi Jinping would like to fully and formally annex Taiwan into the People’s
Republic of China (PRC). But Xi, like all previous leaders of the PRC, faces a critical question: at what
sacrifice? For more than 70 years, Taiwan, the United States, and key actors in the international
community have worked together to keep Beijing’s assessment of the potential cost of an invasion as
unacceptably high.

But as the political scientist Robert Jervis wrote in a landmark 1982 article, “deterrence depends on
perceptions.” To ensure that current and future Chinese leaders continue to see an invasion as
existentially risky, it is imperative that they continue to perceive the United States’ resolve and
credibility as unimpeachable.
The lack of coherence in U.S. assessments of China’s ambitions and timelines in the Taiwan Strait
undermines this goal.

First, these conflicting messages send a signal to Beijing, and the rest of the world, that the United
States does not, in fact, possess clear and compelling intelligence about Xi’s intentions. If it did, then
the spectrum of assessments would be in a much tighter cluster. As we saw in the lead-up to Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine, when U.S. intelligence warns (correctly) that a Russian attack is certain and
imminent, the reliability of public statements matters greatly. If we do see Beijing mobilize for war, the
United States will need every ounce of its credibility to form and hold in place an international response.

Second, the more alarmist warnings about an imminent Chinese invasion are not being matched by the
corresponding behavior one would expect if war is on the near horizon. If there is credible evidence
that the PLA is actively planning to invade Taiwan in the next two years, as General Minihan seems to
be indicating, then the entire U.S. government and military should be mobilizing at a speed and scale not
seen since World War II. It is not, and that likely indicates that the recent statements about an
impending Chinese invasion are not widely shared within the U.S. government. Further, the
discrepancy between statements and actions signals to many that these are not genuine warnings, but
rather attempts to focus congressional and public attention. But again, this simply dilutes the potency of
future pronouncements.

Finally, recent comments about the imminence of a Chinese attack serve as inadvertent propaganda—
and budget rationale—for the PLA. The picture being painted of the PLA is of a military force possessing
fearsome fighting abilities and an unrepentant resolve to take Taiwan. Instead of deflating the morale
and perceived capabilities of the PLA, the United States is inflating it.
 Assurances
Plan creates a virtual deterrent.
Pelopidas’15 |Benoît Pelopidas, Ph.D in Politics, Sciences Po (Paris)/ University of Geneva. Holds the
chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). Affiliate of the Center for International
Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. He is the Principal Investigator of a 1.5 million
euros project on nuclear weapons choices, funded by the European Research Council. “A Bet Portrayed
as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons.” James Goodby; George
Shultz. The War That Must Never Be Fought. Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence, Hoover Press, pp.5-55,
2015, 9780817918453. ffhal-03394041f|KZaidi

The first: yes,

abolishing nuclear weapons is not abolishing war. However, the ability to reconstitute
nuclear weapons would create a “virtual deterrent” effect.54 Moreover, in a world without nuclear
weapons, the support for measures to prevent or respond to a breakout would, arguably, be much
greater than it is today.55 Leaders in this world would probably remember Schelling’s story and learn
from it. As Sagan said, “In a nuclearfree world, the former nuclear-weapons states would have far stronger mutual
incentives to punish and reverse any new state’s decision to acquire atomic bombs. Ironically, it is
precisely because nuclear-weapons states have such large arsenals today that they sometimes
succumb to the temptation to accept new proliferators. In a disarmed world, such complacency would
be more obviously imprudent.”56

Every part of the DA is wrong: No desire for nukes, development hurdles, extended
deterrence lacks credibility, and nukes make allies MORE insecure. BUT conventional
forces like troops solve.
Pelopidas’15 |Benoît Pelopidas, Ph.D in Politics, Sciences Po (Paris)/ University of Geneva. Holds the
chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). Affiliate of the Center for International
Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. He is the Principal Investigator of a 1.5 million
euros project on nuclear weapons choices, funded by the European Research Council. “A Bet Portrayed
as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons.” James Goodby; George
Shultz. The War That Must Never Be Fought. Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence, Hoover Press, pp.5-55,
2015, 9780817918453. ffhal-03394041f|KZaidi

To sum up, nuclear proliferation risks are not likely to increase if the United States decreases the size of its
nuclear arsenal. A closer look at nuclear history demonstrates that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, a positive
nuclear security guarantee has not been a silver bullet for nonproliferation even if it played a role in a couple of
nuclear choices. Current policy discussions overestimate the appeal of nuclear weapons and wrongly assume
that states are seeking to organize their national security around the alternative between an
independent nuclear deterrent and a “nuclear umbrella.” They neglect the most recent studies that
underplay the threat of massive proliferation of nuclear weapons by states in the next decades as well
as the challenges associated with successful proliferation. More importantly, they underestimate the
enormous credibility problem of extended nuclear deterrence and the facts that it might make the protégé
feel more insecure or, on the contrary, might not alter his plans for a national nuclear-weapons
capability. These key problems of extended nuclear deterrence are going to remain for the foreseeable future. Finally, extended
nuclear deterrence is not well-equipped to deter terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons. Because of these
problems, a
more cooperative and tailored policy of security guarantees could be elaborated that would
not rely so explicitly on nuclear weapons. Conventional threats would be much more credible and
would not invite nuclear retaliation.127 This shift, which would require close consultations with allies
who understand the nuclear umbrella as the ultimate sign of US protection, would free the United
States from a possible reputation cost of not keeping its promises if an ally is attacked. It might also
address the concerns of allies who consider that having US nuclear weapons on their soil makes them
more vulnerable.

Prolif thesis is incorrect and naturalizes nuclear desire.

Egeland 21 – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Security Studies, The Paris Institute of
Political Studies

Kjølv Egeland, “The Ideology of Nuclear Order”, New Political Science, 2021, https://hal.science/hal-
03384754v1/file/2021_egeland_the-ideology-of-nuclear-order_nps_43-2.pdf

The implication of the naturalism of nuclear desire is that, despite the overarching goal of a world
without nuclear weapons, the best the international community can hope for in practice is to limit
further nuclearization. According to Pelopidas, the assumption of universal nuclear desire “discredits
disarmament moves as contrary to the ‘direction of history’, claiming that actions in favor of
disarmament would just be utopian and therefore impossible.”87 The idea that nuclearization is
inevitable and irreversible consequently “leads to a focus on arms control instead of disarmament,
because it only pretends to slow the pace of the movement of history and not to try to reverse it.”88
This linear understanding of history often shines through in the statements of officials representing
nuclear-armed states and their allies. Typically, nuclear desire and the prospect of proliferation appears
in the guise of unspecified “rogue states,” “terrorists,” or “bad actors.” As long as such actors are on the
search for nuclear weapons, so goes the argument, “responsible nuclear powers” – a category critical
scholars have understood as racialized, gendered, and patriarchal89 – must retain their “deterrents.” In
this way, nuclear desire, via “bad actors,” externalizes the cause of the non-realization of the sublime
object of peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. The creation of such permanent
excuses or “evils” is arguably a defining trait of ideologies; an ideology, in this view, is a “symbolic field
which contains such a filler [an excuse or scapegoat] holding the place of some structural impossibility,
while simultaneously disavowing this impossibility.”90

The assumption of an abstract and pervasive nuclear desire is intimately linked to a recurring trope in
the ideology of nuclear order, namely the idea that the NPT is constantly on the verge of disintegration.
In this view, a single case of proliferation or a failure by the nuclear-weapon states to implement their
disarmament obligations could lead to a wave of proliferation or mass withdrawals from the NPT.91 The
latter hypothesis is often implicitly invoked in the name of disarmament.92 The logic is simple: If the
nuclear-armed states became convinced that they had to make a choice between disarmament and
uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons, they might opt for disarmament. But this “collapse thesis” is
both empirically uncorroborated – support for the NPT is at an all-time high and the rate of
proliferation has slowed over time – and arguably counterproductive for those promoting
disarmament. Based on the assumption that the non-possession of nuclear weapons is a painful
sacrifice that could easily be reversed, the collapse thesis upholds the notion that denuclearization is a
naïve or impractical struggle against nature. In reality, only a minority of states have ever pursued
nuclear armament.93
Only warrant was Japan we get new answers.
Zero Japanese confidence now.
Giarra 23 – naval aviator who flew P-3 Orions. He was a fleet officer of the deck, served in two ships,
and was a designated strategic planner and alliance manager.

Paul Giarra, July 2023, “Time to Recalibrate,” U.S. Naval Institute,

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/july/time-recalibrate-navy-needs-tactical-nuclear-
weapons-again
The dichotomy between U.S. tactical nuclear weapon capabilities and those of China, Russia, and North Korea is clear to observers in other
countries. Allies, most notably Japan and South Korea, are questioning the United States’ credibility and its ability to
respond in a tactical nuclear context.1 Unofficially (albeit with great consequence), some authoritative and experienced
Japanese statesmen are concluding that no U.S. president would defend Japan against nuclear weapons, and
that the U.S. Navy could not get forward or stay forward in a conflict with China over Taiwan.2 The Republic of
Korea has raised reintroducing U.S. tactical nuclear weapons ashore and afloat to deter North Korea, and the recent
Washington Declaration by U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol may not be enough for
South Koreans who feel Seoul needs its own nuclear arsenal.3 Without a strong and discernable response
plan shared with and publicly visible to allies and adversaries alike, U.S. gestures of reassurance appear unconvincing and
may actually encourage domestic nuclear weapon programs in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere.

Tokyo and Seoul, discomfited by what they see as pending failures of nuclear umbrella security guarantees, are
calling for changes in their own and U.S. nuclear postures. During the Cold War and until now, such statements from
these allies would have been extraordinary, but circumstances have changed. The issue has expanded beyond U.S.
arsenals to how best to combine traditionally unilateral U.S. nuclear weapon efforts with heretofore nonnuclear allies in the face of Russian and
Chinese escalation.

No Japan prolif:
A] Politics, public opposition, and veto power.
Ghazleh 22 – Senior researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory, and an adjunct professor at the
United Arab Emirates University, Abu Dhabi.

Mohammad Ghazleh, May 14 2022, “Five reasons why Japan will unlikely go nuclear,” The Jordan Times,
https://jordantimes.com/opinion/mohammad-abu-ghazleh/five-reasons-why-japan-will-unlikely-go-
nuclear

Of course, Japan has all the capabilities to be a nuclear power and already is in possession of 45.5 tonnes
of reparated Plutonium, enough to produce 6,ooo nuclear bombs. Japan could go nuclear within six to
12 months; nevertheless, Japan will not acquire nuclear weapons for several reasons.

First, as is well known, Japan is the only country to have suffered from nuclear attacks. This was the
main reason for its surrender in the Second World War. After the war, Japan adopted the Three Non-
Nuclear Principles, which stipulate non-possession, non-production, and non-introduction of nuclear
weapons in its territories. Japan is still politically firmly stuck to these principles in accordance with its
Peace Constitution. Former prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, vowed not only to prevent the proliferation
of nuclear weapons, but also to free the world of all nuclear arms. This Japanese sensitivity to nuclear
technology was further reinforced after the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

Second, The anti-nuclear sentiment is strong among Japanese people. Indeed, the Japanese are
strikingly opposed to nuclear weapons. According to a prevous public opinion poll, 82 per cent of
Japanese people are against nuclear weapons, while 69 per cent are also opposed to having these
weapons brought into their country’s territories.

Third, it is not only the Japanese public that is opposed to nuclear weapons. Indeed, there many internal
players who reject these nuclear arms. The nuclear energy industry in Japan is advanced and thriving,
but this only gained acceptance on account of the ‘nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons’ deal of the
1950s. Thus ministries, regulatory bodies, industrial groups, and local governments have the right of
veto against any political decision in this regard. These entities rely on strong public opposition, of
course.

B] Troops.
Nye 23 – University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. PhD in political science from Harvard.

Joseph Nye, February 16 2023, “Japan’s Bet on Hard Power,” Project Syndicate, https://www.project-
syndicate.org/onpoint/japan-s-bet-on-hard-power?barrier=accesspaylog

The best security guarantee is the presence of US troops, which Japan helps to maintain with generous
host-nation support. The new measures announced by Kishida and Biden in January are designed both
to reinforce this guarantee and to provide reinsurance in the event that Trump or a Trump-like figure
returns to the White House. Importantly, these measures do not give Japan’s neighbors any reason to
fear that it has reacquired a taste for aggression. In fact, strengthening the US-Japan alliance is the best
way to ensure that Japan never does.
1AR
 K
The United States is the people.
Yannacone, Rahenkamp, & Cerchione 76 (Victor John, Jr., Co-Chairman of the Environmental
Law Committee, Co-Founder of the American Trial Lawyers Association, & Chairman of the
Environmental Defense Fund; John, Chairman of the Penjerdel Open Space Committee; Angelo J.,
Associate of Benham, Blair, Winesett, and Duke, “Impact Zoning: Alternative to Exclusion in the
Suburbs,” The Urban Lawyer 8, no. 3, p. 418) NIJ
The concept of sovereignty in the United States has evolved considerably in 200 years, reflecting changes in society's perception of the public interest. Unlike the English common law where

sovereign powers were confined to the monarch, the sovereign in the United States is the people. In 1793, Chief Justice Jay explained
the change in the concept of sovereignty under the new republic: From the crown of Great Britain, the sovereignty of their country passed to the people of it. . . . [T]he people, in

their collective and national capacity, established the present Constitution. It is remarkable that in establishing it, the
people exercised their own rights, and their own proper sovereignty, and conscious of the plentitude of it, they declared with be coming dignity, "We the
people of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution." Here we see the people acting as sovereigns of the whole

country. . . . . . . [T]he sovereignty of the nation is [in] the people of the nation. . . . . . . Sovereignty is the right to
govern; a nation or State-sovereign is the person or persons in whom that resides. In Europe the sovereignty is generally ascribed to the Prince;
here it resides with the people. . . . Their Princes have personal powers, dignities, and preeminiences, our rulers have none but official;
nor do they partake in the sovereignty otherwise, or in any other capacity, than as private citizens.

State-based solution key to solve warming—individual action fails and trades off
CAG 10—Climate Change Communication Advisory Group. Dr Adam Corner School of Psychology,
Cardiff University - Dr Tom Crompton Change Strategist, WWF-UK - Scott Davidson Programme
Manager, Global Action Plan - Richard Hawkins Senior Researcher, Public Interest Research Centre -
Professor Tim Kasser, Psychology department, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, USA. - Dr Renee
Lertzman, Center for Sustainable Processes & Practices, Portland State University, US. - Peter Lipman,
Policy Director, Sustrans. - Dr Irene Lorenzoni, Centre for Environmental Risk, University of East Anglia. -
George Marshall, Founding Director, Climate Outreach , Information Network - Dr Ciaran Mundy,
Director, Transition Bristol - Dr Saffron O’Neil, Department of Resource Management and Geography,
University of Melbourne, Australia. - Professor Nick Pidgeon, Director, Understanding Risk Research
Group, School of Psychology, Cardiff University. - Dr Anna Rabinovich, School of Psychology, University
of Exeter - Rosemary Randall, Founder and director of Cambridge Carbon Footprint - Dr Lorraine
Whitmarsh, School of Psychology, Cardiff University & Visiting Fellow at the, Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change Research. (Communicating climate change to mass public audience,
http://pirc.info/downloads/communicating_climate_mass_audiences.pdf)

This short advisory paper collates a set of recommendations about how best to shape mass public
communications aimed at increasing concern about climate change and motivating commensurate
behavioural changes.¶ Its focus is not upon motivating small private-sphere behavioural changes on a
piece-meal basis. Rather, it marshals evidence about how best to motivate the ambitious and systemic
behavioural change that is necessary – including, crucially, greater public engagement with the policy
process (through, for example, lobbying decision-makers and elected representatives, or participating in
demonstrations), as well as major lifestyle changes. ¶ Political leaders themselves have drawn attention
to the imperative for more vocal public pressure to create the ‘political space’ for them to enact more
ambitious policy interventions. 1 While this paper does not dismiss the value of individuals making
small private-sphere behavioural changes (for example, adopting simple domestic energy efficiency
measures) it is clear that such behaviours do not, in themselves, represent a proportional response to
the challenge of climate change. As David MacKay, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of
Energy and Climate change writes: “Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little helps’. If everyone
does a little, we’ll achieve only a little” (MacKay, 2008).¶ The task of campaigners and communicators
from government, business and non-governmental organisations must therefore be to motivate both (i)
widespread adoption of ambitious private-sphere behavioural changes; and (ii) widespread acceptance
of – and indeed active demand for – ambitious new policy interventions.¶ Current public communication campaigns, as
orchestrated by government, business and non-governmental organisations, are not achieving these changes. This paper asks: how should such communications be designed if they are to have
optimal impact in motivating these changes? The response to this question will require fundamental changes in the ways that many climate change communication campaigns are currently
devised and implemented. ¶ This advisory paper offers a list of principles that could be used to enhance the quality of communication around climate change communications. The authors are
each engaged in continuously sifting the evidence from a range of sub-disciplines within psychology, and reflecting on the implications of this for improving climate change communications.
Some of the organisations that we represent have themselves at times adopted approaches which we have both learnt from and critique in this paper – so some of us have first hand
experience of the need for on-going improvement in the strategies that we deploy. ¶ The changes we advocate will be challenging to enact – and will require vision and leadership on the part
of the organisations adopting them. But without such vision and leadership, we do not believe that public communication campaigns on climate change will create the necessary behavioural
changes – indeed, there is a profound risk that many of today’s campaigns will actually prove counter-productive. ¶ Seven Principles¶ 1. Move Beyond Social Marketing¶ We believe that too
little attention is paid to the understanding that psychologists bring to strategies for motivating change, whilst undue faith is often placed in the application of marketing strategies to ‘sell’
behavioural changes. Unfortunately, in the context of ambitious pro-environmental behaviour, such strategies seem unlikely to motivate systemic behavioural change.¶ Social marketing is an
effective way of achieving a particular behavioural goal – dozens of practical examples in the field of health behaviour attest to this. Social marketing is really more of a framework for designing
behaviour change programmes than a behaviour change programme - it offers a method of maximising the success of a specific behavioural goal. Darnton (2008) has described social
marketing as ‘explicitly transtheoretical’, while Hastings (2007), in a recent overview of social marketing, claimed that there is no theory of social marketing. Rather, it is a ‘what works’
philosophy, based on previous experience of similar campaigns and programmes. Social marketing is flexible enough to be applied to a range of different social domains, and this is
undoubtedly a fundamental part of its appeal.¶ However, social marketing’s 'what works' status also means that it is agnostic about the longer term, theoretical merits of different behaviour
change strategies, or the cultural values that specific campaigns serve to strengthen. Social marketing dictates that the most effective strategy should be chosen, where effective means ‘most
likely to achieve an immediate behavioural goal’. ¶ This means that elements of a behaviour change strategy designed according to the principles of social marketing may conflict with other,
broader goals. What if the most effective way of promoting pro-environmental behaviour ‘A’ was to pursue a strategy that was detrimental to the achievement of long term pro-environmental
strategy ‘Z’? The principles of social marketing have no capacity to resolve this conflict – they are limited to maximising the success of the immediate behavioural programme. This is not a flaw
of social marketing – it was designed to provide tools to address specific behavioural problems on a piecemeal basis. But it is an important limitation, and one that has significant implications if
social marketing techniques are used to promote systemic behavioural change and public engagement on an issue like climate change. ¶ 2. Be honest and forthright about the probable
impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt. ¶ There is no merit in ‘dumbing down’ the
scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change are likely to be severe, and that some of these impacts are now almost certainly unavoidable. Accepting the impacts of climate change
will be an important stage in motivating behavioural responses aimed at mitigating the problem. However, deliberate attempts to instil fear or guilt carry considerable risk. ¶ Studies on fear
appeals confirm the potential for fear to change attitudes or verbal expressions of concern, but often not actions or behaviour (Ruiter et al., 2001). The impact of fear appeals is context - and
audience - specific; for example, for those who do not yet realise the potentially ‘scary’ aspects of climate change, people need to first experience themselves as vulnerable to the risks in some
way in order to feel moved or affected (Das et al, 2003; Hoog et al, 2005). As people move towards contemplating action, fear appeals can help form a behavioural intent, providing an impetus
or spark to ‘move’ from; however such appeals must be coupled with constructive information and support to reduce the sense of danger (Moser, 2007). The danger is that fear can also be
disempowering – producing feelings of helplessness, remoteness and lack of control (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Fear is likely to trigger ‘barriers to engagement’, such as denial2 (Stoll-
Kleemann et al., 2001; Weber, 2006; Moser and Dilling, 2007; Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole & Whitmarsh, 2007). The location of fear in a message is also relevant; it works better when placed
first for those who are inclined to follow the advice, but better second for those who aren't (Bier, 2001).¶ Similarly, studies have shown that guilt can play a role in motivating people to take
action but can also function to stimulate defensive mechanisms against the perceived threat or challenge to one’s sense of identity (as a good, moral person). In the latter case, behaviours may
be left untouched (whether driving a SUV or taking a flight) as one defends against any feelings of guilt or complicity through deployment of a range of justifications for the behaviour
(Ferguson & Branscombe, 2010). ¶ Overall, there is a need for emotionally balanced representations of the issues at hand. This will involve acknowledging the ‘affective reality’ of the situation,
e.g. “We know this is scary and overwhelming, but many of us feel this way and we are doing something about it”.¶ 3. Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to
climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ - as well as the benefits - that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be
unconvincing. While narratives about the future impacts of climate change may highlight the loss of much that we currently hold to be dear, narratives about climate solutions frequently
ignore the question of loss. If the two are not addressed concurrently, fear of loss may be ‘split off’ and projected into the future, where it is all too easily denied. This can be dangerous,
because accepting loss is an important step towards working through the associated emotions, and emerging with the energy and creativity to respond positively to the new situation (Randall,
2009). However, there are plenty of benefits (besides the financial ones) of a low-carbon lifestyle e.g., health, community/social interaction - including the ‘intrinsic' goals mentioned below. It
is important to be honest about both the losses and the benefits that may be associated with lifestyle change, and not to seek to separate out one from the other.¶ 3a. Avoid emphasis upon
painless, easy steps. ¶ Be honest about the limitations of voluntary private-sphere behavioural change, and the need for ambitious new policy interventions that incentivise such changes, or
that regulate for them. People know that the scope they have, as individuals, to help meet the challenge of climate change is extremely limited. For many people, it is perfectly sensible to
continue to adopt high-carbon lifestyle choices whilst simultaneously being supportive of government interventions that would make these choices more difficult for everyone. ¶ The adoption
of small-scale private sphere behavioural changes is sometimes assumed to lead people to adopt ever more difficult (and potentially significant) behavioural changes. The empirical evidence
for this ‘foot-in-thedoor’ effect is highly equivocal. Some studies detect such an effect; others studies have found the reverse effect (whereby people tend to ‘rest on their laurels’ having
adopted a few simple behavioural changes - Thogersen and Crompton, 2009). Where attention is drawn to simple and painless privatesphere behavioural changes, these should be urged in
pursuit of a set of intrinsic goals (that is, as a response to people’s understanding about the contribution that such behavioural change may make to benefiting their friends and family, their
community, the wider world, or in contributing to their growth and development as individuals) rather than as a means to achieve social status or greater financial success. Adopting behaviour
in pursuit of intrinsic goals is more likely to lead to ‘spillover’ into other sustainable behaviours (De Young, 2000; Thogersen and Crompton, 2009).¶ People aren’t stupid: they know that if
there are wholesale changes in the global climate underway, these will not be reversed merely through checking their tyre pressures or switching their TV off standby. An emphasis upon
simple and painless steps suppresses debate about those necessary responses that are less palatable – that will cost people money, or that will infringe on cherished freedoms (such as to fly).
Recognising this will be a key step in accepting the reality of loss of aspects of our current lifestyles, and in beginning to work through the powerful emotions that this will engender (Randall,
2009). ¶ 3b. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide. ¶ There will, undoubtedly, be economic benefits to be accrued
through investment in new technologies, but there will also be instances where the economic imperative and the climate change adaptation or mitigation imperative diverge, and periods of
economic uncertainty for many people as some sectors contract. It seems inevitable that some interventions will have negative economic impacts (Stern, 2007).¶ Undue emphasis upon
economic imperatives serves to reinforce the dominance, in society, of a set of extrinsic goals (focussed, for example, on financial benefit). A large body of empirical research demonstrates
that these extrinsic goals are antagonistic to the emergence of pro-social and proenvironmental concern (Crompton and Kasser, 2009).¶ 3c. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green
consumerism’ as a response to climate change.¶ As mentioned above (3b), a large body of research points to the antagonism between goals directed towards the acquisition of material
objects and the emergence of pro-environmental and pro-social concern (Crompton and Kasser, 2009). Campaigns to ‘buy green’ may be effective in driving up sales of particular products, but
in conveying the impression that climate change can be addressed by ‘buying the right things’, they risk undermining more difficult and systemic changes. A recent study found that people in
an experiment who purchased ‘green’ products acted less altruistically on subsequent tasks (Mazar & Zhong, 2010) – suggesting that small ethical acts may act as a ‘moral offset’ and licence
undesirable behaviours in other domains. This does not mean that private-sphere behaviour changes will always lead to a reduction in subsequent pro-environmental behaviour, but it does
suggest that the reasons used to motivate these changes are critically important. Better is to emphasise that ‘every little helps a little’ – but that these changes are only the beginning of a
process that must also incorporate more ambitious private-sphere change and significant collective action at a political level.¶ 4. Empathise with the emotional responses that will be
engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change. ¶ Belief in climate change and support for low-carbon policies will remain fragile unless people are
emotionally engaged. We should expect people to be sad or angry, to feel guilt or shame, to yearn for that which is lost or to search for more comforting answers (Randall, 2009). Providing
support and empathy in working through the painful emotions of 'grief' for a society that must undergo changes is a prerequisite for subsequent adaptation to new circumstances.¶ Without
such support and empathy, it is more likely that people will begin to deploy a range of maladaptive ‘coping strategies’, such as denial of personal responsibility, blaming others, or becoming
apathetic (Lertzman, 2008). An audience should not be admonished for deploying such strategies – this would in itself be threatening, and could therefore harden resistance to positive
behaviour change (Miller and Rolnick, 2002). The key is not to dismiss people who exhibit maladaptive coping strategies, but to understand how they can be made more adaptive. People who
feel socially supported will be more likely to adopt adaptive emotional responses - so facilitating social support for proenvironmental behaviour is crucial.¶ 5. Promote pro-environmental
social norms and harness the power of social networks¶ One way of bridging the gap between private-sphere behaviour changes and collective action is the promotion of pro-environmental
social norms. Pictures and videos of ordinary people (‘like me’) engaging in significant proenvironmental actions are a simple and effective way of generating a sense of social normality around
pro-environmental behaviour (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein and Griskevicius, 2007). There are different reasons that people adopt social norms, and encouraging people to adopt a
positive norm simply to ‘conform’, to avoid a feeling of guilt, or for fear of not ‘fitting in’ is likely to produce a relatively shallow level of motivation for behaviour change. Where social norms
can be combined with ‘intrinsic’ motivations (e.g. a sense of social belonging), they are likely to be more effective and persistent.¶ Too often, environmental communications are directed to
the individual as a single unit in the larger social system of consumption and political engagement. This can make the problems feel too overwhelming, and evoke unmanageable levels of
anxiety. Through the enhanced awareness of what other people are doing, a strong sense of collective purpose can be engendered. One factor that is likely to influence whether adaptive or
maladaptive coping strategies are selected in response to fear about climate change is whether people feel supported by a social network – that is, whether a sense of ‘sustainable citizenship’
is fostered. The efficacy of groupbased programmes at promoting pro-environmental behaviour change has been demonstrated on numerous occasions – and participants in these projects
consistently point to a sense of mutual learning and support as a key reason for making and maintaining changes in behaviour (Nye and Burgess, 2008). There are few influences more powerful
than an individual’s social network. Networks are instrumental not just in terms of providing social support, but also by creating specific content of social identity – defining what it means to be
“us”. If environmental norms are incorporated at this level (become defining for the group) they can result in significant behavioural change (also reinforced through peer pressure).¶ Of
course, for the majority of people, this is unlikely to be a network that has climate change at its core. But social networks – Trade Unions, Rugby Clubs, Mother & Toddler groups – still perform
a critical role in spreading change through society. Encouraging and supporting pre-existing social networks to take ownership of climate change (rather than approach it as a problem for
‘green groups’) is a critical task. As well as representing a crucial bridge between individuals and broader society, peer-to-peer learning circumnavigates many of the problems associated with
more ‘top down’ models of communication – not least that government representatives are perceived as untrustworthy (Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Peer-to-peer learning is more easily
achieved in group-based dialogue than in designing public information films: But public information films can nonetheless help to establish social norms around community-based responses to
the challenges of climate change, through clear visual portrayals of people engaging collectively in the pro-environmental behaviour.¶ The discourse should be shifted increasingly from ‘you’
to ‘we’ and from ‘I’ to ‘us’. This is starting to take place in emerging forms of community-based activism, such as the Transition Movement and Cambridge Carbon Footprint’s ‘Carbon
Conversations’ model – both of which recognize the power of groups to help support and maintain lifestyle and identity changes. A nationwide climate change engagement project using a
group-based behaviour change model with members of Trade Union networks is currently underway, led by the Climate Outreach and Information Network. These projects represent a
method of climate change communication and engagement radically different to that typically pursued by the government – and may offer a set of approaches that can go beyond the limited
reach of social marketing techniques.¶ One potential risk with appeals based on social norms is that they often contain a hidden message. So, for example, a campaign that focuses on the fact
that too many people take internal flights actually contains two messages – that taking internal flights is bad for the environment, and that lots of people are taking internal flights. This second
message can give those who do not currently engage in that behaviour a perverse incentive to do so, and campaigns to promote behaviour change should be very careful to avoid this. The key
is to ensure that information about what is happening (termed descriptive norms), does not overshadow information about what should be happening (termed injunctive norms). ¶ 6. Think
about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone¶ A number of recent publications have highlighted the results of focus group research and talk-back tests in order to ‘get the
language right’ (Topos Partnership, 2009; Western Strategies & Lake Research Partners, 2009), culminating in a series of suggestions for framing climate-change communications. For example,
these two studies led to the suggestions that communicators should use the term ‘global warming’ or ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’, respectively, rather than ‘climate change’. Other research
has identified systematic differences in the way that people interpret the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, with ‘global warming’ perceived as more emotionally engaging than
‘climate change’ (Whitmarsh, 2009).¶ Whilst ‘getting the language right’ is important, it can only play a small part in a communication strategy. More important than the language deployed
(i.e. ‘conceptual frames') are what have been referred to by some cognitive linguists as 'deep frames'. Conceptual framing refers to catchy slogans and clever spin (which may or may not be
honest). At a deeper level, framing refers to forging the connections between a debate or public policy and a set of deeper values or principles. Conceptual framing (crafting particular
messages focussing on particular issues) cannot work unless these messages resonate with a set of long-term deep frames.¶ Policy proposals which may at the surface level seem similar
(perhaps they both set out to achieve a reduction in environmental pollution) may differ importantly in terms of their deep framing. For example, putting a financial value on an endangered
species, and building an economic case for their conservation ‘commodifies’ them, and makes them equivalent (at the level of deep frames) to other assets of the same value (a hotel chain,
perhaps). This is a very different frame to one that attempts to achieve the same conservation goals through the ascription of intrinsic value to such species – as something that should be
protected in its own right. Embedding particular deep frames requires concerted effort (Lakoff, 2009), but is the beginning of a process that can build a broad, coherent cross-departmental

7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of

response to climate change from government.¶

government action¶ Private-sphere behavioural change is not enough, and may even at times become
a diversion from the more important process of bringing political pressure to bear on policy-makers.
The importance of public demonstrations of frustration at both the lack of political progress on climate
change and the barriers presented by vested interests is widely recognised – including by government
itself. Climate change communications, including government communication campaigns, should work
to normalise public displays of frustration with the slow pace of political change . Ockwell et al (2009)
argued that communications can play a role in fostering demand for - as well as acceptance of - policy
change. Climate change communication could (and should) be used to encourage people to
demonstrate (for example through public demonstrations) about how they would like structural barriers
to behavioural/societal change to be removed.
 Assurances
Intermingled conventional and nuclear warning systems spur retaliation
Klare 23 – Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies. On the board of directors of
the Arms Control Association.

Michael Klare, February 2023, “Assessing the Dangers: Emerging Military Technologies and Nuclear
(In)Stability,” Arms Control Association,
https://www.armscontrol.org/sites/default/files/files/Reports/ACA_Report_EmergingTech_digital.pdf

The cyberspace domain—while immensely valuable for a multitude of public, private, and commercial
functions—has also proven to be an attractive arena for great-power competition, given the domain’s
vulnerability to a wide variety of malicious and aggressive activities. These range from cyberespionage,
or the theft of military secrets and technological data, to offensive actions intended to disable an
enemy’s command, control, and communications (C3) systems, thereby degrading its ability to wage
war successfully. Such operations might also be aimed at an adversary’s nuclear C3 (NC3) systems; in
such a scenario, one side or the other—fearing that a nuclear exchange is imminent—could attempt to
minimize its exposure to attack by disabling its adversary’s NC3 systems.

Analysts warn that any cyberattack on an adversary’s NC3 systems in the midst of a major crisis or
conventional conflict could prove highly destabilizing. Upon detecting interference in its critical
command systems, the target state might well conclude that an adversary had launched a pre-emptive
nuclear strike against it, and so might launch its own nuclear weapons rather than risk their loss to the
other side.

The widespread integration of conventional with nuclear C3 compounds these dangers. For reasons of
economy and convenience, the major powers have chosen to rely on the same early-warning and
communications links to serve both their nuclear and conventional forces—a phenomenon described by
James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as “entanglement.” In the event of a
great-power conflict, one side or the other might employ cyberweapons to disable the conventional C3
systems of its adversary in the opening stages of a nonnuclear assault, but its opponent—possibly
fearing that its nuclear systems are the intended target— might launch its nuclear weapons
prematurely.

Trump’s NPR proves conventional commitments matter more

Dalton and Sukin 21 – Toby Dalton is Co-Director and Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sukin has a PhD and MA in political science from
Stanford. Incoming Assistant Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.

Lauren Sukin & Toby Dalton, June 17 2021, “Reducing Nuclear Salience: How to Reassure Northeast
Asian Allies,” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163660X.2021.1934257
While this comprehensive set of policies was initially lauded as reassuring to US allies,23 it does not seem to have effectively addressed allies’ doubts that the
United States ultimately can be relied upon to fight in their defense.24 Indeed, the Trump administration probably undercut the NPR’s message
of credibility by threatening troop withdrawals and demanding larger allied contributions to burden-sharing—probably the two most
important elements of allies’ perceptions of the durability of US security commitments—which policymakers and
concerned publics in both South Korea and Japan continue to question. Polling in South Korea in 2020, for example, indicates that any moves that

would decrease the public’s perceptions that the US alliance was “mutually beneficial,” such as the partial troop
withdrawals that Trump threatened, would also decrease faith in the US nuclear security guarantee and diminish support
for the alliance.25 Advocates of an enhanced role for nuclear deterrence in Northeast Asia tend to overlook this critical

point—the Trump administration increased US nuclear capabilities and the centrality of nuclear weapons in its
Northeast Asia strategy, but this did not diminish allies’ credibility concerns. None of the aforementioned policy papers

outlining such proposals discuss the apparent failure of the 2018 NPR to satiate allies’ worries about US credibility
through strengthened nuclear posture. Plausibly, the acute credibility problem is not about nuclear
capability, but it instead reflects concerns about the durability of US political commitments. The continued
basing of US non-nuclear military capabilities in the region through alliance burdensharing arrangements
remains the most important way to prove US commitment.

The most important commitments are troops – they ensure Japan believes we’ll
defend them
DiGiuseppe and Shea 21 – assistant professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political
Science at Leiden University. Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow's
School of Social and Political Sciences.

Matthew DiGiuseppe and Patrick Shea, July 28 2021, “Alliances, signals of support, and military effort,”
European Journal of International Relations,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13540661211033890

Alliance politics do not stop once the treaty is signed. Governments

can and do take proactive measures to periodically signal
their commitment with costly and ongoing actions (Fearon, 1997; Morrow, 1994). These signals take a variety of forms. They can
include, but are not limited to, active peacetime deployments of troops or weapons, public statements of support,
high-level official visits, or joint military exercises.

These extra-alliance signals serve two goals in alliances. First, signals reinforce intentions regarding the nature of a potential
intervention. Second, signals help states coordinate defense strategies and burden-sharing. These signals work better when they are costly and
not simply cheap talk. As such, those states that send costly signals separate themselves out as reliable and likely to intervene (Morrow, 1994).
States that are unwilling to pay costs associated with maintaining an alliance risk being perceived as less willing and likely to suffer the costs of
intervention as outlined in formal treaties (Morrow 2000: 70). It follows that states party to such alliances will have a greater incentive to invest
in their security as they will have less confidence in their ally’s willingness to intervene.

The signals that are sent to reinforce alliance commitments might not even have a practical purpose, such as
increasing the probability of victory in war. They might instead be pure signals. For example, after developing long-range nuclear
delivery systems, the US kept intermediate-range nuclear weapons deployed in Europe at great expense. O’Neill (1990) argues that this
wasteful “burning” of money sent a strong signal to the Soviet Union of the US commitment that a less-committed ally would not have made.
We argue that such
signals of commitment reduced the imperative of European allies to invest in their military
because it reduced the risk of conflict and signaled that the US was willing to contribute significant resources to
their defense.

Signals, such as deploying

troops or nuclear weapons, also matter because they increase the costs of not following
through with an alliance commitment. As such, they increase the costs paid during peacetime, but also
increase the cost of abandoning an ally in the event of war. Allies risk the destruction of their equipment or
the death and capture of troops if they abandon their alliance commitment. As a result, these costly signals
increase the credibility that a state will follow through on formalized alliance promises.
Troops solve – comparatively more important signal than plan
Lanoszka, assistant professor of international relations at the University of Waterloo and an honorary
fellow at City, University of London, ‘19

(Alexander, “False Alarm? Donald Trump, Alliances and Nuclear Proliferation,” June 11,
https://www.eastwest.ngo/idea/false-alarm-donald-trump-alliances-and-nuclear-proliferation)

But how do security guarantees relate to nuclear proliferation? Presidential rhetoric may be important
for evaluating the strength of a treaty pledge by the U.S. to defend an ally in the event of attack by a
potential adversary like Russia, North Korea or China. However, whether it is more important than
other considerations is debatable, since presidential rhetoric may simply be just that: rhetoric. A
verbally cited promise to follow through on any pledges recorded in print is simply hard to believe. No
country wants to risk the safety of his or her country’s cities for an ally, if they can help it. How can a
state, therefore, have any sort of confidence in its alliances?

Thankfully, there is a way. The U.S. deploys a wide range of military forces to shore up local defense
and deterrence measures to augment the security of its allies and to advance its own national security
interests. U.S. forces stationed in South Korea and Japan, for example, are there for regional
contingency if North Korea and/or China were to commit an act of aggression—not to serve as potential
targets to trigger wider retaliation by Washington, per the logic of trip-wires. They are also there to kill,
making it hard for any potential aggressor to go successfully on the attack without incurring
unacceptable costs. So long as the U.S. has such forces on its ally’s territory, or in the theater of
operations where a potential war would be fought, the security guarantee is sufficiently strong to have
the confidence of its beneficiaries.

It is when the U.S. has unilaterally reduced its forward deployments that its allies become so alarmed
they are tempted to acquire nuclear weapons to ensure their own security. A case in point is South
Korea in the 1970s.
As it does now, South Korea benefited from a treaty promising that Washington would defend it against external aggression. But when President Richard Nixon came into office in 1969, he
spoke of how partners in East Asia and elsewhere would need to bear more of the collective defense burden, especially in light of its failures in Vietnam, rising anti-war sentiment at home and
the downturn in the U.S. economy. Yet, the South Korean President at the time—Park Chung-hee—was unfazed by Nixon’s rhetoric. He believed that the United States would reward his
country for its contributions in the Vietnam War by retaining its large military presence on the Korean Peninsula.

President Park’s optimism was misplaced. In July 1970, Nixon announced that the U.S. would unilaterally withdraw 20,000 of its military personnel from South Korea within a year, cutting the
total U.S. military presence on the peninsula by one-third. The balance of power implications were potentially significant. Since more troop reductions were now conceivable, South Korea
would become newly vulnerable to North Korea—an adversary that, at the time, was relatively more industrialized, enjoyed Chinese and Soviet patronage, had a stronger conventional military
and had engaged in highly provocative but low-level military activities across the Demilitarized Zone against the South since 1966.

Against this backdrop, President Park put South Korea on the path towards acquiring nuclear weapons. This project failed partly because South Korea needed outside sources for credit and
access to reprocessing and enrichment facilities—a vulnerability that the United States used to its advantage to get its ally to curb its activities and to make nonproliferation commitments. Still,
South Korea has had persistent interest in fissile materials since the 1970s and continues to undertake continued pyroprocessing activities. Today, South Korea may not be on an aggressive
path to acquiring nuclear weapons, but its apparent desire to seek some advantage demonstrates that security guarantees—once broken—can be very difficult to repair, thus prompting
countries to reconsider the nuclear option.

The South Korean case illuminates why we are seeing no new efforts to get nuclear weapons, at least
by U.S. treaty allies, in the age of Trump. When one looks beyond the rhetoric, actions speak volumes.
The Trump administration has reinforced U.S. force posture with additional deployments to Germany. It
is seriously considering a permanent military presence in neighboring Poland. Present relations with
South Korea have been rocky, but the Trump administration did sign an updated free trade agreement,
as well as a temporary agreement, to help cover the costs of 28,500 military personnel stationed there.
The U.S. military presence in Japan has remained steady. Indeed, if Trump is serious about containing
China, the U.S. military presence will likely increase in East Asia over the long-term.
Dramatic, unilateral troop withdrawals under the Trump administration are still possible, but the
historical record indicates that such attempts are generally made early in a presidency rather than later.
Nixon, for instance, announced his troop withdrawal out of Vietnam within eighteen months of coming
into office.

Putting all rhetoric aside, if the military foundations of U.S. security guarantees remain strong, nuclear
proliferation among allies remains unlikely.

The public is vehemently against discarding non-nuclear principals – Abe proves.

Knox et al 21 – Knox is a research and policy analyst for the Global Security Program at the Union of
Concerned Scientists. Gregory Kulacki is a senior analyst and the China Project Manager for the program.
Miyako Kurosaki in an independent researcher.

Jennifer Knox, Gregory Kulacki, and Miyako Kurosaki, July 2021, “Japan Is Not an Obstacle to a US “No-
First-Use” Policy,” Union of Concerned Scientists,
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/japan-is-not-an-obstacle-to-nfu.pdf

An important example is the controversy Prime Minister Abe created in 2015 by not mentioning the
Three Non-Nuclear Principles during his obligatory address at the annual commemoration of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima. The public suspected, with good reason, that this was not an oversight, and that
Abe may have been testing whether the political climate would tolerate some weakening of the
principles. The public reaction was swift and politically significant, forcing him to explain the oversight
(Diet 2015). Clearly, this test of the political waters let Abe know he would pay a political price if he
attempted to discard or alter Japan’s non-nuclear principles.

Japanese leaders won’t even admit to supporting America’s nuclear posture.

Knox et al 21 – Knox is a research and policy analyst for the Global Security Program at the Union of
Concerned Scientists. Gregory Kulacki is a senior analyst and the China Project Manager for the program.
Miyako Kurosaki in an independent researcher.

Jennifer Knox, Gregory Kulacki, and Miyako Kurosaki, July 2021, “Japan Is Not an Obstacle to a US “No-
First-Use” Policy,” Union of Concerned Scientists,
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/japan-is-not-an-obstacle-to-nfu.pdf

Why did Prime Minister Abe deny reliable reports that he had lobbied the United States to preserve
first-use options (Rogin 2016)? The most likely explanation is that Japan is a democracy, one in which an
overwhelming majority wants to ban nuclear weapons. In a recent survey, three-quarters of the
population indicated a desire for Japan to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Joining
would make the possession of nuclear weapons illegal and prohibit the introduction of US nuclear
weapons into Japan (Baron, Gibbons, and Herzog 2020).