Open Source 1nc – Minnesota round 4

OFF
The affirmative should disclose the entire 1AC to black people---
partial disclosure is NOT GOOD ENOUGH

BFFR DA – debate for black people is about how we create

strategies of liberation for one another. Denying the negative
adequate prep time leads to pre-determined and unexamined
strategies of liberation.

Consent DA – Its shady as fuck. Besides competition, there is no

good reason not to disclose. The reliance on white traditions of
debate like non-disclosure creates and maintains an activity in
which black people are acted upon and not with.

Vote negative to protect blackness from being blindly targeted – by

ridiculous white altruistic k-pre-empts

It’s a reason to reject the team

 OFF
Disarm means abolition of nuclear weapons
Hedley Bull 61, Assistant Lecturer in International Relations at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, B.Phil. in Political Science from
University College at Oxford University, B.A. in Philosophy & History from
the University of Sydney, “The Control of the Arms Race,” 1961, Praeger for
the Institute for Strategic Studies, p. vii-viii, [italics in original]
Disarmament, carried out unilaterally, is as much a part of the history of military policy as rearmament.
The lowering of the level of armaments, the disbandment of forces, the
abandonment of particular categories of armament, the withdrawal of armies
from advanced positions,the diversion of resources away from armaments and towards other purposes, are practices as familiar in military
history as their opposites. The notion of the history of armaments and armaments policy as consisting only of rearmament, as comprising a continuous increase of forces, of
weapons or of the proportion of wealth devoted to such purposes, does not bear examination.

Violation they – disarm AND downblend nuclear weapons – that’s extra T

– you can’ t mandate what countries do after disarm

Vote neg on limits – they eliminate the waste DA – by fiating down

blending – destroys all neg ground predictated off the EFFECTs of the plan
 OFF
Notions linear progress relies on a politics of hope which is a trick
of time that causes violent black ressentiment and cruel optimism
Calvin L. Warren 15, [Assistant Professor of American Studies, George Washington University], [Professor of
“Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2015, Michigan State University
Press.

The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel
optimism” for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress, equality,
freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach.
The objective of the Political is to keep black in a relation to this political object—in
an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it
strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being . The pursuit of
the object certainly has an “ire- tional” aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expec- tation; instead, it
is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel
attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between histor- ical reality and fantastical
ideal. Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political
hope and de-idealizes its fan- tastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that it
operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this
alter- native from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an un- known future, 3) delimiting the eld of action
to include only activity recog- nized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical
perspectives. The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of
“happiness” and “life.” It terries with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and,
through this logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this
alternative—a discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of
violence and destruction. The construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” en- sures the hegemony and
dominance of political hope within the onto- existential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the
ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—depends on two additional binaries:
“problem/ solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems
have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these
solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem ”; the solution,
in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem”
with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution— every problem is connected to the
kernel of its own eradication. Thepolitics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that
the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a
“solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem
itself. The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself
from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a future
tense unmoored from present-tense justi - cations and pragmatist evidence , the politics of hope cleverly
shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition . Each insistence that these
solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not
subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “pres- ent .”
Put differently,
we can never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed solutions because they escape
the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a “not-yet” and “could-be”
temporality. This “trick” of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be
realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can
never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance
of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very
condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment . This politics secures its hegemony
through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and deval- uing) any other conception of time
that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends
on the incessant
(re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really
exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The “trick” of time and political solution
converge on the site of “action.” In
critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder
of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do something.”
The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement
with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit
certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate ac- tion takes place in the political—the political not only claims
futurity but also action as its property. To
“do something” means that this doing must translate
into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word
“politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do politics”
is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of
life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva [1982]
might call it). Black nihilism rejects this “trick of time” and the lure of emancipatory
solutions. To refuse to “do politics” and to reject the fantastical object of politics is
the only “hope” for blackness in an anti- black world.
Being black is an existential risk – the 1ac’s impact scenarios play
into futural presences that blackness doesn’t occupy - Fear of
nuclear accidents is unfounded and permits the on-going
conventional war against blackness
Harriot, 17 – Michael, Columnist at The Root, poet, Founder of NegusWhoRead, 8-11-2017, "Why Black
America Isn’t Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust," Root, https://ww w.theroot.com/why-black-
america-isnt-worried-about-the-upcoming-nucle-1797754315
Dear White People: I know your last few days have been fraught with peril as your president has engaged the only
world leader as crazy and demented as he is in an intercontinental game of the dozens. I can only imagine how it

must feel to go from tap dancing through a world of limitless privilege to

living under the threat of impending doom, but I’d like to help. I’m sure you’ve
noticed that some of your black friends seem curiously nonplussed about the

president of wypipo going World Championship Wrestling -era Rick Flair on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un all over Twitter.
There are a few reasons black people ain’t afraid of no nuclear

holocaust. Maybe you can extract some existential meaning or learn a few lessons from black people’s Kanye shrug in the
shadow of our Armageddon that might bolster your fragility and help soothe your troubled mind, so I thought I’d share them with
1. You Get Used to It You know how everything in life
you.

seems uncertain now? How you feel like you’re not in control of your
destiny because some white dude drunk with more power than his level
of intellect can handle could wipe out your existence because of his lack
of knowledge and training? What about your kids? Your grandchildren?
What will happen to them? What if the bomb drops when they’re not
home and they are caught in the nuclear blast? Don’t you feel helpless
knowing that your future is in the hands of someone with too much
privilege to know how dumb he is? Doesn’t it seem unfair that little
ol’ you don’t even exist in his world? Isn’t it frustratingly
maddening? Now imagine living like this every day. That’s how
black people feel every time they see blue lights flashing in their
periphery. That’s how black people with master’s degrees feel having to
take a job working under the white dude with a bachelor’s degree. That’s
how a black mother feels when she sees stories of a police killing on the
news and her son isn’t home yet. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. 2. The Bully Always
Backs Down I know that, aside from getting in shoving matches at honky-tonks, y’all are more the
rape-and-pillage, enslave-your-people, take-your-resources,
colonize-your-country, steal-your-culture type and aren’t
really into fair fights, but here’s some information black people find comforting: If you challenge
a bully to a fair fight, he ain’t gon’ do shit. We all know barking chihuahuas like Donald Trump who will

You’d better be glad they’re holding me back.”

stand in a group of people restraining him and scream, “

But every now and then, someone lets go , or another dog gets behind the fence who isn’t afraid,

and you know what always happens? Nothing . Trump isn’t interested in fighting Kim
Jong Unattractive even though, in a private news conference, Trump said, “I loved his hit song ‘Gangnam Style.’” Trump will talk

shit about German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mexican President Enrique Peñ a Nieto, but Merkel and Nieto
know he’s just a dim-witted egomaniac who has no idea what the fuck he’s

talking about. Therefore, they ignore him for the sake of diplomacy. But Kim Jong
Un is crazier than Trump. You have to be crazy to pick a fight with the biggest bully on the block. Black America

knows Trump is going to back down because we know white people (we’ll
get to that later). White people don’t like to fight—they like to win . 3. All

Bombs Matter Why isn’t anyone talking about regular

missiles? Why are we just focusing on the nuclear
ones? North Korea has all kinds of weapons. They have tanks, guns,
bazookas, etc., but you just want to talk about the nuclear weapons.
why are you so worried about North Korean atomic
And

bombs killing Americans when Americans kill Americans

every day? What about American-on-American violence? Look, we
don’t even need to talk about an intercontinental ballistic missile hitting New York and Los Angeles until we address American-on-
American crime. North Korea seems like they hate us, but there are a lot of countries that love America, like South Korea (sure, it
probably has something to do with the thousands of American soldiers occupying their country, but still). Look, I’m sure there are
some countries that have nuclear weapons with madmen at the helm who want to blow us to smithereens, but you’re blowing this way

I guess what I’m trying to say is: Not all countries. 4. We

out of proportion.

Know White People The biggest reason black people are

apathetic about this whole thing is that there is no greater student of
what white people will do than black America. When the subtle shift of the
Caucasian mindset can cause ripple effects that can change or end your life, you tend to get to know them well. It is true for whatever
reason (Obama) that the U.S. economy is running high. Unemployment is low. Corporate profits are up. The Republican Congress is
about to lower the tax rate for wealthy individuals and corporations to -92.2 percent. All of this means one thing: White people aren’t
going to let Trump fuck up their money like that. Rest assured that before Trump starts a nuclear war, the head of Wells Fargo,
the CEO of the Illuminati and the entire executive committee of white people would be in the Oval Office with box cutters and swords
ready to slit Trump’s throat. There is a reason Trump is president: poor white people who vote Republican, moneyed billionaires who
want to rule the world, white women, racists ... none of whom are served by instigating a nuclear holocaust. Before they let Trump
white people will step in. White Americans
destroy the good ol’ red, white and blue, I’m sure

were cool when Trump’s idiocy affected only the Muslims he was trying
to ban from entry. They were eerily quiet when he announced that he
would begin rounding up Hispanics. They sat silently in the shadows
when he attacked affirmative action. They ignore police killings as long as it’s a black boy. Well, I’m glad you
get to see how it feels. Black people have lived under the specter of having our

existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped onto the

shore at Jamestown Landing. Being black in America is living under
a terrorist threat. We endured slavery. We got through Jim
Crow. We have lived through two holocausts—what’s one more?

That constant technoscientific management manifests a dromology

that terminalizes in Dark Pure War – a imperial, capitalistic
expansion of war planning into social life that demands antiblack
violence ad infinitum
Towns 2019 [ARMOND R. TOWNS – Assistant professor at the
University of Richmond in the Department of Rhetoric &
Communication Studies. University of Richmond, USA “(Dark) Pure War:
Virilio, the Cinematic, and the Racial” 2019 Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 |
145-160, http://mediatheoryjournal.org/, ///k-ng]
In Pure War, Paul Virilio argued that war continued beyond the physicality of the battlefield. Outside of the violence of the fight lay a violence of industrial production toward the conditions for war. Put differently, pure war signified the new ways that
war was now acted out ‘in infinite preparation’ (Virilio, 2008: 29). Pure war indicated the always already active preparation for war by the state, even when war was not being physically waged.

One could say that a cornerstone of Virilio’s research has been media’s relation to unending war. A central component of pure war, for example, is information, or the gathering of data to surveil and police populations that are always under the watchful
eye of the war machine. Interestingly, Virilio concerns himself less with the racial implications of those who are open to surveilling and policing and more with the expansion of policing and surveilling as practices that are applicable to ‘everyone’. Yet, his
examples of war have racial undertones that he often does not fully investigate: the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, to name a few, all creep toward the pure war. Even as Virilio (2002) acknowledged the racial implications of the
Second World War, he had less to say about the recognition that the Nazis pulled their racialized strategies of death for the European Jewish population from the US state’s approach to black and indigenous people (Whitman, 2017). Each of these wars,
between white and nonwhite people or between white and white people in relation to those who could never fully be white, suggest that the wars that Virilio found most interesting were not race neutral.

What can Virilio provide for a media studies of race? I argue that
Virilio’s work on pure war can be reinterpreted as a ‘dark pure war’,
concerned with a militaristic, unending war against nonwhite
populations. It is a dark pure war, one that structures the colony and the
metropole, that lays the foundation for pure war. Dark pure war is not
necessarily ‘black’ in the racialized sense, even as it often functions that
way. Instead, it is black in the ‘blackening’ sense, in what Kumi Silva
(2010) calls the ‘identification’ of nonwhite bodies as open to state
violence. Thus, pulling from Virilio and Simone Browne’s (2015) Dark
Matters, a dark pure war outlines the centrality of race to the
continuance of war, even as race is the purposefully forgotten genesis of
such war. This is not Michel Foucault’s (2003) ‘race war’, as Europe is
not the central locale from which such war occurs. Rather, dark pure
war is inseparable from Euro American imperial, capitalistic
expansionism (colonialism and racial slavery) as militarized projects
toward the maintenance of white life and the conditions of black death,
ad infinitum.
Virilio’s work has been called, rightly in my opinion, ‘wild and aphoristic’ (Sharma, 2013). Yet, I want to say that what Virilio may point toward is an investigation of the centrality of technologies to racialization processes. Surveillance studies (which has
long investigated race) and media philosophy (which has been slower to discuss race) are put into conversation with one another here. I advance the concept of dark pure war in three sections. I start by delineating the connections between war, cinema,
and information that Virilio argued were important. I then move into outlining the darkness of pure war, particularly by outlining the racialized components of contemporary policing and surveillance. I conclude by calling for a rethinking of ‘dromology’,
one that moves toward including the multi-symbolic capacity of ‘race’ in discussions of war.

In War and Cinema, Virilio argued that the history of war was both theatrical and a history of transforming perceptual fields, whereby vision was increasingly the site of power. As such, the rifle’s gunsights and the camera came together to situate the
world as a field of vision that could be measured, calculated, and shot. For Virilio, film functioned as a pedagogical tool, one that involved an increasing sensorial detachment from film itself. Virilio’s example is the famous myth of an audience in Paris
watching a film of a moving locomotive filling the screen causing the people in the cinema to believe the train was going to drive over them:

[In] fact it was the precision of the camera-shot which first created audience panic at the Lumières’ ‘motion demonstrations’ of the train’s arrival at la Ciotat, when everyone felt that they risked being crushed or injured by the train.
This kind of fear, akin to the sense of speed that people seek on roller coasters, did not disappear but simply became more pernicious as the audience learnt to control its nervous reactions and began to find death amusing (Virilio,
1989: 39-40).

What Virilio pointed to was a transformation in perception: film produced images of objects, thus, perceptually distancing audiences from said objects, to a point where there would no longer be a need to panic at the sight of an oncoming train in a
cinema. There have been a few attempts to debunk the myth of whether or not the audience was actually sent running at the sight of the train (Cooper, 2016; Grundhauser, 2016), but the fact still stands: ‘film is now second nature to us, but it was utterly
shocking not much more than a century ago’ (Cooper, 2016).

Cinemas were ‘training camps’, bonding ‘people together in the face of death agony, teaching them to master the fear of what they did not know – or rather, as Hitchcock put it, of what did not exist’ (Virilio, 1989: 40). In short, cinema readied people for
‘the artificial horizon of a screen or a monitor capable of permanently displaying the preponderance of the media perspective, the relief of the “tele-present” event taking precedence over the three dimensions of the volume of the objects or places here
present’ (Virilio, 2006: 66). This training did not occur overnight, but involved multiple media forms that all worked toward perceptual transformation. As such, more than cinema, Virilio is interested in the ‘cinematic’, which included and exceeded
cinema, proper; he tried to track the link between cinema, war, and later ‘vision machines’, such as television, CCTV, smart devices, and drone strikes, assuring us that ‘Components of a cinematic machine have been in use over many centuries: forms of
projection, moving images, immobile voyages, and visionary illuminations’ (Crary, 2009: 13). The cinema, television, and war all worked together toward distancing audiences from objects, for Virilio.

Virilio’s work on cinema also adds much to those interested in studying

the Web and information. In the wake of the atom bomb, Virilio warned
of a second bomb, the ‘information bomb’, which is important for pure
war. Whereas the atom bomb was a war of movement, the information
bomb was a war of knowledge and speed, signifying a war ‘won’ by the
increasing speed of interactivity in real time. Such a bomb included and
exceeded cinema, and essentially structured computer screens and the
Web – both media developed during and after the Second World War,
and very much because of it. This is a trajectory of transformations that
cannot be said to have origins in cinema, but were representative of the
impact of the cinematic:
We’re still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is the apatheia, this scientific impassibility which
makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in
memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it’s the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic information is no longer the storage but the
display (Virilio, 2009: 56).

For Virilio, then, the shift from ‘tele-vision’ to ‘tele-surveillance’

reflected the demands of capitalism and war. Whereas tele-vision held
‘the task of informing or entertaining the mass of viewers’ (Virilio, 2006:
59), the new tele-vision, or the ‘tele-surveillance’, was concerned with
‘exposing and invading of individuals’ domestic space, like a new form
of lighting, which is capable of revolutionizing the notion of
neighborhood unit, or of a building or district’ (Virilio, 2006: 59). The
drone strike, then, could pinpoint a ‘target’s’ location, whether indoors
or outdoors.
Thus, tele-surveillance spoke to a ‘dromology,’ a ‘speed politics’, or a
politics of instantaneousness, sparked by the increasing need to
entertain, monitor, and prepare others for their own monitoring.
Further, it replicated the waging of war on people at a distance: ‘Making
information resonate globally, which is necessary in the age of the great
planetary market, is in many ways going to resemble the practices and
uses of military intelligence, and also political propaganda and its
excesses’ (Virilio, 2006: 62). Likewise, this spoke to what many have
called a ‘slow violence’, one that disproportionately impacts the Global
South (Nixon, 2011; Parikka, 2017), as a space largely viewed solely as a
waste station of the Global North. War is a continual process that does
not end when the last round is fired, but is also carried out via the
circulation of information and propaganda in ways that penetrate
architecture without necessarily physically destroying a building’s
structural integrity.
Pure war is the continuance of war after the physicality of war is over
and done; now, information functions toward the continuance of war, as
a preemptive strike against enemies: ‘But war doesn’t really end, as
Virilio noted, it just accelerates, approximating ever more closely to its
pure form’ (Wark, 2018). Information is now a central component of
war, whereby ‘Not only is architecture vulnerable to bombs, it proves
defenseless against information, passing through the doors and walls of
our homes, rearranging the space and time we imagine we live within’
(Wark, 2018). Indeed, ‘the capability of war without war manifests a
parallel information market of propaganda, illusion, dissimulation ’ (Der
Derian, 2002: viii).
To rethink Virilio’s pure war as dark pure war requires thinking about
not only how information is weaponized toward war’s continuance, but
also the presumed racial neutrality associated with both war and
information. Thus, race is the underexamined, overlooked element of
Virilio’s theory. Like discussions of dark matter in physics, Browne’s
employment of ‘dark matter’ is meant to point toward the ‘unseen and
unperceived’ elements of antiblackness in the surveillant practices of
contemporary society. She argues that ‘rather than seeing surveillance as something inaugurated by new
technologies, such as automated facial recognition or unmanned autonomous vehicles (or drones)’ (Browne, 2015: 8), we can
instead think about ‘surveillance in and of black life as a fact of blackness’ (Browne, 2015: 6). Thus, Browne connects
surveillance theory to a dark history concerned with the measurement of bodies to see their ‘intentions’, a dark history often
underexamined in surveillance studies. That history is scientific racism:
Anthropometry, or Bertillonage, was introduced in 1883 by Alphonse Bertillon as a system of measuring and then cataloguing the human body by distinguishing one individual from another for the purposes of identification,
classification, and criminal forensics. This early biometric information technology was put to work as a “scientific method,” alongside the pseudo-sciences of craniometry (the measurement of the skull to assign criminality and
intelligence to race and gender) and phrenology (attributing mental abilities to the shape of the skull, as the skull was believed to hold a brain made up of individual organs) (Browne, 2015: 112).

What Browne points toward is a question unasked by Virilio: what if the

‘fact of blackness’ is the structuring necessity for the new technologies
of surveillance themselves? This would require that we rethink pure
war as a dark pure war, which is to say that pure war holds race as
central, while never acknowledging its importance to the maintenance
of war.
What if we thought about Virilio’s pure war as a racial condition in the US? In short, what if we were to rearticulate WEB Du
Bois’ (1994) question of, ‘How does it feel to be a problem’, as a racialized question of war? The end of the US Civil War and the

Another
end of racial slavery marked the structure of pure war as a condition, rather than a contingency, of black life.

way to say this is that white people went to war with each other over
the right to own our black bodies in the US Civil War, and it presumably
ended in 1865. Yet, the replication of racial violence, what Saidiya
Hartman (2008) calls the ‘afterlife of slavery’, has yet to end for black
people; instead, racial violence is fundamental to what it means to be
black (and white) in the US. Jim Crowism, ghettoization,
deindustrialization, white flight, mass incarceration, and gentrification
are remnants of dark pure war. They are post-war answers to how to
deal with a ‘problem’; to call for their end is to call for the end to what
many cannot let go of: whiteness. Further, with race at its center, this
entails that black people are not the only ones affected by dark pure
war, but are part of dark pure war’s larger assemblage.
What Virilio pointed toward, then, was that cinema and war were necessarily interconnected and assistants in the perceptual transformations that readied populations for their own continual surveillance; and just as important, such forms of surveillance
have been tested on people of color prior to their implementation on the larger society. This is what Browne refers to as the ‘unseen and unperceived’ component of dark matter and what I call dark pure war: it is the necessity of the black body as an
always already surveillable, commodified object, one that can normalize even the contemporary surveillance of people’s information online. For Virilio, the information war penetrates our architectural lives in new ways. Two examples will suffice. In
Chicago, a city that has seen record highs in gunshot homicides, the Chicago Police Department implemented ‘gunfire locator’ technologies to track where gunshots were fired from. Using acoustic sensors, gunfire locators are technologies that attempt to
identify the source and direction of gunfire within the communities that they are set up in. In some black and brown neighborhoods in Chicago, where residents are wary of the police, gunshots are often not reported. Thus, the police department
contends, gunfire locators, which use ‘audio sensors, GPS software, and machine learning algorithms’ (McCullom, 2017), are needed to surveill the largely black and brown communities that are deemed ‘high-crime’ areas. Similar technologies have been
set up in Baltimore, MD and Wilmington, DE, where such technologies are marketed as ‘good crime-fighting news’ (The News Journal, 2014). More specifically:

Gunfire detection employs an array of acoustic sensors – each about the size of a small toaster – placed on the highest local rooftops, utility poles, street lights and other structures to detect and locate the source of gunfire. The
sensors are automatically triggered by the two unique audio characteristics of gunfire: The muzzle blast following the explosion inside the chamber and the sonic boom that occurs when the bullet travels at supersonic speed. The
system pinpoints the exact location of the gunfire by a [sic] triangulating the sound from three sensors. Machine learning algorithms factor the speed of sound – about 1,087 feet per second at 32 degrees Fahrenheit – to measure the
difference between the time the gunfire is detected at three different sensors (McCullom, 2017).

Sound provides a digitized, instantaneous mapping of very specific Chicago neighborhoods – those that are already over-policed and underemployed. Thus, gunfire locators, like other sound technologies, assume questions of power, such as ‘who is
permitted to make noise and who has recourse to its abatement’ (Akiyama, 2010: 457)?

Using data sets presumably free from biases, many of the communities where these gunfire locators are set up are presented as ‘objectively’ more prone to criminality, and, thus, logical choices for where to place gunfire locators. The Southside of Chicago,
for example, is less an area that suffers from ‘poverty, massive levels of unemployment, deindustrialization, housing insecurity, mental health challenges and, racism’ (McCullom, 2017); instead, the data reduces the community to a space where more
crime occurs. This data is, then, profited on by companies such as ShotSpotter, which boast that its technology is central to crime reduction: Oakland Police Department (OPD) has incorporated ShotSpotter data as a critical component in its initiatives to
fight and reduce gun violence, and data show there has been significant progress in these efforts, with a 29% overall reduction in gunfire incidents per day from 2012-2017, and a 71% decrease in gunfire incidents per square mile from 2012-2017
(ShotSpotter, 2018).

ShotSpotter’s concern with data would suggest that they would attempt to show how the implementation of their gunfire locators has reduced crime in places like Oakland, but what they show is that Oakland is seeing reductions in crime like many cities
in the country. ShotSpotter provides no causation, only correlation, suggesting that information technologies such as gunfire locators do not guarantee crime reduction. Still, rather than ‘address many structural barriers and socioeconomic disparities that
contribute to the cycles of violence concentrated among younger African American men in these communities’ (McCullom, 2017), many cities are choosing to direct funds toward information technologies that further the surveillance of people of color
and show little to no capacity to reduce crime, but perpetuate narratives of certain bodies as more prone to crime.

The capability to monitor people of color has exceeded local communities like Chicago and Oakland and entered into a national platform as well. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security initiated its Countering Violent Extremism Task Force (CVE)
programs. The programs were reportedly meant to tide the rise of ‘domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States, as well as international terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL’ (Department of Homeland Security, 2018). The
problem that CVE is responding to is not only terrorism, but the capacity for terrorism to traverse national borders with the click of the mouse, meaning “CVE appropriately incorporates modern technologies and is informed by accurate information
regarding violent extremists’ use of the Internet” (Department of Homeland Security, 2018). With the capacity of information to enter architectures in new ways, the US government structures its ‘War on Terror’ as inseparably physical and digital. It is,
here, that information gathered on potential locations and hideouts of ‘terrorist’ organizations meets ‘unmanned’ drone strikes that kill civilians with the click of a button (Wilcox, 2016).
One arm of CVE has been dedicated to digital ‘information campaigns’ (Price, 2017), which essentially are meant to combat the use of the Web by extremist organizations. In short, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Website,
information campaigns and the use of ‘the Internet and social media’ are not inherently bad; instead, they are only bad if in the hands of the ‘extremist organizations’. Thus, as a counter to ‘individuals being radicalized to violence online’ and in ways that
mirror McCarthyism, DHS offers funds to nongovernmental groups that can assist in DHS’s ‘ability to communicate and leverage the digital environment to reach stakeholders, address violent extremist narratives, and encourage alternatives to violence’
(Department of Homeland Security, 2018). CVE counters information with its own information, particularly with what some have called ‘soft surveillance’ programs, in which CVE ‘encourages institutions and education and health professionals…to (1)
watch congregants, patients, students and clients for supposed “vulnerabilities” to “violent extremism” and (2) refer individuals for deprogramming “interventions”’ (Muslim Justice League, 2018).

Professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were initially awarded a CVE grant of $900,000 to create online information campaigns in hopes of ‘countering activities such as online jihadist recruiting’ (Price, 2017). Originally awarded in
the Obama administration, the CVE grant was later rescinded under the Trump administration. Yet, while these funds were promoted by faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as being targeted at many groups, including white
nationalists, one of the grant’s recipients, Cori Dauber, stated that ‘“our focus is on Islamic State”…“And I think it’s fair to say that the bulk of our emphasis is that”’ (Price, 2017). Dauber’s position is one concerned with igniting the information bomb:
despite the fact that ‘Islamic state’ terrorism does not historically, or geographically, impact the US or the West, as ‘the majority of victims of terrorism are Muslim’ in the Middle East (Aziz, 2017: 262), these information campaigns are needed to
perpetuate the requirement of unending war, one that looks less like a ‘War on Terror’ and more like a ‘war with Islam’ (Aziz, 2017: 261). Further, in the wake of the Trump administration transforming CVE, particularly via cutting ‘its staff to eight full-
time employees and its budget to less than $3 million’ (Beinart, 2018), based on the Trump administration’s rhetoric on Muslims, we should have caution in assuming that CVE has ended, and instead, the newly formed Office of Terrorism Prevention
Partnerships suggests that resources will be more explicitly targeted at Muslims.

Similar to the reasons that gunfire locators are placed in specific locales in US cities, CVE couches its concept of extremism in the racially motivated gathering of information that assumes certain populations are more prone to terrorism. The main
difference, and fear of CVE, is that rather than the problem being solely located in the Southside of Chicago which can be to some extent ignored, information can circulate into houses, dorm rooms, and offices throughout the country and, thus, radicalize
people wherever they find themselves or their cellphones. CVE promotes itself as necessary in order to dissuade extremism from those who are ‘likely’ to find extremist messaging persuasive, no matter if it comes from a laptop, cellphone, or tablet. In the
process, Browne’s (2015) critique of scientific racism as a ‘measurement’ of racialized bodies and their proclivities mirrors Muslim Justice League Deputy Director Fatema Ahmad’s argument that CVE’s focus on information as productive of terrorists is
based on older ‘discredited theories that “radical” beliefs may predict propensity to commit politically motivated violence’ (Muslim Justice League, 2018). The surveillance programs rely on notions of the measurability of bodies, propensities, and
intention, only now that information can be circulated on social media. This is a dark pure war that only mentions white nationalism as an afterthought, and centers nonwhite bodies as always already in need of watching, as measurably where danger
comes from.

A dark pure war, then, is that which has long prepared its population for
unending war against people of color. It is in this light that the FBI
(2017) can release a document on ‘black identity extremism’ that
conflates activism and terrorism. To critique state violence, particularly
as a person of color, is to bring war to one’s doorstep. To not critique
state violence, especially as a person of color, is also to bring war to
one’s doorstep. One cannot opt out of unending dark pure war. Furthermore, I
would add, the disproportionate focus of CVE programs on ‘Muslims and dissidents’ (Muslim Justice League, 2018), as Dauber
(Price, 2017) openly admits, suggests that white nationalists’ forms of violence, such as the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in
Charlottesville, VA in 2017, are not the main objects of pure war. Alternatively, because they are not calling for as radical a
redistribution of society’s resources as they imagine they are, white nationalists are assistants in the larger dark pure war that

Put differently, Unite the Right, black identity

CVE and gunfire locators replicate.

extremism, and CVE are connected: information is the grounds on which

to continue war against people of color’s critiques against the (white)
state.
What are the materialist relations between race (its multiple meanings) and media technology? To answer such a question would require us to think about race not only in terms of media representations, but also in terms of Virilio’s speed. While cinema,
war, and surveillance are central components of Virilio’s work, each are also structured by concerns of speed. One of the key theorizations that comes out of Virilio’s work is ‘dromology’. Virilio pulled dromology from the Greek word dromos for ‘road’ or,
for Virilio, ‘racetrack’. He thinks about dromology as a study of speed, a new space-time where ‘the constant nature of light’s limit speed…conditions the perception of duration and of the world’s expanse as phenomena’ (Virilio, 1997: 13). Virilio argues
speed is not reducible to automobility; instead, in ways that mirror James Carey’s (2008) work, transportation and communication are united in discussions of speed. Thus, ‘there exists a hidden dimension to the communications revolution, one that
affects duration, the lived time of our society’ (Virilio, 1997: 22).

Blackness is a cite of political ontology that’s phenomenologically

and psychologically linked that could only be explained through a
libidinal economy of philia and phobia
Hook 22 (Derek Hook teaches at the London School of Economics. Peace
Kiguwa teaches in the psychology department at the University of the
Witwatersrand The Primal Scene of anti-Blackness: The Masochist
Jouissance of White Racism The Comparatist, Volume 46, October 2022,
pp. 7-28 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2022.0001 jrimp edited language)
Racism is rather more like Freud’s dreamwork than anything else . . . racism expresses itself through displacement,
through denial, through . . . the capacity to say [or represent] . . . contradictory things. —Stuart Hall Anti-Black Fantasy, Afro-
pessimism, Lacanian Psychoanalysis In an instructive outline of Afro-pessimism written in 2016, Jared Sexton stresses that
this emerging mode of radical critique effects a shift from the empirical to the structural, and, concomitantly, a shift from the
experiential (and thereby also the phenomenological and psychological to the realm of
political ontology. Afropessimism, in addition, jettisons any reference to racism as a general phenomenon,
preferring instead to focus on what, with good reason, it takes to be a far more precise and urgent analytical term—one whose
parameters and violence have yet to be adequately conceptualized—namely, anti-Blackness. Writing in 2019, Sexton makes

there is no equivalence between anti-

the point rather more emphatically, insisting that

Blackness and other “salient form[s] of domination, past [or] present” (Sexton 102).
Anti-Blackness, he insists, is not simply “an uncommonly pernicious racist ideology or even a uniquely injurious racist practice
. . . it is, more fundamentally, an unconscious cultural structure, a grammar, a weltanschauung, a metaphysics” (102). Hence

the earlier reference to political ontology: Afro-pessimism, can indeed, for Sexton, be understood as the political
ontology of anti-Blackness A further characterizing feature of Afro-pessimism is that it decenters the
analysis of political economy—here we return to Sexton 2016 essay—“by discerning the libidinal

economy that underwrites and sutures its dynamics” (14, emphasis added). This last
defining feature is of particular interest to those interested in psychoanalysis because in its formulation of

power, and particularly of the nature and role of violence, Afro-pessimism does not only describe the
operations of . . . structures and institutions, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the fantasies of

murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption . . . that

animate the realization of such violence. It is an analysis . . . of how anti-Black fantasies attain
objective value in the political and economic life of society and in the psychic life of culture as well (14 emphasis added). This

prioritization of libidinal economy alongside the stated objective of analyzing fantasy, signals, even if only
tacitly, that a psychoanalytic perspective might have a part to play in the wider goals of Afro-pessimism. We should, of course,
be under no illusions that anything akin to a harmonious relationship exists between Afropessimism and Lacanian theory. In
Frank Wilderson’s recent Afropessimism, for example, he speaks of an “Afropessimist hijacking of psychoanalysis” (11), a

decade after arguing, in Red White and Black, that Lacan’s “logic of full speech . . .[is] imbricated in the
institutionality of anti-Blackness” (76). If we are to avoid a lengthy and complicated digression,
suffice it to say that despite significant variations in how Afro-pessimist thinkers have drawn upon, critically applied, or
critiqued Lacanian ideas, it is nonetheless the case that Lacanian theory has provided an important resource in surveying the
conditions of anti-Blackness.1 My aim here is to consider how Lacanian theory, particularly used alongside Fanon’s
conceptualizations in Black Skin White Masks, might contribute to the Afro-pessimist project of analyzing anti-Black fantasies
and how they, following Sexton, “attain objective value . . . in the political and . . . . psychic life of culture” (14). Interestingly,
part of what we will find is that not just Lacan, but Freud himself (and more, particularly the concepts deployed in The
Interpretation of Dreams) will prove unlikely allies to the Afropessimist project of interrogating anti-Black fantasy. While what
I offer is, admittedly, a modest contribution to the evolving field of Afro-pessimist discourse, it is more than negligible,
especially given the determining role accorded to fantasy by psychoanalysis and the evident force and ontological import of
anti-Black fantasy as stressed by Sexton (we might cite in this respect Christopher Lane, who channels Freud in defense of

psychoanalysis as a necessary means of political analysis : “What . . . could be more political than
fantasy when it determines the fate of entire communities, nations and even continents?” [7]). Such an investigation of
the fantasies of anti-Blackness has a valuable contribution to make to the project of thinking racism comparatively and to an
awareness of the incommensurability of differing forms of racial subjugation. Where then to begin? Well, given the privileged
role that sexuality plays in the production of fantasy for psychoanalysis (Laplanche & Pontalis), and Sexton’s emphasis on the
importance of fantasies of sexual consumption in the realization of anti-Black violence, sexuality would seem the obvious
place. In turning to the volatile knotting of sexuality and violence in anti-Blackness, we must, of course, return (once again), to
Fanon, for whom the sexual dimension remains an irreducible The Primal Scene 9 component of colonial racism. The sexual
dimension is also a crucial differentiating feature in setting anti-Blackness aside from other forms of racism and historical

No anti-Semite, for example, would ever conceive of

oppression—as Fanon insists, “

castrating the Jew. He is killed or sterilized. But the Black person is

castrated” (162). We can refine our aim here though, by turning to a facet of the libidinal economy of
anti-Blackness that has not always received the analytical attention it deserves, that is, by investigating
the masochistic dimension of white anti-Blackness that Fanon pinpoints in Black Skin White Masks via reference to children’s
literature in the United States (such as the tales of Br’er Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories). This alerts us to
a further agenda of this paper: not only to utilize Lacanian psychoanalysis to analyze white anti-Black fantasy, but to use the

Fanonian conceptualization of white masochism —and, importantly, Sexton’s own elaboration of

such ideas—to critically reflect upon, extend, and lend nuance to, the well-known postulate of Lacanian social theory

according to which racism can be approached as a type of “theft of enjoyment.” Despite the
prospective benefits
of this thesis, which, if adequately (historically, politically) contextualized, would be of great critical
promise—most notably, by offering a multifaceted array of tools (the concepts of drive, superego, jouissance, law, object a,
etc.)—it has, regrettably, not typically been used in this way.2 As I have previously argued, the theft of enjoyment thesis seems
all too often utilized as a “ready-made” explanation which inhibits rather than encourages further analytical exploration. To
speak of racism-as-jouissance is to imply a sufficient explanatory cause (that of libidinal enjoyment or the “pleasure of hating”
itself) rather than to develop further lines of sociology and historical enquiry. In short: the racism as theft of enjoyment thesis

risks becoming a “one size fits all” de-historicizing and de-politicizing formula.
So, while I do not elevate this Lacanian postulate to a starring role in what follows, I note it here at the outset because I believe
that Fanon—and Sexton’s—ideas on the masochist racist jouissance provides a case study of how the theft of enjoyment thesis
can be improved upon once adequately situated (located, that is, within the specific conditions of colonial/ anti-Blackness).

Vote neg
Barber 16 (Daniel Colucciello Barber, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Pace University, Philosophy and Religious Studies
Department, Faculty Member. “The Creation of Non-Being.” Rhizomes Issue 29 (2016) //shree)

habits of affirmation, where "habits" indicate the practices

[3] Deleuze's philosophy has come to be associated with

or operations by which reality is experientially and experimentally

enacted.[4] This association could be attributed to Deleuze's invocation of concepts such as the rhizome, which
appears to advocate teeming, emergent, multiplicitous movement in
excess of all boundaries. In such a landscape of fluidity and flux, Deleuze's notion of creation then becomes
associated with the affirmation of alternative possibilities. This association may also be attributed to Deleuze's rigorous
refusal of the being of negativity. He contends that negative being plays no role in the determination of reality, that it is in fact
an illusion that conceals the force of differential immanence. Given the centrality of this contention, any association of
Deleuze's thought with habits of affirmation would have to depend on the following claim: the refusal of negative being entails
the refusal of habits of negativity, in favor of habits of affirmation.[5] [4] Yet it is fundamentally mistaken to conflate the
refusal of negative being with the refusal of negative habits. The call for habits of affirmation is theoretically illegitimate: if all
habits are real, and if reality has no negative being, then all habits—precisely because they are real—do not involve negative
being; the reality that is habituated—regardless of whether this habituation is characterized as affirmative or negative—has
no negative being. If the call for habits of affirmation is therefore not entailed by Deleuze's refusal of negative being, then from

where does this call arise? If habits of affirmation are imperative, then from where
does this imperativity draw its mandate? To begin to answer these questions, one must address
the ways in which habits of affirmation are logically consistent—and ultimately politically

complicit—with the contemporary conjuncture of capitalism. [5] This conjuncture, which has been variously
described in terms of "late capitalism," "postfordism," or " communicative capitalism," is marked

by an affirmation of mobility, innovation, fluidity, possibility, and

creativity. Deleuze analyzed this conjuncture in terms of control
societies, which he distinguished from disciplinary societies. Control establishes domination
not by setting up in advance strict boundaries, but rather by a kind of
unending encouragement, or motivated permissiveness: control
establishes and expands itself by establishing and expanding
possibilities of communication. Domination "no longer operate[s] by confining people but through
continuous control and instant communication" (Deleuze 1997: 174). Whereas discipline names the prohibition of excessive
mobility and innovation, control names the "modulation" of the possibilities implied in such mobility and innovation (Deleuze

1997: 179).[6] [6] With control, domination remains not despite, nor in
opposition to, but precisely as possibility, which is modulated through
a communicability that is ever more fluid and receptive in its listening
in order to be ever more innovative in its surveilling.[7] Following Deleuze's
analysis of control, habits of affirmation—of multiplicitous possibilities, or of

the possibility of being-otherwise—are not resistant to, but actually

constitutive of, control's modulation. Control is marked by "endless
postponement" (Deleuze 1997: 179), meaning that the future—as that which
breaks with the present—never takes place. The present is extended
into the future, and so the future becomes a modulation of the present ; an
essential incommensurability between present and future remains unthinkable.[8] Given Deleuze's analysis, it is not by
accident that he increasingly experimented with habits of negativity. In his last book, What is Philosophy? – co-written with
Fé lix Guattari, and published one year after his analysis of control—one can observe, for instance, his attentiveness to "shame"
(Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 107), which was motivated by his reading of Primo Levi, or his indication of agreement with the
negative dialectic of Theodor Adorno.[9] [7] One finds, in the same book, a polemic against communication and a concomitant
positioning of creation as distinct from and incommensurable with the communicative.[10] Simply put, Deleuze's increased
attention to control, or communication, directly corresponds to his increased attention to the negative—not as being but as
experience and experiment, as habit. Thus it is not only that Deleuze's refusal of negative being cannot be conflated with habits
of affirmation, it is also that Deleuze, when attending to control, attempts to articulate habits of negativity. What is Philosophy?
concludes with an articulation of the No of chaos, the non of thought that enables creation: philosophy must attain "an
essential relationship with the No that concerns it"; philosophy does "not need the No as beginning, or as the end in which [it]
would be called upon to disappear by being realized, but at every moment of [its] becoming or [its] development" (Deleuze

and Guattari 1996: 218). [8] The creation named by Deleuze's philosophy is thus in immanence with
the No, and it is this No-creation immanence that begins to articulate antagonism
toward communication: "Creating has always been something
different from communicating" (Deleuze 1997: 175). This divergence between
communication and the No of creation is utter, essential, and irredeemable.
There is no possibility of emancipating communication, nor is there any
affirmative basis for creation—for the base is communication. There is nothing to affirm, and so

creation is immanent with the negativity of the non: " The key thing may be to create vacuoles

of noncommunication" (Deleuze 1997: 175). The Reality of Non-Being [9] My argument, drawing on
Deleuze, is that the logic of possibility actually serves to modulatively

reproduce the anti-black grammar of the world. Creation, defined as a break with the
presently given world, is not a possibility. It is rather immanent with an axiomatic No to such possibility, with habits of

This thesis concerns a key problematic that stems from the

negativity. [10]

Afro-Pessimist analysis of anti-blackness: if blackness stands both

within the habitus of modernity, as an organizing principle, and
without this habitus, as a perpetually banished subjectivity, then the
very articulation of blackness would seem to depend on and
reproduce such a habitus. In other words, both being-within and being-without
are possibilities governed by modernity's dominative positioning of
blackness. The articulation of blackness is in fact bound by this problematic
insofar as one remains within the ambit of habits of affirmation . In other
words, the presumption of affirmation is co-extensive with the

reproduction of the habitus of modernity: that which is presently available for

affirmation is already governed by modernity and its articulation of
blackness, and so habits of affirmation inevitably participate in and
reproduce the double-bind in which modernity positions blackness . [11]
Against such reproduction, it is essential to insist on habits of negativity.
Such insistence is total: since it is affirmation as such that entails
participation in the being here indexed by modernity, even a modicum of
affirmation mitigates the force enacted by negativity. The power of creation therefore resides
entirely and essentially on the side of negativity—and not at all on the side of affirmation.
Concomitantly, to invoke such power actually entails an unmitigated refusal of habits of affirmation;
affirmation does not name or support, but on the contrary denies, the power of creation. Given the
double-bind in which modernity positions blackness, this is to say that the negativity of the non, in
virtue of its immanence with a force of creation, indexes blackness as a power of non-being, as that
which is without need of—and in fact opposed to—reliance on the affirmative. [12] It
remains
necessary to outline the articulation of this immanence of creation and
non-being—that is, to theoretically express how an unmitigated
insistence on habits of negativity can be both a refusal of affirmation
and an enactment of power. This warrants a return to Deleuze's thought by way of some questions:
How can habits of negativity, articulated via Deleuze's insistence on the non, gain theoretical consistency with his conceptual
refusal of negative being? If negative being is refused, then in what sense can there be insistence on the non? [13] Deleuze
argues that "being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative . . . non-being is
Difference" (Deleuze 1994: 76-77). This makes clear that negative being is refused in virtue of difference; what is essential is
difference in itself. Hence difference is articulated not as the affirmation of affirmative being, nor even as the affirmation of
being as such. On the contrary, difference is articulated as "non-being": negative being is refused, but it is refused in favor of
non-being. Difference antecedes both positive being and negative being, thereby displacing their dialectical or conflictual
relation. In other words, difference is not between opposed beings but in itself, autonomous from and antecedent to every
being or thing; difference is real, but precisely as a matter of non-being. Its reality is not the being of a thing, it is no-thing. [14]

Such theorization enables the delinking of creation (as force of non-being, or no-thing)
from affirmation (as possibility of being). Difference, or non-being, marks a real force of creation
that is without, and incommensurable with, being. In virtue of this unanalogizability of non-being with being, creation is

affirmation is said of being

articulated as a force stemming from negativity, and not at all from affirmation:

and its possibilization, whereas creation is said of non-being. Habits of negativity, which
antagonize every (positively or negatively described) being , or being as such, are
thus coeval with an insistence on the real force of non-being .
 OFF
The Space Traders should offer unlimited resources to the United
States to disarm its nuclear forces if and only if the United States
surrenders all African Americans in the United States to the Space
Traders

Solves the aff and the US says yes. Giving up Black people to the
Space Traders solves multiple extinction threats.
Warren and Coles, 20—associate professor of urban education and
teacher education in the College of Education at Michigan State
University; assistant professor in the division of Curriculum and
Teaching at Fordham University, Graduate School of Education (Chezare
and Justin, “Trading Spaces: Antiblackness and Reflections on Black
Education Futures,” Equity & Excellence in Education, Volume 53, Issue
3, 2020, dml)
The Space Traders
“ ” (TST) is one of several short stories penned by former Harvard law professor, Derrick Bell, in his 1992
groundbreaking text, Faces at the Bottom of The Well (Faces). Here, Bell describes a scenario whereby “beings” from outer space, “in familiar

propose a solution to America’s economic and

comforting tones,”

environmental dilemmas under one condition. That is, the “space

people” simply desired “to take back to their home star all the
African Americans in the United States” in exchange for an unlimited
supply of natural resources including gold and fuel (Bell, Citation1992, pp. 159–160).
Encountering TST narrative for the first time might leave one deeply troubled by the story’s ending, depicted above. Troves of

Black bodies involuntarily surrendered by their domestic neighbors, inhaled into

the belly of mystic spaceships, is a distressing national betrayal of the
U.S. Constitution, or is it? After all, the framers of the Constitution—all white men—purposely designated Black people
as three fifths of a person, delayed the date for the slave trade to be discontinued, and made it an obligation for the government to enforce

Racist conceptions of black people as

fugitive slave laws and stifle insurrections (Tate, Citation1997).

innately inferior became codified through publication of the U.S. Constitution,

thus rendering the black body to be of little to no human value in the

public imaginary beyond their contribution to America’s wealth

accumulation (Browne, Citation2015; Kendi, Citation2016; Patterson, Citation1982, Citation1998; Roberts, Citation1999;
Wacquant, Citation2001; Wilderson, Citation2010). As a result, humanizing black youth’s experience of school remains an enduring equity
conundrum.

Bell, a forefather of Critical Race Theory (CRT), does not indicate the motivations of the outer space beings for wanting to receive black people as
the one condition of their trade proposal. Nor does Bell reveal what happens to the black people who were traded after ascending away from
America’s Atlantic shores into an alien future. In TST, Bell demonstrates that black bodies do indeed have value, at least to the “humanlike” space

creatures who have ventured to earth to retrieve them. The questions remain, however, to what end are
black bodies valuable to their new captors, and what, if any, benefits might
there be for black people as a result of the trade? What if the trade was
a clever salvation strategy intended to transport black people from
America into a sovereign land established with a dynamically inclusive
definition of blackness as its chief governing framework? What if the
“humanlike” creatures negotiating the trade were the black ancestral

architects of black futures free from racial impunity, and the perennial pain and
suffering characteristic of black life in the U.S.? The logics shaping the decision by Americans in
TST to exchange its black citizens (read: human beings) for material wealth is eerily familiar. Put differently, the possibility of

such a trade makes perfect sense if black people are not actually imagined
as fully human in the American psyche.
We choose to explicate TST fantasy for Bell’s commentary on Black liberation. This story serves as a starting point to our discussion of “space” in
this article. It is through this spatial metaphor that we further contemplate how black people’s freedom may be tied to Black Education Spaces
(BES).1 BES are thought here to be physical location(s) in a school building or on a school campus, as well as other more outward facing cultural
symbols, practices, or traditions organized to facilitate black peoples’ well-being in an education institutional context that might otherwise be

creatures from an unknown universe in TST recognized

considered assaultive. Perhaps,

that trading spaces—the abrupt, deliberate sequestering of black

peoples away from their unrelenting dehumanization—was the one
reliable pathway to black freedom. It’s possible these “space people”
used the trade agreement to appeal to America’s entrenched logics of
consumption and plunder to position themselves to emancipate black
people into an alternate universe where they would no longer be
burdened by racism and other byproducts of white supremacy (e.g.,
heterosexism, classism, etc.).

On the one hand, TST depicts the United States of America as anti-Black—a country founded upon
the dispossession of Native peoples and the exploitation of black labor
for economic gain. On the other hand, this fiction can be thought to be Bell’s shrewd invitation to

ponder the potential of outer space—an ethereal universe completely unlike the U.S.,
where black people might gain access to a life unfettered by anti-black
racism, discrimination and prejudice. In this way, TST inspires our thinking about, Black education
futures and more specifically, the significance of better noticing, honoring, and

sustaining the ways black people already practice trading space—physical

and symbolic—to realize visions of liberation and collective well-being

inextricably linked to their healing from, and resistance to,

antiblackness.
 OFF
Next Off Nommo – [J reads purple]

Niggas best stop the use of the strap

If one more Karen, Mista Charlie’s or Barbeque Becky – tell me I’m

not speaking proper nuff’ – I’m boutta turn, flip, kick to expose yo
shit
Johnson 16 [Jennifer – Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences @ Colombia, Cultivating literacies of access and liberation: A case
study on the use of oral language, hybrid literacies, and culture in the 21st
centuryfile:///Users/jrimpson/Downloads/Cultivating_literacies_of_acce.pdf jrimp]

Unless the affirmative’s plan can “transport [Terrance and Shakiya] out the hood,” or can transport single
mothers so that they aren't just going to “low paying jobs to slave for the system to get its feces in return,” or can make transportation home from a
tournament actually safe for Shakiya and Terrance such that they aren’t in the position where they say can honestly say, “you 37 “Solvency” is used as an adjective in
debate used to describe a proposed policy’s mechanism and ability to “solve” the problems the proposed policy is designed to address. 255 don’t know if you’ll reach

your home alive,” then the affirmative’s plan does nothing to alter the life threatening
realities that permeate the worlds in which Shakiya and Terrance live, work, learn, and play. As a result, they are unsurprisingly suspicious
of any policy prescription that claims to improve the quality of life, especially if
the researchers and policy makers—including the young people simulating
them in debate rounds—fail to critically investigate with marginalized and
oppressed people who are most affected by inequalities around transportation, to learn and listen to their needs, research, and ideas for change.
Unless there is a critical engagement with “hood spaces and hood faces,” as Jay would say, Terrance and Shakiya see
transportation as “nothing but representation of the slave ships that transported all of us from our culture;” because Terrance and Shakiya argue that as people are
transported from point A to point B, they are being transported to learn and work in a system that requires conformity to a dominant linguistic and cultural norms that

wherein they don’t

can eat away the integrity and existence of nondominant cultures and languages. Instead, the debaters are calling for spaces

have to “code-switch” but can “be who we are and produce our own
knowledge” and cultivate their knowledge of self—the 5th element of Hip-Hop—which Terrance and Shakiya say is necessary in order to “change what
WE live”: Yet we code switch and code switch as we take off our sweats and put

on our uniforms for school, then take that off and wear slacks for work and our suit for interviews as we transport and transport. But
where can we be who we are, and produce our own knowledge? Today transportation is nothing but the representation of the slave ships that transported all of us from
our culture. We need some 5th element of Hip-Hop, knowledge of self. We know who we are, so you can know who we are, so we can change what WE live. Through a
rhyming flow, Terrance and Shakiya explain how they are tired of hearing affirmative teams argue in debate rounds that their cases will “solve for [them]” (meaning
solve the problems that Terrance and Shakiya experience). Terrance and Shakiya rhetorically ask “how 256 they gone solve for me when they don’t even know me, can't
identify with a word I said while we wrap this round in our gold sheet?” “Round” has a double meaning here: as a shortened expression of both the adverb “around” and
the noun “debate round.” Gold sheet is a reference to debate case and knowledge production as Black Gold. If affirmative teams not only listen but really hear the
arguments that Shakiya and Terrance are making in Black Gold, then it is doubtful that the affirmative would feel compelled to say that their plan, their policy
prescription, would “solve for” Terrance and Shakiya because that policy was not designed as a result of critical and participatory action research done with Terrance
and Shakiya. Furthermore, Shakiya and Terrance argue that when an affirmative team plays the game of debate as a simulation of federal policy making, that before
being too quick to decide on taking one course of action, they must reflexively ask critical epistemological questions, like how do the authors of the evidence in the round
come to know what they know? Whose voices and interests are included and represented and whose are not? Who benefits and who does not? And what is gained
versus what is lost when the affirmative’s agent of change is the federal government versus who the affirmative really is: two high school students who could position
themselves as scholars, leaders and change-makers in their own right, without having to pretend to be someone that they are not. Apparently I'm an advantage, because

all these 1AC’s seem to solve for me. But little did I know that these affs38 are what we really need. People want me to jump on affs
like it’s my trusty steed, but to hell wit all dat I prefer to walk on my feet. You want some authors that I don’t know to tell me what I need. Then you wanna say they solve
for me, but how they gone solve for me when they don’t even know me, can't identify with a word I said while we wrap this round in our gold sheet. Everyone’s 1ac is
quote on quote chrome slick impenetrable to anything when they don’t even know me All I hear’s a bunch of theory because they already told me. 1…2…3…4…5.. years
ago, I've heard it even before me. We solve for heg, 39 we solve for econ , 40 we solve for warming, 41 we
solve for you false claims with fake judicial lanes. All fairy tales in this debate community will be
—

uncovered myths and fiat exposed, the truth magnified and the greatest reality of the pain etched into Black people's lives will be
discovered. Cases are regurgitation that doesn't do anything for the community. They should not be able to claim solvency with their methods. They are all stuck in a
theoretical world where things will be wished away yet we condone it like fiat exists. Just take some time and scope in and break away these chains. The status quo’s the

same cause the 1AC’s don’t change. But when we rip open some space for change our thought is not the right way. But if they not changin
where’s the ultimatum? We are the choice, we are the option. That’s what we creatin. Anticipating that their opponents might call them out for an over-reliance on
personal narratives and opinion, Terrance and Shakiya then reference Dr. Reid-Brinkley’s (2008) argument derived from Louisville’s “Three-Tiered-Methodology” that
stresses the importance of incorporating personal narratives and organic intellectuals along with academic authors into the debate space in order for debaters to have a
better method to more comprehensively evaluate truth claims and develop an understanding of the myriad threats facing oppressed people that are too often
overlooked or dismissed by those in power and by those teaching and learning in educational spaces like debate: Doctor Shanara Reid-Brinkley already said it…we need
to incorporate our identity in order to evaluate the real truth claims. And Warren and Fasset even went beyond this…when you don’t incorporate and identity and
become identity-less, that fluidity is an embodiment of Whiteness. That’s why it is important for us to take into account the stories of those who have been a victim of the
system and be marginalized. Way too often policies are ignoring those who it affects the most. Politics doesn’t wanna listen cuz it got no love for us ghetto children.
There’s no place in the hood where people can voice heir opinions, policies will never succeed unless they encounter lived experiences of growing up in poverty, living in
danger of police brutality because of the way you look: pants low, hoodies on, in hopes to escape but seen as a menace to society... Hate crimes/racism: people have no
understanding, no context of who anyone is, so we can only speculate and formulate our own opinions. So I know black people like basketball and football and 16 and
Pregnant and smashin hoes while chillin wit da bros and droppin out of college to get dough cuz thas what the TV told me, but what have WE told you? Shakiya and

Terrance argue that because “ politics doesn’t wanna listen cuz it got no love for us ghetto children,” and because “there’s no place in the
hood where people can voice their opinions,” their voices and issues are snuffed out of existence and replaced with stereotypes that frame young Black men as a
“menace to society,” stereotypes that are called upon by the likes of George Zimmerman as a justification for killing young Black men like Trayvon Martin. Granted,
Terrance and Shakiya could work on how they quantify their major and minor premises to avoid the risk of sounding over-generalizing such that others dismiss their
words and arguments. At the same time, keep in mind that this presentation of Black Gold is what Terrance and Shakiya would have presented in their first constructive
speech; subsequent speeches would provide them with ample opportunities to further qualify their arguments. Aristotelian rhetoric aside, Terrance and Shakiya are
emphasizing the importance of using language and literacies in competitive academic high school policy debate to investigate, discover, and publicize what might be
often hidden or obscured from public view and civic and political discourse. Shakiya and Terrance argue that until people “encounter lived experiences of growing up in
poverty” and can begin to feel the urgency behind eliminating the root causes of conditions in which people can be “living in danger of police brutality because of the way
you look,” then policies will never succeed in ameliorating the threats to the lives of Black children or fully dismantling the barriers to their future possibilities to thrive
and grow into adults who can live a fulfilling and meaningful life. Up until this point, Black Gold contains a series of indirections, as the debaters dance around the thesis
of their argument before overtly proposing their advocacy (see Woodyard, 2003). Additionally, Terrance and Shakiya know that whoever ends up judging their debate
round, has most likely never heard a case like Black Gold: with its radical and unabashed content; unconventional structure laden with Black rhetorical features;
linguistic meshing of Black English, competitive academic policy debate jargon, Dominant American English, and Hip-Hop; and additional multimodal literacy practices

judge that
including the playing of Jazz and the oral reading of a written speech. At the end of the first constructive speech, Terrance and Shakiya explain to the

they should vote for the team that demonstrates a better epistemological

foundation for creating policies that can directly reflect the expressed social, economic, and political needs of Black
people who are living in oppressive conditions. The judge is further advised to vote for the team that can also most effectively
communicate these issues in such a way that would be intelligible to people inside and outside the debate community—they need
to have Nommo verve, soul—because change requires the ability to
,

meet and move the people to action In his essay about the spiritual essence of African American rhetoric, Adisa A.
Alkebulan (2003) discusses some of its aesthetic qualities. This rhetoric includes art that contains an epic memory of

ancestral roots, language carrying complex ideas, and African sociocultural

values including the high value placed on spoken arts making it such that speakers are expected to
deliver speeches in a way that is aesthetically pleasing: “Africans, being the product of an oral
tradition, attach music, poetry, and other verbal art forms to language because they are all means of creating,

recreating, and maintaining African culture” (p. 35) and for making and negotiating social, cultural and
political meaning and social understanding
The way blackness experiences nuclear apocalypse goes beyond
the comprehension of the standard language
Bagdanov 19 (Kristin George Bagdanov, earned her MFA in poetry from Colorado State
University and is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at U.C. Davis, “Atomic
Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka’s Compulsive Futures”, 2019, The Oxford Literary Review 41.1,
51–67, DOI: 10.3366/olr.2019.0265
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2019.0265)
I cannot use the future compulsive tense in a sentence. It can only
be expressed through the performance of temporal discontinuity, the
clash between text and context. This inexpressibility is not unique to the
future compulsive tense but continuous with the fact that for English
speakers, there is no future tense, technically. While one can change a
verb from present to past—I am, I was—one must rely on an auxiliary
verb such as “will” to project into the future—I will be. The future
always already dependent on will. The inherent supplementarity of the
future tense is perhaps what makes it so central to Nuclear Criticism’s
theorisations of apocalypse. In his 1984 essay ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now,’ Derrida claims that total
nuclear war can only be expressed by the future perfect tense,
beginning his essay with the enigmatic statement that: ‘At the beginning there will have been

speed’ (20; emphasis mine). In the future perfect tense, one projects oneself
doubly: once into the far future, then again into the near future, which
then becomes the object of reflection for that far-future self. This double
projection is treated as necessary due to the new temporal conditions of the atomic age wherein, Ken Ruthven
explains, ‘there will be no space between the beginning and the end in which a present tense can operate, nothing beyond the end to require speculating
about in a future tense, and nobody left around to do the speculating.’5 The future perfect tense operates on the assumption that, were it not for nuclear

future
war, the subject would already have a stake in this future, able to doubly project and reflect upon one’s future past. Even a

nullified by nuclear war remains a space in which one might

imaginatively project and reflect upon one’s existence and extinction. The
future compulsive tense, however, operates according to an inverse logic, as the future is not an empty space to be filled, but one that must be created.
Baraka shows how the future compulsive tense is forged by those already inhabiting the uninhabitable, post-apocalyptic future. The future compulsive

. This tense
tense of Atomic Afrofuturism emerges from the space between the end and the beginning as a way out of this post-apocalyptic no-man’s land

cannot be used in a sentence because it exceeds the conventional

structures of grammar, even with the supplement of the future
tense, as it can only be made intelligible within the context of a
past ruptured by slavery that forecloses African Americans futures.
One way to articulate the dispossession of the future wrought by slavery
is the erasure of subjectivity, which can be represented by personal and
possessive pronouns. In what feminist critic Hortense Spillers calls the ‘oceanic suspension’ of the
Middle Passage, I, me, mine and the capacity of being-for-oneself
are reduced to the objectified condition of being-for-others. 6 In ‘Mama’s
Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ she writes: ‘the captive body reduces to a thing,

becoming being for the captor’ (67). In grammatical terms: the subject
is unmoored from the predicate, unable to act reflexively. The
trauma of this objectification, its literal ‘marking and branding,’
lives on through intergenerational trauma in which black subjects
are always ‘marked’ as such (‘I am a marked woman,’ the article begins [65]) and thereby
excluded from the unmarked ‘I’ of subjectivity (67). The figuration of the
white unmarked subject continues to structure the grammar that
erases African identity and forecloses black futures. Spillers
demonstrates how grammar functions as the ‘symbolic order’ that
suppresses blackness even as it grants coherence to whiteness: ‘if I
were not here,’ she writes, ‘I would have to be invented’ (65). To speak of one’s

future, one must first be able to speak of oneself. To say: I, myself, exist.
The tricker God operates through a language of irony, deceit, and
black signification
Gates Jr 12 (Henry Louis Gates Jr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American
literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins
Center for African and African American Research at
HarvardUniversity.https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53713bf0e4
b0297decd1ab8b/t/5c3376354ae2372e139c66ad/1546876476057/
gates_jr_the_signifying_monkey_and_the_language_of_signifyin%28g
%29_rhetorical_difference_and_the_orders_of_meaning.pdf jrimp)
Thinking about the black concept of Signifyin(g) is a bit like stumbling unaware into a
hall of mirrors: the sign itself appears to be doubled, at the very least, and (re)doubled
upon ever closer examination. It is not the sign itself, however, which has multiplied. If
orientation prevails over madness, we soon realize that only the signifier has been doubled and

(re)doubled, a signifier in this instance that is silent, a "soundimage" as Saussure defines the signifier, but a
"sound-image" sans the sound. The difficulty that we experience when thinking about the nature of the visual
(re)doubling at work in a hall of mirrors is analogous to the difficulty we shall encounter in relating the black linguistic sign,

"Signification," to the standard English sign, "signification." This level of conceptual difficulty stems from-indeed,
seems to have been intentionally inscribed within-the selection of the signifier "Signification" to represent a concept
remarkably distinct from that concept represented by the standard English signifier, "signification." For the standard English
word is a homonym of the Afro-American vernacular word. And, to compound the dizziness and the giddiness that we must

experience in the vertiginous movement between these two "identical"

signifiers, these two homonyms have everything to do with each other and, then again, absolutely
nothing.3
 OFF
The plan overburdens PANTEX, the US’s sole dismantlement site, allowing
terrorists to acquire a bomb
Erik Devereux 22 strategic consultant and policy analyst with expertise in
quantitative and qualitative research, data analysis, program evaluation,
and the logic of policy interventions. “Crisis in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Complex: Part 4 – All Roads Lead To Pantex,” American Society for Public
Administration, PATimes, 08/19/2022, https://patimes.org/crisis-in-the-u-s-
nuclear-weapons-complex-part-4-all-roads-lead-to-pantex/
This is the fourth column in a series regarding the unfolding, unprecedented crisis in the U.S. Nuclear
Weapons Complex (NWC) (the first column on how U.S. budget politics since 1969 have damaged the NWC is here;
the second on how nuclear weapons ended exponentially deadly warfare among the great powers is here; the third column on
issues with manufacturing plutonium “pits” is here). This column discusses the facility where the challenges facing the NWC come to
a head: the PANTEX Plant located in the Texas Panhandle (for fans of the Tom Hanks movie, “Cast Away,” PANTEX is located very
near the desolate crossroads where the movie begins and ends). The diagram accompanying this article (source) shows the central

PANTEX plays in the NWC: It is where all components of nuclear weapons are
role

shipped to be assembled into bombs. PANTEX is also where conventional

explosives are manufactured to be used in the fission primary of each
bomb. The Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory manufactures the fusion secondary components (Canned Secondary
Assemblies) to be inserted into the finished bombs along with the U238 metal casings for the bombs. My next column will discuss

the effects of deferred maintenance and other forms of neglect at Y-12. To be blunt,PANTEX is a hot mess. One
set of problems pertains to the United States lacking a proper storage depot

for the 35 metric tons of plutonium accumulated from dismantling tens of

thousands of bombs over the past decades. PANTEX, where those bombs
were dismantled, was not designed for this purpose nor is it located
appropriately for keeping so much plutonium safe from environmental
hazards. In 2010, the facility experienced a flood that threatened the plutonium storage
areas. Plutonium and water should never mix; if you remember your high school chemistry
experiment of mixing sodium and water, that ensuing reaction is just a hint of the explosive fire that occurs when

plutonium becomes wet. Plutonium fires are nearly impossible to extinguish

and highly toxic to human health. Such a fire at PANTEX could become a crisis on
par with Chernobyl. Recent safety reviews continue to criticize the U.S.
Department of Energy for not repairing issues that continue to allow PANTEX to be
environmentally vulnerable. Another set of problems pertains to long-term exposure to beryllium among
workers at PANTEX. Beryllium is used in the assembly of the fission component of a nuclear weapon; it is an effective neutron
reflector that helps increase the efficiency of the fission “burn”. Beryllium is also toxic. Workers exposed to beryllium dust without
appropriate safety gear develop long-term grievous health issues which is exactly what transpired at PANTEX across the course of
the Cold War. During the intense nuclear weapons build-up of the 1950s and 1960s, the NWC consistently sacrificed the
environment and worker safety in the interest of national security. That pattern continued at PANTEX through the 1990s as workers

there became ill from exposure to beryllium. The combination of deferred maintenance, lax
attention to worker safety and increasing possibilities of environmental
disaster has created the same problem currently afflicting plutonium
activities at Los Alamos National Labs: PANTEX is at risk of losing its
experienced, skilled workforce and having serious difficulties recruiting
replacements. Remember, the personnel at PANTEX go to work every day either to dismantle or build functioning nuclear
weapons. This is hardly an appropriate setting for the issues PANTEX currently is experiencing. A final concern about

PANTEX is its security against espionage and terrorism . Despite the remote

location and relative obscurity from the public eye—so obscure that a former governor of
Texas who became U.S. Secretary of Energy seemed not to know PANTEX exists— PANTEX and the entire NWC

recently have been criticized for poor attention to security. Unlike the other sites within
the NWC, however, PANTEX alone is where an unauthorized intrusion could result

in access to a functioning nuclear weapon. This vulnerability adds to the costs piling up around the
NWC to make the complex fully functional at a time when the United States is making plans to build an entire new generation of
weapons to replace the thousands that will have to go out of service. During the first George W. Bush Administration, the
Department of Energy considered the possibility of scrapping the existing NWC and building a single, consolidated site to
manufacture nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Among the current nuclear states, only the United States and Russia persist in
having such decentralized complexes. That is the legacy of World War II and the Cold War including completely ineffective efforts to
prevent espionage by locating NWC sites in relatively obscure parts of the United States. (Richland, WA; Los Alamos, NM; Oak Ridge,
TN). It is time to reconsider the idea of building a new NWC given the problems already discussed in this series of columns. I will turn
again to that option in the final column of the series to be published later this year.

White power nuclear terrorist attacks cause infinite racial violence

through the annihilation of the non-white – the unifying doctrine that
they act upon is a step-by-step manual on how to conduct nuclear
genocidal terrorism that they have historically deployed
Belew 2018 [Dr. Kathleen Belew is a research fellow at Stanford, an assistant
professor of history at the University of Chicago and an international
authority on the white-power movement (Including testifying on white
nationalism in a congressional hearing in 2019). “Bring the War Home: The
White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018. Copyright © 2018, 978-0-
674-98494-3 (PDF), 978-0-674-98492-9 (EPUB)///run-ng]
Cell warfare without direction from movement leadership depended upon commonly held cultural narratives and values, and shared

. In this new climate, movement texts that

texts and symbols, to motivate and coordinate activity

had already captured the imagination of white power activists came to play
a major role in shaping action. The racist utopian novel The Turner Diaries,
perhaps the most prominent white power text, was one that served this
function. It first appeared in serial form in Attack!, the newspaper of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance, in 1974. Group
leader and author William Pierce published it in paperback under the pseudonym of Andrew Macdonald in 1978.37 Over the next
twenty years, The Turner Diaries sold some 500,000 copies, gaining tremendous popularity both in the white power movement and
around the mercenary soldier circuit. It was advertised in Soldier of Fortune magazine and sold in bookstores as far away as South

That The Turner Diaries popped up over and over again in the hands of
Africa.

key movement actors, particularly in moments of violence, reveals its utility

in coordinating acts of underground resistance. Louis Beam would use “Turner” as one of his
many aliases. Glenn Miller would later say he handed out some 800 free copies of the book while leading the White Patriot Party,
and an undercover informant verified that he received the book during his induction to that group. Order member Bruce Pierce
would be arrested carrying a copy, and Order member Randall Rader would say the group kept a stack of twenty to thirty copies in
the bunkhouse at Bob Mathews’s farm. Timothy McVeigh would sell the novel on the gun show circuit prior to his bombing of the

The Turner Diaries worked as a foundational how-to

Oklahoma City federal building.38

manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war. Presented
as a diary found and published after a white racist revolution has
overthrown the U.S. government, it describes an all-white utopia. It
recounts a series of terrorist attacks leading up to the partitioning of a
white homeland in California and the use of nuclear weapons to clear first
the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations. In the
future world, in which the diary serves as a historical artifact of the
revolution, the white supremacist army, called the Organization, has
abolished the dollar, started a new calendar at year zero, and made women
subservient. At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration
of all people of color out of California, the genocide of Jews, the nuclear
bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public
lynching of all people in interracial relationships. The book drew heavily on
the idea of veterans as white power soldiers and on the utility of
paramilitary violence. The protagonist, Earl Turner, implies that many
Organization members were military men. Turner says, “We have decades
of guerrilla warfare in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to instruct us,” and he
warns that the white supremacist movement will force the public “into the
front lines, where they must choose sides and participate, whether they
like it or not.”39 In the novel, set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Earl
Turner works as a soldier in the racist movement attempting to overthrow
the government, which he calls the System. An engineer handy with
weaponry, Turner advances quickly through the ranks; after he blows up
FBI headquarters, the Organization inducts him into the Order, a secret
society of key soldiers. He then performs the Test of the Word, proving his
knowledge of movement ideals, and the Test of the Deed, proving himself
through violent action. He vows to kill himself before giving away the
group’s secrets. The Order, he writes, “will remain secret, even within the
Organization, until the successful completion of the first phase of our task:
the destruction of the System.” When Turner is arrested, he breaks his
vows by failing to kill himself with a cyanide capsule prior to interrogation.
Although the group breaks him out of prison, they decide to punish him for
his failure by assigning him a suicide mission. The diary ends as Turner
prepares to fly a small plane—loaded with a sixty-kiloton nuclear warhead
—into the Pentagon. A small afterword, in the voice of someone who has
found Turner’s diary, describes the ensuing revolution and white victory
after his death. This narrative, outlining a strategy that is dependent on
secrecy, loyalty, and violence, would become the sustaining myth of a real-
life Order dedicated to a violent war on the state, and a guidebook for
decades of white power terrorist violence.40 Beam, too, wanted white power activists to organize as
a guerrilla army. For the cell structure, he drew both on the organization of counterinsurgency combat troops and on the
organization of the communist revolutionaries they faced in wars and mercenary interventions around the world. He called for a
network of cells organized not by direct orders from leadership, but by a common set of worldviews, logics, and a violent repertoire

Much as the white power movement used

of action held in common by movement members.

racism, anticommunism, and frustration over the experience and loss of the
Vietnam War to bind together previously disparate groups, leaderless
resistance factions could use that same narrative to operate on their own,
with only minimal coordination from leadership. Essays of a Klansman, printed at Hayden Lake
in 1983, contained a two-part piece, “Understanding the Struggle,” that began to outline this strategy. In an undated essay, likely
published shortly thereafter, Beam named this approach “Leaderless Resistance” and further refined the idea: Any one cell can be
infiltrated, exposed and destroyed, but this will have no effect on the others; in fact, the members of the other cells will be
supporting that cell which is under attack. … At first glance, such a type of organization seems unrealistic, because the natural

The
question is, how are the cells to cooperate with each other, when there is no intercommunication or central direction?

answer to this question is that participants in a program of Leaderless

Resistance through phantom cell organization must know exactly what they
are doing and how to do it. This is by no means as impractical as it appears,
because it is certainly true that in any movement, all persons involved have
the same general outlook, are acquainted with the same philosophy, and
generally react to given situations in similar ways. As the entire purpose of
Leaderless Resistance is to defeat the enemy by whatever means possible,
all members of phantom cells will tend to react to objective events in the
same way, usually through the tactics of resistance and sabotage.41 In
other words, Beam’s strategy relied on the viewpoint, values, and
predictable reactions shared by white power groups to form them into an
army. The Vietnam War narrative was critical here, as it framed both the
general outlook and philosophy of white power paramilitarism, and
because it provided the repertoire from which activists and cells might
select violent actions.42 This guerrilla war on the state was never intended
to succeed through an outright coup aimed at overwhelming the military
and police, at least not in the early stages. The overwhelming militarization
and armament of the state discounted such a strategy even for those who
dreamed of race war. Instead activists in resistance cells hoped to follow
the model of The Turner Diaries in mounting a campaign of violence
designed to awaken a sympathetic white public. They hoped that acts like
destroying infrastructure, poisoning water, assassinating political targets,
and undermining public confidence in currency would reveal the problems
with “the System.” They thought people of color, race traitors, Jews,
communists, journalists, academics, and other enemies were lost causes.
But they hoped that they could sway a white public in their favor, make
small territorial gains, and eventually seize movement objectives ranging
from a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, to a white America, to a
white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color. The Turner
Diaries provided an outline for each step of this plan. 43
 OFF
The plan causes an immediate global shift to non-nuclear technology.
Causes extinction from emerging tech and turns the case through nuclear
rearmament.
Zachary Kallenborn 24, Kallenborn is an adjunct fellow (non-resident) with
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), policy fellow at the
Schar School of Policy and Government, fellow at the National Institute for
Deterrence Studies, Research Affiliate with the Unconventional Weapons
and Technology Division of the National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), an officially proclaimed U.S.
Army "mad scientist," and national security consultant. He has published
more than 60 articles in a wide range of peer-reviewed, wonky, and popular
outlets, including the Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy, Slate,
DefenseOne, War on the Rocks, the Modern Institute at West Point,
Terrorism and Political Violence, and Parameters. Journalists have written
about and shared that research in The New York Times, the AP, NPR, The
Economist, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, Politico, Al Jazeera, The
Independent, Blick, Newsweek, New Scientist, MIT Tech Review, WIRED,
and the BBC, among others in dozens of languages, 1-10-2024, "Why a
nuclear weapons ban would threaten, not save, humanity," Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2024/01/why-a-nuclear-weapons-
ban-would-threaten-not-save-humanity/
But nuclear weapons are not the only threat to humanity. An asteroid over 1
kilometer in diameter striking the Earth, genetically engineered biological weapons,

super volcanoes, extreme climate change, nanotechnology, and artificial

superintelligence all could generate existential harm, whether defined as the collapse of
human civilization or literal human extinction. To address those challenges, humanity needs global

cooperation to align policies, pool resources, maintain globally critical

supply chains, build useful technologies, and prevent the development of
harmful technologies. Nuclear deterrence—alongside robust international organizations, laws,
norms, alliances, and economic dependencies—helps make that happen.

governments and organizations aiming to reduce existential risks should support nuclear risk-
Global

reduction measures but oppose quick, complete abolition of nuclear

weapons. Nuclear abolition creates serious risk of returning to an era of
great power conflict, which could drastically increase existential risk. A global war
between China, Russia, the United States and their respective allies risks the survival of the global cooperative system necessary to
combat other existential threats, while threatening infrastructure necessary for risk mitigation measures and accelerating other

existential risk scenarios. As Iskander Rehman wrote in his recent in-depth study of great power war: “ Protracted great
power wars are immensely destructive, whole-of-society affairs, the effects of which typically extend
well beyond their point of origin, spilling across multiple regions and siphoning huge amounts of personnel, materiel and resources…

protracted great-power wars usually only end when an adversary

Ultimately,

faces total annihilation, or collapses under the weight of its own exhaustion.” If the great powers collapse, the
global system may collapse with them. Nuclear deterrence can help
prevent that.
Nuclear weapons place a cap on how bad great power conflict can become
and may deter the emergence and escalation of great power war. If China, the
United States, or Russia faced a genuine existential threat, the nuclear weapons would emerge, threatening nuclear retaliation. As
Chinese General Fu Quanyou, head of the People Liberation’s Army General Staff until 2002, once said: “The U.S. and Soviet
superpowers both had strong nuclear capabilities able to destroy one another a number of times, so they did not dare to clash with

Mutually assured
each other directly, war capabilities above a certain point change into war-limiting capabilities.”

destruction also helps prevent serious great power conflict from breaking out
in the first place. During the current war between Ukraine and Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used

nuclear threats to deter direct NATO involvement and keep the conflict local.
The United States might wish to support Ukraine against Russia, but it’s not willing to risk a Russian nuclear strike on New York City

Removing that deterrence by banning

or Washington, DC to do more than provide money and material.

nuclear weapons means a potential return to protracted, global great

power war.
Opposing quick, complete abolition does not mean opposing
To emphasize:

reduction of nuclear arsenals or risk reduction measures like improved

crisis management and ensuring human control over nuclear weapons.
Massive nuclear war is the most likely scenario for existential harm to humanity in the near term. As the Chinese nuclear arsenal
grows, and China potentially aims for nuclear parity with the United States in the coming decades, that problem is going to get
worse. Current nuclear weapon strategies depend on targeting adversary nuclear weapons, which means as an adversary builds
more nuclear weapons, the United States must build more too. If the United States builds more, so too will Russia and China.
Unchecked, nuclear arsenal sizes could quickly spiral upwards, passing the heights of the Cold War when the United States had
23,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had 39,000.

the global
The risks of great power war. War among great powers increases existential risk in at least four ways. First,

cooperative system necessary to combat existential threats may be

seriously damaged or destroyed. Second, combatants might target and destroy
infrastructure and capacity necessary to implement existential risk
mitigation measures. Third, military necessity may accelerate the
development of technologies like artificial intelligence that create new
existential risks. Fourth, a great power war following nuclear abolition could
touch off rapid, unstable nuclear rearmament and proliferation.
After World War II, the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and numerous other international organizations were built to stabilize the

world and prevent such a global catastrophe from happening again. That cooperative
framework allowed for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, enabled global partnerships on biosecurity through the G-7, and
facilitated high-level discussions on the risks of artificial intelligence . However, a
massive global war would undermine the very foundations of this order,
because it would show the economic, political, and institutional ties
between nations were never enough to prevent global conflict . Plus, World War III
might result in the crippling or destruction of the powerful states and institutions that hold up global governance: China, France,

global community may

Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, NATO, and others. The

lose the cooperative institutions necessary for climate change reduction,

limiting or controlling risky biological research, prevent the creation and

proliferation of artificial superintelligence, and generally defend the planet.

Great power war could accelerate a broad range of technologies that generate new and
increase other existential risks. Russian President Putin noted in 2017 that, “[w]hoever becomes the leader in [artificial

intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.” A great power war would almost certainly accelerate

research, development, and implementation of artificial intelligence. One can

easily imagine a Manhattan Project for artificial superintelligence , bringing together NATO’s

leading artificial intelligence researchers and organizations to create a superintelligence (or close

enough to it) to defend friendly cybernetworks and attack adversarial ones,

manipulate adversary decision-making, or create and manage insurgent forces.

Although quantum computing is not an existential risk, accelerating development to help break adversary encryption or other
military purposes would exacerbate artificial intelligence-related risks, too. Quantum computing offers potentially millions of times
more computing power than classical computers, and computing power is a critical resource necessary to train artificial intelligence

war might also spur massive investment in biotechnologies like

models. Great power

genetic engineering to enhance soldier effectiveness. Improvements and

proliferation in genetic engineering generate a range of biological warfare
concerns from creating new biological warfare agents to making existing agents more
harmful.

In a war for survival, infrastructure necessary to mitigate existential risks might be destroyed. Space launch capabilities constitute a
prime example: On November 24, 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test from Vandenburg Space Force Base
near Santa Barbara, California. If China and the United States were at war, Vandenburg Space Force Base would be a viable and
desirable target for Chinese attacks. China has long recognized that the United States military depends heavily on space assets for
communication, remote sensing, and position, navigation, and timing. And Vandenburg is home to the Combined Space Operations
Center, the Space Force center responsible for executing “operational command and control of space forces to achieve theater and
global objectives.” Damaging or destroying the base, including its space launch capabilities, could help China win the war. At the
same time, damaging or destroying the base would make it harder for the United States to carry out asteroid deflection research
and, depending on timing, prevent the United States from launching a planetary defense mission when an asteroid is inbound.

General loss of state capacity could also draw resources and policy attention away from
existential risk mitigation. Research by, Greg Koblentz of George Mason University and King’s College London
researcher Filippa Lentzos mapped 69 Biosafety Level 4 laboratories around the world. At these labs, research is conducted on the
most dangerous pathogenic material, like the microorganisms that cause smallpox and Ebola. The United States and global
community expends significant resources to secure those facilities: President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget provides $1.8 billion to
strengthen biosecurity and biosafety. But in a World War III involving the United States and China, biosecurity may fall by the
wayside. Even if the United States prevails, rebuilding Tokyo, Los Angelos, Seoul, or other major cities demolished during the fighting
would command tremendous resources, and attention.

nuclear abolition could trigger rapid, unstable

Finally, a World War III breaking out after

nuclear rearmament and proliferation. The United States, Russia, China, and other nuclear
powers would almost certainly realize that nuclear abolition was a mistake and
rearm themselves. A post-abolition World War III would also likely
demonstrate to many other states that nuclear weapons are necessary to
defend their sovereignty. Rapid nuclear rearmament and proliferation could be highly

destabilizing, with significant new risks of nuclear war, because new nuclear arsenals may not be accompanied by the
necessary crisis communication, secure second-strike, and general deterrence doctrine necessary to ensure stability.

Even if nuclear abolition were achieved, the basic knowledge underlying

nuclear weapons would not disappear. Even if all nuclear warheads were
dismantled, weapon designs were destroyed, and enrichment facilities
closed, the historical and scientific knowledge of nuclear energy and nuclear
weapons would not disappear. Nuclear weapons knowledge would need to be
retained even in a global zero world to support any monitoring or
verification programs aimed at ensuring that a nuclear global zero stays
“zero.” That knowledge could provide the seeds for rearmament. So, while nuclear
abolition might reduce nuclear-related existential risks in the short-term, abolition might counterintuitively

increase nuclear existential risk in the long-term.

CASE
 China ADV

1---Sacrifice DA – The affirmative actualizes the dangers of a

fabulously war by perfecting God terms invented by the Rand
cooperation to justify extraction of inner-city and indigenous land
Matheson 15 [Calum Matheson, PhD is Associate Professor of Public Deliberation and Civic Life and the
incoming Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.; “Desired Ground Zeroes:
Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive”; 2015;]

instill skepticism about the efficacy of current strategies meant to

This project should

confront nuclear violence by challenging it discursively. A great deal of

work about the Bomb, following Carol Cohn’s excellent article and the germinal work of Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell and
Rory O'Connor in Nukespeak, has focused on the sanitizing effects of nuclear language. Barry

terms like “Strategic

Brummett, Daniel Zins, and Edward Schiappa have all published work in this vein. Schiappa criticizes

Defense Initiative” and CORRTEX for “bureaucratizing” and

“domesticating” nuclear issues. Through these verbal strategies, nuclear

realities are “insulated from public inspection by acronyms or

sanitized jargon” (253). Both Barry Brummett and Charles Kauffman use the work of Kenneth Burke to argue that
naming practices constrain public knowledge and influence attitudes
about nuclear weapons, either through perfecting “God terms” for Brummett or
through reference appealing historical myths such as the American
frontier for Kauffman (Brummett, 1989; Kauffman, 1990). Even David Cratis Williams, who combines a Derridean perspective to the
more familiar Burke, emphasizes that a chief goal of nuclear criticism is a “publicly

accessible” language (Williams 202). These are all advocates for what we might call the concealment thesis. The basic
assumption for proponents of this idea is that nuclear terminology conceals the reality of

nuclear warfare and thus makes it palatable. The nuclear thinking

developed by RAND game theorists and others produced an arcane
vocabulary for all aspects of nuclear conflict, much as academia has for
its own concerns: “counterforce targeting,” “throw-weight,” “circular
error probable,” “post-attack state,” and, of course, “countervalue”
and “first strike.” These terms mystify and enchant the public, just
as they did public intellectuals during the Cold War, the fictional
narrator of End Zone, and legions of high school and college
undergraduate debaters to this very day (myself included). The theories
of language used in the concealment thesis draw from different sources (Burke, Derrida, and Aristotle, Orwell, just to name a few), but their least
common denominator is a belief that nuclear metaphors and euphemism sustain the
complex of nuclear destruction by concealing the horror of nuclear war.
The implication of this idea is that providing a new vocabulary for
public debate, such as the “devil terms” Brummett suggests, would enable
democratic deliberation and therefore constrain the nuclear state. As Schiappa
puts it, a “negative nukespeak would consist of linguistic strategies to

portray nuclear weapons and war as dangerous and immoral” (268). Such a
strategy might “salvage” debate over nuclear weapons in the public
sphere (Schiappa 254). Even outside communication studies, there is a broad consensus amongst critics of nuclear weapons that
democratic debate is the key method for resistance to nuclear weapons and that concealing language stands as a barrier to it. Nuclear

critique of all kinds has dropped off considerably since the end of the Cold War such that the concealment
thesis, although advanced most comprehensively in the 1980s, remains the chief contribution of
communication studies to the politics of nuclear warfare. The central argument of this
book suggests that this legacy needs revision. The economy of nuclear discourse since the day

of Trinity has been driven by the attempt to get closer to the Real, to
have the Bomb as it “really is.” Chapter 2 will suggest that nuclear simulations were presented as more real and
more rational than the Doomsday imaginations of Curtis LeMay and the early Strategic Air Command. Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth was
another effort to bring Americans face-to-face with the reality of nuclear war, as were the more explicitly fictional novels churned out especially

nuclear war remains “fabulously

in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s. Underlying these efforts is the fact that

textual” in Derrida’s terms (24-27). There have been atrocities related to nuclear
weapons and their production—indigenous peoples subjected to
uranium mining and nuclear testing, inner city populations
confined and targeted in the name of the Bomb, “downwinders”
exposed to radioactivity, U.S. soldiers made to witness tests with
inadequate protection, and non-human animals subjected to cruelty in
the name of understanding just what a nuclear war might be like. But there
has never been a nuclear war in the sense that strategists, novelists, and
survivalists imagined it. To imagine the graphic details of a possible nuclear war
does not reveal the truth but instead relies on the same dynamic that
makes the Bomb so fascinating in the first place: a sense of access to
the Real. My overall aim is to establish the death drive as a problematic for
communication studies. I argue that it is a desire for unmediated experience
spurred on by the Real, but because communication is always mediated, this desire is
frustrated as soon as it is 29 expressed. The quest for the Real ends up mired in the Symbolic.
Unable to enjoy the Real because its loss is the necessary condition for
subjectivity in the first place, we invest in subjectivity instead, enjoying
the perceived control over presence and absence demonstrated in the
fort-da dynamic. In developing this argument, I hope to make a contribution to communication studies by showing
that silence, omission, and lack do not just frustrate our effort to

communicate, but partly determine the ways in which we do so. These

unspeakable failures are not therefore purely negative—they are an excess
beyond language, not a vacuum. Specific media artefacts, whether war games or literary texts, exist instead of
others because they are animated by desire and the uncanny sense of the Real. Therefore, efforts to

understand what we do communicate require attention to the larger

economy of desire and that which we cannot mediate. For rhetoric, this means a new
understanding of the sublime as an uncanny attribute of signifiers and media itself in relation to the Real, rather than simply a
grand style of speech. For media and technology studies, it means acknowledging how the enjoyment of our power over
presence and absence leads us to form attachments that sustain some particular technologies instead of others, making an

account of desire necessary even for a truly materialist understanding of mediation. This also means rethinking the
relationship between public discourse and political change since, as
the example of nuclear weapons shows, horror and fascination are woven
together such that exposing the potential for catastrophe does not
translate into an effective response.

2---Conditions for use DA - Debate’s pursue of “jouissance” is

trapped in a repetition compulsion that creates a simulation fever
that re-invests in modes of cognitive dissonance that instills a
radical passivity that makes nuclear war more likely
Matheson 15 [Calum Matheson, PhD is Associate Professor of Public Deliberation and Civic Life and the
incoming Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.; “Desired Ground Zeroes:
Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive”; 2015;] Jrimp

contain a consistently anti-

The narrative elements of First Strike and its political paratext thus

nuclear message. The procedural elements of the game could support the
idea that nuclear war plans, if implemented, would result in unmitigated suffering. The message of First
Strike’s procedures, however, could also be read as the exact opposite. Nuclear powers are the only

ones with agency in the game. Non-nuclear territories are simply empty
space for the player or nuclear enemies to capture and control. Imperialism pays: not only are more
territories available for the game’s core actions, but conquests of some places by some countries (e.g., annexation of Africa by
the European Union) yield special rewards. Although the victory screen contains a question mark (“You win?), success and
failure are clearly different states and winning is rewarded. The procedural message of this supposedly anti-nuclear game can
therefore be read as an argument for speed, resourcefulness, aggression, and amoral planning as keys for success in a nuclear
war. There is no human extinction in First Strike. No war of 92 any scale can produce a nuclear winter. Victory and survival are
both possible. This ambiguity has been noted by reviewer Carter Dotson, who wrote that “most of the social commentary [in
First Strike] seems to come from the way that players interpret the situation, rather than any conscious message that the game
gives. There’s no reward for not striking first, or any punishment for being the aggressor” (Dotson). Developers frequently said

that this game about nuclear war had to be “fun,” and this is reflected in its gameplay and
aesthetics (First Strike, “Mr. Obama”). The game’s crisp graphical model of the Earth is reminiscent but richer than the similar
Introversion game DEFCON, and it is accompanied by ethereal, cerebral music. The aesthetic of the game is almost clinical.
Although casualty numbers are sometimes displayed, these transmissions are matter-of-fact, even soothing when they reflect
 this sanitization is intended to produce an
a successful attack by the player. It is possible to argue that

uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, akin to what Bogost calls “simulation fever,”

the “the nervous discomfort caused by the interaction of the game’s unitoperational representations of a
segment of the real world and the player’s subjective understanding of
that representation” (Unit Operations 136). Some of this discomfort is apparent in player reviews, but it seems
subdued, the minor embarrassment of a guilty pleasure. One reviewer called it “worryingly fun” (Priestman). Another

reviewer acknowledged the game’s stated message while recognizing the thrill of simulating
destruction:Players enjoy the game in the simple sense that it can be fun to play, but they enjoy it
in the Lacanian sense of jouissance, as well, the affective investment in
or cathexis to an object even when it surpasses the point of pleasure and
becomes painful. Intentions, procedures, and player reactions to First Strike are analogous to the rhetor, 94
speech, and audience in more traditional rhetoric. The game’s paratextual context and narrative content contradict its
procedural argument. To account for players’ investment in the repetitious play of simulation requires attention not just to the
context and content of the game itself, but to the relations of enjoyment and repetition in which players invest. That the game
can be “worryingly fun” (Priestman), “equal parts beautiful and gut-wrenching” (Faraday, “Go to DEFCON 2”), a “frenetic,
stressful, and awesome scramble” (Jones) suggests that simulation fever does not repel players. Instead, they become feverish

players invest not in one side or the other of the

for simulation as such. Reviews suggest that

nuclear fascination/horror discrepancy, but in the discrepancy itself. In First Strike, players
are compelled to repeat by the incentive structure of the game, which
rewards repeated plays with new countries to fight as or against. But even without this procedural reward,
the game encourages repetition. It is almost impossible to play a
“perfect” game, and the outcome could always be changed somewhat, and as no two sessions are
identical, repetition is always repetition with a difference. In the words of one reviewer, “The replay value is through the
roof, since every experience is different. Even without multiplayer, you will come back over and over again” (Gil). In the words
of another, the game is a “replayable single-player strategy game that I kept coming back to long after I had enough material

for my review” (Faraday “Stop Worrying”). First Strike’s repetition allows players to enjoy
useless subjectivity, or the enjoyment of the subject as subject—the
enjoyment of the capacity for choice primarily rather than the results of
specific choices (Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality 3). In his article “Tether and Accretions: Fantasy as Form in
Videogames,” Christopher Goetz describes one mode of producing pleasure in videogames as the 95 “ tether”

fantasy. Players enjoy exposing themselves to risk, “expanding” out into the world,
and then withdrawing into a safer space, repeating the process again
and again. Being caught in a vulnerable state can be a “playful act” even when this play is “repetitious
of an originally horrifying event” (423). The “worrying” fun of First Strike is
understandable as the uncanny effect of repetition and simulation fever . Recall that for

Bogost simulation fever is the gap between the performance of a simulated system

and the player’s concept of that system’s operation “in real life.” This fits well with Freud’s understanding of the uncanny,
where “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction

between imagination and reality is effaced, as when…a symbol takes

over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes” (“The Uncanny”). Players of First Strike
are made uncomfortable by the juxtaposition of fun and war, but the illusion of
control, the ability to exit the game and continue their lives, creates a tether like that
attached to the young boy’s reel, permitting them to control the conditions by which

the simulated world is made present and absent. Perhaps the enjoyment of this control
explains why so many reviewers requested a pause feature, originally absent but added in an update by Blindflug (“Forums”).

That discomfort persists can be understood as the game’s incomplete

move to conceal the more horrifying associations of nuclear war. First Strike
might strengthen certain metaphorical connections, for example those between nuclear war and victory, at the expense of

These elided
other metonymic ones, such as the direct bodily horror of radiation burns and screaming victims.

connections that proliferate meaning may be concealed, but they may persist in the
unconscious as described in the previous chapter—in other words, they remain live connections in the
Symbolic economy that produces given subjects. This can be seen in Jason Ruddy’s review
of the game, which 96 he calls “wickedly fun,” although its “hope” is “not quite enough to shake off the uneasiness you’ll feel
every time you read the stats at the end of a game.” His discomfort is palpable near the end of his review. “I had a lot of fun
playing it,” he wrote, “and feel as though the only negative bits in my experience were tied to…the bad taste it left in my mouth
after each game was complete. Every 10 minutes met with the same result, billions dead and a ‘You Win?’ stats screen. If that
sort of thing won’t stop you from having a good time, then I recommend giving this one a go” (Ruddy). Here is enjoyment,
unease, an acknowledgement of the game’s contradictions, and a decision to play this program “meant to be played…

The capacity to enjoy

repeatedly” because it allows players to practice and improve their decisions (Ruddy).

this ostensibly anti-war game is the same factor that brings players to
the U.S. Office of Naval Research MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the
Internet), a collaborative online simulator that relies on the fun of playing to crowdsource defense policy ideas

3---Co2 emissions stop an impending ice age

Doyle 16 (Alister, formerly a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT,
environmental correspondent for Reuters since 2004 where he covers
climate science and the UN, “Global Warming Could Stave Off Next Ice
Age For 100,000 Years”, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-
climatechange-iceage-idUSKCN0UR2G320160113)
OSLO — Global warming is likely to disrupt a natural cycle of ice ages and
contribute to delaying the onset of the next big freeze until about
100,000 years from now, scientists said on Wednesday. In the past million years, the world has had about 10 ice ages before swinging
back to warmer conditions like the present. In the last ice age that ended 12,000 years ago, ice sheets blanketed what is now Canada, northern Europe and Siberia. In

a new explanation for the long-lasting plunges in global temperatures

that cause ice ages, scientists pointed to a combination of long-term shifts in the Earth's orbit around the sun,
together with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere . They said the planet seemed naturally on track
to escape an ice age for the next 50,000 years, an unusually long period of warmth, according to the study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. But

rising man-made greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century
could mean the balmy period will last for 100,000 years, they wrote in the journal
Nature. The findings suggest human influences "will make the initiation of the next ice
age impossible over a time period comparable to the duration of
previous glacial cycles," they wrote. "Humans have the power to change the
climate on geological timescales," lead author Andrey Ganopolski told Reuters.

Extinction – we’re on the brink now – timeframe is fast

Duke 15 (Selwyn, New American, citing S. Fred Singer, professor
emeritus at the University of Virginia and a founding director of the
Science & Environmental Policy Project, “Climate Change: Is a Deadly Ice
Age on the Horizon?”,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/21177-
climate-change-is-a-deadly-ice-age-on-the-horizon)
an
The last ice age ended approximately 12,000 years ago, and since then we’ve been enjoying a pleasantly warm “interglacial period.” But given that

interglacial may last only 12,000 years, we’re confronted with a scary
prospect: Another ice age may be nigh. And this could have devastating
effects on mankind. So says atmospheric and space physics expert S.
Fred Singer, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and a
founding director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. While he has
never been worried about global warming — emphasizing that climate alarmists’ predictions have been consistently wrong — he writes at American Thinker today that

he has “recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the
dangers they pose to humans on our planet — and indeed to most of
terrestrial ecology.” In fact, he’s so concerned that he proposes we try to mitigate any
cooling that may occur. Professor Singer cites a manuscript written by a co-author of his, Dennis Avery,
which documents the historic causes of civilizational collapse. Its conclusion,
Singer reports, is that “cold periods and droughts appear to be the main dangers
to agriculturally based societies in all regions of the world.” Of course, this is just
common sense. Plants don’t grow very well in deserts or during Northeast winters. But what if it were winter year

'round? The effects would be striking. As Singer tells us, there have been nearly 20 major glaciations “in the past two to
three million years. The coolings are quite severe: the most recent one, ending only about 12,000

years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick

continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of (barely) surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more
adaptable Homo Sapiens.” While Singer says that most experts believe the next glacial period lies

just on the horizon, the exact timing is unknown; one scientist claims it may be delayed by another 40,000 years. It’s more
than just major ice ages that imperil us, however. As Singer also informs, “There are two
kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different…: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a
100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically . (ii) “Little” ice ages were
discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled
by the Sun. The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent.” And
while such a period may be called “little,” its effects are anything but. Describing
the consequences of the last such age, occurring between 1400 and 1830 A.D., Singer writes, “The Norse settlements were abandoned; indeed, Scandinavia was hardest
hit. Climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb documents crop failures, starvation, and disease in Europe, together with ice fairs on the frozen Thames.” Further illustrating the
dangers of global cooling, some researchers believe that an earlier period of cold and dry weather might have contributed to one of history’s major events: the Western
Roman Empire’s fall. As the Daily Need wrote in 2011 citing a study published in the journal Science, “Climate variability, with other factors, brought about a period of
agricultural instability that affected both the Romans and militant migrant populations to the northeast — the ‘barbarians.’ These migrants then fought their way south,
toward the warmer Mediterranean weather — and toward an already weakened Rome.”

4---No energy wars.

Meierding 20 – Dr. Emily Meierding, National Security Professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Political Science PhD at the University of
Chicago. [The Exaggerated Threat of Oil Wars, 3-20-2021,
https://www.lawfareblog.com/exaggerated-threat-oil-wars]
Happily,the historical record indicates that China and its neighbors are unlikely to escalate
their energy sparring. Contrary to overheated rhetoric, countries do not

actually “take the oil,” to use President Trump’s controversial and inaccurate phrase. Instead, my recent research
demonstrates that countries avoid fighting for oil resources.

No Blood for Oil

Between 1912 and 2010, countries fought 180 times over territories that
contained—or were believed to contain—oil or natural gas resources. These
conflicts ranged from brief, nonfatal border violations, like Turkish jets entering Greek airspace, to the two world wars. Many of
these clashes—including World War II, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (1990), the U.S. invasion of Iraq (2003), the Iran-Iraq War (1980-
1988), the Falklands War (1982), and the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932-1935)—have been described as classic oil
wars: that is, severe international conflicts in which countries fight to obtain petroleum resources.

a closer look at these conflicts reveals that none merits the classic “oil
However,

war” label. Although countries did fight over oil-endowed territories, they usually fought for other reasons, including
aspirations to regional hegemony, domestic politics, national pride, or contested territories’ other strategic, economic, or symbolic

Oil was an uncommon trigger for international confrontations and

assets.

never caused major conflicts.

On approximately 20 occasions, over almost a century, countries engaged in minor conflicts to obtain oil resources. However, these

“oil spats” were brief, mild, mostly nonfatal, and generally involved countries whose hostility predated
their resource competition. Greece and Turkey have prosecuted oil spats. So have China and Vietnam, Guyana and Venezuela, and a

confrontations inspired aggressive rhetoric while they were

dozen other pairs of countries. These

underway, but none of them ever escalated into a larger armed conflict.

Oil has periodically influenced the trajectories of major conflicts that were launched for other reasons. At the end of World War I,
British troops seized Mosul province in order to secure its oil resources. Oil aspirations also motivated Germany’s invasion of the
Russian Caucasus (1941-1942) and Japan’s invasion of the Dutch East Indies (1941-1942). While the latter attack precipitated U.S.
involvement in World War II, it was also a continuation of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). All of these “oil campaigns”
were inspired by aggressors’ wartime resource needs. Absent the ongoing conflicts, these countries would not have fought for oil.
The historical record also reveals one “oil gambit”: Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Conventional explanations for the attack assert
that Saddam Hussein was either greedily attempting to grab his neighbor’s oil resources or needily attempting to limit Kuwait’s oil
output in order to raise oil prices and escape from a deepening economic crisis caused by falling oil prices and Iraq’s large debts,
incurred during the Iran-Iraq War. The first explanation is wrong. The second is correct, but incomplete, because it omits Saddam’s
larger motive for aggression: his fear of the United States. The regime’s records, seized during the 2003 U.S. invasion, reveal
Saddam’s belief, nurtured since the 1970s, that the United States was determined to contain Iraq and remove him from power. In
1990, this false conviction led Saddam to assume that the United States was engineering Iraq’s economic crisis by encouraging
Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates to exceed their OPEC oil production quotas and refuse Iraq’s repeated entreaties to cancel its
war debts. After his infamous meeting with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie failed to persuade Saddam of the United States’s benign
intentions, he concluded that conquering Kuwait was his only remaining means of survival. Fear of U.S. hostility, not oil aspirations,
prompted Iraq to invade Kuwait.

A Question of Value

The absence of oil wars is surprising and counterintuitive. Petroleum is an exceptionally valuable resource. It fuels all countries’
economies and militaries. Oil sales are also a crucial revenue source for producer states. Surely, countries are willing to fight to
obtain petroleum resources.

classic oil wars are extraordinarily costly. A country that aims to seize
In fact,

foreign oil faces, first, the costs of invading another country. International
aggression is destructive and expensive under the best of circumstances. It
may also damage the oil infrastructure that a conqueror hopes to acquire. Next, if a
conqueror plans to exploit oil resources over the long term, it faces the costs of occupying seized territory. As the United States has

learned from its “endless wars,” foreign occupation is extremely challenging, even for the world’s
most powerful country.

Additionally, a conqueror faces international approbation for oil grabs. As censorious responses to Trump’s proposition that the
United States “take the oil” from Syria, Iraq and Libya have indicated, seizing another country’s oil is considered reprobate behavior.
It violates international laws against plunder and materially threatens to consolidate control over global oil resources. As Iraq
learned in 1990, other countries and international institutions respond to oil grabs with diplomatic censure, economic sanctions and
even military force. Finally, if a conqueror manages to maintain control over foreign oil resources, it may not be able to exploit them.

Conquest scares off the foreign oil companies that many countries rely on to finance and manage oil
production.

Because of the high costs of invasion, occupation, and international

opprobrium, classic oil wars are simply not worth the effort, regardless of petroleum’s value.
Countries may occasionally decide that it is worth initiating an oil spat to obtain desired resources, especially when targeted

territories are contested and other issues are at stake. However, fighting major conflicts for oil does not
pay.
Keep Your Eyes Off the Prize

this is good news for stability in the South China Sea and other oil-rich regions. There is no reason to
All of

expect that China’s recent energy sparring with Vietnam and Malaysia will escalate into a larger international

conflict, at least with regard to the oil at stake. Oil spats never do, no matter how acrimonious they appear while underway.
5---Repurposing weapons-into-fuel is more than slapping it in there –
technical and bureaucratic barriers ensure the material never makes it
into reactors
Tracy 2023 [Cameron Tracy is a Research Scholar at Stanford University’s
Center for International Security and Cooperation. He holds a PhD in
materials science & engineering from the University of Michigan. “Disposal,
Destruction and Disarmament: Comparative Analysis of US Chemical
Weapon and Weapons Plutonium Stockpile Reductions,’ Volume: 17
Central European Journal of International and Security Studies Issue: 1
Page(s): 36-65 Issue published: 13 March 2023, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51870/SJMQ9813, ///k-ng]
Organisational sclerosis in the plutonium stockpile reductions effort
Tensions between organisational routinisation and mission novelty are
evident in the weapons plutonium case. Prior to the PMDA, the DOE had
little experience with the production and use of plutonium-bearing nuclear
fuel, the elimination method mandated by the agreement. Limited US
testing of this technology in the 1970s was halted by a 1977 federal
moratorium, based on fears that normalisation of plutonium use in civilian
applications would hasten the proliferation of nuclear weaponry (von
Hippel 2001). This ban was lifted in 1981, but commercial and research
interest proved minimal given the low cost of conventional, uranium-based
nuclear fuel (Bunn et al. 2005). Unlike in other nations, most prominently
France, plutonium was not adopted as a fuel for US nuclear reactors. So
unfamiliar was the DOE with plutonium fuel technology that, when tasked
with the conversion of weapons plutonium to fuel under the PMDA, it had
to rely heavily on a subsidiary of Areva, the French state-owned nuclear
firm, for design and construction services (Lubkin 2018).
In contrast, the DOE possessed extensive experience with nuclear waste dilution and burial. Since the earliest days of nuclear energy there has existed a consensus in the United States that disposal in stable geologic formations is the best means of dealing with
unwanted nuclear materials (US National Research Council 1957). The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act codified in law the government’s commitment to geologic disposal. But perhaps the most meaningful expression of the DOE’s adherence to burial is found in its
infrastructure. Since 1999 the DOE has operated WIPP, the world’s only deep geologic repository for nuclear waste, into which it plans to invest upwards of $20 billion (Feder 1999).

Under these conditions, typical organisational heuristics would strongly favour abandonment of the irradiation approach, an unfamiliar technique imposed by external political forces, and its substitution with dilution and burial, an approach that aligns with existing
capabilities and capitalises on prior investments. The DOE’s swift reversion to its preexisting waste management routine aligns with an organisational preference for more familiar alternatives to irradiation. Just one year after the PMDA’s signing, the US Congress
chided the department for ‘consideration of alternative plutonium disposition and management scenarios’, mainly dilution and burial, alongside a ‘much lower than expected budget request’ (US House of Representatives 2001: 131).

The DOE’s apathetic approach to plutonium irradiation bordered on self-

sabotage. After failing to request from Congress the requisite appropriations, the department commissioned a succession of
reports claiming inadequate funding for the irradiation technique and suggesting its replacement with burial (US Department of
Energy 2014b; Aerospace Corporation 2015; Oak Ridge National Laboratory 2015). According to Congress these DOE assessments
had ‘not accurately represented the comparative life cycle costs of these alternatives’, suggesting ancillary motives for the DOE’s
preference (US House of Representatives 2014: 143). The DOE’s ardent pursuit of more familiar alternatives to irradiation—the
adoption of which scuttled the PMDA—corresponds to the predictions of organisation theory that ‘damaging interactions can occur .
. . when new, unfamiliar tasks are superimposed onto old routines’ (Allison & Zelikow 1999: 158).[23]

These internal factors hindering organisational change within the DOE were
accompanied by an evolving institutional environment that grew
increasingly unconducive to stockpile reductions. Unsurprisingly,
negotiation of the PMDA coincided with a reassessment of the role of
nuclear weapons in global security policy. The fall of the Soviet Union did
away with a primary justification for US reliance on nuclear weapons,
prompting a revival of nuclear reductionist, de-legitimationist and
abolitionist thought (Nitze 1994; Canberra Commission on the Elimination
of Nuclear Weapons 1996; US National Academy of Sciences 1997).
But support for the arsenal rebounded in subsequent decades, buoyed by a renewed focus on great power conflict and familiar
deterrence relationships (Freedman & Michaels 2019: 631-648). As the PMDA unraveled, dominant US discourses reflected a belief
that ‘the conditions that might make possible the global elimination of nuclear weapons . . . would require a fundamental

transformation of the world political order’ (Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States 2009: xvi).

Perceptions of the immutability of existing nuclear postures extended to

the plutonium stockpile. The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review called for a
‘sustained plutonium pit manufacturing capability needed to . . . prepare
for future uncertainty’ (US Department of Defense 2018: 62). This
conception of stockpiled plutonium as a safeguard against unknown
dangers stood in stark contrast to the stockpile reductions mission. It instead
signified preoccupation with a possible ‘loss of influence over what happens to be the means of supreme political potency’ identified
by von Meier, Miller, and Keller in their sociological study of plutonium stockpile management (von Meier, Miller & Keller 1998: 25).

In line with the institutionalist account of organisational decision-making,

DOE strategy mirrored this evolution in the social framing of weapons
plutonium. Documents spanning the reductions programme exhibit a
corresponding shift in rhetorical focus. Early planning identified two
motivations for reduction: ‘the risk that either weapons or fissile materials
could be obtained by unauthorized parties’ (i.e. nonproliferation) and ‘the
risk that weapons or fissile materials could be reintroduced into the
arsenals from which they came’ (i.e. arms control) (US National Academy of
Sciences 1994: 3). The former frames plutonium as an intrinsically valuable
material to be protected from theft, the latter as an undesirable threat to
global security that must be made inaccessible to everyone, including its
current possessors. It is the arms control motivation alone that mandates permanent, irreversible elimination;
nonproliferation aims could be achieved more cheaply by secure storage of plutonium to protect it from non-US actors.
In the ensuing decades, this arms control impetus faded and was eclipsed
by the nonproliferation justification. A 2014 DOE report arguing for
substitution of the means of disposal mandated by the PMDA spoke only of
‘danger to national and international security due to proliferation concerns
and potential use by non‐state actors for nuclear terrorism purposes’ (US
Department of Energy 2014b: 7). The arms control justification, previously a
central pillar of the reductions mission, was conspicuously absent.
While technical factors alone fail to explain the trajectory of the US
weapons plutonium reductions effort, organisational factors exhibit
substantial explanatory power. Evolution of the institutional context in
which reductions were sought acted in tandem with the DOE’s path-
dependent tendencies to promote abandonment of the initial goal of
permanent elimination by irradiation, and its substitution with a more
familiar—and thus more organisationally tenable—means of disposal.

6---Each reactor takes decades and billions of dollars.

Amy Joi O’Donoghue 23, Reporter for the Utah InDepth Team at Deseret
News, “Why it takes so long to get advanced nuclear reactors up and
running,” Deseret News, 11-03-2023,
https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/3/23945220/nuclear-energy-utah-
idaho-idaho-national-laboratory-power-congress-john-curtis-nuscale
bills aimed at modernizing, cost cutting and streamlining the
A bevy of

permitting process for advanced nuclear reactors recently received endorsement by a congressional
subcommittee, in part due to the long and arduous process related to a project with ties to Utah.

C3, an online magazine put out by the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions, flagged the bills, including two that would cut
costs. One of those bills is sponsored by Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah and another is sponsored by Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-Indiana.

cited the certification process for NuScale’s VOYGR—which is the only

The magazine

advanced reactor design to receive certification from the U.S. Nuclear

Regulatory Commission.
It took seven years to complete and cost NuScale $500 million. The original
application alone was 12,000 pages and 2 million pages of regulatory audits.
This is in addition to a pre-application process that took nearly 10 years to complete.

7---Materials are a non-issue---we have plenty, and materials are in Ohio,

not Russia.
James Conca 21, Senior Scientist and Chief Technical Officer at UFA
Ventures, Inc., Affiliate Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Ph.D. in
Geochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, “Supplying New
Types Of Nuclear Fuel With HALEU Is Not A Problem,” Forbes, 09-08-2021,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/09/08/supplying-new-
types-of-nuclear-fuel-with-haleu-is-not-a-problem
Most nuclear power reactors use Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) which is enriched only to about 3% to 5%
U-235.

We’ve known this for a while. The hurdles are only political and bureaucratic. Of course, I use the
term “only” very loosely. These hurdles are usually more difficult than any technical or scientific hurdle.

Having excess inventory

As in most supply chains, the amount of material produced is just about what is needed.

on hand doesn’t help with nuclear since nuclear power plants have at least two

years’ worth of fuel onsite at any time.

So the claim that insufficient supplies of HALEU will hinder new reactor design
deployment is hollow. The reason there is no commercial supply of HALEU in
North America at the moment is because there were no companies with a likelihood of

producing reactors soon enough that would need that fuel - until now.
enrichment facilities in
The primary source of commercially-available HALEU today is from Russia. But there are

the United States and elsewhere that produce LEU that could be ramped up
in less time than the reactors can be deployed. Enrichment facilities are
not that difficult to build.
Butthe United States is moving forward. The latest URENCO enrichment facility in Eunice, New Mexico
went into LEU production only four years after regulatory approval, and they have recently announced a

program to produce HALEU and to construct a facility dedicated to just that.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory will produce HALEU for upcoming
new reactor demonstrations and for new fuels like CCTE’s ANEEL that will replace older fuels in some existing reactor designs.
In addition,BWX Technologies has a contract with INL to expand and upgrade its
TRIstructural-ISOtropic (TRISO) nuclear fuel manufacturing line . TRISO is the fuel for pebble-bed and
other advanced reactors, and uses HALEU.

DOE has also promised to provide the first fuel load of HALEU for Oklo’s micro-reactor, the
Aurora Powerhouse. This particular HALEU is being made with spent fuel, which is not a workable solution for many advanced
reactors, but Oklo plans to produce its own HALEU soon.

To address the overall problemof domestic supply, Congress has ordered DOE to enable more
HALEU production. The Department is developing a plan to establish that supply.
Several commercial entities are gearing up for HALEU production around
the world. Orano Conversion & Enrichment, a multinational nuclear fuel cycle company headquartered in Hauts-de-Seine,
France, is assessing the enrichment market and the expected requirements for HALEU in anticipation of supplying HALEU.
Centrus Energy is ahead of most competitors. Their
But nuclear fuel and services provider

commercial-scale, domestic facility in Piketon, Ohio, Centrus will produce HALEU

needed to fuel many next-generation reactor designs, including the recently
announced Natrium Power Storage System designed by Bill Gates’ TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, as well as
new fuels like CCTE’s ANEEL fuel that is a mixture of HALEU and thorium.

Having already received license-approval from NRC, Centrus expects to start production in 2022, which would certainly handle any
domestic needs over the next ten years.

don’t worry that fuel supply is some kind of bottleneck in the advance of
So

nuclear power. The fuel will come well before the reactors.
8---Nuclear power can’t stop warming
Alexander Sammon 19, Senior Fellow and Ben Bagdikian Editorial Fellow at
Mother Jones, “The Tantalizing Nuclear Mirage”, The American Prospect,
12/5/2019, https://prospect.org/greennewdeal/the-tantalizing-nuclear-
mirage/
In a world where the rapid deployment of zero-carbon energy production is
urgent, nuclear power, the argument goes, represents the only proven bet.
As it stands, nuclear is currently the largest single source of near-zero-carbon energy generation in the United States, providing 20
percent of our total energy mix. And while the waste may be dangerous, and the risks associated with meltdowns cinematically
seared into our collective memory, the technology is actually safer than burning fossil fuels—one study found that per unit of
electricity generated, oil is 263 times more deadly than nuclear, on account of air pollution alone. With 11 years, per the U.N.’s 2018
IPCC report, to overhaul our energy system, to be serious about decarbonization is to find a place at the table for nuclear.

It’s an alluring idea. Already, this logic has been embraced in states like Ohio and Booker’s New Jersey, which have
been allocating green tax subsidies to nuclear projects. And while it’s largely played out in the background, the question of what to
do about nuclear has vexed Green New Dealers since the rollout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s framework in February. While plane
travel and hamburgers raised hackles in the press, one of the first clauses to be deleted from the initial proposal pledged to phase
out the technology altogether.
So does the Green New Deal need nuclear to achieve its lofty goals? Does
zero-carbon energy infrastructure necessitate a nuclear buildout, or at least
an embrace of already-existing nuclear as a bridge fuel, as countries like Sweden have done?

Unfortunately, the case for nuclear as a green technology is not so simple

—the technology faces a spate of environmental and economic challenges,
while its track record as a bridge fuel shows it may be more rivalrous than
concomitant with renewables. In fact, it may be the nuclear industry that
needs the Green New Deal, not the other way around.
DESPITE THE NEWFOUND exigency of overhauling the country’s energy mix, this is not the first time America’s energy system has
arrived at a crossroads in the last ten years, nor is it the first time nuclear has been trotted out as its last, best hope. In the late
aughts, with oil prices soaring and production stagnant, policymakers made a commitment to expanding American nuclear
generation. An era of so-called “nuclear renaissance” began, with four next-generation reactors commissioned at two plants, one in
Georgia and the other in South Carolina.

nuclear energy was first announced as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide
Since

abundance have far outpaced its production.

Now, over a decade later, that project managed to bankrupt its construction company, Westinghouse, nearly taking down the entire
Toshiba conglomerate, Westinghouse’s parent company, with it. The two reactors in South Carolina were abandoned, while the
Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power utility companies assumed control of the remaining two reactors in Georgia, the Vogtle 3 and

4. Buteven a cash infusion from Georgia ratepayers, who began subsidizing the completion of the project in 2011,
was not enough to keep the project close to its budget or timeline. Initially expected

to come online in 2016-2017, the Vogtle plant has run some $14 billion over budget. Its completion

dates have been deferred to 2021-2022. There’s currently no other active nuclear

development in the United States.

That timeline should be particularly alarming for nuclear enthusiasts. If it’s
going to take 10 to 15 years to see a plant through to completion, even
with massive financial backing, that’s seemingly impossible to square with
the 11 years to decarbonize. At the very least, we’d need hundreds, if not thousands of
plants already under construction just to make a dent. Booker, Yang, and
other advocates are betting that R&D might accelerate that process, but in
a real sense it’s already too late.
new construction can’t be counted on, and the window for adding new
So if

nuclear to the fleet has already shut, what about the reactors we currently have? Has their
environmental potential gotten short shrift?