Prolif Stuff Copy

Arizona Debate Institute 2009 1Frappier/Russell/Stables Lab Prolif Core

Prolif Core

***PROLIF BAD***

Prolif Not Inevitable...................................................................................................................................................2

Prolif Bad – Prolif is Fast (1/2)...................................................................................................................................3

Prolif Bad – **Utgoff** (1/2).....................................................................................................................................5Prolif Bad – Accidents................................................................................................................................................7Prolif Bad – Causes Nuke War (1/2)..........................................................................................................................8Prolif Bad – Causes Conventional War....................................................................................................................10Prolif Bad – Causes Miscalc.....................................................................................................................................11Prolif Bad – Deterrence Fails (Generic)...................................................................................................................12Prolif Bad – Kills Heg...............................................................................................................................................13Prolif Bad – No Civilian Control..............................................................................................................................14Prolif Bad – No 2nd Strike Capability........................................................................................................................15Prolif Bad – Nuclear Escalation................................................................................................................................16Prolif Bad – Nuclear Winter.....................................................................................................................................17Prolif Bad – Preemptive Strikes................................................................................................................................18Prolif Bad – Rogue States.........................................................................................................................................19Prolif Bad – Terrorist Acquisition............................................................................................................................20Prolif Bad – A2: Deterrence Empirically Successful...............................................................................................21Prolif Bad – A2: Rationality Checks........................................................................................................................22

***PROLIF GOOD***

Prolif Inevitable........................................................................................................................................................23

Prolif Good – Prolif is Slow (1/2).............................................................................................................................24

Prolif Good – Prevents Wars (1/2)............................................................................................................................26Prolif Good – Prevents Miscalc................................................................................................................................28Prolif Good – Solves Entanglement/Escalation........................................................................................................29Prolif Good – Conventional > Nuclear War (1/3)....................................................................................................30Prolif Good – Solves Poverty...................................................................................................................................33Prolif Good – Poverty > Nuke War..........................................................................................................................34Prolif Good – A2: Accidents.....................................................................................................................................35Prolif Good – A2: Anonymous Attack.....................................................................................................................36Prolif Good – A2: Asymmetry..................................................................................................................................37Prolif Good – A2: Civil Wars...................................................................................................................................38Prolif Good – A2: Hair Trigger Alert.......................................................................................................................39Prolif Good – A2: Military Control is Unstable.......................................................................................................40Prolif Good – A2: No 2nd Strike Capabilities............................................................................................................41Prolif Good – A2: Nuke Blackmail Undermines Heg..............................................................................................42Prolif Good – A2: Preemptive Strikes......................................................................................................................43Prolif Good – A2: Proximity.....................................................................................................................................44Prolif Good – A2: Rogue/Failed States....................................................................................................................45Prolif Good – A2: Terrorists (1/3)............................................................................................................................46Prolif Good – A2: Unstable Rivalries.......................................................................................................................49

***PROLIF BAD***


***PROLIF BAD***

Prolif Not Inevitable

Prolif is not inevitable – history proves when the U.S. gets its house in order, others follow

GII accessed 9 [Global Interdependence Initiative, http://www.gii-exchange.org/guide/terrorism/13E.shtml, Acc. Jul 31, 2009]cn

"...History shows that we can get results when we work with other nations to enforce and, when necessary,

strengthen the international laws and standards that discourage the spread of deadly weapons. For

example, international agreements have succeeded in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to a handful of nations, and these agreements have encouraged several nations -- like Brazil and South Africa -- to give up their plans for developing such weapons. International cooperation on chemical weapons has led to the destruction of millions of tons of chemical agents. Thanks to another cooperative agreement, the U.S. is helping Russia do a better job of monitoring and securing its nuclear weapons and materials; this joint program has also provided 40,000 weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union with funding for peaceful research, so they don't have to go looking for work in places like North

Korea and Iran. There's much more to do, and in some areas we're moving too slowly. But we can build on these successes to tackle today's weapons challenges, if we muster the political will to do so..." "...Many nations share our concern about the spread of deadly weapons, and history shows that we can get results when we work together to develop shared rules and enforcement mechanisms for dealing with this threat. Those rules and mechanisms can and should be strengthened, and the U.S. should play an important role in this process. But that's not all we can do. We should also support impartial international institutions, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, that go where individual nations can't go and exert pressure on behalf of the entire global community. Getting serious about prevention is critical too. We should play an active role in international diplomatic efforts to help resolve regional conflicts -- like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- that escalate tensions and create incentives for neighboring countries to develop deadly weapons. And we should increase our investment in proven, cooperative programs to help other countries do a better job of guarding their stockpiles of weapons and materials -- so terrorists aren't able to acquire or steal them. It's hard, expensive work, but when we use the full array of tools at our disposal, and share the burden with other nations, the odds are on our side. We can do it..." "...For just 1 percent of the current defense budget, we could secure all the nuclear bomb material in the world, taking it off the black market for good. Getting more serious about measures to prevent proliferation

would be a smart investment in our own security..." "...Proliferation isn't just about "them" -- it's also about us. We can set a good example by significantly reducing the role of nuclear weapons in our own security policies. That would reduce the attractiveness and acceptability of these weapons in the eyes of other nations..."

Prolif isn’t inevitable – countries don’t need them, and persuasion to not prolif has been successful in the past

Roberts 9 [Brad, Ph.D., Institute for Defense Analyses, “Challenges to Military Operations in Support of U.S. Interests, Online, Acc. Jul 31, 2009]cn

Proliferation is not inevitable. Many states have had nuclear weapons ambitions but few have gone the distance. Historical peak of nuclear weapon seekers: 20. Ratio of nonproliferation wins to losses in 1960s was 18 to 5. Ratio

over last 20 years is 4 to 2: South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine versus Pakistan and North Korea. Many states have accepted latency as an adequate substitute for actual weapons. Proliferation pressures erupt in waves. Drivers: both

primary and secondary. Usually the primary drivers are localized within regions but sometimes secondary drivers are external. Nonproliferation successes include both rollback and the inhibition of “roll forward” by those with latent capabilities.

http://www.gii-exchange.org/guide/terrorism/13E.shtml


Prolif Bad – Prolif is Fast (1/2)

Proliferation will be fast and unstable, cracking multilateral coping mechanisms

Roberts 99 [Brad, member of the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses, "Viewpoint: Proliferation And Nonproliferation In The 1990s," The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/voI06/64/robert64.pdf, accessed 9/2/02]cn

But the standard answers don't really take us very far into this problem any more. To grasp the full stake requires a broader notion of stability-and an appreciation ofthe particular historical moment in which we find ourselves. It is an accident of history that the diffusion of dual-use capabilities is

coterminous with the end of the Cold War. That diffusion means that we are moving irreversibly into an international system in which the wildfire-like spread of weapons is a real possibility. The end of the Cold War has brought with it great

volatility in the relations of major and minor powers in the international system. What then is at stake? In response to some catalytic event, entire regions could rapidly cross the threshold from latent to extant weapons capability, and from covert to overt postures, a process that would be highly competitive and.iliky, and which likely would spill over wherever the divides among regions are not tidy. This would sorely test Ken Waltz's familiar old heresy that "more may be

better"-indeed, even Waltz assumed proliferation would be stabilizing only if it is gradual, and warned against the rapid spread of

weapons to multiple states. At the very least, this would fuel NBC terrorism, as a general proliferation ofNBC weapomy would likely erode the constraints that heretofore have inhibited states from sponsoring terrorist use of these capabilities. Given its global stature and media

culture, America would be a likely target of some of these terrorist actions. What kind of catalytic event might cause such wildfire- like proliferation? The possibilities are not numerous and thus we should not be too pessimistic, although history usually surprises. One catalyst could be a major civil war in a large country in which NBC weapons are used. Another catalyst might be a crisis in which NBC weapons are used to call into question the credibility ofUS security guarantees. Such a crisis would have farreaching consequences, both within and beyond any particular region. If the threat ofthe use of such weapons is sufficient to dissuade the United States from reversing an act of aggression, or if their use is successful in defeating a US military operation, there would be hell to pay. How, for example, would Japan respond to a US decision not to seek to reverse NBC-backed aggression

on the Korean peninsula? How might NATO partners respond to a collapse of US credibility in East Asia? This stake isn't just America's stake. Any country whose security depends to some extent on a regional or global order guaranteed by Washington has a stake in preventing such wildfire-like proliferation. This is truest of America's closest security partners, but it is true of the many small and medium-sized states that depend, to some degree, on collective mechanisms for their security. It seems

reasonable to expect that many of these states would respond to a loss of US credibility and to the fear of greater regional instability by moving up the latency curve. If they were also to cross the threshold to weapons production, the international system would have a hard time coping. It seems likely that such proliferation would cause the collapse of nonproliferation and arms control mechanisms. This, in turn, would

precipitate a broader crisis of confidence in the other institutions of multilateral political and economic activity that

depend on some modicum of global stability and cooperation to function. The consequences could be very far-reaching. These international mechanisms and institutions have been a primary means of giving order to an anarchic international system.

Proliferation snowballs into unsafe fast proliferation

Wilcock 97 [Luke, "Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Efficacy of Deterrence," Interstate Online, Issue 50, Spring, http://users.aber.ac.uk/scty34/50/prolif.htm, accessed 8/3/02]cn

Coupled to the above is the prospect of a reduction in the freedom of action of the major powers, mainly the United States and Russia, and tied up with this

is the question of how the deterrence relationship will develop between small and major nuclear powers. (fint11) The worry of proliferation pessimists is that additional nuclear states will increase the risks major powers will have to face in their efforts to intervene in and defuse conflict situations. The heightened probability that nuclear weapons will be present and of the potential for escalation to the nuclear level which will therefore exist, will, it is thought, significantly increase the costs of such intervention and hence be a deterrent to this. Furthermore, fearing a proliferated world, it is argued that non-nuclear

states concerned for their security, especially as the deterrent umbrella provided by the United States and Russia recedes, will become locked into a global nuclear arms race where the urgency to acquire nuclear weapons takes precedent over safety.


Prolif Bad – Prolif is Fast (2/2)

States build more weapons than they need - proliferation isn't purely tied to security

Mahaffey 2k [Marianne, "Theories on the Spread of Nuclear Weapons," March 1,2000, http://www.stanford.edu/~ahm/class/2000-Q1-Win/PS243B-IS/Review%20Essays/09-Sagan&Waltz(MM).doc, accessed 8/4/02]cn

Theories of domestic politics can be invoked to think about proliferation as a consequence of factors other than national security. First, Waltz argues that we should not fear small states' ownership of nuclear weapons, as their arsenals will not

be extensive, and therefore easy to handle safely. Not many weapons are needed to deter even large powers. But proliferation has not been parallel to need up to this point. States often build more nuclear weapons than they need. Sagan, in a later

article "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?" finds possible domestic reasons for choices made regarding nuclear weapons. The weapons are used as tools by state actors to serve interests other than those of national security. "International threats are seen as being more malleable and more subject to interpretation, and can therefore produce a variety of responses from domestic actors. Security threats are therefore not the central

cause of weapons decisions according to this model: they are merely windows of opportunity through which parochial interests can jump" If states are acquiring nuclear weapons or increasing their arsenals for domestic reasons rather than balance of power reasons, the number of weapons will not reflect the needs of the state.

Prolif snowballs

Payne 96 [Keith, adjunct professor at Georgetown and president of the National Institute for Public Policy, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age, p. 21-22]cn

Two points are suggested by this discussion. First, of course, is that proliferation is beginning to pose a real threat to u.S. allies and overseas interests.

Second, proliferation can be self-propelled, as proliferation by one regional power serves as the catalyst for further proliferation in that region-the pressure on Japan from North Korean proliferation demonstrating the point. Consequently, the view noted above by Kabun Muto concerning Japanese armament, despite the furor it stirred, should not come as a surprise. Japan is a country with a high population density, and a small number of North Korean missiles and WMD could place much of the Japanese population and industry at risk.


Prolif Bad – **Utgoff** (1/2)

Prolif will escalate and ensure deterrence breaks down – the impact is preemptive nuclear wars around the globe

Utgoff 2 [Victor, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, "Proliferation, Missile Defense, and American Ambitions," Survival, Summer, p. 87-90]cn

Further, the large number of states that became capable of building nuclear weapons over the years, but chose not to, can be reasonably well explained by the fact that most were formally allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Both these superpowers had strong nuclear forces and put great pressure on their allies not to build nuclear weapons. Since the Cold War, the US has retained all its allies. In addition, NATO has extended its protection to some of the previous allies of the Soviet Union and plans on taking in more. Nuclear proliferation by India and Pakistan, and proliferation programmes by North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all involve states in the opposite situation: all judged that they faced serious military opposition and had little prospect of establishing a reliable supporting alliance with a suitably strong, nucleararmed state. What would await the world if strong protectors, especially the United

States, were [was] no longer seen as willing to protect states from nuclear-backed aggression? At least a few additional states would begin to build their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to distant targets, and these initiatives would spur increasing numbers of the world’s capable states to follow suit. Restraint would seem ever

less necessary and ever more dangerous. Meanwhile, more states are becoming capable of building nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Many,

perhaps most, of the world’s states are becoming sufficiently wealthy, and the technology for building nuclear forces continues to

improve and spread. Finally, it seems highly likely that at some point, halting proliferation will come to be seen as a lost cause and the

restraints on it will disappear. Once that happens, the transition to a highly proliferated world would probably be very rapid. While some regions might be able to hold the line for a time, the threats posed by wildfire proliferation in most other

areas could create pressures that would finally overcome all restraint. Many readers are probably willing to accept that nuclear proliferation is such a grave threat to world peace that every effort should be made to avoid it. However, every effort has not been made in the past, and we are talking about much more substantial efforts now. For new and substantially more burdensome efforts to be made to slow or stop nuclear proliferation, it needs to be established that the highly proliferated nuclear world that would sooner or later evolve without such efforts is not going to be acceptable. And,

for many reasons, it is not. First, the dynamics of getting to a highly proliferated world could be very dangerous.

Proliferating states will feel great pressures to obtain nuclear weapons and delivery systems before any potential opponent does. Those who succeed in outracing an opponent may consider preemptive nuclear war before the opponent becomes capable of nuclear retaliation. Those who lag behind might try to preempt their opponent’s nuclear programme or defeat the opponent using conventional forces. And those who feel threatened but are incapable of building nuclear weapons may still be able to join in this arms race by building other types of weapons of mass

destruction, such as biological weapons. Second, as the world approaches complete proliferation, the hazards posed by nuclear weapons today will be magnified many times over. Fifty or more nations capable of launching nuclear weapons means that the risk of nuclear accidents that could cause

serious damage not only to their own populations and environments, but those of others, is hugely increased. The chances of such weapons failing into the hands of renegade military units or terrorists is far greater, as is the number of nations carrying out

hazardous manufacturing and storage activities. Worse still, in a highly proliferated world there would be more frequent opportunities for the use of nuclear weapons. And more frequent opportunities means shorter expected times between conflicts in which nuclear weapons get used, unless the probability of use at any opportunity is actually zero. To be sure,

some theorists on nuclear deterrence appear to think that in any confrontation between two states known to have reliable nuclear capabilities, the

probability of nuclear weapons being used is zero.’ These theorists think that such states will be so fearful of escalation to nuclear war that they would always avoid or terminate confrontations between them, short of even conventional war. They

believe this to be true even if the two states have different cultures or leaders with very eccentric personalities. History and human nature, however, suggest that they are almost surely wrong. History includes instances in which states ‘known to possess nuclear weapons did engage in direct conventional conflict. China and Russia fought battles along their common border even after both had nuclear weapons. Moreover, logic suggests that if states with nuclear weapons always avoided conflict with one another, surely states without nuclear weapons would avoid conflict with states that had them. Again, history provides counter-

examples Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 even though it saw Israel as a nuclear power at the time. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and fought Britain’s efforts to take them back, even though Britain had nuclear weapons. Those who claim that two states with reliable nuclear capabilities to devastate each other will not engage in conventional conflict risking nuclear war also assume that

any leader from any culture would not choose suicide for his nation. But history provides unhappy examples of states whose leaders were ready to choose suicide for themselves and their fellow citizens. Hitler tried to impose a ‘victory or destruction’’ policy on his people as Nazi Germany was going down to defeat. And Japan’s war minister, during debates on how to respond to the American atomic bombing, suggested ‘Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”

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Prolif Bad – **Utgoff** (2/2)

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If leaders are willing to engage in conflict with nuclear-armed nations, use of nuclear weapons in any particular instance may not be likely, but its probability would still be dangerously significant. In particular, human nature suggests that the threat of retaliation with nuclear weapons is not a reliable guarantee against a disastrous first use of these weapons. While national leaders and their advisors everywhere are usually talented and experienced people, even their most important decisions cannot be counted on to be the product of well-informed and thorough assessments of all options from all relevant points of view. This is especially so when the stakes are so large as to defy assessment and there are substantial pressures to act quickly, as could be

expected in intense and fast-moving crises between nuclear-armed states. Instead, like other human beings, national leaders can be seduced by wishful thinking. They can misinterpret the words or actions of opposing leaders. Their

advisors may produce answers that they think the leader wants to hear, or coalesce around what they know is an inferior decision because the group urgently needs the confidence or the sharing of responsibility that results from settling on something. Moreover, leaders may not recognize clearly where their personal or party interests diverge from those of their citizens. Under great stress, human beings can lose their ability to think carefully. They can refuse to believe that the worst could really happen, oversimplify the problem at hand, think in terms of simplistic analogies and play hunches. The intuitive rules for how individuals should respond to insults or signs of weakness in an opponent may too readily suggest a rash course of

action. Anger, fear, greed, ambition and pride can all lead to bad decisions. The desire for a decisive solution to the problem at hand may lead to an unnecessarily extreme course of action. We can almost hear the kinds of words that could flow from discussions in nuclear crises or war. ‘These people are not willing to die for this interest’. ‘No sane person would actually use

such weapons’. ‘Perhaps the opponent will back down if we show him we mean business by demonstrating a willingness to use nuclear weapons’. ‘If I don’t hit them back really hard, I am going to be driven from office, if not killed’. Whether right or wrong, in the stressful atmosphere of a nuclear crisis or war, such words from others, or silently from within, might resonate too readily with a harried leader. Thus, both

history and human nature suggest that nuclear deterrence can be expected to fail from time to time, and we are fortunate it has not happened yet. But the threat of nuclear war is not just a matter of a few weapons being used. It could get much worse. Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressures to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.’ Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other’s cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to

air strikes and armoured attacks on the other. Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants before hand. Intense and blinding anger is a common response to fear or

humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial

probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not

all, nations wearing nuclear ‘six-shooters’ on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every

once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations. This kind of world is in no nation’s interest. The means for preventing it must be pursued vigorously. And, as argued above, a most powerful way to prevent it or slow its emergence is to encourage the more capable states to provide reliable protection to others against aggression, even when that aggression could be backed with nuclear weapons. In other words, the world needs at least one state, preferably several, willing and able to play the role of sheriff, or to be members of a sheriff’s posse, even in the face of nuclear threats.


Prolif Bad – Accidents

Proliferation increases the risk of inadvertent escalation

McGwire 94 [Michael, Faculty of Social and Political Science at Cambridge, "Is There a Future for Nuclear Weapons?" International Affairs, 70, 2, p. 224-225]cn

Advocates of an LSN world claim that nuclear war would be prevented by the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction. This assumes that war is

always the outcome of rational decision-making and ignores the possibility of accidental or inadvertent war. Recent analysis of the command, control and communications (C3) systems ofUS and Soviet strategic forces during the Cold War argues that a significant probability of procedural and systems malfunctions (and hence mistaken activation of strike plans) was inherent in both systems. Inadvertent war can come about through misunderstanding and/or the momentum of events. The Cuban missile crisis is a classic example of this process, but access to the archives is revealing other incipient cases, the misreading of a

NATO exercise in November 1983 being a good example. So far our luck has held, but it will be severely tested as_we move from a bipolar to a multipolar game, where the new players' nuclear C3 will be more prone to system errors, and each player's understanding of the others' thought processes will be even more rudimentary. And can we assume that the other players will all be as cautious as the Soviet Union, which

saw the primary threat as inadvertent war, a danger that could be avoided but not prevented? Or are they more likely to emulate the United States, which believed that war could be prevented by the threat of escalation, and was prepared to up

the ante in a crisis? The existence of two or more such players would sharply increase the future probability of inadvertent and accidental war.

Proliferation increases the risk of nuclear mishaps

Freedman 95 [Lawrence, Professor of War Studies at King's College, "Great Powers, Vital Interests and Nuclear Weapons," Survival, v36 n4, Winter, p. 37]cn

As nuclear arsenals spread, despite the non-proliferation regime, more parts of the world move beyond the effective influence of the former great powers, while, at the same time, the possibility of some dreadful nuclear mishap or deliberate employment increases. Given the uncertain distribution of the effects of any nuclear detonations, this prospect should encourage a broad view of vital interests. It argues not only for efforts to support the nonproliferation regime, but also, and as important, that the great powers should get involved before areas of conflict begin to acquire a nuclear dimension.


Prolif Bad – Causes Nuke War (1/2)

Nuclear prolif is too dangerous – it leads to multiple scenarios for nuclear war

Totten 94 [Samuel, Associate Professor, College of Education, University of Arkansas, 1994, The Widening Circle of Genocide, p. 289]cn

There are numerous dangers inherent in the spread of nuclear weapons, including but not limited to the

following: the possibility that a nation threatened by destruction in a conventional war may resort to the use of its

nuclear weapons; the miscalculation of a threat of an attack and the subsequent use of nuclear weapons in order to stave off the suspected attack; a nuclear weapons accident due to carelessness or flawed technology (e.g., the

accidental launching of a nuclear weapon); the use of such weapons by an unstable leader; the use of such weapons by renegade military personnel during a period of instability (personal, national or international); and, the theft (and/or development) and use of such weapons by terrorists. While it is unlikely (though not impossible) that terrorists would be able to design their own weapons, it is

possible that they could do so with the assistance of a renegade government.

Prolif causes war – it destroys good relations, prompts first strikes, and military doctrine ensures use

Quester 2k [George, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, "The Unavoidable Importance ofNuclear Weapons," Alternative Nuclear Futures, ed. Baylis and O'Neil, p. 33]cn

The outside world, and the countries directly within a region, will have to be very nervous about the transition periods where countries are coming into the possession of such weapons, and can deploy only rudimentary delivery systems, thus tempting an adversary to strike first in a preventive war. If the impact of nuclear proliferation on the likelihood of war might thus be mixed, the impact on the destructiveness of war will most probably be horrendous, as millions are killed in short bursts of warfare, rather than thousands. The spread of nuclear weapons to any large number of separate countries increases the chances of their coming into use, simply because they are embedded in the military forces that are committed to conflict. and come to be treated as 'just another weapon but with potential1y horrible results where the

targets are the cities of south Asia or the Middle East. And yet another possibility, of course, is that a relatively irrational or actually crazy ruler would come into command of one of these arsenals, someone indifferent to the nuclear or other

retaliation that his country would suffer, someone thus capriciously launching a local nuclear holocaust. Turning to the

burdens in peacetime of being prepared for war, the spread of nuclear weapons can also poison the political relations in pairs of countries. Consider the normal relations of Brazil and Argentina today, as compared with what those relations might have become if each had acquired a nuclear arsenal, amid all the calculations and discussions of what each could do to the other's cities.


Prolif Bad – Causes Nuke War (2/2)

No theory can be perfect - the risks of proliferation make failure too dangerous to risk

Betts 2k [Richard, Professor and the Director ofthe Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, "Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. 65-66]cn

High-quality theory is not necessarily a direct guide to good policy. In the scientifically rickety world of social science,

any theory that predicts, say, 90 percent of outcomes on some important matter is an amazingly good theory. The Waltz argument may be in that category. In the overwhelming majority of cases, new nuclear states may be more cautious and remain deterred by each other. In the world of policy on the other hand, people do not marvel at all the cases where nuclear weapons will make the world safer, but

worry about the exceptions where things will go wrong. Those wrapped up in policy also take more seriously the prospects for nonrational or accidental action associated with complex organizations, problems that Sagan poses as the main grounds for greater pessimism than Waltz derives from looking at the broader logic of the international balance of power. Nuclear weapons

stabilize In most cases, the logic of deterrence theory that became the bedrock of U.S. strategic thought in the course of the nuclear era suggests that the acquisition of nuclear weapons should have a stabilizing effect-that is, they should make it hard to change the status quo by force. Those who have a powerful deterrent will be less coercible or conquerable. It is less clear whether they will coerce non-nuclear neighbors. "Rogue" states that start brandishing nuclear threats risk bringing down an international consensus-and more significantly U.S. power and countercoercion-on themselves. On the other hand, they may sometimes find that nuclear capability makes the outside powers more

amenable to negotiation than they might otherwise be (as in the case ofNorth Korea's diplomatic coup with the United States). If nuclear spread enhances stability, this is not entirely good news for the United States, since it has been accustomed to attacking small countries with impunity when it felt justified and provoked. The United States is not accustomed to being deterred by anyone but the Russians or Chinese. This is not the main reason, however, that the Waltz argument fails to

command enthusiasm. The main reason is the worry that real statesmen may not always have the courage of Waltz' convictions, that one exception to the rule may be too many, and that the ramifications of the first breakage of the half-century taboo on nuclear use are too unpredictable to tempt us to run the experiment. If the probability that nothing will go seriously wrong in any one case of proliferation lli a reassuring 90 percent, the odds that nothing will go seriously wrong in any of them decline steadily as the number of cases grows. In short,

when it comes to nuclear weapons, "very" stable in "almost all" cases is great for purposes of theoretical clarification, but not good enough for purposes of policy prescription.


Prolif Bad – Causes Conventional War

Nuclear weapons catalyze conventional war

Abraham 99 [Itty, "Nuclear Power and Human Security," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, v31 n2]cn

But "successful" nuclear deterrence does not make conventional warfare less likely. If anything, the

historical record shows that the nuclear powers, successfully deterred from dropping missiles on each other, fought each other through a variety of surrogates in Africa, Latin America and Asia, for nearly haIfa centurv. The

price for the cold war was paid with the lives of black, brown, and yellow people-not a sign of success if you lived anywhere other than in the United States or the Soviet Union. For India and Pakistan, there is nowhere else to go, or, having nuclear weapons on both sides says nothing about the likelihood of peace breaking out. Rather, the presence of nuclear weapons may make policy-makers more sanguine about resorting to conventional and

unconventional forms of warfare. The moral sanction of not using nuclear weapons because of their destructive power is easily trumped by the peculiar form of "rationality" that becomes the norm for strategic discourse once nuclear are in place. As nuclear war fighting plans are drawn up, policy-makers are "rationally" led to make calculations on the basis of the threat potential of relative destruction. Does a destroyed Karachi equate to a destroyed Bombay, or should New Delhi be added in order to make the

relative loss to each country the same, they ask each other. Are nine million Indian dead the same as one million Pakistani dead, given the population differentials of each country? That even asking questions like this betrays a fundamentally immoral condition is soon forgotten once the rational game played by theorists and strategic thinkers takes over.

Nuclear weapons increase the chance for conventional war

Lavoy 95 [Peter, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Security Studies, Summer, 1995, p. 737]cn

Some observers fear that nuclear weapons make the use of conventional military force more probable. Early in his

career, Waltz himself suggested that a "mutual fear of big weapons may produce, instead of peace,.!! spate of smaller wars." There are at least two possible paths to conventional war in the nuclear world. First, states armed with nuclear weapons might bully or attack their non-nuclear neighbors and then use their nuclear arsenals to intimidate foreign powers from intervening. Second, in a situation in which two states possess nuclear weapons, if one country is confident in its ability to manipulate the risk of nuclear war and control the pace of military escalation, it might attempt to use military force against the other state in an effort to alter the territorial or political status quo.

Nuclear weapons inspire conventional escalation which may spill over to nuclear use

Miller 93 [Steven, Director of Studies at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, "The Case Against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent," Foreign Affairs, June/July]cn

IT IS RARELY ARGUED that nuclear weapons will magically solve the problem of conflict in its entirety. While all-out or high-stakes wars may become too dangerous to fight, there is still room for less challenges at lower levels of conflict. If the nuclear balance is believed to be highly stable, then decision-makers may calculate that they can fight even substantial conventional wars with little risk of escalation, since all parties

possess enormous incentives not to use nuclear weapons. In addition, nuclear deterrent threats will not be equally effective in all circumstances; deterrence will not work well when dealing with ambiguous borders or disputed territories -- a point that may be highly relevant to Russian-Ukrainian relations. But conventional conflicts in a nuclear environment raises the risk not only of intentional nuclear escalation, which leaders will have incentives to avoid, but

also of inadvertent nuclear escalation, which leaders may not be able to avoid even if they want. A conventional war could jeopardize nuclear deterrent capabilities directly or degrade other important capabilities, such as warning systems, thus

increasing the possibility of successful nuclear preemption. The most extensive analysis of this question concludes that the problem of inadvertent escalation will "loom especially large for small and medium-sized nuclear powers, since they will have the most difficult time building nuclear forces that can survive."


Prolif Bad – Causes Miscalc

Nuclear weapons force aggression into covert channels, increasing miscalculation

Betts 2k [Richard, Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, "Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. 66-67]cn

The notion that widespread nuclear capability would inhibit aggression by creating a world of porcupines or a "unit veto

system" of omnilateral deterrence is an old one. The suppression of military interventionism, however, could simply channel impulses to meddle into covert political action or other less direct methods. These in turn

could increase diplomatic tension and the chances of miscalculation, especially since many of the political systems of the potential proliferators are likely to be weak, permeable, and praetorian, unlike the stable institutionalized

governments of the developed world. Internal political weakness and externally deployable military strength (via

WMD) are a volatile combination. It was reckless enough for the Argentine junta in 1982 to divert public attention from internal economic problems by grabbing the Falkland (or Malvinas) Islands-one of only two cases of a non-nuclear state initiating combat against a nuclear power (the other being Egypt and Syria against Israel in 1973).

*Proliferation increases complexity making miscalculation more likely

Wilcock 97 [Luke, "Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Efficacy of Deterrence," Interstate Online, Issue 50, Spring, http://users.aber.ac.uk/scty34/50/prolif.htm, accessed 8/3/02]cn

Evidently the regional consequences of nuclear proliferation raise some important questions, but what are the wider implications of nuclear weapons proliferation? How will emergent nuclear states affect stability on an international

scale? For Stanley Hoffmann, "a world of many nuclear states would raise extremely difficult issues of management." The crucial factor is perceived to be the resultant increase in difficulty in decision making, that more nuclear powers will complicate calculations and that mis-perceptions will become more dangerous and more likely as a consequence. It is argued that the relatively clear-cut bipolarity which characterised the Cold War would diminish and that "uncertainties will tempt

instead of deter. " Having got used to a stable nuclear world, states may start to take the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons for granted and in so doing become more and more daring in their foreign policy aims. (ftntlO) Nuclear weapons possession might create ambitions, ambitions which are likely to be conflictual.


Prolif Bad – Deterrence Fails (Generic)

Proliferation puts arms control in the hands of the undeterrable

DeNardo 95 [James, The Amateur Strategist]cnProliferation in successor states would put nuclear weapons in the hands of inexperienced and possibly unstable governments, which are likely to be populated by people new to the problem of security policy. It is worth questioning whether the canons of strategic stability as they evolved over 45 years of U.S.-Soviet standoff are so universal as to be pertinent to the nuclear relationship between the successor states ofthe Soviet Union and other nuclear powers around the world. (p. 31) [K. M. Campbell, A. B. Carter, S. E. Miller, C. A. Zraket, Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union, Harvard University, John F Kennedy School of Government: CSIA

Studies in International Security, No.1, November 1991 The dark side of nuclear democracy, it seems, is the ascendancy of amateur strategists - people who are innocent about the subtleties of deterrent stability, and who we fear will be incompetent. irrational. impetuous, or worse stilI, "undeterrable. "

Deterrence fails - counterforce strategies and multilateral threats inhibit stability

Wirtz 98 [James, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Post-graduate School, "Beyond Bipolarity: Prospects for Nuclear Stability After the Cold War," The Absolute Weapon Revisited, ed. Paul, Harknett, and Wirtz, p. 153]cn

The logic ofMAD might not govern strategic relationships in the future. Counterforce strategies, nonsurvivable delivery systems, waning robustness of arsenals, and the potential for "windows of vulnerability" would reduce the prospects for arms-race and crisis stability, at least until second-strike capabilities

emerge between any potential combination of nuclear-armed antagonists. Additionally, bipolarity, or the more idiosyncratic sources of Cold War stability, will not exist to reduce the instability created by the absence ofMAD. An extremely dynamic nuclear balance, possibly produced by the politics of nuclear alliances, will stand in stark contrast to the slow and relatively predictable pace of change in the superpowers' Cold War arsenals. And even an overwhelming nuclear advantage appears incapable of deterring millenarian states; perceptions of the intensity of leaders' motivations for engaging in war, and the actual strength of those motivations, would have a greater impact on stability in deterrence situations not characterized by MAD.

When combined, these developments indicate that future nuclear relations could be governed by the logic of conventional deterrence.

Nuclear optimists overestimate the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons

Betts 2k [Richard, Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, "Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. 73]cn

There are two main rebuttals, and they are convincing. First, the fact of a half-century of nuclear peace between the superpowers leads the optimists to assume that what was, had to be, and to overestimate how intrinsically safe the confrontation was. Although U.S. and Soviet leaders meant to be cautious, there were numerous accidents that raised the risk of inadvertent escalation. Moreover, the tendency of military elites to consider preventive war as a solution more readily than civilian politicians do manifested itself even in the United

States; in newly nuclear countries with military governments, these tendencies would not be as reliably constrained as they have been.


Prolif Bad – Kills Heg

Prolif causes war and kills US credibility

Welch 2k [General Larry, USAF (retired), Foreword, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. vii-viii]cn

Some hope that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will ultimately lead potential aggressors to conclude that war has become too dangerous.

But centuries of history, including the past five decades, lead most observers of the international scene to be deeply skeptical that a more proliferated world would be more peaceful. It seems more likely that highly destructive wars would increase as the number of actors armed with these weapons rises. Thus, efforts to limit or roll back proliferation remain a national priority There is reason for some optimism about the outcome of such efforts. Looking back, international nonproliferation efforts, coupled with the selfrestraint exercised by many nations, have been surprisingly effective. Predictions made decades ago of the number of states that would have weapons of mass destruction by 2000 have proven pessimistic. While the large majority of the world's states are now capable of building weapons of mass destruction, only a minority appear to have done so, or to be purposely moving toward such weapons. Many factors are involved in explaining this divergence between capabilities to build such weapons and the choice to do so. Among the most important is the belief that the major states will continue to play their post-World War II role of keeping sovereign states from conquering or destroying one another. But

proliferation raises the risk involved in intervention, and the end of the global contest for power with the former Soviet Union causes some to believe that the outcomes of regional wars are less important to the United States. This combination could undermine confidence in the capability and the will of the United

States to continue to play the key stabilizing role the world has come to expect of it.

Proliferation undermines hegemony and international stability

Freedman 95 [Lawrence, Professor of War Studies at King's College, "Great Powers, Vital Interests and Nuclear Weapons," Survival, v36 n4, Winter, p. 37]cn

The situation, however, is more complicated and more paradoxical than this suggests. Rather than reinforce power politics as usual, nuclear weapons in fact confirm a tendency towards the fragmentation of the international system in which the erstwhile great powers playa reduced role. While their credibility in extremis may be as dubious as

ever, nuclear guarantees show a remarkable resilience within an established alliance framework. Outside such a framework, however, they have at most a fleeting half-life, especially at a time when the nuclear powers are taking care to limit their general liabilities when addressing the security concerns of others. Nuclear powers are reluctant to transfer nuclear capabilities to vulnerable states to enable them to help themselves, although they have no difficulties in justifying conventional arms transfers on this basis.


Prolif Bad – No Civilian Control

Proliferants will not have stable civil/military relationsCimbala 2 [Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State, and James Scouras, Principal Scientist at DynCorp National Security Programs, A New Nuclear Century, p. 133]cn

The question is whether the regime can impose either assertive or delegative military control over its armed forces, and, if it does, the consequences for its

crisis management and normal nuclear operations. Assertive control implies a great deal of civilian intervention in military operations and management, delegative control, more willingness to let the military have their own way on operational and organizational issues. Strict rules about nuclear custody are an example of assertive control; for example, in the early years of the nuclear age, atomic weapons were withheld from the military under normal conditions. An example of delegative control is the understanding among U.S. Cold War policymakers that, in the event of a nuclear attack disabling the president and/or the civilian chain of command, the U.S. deterrent would not be paralyzed.

Military commanders could, under carefully defined and admittedly drastic conditions, launch in response to unambiguous indications of attack. Organizational process factors and other decision-making attributes of states with small, new nuclear arsenals may push their militaries toward doctrines that favor nuclear preemption. First-strike vulnerable forces may invite attack on themselves. Newly acquired nuclear arsenals may not be "fail safe" against accidental launch or military usurpation of civil command prerogative. Among nuclear aspirants in 1998, several states, including North Korea, Iran, Iraq (temporarily thwarted by UN inspections), and Libya, the distinction between "civil" and "military" was as opaque to many outside observers as it was to some of their own poorly informed citizens. In Pakistan, a declared nuclear power since May 1998, the military has run the nuclear weapons development program from the time of its inception to the present. Neither Indian nor Pakistani nuclear release protocols are clear to outside observers, and

uncertainty marks U.S. understanding of "first use" or "no first use" doctrines in New Delhi and Islamabad. The possibility cannot be excluded that nuclear command authority rests de facto in the hands of brass hats, unaccountable to civil control, in anyone or more of the new nuclear powers or nuclear aspiring states.

Lack of civilian control causes accidental or intentional nuclear launch

Sagan 95 [Scott, The Spread ofNuclear Weapons: A Debate, p. 48-49]cnThere are two central arguments. First, I argue that professional military organizations-because of common biases, inflexible routines, and parochial interests-display organizational behaviors that are likely to lead to deterrence failures and deliberate or accidental war. Unlike the widespread psychological critique of rational deterrence theory-which maintains that some political leaders may lack the intelligence or emotional stability to make deterrence work -this organizational critique argues that

military organizations, unless professionally managed through a checks-and-balances system of strong civilian control' are unlikely to fulfill the operational requirements for stable nuclear deterrence


Prolif Bad – No 2 nd Strike Capability

Resource constraints prevent stable deterrence

Karl 97 [David, Ph.D. International Relations at the University of Southern California, "Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers," International Security, Winter, p. 104]cn

Disputing this assessment, pessimists believe that the important resource constraints faced by developing countries may prevent the emergence of stable deterrence between new nuclear powers. The technological and financial weaknesses of proliferating states would result in small and rudimentary force postures that are vulnerable to firststrike attack and operate under ramshackle safety measures and command and control structures, generating greater pressures on crisis stability and increased opportunities for accidents and unauthorized seizure.

Leaders aren't deterred by small forces

Sagan 95 [Scott, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, p. 123-124]cnWhat matters for stable deterrence, of course, is not what Kenneth Waltz, or Scott Sagan, or any other scholar thinks is a sufficient retaliatory force. What matters is what the decisionmakers of an adversary's state think. Looking at the large arsenals that existed in 1954, Waltz asks, "who would dare to strike forces of that size?" Well, quite a few people. As I noted in Chapter 2, many of the senior leaders of the U.S. military-Curtis LeMay, Orvil Anderson,

Nathan Twining, Thomas Power, Thomas White, Hoyt Vandenberg, and Arthur Radford-advocated striking a preventive blow at the USSR during this period. Even as late as 1961, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could tell President Kennedy that the United States would

"prevail in the event of general nuclear war" with the USSR, even though the Soviet Union had what was then estimated to be an arsenal of approximately five hundred strategic nuclear weapons.


Prolif Bad – Nuclear Escalation

Even limited use can cause extinction - erosion of the firewall guarantees eventual destruction

Kateb 92 [George, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, The Inner Ocean, p. 111-12]cnSchell's work attempts to force on us an acknowledgment that sounds far-fetched and even ludicrous, an acknowledgment that the possibility of extinction is carried by any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited or how seemingly rational or seemingly morally justified. He himself acknowledges that there is a difference between possibility and certainty. But in a matter that is more than a matter, more than

one practical matter in a vast series of practical matters, in the "matter" of extinction, we are obliged to treat a possibility-a

genuine possibility- as a certainty. Humanity is not to take any step that contains even the slightest risk of extinction. The doctrine of no-use is based on the possibility of extinction. Schell's perspective transforms the subject. He takes us away from the arid stretches of strategy and asks us to feel continuously, if we can, and feel keenly if only for an instant now and then, how utterly distinct the nuclear world is. Nuclear discourse must vividly register that distinctive- ness. It is of no moral account that extinction may be only a slight possibility. No one can say how great the possibility is, but no one has yet credibly denied that by some sequence or other a particular use of nuclear weapons may lead to human and natural extinction. If it is not impossible it must

be treated as certain: the loss signified by extinction nullifies all calculations of probability as it nullifies all calculations of costs and benefits. Abstractly put, the connections between any use of nuclear weapons and human and natural extinction

are several. Most obviously, a sizable exchange of strategic nuclear weapons can, by a chain of events in nature, lead to the earth's uninhabitability, to "nuclear winter," or to Schell's "republic of insects and grass." But the consideration of extinction cannot rest with the possibility of a sizable exchange of strategic weapons. It cannot rest with the imperative that a sizable exchange must not take

place. A so-called tactical or "theater" use, or a so-called limited use, is also prohibited absolutely, because of the possibility of immediate escalation into a sizable exchange or because, even if there were not an immediate escalation, the possibility of extinction would reside in the precedent for future use set by any use whatever in a world in which more than one power possesses nuclear weapons. Add other consequences: the contagious effect on nonnuclear powers who may feel compelled by a mixture of fear and vanity to try to acquire their own nuclear weapons, thus increasing the possibility of use by increasing the number of nuclear powers; and the unleashed emotions of indignation, retribution, and revenge which, if not acted on immediately in the form of escalation, can be counted on to seek expression later. Other than full

strategic uses are not confined, no matter how small the explosive power: each would be a cancerous transformation of the world. All nuclear roads lead to the possibility of extinction. It is true by definition, but let us make it explicit: the doctrine of no-use excludes any first or retaliatory or later use, whether sizable or not. No-use is the imperative derived from the possibility of extinction. By containing the possibility of extinction, any use is tantamount to a declaration of war against humanity. It is not merely a war crime or a single crime against humanity. Such a war is waged by the user of nuclear weapons against every human individual as individual (present and future), not as citizen of this or that country. It is not only a war against the country that is the target. To respond with nuclear weapons, where possible, only

increases the chances of extinction and can never, therefore, be allowed. The use of nuclear weapons establishes the right of any person or group, acting officially or not, violently or not, to try to punish those responsible for the use. The aim of the punishment is to deter later uses and thus to try to reduce the possibility of extinction, if, by chance, the particular use in question did not directly lead to extinction. The form of the punishment cannot be specified. Of course the chaos ensuing from a sizable exchange could make punishment irrelevant. The important point, however, is to see that those who use nuclear weapons are qualitatively worse than criminals, and at the least forfeit their offices.


Prolif Bad – Nuclear Winter

Nuclear war causes nuclear winter, killing all life

Rao 90 [Narashima, Minister of External Affairs, Towards a Nuclear Weapon Free and Non-violent World, p. 4]cn

The nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear weapon powers concentrate an awesome power of destruction. It has recently been established scientifically that the use of even a small proportion of these weapons will suffice to bring about a nuclear winter in which there will be no trace of life on earth. Thus the world has been brought to the very edge of a precipice and the survival of the human race is in real peril, only one pressing of the wrong button or one computer malfunction away. Political leaders, scholars, scientists and strategic experts and activists of the peace movements bring home the fact that such a situation cannot be allowed to continue. The urgent and over-riding need to take decisive steps for bringing about nuclear disarmament now was acknowledged almost universally. That even the leading nuclear weapon powers have begun to realize this truth is symbolized in the signing and ratification of the INF Treaty and the impressive progress made in its implementation.

Nuclear winter kills all life – scientific consensus

Hogan 94 [Michael, The Nuclear Freeze Campaign, p. 52]cnIn the fall of 1983, a group of scientists led by Carl Sagan introduced a new strain of apocalyptic discourse into the freeze debate: the rhetoric of nuclear winter. Simply stated, the theory of nuclear winter held that even a small exchange of nuclear weapons-on the order, perhaps, of 500 of the world's 18,000 nuclear weapons-would throw so much dirt, soot, and smoke into the atmosphere that the earth would be plunged into darkness and subfreezing temperatures, a "winter" lasting long enough to create "a real possibility of the extinction of the human species" Unlike doomsday scenarios that preceded it, the theory of nuclear winter was based upon "extensive scientific studies," and it had been "endorsed by a large number of scientists."


Prolif Bad – Preemptive Strikes

Prolif causes pre-emptive strikes by weaker states

Beckman 2k [Peter, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, et al, The Nuclear Predicament: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century, 3rd edition, p. 6]cn

There are, of course, other reasons to be concerned. If nuclear proliferation continues, there are some potential nuclear states that may not be politically strong and stable enough to ensure control of the weapons and control of the decision to use them. If neighboring, hostile, perhaps politically unstable states, such as India and Pakistan, have them, the temptation to strike against traditional rivals may be too hard to resist. When the weak fear the strong, the weaker party often does what it can to maintain its security. Pakistan has fought three wars with its larger and more powerful neighbor, India. If it feels threatened, it might be tempted in the future to act preemptively. Many fear that states that are radical at home, say a Libya, will recklessly use their nuclear weapons in pursuit of revolutionary ends abroad. In some of the new nuclear states,

civil control of the military may be weak. Nuclear weapons may fall into the hands of military officers more inclined to use them.

Despite uncertainty, military leaders will plan and seriously consider preemptive strikes

Fetter 96 [Steve, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, "Nuclear Deterrence and the 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis," International Security, v21 nl, Summer, p. 179 ]cn

Although no prudent leader should have confidence in the ability of preemptive or counterforce strikes to limit

damage to an "acceptable" level, that does not mean that such attacks will not be planned and seriously considered during a crisis. The fact that U.S. and Soviet planners could not have confidence in the ability of counterforce

strikes to limit damage did not prevent military officials from planning counterforce attacks. As late as 1961, the U.S. military believed that massive preemptive strikes "should permit the United States to prevail in the event of a general nuclear war," even though they

believed that "some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States." Some military leaders went so far as to recommend a preemptive attack, despite the fact that the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities at the time far exceeded those of India or

Pakistan today. Without reliable information on the nuclear doctrines of proliferators, it would be unwise to assume that military officials in these countries will not also plan such attacks and recommend their implementation during a crisis.


Prolif Bad – Rogue States

Prolif leads to rogue acquisition, which neutralizes U.S. heg, allows for dangerous brinksmanship, and increases the risk of nuke war and accidents

Walt 2k [Stephen, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, "Containing Rogues and Renegades: Coalition Strategies and Counterproliferation," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. 192-193]cn

The emergence of rogue states armed with WMD is believed to be especially dangerous for at least four reasons. First, such regimes are believed to be more likely to use these capabilities than other states would be, either because they are ideologically committed to altering the status quo or because they are less sensitive to the human costs that the

use of such weapons might entail. Second, a rogue state armed with WMD might be able to deter other states from intervening against it, thereby facilitating its efforts to coerce or conquer its neighbors. In particular, some U.S. officials

suggest that the threat of retaliation with WMD might deter the United States from using its superior conventional capabilities to counter conventional aggression, thereby placing current U.S. allies in jeopardy According to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, for example, "Today, the United States is the biggest kid on the block when it comes to conventional military forces and it is our potential adversaries who may attain nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons may still be the great equalizer; the problem is the United

States may now be the equalizee." Third, and following from the second point, the emergence of rogue states armed with WMD might make threatened states more reluctant to join alliances against them, for fear of becoming the victim of a highly

destructive attack. Such fears could inhibit U.S. efforts to contain these regimes and could defeat multilateral efforts to moderate their international conduct. For example, Roger Molander and Peter Wilson argue that "a regional predator will find a small nuclear arsenal a powerful tool for collapsing regional military coalitions that the United States might craft to oppose such a future opponent,~' and former Defense Department official Zalmay Khalilzad suggests that rogue states such as Iraq and Iran might use WMD to "deter the United States and its allies from [acting] ... [or to] intimidate the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] states into not inviting U.S. or other Western forces to intervene," thereby facilitating

renewed aggression in the Persian Gulf. Finally, many experts argue that a rogue state's unconventional arsenal would lack adequate safeguards and command-and control devices, thereby increasing the risk of theft, accidents, or unauthorized use. Even if rogue leaders proved more rational than many believe, the danger of inadvertent attacks would grow as more states acquire WMD capabilities.


Prolif Bad – Terrorist Acquisition

Prolif increases the likelihood of terrorist acquisition – nonprolif policy is key to solve

Beckman 2k [Peter, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, et ai, The Nuclear Predicament: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century, 3rd edition, p. 229-230]cn

What precautions should we take against the risk of nuclear terrorism? Here there is a close relationship between the two targets of antiproliferation policy: states, as discussed earlier in the chapter, and terrorist groups. First, stopping states from acquiring nuclear weapons will help stop terrorist groups from acquiring them. As Thomas Schelling notes:

"The best way to keep [nuclear] weapons and weapons-material out of the hands of nongovernmental entities is to keep them out of the hands of national governments." Second, precautions to keep nuclear weapons from proliferating to terrorist groups are of the same general sort as precautions against the more familiar kind of nuclear proliferation involving states. Our antiproliferation efforts directed against nonstate groups, like those directed against states, can be based on coercion, denial, and/or cooperation. In terms of coercion,

authorities can engage in on-going intelligence activities to attempt to learn of any efforts on the part of terrorist groups to acquire nuclear weapons, coupled with the availability of military-type rapid response teams, such as the Nuclear Emergency Search Teams maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy, to thwart any such effort. In terms of denial, authorities can make efforts to keep nuclear weapons and the materials needed to construct them out of the hands of terrorist groups. Cooperative antiproliferation takes a different form in the case of nonstate groups. In the case of cooperative efforts to stop proliferation by states, one seeks to negotiate with those states to convince them in one

way or another that acquiring nuclear weapons is not in their interest. To seek to stop terrorist groups from using nuclear weapons, the cooperation that is appropriate does not involve wotking with the terrorist groups themselves, but rather working with the people whose grievances the terrorist group claim to represent, and with their governments, to reduce the injustices that give rise to those grievances.


Prolif Bad – A2: Deterrence Empirically Successful

That deterrence worked before is no indication it will work in the future – past close calls prove the risk is far too high

Fetter 96 [Steve, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, "Nuclear Deterrence and the 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis," International Security, v21 nl, Summer, p. 179 ]cn

Hagerty cites the "unblemished record of political leaders resisting the temptation to decapitate their enemies' existing nuclear forces" as strong evidence

against the "logic of non-proliferation" (p. 85). But the fact that deterrence held in one crisis, or even ten crises, does not prove that the risks of nuclear deterrence are acceptable, any more than twenty-four successful launches proved that the Space

Shuttle met an acceptable standard of reliability, or twenty years' experience operating civil nuclear reactors proved that the risk of a meltdown was acceptably low. The successful resolution of a single nuclear crisis does not provide meaningful evidence

about the probability of nuclear war over the long term. Deterrence is a threat that leaves something to chance, and the risk that a crisis

might escalate out of control is a powerful factor that moderates the behavior of prudent leaders. The key question is not whether deterrence can

fail, but how likely such failures are. If a one percent chance of a nuclear conflagration is too great a risk to run, then the fact that deterrence was successful in one or two crises is a completely inadequate basis for rejecting the "logic of nonproliferation." An

examination of past nuclear crises should not make one optimistic that the risks of nuclear deterrence are acceptably low. While it is true that even the most extreme crisis-the Cuban missile crisis-was resolved without resort to nuclear weapons, recent research has revealed disturbing evidence indicating that risks of escalation and accidental or unauthorized use were far greater than is usually appreciated.2 Consider: Top U.S. military leaders, in the mistaken belief that no nuclear warheads had been delivered to Cuba, recommended air strikes to destroy the missile sites, followed by an invasion of Cuba. Authorization had been given to Soviet commanders in Cuba to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S. invasion. These warheads, which lacked control devices to prevent unauthorized use, were dispersed during the crisis to reduce their vulnerability to a U.S. attack. The longer-range missiles and their warheads also lacked use controls~ opening up the possibility that Soviet commanders in Cuba could have launched a nuclear attack against the United States. Castro and Soviet military leaders argued for a tough response to U.S. demands that the missiles be removed. Khrushchev initially ordered work accelerated on the missile sites, and ordered Cuba-bound ships to ignore the U.S. quarantine. At the height of the crisis, Soviet commanders in Cuba, acting on their own authority, ordered air defense units to shoot down a U-2 reconnaissance airplane. Later that same day, a U-2 on a routine mission accidentally strayed over Soviet airspace. Either act could have been interpreted as a calculated provocation by the other side. During the crisis, officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base jerry-rigged the launch system to give themselves the ability to launch their Minuteman missiles without higher authorization. During the crisis, the Strategic Air Command deployed nuclear warheads in nine often test silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base and then launched the tenth missile in a previously scheduled test, oblivious to the possibility that the Soviets might have been aware of the warhead deployments and could have confused the test for a nuclear attack. During the crisis, U.S. radar operators mistakenly reported that a missile had been launched from Cuba and was about to hit Tampa. Only

after the expected detonation failed to occur was it discovered that an operator had inserted a training tape into the system. Optimists apparently

believe that the fact that war was avoided despite these mishaps shows just how robust nuclear deterrence is. This is somewhat like NASA managers who used the fact that booster seals had eroded and partially failed in earlier successful launches to justify the fateful decision to launch the Challenger: There are several references

to flights that had gone before. The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by... are warnings that something is wrong . The fact that this danger did not lead to catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next

time . When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.

To pessimists, the mishaps and miscommunications during the missile crisis demonstrate that deterrence can fail despite our best efforts to prevent nuclear war, and that the probability of such a failure is unacceptably high. Under somewhat different circumstances, with different political and military leaders, an attack on Cuba might have been ordered, a serious accident might have occurred, or an innocent event might have been misinterpreted as an act of war, any of which might have triggered the use of nuclear weapons. The fact that nuclear war was avoided in the Cuban missile crisis and the 1990 Indo-Pakistani crisis should be little comfort for the next crisis.


Prolif Bad – A2: Rationality Checks

Prolif drastically increases the risks of nuke war – rationality is no check

Quester & Utgoff 94 [George, Government at Maryland and Victor, Institute for Defense Analysis, "No-First-Use and Nonproliferation: Redefining Extended Deterrence," Washington Quarterly, Spring]cn

If Americans ask themselves the elementary question of why they should be opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, an obvious first answer might now be that such a spread of weapons of mass destruction could lead to U.S. cities being destroyed and/or U.S. military units or other U.S. assets abroad suffering nuclear attacks. Further, Americans also care about nuclear proliferation because foreign cities may get destroyed in future outbreaks of war.

Following such proliferation, nuclear attacks on U.S. targets could take place more "rational1y" in the wake of normal military and political conflicts. Crises sometimes lead to "a war nobody wanted," or to

escalations that neither side can control. The risks that such deterrence failures would involve nuclear use are increased as more countries get nuclear weapons. Such nuclear attacks on U.S. targets could also take place less "rational1y" -- if someone like Idi Amin or Mu'ammar Qadhafi were to take charge of a country that possesses nuclear weapons. The kinds of political forces that bombed the World Trade Center in New York, or

attacked the entrance to Central Intel1igence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Virginia, might then use nuclear weapons. Second, nuclear weapons have always been important, not just for the devastation they inflict, but also for the political intimidation imposed by the possibility of nuclear

devastation. The spread of nuclear weapons to any sizable number of countries will tend to give each a way of intimidating the rest of the world, and thus of vetoing the outside world's objections to any of its more

obnoxious activities: "ethnic cleansing," brutal dictatorships, warlord-caused famines, or conquests of neighboring states not so strongly armed. Americans, and most other people, will want to avoid a situation in which any state can defy the will of the rest of the world, just by being able to threaten the destruction of any of the world's cities. Whatever hopes are now entertained for a disciplined world

order and a reliable system of collective security thus depend on the halting of nuclear proliferation. Final1y, the United States will not find it easy to sit on the sidelines in a regional war involving nuclear-armed states. In desperate circumstances such states will try to threaten the interests of bystanders, in order to force an international intervention. And other states within and outside such a region wil1 apply great pressures for U.S. and/or UN involvement.


***PROLIF GOOD***

Prolif Inevitable

Prolif is inevitable – nuke power and states feel threatened

Stuart 7 [John, writer for Future, Mar 11, “Talk: Nuclear Proliferation,” http://future.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Nuclear_Proliferation]cn

Proliferation will increase the risk of nuclear material available to terrorist organisations. Proliferation is inevitable. A number of states are already starting to develop a "civil" nuclear programme. A number of these states do not have the most stable of

political regimes or have a significant level of extremist activity within their borders. Under the guise of obtaining civilian nuclear power, it will be no surprise to many that some other states have the hidden agenda of producing nuclear fission weapons. As a result of their own foreign policies, such countries may perceive they need protection from the war orientated rumblings of other states. Alternatively, such countries may also believe in the concept of “pre-emptive action” to further their own view of the world.

International political actors believe it’s inevitable – this makes it so

Ingram 8 [Paul, Executive Director, BASIC, “Taking Responsibility,” http://www.basicint.org/gtz/gtz01.pdf, Acc. Jul 31, 2009]cn

There is unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, a lack of faith displayed by key actors in the non-proliferation regime. Some already believe that proliferation is inevitable, and resort in the first instance to sanction, threat and military action as a means to slow it down. Such lack of faith in the institutions of the non-proliferation regime corrodes the ability of the international community to work together. The pessimism is self-fulfilling, because proliferation of technologies and military capabilities is the natural state of international relations. In such a world it is only a matter of time before more states, possibly non-state

actors, possess the technologies and choose to use them.

Nuke prolif is inevitable – energy demands ensure it

The Hindu 7 [Jul 6, Nuclear future “is a dangerous pipe dream,” http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/06/stories/2007070651591300.htm, Acc. Jul 31, 2009]cn

The researchers say that nuclear proliferation is inevitable in the next decade. If all the reactors planned today are built, a further seven countries will have nuclear power. Nine more potentially volatile Middle

Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, have expressed interest in civil nuclear power, says the paper. In

addition, future demand for electricity will come from the world’s poorest countries, which are expected to add nearly 3.5 billion to their populations in the next 60 years. “If nuclear power is to play more than a marginal role in combating global warming, then nuclear power will have to be operated in countries like Bangladesh, Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan, which at present have no nuclear reactors,” it says. “According to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency,

within 30-40 years at least 30 countries are likely to have access to fissile materials from their civil nuclear power programmes that can be used for nuclear weapons and competent nuclear physicists and engineers who could design and fabricate them. “Future breeder reactors will be fuelled with plutonium and only a small input of uranium. The plutonium will be of a type suitable for use in the most efficient nuclear weapons. The normal operation of these reactors will, as a matter of course, multiply the amount of weapons-usable plutonium available across the world.

http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/06/stories/2007070651591300.htm

http://www.basicint.org/gtz/gtz01.pdf


Prolif Good – Prolif is Slow (1/2)

Prolif will be slow – countries don’t have a pressing need for nukes

Waltz 2k [Kenneth, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vI nl, Winter/Spring, http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/gjia/gjia_winsprOOf.html. accessed 8/11/02]cn

It is now estimated that about twenty-five countries are in a position to make nuclear weapons rather quickly. Most

countries that could have acquired nuclear military capability have refrained from doing so. Most countries do not need them. Consider Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. Argentina and Brazil were in the process of moving toward nuclear military capability, and both decided against it-wisely I believe-because neither country needs nuclear weapons. South Africa had about half a dozen warheads and decided to destroy

them. You have to have an adversary against whom you think you might have to threaten retaliation, but most countries are not in this position. Germany does not face any security threats-certainly not any in which a nuclear force would be relevant. I would expect the pattern of the past to be the same as the pattern in the future, in which one or two states per decade gradually develop nuclear weapons.

No arms races – nuclear weapons make force comparisons irrelevant

Waltz 95 [Kenneth, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, 1995, p. 29-30]cn

One may believe that old American and Soviet military doctrines set the pattern that new nuclear states will follow. One may also believe that they will suffer the fate ofthe United States and the former Soviet Union, that they will compete in building larger and larger nuclear arsenals while continuing to accumulate conventional weapons. These are doubtful beliefs. One can infer the future from the past only insofar as future situations may be like past ones

for the actors involved. For three main reasons, new nuclear states are likely to decrease, rather than to increase, their military spending. First, nuclear weapons alter the dynamics of arms races. In a competition of two or more parties, it may be hard to say who is pushing and who is being pushed, who is leading and who is following. If one party seeks to increase its capabilities, it may seem that others must too. The dynamic may be built into the competition and may unfold despite a mutual

wish to resist it. But need this be the case in a strategic competition among nuclear countries? It need not be if the conditions of competition make deterrent logic dominant. Deterrent logic dominates if the conditions of competition make it nearly impossible for any of the competing parties to achieve a first-strike capability. Early in the nuclear age, the

implications of deterrent strategy were clearly seen. "When dealing with the absolute weapon," as William T. R. Fox put it,

"arguments based on relative advantage lose their point." The United States has sometimes designed its forces according to that logic. Donald A. Quarles, when he was President Eisenhower's secretary of the Air Force, argued that "sufficiency of air power" is determined by "the force

required to accomplish the mission assigned." Avoidance of total war then does not depend on the "relative strength of the two opposed forces." Instead, it depends on the "absolute power in the hands of each, and in the

substantial invulnerability of this power to interdiction." To repeat: If no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are irrelevant. Strategic arms races are then pointless. Deterrent strategies offer this great advantage: Within 'wide ranges neither side need respond to increases in the other side's military capabilities.


Prolif Good – Prolif is Slow (2/2)

Empirically, slow prolif doesn’t open the floodgates

Waltz 3 [Kenneth, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, p. 42-43]cn

Countries have to take care of their own security, if countries feel insecure and believe that nuclear weapons would make them more secure, America's policy of opposing the spread of nuclear weapons will not prevail. Any slight chance of bringing the spread of nuclear weapons to a halt exists only if the United States strenuously tries to achieve that end. To do so carries costs measured in terms of other interests. The strongest way for the United States to persuade other countries to forego nuclear weapons is to guarantee their security. How many states' security do we want to guarantee?

Wisely, we are reluctant to make promises, but then we should not expect to decide how other countries provide for their security. Some have feared

that weakening opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons will lead numerous states to obtain them because it may seem that "everyone is doing it." Why should we think that if we relax, numerous states will begin to make nuclear weapons? Both the United States and the Soviet Union were relaxed in the past, and those effects did not follow. The Soviet Union initially supported China's nuclear program. The United States

helped both Britain and France to produce nuclear weapons. By 1968 the CIA had informed President Johnson of the existence oflsraeli nuclear weapons, and in July of 1970, Richard Helms, director ofthe CIA, gave this information to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These and later disclosures were not followed by censure of Israel or by reductions of economic assistance. And in September of 1980, the executive branch, against the will of the House of Representatives but with the approval of the Senate, continued to do nuclear business with India despite its explosion of a nuclear device and despite its unwillingness to sign the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do. One can believe that American opposition to nuclear arming stays the deluge only by overlooking the complications of intemationallife. Any state has to examine many conditions before deciding whether or not to develop nuclear weapons. Our opposition is only one factor

and is not likely to be the decisive one. Many states feel fairly secure living with their neighbors. Why should they want nuclear weapons~ Some countries, feeling threatened, have found security through their own strenuous efforts and through arrangements made with others. South Korea is an outstanding example. Many officials believe that South Korea would lose more in terms of American support if it acquired nuclear weapons than it would gain by having them. Further, on occasion we might slow the spread of nuclear weapons by not opposing the nuclear weapons programs ofsome countries. When we opposed Pakistan's nuclear program, we were saying that we disapprove of countries developing nuclear weapons no

matter what their neighbors do. The gradual spread of nuclear weapons has not opened the nuclear floodgates. Nations attend to their security in the ways they think best. The fact that so many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do says more about the hesitation of countries to enter the nuclear military business than about the effectiveness of American nonproliferation policy. We should suit our policy to individual cases, sometimes bringing pressure against a country moving toward nuclear weapons capability and sometimes quietly acquiescing: No one

policy is right in all cases. We should ask what the interests of other countries require before putting pressure on them. Some countries are likely to suffer more in cost and pain if they remain conventional states than if they become nuclear ones. The measured spread of nuclear weapons does not run against our interests and can increase the security of some states at a price they can afford to pay.

Chain reaction prolif is a myth – arms races are unlikely and extremely slow

Tertrais 1 [Bruno, senior research fellow for strategic studies at the Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique, Washington Quarterly, Autumn]cn

Beijing has a long historical record of developing strategic programs very slowly; the Chinese leadership may be wary of entering into a competition that it may perceive -whatever the reality-as having been lethal to the Soviet Union. Thus, for many reasons, China is likely to "jog" with rather than race with the United States. Finally, the Bush administration's missile defense program is intended to intercept handfuls of incoming missiles, not hundreds. The extinction ofthe Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty would no more trigger a new arms race than it limited the Cold War's arms race (if the ABM Treaty had closed the possibility of an offensive/defensive race, it channeled the superpowers' competition toward the offensive side). These analyses produce a few conclusions.•

Asian countries have not engaged in arms racing of the sort that existed during the Cold War, although the countries strategically compete among themselves. Claims of the existence ofa "nuclear reaction chain" do reflect a reality. The links between the Chinese,

Indian, and Pakistani nuclear programs, for instance, are historically well proven. Asian arms races, however, to the extent that they exist, are mostly slow processes fueled by political rivalries and of a qualitative rather than quantitative nature, especially as far as ballistic missiles are concerned. They qualify as Type-II arms racing rather than Type-I. As a former Pentagon official argued, "It is a bunch of loosely coupled arms races, and our past has been dominated by one very large arms race.... People need to stop living in the past."

15 • The conditions do not exist for a new arms race involving the United States, Russia, and China. Neither Russia nor China has the means or the will to race in the way that the Soviet Union and the United States did during the Cold War. Moscow and Beijing will only seek to maintain their current ability to strike the United States, not compete for the best missile or the highest number of warheads.• Some links do exist between Asian arms racing and global arms racing involving the five recognized nuclear powers. Notably, because "China's

nuclear identity is both global and Asian," it stands at the juncture ofAsian and global strategic dynamics. There is a logical abyss, however,

between this idea and the belief that a mechanical process exists whereby an increase in the Pakistani nuclear weapons arsenal would automatically trigger a rise in the Indian one, instigating a Chinese decision to augment its own forces, and eventually leading Moscow to build up its own forces-or vice versa.


Prolif Good – Prevents Wars (1/2)

Prolif deters large-scale regional wars

Karl 97 [David, Ph.D. International Relations at the University of Southern California, "Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers," International Security, Winter, p. 90-91]cn

Although this school bases its claims upon the U.S-Soviet Cold War nuclear relationship, it admits of no basic exception to the imperatives of nuclear deterrence. Nothing within the school's thesis is intrinsic solely to the superpower experience. The nuclear "balance of terror" is seen as far from fragile.

Nuclear-armed adversaries, regardless of context, should behave toward each other like the superpowers during the Cold War's "nuclear peace." The reason for this near-absolute claim is the supposedly immutable

quality of nuclear weapons: their presence is the key variable in any deterrent situation, because fear of their devastating consequences simply overwhelms the operation of all other factors. 'Martin van Creveld alleges that

"the leaders of medium and small powers alike tend to be extremely cautious with regard to the nuclear weapons they possess or with which they are faced-the proof being that, to date, in every region where these weapons have been introduced, large-scale interstate warfare has disappeared." Shai Feldman submits that

"it is no longer disputed that the undeclared nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan have helped stabilize their relations in recent years. It is difficult to see how escalation of the conflict over Kashmir could have been avoided were it not for the two countries' fear of nuclear escalation." The spread of nuclear weapons technology is thus viewed by optimists as a positive development, so much so that some even advocate its selective abettance by current nuclear powers.'

Proliferation lessens the frequency and magnitude of wars


For a number of reasons, deterrent strategies promise less damage than war-fighting strategies. First, deterrent strategies induce caution all around and thus reduce the incidence of war. Second, wars fought in the face of strategic nuclear weapons must be carefully limited because a country having them may retaliate if its

vital interests are threatened. Third, prospective punishment need only be proportionate to an adversary's expected gains in war after those gains are discounted for the many uncertainties of war. Fourth, should deterrence fail, a few judiciously delivered warheads are likely to produce sobriety in the leaders of all of the countries involved and thus bring rapid deescalation. Finally, war-fighting strategies offer no clear place to stop short of victory

for some and defeat for others. Deterrent strategies do, and that place is where one country threatens another's vital interests. Deterrent strategies lower the probability that wars will begin. If wars start nevertheless, deterrent

strategies lower the probability that they will be carried very far. Nuclear weapons lessen the intensity as well as the frequency of war among their possessors. For fear of escalation, nuclear states do not want to fight long and hard

over important interests-indeed, they do not want to fight at all. Minor nuclear states have even better reasons than

major ones to accommodate one another and to avoid fighting. Worries about the intensity of war among nuclear states have to be viewed in this context and against a world in which conventional weapons have become ever costlier and more destructive.


Prolif Good – Prevents Wars (2/2)

History is on our side – nuclear states don’t go to war with each other and prolif deescalates former tensions

Mueller 98 [John, Professor of Political Science at the UNC-Chapel Hill, "The Escalating Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons," The Absolute Weapon Revisited, ed. Paul, Harknett, and Wirtz, p. 83]cn

Therefore, although there may be some imaginable circumstances under which nuclear weapons could have value, these scenarios tend to be rather strained.

Moreover, with the possible exception of the curious events surrounding the Yom Kippur War of 1973, there has been no clear militarized crisis among major countries since 1962. And conventional international wars between India and Pakistan and

between Israel and the Arab states, once so common, have been absent from the world scene for decades.

Indeed, international wars are quite rare: most armed conflicts- including ones currently taking place-are civil wars. Dropping a nuclear bomb on one's neighbor doesn't make a great deal of sense. Civil wars do not usually present military targets that might make nuclear weapons very helpful, although a nuclear attack on an enemy city could appeal to an appropriately fanatical leader as the ultimate in ethnic cleansing.

Prolif prevents war by rendering military possession of territory insignificant

Goldstein 2k [Avery, Department of Political Science University of Pennsylvania, Deterrence and Security in the 21 51 Century, p. 285]cn

Another reason why the possession of nuclear weapons is unlikely to encourage attempts to alter the status quo

is that their possession sharply reduces the intrinsic military value of territory. To the extent that states rely on threats of nuclear punishment to dissuade challenges to their vital interests, security depends less on geographic considerations relevant to the time and space necessary for offensive or defensive maneuvers, and more on the modest requirements of deployment sufficient for ensuring that potential aggressors will be uncertain about their ability to execute a fully effective preemptive strike. As the practice of the smaller nuclear states reveals, creativity in modest mobile deployments, stealth, and deception can compensate for material disadvantages linked with geography.

Arms races trigger political dialogue, which prevents war

Tertrais 1 [Bruno, senior research fellow for strategic studies at the Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique, Washington Quarterly, Autumn]cn

Do arms races cause wars? This classic international relations question is almost a century old. After World War I, scholars and politicians were tempted to label the extraordinary military buildup that developed between 1870 and 1914 as a major cause, if not the major cause, of the conflict.

Subsequent historical studies, however, have shed considerable doubt on this theory. Moreover, arms racing

may in fact have positive aspects. NATO's 1979 decision to deploy Pershing-2 and ground launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in response to the Soviet Union's deployment of SS-20s and Backfire bombers, which undoubtedly was part of an action-reaction process, made the "zero option" and the

INF Treaty possible. When competition spirals out of control, states may feel that engaging in a dialogue to control it is in their common interest-thereby creating an atmosphere conducive to a better understanding of the other party.


Prolif Good – Prevents Miscalc

Nuke war makes military calculations irrelevant and impossible – prolif solves the risk of miscalc and war


Uncertainty about outcomes does not work decisively against the fighting of wars in conventional worlds. Countries armed with conventional weapons go to war knowing that even in defeat their suffering will be limited. Calculations about nuclear war are differently made. A nuclear world calls for a different kind of reasoning. If countries armed with nuclear weapons go to war, they do so knowing that their suffering may be unlimited. Of course, it also may not be, but that is not the kind of uncertainty that encourages anyone to use force. In a conventional world, one is uncertain about winning or losing. In a nuclear world, one is uncertain about surviving or

being annihilated. If force is used, and not kept within limits, catastrophe will result. That prediction is easy to make because it does not require close estimates of opposing forces. The number of one's cities that can be severely damaged is equal to the number of

strategic warheads an adversary can deliver. Variations of number mean little within wide ranges. The expected effect of the deterrent achieves an easy clarity because wide margins of error in estimates ofthe damage one may suffer do not matter'. Do we expect to lose on city or

tow, two cities or ten? When these are the pertinent questions, we stop thinking about running risks and start worrying about how to avoid them. In a conventional world, deterrent threats are ineffective because the damage threatened is distant, limited, and problematic. Nuclear weapons make military miscalculation difficult and politically pertinent prediction easy.

Prolif prevents conflicts that would otherwise occur

Miller 93 [Steven, Director of Studies at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, "The Case Against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent," Foreign Affairs, June/July]cn

THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR proliferation rests on the pacific effects of nuclear weapons. As Kenneth Waltz

asserts in the most famous advocacy of proliferation, nuclear spread "will promote peace and reinforce international stability." Because nuclear weapons greatly increase the costs and risks of war, they induce caution in the behavior of states and substantially reduce the likelihood of miscalculation. Wars between nuclear-arms states

become simply too dangerous to fight. The force of this argument is greatly strengthened by the experience of the Cold War, in which the two bitterly opposed protagonists avoided war for nearly half a century despite numerous crises and provocations. If nuclear weapons reliably cause peace,

then nuclear proliferation to Ukraine -- or any other state, for that matter --is not merely acceptable, but desirable, stabilizing a situation that might otherwise be prone to conflict.


Prolif Good – Solves Entanglement/Escalation

Prolif solves the need for extended deterrence, ensuring conflicts don’t escalate

Layne 96 [Christopher, fellow of the Center For Science and International Affairs at Harvard, "Minimal Realism in East Asia," The National Interest, Spring, p. 72-73]cn

This is doubly true when the potential aggressor is a nuclear power because, as Charles de Gaulle reasoned well, rational states will not risk suicide to save their allies. For both protector and protected, extended nuclear deterrence raises constant and ultimately insoluble dilemmas of credibility and reassurance. The conditions that contributed to successful extended nuclear deterrence in Cold War Europe do not exist in post-Cold War East Asia. Unlike the situation that prevailed in Europe between 1948 and 1990-which was fundamentally stable and static-East Asia is a volatile region in which all the major players- Japan, China, Korea, Russia, Vietnam-are candidates to become involved in large-scale war. There is no clear and inviolable status quo. The lines of demarcation between spheres of influence are already blurred and may well become more so as Chinese and Japanese influence expand simultaneously, increasing the number and unpredictability of regional rivalries. The status of Taiwan, tension along the 38th Parallel in Korea, conflicting claims to ownership of the Spratly Islands, and the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands are only a few of the flash-points that could ignite a great power war in East Asia. Washington will clearly exercise far less control over the policies of East Asian powers

than it exercised over Americas European allies during the Cold War. Hence, the risk of being chain-ganged into a nuclear conflict are much higher for the United States in post-Cold War East Asia if it maintains or extends nuclear guarantees to any of the region's major states. Even more important, post-Cold War East Asia simply does not have the same degree of strategic importance to the United States as did Europe during the Cold War. Would the United States risk a nuclear confrontation to defend Taiwan, the SpratIys, or Senkaku? Knowing that they would not constitute the same kind of threat to U.S. interests that the Soviet Union did, future revisionist East

Asian powers would probably be more willing to discount America's credibility and test its resolve. The presence of American forces in the region may indeed have the perverse effect of failing to preserve peace while simultaneously ensuring the United States would be drawn automatical1y into a future East Asian war. They could constitute the

wrong sort of tripwire, tripping us rather than deterring them. Notwithstanding current conventional wisdom, the United States should encourage East Asian states-including Japan-to resolve their own security dilemmas, even if it means acquiring great power, including nuclear, military capabilities. Reconfiguring American security policies anywhere in the world in ways that, in effect, encourage nuclear proliferation is widely seen as irresponsible and risky. This is not necessarily the case. Nuclear proliferation and extended deterrence are generally believed to be flip sides of the same coin, in the sense that providing the latter is seen to discourage the former. Nearly all maximalists are simultaneously proliferation pessimists (believing that any proliferation will have negative security implications) and extended nuclear

deterrence optimists (believing that extended nuclear deterrence "works"). But this formulation comes apart from both ends in East Asia: Potential nuclear powers in the region are unlikely to act irresponsibly and, as suggested above, the U.S. nuclear umbrella is of uncertain credibility in post-Cold War circumstances in which the Soviet Union no longer exists and strains in the U.S.-Japanese relationship are manifest. Even selective proliferation by stable, non-rogue states admittedly raises important political, strategic, organizational, and doctrinal issues. But so

does relying on America's nuclear extended deterrence strategy in changed circumstances. The need at hand is to weigh the dangers imbedded in an extended deterrence strategy against those posed by the possibility of nuclear proliferation, and here the Japanese case provides the most important and sobering illustration.


Prolif Good – Conventional > Nuclear War (1/3)

Conventional wars outweigh the aff – they’re the only scenario for nuclear escalation

Shwartz & Derber 91 [William and Charles, Harvard Nuclear Study Group, The Nuclear Seduction, Introduction, http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft1n39n7wg&chunk.id=d0e180&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e180&brand=ucpress]cn

For many years, a striking consensus has reigned: the nuclear arms race between the superpowers is the main source of danger. The arms race is "the central concern of the closing years of the century," the cause célèbre of our time. A U.S. senator says that "the very survival of our planet, the survival of the human race, is at stake," a common view.[1] The right, the center, and the left disagree, of course, about how the United States should run the arms race. The right urges us to build weapons like the MX missile, the Stealth bomber, and "Star Wars"; the center, to sign arms control treaties like INF and START with the Soviet Union; and the left, to stop and then reverse the arms race through a test ban, a "freeze," and huge reductions in nuclear arsenals. But all focus on the hardware, the weapons themselves. Most of the nuclear debate concerns which weapons should be deployed and which destroyed. But short of

near-total nuclear disarmament, we believe that no change in the arms race can in fact make a profound difference. MX,

Star Wars, INF, a freeze, or even a 90 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals cannot reliably change the horror of a nuclear war. They cannot much affect the risk that the nuclear states will plunge us into that horror. They cannot make the world much safer or more dangerous than it already is. The nuclear danger is

real—even more ominous, as we will show, than most people appreciate. But the fixation on weapons has obscured the real menace: the political conflict and violence raging around the world that could one day burn out of control and set off a nuclear cataclysm. As the world debates largely irrelevant missiles and arms control treaties, the superpowers

are fanning the flames of conflict and war from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, Lebanon to Cambodia. Forty years of history reveal that such conflicts can suddenly veer out of control and even erupt into open superpower confrontation. Yet in a time of unprecedented public concern about nuclear war, few—even in the peace movement—protest the nuclear hazards of their governments' foreign intrigues and interventions. Those of us concerned with the nuclear threat have long been like the apocryphal drunk who searches for his lost keys hour after hour under a lamppost—because it's light there. The giant weapons systems are seductive, the obvious place to look for answers to the nuclear peril. The

light there is good. But there is little to be found. If we want the keys to a safer world, we must turn the light to the real

conflicts and battlefields where the superpowers and their clients confront each other every day, often hidden from public view, and where they periodically collide in terrifying crises that threaten to provoke worldwide catastrophe. The Absolute Weapon Public issues generally develop a "culture," a consensus about the key questions, the level of

analysis, and the language of debate. Since these assumptions are shared, they rarely come up for discussion. The common perspective that guides discourse on nuclear war and peace is what we call the "weapons paradigm." It magnifies the importance of the

weapons themselves far beyond their real significance. It views weapons as the basic source of security or insecurity, power or

weakness, peace or war. It pegs the arms race as the problem and some change in that race as the solution.

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft1n39n7wg&chunk.id=d0e180&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e180&brand=ucpress%5Dcn

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft1n39n7wg&chunk.id=d0e180&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e180&brand=ucpress%5Dcn



Conventional weapons outweigh – they’ve killed more people, encourage war, and trade off with other social initiatives which threatens state collapse

DIS 99 [Disarmament and International Security, Background Guide, Fall, http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/-ucbmun/materials/disecFall99.doc, accessed 1/7/03]cnLimitless and unrestricted, small arms and conventional weapons have lead to the death of more people and

the squandering of more money than nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons combined and remain to

have a much greater impact upon human population and world politics. Many experts believe that nuclear

disarmament will never be realized until progress has been made toward general and complete disarmament. The theory is that countries develop nuclear weapons as protection against the conventional weapons of opposing states. Recent history and the Cold

War serve as an example that nations are more likely to use their small arms and conventional weapons in aggressive acts than alternative forms of warfare. The build up of small arms and conventional weapons also spurs the tensions amongst neighboring nations even further. As nations increase their forces and the stockpiles of weapons, surrounding nations feel

compelled to increase their own forces and weapons supplies. The arms race destroys the trust and diplomatic relationships between neighboring nations thus inhibiting international and interregional peace. A major concern with conventional weapons is

with the use of those that have indiscriminate effects, which involves the use of land mines, booby traps, and other weapons in the process of being developed, such as blind laser weapons. In the end, these weapons harm more

innocent civilians than members of an opposing army and their effects remain long after conflict resolution. The market for small arms and conventional weapons is immense and costly. Both the legal proliferation and black market proliferation of these weapons have created

international tensions. Many believe that terrorism cannot be abated as long as their weapons of choice remain completely accessible on the world market. The greatest victim of small arms and conventional weapons are the underdeveloped and

developing nations. Instead of spending money on economic and social incentives - such as education, welfare, medical

treatment, treatment of water, the production of food, and the building of factories and a workforce - these nations purchase these weapons at high prices and maintain armies that are not proportionate to their country's size. Despite the lack of progress, an obligation covering General and Complete Disarmament was included in Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It commits all parties to the treaty "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." But in spite of this renewed pledge of

the NPT parties, no negotiation on general disarmament is taking place today, and none is planned and 45 million people have died since the end of World War II at the expense of these weapons.



Nuke war wouldn’t be all that bad

Nyquist 99 [J.R., WoridNetDaily contributing editor and author of 'Origins of the Fourth World War,' May 20, http://www.antipas.org/news/world/nuclear_war.htrnl]cn

I patiently reply to these correspondents that nuclear war would not be the end of the world. I then point to studies showing

that "nuclear winter" has no scientific basis, that fallout from a nuclear war would not kill all life on earth. Surprisingly, few of my correspondents are convinced. They prefer apocalyptic myths created by pop scientists, movie producers and joumalists. If Dr. Carl Sagan once said "nuclear winter" would follow a nuclear war, then it must be true. If radiation wipes out mankind in a movie, then that's what we can expect in real life. But Carl Sagan was wrong about nuclear winter. And the movie "On the Beach" misled American filmgoers about the effects of fallout. It is time, once and for all, to lay these myths to rest. Nuclear war would not bring about the end of the

world, though it would be horribly destructive. The truth is, many prominent physicists have condemned the nuclear winter hypothesis. Nobel laureate Freeman Dyson once said of nuclear winter research, "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight." Professor Michael McElroy, a Harvard physics professor, also criticized the nuclear winter hypothesis. McElroy said that nuclear winter researchers "stacked the deck" in their study, which was titled "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions" (Science, December 1983). Nuclear winter is the theory that the mass use of nuclear weapons would create enough smoke and dust to blot out the sun, causing a catastrophic drop in global temperatures. According to Carl Sagan, in this situation the earth would freeze. No crops could be grown.

Humanity would die of cold and starvation. In truth, natural disasters have frequently produced smoke and dust far greater than those expected from a nuclear war. In 1883 Krakatoa exploded with a blast equivalent to

I0,000 one-megaton bombs, a detonation greater than the combined nuclear arsenals of planet earth. The Krakatoa explosion had negligible weather effects. Even more disastrous, going back many thousands of years, a meteor struck Quebec with the force of 17.5 million one megaton bombs, creating a crater 63 kilometers in diameter. But the world did not freeze. Life on earth was not extinguished. Consider the views of Professor George Rathjens of MIT, a known antinuclear activist, who said, "Nuclear winter is the worst example of misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory." Also consider Professor Russell Seitz, at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, who says that the nuclear winter hypothesis has been discredited. Two researchers, Starley Thompson

and Stephen Schneider, debunked the nuclear winter hypothesis in the summer 1986 issue of Foreign Affairs. Thompson and Schneider stated: "the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability." OK, so nuclear winter isn't going to happen. What about nuclear fallout? Wouldn't the radiation from a nuclear war contaminate the whole earth, killing everyone? The short answer is:

absolutely not. Nuclear fallout is a problem, but we should not exaggerate its effects. As it happens, there are two types of fallout produced by nuclear detonations. These are: 1) delayed fallout; and 2) short-term fallout. According to researcher Peter V. Pry, "Delayed fallout will not, contrary to popular belief, gradually kill billions of people everywhere in the world." Of course, delayed fallout would increase the number of people dying of

lymphatic cancer, leukemia, and cancer of the thyroid. "However," says Pry, "these deaths would probably be far fewer than deaths now resulting from ... smoking, or from automobile accidents." The real hazard in a nuclear war is the short-term fallout. This is a type of fallout created when a nuclear weapon is detonated at ground level. This type of fallout could kill millions of people, depending on the targeting strategy of

the attacking country. But short-term fallout rapidly subsides to safe levels in 13 to 18 days. It is not permanent. People who live outside of the affected areas will be fine. Those in affected areas can survive if they have access to underground shelters.

Nuke war wouldn’t escalate

Gray 2k [Colin, Professor ofInternational Politics at the University of Hull, "To Confuse Ourselves: Nuclear Fallacies," Alternative Nuclear Futures, ed. Baylis and O'Neil, p. 17]cn

A small nuclear war is an oxymoron. While most probably it is true that a nuclear war between regional powers would have the effect of encouraging extra-regional actors to keep their heads down, it is not likely that a 'small' nuclear war between regional rivals

would have negligible, or world-system supporting, consequences. Scholar-theorists like Kenneth N. Waltz probably are correct when they point to the readily confinable domain of a regional nuclear conflict. In Waltz's brutally realistic words: [i]f such

[relatively weak] states use nuclear weapons, the world will not end. The use of nuclear weapons by lesser powers would hardly trigger them elsewhere. No one wants to be a player (target) in other people's nuclear wars.


Prolif Good – Solves Poverty

Prolif massively curtails military spending

Goldstein 2k [Avery, Department of Political Science University of Pennsylvania, Deterrence and Security in the 21 51 Century, p. 289]cn

The presence of nuclear weapons may, however, do more than just reduce the likelihood of war. The availability of nuclear weapons may,

as the more demanding definition of peace suggests, help limit the diversion of human resources to huge military establishments even while states continue to believe their security requires them to maintain arms. Because the retaliatory requirements of a deterrent strategy do not entail close comparison with the adversary's forces, nuclear states need not maintain large weapons inventories or engage in intense arms racing to ensure their security. Nor do states emphasizing nuclear deterrence need to field massive (and comparatively expensive) conventional forces designed to fight a protracted war, since their main purpose is to preclude quick and easy gains for the adversary and oblige him to confront the unacceptable risk of unpredictable escalation.

Military spending creates cycles of poverty, crushes economic growth, and makes conflict more likely

Desai 2k [Nitin, undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs at the UN, and Jayantha Dhanapala, undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs at the UN, International Herald Tribune, December 22]cn

At the United Nations' Millennium Summit in September, world leaders pledged to "free our peoples from the scourge of war, whether within or between States," and to halve global poverty by the year 2015. That these should be global imperatives is apparent from two broad statistics. Wars claimed more than

5 million lives in the 1990s, and nearly 3 billion people, almost half the world's population, live on a daily income of less than $2 a day. Poverty and conflict are not unrelated; they often reinforce each other. Poverty is a potent catalyst for conflict and violence within and among states, particularly at a time when poor countries and peoples are increasingly aware of the relative affluence of others.

Conflicts plunge many individuals into poverty and deal a severe blow to a country's longerterm development efforts. Even where there is no active conflict, military spending absorbs resources that could be used to attack poverty. During the Cold War, world defense spending peaked at around $1.2 trillion in 1987. The first half of the 1990s saw some sharp reductions in military expenditures in economically advanced countries. Partially as a result, Western countries reaped a substantial peace dividend in the form of an extended period of economic prosperity. However, by 1997 global military expenditures were rising again. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, world military expenditures rose by more than 2 percent in 1999, and a further increase is expected for this year. World military spending is now around $800 billion, a level equal to more than 2.5 percent ofthe world's output of goods and services. The share of the developed world in global defense spending continues to exceed 70 percent, with five economically advanced countries accounting for the great bulk of this spending. The share of the developing world, however, has grown during the past decade. During the 1990s, spending on arms and the maintenance of military forces increased by one-fifth in

East Asia, by one- quarter in South Asia and by more than one-third in South America. High military spending has been both a cause and a result of the large number of conflicts in the developing world. On average, defense spending absorbs more than 10 percent of government budgets around the world. In some developing countries the burden is considerably higher than this average. These increasing military expenditures in developing countries are reflected in international arms sales. Global arms transfer agreements with developing nations increased from $16.8 billion in 1998 to $20.6 billion in 1999. The U.S. Congressional Research Service estimates that worldwide arms deliveries from 1992 to 1999 totaled more than $296 billion, of which nearly 70 percent went to developing countries. The economically advanced countries accounted for more than 90

percent of these sales. High levels of military spending in some countries impair development by crowding out private and public investment. Moreover, since developing countries import most of their military equipment, spending on foreign armaments reduces the scope for imports of capital goods that would allow the economy to expand and diversify. Most importantly, high levels of military spending aggravate tensions and engender suspicion, encouraging higher spending in other countries and creating conditions ripe for conflict.


Prolif Good – Poverty > Nuke War

Poverty outweighs – it outweighs the impact of nuke war and lies at its root cause

Gilligan 96 [James, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical and Director of the Center for the Study of Violence “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes,” p191-196]cn

The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide-or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000) deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even

a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R . (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect. the equivalent of an ongoing, unending~ in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also

the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and

genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence-structural or behavioral-is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.


Prolif Good – A2: Accidents

No risk of accidents – 50 years of history proves


“Love is like war,” the chaplain says in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, “it always finds a way.” For half a century, nuclear war has not found a way. The old saying, “accidents will happen,” is translated as Murphy’s Law holding that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Enough has gone wrong, and Scott Sagan has recorded many of the nuclear accidents that have, or have nearly,

taken place. Yet none of them has caused anybody to blow anybody else up. In a speech given to American scientists in 1960, C. P. Snow said this: “We know, with the certainty of statistical truth, that if enough of these weapons are made—by enough different states—some of them are going to blow up. Through accident, or folly, or madness—but the motives don’t matter. What does matter is the nature of the statistical fact.” In 1960, statistical fact told Snow that within “at the most, ten years some of these bombs are going off.” Statistical fact now tells us that we are twenty-five years overdue. But the novelist and scientist overlooked the fact that there are no “statistical facts.”’ Half a century of nuclear peace has to be explained

since divergence from historical experience is dramatic. Never in modern history, conventionally dated from 1648, have the great and

major powers of the world en joyed such a long period of peace . Scott Sagan emphasizes the problems and the conditions that conduce to pessimism. I emphasize the likely solutions and the conditions that conduce to optimism, bearing in mind that nothing in this world is ever certain.

Risk of backlash prevents accidental launch


Deterrence is also a considerable guarantee against accidents, since it causes countries to take good care of their weapons, and against anonymous use, since those firing the weapons can neither know that they will be undetected nor what form of punishment detection might bring. In life, uncertainties abound. In a

conventional world, they more easily lead to war because less is at stake. Even so, it is difficult to think of wars that have started by accident even

before nuclear weapons were invented. It is hard to believe that nuclear war may begin accidentally, when less frightening conventional wars have rarely done so.

Fear of accidents prevents them


Fear of accidents works against their occurring. This is illustrated by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Accidents

happened during the crisis, and unplanned events took place. An American U-2 strayed over Siberia, and one flew over Cuba. The American Navy continued to play games at sea, such games as trying to force Soviet submarines to surface. In crises, political leaders want to control all relevant actions, while knowing that they cannot do so. Fear of losing control propelled Kennedy and Khrushchev to end the crisis quickly. In a conventional world, uncertainty may tempt a country to join battle. In a nuclear world, uncertainty has the opposite effect. What is not surely controllable is too dangerous to bear.


Prolif Good – A2: Anonymous Attack

No state would risk a anonymous attack


Some have feared that a radical Arab state might fire a nuclear warhead anonymously at an Israeli city in order to block a

peace settlement. But the state firing the warhead could not be certain of remaining unidentified. Even if a country's leaders persuaded themselves that chances of retaliation were low, who would run the risk?


Prolif Good – A2: Asymmetry

Asymmetry is irrelevant – other countries’ nukes prevent preemptive strikes, and uncertainty still deters


Because strategic uncertainty is seen as having a powerful dissuasive effect, optimists usually view the very increase in the numbers of nuclear-armed states

as an additional element of stability. Dagobert Brito and Michael Intriligator, for instance, argue that uncertainty over the reaction of other nuclear powers will make all hesitant to strike individually. As an example, they point to the restraint the superpowers exercised on each other in the 1960s, when first the United States and then the Soviet Union contemplated military action against China's nascent nuclear weapon sites. The net effect of the uncertain reaction of others is that "the probability of deliberate nuclear attack falls to near zero with

three, four, or more nuclear nations." Similarly, Waltz reasons that even in cases of asymmetric proliferation within conflict dyads, nuclear weapons will prove "poor instruments for blackmail" because a "country that takes the nuclear offensive has to fear an appropriately punishing strike by someone. Far from lowering the expected cost of

aggression, a nuclear offense even against a non-nuclear state raises the possible costs of aggression to incalculable heights because the aggressor cannot be sure of the reaction of other nuclear powers."


Prolif Good – A2: Civil Wars

Civil wars won’t lead to nuclear launch and it wouldn’t escalate anyway


'Third, although highly unstable states are unlikely to initiate nuclear projects, such projects, begun in stable times, may

continue through periods of political turmoil and succeed in producing nuclear weapons. A nuclear state may be unstable or may become so. But what is hard to comprehend is why, in an internal struggle for power, the contenders would start using nuclear weapons. Who would they aim at? How would they use them as instruments for maintaining or gaining control? I see little more reason to fear that one faction or another in a less-developed country will fire atomic weapons in a struggle for political power than that they will be used in a crisis of succession. One or another nuclear state will experience uncertainty of succession, fierce struggles

for power, and instability of regime. Those who fear the worst have not shown how those events might lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Strikingly, during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, some group managed to keep control of China's nuclear weapons. Fourth, the possibility of one side in a civil war firing a nuclear warhead at its opponent's stronghold nevertheless remains. Such an act would produce a national tragedy, not an international one. This question then arises: Once the weapon is fired, what happens next? The domestic use of nuclear weapons is, of all the uses imaginable, least likely to lead to escalation and to global tragedy.


Prolif Good – A2: Hair Trigger Alert

New nuclear states won’t adopt launch on warning – their arsenals won’t be massive


To be effective, deterrent forces, whether big or small ones, must meet these requirements. First, at least a part of a state's nuclear forces must appear to be able to survive an attack and launch one of its own. Second, survival of forces must not require early firing in response to what may be false alarms. Third, command and control must be reliably maintained; weapons must not be susceptible to accidental or unauthorized use. The first two requirements are

closely linked both to each other and to measures needed to ensure that deterrent forces cannot be preempted. If states can deploy their forces in ways that preclude preemption-and we have seen that they can-then their forces need not be rigged for hair-trigger response. States can retaliate at their leisure. This question then arises: May dispersing forces for

the sake of their survival make command and control hard to maintain? Americans think so because we think in terms of large nuclear arsenals. Small nuclear powers neither have them nor need them. Lesser nuclear states may deploy, say, ten real weapons and ten dummies, while permitting other countries to infer that numbers are larger. An adversary need only believe that some warheads may survive its attack and be visited on it. That belief is not hard to create without making command and control unreliable.

Proliferants can adopt ride-it-out strategies, preventing escalationSeng 97 [Jordan, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Security Studies, Summer, p. 79-80]cn

In all, the interaction between delegation and concealment will make it likely that minor proliferators' will have what might be called ride-it-out-and-retaliate strategies. Minor proliferators will have a second strike capability that is not time critical. They can wait for the dust to settle before executing counterlaunches. If a crisis occurs, if launch commanders have reason to think that a first strike might have happened, if central command might

have been bombed and eliminated, launch commanders can ride out the initial panic and take the time to employ the procedures they have for confirming the appropriateness of nuclear retaliation. Ride-it-out-and-retaliate strategies are not without precedent in nuclear history. The negative control situation of minor proliferators will be similar to that of advanced states' ballistic missile submarine forces. Insofar as the history of submarine control is widely acknowledged as a favorable one, the similarities are encouraging and instructive.


Prolif Good – A2: Military Control is Unstable

Civilian control is irrelevant – military leaders have an incentive to not use nukes and empirically don’t


Fifth, in some of the new nuclear states, civil control of the military may be shaky. Nuclear weapons may fall into the

hands of military officers more inclined than civilians are to put them to offensive use. This again is an old worry. I can see no reason to

think that civil control of the military was secure in the Soviet Union, given the occasional presence of military officers in the

Politburo and some known and some surmised instances of military intervention in civil affairs at critical times. In the People's Republic of China, military and civil branches of government are not separated but fused. Although one may prefer civil control, preventing a highly destructive war does not require it. What is required is that decisions be made that keep destruction within bounds, whether decisions are made by civilians or soldiers. Soldiers may be more cautious than civilians. Generals and admirals do not like uncertainty, and they do not lack patriotism. They do not like to fight conventional wars under unfamiliar conditions. The offensive use of nuclear weapons multiplies uncertainties. Nobody knows what a nuclear battlefield might look like, and nobody knows what will happen after

the first city is hit. Uncertainty about the course that nuclear war might follow, along with the certainty that destruction can be immense, strongly inhibits the first use of nuclear weapons.


Prolif Good – A2: No 2 nd Strike Capabilities

New nuke states will obtain 2nd strike capabilities – they have the incentives and capabilities


Both optimists and pessimists agree that secure retaliatory capabilities are a sine qua non for stable deterrence but differ over whether new nuclear powers

will be able to acquire such capabilities. For optimists, the problems involved in creating situations of mutual deterrence---

once the hurdles of fabricating simple fission weapons are overcome-are not beyond the organizational, technological, and economic capabilities of many states, especially since only a handful of weapons is all that is necessary for deterrence to be in force. Proliferators can be expected to field secure second-strike forces given the obvious incentives to protect expensive military investments and the difficulties an enemy faces in executing a successful first strike.

2nd strike is irrelevant – the perception that a few nukes would survive is enough to deter


Students of organizations rightly worry about complex and tightly-coupled systems because they are susceptible to damaging accidents. They wrongly believe that conflicting nuclear states should be thought of as a tightly-coupled system. Fortunately, nuclear weapons loosen the coupling of states by lessening the effects of proximity and by cutting through the complexities of conventional confrontations. Organizational theorists fail to distinguish

between the technical complexities of nuclear-weapons systems and the simplicity of the situations they create. Sagan points out that the survival of

Indian and Pakistani forces cannot be guaranteed. But neither can their complete destruction, and that is what matters. Oddly, many pessimists believe that countries with small and technologically limited nuclear forces may be able to accomplish the difficult feat of making a successful first strike but not the easy one of making their own nuclear force appear to be invulnerable. They overlook a basic nuclear truth: If some part of a force is invulnerable, all of the force is invulnerable. Destroying even a major portion of a nuclear force

does no good because of the damage a small number of surviving warheads can do. Conventional weapons put a

premium on striking first to gain the initial advantage and set the course of the war. Nuclear weapons eliminate this premium. The initial advantage is insignificant if the cost of gaining it is half a dozen cities.


Prolif Good – A2: Nuke Blackmail Undermines Heg

Prolif won’t undermine U.S. leadership

Welch 2k [General Larry, USAF, Foreword, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff, p. vii]cn

But proliferation raises the risk involved in intervention, and the end of the global contest for power with the former Soviet Union

causes some to believe that the outcomes of regional wars are less important to the United States. This combination could undermine confidence in the capability and the will of the United States to continue to play the key stabilizing role the world has come to expect of it. I believe the United States will continue in its stabilizing role for at least three reasons. First, U.S. political leaders, whatever their political philosophy, have always found it difficult to keep the nation on the sidelines in the face of massive violence or destabilizing developments. Second, the United States

will seldom, if ever, find it in its national interest to be deterred from standing up to aggression. Third,

I believe that the United States remains willing to accept risks-even large risks- for an important cause.

Empirically, prolif doesn’t allow nuclear blackmail – states aren’t threatened, and bandwagoning solves

Walt 2k [Stephen, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, "Containing Rogues and Renegades: Coalition Strategies and Counterproliferation," The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, p. 212]cn

Thus, states facing a rogue state's blackmail should be able to obtain U.S. backing. And because helping to thwart nuclear blackmail is in the larger U.S. interest. it should not be too difficult for U.S. leaders to convince both potential allies and

possible challengers that its pledges are genuine. Since nearby states have little reason to kowtow to a rogue state's blackmail, and little

reason to fear that they will be utterly abandoned, there is also little reason to fear that a rogue's acquisition of WMD would immediately undermine existing security commitments or trigger a cascade of capitulations. Once again, the

history of the nuclear age provides reassuring evidence on this point. U.S. leaders once worried that

Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons would allow the Kremlin to conduct "piecemeal aggression against others, counting on our unwillingness to engage in atomic war," and cause our allies to "lose their determination." Similar fears accompanied the growth of Soviet nuclear and conventional forces in the 1970s, which many experts believed cast doubt on U.S. credibility and placed NATO in danger of collapse. In

fact, most non-nuclear states have been more than willing to balance against hostile nuclear adversaries. For example, non-nuclear powers such as West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Japan joined defensive alliances against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, just as Cuba and Nicaragua aligned themselves with Moscow to gain protection from the United States.

Pakistan strengthened its alignment with China following India's "peaceful" nuclear explosion in 1974,

and Israel's not-so-secret development of nuclear weapons did not deter a number of Arab states from allying against it. Indeed, Syria and Egypt launched a conventional attack on Israel in October 1973 despite their awareness that Israel already possessed a number of nuclear bombs. Syrian troops opposed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 despite their conventional inferiority and Israel's nuclear arsenal, and Iraq's chemical weapons capability did not deter the United States or its coalition partners from ousting it from Kuwait in 1991. Thus,

the historical record is admirably clear: an opponent's possession of WMD does not make other states unwilling to defend their own vital interests, or deter them from using force when necessary


Prolif Good – A2: Preemptive Strikes

States won’t risk preemptive strikes


Optimists have relaxed views of the preventive-war dangers entailed in situations in which a nuclear power confronts a nuclearizing rival. The practical difficulties of ensuring a disarming strike to preclude any possibility of nuclear retaliation make preventive actions a military gamble that states are very unlikely to take. As Waltz explains, "prevention and

pre-emption are difficult games because the costs are so high if the games are not perfectly played.

Ultimately, the inhibitions [against such attacks] lie in the impossibility of knowing for sure that a disarming strike will totally destroy an opposing force and in the immense destruction even a few warheads can wreak."

To optimists, states will have to learn to live with a rival's emerging nuclear armory.

Preemptive strikes won’t happen – low probability of success and deterrence checks


The uneven development of the forces of potential and of new nuclear states creates occasions that permit strikes and may invite them. Two stages of nuclear development should be distinguished. First, a country may be in an early stage of nuclear development and be obviously unable to make nuclear weapons. Second, a country may be in an advanced stage of nuclear development, and whether or not it has some nuclear weapons may not be surely known. All of the present nuclear countries went through both stages, yet until Israel struck Iraq's nuclear facility in June of 1981, no one had launched a

preventive strike. A number of causes combined may account for the reluctance of states to strike in order to prevent adversaries from developing nuclear forces. A preventive strike is most promising during the first stage of nuclear

development. A state could strike without fearing that the country it attacked would be able to return a nuclear blow. But would one country strike so hard as to destroy another country's potential for future nuclear development? If it did not, the country struck could resume its nuclear career. If the blow struck is less than devastating, one must be prepared either to repeat it or to occupy and control the country. To do either would be forbiddingly difficult. A preemptive strike launched against a country that may have a small number of warheads is even less promising than a

preventive strike during the first stage. If the country attacked has even a rudimentary nuclear capability, one's own severe punishment becomes possible. Nuclear forces are seldom delicate because no state wants delicate forces, and nuclear forces can easily be made sturdy.

Nuclear warheads can be fairly small and light, and they are easy to hide and to move. Even the Model-T bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small enough to fit into a World War II bomber. Early in the nuclear age, people worried about atomic bombs being concealed in packing boxes and placed in the holds of ships to be exploded when a signal was given. Now, more than ever, people worry about terrorists stealing nuclear warheads because various states have so many of them. Everybody seems to believe that terrorists are capable of hiding bombs.' Why should states be unable to do what terrorist gangs are thought to be capable.

Israel proves – conventional strikes don’t escalate

Rousseau 2k [David, Professor of Political Science at Albany, "PROLIFERATION MODULE," http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/polisci/psciI50/modules/pro/lecturel.htm. accessed 8/4/02]cn

Nuclear proliferation has not lead to either conventional or nuclear war. Second, if an existing nuclear power engages in a preventative strike, it will not be the end of the world. Israel's preventative strike against the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 did not result in the use of nuclear weapons. While the attack was personal tragedy for those killed in the raid, it would not lead me to conclude that proliferation is very dangerous.


Prolif Good – A2: Proximity

Empirically, proximity and short warning time don’t cause nuke war


Proximity does make warning time short. Missiles Can fly between Islamabad and New Delhi in less than five minutes. Yet

nuclear countries in the past have often been close militarily if not geographically. Cuba is only ninety miles from American shores, and that is proximity enough. The United States flew planes at the Soviet Union's borders and across them, believing its radars would not spot them. American bravado continues. In April 2001, an American surveillance plane was struck by a Chinese plane over waters near China. Close surveillance is provocative even if international legalities are nicely observed. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said when an American plane went down thirty-two miles from the Chinese coast in August 1956, "If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores, we would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer, whether through error or not." Operation Brasstracks was an all-service Indian operation staged in 1987. As Sagan says, it is widely believed that General Sundarji intended it to be a prelude to a war in which India would destroy Pakistan's nuclear facilities. Sundarji may have thought that even if Pakistan had a few bombs, India would be able to destroy them on the ground. In retrospect, Brasstracks looks more like a typical instance oflndian failure to coordinate policies among the Prime Minister's Office, the External Affairs Ministry; the Defense Ministry; and the military services. Brasstracks is not something new in the nuclear annals. It pales in comparison to provocative acts by the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1983, for example, Able Archer-a recurrent NATO military exercise-was more extensive than ever before. It was held at a time of extraordinary tension. The Soviets believed that surprise was the key to American war plans. During the exercise, the simulated alert ofNATO nuclear forces was thought by the Soviets to be a real one. American Pershing II missiles were to be deployed in Europe soon. The Soviets believed that some of them. with their fifty-kiloton payload, fifty-meter accuracy, and ten-minute delivery time to Moscow, had already arrived. Early in the Reagan administration, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and other officials proclaimed that it was our aim to be able to fight, sustain, and win a nuclear war.

With some reason, Soviet leaders believed it was about to begin. Vast distances lie between the United States and Russia. What difference do

these distances make when American troops and missiles are stationed in Europe and Northeast Asia? Those who believe that the Indian-Pakistani confrontation is without precedent have either little knowledge of cold war history or oddly defective memories.


Prolif Good – A2: Rogue/Failed States

Prolif is the only way to moderate radical regimes


Whatever the identity of rulers, and whatever the characteristics of their states, the national behaviors they produce are strongly conditioned by the world outside. With conventional weapons, a defensive country has to

ask itself how much power it must harness to its policy in order to dissuade an aggressive state from striking. Countries willing to run high risks are hard to dissuade. The characteristics of governments and the temperaments of leaders have to be carefully weighed. With nuclear weapons. any state will be deterred by another state's second-strike forces; one need not be preoccupied with the qualities ofthe state that is to be deterred or scrutinize its

leaders. In a nuclear world, any state-whether ruled by a Stalin, a Mao Zedong, a Saddam Hussein, or a Kim Jong II-will be deterred by the knowledge that aggressive actions may lead to its own destruction.

Even radical states will abide by nuclear restraint – prolif makes them more cautious and cooperative


Second, many fear that states that are radical at home will recklessly use their nuclear weapons in pursuit of revolutionary ends abroad. States that are radical at home, however, may not be radical abroad. Few states have been radical in the conduct of their foreign policy, and fewer have remained so for long. Think of the

Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. States coexist in a competitive arena. The pressures of competition cause them to behave in ways that make the threats they face manageable, in ways that enable them to get along. States can remain radical in foreign policy only if they are overwhelmingly strong-as none of the new nuclear states will be-or if their acts fall short of damaging vital interests of other nuclear powers. States that acquire nuclear weapons will not be regarded with indifference. States that want to be freewheelers have to stay out of the nuclear business. A nuclear Libya, for example, would have to show caution, even in rhetoric, lest it suffer retaliation in response to someone else's anonymous attack on a third state. That state, ignorant of who attacked, might claim that its intelligence agents had identified Libya as the

culprit and take the opportunity to silence it by striking a heavy conventional blow. Nuclear weapons induce caution in any state, especially in weaker ones.

Deterrence covers seemingly irrational state actors as wellTennant 7 [Agnieszka, journalist, Aug 13, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/august/15.50.html]cn

A nuclear-free world is not realistic, Langewiesche argues; poorer countries will inevitably join the group of countries

we like to think are more responsible in stockpiling nukes. North Korea and Iran are just the beginning. Politicians may paint some developing nations as evil, but their production of nuclear weapons signals to Langewiesche that they're making rational choices. Nuclear weapons are the wisest investment cash-strapped countries can make. The biggest bang for their buck. And, oddly, there's hope in that. Langewiesche writes that even regimes with the kookiest leaders are "subject to conventional logic of deterrence and will hesitate to use their weapons because of the certainty of a crushing response—since they, too, have cities and infrastructures that they will lose." Thus, any nuclear attack by nation-states is highly unlikely, and their arsenals are well-secured. It gets trickier, of course, with transnational terrorists who act independently of any state, because they don't have territory that could be hit in retaliation. But very few people in the world have the money, know-how, and connections needed to make nuclear weapons. Langewiesche explains that their success would depend on a series of highly risky operations, including: infiltrating a well-protected site with at least 100 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, stealing the uranium, transporting the fuel across borders to an assembly point, and producing the weapon. All improbable in a world far removed from the one Jack Bauer takes on in the TV series 24.


Prolif Good – A2: Terrorists (1/3)

Terrorists prefer conventional weapons – they’re easier to get, and nukes are antithetical to their goals


For terrorists who abandon tactics of disruption and harassment in favor of dealing in wholesale death and destruction, instruments other than nuclear weapons are more readily available. Poisons and germs are easier to get than nuclear weapons, and poisoning a city's water supply, though rather complicated, is more easily done than blowing a city up. Nevertheless, terrorists may seek to gain control of nuclear materials and use them to threaten or destroy. Yet, with shaky control of nuclear weapons materials in Russia and perhaps in Pakistan, and with the revelation in 1994 that the United States had lost track of some of its nuclear materials, one can hardly believe that nuclear weapons spreading to another country or two every now and then adds much to the chances that terrorists will be able to buy or steal nuclear materials. Plentiful sources are already available. Nuclear terror is a problem distinct from the spread of nuclear weapons to a few more countries. Terrorists have done a fair bit of damage by using conventional weapons and have sometimes got their way by threatening to use them. Might terrorists not figure they can achieve more still by threatening to explode nuclear weapons on cities of countries they may wish to bend to their bidding? Fear of nuclear terror arises from the assumption that if terrorists can get nuclear weapons they will get them, and then all hell will break loose. This is comparable to assuming that if weak states get nuclear weapons, they will use them for aggression. Both assumptions are false. Would the

courses of action we fear, if followed, promise more gains than losses or more pains than profits? The answers are obvious. Terrorists have some

hope of reaching their long-term goals through patient pressure and constant harassment. They cannot hope to do so by issuing unsustainable threats to wreak great destruction, threats they would not want to execute anyway.

Terrorists don’t want nukes – obtaining them is too risky

Lavoy 95 [Peter, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Security Studies, Summer]cn

Waltz does not dispute the ability of terrorists to gain control of a. few nuclear explosives. He does doubt, however, that terrorists ever would use them. This

sanguine view derives from three assumptions Waltz makes about the nature and aims of terrorist organizations. First, because 'secrecy is safety" for terrorists, Waltz believes that they would not wish suddenly to enlarge their ranks through the multiplication of "suppliers, transporters, technicians, and guardians" required to obtain and maintain nuclear weapons. Second, terrorists are not well suited to carrying out the time-consuming negotiations needed to obtain the compliance of a state placed under a terrorist nuclear threat. Third, terrorists favor tactics of disruption and harassment to threats of wholesale death and destruction; nuclear weapons do not help terrorists reach their long-term goals. If terrorists did seek to take many lives, Waltz reasons that poison would be a better weapon.

Terrorists won’t use nukes – they think it’s immoral, undermines their goals, and are too powerful

Beckman 2k [Peter, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, et aI, The Nuclear Predicament: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century, 3rd edition, p. 227-228]cn

Would it be rational for terrorists to use nuclear weapons? An act is rational only relative to the goals and assumptions of the actor. So, to ask whether nuclear terrorism is rational for a terrorist group is to ask whether it is rational relative to its goals and assumptions. Normally, a terrorist group has goals

and assumptions different from those of the ordinary person. Still, there is some reason to think that nuclear use would not be rational for

the terrorist, even from the terrorist's point of view. For one thing, the main concern of terrorists seems to be to make their grievances known, not just to kill people. Brian Jenkins notes: "Simply killing a lot of people has seldom been a

terrorist objective.... Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." He bolsters this point by observing

that many terrorists are morally opposed to indiscriminate violence, given that "they regard a government as their opponent. not the people," and they do not want to alienate the people. There are other reasons to think that

nuclear terrorism would be irrational from the terrorist's perspective. The cohesion of a terrorist group is of great importance to the group, and the use of nuclear weapons risks the loss of that cohesion. Given the revulsion some in the group might feel toward such an act, the decision to use nuclear weapons might shatter the group. Moreover, terrorists might well

discover the same truth that states have discovered, namely, that nuclear weapons are too powerful. For the question arises: What demands could nuclear terrorists make that would correspond in magnitude to what they threaten, demands that they could be assured that the state would carry out, given the temporary nature of the nuclear threat they would pose?


Prolif Good – A2: Terrorism (2/3)

Terrorists can’t make, buy, or steal a nuke – multiple barriers makes the risk near zero

Milhollin 2 [Gary, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control]cnDespite the reports, and despite the attendant warnings, the risk that a terrorist group like al Qaeda could get the bomb (or a "dirty"

substitute) is much lower than most people think. That is the good news. There is also bad news: the risk is not zero. THERE ARE

essentially two ways for a terrorist group to lay its hands on a nuclear weapon: either build one from scratch or somehow procure an already

manufactured one or its key components. Neither of these is likely. Building a bomb from scratch would confer the most power: a group that could build one bomb could build several, and a nuclear arsenal would put it front and center on the world stage. But of all the possibilities, this is

the unlikeliest--"so remote," in the words of a senior nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, "that it can be essentially ruled out. " The chief obstacle lies in producing the nuclear fuel--either bomb-grade uranium or plutonium--that actually explodes in a

chain reaction. More than 80 percent of the effort that went into making America's first bombs was devoted to producing this fuel, and it is no easy task. To make bomb-grade uranium, a terrorist group would need thousands of high-speed gas centrifuges, machined to exact dimensions, arranged in series, and capable of operating under the most demanding conditions. If they wanted to produce the uranium by a diffusion process, they would need an even greater number of other machines, equally difficult to manufacture and operate. If they followed Saddam Hussein's example, they could try building a series of giant electromagnets, capable of bending a stream of electrically charged particles--a no less daunting challenge. For any of these, they would also need a steady supply of natural uranium and a

specialized plant to convert it to a gaseous form for processing. Who would sell these things to would be nuclear terrorists?

The answer is: nobody. The world's nuclear-equipment makers are organized into a cooperative group that exists precisely to stop items like these from getting into unauthorized hands. Nor could a buyer disguise the destination and send materials through obliging places like Dubai (as Iran does with its hot

cargoes) or Malta (favored by Libya's smugglers). The equipment is so specialized, and the suppliers so few, that a forest of red flags would go up. And even if the equipment could be bought, it would have to be operated in a place that the United States could not find. If manufacturing bombgrade uranium is out of the picture, what about making plutonium, a much smaller quantity of which is required to form a critical mass (less than fourteen pounds was needed to destroy Nagasaki in 1945)? There is, however, an inconvenient fact about plutonium, which is that you need a reactor to make enough of it for a workable bomb. Could terrorists buy one? The Russians are selling a reactor to Iran, but Moscow tends to put terrorist groups in the same category as Chechens. The Chinese are selling reactors to Pakistan, but Beijing, too, is not fond of terrorists. India and Pakistan can both build reactors on their own, but, for now, these countries are lined up with the U.S. Finally, smuggling a reactor would be no easier than buying one. Reactor parts are unique, so manufacturers would not be fooled by phony purchase orders. Even if terrorists somehow got hold ofa reactor, they would need a special, shielded chemical plant to chop up its radioactive fuel, dissolve it in acid, and then extract the plutonium from the acid. No one would sell them a plutonium extraction plant, either. It is worth remembering that Saddam Hussein tried the reactor road in the 1970's. He bought one from France--Jacques Chirac, in his younger days, was a key facilitator of the deal--hoping it would propellraq into the nuclear club. But the reactor's fuel was sabotaged in a French warehouse, the person who was supposed to certifY its quality was murdered in a Paris hotel, and when the reactor was finally ready to operate, a squadron oflsraeli fighter-bombers blew it apart. Asimilar fate would undoubtedly await any group that tried to follow Saddam's method today.

IF MAKING nuclear-bomb fuel is a no-go, why not just steal it, or buy it on the black market? Consider plutonium. There are hundreds of reactors in the world, and they crank out tons ofthe stuff every year. Surely a dedicated band of terrorists could get their hands on

some. This too is not so simple. Plutonium is only created inside reactor fuel rods, and the rods, after being irradiated, become so hot that they melt unless kept under water. They are also radioactive, which is why they have to travel submerged from the reactor to storage ponds, with the water acting as both coolant and radiation shield. And in most power reactors, the

rods are welded together into long assemblies that can be lifted only by crane. True, after the rods cool down they can be stored dry, but their radioactivity is still lethal. To prevent spent fuel rods from killing the people who come near them, they are transported in giant radiation-shielding casks that are not supposed to break open even in head-on collisions. The casks are also guarded. If terrorists managed to hijack one from a country that had reactors they would still have to take it to a plant in another country that could extract the plutonium from the rods. They would be hunted at every step of the way. Instead of fuel rods, they would be better advised to go after pure plutonium, already removed from the reactor fuel and infinitely easier to handle. This kind of plutonium is a threat only if you ingest or inhale it. Human skin blocks its radiation: a terrorist could walk around with a lump of it in his front trouser pocket and still have children. But where to get hold of it? Russia is the best bet: it has tons of plutonium in weapon-ready fmID, and the Russian nuclear-accounting system is weak. Russia also has underpaid scientists, and there is unquestionably some truth behind all the stories one hears about the smuggling that goes on in that country. But very little Russian plutonium has been in circulation, with not a single reported case of anything more than gram quantities showing up on the black market. This makes sense. Pure plutonium is used primarily for making nuclear warheads, it is in military hands, and military forces are not exactly keen to see it come back at them in somebody else's bombs. One source of pure plutonium that is not military is a new kind of reactor fuel called "mixed oxide." It is very different from the present generation of fuel because it contains weapon-ready material.

But precisely because it is weapon-ready, it is guarded and accounted for, and a terrorist group would have to win a gun battle to get close to it. Then they would probably need a crane to move it, and would have to elude or fight off their pursuers. If terrorists did procure some weapon-ready plutonium, would their problems be over? Far from it: plutonium works only in an "implosion"-type bomb, which is about ten times more difficult to build than the simple uranium bomb used at Hiroshima.


Prolif Good – A2: Terrorism (3/3)

Impact to nuke terror would be small

Mueller 99 [Karl, Assistant Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, Foreign Affairs, May/June]cn

Nuclear weapons clearly deserve the "weapons of mass destruction" designation because they can indeed destroy masses of people in a single blow. Even

so, it is worth noting that any nuclear weapons acquired by terrorist groups or rogue states, at least initially, are likely to be small. Contrary to exaggerated Indian and Pakistani claims, for example, independent analyses of their May 1998 nuclear tests have

concluded that the yields were Hiroshima-sized or smaller. Such bombs can cause horrible though not apocalyptic damage. Some 70,000 people died in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. People three miles away from the blast sites received only superficial wounds even when fully

exposed, and those inside bomb shelters at Nagasaki were uninjured even though they were close to ground zero. Some buildings of

steel and concrete survived, even when they were close to the blast centers, and most municipal services were restored within days. A Hiroshima sized bomb exploded in a more fire-resistant modem city would likely be considerably less devastating.

Used against well prepared, dug-in, and dispersed troops, a small bomb might actually cause only limited damage. If a single such bomb or even a few of them were to fall into dangerous hands, therefore, it would be terrible, though it would hardly threaten the end of civilization.


Prolif Good – A2: Unstable Rivalries

No region or rivalry is too unstable for deterrence to fail – more nukes mean bitterness doesn’t translate into war


In what ways may the actions and interactions of new nuclear states differ from those of old nuclear powers?

First, new nuclear states may come in hostile pairs and share a common border. Where states are bitter enemies one may

fear that they will be unable to resist using their nuclear weapons against each other. This is a worry about the future that the past does not disclose. The Soviet Union and the United States, and the Soviet Union and China, were hostile enough: and the latter pair shared a long border. Nuclear weapons caused China and the Soviet Union to deal cautiously with each other. But bitterness among some potential nuclear states, so it is said, exceeds that felt by the old ones. Playing down the bitterness sometimes felt by the United States, the Soviet Union, and China requires a creative reading of history. Moreover, those who believe

that bitterness causes wars assume a close association that is seldom found between bitterness among nations

and their willingness to run high risks.

Empirically, introduction of nukes only stabilizes hostile pairs

Rousseau 2k [David, Professor of Political Science at Albany, "PROLIFERATION MODULE," http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/polisci/psciI50/modules/pro/lecturel.htm. accessed 8/4/02]cn

History has demonstrated that only states facing a hostile external environment will be willing to spend the billions and billions of dollars necessary to

acquire nuclear weapons. However, the existence of a enduring and hostile rival does not pose a real danger for two

reasons. First, history shows that injecting nuclear weapons into long term hostile situations does not result in war. The United States allowed the Soviets to get nuclear weapons in 1949 without initiating violence. The Soviets allowed the British to get nuclear weapons in 1952 without initiating violence. The Soviets allowed France to get nuclear

weapons in 1960 without initiating violence. The United States and Soviet Union allowed the Chinese to get nuclear weapons in 1964

without initiating violence. The Chinese allowed India to get nuclear weapons in 1974 without initiating violence. The Indians allow Pakistan to get nuclear weapons in the 1990's without initiating violence.

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