Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Pointer/Gordon/Watts/Samuels Turkey Neg


Deterrence and the reduction of nuclear threat is separate to the nuclear arms race. The aff is a technical fix to a political problem



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Deterrence and the reduction of nuclear threat is separate to the nuclear arms race. The aff is a technical fix to a political problem.

Schwartz and Derber 90 (William and Charles, Professors at Yeshiva U and Boston College, Nuclear Seduction) PR

After four decades of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, no one has found a way to sharpen the weapon to eliminate or even greatly reduce this risk. That much is well known. In a 1984 survey 90 percent of Americans agreed that "we and the Soviets now have enough nuclear weapons to blow up each other several times over"; 89 percent said that "there can be no winner in an all-out nuclear war; both the U.S. and the Soviet Union would be completely destroyed"; 71 percent believed that "there is no defense in a nuclear war"; and 83 percent thought that "a limited nuclear war is nonsense."[11] McGeorge Bundy coined the term "existential deterrence" to describe the implications of these basic nuclear realities. He observes that the "terrible and unavoidable uncertainties in any recourse to nuclear war" invalidate all strategies based on specific weapons and scenarios. [ 12] All that matters is the possibility of uncontrolled escalation once the nuclear shooting begins. No one knows the likelihood of escalation or how to prevent it. So real political leaders, as opposed to abstract models of nuclear strategists, concern themselves only with the gross fact that catastrophic escalation could occur—that is all that they really know. The whole complex labyrinth of nuclear hardware and the doctrines governing its use thus collapse to a single easily understood fact: each side has "large numbers of thermonuclear weapons that could be used against the opponent, even after the strongest possible preemptive attack." This reality is "essentially unaffected by any changes [in weapon deployments] except those that might truly challenge the overall survivability of the forces on one side or the other."[13]The remote likelihood of such a challenge (see Chapter 2) makes deterrence inherent in the existence of the weapons. If the strength of deterrence—the main force preventing nuclear war—is existential and thus relatively independent of the arms race, then logically the risk of nuclear war should be also. Like most nuclear doves, however, Bundy is well known for his opposition to "the competition in weapons systems," which, he dramatically writes, "is now itself becoming the largest single threat to peace." Similarly, George Kennan writes that "today we have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding"; that "the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented"; and that "the relative size of the arsenals has no serious meaning." But Kennan too looks to these "redundant" and "useless" weapons for solutions to the nuclear problem, most dramatically with his well-known advocacy of a mutual 50 percent across-the-board cut in superpower nuclear arsenals.[14] Yet if this "modest proposal" were ever carried out, could Kennan claim that deterrence and the risks of war had been fundamentally altered—rooted as they are in a "redundancy of grotesque dimensions" that even a 50 percent cut would hardly begin to undo? The right, the center, and the left seem equally misguided in attaching great significance to which nuclear weapons are deployed or destroyed by the superpowers. Because no realistic changes in the pace, balance, or even direction of the arms race can alter the basic conditions of our nuclear existence, they should make little difference to the incentives to start nuclear war, the damage we can expect should a war occur, or the division of international political power. Even major steps by the superpowers to rearm (including Star Wars) or to disarm (including the nuclear freeze or large cuts in nuclear arsenals) would leave the nuclear problem essentially unchanged, as we argue in more detail in succeeding chapters. The common tendency to identify the problem of nuclear war with the nuclear arms race is a logical fallacy that dangerously distorts nuclear politics by promoting technical fixes to what is overwhelmingly a political problem.

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Witthdrawals of nuclear weapon systems will NOT lessen the nuclear danger, and will perpetuate the capitalist system because it will inject money back into the privately owned companies.

Schwartz and Derber 90 (William and Charles, Professors at Yeshiva U and Boston College, Nuclear Seduction) PR
Activists, then, should not try to stop U.S. nuclear weapons systems or promote negotiated arms control treaties on the dubious grounds that the nuclear danger will then recede or on the equally dubious grounds that money will automatically be saved, or if it is saved that it will necessarily go toward better purposes. If those better purposes are to feed children, clean the air and water, or build clinics, they should be pursued directly with whatever money can be found—including the funds now wasted on superflous missiles and bombers when such funds can be clearly redirected. To take one example of a promising initiative, in 1987 the Soviet Union was among 148 countries represented at a United Nations conference on the relation between disarmament and international economic development. The Soviets proposed an international fund to channel money saved on future arms control agreements to Third World needs. Though even the sharp reductions in strategic nuclear weapons contemplated in the START negotiations would probably not lead to much if any savings (as we discuss later), at least the Soviets supported the principle that the superpowers should actually beat their nuclear swords into ploughshares. (The United States, in contrast, boycotted the U.N. conference. The United States has long insisted that arms control and economic development should not be linked and has refused to commit any money saved by future arms treaties to Third World programs.)[27] Savings from either the nuclear or conventional parts of the military budget would not necessarily benefit the macroeconomy any more than they would automatically go toward social needs at home or abroad. There is much debate about the economic purposes and consequences of high military spending. Some (on both the right and the left) regard it as a motor of the economy—military Keynesianism—providing a politically acceptable way for a capitalist state to inject huge sums of capital into privately owned high-technology companies and providing a guaranteed market for tremendous industrial output that might otherwise go unsold in an American economy that is steadily losing ground to Japanese, European, and even Third World producers. In this view, the arms race is driven largely by broad corporate interests, shared perhaps by workers and communities that depend on corporate prosperity for their own livelihood. Others claim that high military spending primarily benefits only the few giant corporations that build the weapons and is in fact ruining the U.S. economy—reducing employment by emphasizing capital intensive high technology and eroding competitiveness by draining from the civilian sector the bulk of the nation's scientific and technical brainpower and its research and development capital. But whatever the interests behind high military spending and whatever economic benefits or damage it brings, one must be skeptical of all predictions about how a smaller military budget would ultimately affect overall employment, inflation, and other macroeconomic indices.




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