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Contents
Contents ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2 AIDS/HIV Extinction ........................................................................................................................................................ 4 AIDS/HIV Mutations ........................................................................................................................................................ 5 ANWR Drilling Bad -- Species ............................................................................................................................................ 6 Asian Wars Go Nuclear ........................................................................................................................................................ 7 Biopower -- Extinction ......................................................................................................................................................... 8 Capitalism Bad War/All Impacts ....................................................................................................................................... 9 Civil-Military Relations Good Bacevich & Kohn ........................................................................................................... 10 Constitution Good Outweighs Everything ....................................................................................................................... 11 Constitution Good Outweighs Everything ....................................................................................................................... 12 Climate Change/Warming -- Brandenberg ......................................................................................................................... 13 Deference (Judicial) Good -- Readiness ............................................................................................................................. 14 Deference (Judicial) Bad -- Extinction ............................................................................................................................... 15 Deforestation Bad ............................................................................................................................................................... 16 Democracy Good Diamond ............................................................................................................................................. 17 Democracy Good/Democide -- Rummel ............................................................................................................................ 18 Economy Mead, Lewis, Beardon ..................................................................................................................................... 19 Economy Zey/Ecxtinction ............................................................................................................................................... 20 Food Prices Increase Kills a Billion Tampa Tribune .................................................................................................... 20 Growth Bad War.............................................................................................................................................................. 21 Growth Bad War.............................................................................................................................................................. 22 Growth Bad -- Upswing Impact Magnifier......................................................................................................................... 23 Growth Bad -- Upswing Impact Magnifier......................................................................................................................... 24 Growth Good -- Growth Stops War.................................................................................................................................... 25 Growth Good -- Growth Saves Environment ..................................................................................................................... 26 Ethnic Conflict -- Shehadi .................................................................................................................................................. 28 Famine -- Extinction ........................................................................................................................................................... 29 Freedom Petro ................................................................................................................................................................. 30 Genocide Impacts -- Gurr ................................................................................................................................................... 31 Hedgemony Bad Extinction -- Chomsky ......................................................................................................................... 32 Hegemony Bad War Layne .......................................................................................................................................... 33 Hegemony Good Khalilzad ............................................................................................................................................. 35 Unipolarity Good: Global War (Thayer) ............................................................................................................................ 36 Hegemony Good -- Global War (Thayer)........................................................................................................................... 37 Hegemony Good: Global War (Ferguson).......................................................................................................................... 38 Unipolarity Good: Extinction (Smil) .................................................................................................................................. 39 Human Rights Hoffman................................................................................................................................................... 40 India Pakistan Nabi.......................................................................................................................................................... 41 India Pakistan Washington Times ................................................................................................................................... 41 Individual Rights -- Kateb .................................................................................................................................................. 42 Iran Proliferation Impacts Byman + Terminal Impact ..................................................................................................... 43 Iran Proliferation Impacts Byman + Terminal Impact ..................................................................................................... 44 Iran Proliferation Impacts Sokolsky ................................................................................................................................ 45 Iran Proliferation Schoenfeld ........................................................................................................................................... 46 Israel Preemption Of Iran Nuclear War ........................................................................................................................... 48 Iran Strikes Bad World War III ....................................................................................................................................... 49 Iran Strikes Bad World War III ....................................................................................................................................... 50 Japan Rearm Impacts -- Economy ...................................................................................................................................... 52 Japan Rearm Impacts -- Iran ............................................................................................................................................... 53 Japan Rearm Impacts North Korea .................................................................................................................................. 54 Japan Rearm Impacts North Korea .................................................................................................................................. 55 2
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Japan Rearm Impacts Nuclear War ................................................................................................................................. 56 Japan Rearmament Impacts Russian Aggression............................................................................................................. 57 Japan Rearmament Impacts Russian Aggression............................................................................................................. 58 Japan Rearmament Impacts -- Taiwan................................................................................................................................ 59 Japan Rearmament Impacts -- Terrorism............................................................................................................................ 60 Korean Proliferation Impacts .............................................................................................................................................. 61 Korean War Impacts Africa News ................................................................................................................................... 62 Korean War Impacts Economy ........................................................................................................................................ 63 Middle East War -- Steinbach............................................................................................................................................. 64 Middle East War -- Evron................................................................................................................................................... 64 Middle East War -- Blank ................................................................................................................................................... 65 Militarism -- Reardon ......................................................................................................................................................... 66 Minority Rights Buckley ................................................................................................................................................. 67 Morality Watson .............................................................................................................................................................. 68 Morality -- Gewirth ............................................................................................................................................................ 68 NATO Good ....................................................................................................................................................................... 69 Nuclear Power Good -- Lovelock ....................................................................................................................................... 71 Oil Wars Extinction ......................................................................................................................................................... 72 Ozone Destruction Bad -- Extinction.................................................................................................................................. 73 Patriarchy Reardon ......................................................................................................................................................... 74 Protectionism Bad Extinction .......................................................................................................................................... 76 Peace Process Generally Good ........................................................................................................................................ 78 Peace Process Generally Good ........................................................................................................................................ 79 Poverty Gilligan............................................................................................................................................................... 80 Privacy Schoenman ......................................................................................................................................................... 81 Proliferation Utgoff ......................................................................................................................................................... 82 Proliferation End of the World ........................................................................................................................................ 82 Proliferation -- Miller ......................................................................................................................................................... 83 Racism -- Memmi ............................................................................................................................................................... 84 Readiness -- Key To Hegemony ......................................................................................................................................... 85 Readiness Stops Global War ........................................................................................................................................... 86 Russian Economy -- David ................................................................................................................................................. 87 Saudi Arabian Economy -- David....................................................................................................................................... 88 Saudi Arabian Civil War -- Pollack .................................................................................................................................... 90 Separation of Powers Good War/Redish .......................................................................................................................... 91 Species Loss Extinction ................................................................................................................................................... 92 Space Militarization Bad Robb ........................................................................................................................................ 93 Statism Genocide & War ................................................................................................................................................. 94 Taiwan War Impacts Hsuing & Straits Times ................................................................................................................. 95 Terrorism (Nuclear) Easterbrook, Amhed, Haas ............................................................................................................. 96 Terrorism (Nuclear) Zedillo, Alexander .......................................................................................................................... 97 Terrorism (Nuclear) Zedillo, Alexander .......................................................................................................................... 98 Terrorism (Bioterrorism) Steinbrenner & Ochs ............................................................................................................... 99 U.S.-Japan Alliance Good General War ........................................................................................................................ 100 Viruses Toronto Star ...................................................................................................................................................... 101 Viruses Franz ................................................................................................................................................................. 101 Viruses Ryan ................................................................................................................................................................. 102 Water Wars Nuclear War............................................................................................................................................... 103
Every age has its killer. But Aids is without precedent. It is comparable only to the Black Death of the Middle Ages in the terror it evokes and the graves it fills. But unlike the plague, Aids does not come at a time of scientific innocence: It flies in the face of space exploration, the manipulation of genes and the mapping of the human genome. The Black Death - the plague, today easily cured by antibiotics and prevented by vaccines killed a full 40 million Europeans, a quarter of the population of Europe, between 1347 and 1352. But it was a death that could be avoided by the simple expedient of changing addresses and whose vector could be seen and exterminated. With Aids, the vector is humanity itself, the nice person in the next seat in the bus. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Every human being who expresses the innate desire to preserve the human genetic pool through the natural mechanism of reproduction is potentially at risk. And whereas death by plague was a merciful five days of agony, HIV is not satisfied until years of stigma and excruciating torture have been wrought on its victim. The plague toll of tens of millions in two decades was a veritable holocaust, but it will be nothing compared to the viral holocaust: So far, 18.8 million people are already dead; 43.3 million infected worldwide (24.5 million of them Africans) carry the seeds of their inevitable demise unwilling participants in a March of the Damned. Last year alone, 2.8 million lives went down the drain, 85 per cent of them African; as a matter of fact, 6,000 Africans will die today. The daily toll in Kenya is 500. There has never been fought a war on these shores that was so wanton in its thirst for human blood. During the First World War, more than a million lives were lost at the Battle of the Somme alone, setting a trend that was to become fairly common, in which generals would use soldiers as cannon fodder; the lives of 10 million young men were sacrificed for a cause that was judged to be more worthwhile than the dreams - even the mere living out of a lifetime - of a generation. But there was proffered an explanation: It was the honour of bathing a battlefield with young blood, patriotism or simply racial pride. Aids, on the other hand, is a holocaust without even a lame or bigoted justification. It is simply a waste. It is death contracted not in the battlefield but in bedrooms and other venues of furtive intimacy. It is difficult to remember any time in history when the survival of the human race was so hopelessly in jeopardy.
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PlanetDebate20078HarvardImpacts
Jonathan S. Landay, National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, 2000 [Top Administration Officials Warn Stakes for U.S. Are High in Asian Conflicts, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, March 10, p. Lexis]
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea, or India and Pakistan are spoiling to fight. But even a minor miscalculation by any of them could destabilize Asia, jolt the global economy and even start a nuclear war. India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear weapons, and North Korea may have a few, too. Asia lacks the kinds of organizations, negotiations and diplomatic relationships that helped keep an uneasy peace for five decades in Cold War Europe. Nowhere else on Earth are the stakes as high and relationships so fragile, said Bates Gill, director of northeast Asian policy studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
We see the convergence of great power interest overlaid with lingering confrontations with no institutionalized security mechanism in place. There are elements for potential disaster. In an effort to cool the regions tempers, President Clinton, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger all will hopscotch Asias capitals this month. For America, the stakes could hardly be higher. There are 100,000 U.S. troops in Asia committed to defending Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and the United States would instantly become embroiled if Beijing moved against Taiwan or North Korea attacked South Korea. While Washington has no defense commitments to either India or Pakistan, a conflict between the two could end the global taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international nonproliferation regime. In addition, globalization has made a stable Asia _ with its massive markets, cheap labor, exports and resources _ indispensable to the U.S. economy. Numerous U.S. firms and millions of American jobs depend on trade with Asia that totaled $600 billion last year, according to the Commerce Department.
PlanetDebate20078HarvardImpacts
explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as the reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with
the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart from an economism which simply ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which more later), such an "explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental irrationality of late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the part of "big capital." While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by its incorporation into the politics of Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the inter-imperialist world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence, La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of genocide is just so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of resolve." It is quite true that capital has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been routinely wielded for more than a generation by the organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of "democracy" in the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own imperialist aims in the Middle-East). And just as surely the ideology of antifascism and its functionality for capital must be exposed by revolutionaries. Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism, but which constitutes a denial of the most lethal tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves as a screen behind which the death-world wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is the
Richard H. Kohn is Professor of History and Chair, Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY, November 12, 2005, p. http://web.mit.edu/ssp/seminars/wed_archives_05fall/kohn.htm.
One the oldest fears in civil military relations is militarism, the displacement of civilian government by the military and the imposition of military values, perspectives and ideals on the rest of society. This fear is rooted in the fear of standing armies and embedded in the US Constitution. The word militarism was invented by European leftist opponents of their government in the eighteen sixties. Militarism came to be seen in the United States as a threat to freedom and democracy. The fear of militarism was articulated in academia and Congress in the nineteen thirties. In the United States, this fear was expressed primarily toward internal problems, but after World War I, it was also seen as having caused German aggression and thus as a force that created foreign threats.
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MORAL OBLIGATION TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION Daryl Levinson, professor of law at University of Virginia, Spring 2000 UC Law Review
Extending a majority rule analysis of optimal deterrence to constitutional torts requires some explanation, for we do not usually think of violations of constitutional rights in terms of cost-benefit
Quite the opposite, constitutional rights are most commonly conceived as deontological sideconstraints that trump even utility-maximizing government action. Alternatively, constitutional rights might be understood as serving rule-utilitarian purposes. If the disutility to victims of constitutional violations often exceeds the social benefits derived from the rightsviolating activity, or if rights violations create long-term costs that outweigh short-term social benefits, then constitutional rights can be justified as tending to maximize global utility, even though this requires local utility-decreasing steps. Both the deontological and ruleutilitarian descriptions imply that the optimal level of constitutional violations is zero; that is, society would be better off, by whatever measure, if constitutional rights were never violated.
analysis and efficiency.
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The world goes on its merry way and fossil fuel use continues to power it. Rather than making painful or politically difficult choices such as inventing in fusion or enacting a rigorous plan of conserving, the industrial world chooses to muddle through the temperature climb. Lets imagine that America and Europe are too worried about economic dislocation to change course. The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with global warming that puts more catalytic ice crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations heartlands. The seas rise, the tropics roast but the media networks no longer cover it. The Amazon rainforest becomes the Amazon desert. Oxygen levels fall, but profits rise for those who can provide it in bottles. An equatorial high pressure zone forms, forcing drought in central Africa and Brazil, the Nile dries up and the monsoons fall. Then inevitably, at some unlucky point in time, a major unexpected event occursa major volcanic eruption, a sudden and dramatic shift in ocean circulation or a large asteroid impact (those who think freakish accidents do not occur have paid little attention to life on Mars), or a nuclear war that starts between Pakistan and India and escalates to involve China and Russia Suddenly, the gradual climb in global temperatures goes on a mad excursion as the oceans warm and release large amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide from their lower depths into the atmosphere. Oxygen levels go down as oxygen replaces lost oceanic carbon dioxide. Asthma cases double and then double again. Now a third of the world fears breathing. As the oceans dump carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect increases, which further warms the oceans, causing them to dump even more carbon. Because of the heat, plants die and burn in enormous fires which release more carbon dioxide, and the oceans evaporate, adding more water vapor to the greenhouse. Soon, we are in what is termed a runaway greenhouse effect, as happened to Venus eons ago. The last two surviving scientists inevitably argue, one telling the other, See, I told you the missing sink was in the ocean! Earth, as we know it, dies. After this Venusian excursion in temperatures, the oxygen disappears into the soil, the oceans evaporate and are lost and the dead Earth loses its ozone layer completely. Earth is too far from the Sun for it to be a second Venus for long. Its atmosphere is slowly lost as is its waterbecause of the ultraviolet bombardment breaking up all the molecules apart from carbon dioxide. As the atmosphere becomes thin, the Earth becomes colder. For a short while temperatures are nearly normal, but the ultraviolet sears any life that tries to make a comeback. The carbon dioxide thins out to form a thin veneer with a few wispy clouds and dust devils. Earth becomes the second Mars red, desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.
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Michael H. Gilbert, Lieutenant Colonel, US Air Force, USAFA Journal of Legal Studies, 1997 / 1998 (8 USAFA J. Leg. Stud. 197) Today, the military institution stands as a force to be reckoned with by government leaders in the formation of national and military policy and strategy. Its size and penetration into every aspect of American life since the 1950s have made the military an unexpected influence over the nation's domestic and foreign policies. As an institution, the military wields pervasive influence that can thwart effective oversight by traditional legislative and bureaucratic processes normally relied upon by the legislative and executive branches. The federal judiciary contributes to the military confidence of their authority by being unwilling to review cases presenting issues challenging military authority and control. Were the judiciary willing to pierce the seemingly impenetrable military shell, the military might not possess the same confidence. Reviewing the path taken by the Supreme Court to arrive at this point will illuminate the issue at hand.
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Thomas Homer-Dixon, political scientist & population researcher, THE UPSIDE OF DOWN: CATASTROPHE, CREATIVITY, AND THE RENEWAL OF CIVILIZATION, 2006, p. 150 In Haiti, forest and soil loss contributes to a relentless economic crisis that erodes all public institutions, encourages pervasive corruption, and helps sustain vicious fighting between political factions; as criminal violence and kidnappings for ransom have soared, people try to escape the country any way they can sometimes on boats as illegal refugees to the United States. In the Philippines, cropland and forest degradation in the country's mountainous interior zones causes chronic poverty that's exploited by a persistent Communist insurgency.' In Rwanda, land shortages resulting from population growth and soil degradation were a major underlying reason for the bitter hatreds and violence that led to the horror of the 1994 genocide. In the Darfur region of the Sudan, population pressure, land scarcity, and drought have encouraged attacks by Arab nomads and herdsman on black farming communities, producing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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participation of middle and lower classes in the determination of power holders and policy making, then there have been many democracies throughout history. And whether considering the classical Greek democracies, the forest democracies of medieval Switzerland, or modern democracies, they did or do not fight each other (depending on how war and democracy is defined, some might prefer to say that they rarely fought or fight each other).5 Moreover, once those states that had been mortal enemies, that had frequently gone to war (as have France and Germany in recent centuries), became democratic, war ceased between them.6 Paradigmatic of this is Western Europe since 1945. The cauldron of our most disastrous wars for many centuries, in 1945 one would not find an expert so foolhardy as to predict not only forty-five years of peace, but that at the end of that time there would be a European community with central government institutions, moves toward a joint European military force by France and Germany, and zero expectation of violence between any of these formerly hostile states. Yet such has happened. All because they are all democracies. Even among primitive tribes, it seems, where Power is divided and limited, war is less likely.7 Were all to be said about absolute and arbitrary Power is that it causes war and the attendant slaughter of the young and most capable of our species, this would be enough. But much worse, as the case studies in this book will more than attest, even without the excuse of combat
Power also massacres in cold blood those helpless people it controls. Several times more of them. Consider table 1.2 and figure 1.1, the list and its graph of this century's megamurderers--those states killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1,000,000 or more men, women, and children. These fifteen megamurderers have wiped out over 151,000,000 people, almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle-dead for all this century's international and civil wars up to 1987.8 The most absolute Power, that is the communist U.S.S.R., China and preceding Mao guerrillas, Khmer
Rouge Cambodia, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, as well fascist Nazi Germany, account for near 128,000,000 of them, or 84 percent. Table 1.2 also shows the annual percentage democide rate (the percent of its population that a regime murders per year) for each megamurderer and figure 1.1 graphically overlays the plot of this on the total murdered. However, such massive megamurderers
as the Soviet Union and communist China had huge populations with a resulting small annual democide rate. For their populations as a whole some less than megamurderers were far more lethal. Table 1.3 lists the fifteen most lethal regimes and figure 1.2 bar graphs them. As can be seen, no other megamurderer comes even close to the lethality of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during 1975 through 1978. As described in Chapter 9 of Death By Government, in less than four years of governing they exterminated over 31 percent of their men, women, and children; the odds of any Cambodian surviving these four long years was only about 2.2 to 1. Then there are the kilomurderers, or those states that have killed innocents by the tens or hundreds
of thousands, such as the top five listed in table 1.2: China Warlords (1917-1949), Atatrk's Turkey (1919-1923), the United Kingdom (primarily due to the 1914-1919 food blockade of the Central Powers in and after World War I, and the 1940-45 indiscriminate bombing of German cities), Portugal (1926-1982), and Indonesia (1965-87). Some lesser kilomurderers were communist Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Rumania, and Ethiopia, as well as authoritarian Hungary, Burundi, Croatia (1941-44), Czechoslovakia (1945-46), Indonesia, Iraq, Russia, and Uganda. For its indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese civilians, the United States must also be added to this list (see Statistics of Democide).
These and other kilomurderers add almost 15,000,000 people killed to the democide for this century, as shown in table 1.2. Of course, saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in reality
people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo and megamurders of our century and we must not lose their identity under the abstraction of "state," "regime," "government," or
. Stalin, by far, leads the list. He ordered the death of millions, knowingly set in train events leading to the death of millions of others, and as the ultimate dictator, was responsible for the death of still millions more killed by his henchman. It may come as a surprise to find Mao Tse-tung is next in line as this century's greatest murderers, but this would only be because the full extent of communist killing in China under his leadership has not been widely known in the West. Hitler and Pol Pot are of course among these bloody tyrants and as for the others whose names may appear strange, their megamurders are described in detail in Death By Governments. The monstrous bloodletting of at least
"communist." Table 1.4 lists those men most notorious and singularly responsible for the megamurders of this century
these nine men should be entered into a Hall of Infamy. Their names should forever warn us of the deadly potential of Power. The major and better known episodes and institutions for which these and other murderers were responsible are listed in table 1.5. Far above all is gulag--the Soviet
In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; or buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or foreigners.
slave--labor system created by Lenin and built up under Stalin. In some 70 years it likely chewed up almost 40,000,000 lives, over twice as many as probably died in some 400 years of the African slave trade, from capture to sale in an Arab, Oriental, or New World market.9
The dead even could conceivably be near 360,000,000 people. This is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power and not germs. The souls of this monstrous pile of dead have created a new land, a new nation, among us. Let in Shakespeare's word's "This Land be calle'd The field of Golgotha, and dead men's Skulls"10 As clear from the megamurderers listed in table 1.2 alone, this land is multicultural and multiethnic, its inhabitants believed in all the world's religions and spoke all its languages. Its demography has yet to be precisely measured and only two rough censuses, the most recent constituting Death By Government, have so far been taken.11 But this last census does allow us to rank this land of the murdered sixth in population among the nations of the living, as shown in figure 1.3. his census and the estimates of explorers also enables us to estimate Golgotha's racial and ethnic composition, which is pictured in figure 1.4. Chinese make up 30 percent of its souls, with Russians next at 24 percent. Then there is a much lower percentage of Ukrainians (6 percent), Germans (4 percent), Poles (4 percent), and Cambodians (2 percent). The remaining 30 percent is made up of a diverse Koreans, Mexicans, Pakistanis (largely ethnic Bengalis and Hindus), Turk subjects, and Vietnamese. But still, is Golgotha dominantly Asian? European? What region did most of its dead souls come from. Figure 1.5 displays two different ways of looking at this: the percent of Golgothians from a particular region and also the percent of a region's 1987 population in Golgotha. While most, some 40 percent, are from Asia and the Middle East, the highest proportion of any region's population in Golgotha, around 22 percent, is from the territory of the former Soviet Union. In other words, Asians are the largest group while the former Soviet Union has contributed the most of its population. Note that 18 percent of Golgothians are former Europeans, including those from all of Eastern Europe except the former USSR; Europe has contributed 6 percent of its population to this land of the murdered. So much for Golgotha and a summary overview of its statistics. As I already have made clear, Golgotha owes its existence to 12 Power. I can now be more specific about this. Table 1.6 summarizes the most prudent democide results and contrasts them to this century's battle-dead. Figure 1.6 gives a bar chart of these totals. Note immediately in the figure that the human cost of democide is far greater than war for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, while although for democracies they suffer fewer battle-dead than
Putting the human cost of war and democide together, Power has killed over 203,000,000 people in this century In each case, as the arbitrary power of a regime increases massively, that is, as we move from democratic through authoritarian to totalitarian regimes, the amount of killing jumps by huge multiples.
other regimes, this total is still greater than democratic domestic and foreign democide. In evaluating the battle-dead for democracies keep in mind that most of these dead were the result of wars that democracies fought against authoritarian or totalitarian aggression, particularly World War I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars.13
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Walter Russell, Mead, Senior Fellow Council on Foreign Relations, NEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Summer, 1992, p. 30 The failure to develop an international system to hedge against the possibility of worldwide depression- will open their eyes to their folly. Hundreds of millions-billions-of people around the world have pinned their hopes on the international market economy. They and their leaders have embraced market principles-and drawn closer to the West-because they believe that our system can work for them. But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates, or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia. China. India-these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the 1930's.
Chris Lewis, growth skeptic concedes, 1998 [The Coming Age of Scarcity] Most critics would argue, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within this collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in mass death, suffering, and even regional nuclear wars. If First World countries choose military
confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass death and genocide on a global scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison.
However, these neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the complex, economic and trading networks and squander material, biological, and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to support the earths 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of global civilization.
Liutenant Colonel Bearden, 2000 (Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, 2000, The Unnecessary Energy Crisis: How We Can Solve It, 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BigMedicine/message/642) Bluntly, we foresee these factors - and others { } not covered - converging to a catastrophic collapse of the world economy in about eight years. As the collapse of the Western economies nears, one may expect catastrophic stress on the 160 developing nations as the developed nations are forced to dramatically curtail orders. International Strategic Threat Aspects History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response. Or suppose a desperate China - whose long range nuclear missiles can reach the United States - attacks Taiwan. In addition to immediate responses, the mutual treaties involved in such scenarios will quickly draw other nations into the conflict, escalating it significantly. Strategic nuclear studies have shown for decades that, under such extreme stress conditions, once a few nukes are launched, adversaries and potential adversaries are then compelled to launch on perception of preparations by one's adversary. The real legacy of the MAD concept is his side of the MAD coin that is almost never discussed. Without effective defense, the only chance a nation has to survive at all, is to launch immediate full-bore pre-emptive strikes and try to take out its perceived foes as rapidly and massively as possible. As the studies showed, rapid escalation to full WMD exchange occurs, with a great percent of the WMD arsenals being unleashed . The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades. 19
A ONE DOLLAR INCREASE IN FOOD PRICES KILLS 1 BILLION Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96 On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s, world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food," he said. "Rising prices can also quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.
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Growth Bad War
GROWTH CYCLES MAKE SEVERE WARS INEVITABLE George MODELSKI, professor of political science, University of Washington; AND William R. THOMPSON, professor of political science; director, Center for the Study of International Relations; Indiana University, 1996, Leading Sectors and World Powers, pp. 20-22 Goldstein (1985, 1987, 1988, 1991a) has probably contributed more than anyone else to reviving the question of how wars and prosperity are linked. His 1988 analysis went some way in summarizing many of the arguments concerning economic long waves and war. His 1991 analysis is one of the more sophisticated empirical studies to emerge after nearly a century of controversy (spatiotemporal boundaries: world system from the mid-eighteenth to the midtwentieth centuries).3 The basic perspective that emerges from his analyses, outlined in figure 2.2, sees economic upswings increasing the probability of severe wars. Severe wars usher in a phase of stagnation from which the world economy eventually recovers leading to another resurgence of robust economic growth. Goldsteins analysis suggests that this process has gone on since at least 1495. Economic upswings create economic surpluses and full war chests. The ability to wage war makes severe wars more likely. Severe wars, in turn, consume the surpluses and war chests and put an end to the growth upswing. Decades are required to rebuild. While there may be some gains registered in terms of resource mobilization for combat purposes, these gains are offset by the losses brought about by wartime distortions and destruction. Goldstein is careful to distinguish between production and prices. Prices, in his view, are functions of war. Other things being equal, the severity of the war greatly effects the rate of war-induced inflation in other words, the greater the severity, then the higher the rate of inflation. When prices rise, real wages decline. Yet he also notes that production (production waves are said to precede war/price waves by some ten to fifteen years) is already stagnating toward the end of the upswing. This phenomenon is explained in terms of demand increases outstripping supply. As a result, inflation occurs. The lack of clarity on this issue may be traceable to the lack of specification among innovation, investment, and production. Cycles in innovation and investment are viewed as reinforcing the production long wave. Increases in innovation facilitate economic growth but growth discourages further innovation. Investment increases on the upswing but, eventually, over investment results. Investors retrench and growth slows down as a consequence. What is not exactly specified is whether innovation, investment, war, or some combination of the three processes is responsible for ending the upswing. Goldstein also raises the question of how these economic/war cycles impact the distribution of capabilities among the major powers. War severity increases capability concentration. Relative capabilities then begin a process of diffusion as they move toward equality among the major powers. Another bout of severe war ensues and the cycle repeats itself. In addition to war, differential rates of innovation and production influence relative capability standings. Presumably, all three factors share some responsibility for generating the fluctuations in capability concentration.
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Growth Bad -- Upswing Impact Magnifier
UPSWINGS ARE TWENTY-ONE TIMES DEADLIER THAN DOWNSWINGS Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor of International Relations, American University, 1988, Long Cycles, pp. 244-248 The connection between economic phase periods and wars is investigated in several ways. Levys great power wars (class 2, above) are categorized (table 11.4) according to the economic phase period in which the war mainly fell (see definitions above, p. 239). Thirty-one wars occurred during upswings, twenty-seven during downswings, and six seriously overlapped phase periods (see also table 11.5, column 7). Thus hardly any more wars occurred on the upswing phases than the downswings. But in total battle fatalities (severity), except for the 157594 upswing, there is a clear alternation between upswing and downswing phases. More severe wars occurred during upswing phases. I have tabulated six war indicators by phase period (table 11 .5).26 The first indicator (col. 3) derives from the list of fatalities (table 11.4), here expressed as an average annual fatality rate in each phase.27 This indicator is also displayed as a bar chart in figure 11.3. With the exception of the (low-fatality) upswing of 157594, fatalities follow the pattern of upswings and downswings throughout the 481-year span of the data. Up through 1892, the average annual fatality rate was six times higher on upswings than on downswings; if the twentieth century is included, it is twenty-one times higher on upswings than downswings. Categorizing the same fatality data strictly by phase period (col. 4),28 in conjunction with the method just discussed, points to sensitivities to the exact dating of turning points. Not surprisingly, the main effect is on the twentieth centurys two world wars, each overlapping one to two years into an adjacent phase. The results also show the weakest correlation to be in the period 14951620. Nonetheless, the fatality rate on upswings is still more than four times higher than on downswings for both 14951892 and 1495 1975. The greater severity of war on long wave upswings, then, is a very strong and consistent correlation.29 GROWTH CYCLES CAUSE WAR AND THE USE OF NEW, DESTRUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY Joshua S. GOLDSTEIN, Professor of International Relations, American University, 1988, Long Cycles, p. 29 Kondratieffs response to Trotskys argument was that Trotsky takes an idealist point of view.17 New markets and resources are drawn into the capitalist system not by accident, but in face of the existing economic preconditions. That is, the internal dynamics of capitalism shape the long wave, which in turn shapes the superstructural factors such as innovation and war that Trotsky called external. Specifically, Kondratieff argued that during the recession . . . an unusually large number of important discoveries and inventions in the technique of production and communication are made, which, however, are usually applied on a large scale only at the beginning of the next long upswing ([1926] 1935:111). Likewise, the most disastrous and extensive wars and revolutions occur on the upswing of the long wave (p. 111), because long-term economic expansion aggravates the international struggle for markets and raw materials while domestically sharpening the struggle over the distribution of the fruits of that economic growth ([1928] 1984:95). Wars, revolutions, and innovations are thus products, not causes, of the long wave.
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. The most important challenge for economic cooperation in the years ahead will be to keep the world economy growing at a vigorous and sustainable pace. With real economic growth the serious problems of world debt, unbalanced trade, currency disequilibrium and unemployment -- as well as the social, ethnic, racial and nationalist tensions and the violence to which they give rise -- can be contained, and progress made toward their solutions.
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Kamal Shehadi, Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, December, ETHNIC SELF DETERMINATION AND THE BREAK UP OF STATES, 1983, p. 81 This paper has argued that self-determination conflicts have direct adverse consequences on international security. As they begin to tear nuclear states apart, the likelihood of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of individuals or groups willing to use them, or to trade them to others, will reach frightening levels. This likelihood increases if a conflict over self-determination escalates into a war between two nuclear states. The Russian Federation and Ukraine may fight over the Crimea and the Donbass area; and India and Pakistan may fight over Kashmir. Ethnic conflicts may also spread both within a state and from one state to the next. This can happen in countries where more than one ethnic self-determination conflict is brewing: Russia, India and Ethiopia, for example. The conflict may also spread by contagion from one country to another if the state is weak politically and militarily and cannot contain the conflict on its doorstep. Lastly, there is a real danger that regional conflicts will erupt over national minorities and borders.
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B. Harff-Gur, Northwestern, HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AS A REMEDY FOR GENOCIDE, 1981, p. 40 One of the most enduring and abhorrent problems of the world is genocide, which is neither particular to a specific race, class, or nation, nor is it rooted in any one, ethnocentric view of the world. Prohibition of genocide and affirmation of its opposite, the value of life, are an eternal ethical verity, one whose practical implications necessarily outweigh possible theoretical objections and as such should lift it above prevailing ideologies or politics. Genocide concerns and potentially effects all people. People make up a legal system, according to Kelsen. Politics is the expression of conflict among competing groups. Those in power give the political system its character, i.e. the state. The state, according to Kelsen, is nothing but the combined will of all its people. This abstract concept of the state may at first glance appear meaningless, because in reality not all people have an equal voice in the formation of the characteristics of the state. But I am not concerned with the characteristics of the state but rather the essence of the state the people. Without a people there would be no state or legal system. With genocide eventually there will be no people. Genocide is ultimately a threat to the existence of all. True, sometimes only certain groups are targeted, as in Nazi Germany. Sometimes a large part of the total population is eradicated, as in contemporary Cambodia. Sometimes people are eliminated regardless of national origin the Christians in Roman times. Sometimes whole nations vanish the Amerindian societies after the Spanish conquest. And sometimes religious groups are persecuted the Mohammedans by the Crusaders. The culprit changes: sometimes it is a specific state, or those in power in a state; occasionally it is the winners vs. the vanquished in international conflicts; and in its crudest form the stronger against the weaker. Since virtually every social group is a potential victim, genocide is a universal concern.
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Noam Chomsky, Linguists Professor @ MIT, HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL, 2003, pp. 231-2
Throughout history it has been recognized that such steps are dangerous. By now the danger has reached the level of a threat to human survival. But as observed earlier, it is rational to proceed nonetheless on the assumptions of the prevailing value system, which are deeply rooted in existing institutions. The basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival. Hardly novel, the principle has been amply illustrated in the past half-century. For such reasons, the US has refused to join the rest of the world in reaffirming and strengthening the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to reserve space for peaceful purposes. The concern for such action, articulated in UN resolutions calling for "Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space," is motivated by widespread recognition that Washington intends to breach this barrier, so far maintained. The US was joined in its abstention in 1999 by Israel, in 2000 by Micronesia as well. As noted earlier, immediately after it was learned that the world had barely been saved from a war that might have "destroyed the Northern Hemisphere," the Bush administration effectively vetoed yet another international effort to prevent the militarization of space. For the same reasons, Washington blocked negotiations at the UN Conference on Disarmament during the sessions that opened in January 2001, rejecting the call of SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan that member states overcome their lack of "political will" and work toward a comprehensive accord to bar militarization of space. "The U.S. remains the only'one of the 66 member states to oppose launching formal negotiations on outer space," Reuters reported in February. In June, China again called for banning of weapons in outer space, but the US again blocked negotiations." Again, that makes good sense if hegemony, with its short-term benefits to elite interests, is ranked above survival in the scale of operative values, in accord with the historical standard for dominant states and other systems of concentrated power..' One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that "another world is possible," in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought, action, and institutions. Which trajectory will dominate, no one can foretell. The pattern is familiar throughout history; a crucial difference today is that the stakes are far higher. Bertrand Russell once expressed some somber thoughts about world peace: After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return . No doubt the projection is accurate on some dimension beyond our realistic contemplation. What matters is whether we can awaken ourselves from the nightmare before it becomes all-consuming, and bring a measure of peace and justice and hope to the world that is, right now, within the reach of our opportunity and our will.
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Christopher Layne, Visiting Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, 1998 [World Policy Journal, Rethinking American grand strategy: Hegemony or balance of power in the twentyfirst century? vol. 15 iss. 2, Summer, proquest]
Indochina and Bosnia demonstrate how the strategy of preponderance expands America 's frontiers of insecurity. The posited connection between security and economic interdependence requires the United States to impose order on, and control over, the international system. To do so, it must continually enlarge the geographic scope of its strategic responsibilities to maintain the security of its already established interests. As the political scientist Robert H. Johnson observes, this process becomes self-sustain- ing because each time the United States pushes its security interests outward, threats to the new security frontier will be apprehended: "Uncertainty leads to self-extension, which leads in turn to new uncertainty and further self-extension." 16 Core and periphery are interdependent strategically; however, while the core remains constant, the turbulent frontier in the periphery is constantly expanding. One does not overstate in arguing that this expansion is potentially limitless. Former na- tional security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recently has suggested, for example, that NATO expansion is just the first step toward creating an American-dominated "Trans Eurasian Security System" {TESS}, that ulti- mately will embrace Russia, China, Japan, India, and other countries-- a security struc- ture "that would span the entire {Eurasian} continent." 17 There is a suggestive parallel between late Victorian Britain and the United States today. The late- nineteenth-cenury British statesman Lord Rosebery, clearly recognized that economic interdependence could lead to strategic overextension: Our commerce is so universal and so penetrating that scarcely any question can arise in any part of the world without involving British interests. This consideration, instead of widening, rather circumscribes the field of our actions. For did we not strictly limit the principle of intervention we should always be simultaneously engaged in some forty wars. 18 Of course, it is an exaggeration to sug-gest that the strategy of preponderance will involve the United States in 40 wars simultaneously. It is not, however, an exag- geration to note that the need to defend America 's perceived interest in maintaining a security framework in which economic interdependence can flourish has become the primary post-Cold War rationale for expanding its security commitments in East Asia and in Europe. To preserve a security framework favorable to interdependence, the United States does not, in fact, intervene everywhere; however, the logic underlying the strategy of preponderance can be used to justify U.S. intervention anywhere.
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What might happen to the world if the United States turned inward? Without the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), rather than cooperating with each other, the West European nations might compete with each other for domination of East-Central Europe and the Middle East. In Western and Central Europe, Germany -- especially since unification -- would be the natural leading power. Either in cooperation or competition with Russia, Germany might seek influence over the territories located between them. German efforts are likely to be aimed at filling the vacuum, stabilizing the region, and precluding its domination by rival powers. Britain and France fear such a development. Given the strength of democracy in Germany and its preoccupation with absorbing the former East Germany, European concerns about Germany appear exaggerated. But it would be a mistake to assume that U.S. withdrawal could not, in the long run, result in the
renationalization of Germany's security policy. The same is also true of Japan. Given a U.S. withdrawal from the world, Japan would have to look after its own security and build up its military capabilities. China, Korea, and the nations of Southeast Asia already fear Japanese hegemony. Without U.S. protection, Japan is likely to increase its military capability dramatically -- to balance the growing Chinese forces and still-significant Russian forces. This could result in arms races, including the possible acquisition by Japan of nuclear weapons. Given Japanese technological prowess, to say nothing of the plutonium stockpile Japan has acquired in the development of its
nuclear power industry, it could obviously become a nuclear weapon state relatively quickly, if it should so decide. It could also build long-range missiles and carrier task forces. With the shifting balance of power among Japan, China, Russia, and potential new regional powers such
as India, Indonesia, and a united Korea could come significant risks of preventive or proeruptive war. Similarly, European competition for regional dominance could lead to major wars in Europe or East Asia. If the United States stayed out of such a war -- an unlikely prospect -- Europe or East Asia could become dominated by a hostile power. Such a development would threaten U.S. interests. A power that achieved such dominance would seek to exclude the United States from the area and threaten its interests-economic and political -- in the region. Besides, with the domination of Europe or East Asia, such a power might seek global hegemony and the United States would face another global Cold War and the risk of a world war even more catastrophic than the last. In the Persian Gulf, U.S. withdrawal is likely to lead to an intensified struggle for regional domination. Iran and Iraq have, in the past,
both sought regional hegemony. Without U.S. protection, the weak oil-rich states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) would be unlikely to retain their independence. To preclude this development, the Saudis might seek to acquire, perhaps by purchase, their own nuclear weapons. If either Iraq or Iran controlled the region that dominates the world supply of oil, it could gain a significant capability to damage the U.S. and world economies. Any country that gained hegemony would have vast economic resources at its disposal that could be used to build military capability as well as gain leverage over the United States and other oil-importing nations. Hegemony over the Persian Gulf by either Iran or Iraq would bring the rest of
the Arab Middle East under its influence and domination because of the shift in the balance of power. Israeli security problems would multiply and the peace process would be fundamentally undermined, increasing the risk of war between the Arabs and the Israelis. <continued> The extension of instability, conflict, and hostile hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Persian Gulf would harm the economy of
the United States even in the unlikely event that it was able to avoid involvement in major wars and conflicts. Higher oil prices would reduce the U.S. standard of living. Turmoil in Asia and Europe would force major economic readjustment in the United States, perhaps reducing U.S. exports and imports and jeopardizing U.S. investments in these regions. Given that total imports and exports are equal to a quarter of U.S. gross domestic product, the cost of necessary adjustments might be high. The higher level of turmoil in the world would also increase the likelihood of the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and means for their delivery. Already several rogue states such as North Korea and Iran are seeking nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. That danger would only increase if the United States withdrew from the world. The result would be a much more dangerous world in which many states possessed WMD capabilities; the likelihood of their actual use would increase accordingly. If this happened, the security of every nation in the world, including the United States, would be harmed.<continued> Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.
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increasing respect for human rights, growing democratization--is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international orders collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly. As country and
western great Ral Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important to note what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction among many states that were historical antagonists, most notably France and West Germany. Today, American
primacy helps keep a number of complicated relationships aligned--between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax Americana does reduce war's likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second, American power gives the United States the ability to spread democracy and other elements of its ideology of liberalism. Doing so is a source of much good for the countries
concerned as well as the United States because, as John Owen noted on these pages in the Spring 2006 issue, liberal democracies are more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.3 So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition, once states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of conflict is significantly reduced. This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it is because they are more open, more transparent and more likely to want to resolve things amicably in concurrence with U.S. leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for advancing the interests of the United States CONTINUES Third, along with the growth in the number of democratic states around the world has been the growth of the global economy. With its allies, the United States has labored to create an economically
liberal worldwide network characterized by free trade and commerce, respect for international property rights, and mobility of capital and labor markets. The economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order is a global public good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World. The United States created
this network not out of altruism but for the benefit and the economic well-being of America. This economic order forces American industries to be competitive, maximizes efficiencies and growth, and benefits defense as well because the size of the economy makes the defense burden manageable. Economic spin-offs foster the development of military technology, helping to ensure military prowess. Perhaps the greatest testament to the benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service diplomat and researcher at the World Bank, who started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post-independence India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now recognizes that the only way to
bring relief to desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the adoption of free market economic policies and globalization, which are facilitated through American primacy.4 As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is one of the strongest academic proponents of American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides. Fourth and finally, the United States, in seeking primacy, has been willing to use its power not only to advance its interests but to promote the welfare of people all over the globe. The United States is the earth's leading source of positive externalities for the world. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the end of the Cold War--and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed, the U.S. military is the earth's "911 force"--it serves, de facto, as the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire department. Whenever there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or tsunami, the United States assists the countries in need.
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Doctrine is to attack terrorists far from America's shores and not to wait while they use bases in other countries to plan and train for attacks against the United States itself. This requires a physical, on-the-ground presence that cannot be achieved by offshore balancing. Indeed, as Barry Posen has noted, U.S. primacy is secured because America, at present, commands the "global commons"--the oceans, the world's airspace and outer space--allowing the United States to project its power far from its borders, while denying those common avenues to its enemies. As a consequence, the costs of power projection for the United States and its allies are reduced, and the robustness of the United States' conventional and strategic deterrent capabilities is increased. This is not an advantage that should be relinquished lightly.
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http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3009996.html
So what is left? Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century. For the world is much more populous--roughly 20 times more--so friction between the world's disparate "tribes" is bound to be more frequent. Technology has transformed production; now human societies depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on supplies of fossil fuels that are known to be finite. Technology
has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it. For more than two decades, globalization--the integration of world markets for commodities, labor, and capital--has raised living standards throughout the world, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. The reversal of globalization-which a new Dark Age would produce--would certainly lead to economic stagnation and even depression. As the United States sought to protect itself after a second September 11 devastates, say, Houston or Chicago, it would inevitably become a less open society, less hospitable for foreigners seeking to work, visit, or do business. Meanwhile, as Europe's Muslim enclaves grew, Islamist extremists' infiltration of the EU would become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions over the Middle East to the breaking point. An economic meltdown in China would plunge the Communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that undermined previous Chinese empires.
Western investors would lose out and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad. The worst effects of the new Dark Age would be felt on the edges of the waning great powers. The
wealthiest ports of the global economy--from New York to Rotterdam to Shanghai--would become the targets of plunderers and pirates. With ease, terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers, aircraft carriers, and cruise liners, while Western nations frantically concentrated on making their airports secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in the Korean peninsula and Kashmir, perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East. In Latin America, wretchedly poor citizens would seek solace in Evangelical Christianity imported by U.S. religious orders. In Africa, the great plagues of AIDS and malaria would continue their deadly work. The few remaining solvent airlines would simply suspend services to many cities in these continents; who
would wish to leave their privately guarded safe havens to go there? For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If
the United States retreats from global hegemony--its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power. Be careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity--a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a not-so-new world disorder.
frontier--its critics at home and abroad must
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For hundreds of millions of people in the world today, the most important source of insecurity is not a terrorist threat but grinding, extreme poverty. More than a billion of the world's six billion people live on less than one dollar a day. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the entire human rights framework is based on the indivisibility of human rights. This includes not only civil and political rights but also economic, social, and cultural rights. The discrepancy between these human rights promises and the reality of life for more than one-sixth of the world's people must be eliminated if terrorism is to be controlled. Every human being is entitled to a standard of living that allows for their health and wellbeing, including food, shelter, and medical care. Yet more than three thousand African children die of malaria each day. Only a tiny percentage of the twenty-six million people infected with HIV/AIDS have access to the health care and medicine they need to survive. Many additional examples could be given. Many governments have adopted the Millennium Development
Goals to be achieved by 2015. The goals include targets for child and infant mortality, the availability of primary education for all children, halving the number of people without access to clean water along with many others. According to the World Bank, these goals will not be achieved, in part because the "war on terrorism" is shifting attention and resources away from long-term development issues. How can we eradicate violent challenges to the existing world order if education is not universal? Without education and peaceful exchanges between peoples, the "war on terrorism" will only succeed in creating new generations of warriors. Why is terrorism given more attention than the scourge of violence against women? Millions of women are terrorized in their daily lives, yet no "war" on violence against women is being waged. Clearly, this problem is more widespread than terrorist violence and invariably makes women insecure as well as second-class citizens in every corner of the world. If some of the resources and attention devoted to the "war on terrorism" were diverted to the eradication of world poverty or eliminating violence against women, would the world be more secure? There is no easy answer to this question, but the "war on terrorism" seems to sideline any serious discussions, along with any serious action on the other pressing causes of human insecurity. True security depends on all of the world's peoples having a stake in the international system and receiving the basic rights promised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, regardless of race, gender, religion, or any other status.
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Dr. Ghulam Nabi, INDIA-PAKISTAN SUMMIT AND THE ISSUE OF KASHMIR, July 13, 2003, p. http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2001/July/13/05.html The most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary. This apocalyptic vision is no idiosyncratic view. The Director of Central Intelligence, the Department of Defense, and world experts generally place Kashmir at the peak of their nuclear worries. Both India and Pakistan are racing like thoroughbreds to bolster their nuclear arsenals and advanced delivery vehicles. Their defense budgets are climbing despite widespread misery amongst their populations. Neither country has initialed the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or indicated an inclination to ratify an impending Fissile Material/Cut-off Convention.
Ghulam Nabi Fai, Executive Director, Kashmiri American Council, WASHINGTON TIMES, September 8, 2001, p. 1 The foreign policy of the United States in South Asia should move from the lackadaisical and distant (with India crowned with a unilateral veto power) to aggressive involvement at the vortex. The most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary.
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I have rehearsed platitudes. The justification is that these platitudes of individualism are not really platitudes. They are fundamental considerations that can wither through complacent or irritable inattention. In their withering, the way is eased for massive ruin and for the possibility of extinction. From these considerations presumably the considerations that guide our livesthe absolute impermissibility of using nuclear weapons emerges. Individualism in the form of personal and political rights bars a government whose legitimacy rests on acknowledging and protecting those rights from acting in any way that risks or causes massive ruin at home or that threatens or inflicts it abroad. The emphasis is on the death of millions of individuals. The subjects of illegitimate governmentsfor example, the people of despotic statesare covered equally by this imperative: the claim to individual rights is not an enclosed, parochial matter, but universalist in nature. Kven though their own government does not acknowledge and protect their rights, any legitimate government which has an effect on them must do so insofar as it can. (Michael Walzer has already made this point in just and Unjust Wars[ 1977].) Above all, in dealing with foreigners, a legitimate government must not inflict massive ruin. The theory of the just war and elementary notions of common humanity may disallow any policy that risks or causes massive ruin, but the underlying moral principles of the American political system independently and clearly do so. If officials of a legitimate government use nuclear weapons or threaten to do so, and whether or not their people suffer retaliation, the officials have so grossly violated the principles of the system that they must be understood as having intended its moral destruction and therefore to have created a situation in which a revolution against them is abstractly justified in behalf of the very system they have subverted. They are the real revolutionaries. Notice what underlies the pretended right to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. In the case of the United States, government rhetoric invokes freedom as the value that may be defended by nuclear weapons. Freedom is the term used to refer to all those rights to which the U.S. Constitution is devoted. Yet how can there be consistent faith in rights when masses of people become passive victims? American citizens would not be acting to defend their freedom; they would simply be enlisted in mass death. Further, how can there be consistent faith in rights when mass death is inflicted on others? The theory of rights recognizes no difference between one's fellows and foreigners so far as negative moral entitlements are concerned: everyone has an equal claim not to have rights violated, even if positive claims to increased well-being may be nationally confined. If political freedom institutionally survived the use of nuclear weapons, its essence would have been spiritually maimed, perhaps destroyed irretrievably. The users of nuclear weapons would have engaged in a revolution against freedom.
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Daniel Byman, Director, Center for Peace and Security Studies, Georgetown, THE FUTURE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT OF THE MIDDLE EAST, September 8, 2005, http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/nssp/documents/Byman%20Testimony%20for%20HASC%2009.2 8.05.pdf The biggest risk is that a nuclear weapon would make Iran more confident and aggressive. A nuclear-armed Iran would be far harder to the United States to coerce. Tehran could become more aggressive in Iraq or Afghanistan, increase pressure on the Arab kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, or bolster terrorism against Israel secure in the knowledge that it is protected from U.S. retaliation by its atomic arsenal. Pakistan appears to have used a similar calculus in its decision to escalate the Kashmir insurgency and support anti-India terrorism after it developed its nuclear program.
IRANIAN INTERVENTION IN IRAQ CAUSES CRISIS ESCALATION AND COMPLETE STATE COLLAPSE
Daniel Byman, Director, Center for Peace and Security Studies, Georgetown, THE FUTURE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT OF THE MIDDLE EAST, September 8, 2005, http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/nssp/documents/Byman%20Testimony%20for%20HASC%2009.2 8.05.pdf The future of Iraq is uncertain in the near-term let alone the long-term. Iraq could emerge as a model of democracy for a region that is one of the least free in the world. On the other hand, Iraq could also splinter into three or more fragments or collapse completely. It is even possible that a new military dictator could take power, riding into Baghdad with the support of Iraqi soldiers trained, armed, and recruited by the United States to fight the local insurgents. But even a democratic or military government is likely to be weak and would find it difficult to stop violence within its territory. In addition, Sunni-Shi'a tension will continue, with jihadists from outside the country fanning the flames of sectarian violence. Such weakness has many ramifications. Truly massive civil strife is a possibility, with the conflict generating tens of thousands of deaths and even more refugees and internally displaced people. Because many in the Arab world will blame problems in the post- Saddam Iraq on the United States, U.S. credibility would suffer, regardless of the accuracy of various allegations. Iran is also likely to maintain a strong influence in Iraq. Tehran has vital strategic interests in Iraq, reinforced by ideology, history, and close ties among the clerical establishment. Should violence grow, particularly if it leads to an all-out sectarian civil war, Iranian intervention may increase dramatically as it seeks to help its Shi'a coreligionists (particularly those among their ranks friendly to Tehran). Such an intervention in turn could prompt Iran's rivals to step up their interference in the country, thus escalating the crisis. A weak Iraq could also emerge as a major haven for anti-U. S. jihadists who use the country as a new Afghanistan and send terrorists on missions to Europe, the United States, and neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. These countries are not on the verge of civil war, but even a small number of terrorists sent could dramatically increase civil strife, harm economic growth, and make the regimes hesitant to embrace political reform. Already European counterterrorism officials are gravely concerned with the influence of veteran jihadists when they return from Iraq.
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Ousting Saddam Hussein might have more far-reaching consequences than most people imagine. The possible splintering of Iraq as a result of U.S. military action might radically destabilize the Middle East. Such an outcome would do nothing to promote American national interests. Iraq is divided into three parts: the Shiite south, the Sunni center and the Kurdish north. These three constituent parts were soldered together after World War I. Historically, they possessed little in common. During most of the last 75 years, they have been held together only through the heavy hand of the Sunni center. Hussein is very much in that Sunni dictatorial tradition. Of course, what he has done to Kuwait, and to his own people, is abominable. Nevertheless, one may argue that without the "rigor" imposed from Baghdad, Iraq might dissolve, briefly, into three independent statelets. But such statelets would probably not be independent for long. Much larger and more powerful neighbors would likely gobble each of them up soon enough. A fragmented Iraq would introduce radical instability into the Middle East political system. Upheavals would probably metastasize, with unpredictable results. None would foster American national interests.
MIDDLE EAST WAR GOES NUCLEAR
John Steinbach, DC Iraq Coalition, ISRAELI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: A THREAT TO PEACE, March 2002, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/STE203A.html Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum(and the) next war will not be conventional." Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major(if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familiar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon- for whatever reason- the deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration."
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Henry Sokolsky, Executive Director, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, POLICY REVIEW, October/November 2003, p. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3447161.html If nothing is done to shore up U.S. and allied security relations with the Gulf Coordination Council states and with Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt, Iran's acquisition of even a nuclear weapons breakout capability could prompt one or more of these states to try to acquire a nuclear weapons option of their own. Similarly, if the U.S. fails to hold Pyongyang accountable for its violation of the NPT or lets Pyongyang hold on to one or more nuclear weapons while appearing to reward its violation with a new deal--one that heeds North Korea's demand for a nonaggression pact and continued construction of the two light water reactors--South Korea and Japan (and later, perhaps, Taiwan) will have powerful cause to question Washington's security commitment to them and their own pledges to stay non-nuclear. In such a world, Washington's worries would not be limited to gauging the military capabilities of a growing number of hostile, nuclear, or near-nuclear-armed nations. In addition, it would have to gauge the reliability of a growing number of nuclear or near-nuclear friends. Washington might still be able to assemble coalitions, but with more nations like France, with nuclear options of their own, it would be much, much more iffy. The amount of international intrigue such a world would generate would also easily exceed what our diplomats and leaders could manage or track. Rather than worry about using force for fear of producing another Vietnam, Washington and its very closest allies are more likely to grow weary of working closely with others and view military options through the rosy lens of their relatively quick victories in Desert Storm, Kosovo, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Just Cause. This would be a world disturbingly similar to that of 1914 but with one big difference: It would be spring-loaded to go nuclear.
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Now, once again, the question has arisen of what forcible steps Israel might take in order to deny nuclear weapons to its enemies. This past September, Ephraim Sneh, a general in the Israeli army reserves and a leading member of the opposition Labor party, spoke publicly of the possibility that the IDF might be compelled to "deliver a conventional counterstrike or preemptive strike" against Iranian atomic facilities. This was not long after Teheran tested its Shahab-3 missile--to the yawns of the international community--and then displayed the missile in a military parade with banners draped from it reading, "Israel should be wiped from the map"--to still more yawns by the international community. Sneh was roundly criticized at home for his remarks, not because he was wrong but because, as Uzi Landau, the chairman of the Knesset's foreign-affairs and security committee, explained, "unnecessary chatter" could heighten the likelihood of Israel's being targeted for attack. But whether or not Sneh should have spoken out, the option he referred to may be less viable than it once was. Both Iran and Iraq have already taken measures--concealment, dispersion, hardening, surface-to-air defense--to ensure that the feat performed by Israel's air force in 1981, and for which it was universally condemned at the time, including by the United States, could not easily be repeated. If preemption is largely ruled out as an option, what then? To reduce its vulnerability--enemy missiles can arrive within ten minutes from firing--Israel may well be compelled to adopt a "launch-on-warning" posture for both its conventional and nuclear forces. For the purpose of considering this eventuality, we may assume that Israel has indeed developed a secure retaliatory force of the kind Tucker saw as essential to stability. Even so, however, this would not offer much reassurance. Unlike its neighbors, and unlike the U.S., Israel is a tiny country, and in a nuclear environment it would not have the luxury of waiting to assess the damage from a first strike before deciding how to respond. Thus, in any future crisis, at the first hint from satellite intelligence or some other means that a missile fusillade was being prepared from, say, Iran or Iraq, Israel, to protect its populace, would have to punch first. And it would have to strike not only at missile sites, some of which it might well miss, but at a broader range of targets--communications facilities, air bases, storage bunkers, and all other critical nodes--so as to paralyze the enemy and thus rule out the possibility of attack. These are the implications of launch-on-warning. Clearly, such a posture presents grave problems. Lacking secure second-strike forces of their own, and aware that Israel would no doubt try to hit them preemptively, Iran and Iraq would be under tremendous pressure to launch their missiles first--to "use them or lose them." In other words, what this scenario leads to is the prospect of both sides' moving to a permanent position of hairtrigger alert. It is a nightmarish prospect. The possibility that nuclear war might break out at any moment--by accident, miscalculation, or design--would inevitably place an intolerable strain on Israel's freedom of military movement, and take a no less heavy toll on civilian morale.
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IRANIAN PROLIFERATION BAD MANY REASONS Kurt M. Campbell & Michael E. OHanlon, CSIS & Brookings, 2006, HARD POWER: THE NEW POLITICS OF NATIONAL SECURITYp. 228-9 It is worth underscoring why an Iranian nuclear weapon would be such a bad thing. After all, some might say, with the worlds
five permanent UN Security Council members having the bomb, with South Asia having gone nuclear in the last decade, and with even North Koreas presumed arsenal apparently being tolerated (or at least not severely opposed) by the international community, why not simply tolerate a
already have the bomb (in Pakistan and India) which counters the notion that fairness somehow requires that we allow another country with a large Islamic population to obtain a nuclear capability. But the real arguments are threefold. First, over the past one to two decades, only the former Taliban government in Afghanistan rivaled Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Irans support for Hezbollah
and other groups has not only directly led to violence against Israel and American military forces in Saudi Arabia, but also to violence against Jewish populations in Latin America. Iran now appears to be having a hand in helping Iraqi insurgents improve the improvised explosive devices they have used with such deadly effect against coalition troops and indigenous security forces in Iraq. Given this record, there is at least some remote
possibility that Iran would give nuclear capabilities to a terrorist group under extreme circumstances. Second, and more likely, Iran could become emboldened in other aggressive ways by possession of a bomb. In particular, it could step up support for violence against Israel or US and other Western military forces in the Persian Gulf region. It could threaten its neighbors in the region, some of which govern territory or resources that Iran claims. Tehran could be emboldened by knowing that retaliation against its aggression could become more difficult if it had a nuclear deterrent. Third, Irans acquisition of a nuclear weapon would be one more serious blow against a nuclear-nonproliferation effort that has taken numerous hits of late.
Thankfully, earlier forecasts of the nonproliferation regimes demise have not come to pass. President Kennedy and other observers in the 1960s thought the world might have a couple dozen nuclear powers by now. After the Cold War ended, it again seemed likely that many states would obtain the bomb. But most European powers and Americas East Asian allies showed remarkable restraint throughout this period, as did most Arab states, and three former Soviet republics as well as South Africa actually denuclearized after the Cold War. However, India, Pakistan, and North
Korea have in recent years created a dangerous momentum that threatens to blow the lid off these past accomplishments and lead to a rampantly proliferating world. Irans acquisition of the bomb, even as the world watched the entire process unfold right before its collective eyes, would increase the risks much more. IRANIAN PROLIF POSES MORE SERIOUS THREAT OF WAR THAN NORTH KOREA LESS LIKELY TO BE DETERRED AND RESTRAINED Mark Fitzpatrick, IISS Senior Fellow for Non-Proliferation, 2006, Survival, Vol. 48, No.1, Spring, p. 69 Notwithstanding North Koreas sales activity, Iran today presents the more dangerous proliferation challenge. In one sense, this is because the process of Iranian proliferation is still in the present tense in contrast to the past tense in North Korea, where non-proliferation efforts have failed. North Korea sits on a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, but it is largely a status-quo country, seeking little more today than to keep its regime in power and its enemies at bay. Any re-emergence of Pyongyangs spent reunification dreams is held in check by the mighty deterrent forces wielded by its much more powerful neighbours. Irans religious leaders, by contrast, maintain a revolutionary fervour, regional leadership aspirations and support for liberation struggles seeking change through terrorist means. Ahmadinejads unrepentant calls for Israel to be wiped off the map underscore the existential threat a nuclear weapon in Irans hands would pose to that country. The dangers Iran presents to Western interests are complex and growing.
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when someone like Iran calls the US bluff with a formidable response potential, the US is left with little option but to launch the unthinkable - nuclear strike. There are saner voices within
the US political establishment, such as former National Security Council heads, Brent Scowcroft or even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who clearly understand the deadly logic of Bush's and the Pentagon hawks' preemptive posture. The question is whether their faction within the US power establishment today is powerful enough to do to Bush and Cheney what was done to Richard Nixon when his exercise of presidential power got out of hand. It is useful to keep in mind that even were Iran to possess nuclear missiles, the strike range would not reach the territory of the US. Israel would be the closest potential target. A US preemptive nuclear strike to defend Israel would raise the issue of what the military agreements between Tel Aviv and Washington actually encompass, a subject neither the Bush administration nor its predecessors have seen fit to inform the American public about.
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[America and Iran: At the Brink of the Abyss, Feb 20, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8577]
The U.S. has just declared that it will defend Israel militarily against Iran if needed. Presumably this includes a scenario where Israel would initiate hostilities by unprovoked bombing of Iranian facilities, as it did with Iraq's Osirak, and Iran would respond with missiles targeting Israel. The U.S. intervention is likely to be further bombing of Iran's facilities, including underground installations that can only be destroyed with low-yield nuclear bunker-busters. Such nuclear weapons may cause low casualties, perhaps only in the hundreds [.pdf], but the nuclear threshold will have been crossed. Iran's reaction to a U.S. attack with nuclear weapons, no matter how small, cannot be predicted with certainty. U.S. planners may hope that it will deter Iran from responding, thus saving lives. However, just as the U.S. forces in Iraq were not greeted with flowers, it is likely that such an attack would provoke a violent reaction from Iran and lead to the severe escalation of hostilities, which in turn would lead to the use of larger nuclear weapons by the U.S. and potential casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Witness the current uproar over cartoons and try to imagine the resulting upheaval in the Muslim world after the U.S. nukes Iran. - The
Military's Moral Dilemma - Men and women in the military forces, including civilian employees, may be facing a difficult moral choice at this very moment and in the coming weeks, akin to the moral choices faced by Colin Powell and Dan Ellsberg. The paths these two men followed were radically different. Colin Powell was an American hero, widely respected and admired at the time he was appointed secretary of state in 2001. In February 2003, he chose to follow orders despite his own serious misgivings, and delivered the pivotal UN address that paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following month. Today, most Americans believe the Iraq invasion was wrong, and Colin Powell is disgraced, his future destroyed, and his great past achievements forgotten. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, played a significant role in ending the Vietnam War by leaking the Pentagon Papers. He knew that he would face prosecution for breaking the law, but was convinced it was the correct moral choice. His courageous and principled action earned him respect and gratitude. The Navy has just reminded [.pdf] its members and civilian employees what the consequences are of violating provisions concerning the release of information about the nuclear capabilities of U.S. forces. Why right now, for the first time in 12 years? Because it is well aware of moral choices that its members may face, and it hopes to deter certain actions. But courageous men and women are not easily deterred. To disobey orders and laws and to leak information are difficult actions that entail risks. Still, many principled individuals have done it in the past and will continue to do it in the future ( see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].) Conscientious objection to the threat and use of nuclear weapons is a moral choice. Once the American public becomes fully aware that military action against Iran will include the planned use of nuclear weapons, public support for military action will quickly disappear. Anything could get the ball rolling. A great catastrophe will have been averted. Even U.S. military law recognizes that there is no requirement to obey orders that are unlawful. The use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country can be argued to be in violation of international law, the principle of just war, the principle of proportionality, common standards of morality ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), and customs that make up the law of armed conflict. Even if the nuclear weapons used are small, because they are likely to cause escalation of the conflict they violate the principle of proportionality and will cause unnecessary suffering. The Nuremberg Tribunal, which the United States helped to create, established that "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." To follow orders or to disobey orders, to keep information secret or to leak it, are choices for each individual to make extremely difficult choices that have consequences. But not choosing is not an option. - America's Collective Responsibility Blaming the administration or the military for crossing the nuclear threshold is easy, but responsibility will be shared by all Americans. All Americans knew, or should have known, that using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country like Iran was a possibility given the Bush administration's new policies. All Americans could have voiced their opposition to these policies and demand that they be reversed. The media will carry a heavy burden of responsibility. The mainstream media could have effectively raised public awareness of the possibility that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons against Iran. So far, they have chosen to almost completely hide the issue, which is being increasingly addressed in non-mainstream media. Members of Congress could have raised the question forcefully, calling for public hearings, demanding public discussion of the administration's plans, and passing new laws or resolutions. So far they have failed to do so and are derelict in their responsibility to their constituents. Letters to the president from some in Congress [1], [2] are a start, but are not likely to elicit a meaningful response or a change in plans and are a far cry from forceful action. Scientific organizations and organizations dealing with arms control and nuclear weapons could have warned of the dangers associated with the Iran situation. So far, they have not done so ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]). Scientists and engineers responsible for the development of nuclear weapons could have voiced concern [.pdf] when the new U.S. nuclear weapons policies became known, policies that directly involve the fruits of their labor. Their voices have not been heard. Those who contribute their labor to the scientific and technical infrastructure that makes nuclear weapons and their
. - The Nuclear Abyss - The United States is preparing to enter a new era: an era in which it will enforce nuclear nonproliferation by the threat and use of nuclear weapons. The use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran will usher in a new world order. The ultimate goal is that no nation other than the
means of delivery possible bear a particularly heavy burden of moral responsibility. Their voices have barely been heard U.S. should have a nuclear weapons arsenal. A telltale sign that this is the plan is the recent change in the stated mission of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are developed. The mission of LANL used to be described officially as "Los Alamos National Laboratory's central mission is to reduce the global nuclear danger" [1] [.pdf], [2] [.pdf], [3] [.pdf]. That will sound ridiculous once the U.S. starts throwing mini-nukes around. In anticipation of it, the Los Alamos mission statement has been recently changed to "prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to protect our homeland from terrorist attack." That is the present and future role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, to be achieved through threat (deterrence) and use of nuclear weapons. References to the old mission are nowhere to be found in the current Los Alamos documents, indicating that the change was deliberate and thorough. It is not impossible that the U.S. will succeed in its goal. But it is utterly
. Once the U.S. crosses the nuclear threshold against a non-nuclear country, many more countries will strive to acquire nuclear weapons, and many will succeed. The nuclear abyss may turn out to be a steep precipice or a gentle slope. Either way, it will be a one-way downhill slide toward a bottomless pit. We will have entered a path of no return, leading in a few months or a few decades to global nuclear war and unimaginable destruction. But there are still choices to be made. Up to the moment the first U.S. nuclear bomb explodes, the fall into the abyss can be averted by choices made by each and every one of us. We may never know which choices prevented it if it doesn't happen. But if we make the wrong choices, we will know what they were. And so will future generations, even in a world where wars are fought with sticks and stones.
improbable. This is a big world
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American forces in Iraq today are engaged in the pivotal struggle of our age. If the United States allows Iraq to slide into full-scale civil war, characterized by the collapse of the central government and the widespread mobilization of the population in internal conflict, the consequences will be epochal. Internal strife in Iraq has already generated a large displaced population within the country and significant refugee flows into neighboring lands. Those neighbors, both Sunni and Shia, have already made clear their determination to enter Iraq and its struggles if America withdraws and the conflict escalates into greater sectarian violence or civil war. Iraqs diverse neighbors, however, have opposing interests in how the conflict is settled. Consequently, failure in Iraq now will likely lead to regional war, destabilizing important states in the Middle East and creating a fertile ground for terrorism. Success in Iraq, on the other hand, would transform the international situation. Success will give the United States critical leverage against Iran, which is now positioning itself to become the regional hegemon after our anticipated defeat. It will strengthen Americas position around the world, where our inability to contain conflict in Iraq is badly tarnishing our stature. And success will convert a violent, chaotic region in the heart of the
Middle East and on the front line of the Sunni-Shiite divide into a secure state able to support peace within its borders and throughout the region. There can be no question that victory in Iraq is worth
defeat would be catastrophic. Some now argue that victory is beyond our grasp. America cannot (or should not) involve itself in civil, sectarian conflicts, they say, and the troops required to control such conflicts are larger than the U.S. military could possibly deploy. Neither of these arguments is valid. The United States has faced ethno-sectarian conflict on at least five occasions in the past fifteen years. In Somalia, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, successive American administrations allowed the conflicts to continue without making any serious attempts to control or contain them. The results have been disastrous. Inaction in
considerable American effort or that Afghanistan in the 1990s led to the rise of the Taliban and its support for Osama bin Laden and al Qaedaand therefore indirectly to the 9/11 attacks. Inaction, indeed humiliation, in Somalia led to a larger civil war in which radical Islamists took control of most of the country by the end of 2006. In late December, the conflict took a new turn as Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in support of the
. In Rwanda, civil war and genocide also spread, involving Congo and, indeed, much of sub-Saharan Africa in widespread conflict and death. One clear lesson of postCold War conflicts is that ignoring civil wars is dangerous and can generate grave, unintended consequences for Americas future security. The United States has recently
internationally recognized transitional government. A civil war has become a regional war, as civil wars often do intervened, along with its allies, to control ethnically and religiously motivated civil wars on two occasions, however: in 1995 in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo. Both efforts were successful in ending the violence and creating the preconditions for peace and political and economic imperfect: much of the ethnic cleansing had already been accomplished in both areas before the United States intervened with armed force. In the Balkans, however, the levels of violence and death as a proportion of the population were much higher than they have been in Iraq. Additionally, the armed forces of the states neighboring Bosnia and Kosovo were much more directly involved in the struggle than those of Iraqs neighbors. Above all
, the introduction of U.S. and European forces in strength in Bosnia and Kosovo has ended the killing and prevented that conflict from spreading throughout the region, as it threatened to do in the 1990s. It is possible to contain ethno-sectarian civil wars, but only by ending them. The United States has the military power necessary to control the violence in Iraq.
The main purpose of the report that follows is to consider in detail what amount of armed force would be needed to bring the sectarian violence in Baghdad down to levels that would permit economic and political development and real national reconciliation. Before turning to that consideration, however, we should reflect on the fact that the United States between 2001 and 2006 has committed only a small proportion of its total national strength to this struggle
. There are more than 1 million soldiers in the active and reserve ground forces, and only 140,000 of them are in Iraq at the moment. Many others are engaged in vital tasks in the United States and elsewhere from which they could not easily be moved, and soldiers and Marines are not interchangeable beans. If this war were the vital national priority that it should be, however, the United States could commit many more soldiers to the fight. This report will address in greater detail some of the ways of making more forces available for this struggle. The United States could also devote a significantly higher proportion of its national wealth to this problem in two ways. First, the president has finally called for a significant increase in the size of the ground forcesthe warriors who are actually shouldering much of the burden in this conflict. The United States can and should sustain larger ground forces than it now has, both to support operations in Iraq and to be prepared for likely contingencies elsewhere.
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Laura DAndrea Tyson, Former Economic Advisor to the Clinton Administration and total MILF, 2000 [Council on Foreign Relations, Future Directions for U.S. Economic Policy Toward Japan]
The ongoing changes within Japan's economy provide both American policymakers and businesses with opportunities to craft a new economic relationship between Japan and the United States. Task Force members agree that this relationship must rest on the premise that a healthy Japanese economy serves America's economic and geopolitical interests. Despite its decade-long stagnation, Japan remains the largest economy in Asia, America's third-largest trading partner, and its major ally in the Asia-Pacific region. B. ECONOMIC DECLINE CAUSES WORLD WAR
Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1998 [Los Angeles Times, Markets Biggest Threat To Peace, August 23, p. M1]
Even with stock markets tottering around the world, the president and the Congress seem determined to spend the next six months arguing about dress stains. Too bad. The United States and the world are facing what could grow into the greatest threat to world peace in 60 years. Forget suicide car bombers and Afghan fanatics. Its the financial markets, not the terrorist training camps that pose the biggest immediate threat to world peace. How can this be? Think about the mother of all global meltdowns: the Great Depression that started in 1929. U.S. stocks began to collapse in October, staged a rally, then the market headed south big time. At the bottom, the Dow Jones industrial average had lost 90% of its value. Wages plummeted, thousands of banks and brokerages went bankrupt, millions of people lost their jobs. There were similar horror stories worldwide. But the biggest impact of the Depression on the United States--and on world history--wasnt money. It was blood: World War II, to be exact. The Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, undermined the ability of moderates to oppose Joseph Stalins power in Russia, and convinced the Japanese military that the country had no choice but to build an Asian empire, even if that meant war with the United States and Britain. Thats the thing about depressions. They arent just bad for your 401(k). Let the world economy crash far enough, and the rules change. We stop playing The Price is Right and start up a new round of Saving Private Ryan.
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Takashi Kitazume, Staff Writer Japan Times, 2005 [Despite improvement, Japan-U.S. relations need more work, March, http://classified.japantimes.com/ads/kkc/2005/kkc20050303b.htm]
"Japan can be very helpful, potentially, to the U.S. and the world in stabilizing the broader international relationship with Iran," he said. But in the short term, Calder said, the crucial issue is the nuclear program. Japan would be well advised to postpone its project to develop the Azadegan oil field in southern Iran, so that nations can work together to have Iran drop its nuclear ambitions through closely coordinated pressure, he added. Kurt Campbell, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that Japan is not alone in trying to engage Iran commercially. In fact, many other countries have major projects in Iran, with the U.S. as the "odd man out," he said. "The only way we're going to have success vis-a-vis Iran would be for Europe, Japan and the U.S. to alter their strategies," he said. "Essentially
today, Europe has offered just carrots and America has only offered sticks. If we are to be successful . . . Europeans have to be a little bit more threatening about what the potential consequences of continued nuclear provocation are, and the U.S. must put on the table a more positive vision for Iran if Iran takes steps to stop its nuclear ambitions," he added. Fumiaki Kubo, a professor of law at the University of Tokyo, noted that even though they are close allies, it would be only natural for Japan and the United States to have differences on some issues. Kubo also pointed out that while government-to-government ties have improved dramatically, Japan's public opinion toward the U.S., particularly the Bush administration, is not so favorable. And while developments since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks suggest that Japan will move in the direction of playing a greater role in the bilateral security alliance, it is unclear whether the Japanese public will support it, he noted. Calder agreed that public opinion is vital for security policy. "Will the Japanese people be ready for an expanded role of Japan in the security alliance with the U.S.? Of course
that is determined between leaders, but also needs to be something that is more broadly persuasive to the people of both nations," he said. B. IRANIAN NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION LEADS TO NUCLEAR WAR
Henry Sokolski, Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, 2003 [Taking Proliferation Seriously, http://www.policyreview.org/oct03/sokolski_print.html/]
If nothing is done to shore up U.S. and allied security relations with the Gulf Coordination Council states and with Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt, Irans acquisition of even a nuclear weapons breakout capability could prompt one or more of these states to try to acquire a nuclear weapons option of their own. Similarly, if the U.S. fails to hold Pyongyang accountable for its violation
of the npt or lets Pyongyang hold on to one or more nuclear weapons while appearing to reward its violation with a new deal one that heeds North Koreas demand for a nonaggression pact and continued construction of the two light water reactors South Korea and Japan (and later, perhaps, Taiwan) will have powerful cause to question Washingtons security commitment to them and their own pledges to stay non-nuclear. In such a world, Washingtons worries would not be limited to gauging the military capabilities of a growing number of hostile, nuclear, or near-nuclear-armed nations. In addition, it would have to gauge the reliability of a growing number of nuclear or near-nuclear friends. Washington might still be able to assemble coalitions, but with more nations like France, with nuclear options of their own, it would be much, much more iffy. The amount of international
intrigue such a world would generate would also easily exceed what our diplomats and leaders could manage or track. Rather than worry about using force for fear of producing another Vietnam, Washington and its very closest allies are more likely to grow weary of working closely with others and view military options through the rosy lens of their relatively quick victories in Desert Storm, Kosovo, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Just Cause. This would be a world disturbingly similar to that of 1914 but with one big difference: It would be spring-loaded to go nuclear.
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Masaru Honda, Senior Staff Writer Asahi News, 2006 [Japan must lobby U.S. to talk directly with Pyongyang, 7/7, http://www.asahi.com/english/Heraldasahi/TKY200607070248.html]
The multiple missile firings Wednesday by North Korea shattered Pyongyang's moratorium on such launches. The moratorium on North Korea's nuclear weapons development has already broken down. In the worst-case scenario, the six-party talks, which could develop into a framework for regional security, could be the next to go. For the time being, Japan and the United States plan to tighten the noose around North Korea, mainly through the United Nations Security Council. However, gaining the total cooperation of China and Russia--two key players on the council as well as the six-party talks--will not be easy. The policy of setting
moratoriums on North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile development programs was an initiative of the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton. After the nuclear crisis that emerged on the Korean Peninsula in 1994, the United States and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework in 1994. That agreement was supposed to have prevented North Korea from producing plutonium for nuclear warheads. Following the launch of the Taepodong-1 ballistic missile in 1998, William Perry, a former U.S. defense secretary, visited North Korea and reached a deal in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze missile launches in exchange for continued assistance. However, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush suspected that North Korea was secretly planning to produce weapons-grade material through uranium enrichment. The Agreed Framework was no longer functional, and North Korea began openly manufacturing plutonium. In 2005, Pyongyang announced that it possessed nuclear weapons. In Perry's view, North Korea has produced enough plutonium since 2003 for six to eight nuclear warheads. Although the North Korean threat has grown, the Bush administration has rejected bilateral negotiations with Pyongyang. Instead, the United States started up the six-party talks by bringing in China, which has influence over North Korea. Last fall, a joint statement was released after the six-party talks that called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons development plan. However, Washington got fed up with North Korea's covert activities, including the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and imposed economic sanctions. That led to greater mistrust between the United States and North Korea.
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Morton H. Halperin, Director of Policy Planning at State Department, 2000 [The Nuclear Dimension of the US-Japan Alliance, http://www.nautilus.org/archives/library/security/papers/Halperin-US-Japan.pdf]
However, any realistic appraisal of nuclear dangers would suggest that neither rogue states/terrorist groups nor a deliberate Russian attack is the right focus if the goal of U.S. national security policy is to prevent the use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The most immediate danger is that India and Pakistan will stumble into a nuclear war following their nuclear tests and their apparent determination to deploy nuclear forces. A second danger will continue to be that Russian missiles will be fired on the United States by accident or as a result of unauthorized action. Over the longer run, these threats will be eclipsed by the danger that the non-proliferation regime will collapse and other states will develop nuclear weapons. A terrorist threat should, in my view, become a matter of serious concern only if there is much wider dispersal of nuclear weapons among states stemming from an open collapse of the nonproliferation regime.
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Peter Brookes, Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, 2005 [An Alarming Alliance: Sino Russian Ties Tightening, The Heritage Foundation, 8/15, http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed081505a.cfm]
First, the Pentagon must make sure the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review balances U.S. forces to address both the unconventional terrorist threat and the big-power challenge represented by a Russia-China strategic partnership. Second, the United States must continue to strengthen its relationship with its ally Japan to ensure a balance of power in Northeast Asia and also encourage Tokyo to improve relations with Moscow in an effort to loosen Sino-Russian ties. B. SINO-RUSSIAN RELATIONS TRIGGER RENEWED RUSSIAN AGGRESSION
Constantine Menges, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, 2005 [China: The Gathering Threat, p. 426]
Of equal concern is the possible reemergence of an authoritarian dictatorship in Russia under President Putin or a successor, whether ultranationalist or Communist. Our in-depth analysis of President Putin has included insights into his personal development, his work in the Soviet foreign intelligence service (KGB), and his actions since assuming the presidency of Russia on January 1, 2000. Putin is an intelligent, disciplined, and systematic leader, determined to assure that Russia is, in his words, a "strong state," under a "dictatorship of law" and that Russia has a major role in the world.' Putin declares his support for political democracy and movement toward a market-oriented economy, but the evidence to date suggests that Russia is gradually moving toward a more autocratic path. As Russia moved toward dictatorship, Putin would attempt to maintain a Potemkin democracy for the purpose of deceiving the major democracies, so that they would continue providing needed economic support for Russia. The ever-closer relationship between Russia and China strengthens the author itarian tendencies within Russia, thereby increasing the risk that it will become more aggressive internationally. As the Chinese government develops relations with the Putin government, the Chinese Communist Party has revived direct relations with the Communist Party in Russia and also ties between the Chinese and Russian parliaments. These multiple relationships, all coordinated from the Chinese side through its Communist Party, provide many opportunities to cultivate allies in Russia and to fan suspicion of the U.S. and of democracy. This is especially true of China's ever-expanding and mutually profitable relationships with the Russian military and its military production and research entities.
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Ariel Cohen, Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, 1996 [The New Great Game: Oil Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, January 25, http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/BG1065.cfm]
Much is at stake in Eurasia for the U.S. and its allies. Attempts to restore its empire will doom Russia's transition to a democracy and free-market economy. The ongoing war in Chechnya alone has cost Russia $6 billion to date (equal to Russia's IMF and World Bank loans for 1995). Moreover, it has extracted a tremendous price from Russian society. The wars which would be required to restore the Russian empire would prove much more costly not just for Russia and the region, but for peace, world stability, and security. As the former Soviet arsenals are spread throughout the NIS, these conflicts may escalate to include the use of weapons of mass destruction. Scenarios including unauthorized missile launches are especially threatening. Moreover, if successful, a reconstituted Russian empire would become a major destabilizing influence both in Eurasia and throughout the world. It would endanger not only Russia's neighbors, but also the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East. And, of course, a neo-imperialist Russia could imperil the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf.15 Domination of the Caucasus would bring Russia closer to the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East. Russian imperialists, such as radical nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have resurrected the old dream of obtaining a warm port on the Indian Ocean. If Russia succeeds in establishing its domination in the south, the threat to Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, and Afganistan will increase. The independence of pro-Western Georgia and Azerbaijan already has been undermined by pressures from the Russian armed forces and covert actions by the intelligence and security services, in addition to which Russian hegemony would make Western political and economic efforts to stave off Islamic militancy more difficult. Eurasian oil resources are pivotal to economic development in the early 21st century. The supply of Middle Eastern oil would become precarious if Saudi Arabia became unstable, or if Iran or Iraq provoked another military conflict in the area. Eurasian oil is also key to the economic development of the southern NIS. Only with oil revenues can these countries sever their dependence on Moscow and develop modern market economies and free societies. Moreover, if these vast oil reserves were tapped and developed, tens of thousands of U.S. and Western jobs would be created. The U.S. should ensure free access to these reserves for the benefit of both Western and local economies.
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Yukio Okamoto, Security Adviser to Japanese Cabinet, 2002 [Washington Quarterly 25.2 p. 59-72]
The U.S.-Japan alliance represents a significant hope for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan problem. Both Japan and the United States have clearly stated that they oppose reunification by force. When China conducted provocative missile tests in the waters around Taiwan in 1996, the United States sent two aircraft carrier groups into nearby waters as a sign of its disapproval of China's belligerent act. Japan seconded the U.S. action, raising in Chinese minds the possibility that Japan might offer logistical and other support to its ally in the event of hostilities. Even though intervention is only a possibility, a strong and close tie between Japanese and U.S. security interests guarantees that the Chinese leadership cannot afford to miscalculate the consequences of an unprovoked attack on Taiwan. The alliance backs up Japan's basic stance that the two sides need to come to a negotiated solution. B. THIS CAUSES EXTINCTION The Straits Times, 2000
[Regional Fallout: No One Gains in War Over Taiwan, June 25, Lexis]
THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and --horror of horrors -- raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -- truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilisation.
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[11/18, LN]
On September 11, 2001, Americans were reminded in the most profound way that, like other countries, our territory is vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, not surprisingly, our people began to review our alliance relationship abroad in terms of whether or not they contributed directly to helping deal with a current problem. Those alliances which fostered timely, tangible, steadfast support in dealing with this new problem of international terrorism have been highly evaluated in the United States. As we look at the alliance with Japan, it has exactly those qualities. Secondly, there are permanent military campaigns that have occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here, it seems to me Japan has changed its security role in a very impressive way. B. TERRORISM CAUSES GLOBAL NUCLEAR CONFLICT THE ULTIMATE IMPACT IS EXTINCTION
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University, 1987 [Terrorism and Global Security, Second Edition, p.42-3]
Nuclear terrorism could even spark full-scale war between states. Such war could involve the entire spectrum of nuclearconflict possibilities, ranging from a nuclear attack upon a non-nuclear state to systemwide nuclear war. How might such far-reaching consequences of nuclear terrorism come about? Perhaps the most likely way would involve a terrorist nuclear assault against a state by terrorists hosted in another state. For example, consider the following scenario: Early in the 1990s, Israel and its Arabstate neighbors finally stand ready to conclude a comprehensive, multilateral peace settlement. With a bilateral treaty between Israel and Egypt already many years old, only the interests of the Palestiniansas defined by the PLOseem to have been left out. On the eve of the proposed signing of the peace agreement, half a dozen crude nuclear explosives in the one-kiloton range detonate in as many Israeli cities. Public grief in Israel over the many thousands dead and maimed is matched only by the outcry for revenge. In response to the public mood, the government of Israel initiates selected strikes against terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, whereupon Lebanese Shiite forces and Syria retaliate against Israel. Before long, the entire region is ablaze, conflict has escalated to nuclear forms, and all countries in the area have suffered unprecedented destruction. Of course, such a scenario is fraught with the makings of even wider destruction. How would the United States react to the situation in the Middle East? What would be the Soviet response? It is certainly conceivable that a chain reaction of interstate nuclear conflict could ensue, one that would ultimately involve the superpowers or even every nuclear-weapons state on the planet. What, exactly, would this mean? Whether the terms of assessment be statistical or human, the consequences of nuclear war require an entirely new paradigm of death. Only such a paradigm would allow us a proper framework for absorbing the vision of near-total obliteration and the outer limits of human destructiveness. Any nuclear war would have effectively permanent and irreversible consequences. Whatever the actual extent of injuries and fatalities, such a war would entomb the spirit of the entire species in a planetary casket strewn with shorn bodies and imbecile imaginations.
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American government announced a few days ago that it was moving towards normalising relations with North Korea.
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John Steinbach, DC Iraq Coalition, ISRAELI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: A THREAT TO PEACE, March 2002, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/STE203A.html Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum(and the) next war will not be conventional." Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major(if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familiar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon- for whatever reason- the deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration."
Yair Evron, Professor of International Relations at Tel Aviv University, 1994 [Israels Nuclear Dilemma, p. 123-4]
The potential risks involved in the functioning of the superpowers C3 may recur in the Middle East and, in some cases, with apparently greater intensity. The probability of erroneous decisions is therefore higher. These factors center on technical failures of warning systems, or the combination of technical failure and human error, deriving from misperception of the enemys behavior. There also exist processes of escalation that are totally distinct from technical failure, and which derive exclusively from human error. The latter case is most often the function of the erroneous interpretation of various enemy actions. These factors are liable to yield disastrous outcomes. The outcomes can be divided into two major categories of events: misperception of an enemy action that is mistakenly understood as a conventional or nuclear attack on the states nuclear bases or on the state in its entirety. Such a misperception could cause a rapid escalation. The second category comprises the escalation from a conventional war to the use of nuclear weapons. The persistence of intense conflicts in the Middle East will of course contribute to the potential danger of misperceptions. Hence, for example, if the Arab-Israeli peace process fails to advance and in particular were the situation to return to the level of conflict that preceded the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, the intensity of the conflict could reinforce the potential for errors of perception among decisionmakers. A high level of conflict tends to promote the tendency of decision-makers to view the other sides actions with great concern.
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Stephen Blank, professor, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, WORLD & I, February 2001, p. 118 After seven or more years of America's best efforts, we now should see with whom we are dealing and the multiple fronts of the real Middle East war. In today's Middle East, every form of conflict along the spectrum from rock throwing to nuclear war can take place. Governments there have long since used weapons of mass destruction in other states' civil wars. Further opportunities to start these civil wars or use such weapons must be firmly deterred and discouraged. Rather than choose peace and democracy, Arafat and his allies have chosen war and hatred. Israel and the United States should act together to make sure that they never get to make another similar choice.
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The arms produced for national defense have been used to maintain racist, repressive systems that deny the personal well being and human rights of ethnic groups and political dissenters. Fourth, that we can be protected from preventable harm and cared for in times of disaster without enduring greater harm, that the life and well-being of the Earths peoples will not be harmed as a consequence of imbalanced security policies, preparation for war, and armed conflict. Yet, in a highly militarized world. local conflicts rage that daily impose death and suffering on noncombatants as well as armed forces. The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf and the 1992 war in a disintegrating Yugoslavia took uncounted numbers of civilian lives, produced hundreds of thousands of refugees. and reduced living conditions to circumstances that of themselves were lethal. A flourishing trade in conventional arms fuels the flames of these conflicts and consumes resources in a truly incendiary manner, leaving in ashes people's hopes for even a minimal standard of life. The technological arms race, with its advancing weapons development, has also further diverted resources from social and human purposes as it escalates to the point of the possibility of total destruction. Arms development cannot be relied upon to prevent aggression and warfare. A case can be made that, on the contrary, arms production and
Apartheid and racism in various forms impede the social development of many indigenous peoples. trafficking encourage armed conflict, eroding rather than assuring our expectation of protection or "defense." Each of these expectations has been the focus of major United Nations reports and declarations on development, human rights, the environment, and disarmament and security. But little public heed has been paid. However, women's movements and initiatives are insisting that we must turn our attention to meeting these four fundamental expectations that constitute authentic security. They help to point out that we must attend to the obstacles to these expectations in an integrated, comprehensive fashion based on an understanding of the interrelationships among them. Until we understand the connections among these four expectations and the other global problems deriving from their frustration, neither the world nor any of its people will be secure. Women's experiences and feminine values are sources of such alternatives. Feminine Characteristics as Approaches to Peace and Security The discussions in this book and elsewhere of the need for women's participation in public affairs are essentially a call to valorize those feminine characteristics that are conducive to peace and comprehensive approaches to security. Some feminists argue that these characteristics hold the greatest possibilities
to move us from the present condition of continuous armed conflict, potential nuclear annihilation, and ecological collapse toward the achievement of a truly just world peace and authentic global security.
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A second change has to do with what, in any case, one might have called workaday anti-Semitism, now virtually eradicated or vastly diminished. No doubt the most immediate cause of this sea change was the Holocaust. I remember a perfect expression of what I am talking about. It was a private lunch. A distinguished public figure remarked casually that he would today leave the table in protest if he heard spoken such aninadversions on the Jews as were routinely spoken at his father's table when he was a boy. The change doesn't mean (no change ever will) the end of ethnic-oriented derisive humor, even though much of it is selfconsciously surreptitious m tone. It means merely that there is general acquiescence in the proposition that indifference to the rights of minorities can mutate, and during this century has done so, to genocide.
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Morality Watson
WE MUST ACT MORALLY, EVEN IF IT MEANS OUR OWN DEATH Watson, philosophy professor, Washington University, WORLD HUNGER AND MORAL OBLIGATION, 1977, pp. 118-9. One may even have to sacrifice ones life or ones nation to be moral in situations where practical behavior would preserve it. For example, if a prisoner of war undergoing torture is to be a (perhaps dead) patriot even when reason tells him that collaboration will hurt no one, he remains silent. Similarly, if one is to be moral, one distributes available food in equal shares even if everyone dies. That an action is necessary to save ones life is no excuse for behaving unpatriotically or immorally if one wishes to be a patriot or moral. No principle of morality absolves one of behaving immorally simply to save ones life or nation. There is a strict analogy here between adhering to moral principles for the sake of being moral, and adhering to Christian principles for the sake of being Christian. The moral world contains pits and lions, but one looks always to the highest light. The ultimate test always harks back to the highest principle recant or die. The ultimate test always harks back to the highest principle recant or die and it is pathetic to profess morality if one quits when the going gets rough.
Morality -- Gewirth
JUST LIKE MARTIN LUTHER KING WASNT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENCE OF WHITE SUPREMACISTS, WE ARENT RESPONSIBLE FOR NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF INTERVENING ACTORS
Alan Gewirth, philosophy professor, Chicago, ABSOLUTISM AND ITS CONSEQUENTIALIST CRITICS, 1994, p. 38. (PDNSS1622) An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King, Jr. was repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of the intervening action, however, it was Kings opponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks. It follows from the principle of the intervening action that it is not the son but rather the terrorists who are morally as well as causally responsible for the many deaths that do or may ensue on his refusal to torture his mother to death. The important point is not that he lets these persons die rather than kills them, or that he does not harm them but only fails to help them, or that he intends their deaths obliquely but not directly. The point is rather that it is only through the intervening lethal actions of the terrorists that his refusal eventuates in many deaths. Since the moral responsibility is not the sons, it does not affect his moral duty not to torture his mother to death, so that her correlative right remains absolute.
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NATO Good
COLLAPSE OF NATO CAUSES MULTIPLE ESCALATORY NUCLEAR WARS John Duffield, Assistant Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, 1994 [Political Science Quarterly 109:5, p. 766-7] Initial analyses of NATO's future prospects overlooked at least three important factors that have helped to ensure the alliance's enduring relevance. First, they underestimated the extent to which external threats sufficient to help justify the preservation of the alliance would continue to exist. In fact, NATO still serves to secure its members against a number of actual or potential dangers emanating from outside their territory. These include not only the residual threat posed by Russian military power, but also the relatively new concerns raised by conflicts in neighboring regions. Second, the pessimists failed to consider NATO's capacity for institutional adaptation. Since the end of the cold war, the alliance has begun to develop two important new functions. NATO is increasingly seen as having a significant role to play in containing and controlling militarized conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe. And, at a deeper level, it works to prevent such conflicts from arising at all by actively promoting stability within the former Soviet bloc. Above all, NATO pessimists overlooked the valuable intra-alliance functions that the alliance has always performed and that remain relevant after the cold war. Most importantly, NATO has helped stabilize Western Europe, whose states had often been bitter rivals in the past. By damping the security dilemma and providing an institutional mechanism for the development of common security policies, NATO has contributed to making the use of force in relations among the countries of the region virtually inconceivable. In all these ways, NATO clearly serves the interests of its European members. But even the United States has a significant stake in preserving a peaceful and prosperous Europe. In addition to strong transatlantic historical and cultural ties, American economic interests in Europe as a leading market for U.S. products, as a source of valuable imports, and as the host for considerable direct foreign investment by American companies remain substantial. If history is any guide, moreover, the United States could easily be drawn into a future major war in Europe, the consequences of which would likely be even more devastating than those of the past, given the existence of nuclear weapons.11
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suggests it could be even more serious, and Most of us are aware of some degree of warming; winters are warmer and spring comes earlier. But in the Arctic, warming is more than twice as great as here in Europe and in summertime, torrents of melt water now plunge from Greenland's kilometre-high glaciers. The complete dissolution of Greenland's icy mountains will take time, but by then the sea will have risen seven metres, enough to make uninhabitable all of the low lying coastal cities of the world, including London, Venice, Calcutta, New York and Tokyo. Even a two metre rise is enough to put most of southern Florida under water. The floating ice of the Arctic Ocean is even more vulnerable to warming; in 30 years, its white reflecting ice, the area of the US, may become dark sea that absorbs the warmth of summer sunlight, and further hastens the end of the Greenland ice. The North Pole, goal of so many explorers, will then be no more than a point on the ocean surface. Not only the Arctic is changing; climatologists warn a four-degree rise in temperature is enough to eliminate the vast Amazon forests in a catastrophe for their people, their biodiversity, and for the world, which would lose one of its great natural air conditioners. The scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001 that global temperature would rise between two and six degrees Celsius by 2100. Their grim forecast was made perceptible by last summer's excessive heat; and according to Swiss meteorologists, the Europe-wide hot spell that killed over 20,000 was wholly different from any previous heat wave. The odds against it being a mere deviation from the norm were 300,000 to one. It was a warning of worse to come. What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. When that happens, little time is left to put out the fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act.
global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism. He may even have underestimated, because, since he spoke, new evidence of climate change the greatest danger that civilisation has faced so far.
So what should we do? We can just continue to enjoy a warmer 21st century while it lasts, and make cosmetic attempts, such as the Kyoto Treaty, to hide the political embarrassment of global warming, and this is what I fear will happen in much of the world. When, in the 18th century, only one billion people lived on Earth, their impact was small enough for it not to matter what energy source they used. But with six billion, and growing, few options remain; we can not continue drawing energy from fossil fuels and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time. If we had 50 years or more we might make these our main sources. But we do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilisation. Worse still, if we burn crops grown for fuel this could hasten our decline. Agriculture already uses too much of the land needed by the Earth to regulate its climate and chemistry. A car consumes 10 to 30 times as much carbon as its driver; imagine the extra farmland required to feed the appetite of cars. By all means, let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy. True, burning natural gas instead of coal or oil releases only half as much carbon dioxide, but unburnt gas is 25 times as potent a greenhouse agent as is carbon dioxide. Even a small leakage would neutralise the advantage of gas.
The prospects are grim, and even if we act successfully in amelioration, there will still be hard times, as in war, that will stretch our grandchildren to the limit. We are tough and it would take more than the climate catastrophe to eliminate all breeding pairs of humans; what is at risk is civilisation. As individual animals we are not so special, and in some ways are like a planetary disease, but through civilisation we redeem ourselves and become a precious asset for the Earth; not
There is a chance we may be saved by an unexpected event such as a series of volcanic eruptions severe enough to block out sunlight and so cool the Earth. But only losers would bet their lives on such poor odds. Whatever doubts there are about future climates, there are no doubts
least because through our eyes the Earth has seen herself in all her glory. that greenhouse gases and temperatures both are rising. We have stayed in ignorance for many reasons; important among them is the denial of climate change in the US where governments have failed to give their climate scientists the support they needed. The Green lobbies, which should have given priority to global warming, seem more concerned about threats to people than with threats to the Earth, not noticing that we are part of the Earth and wholly dependent upon its well being. It may take a disaster worse than last summer's European deaths to wake us up. Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer. I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to
nuclear energy.
worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear - the one safe, available, energy source - now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.
Even if they were right about its dangers, and they are not, its
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Patriarchy Reardon
PATRIARCHY IS THE ROOT OF THE WAR SYSTEM
Betty A. Reardon, Director of the Peace Education Program at Teachers College Columbia University, 1993, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, p. 30-2 (PDNSS6401)
In an article entitled Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us toward War (1983), Charlene Spretnak focused on some of the fundamental cultural factors that deeply influence ways of thinking about security. She argues that patriarchy encourages militarist tendencies. Since a major war now could easily bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions in our national forums addressing the madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters of hardware and statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is badly needed . . . A clearly visible element in the escalating tensions among militarized nations is the macho posturing and the patriarchal ideal of dominance, not parity, which motivates defense ministers and government leaders to strut their stuff as we watch with increasing horror. Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically inappropriate for the nuclear age. To prove dominance and control, to distance ones character from that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bayall of these patriarchal pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, largescale conventional war it would refrain from using its multiple-warhead nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water. If we believe that war is a necessary evil, that patriarchal assumptions are simply human nature, then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust. The causes of recurrent warfare are not biological. Neither are they solely economic. They are also a result of patriarchal ways of thinking, which historically have generated considerable pressure for standing armies to be used. (Spretnak 1983) These cultural tendencies have produced our current crisis of a highly militarized, violent world that in spite of the decline of the cold war and the slowing of the military race between the superpowers is still staring into the abyss of nuclear disaster, as described by a leading feminist in an address to the Community Aid Abroad State Convention, Melbourne, Australia: These then are the outward signs of militarism across the world today: weapons-building and trading in them; spheres of influence derived from their supply; interventionboth overt and covert; torture; training of military personnel, and supply of hardware to, and training of police; the positioning of military bases on foreign soil; the despoilation of the planet; intelligence networks; the rise in the number of national security states; more and more countries coming under direct military rule; 13 the militarization of diplomacy, and the interlocking and the international nature of the military order which even defines the major rifts in world politics.
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interdependent, and that is a good step in the direction of world stability. With nuclear weapons at two a penny, stability will be at a premium in the years ahead.
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Roy Balleste, Associate Law Library Director at Nova Southeastern University School of Law, 2004 [Revista de Derecho Puertorriqueno 43 Rev. D.P. 249 The International Status of Jerusalem: The Legacy of Lasting Peacep. 275-6]
Once again, I am reminded of the words of St. Thomas Aquinas. He stated that "friends need not agree in opinion, but only upon such goods as conduce to life, and especially upon such as are important; because dissension in small matters is scarcely accounted dissension." Cooperation for success is the key to a permanent solution for the legal status of Jerusalem. As of 18 February 2003, the city of Jerusalem was still called "the key to peace." Now there is a constant mention by the media of a new agreement or 'road map' for the final settlement of peace in the region. President George W. Bush recently announced the potential establishment of a road map for peace. If this plan is finally implemented, Jerusalem will be discussed when phase three of the plan is implemented in 2005. The only remaining comment to be made concerns the entry into force of any proposed new agreement. Whether this or any other agreement will work is a matter of excitement. Since failure by either party will be enough to prevent a resolution, it will be a matter of some anxiety to see whether sufficient cooperation is gathered, and in what sort of timetable. Finally, it has been my attempt to create an analysis, to inform and propose. Not to end, but to provide an additional alternative. I have analyzed international legal issues pertaining Jerusalem with a high conviction that the application of international legal agreements is the proper method of resolving most difficult international disagreements, no matter what they might be. In the end, a common goal should be achieved: the resolution of the Jerusalem question, an indispensable goal with international legal implications. In my humble opinion, there is little understanding about the legal significance of the city, and yet Jerusalem represents an invaluable asset for humanity. It is the most "potential" place on the planet for the creation of new peace, and its religious significance is a remainder to future generations of the accomplishment of human beings in the pursuit of world peace. But above all, the legal framework of Jerusalem may become its greatest legacy to humanity, the legacy of lasting peace.
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[Two preconditions for hope in the Middle East, London (UK): Jul 19, p. 19, PROQUEST]
The election of Hamas both illustrated the dangers of democracy without a stable political foundation and that the Palestinians could not be a real peace partner. So, however, did Israeli unilateralism and reliance on isolation of the Palestinians. Israel's efforts to drive Hamas from political power simply made things worse. Isolated and impoverished Palestinians became more extreme; Iran, Syria and outside extremists gained more footholds; and Mahmoud Abbas, the PA's new leader, became weaker. Israel's extraordinary sensitivity to casualties and hostages made it vulnerable in other ways. The IDF invasion of Gaza and attacks on Hamas further radicalised younger and more militant Palestinians and they - not politicians or their parents - have the guns and ability to carry out attacks. Two things must happen if thereis to be any real hope. First, the United Nations must help Lebanon disarm Hizbollah, stop it receiving further arms from Iran and Syria and halt its military aid to Hamas. Brokering a ceasefire and another hollow UN peacekeeping force will have only a cosmetic impact, at best. Second, the Quartet group of Middle East mediators must put severe pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians: on Israel, to halt unilateral expansion into the West Bank and aid moderate Palestinian voices; on the Palestinians, to understand that aid and support are tied to either Hamas changing or going. This must be followed by a "road map" that confronts both sides with a true peace plan, specific final settlement proposals and a time schedule. Half measures and conventional diplomacy have all the value of putting lipstick on a pig and will be neither Halal nor Kosher. THE PEACE PROCESS IS KEY TO DEMOCRACY PROMOTION States News Service, 2006 [BUSH RENEWS U.S. COMMITMENT TO PEACE IN MIDDLE EAST 7-22 LN] America remains committed to lasting peace in the Middle East. The United States and our partners will continue to seek a return to the road map for peace in the Middle East, which sets out the pathway to establishing a viable democratic Palestinian state that will live in peace with Israel. We will continue to support moderate leaders, like Palestinian Authority President Abbas. We will continue to call on Hamas to end its acts of terror. And now, more than ever, the Palestinians need leaders who are not compromised by terror and who will help the Palestinian people provide a future for their children based on regional peace and security. In the long-term, this peace will come only by defeating the terrorist ideology of hatred and fear. The world's best hope for lasting security and stability across the Middle East is the establishment of free and just societies. America and our allies will act decisively because we know our security is at stake in this struggle and we know the cause of freedom will prevail.
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Poverty Gilligan
POVERTY IS THE EQUIVALENT TO A WOULD-BE THERMONUCLEAR WAR BETWEEN THE FORMER-USSR AND THE US EVERY 15 YEARS. James Gilligan, Department of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School, VIOLENCE: REFLECTIONS ON OUR DEADLIEST EPIDEMIC, 2000, p 195-196. The 14 to 18 million deaths a year cause 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 caused by genocide--or about eight million per year, 1935-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-1966 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 19541973), 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 word, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were 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. GILLIGAN PHD PSYCHIATRY HARVARD PROFESSOR 1998 (Cited by Mumia A Quiet and Deadly Violence) http://www.iacenter.org/violence.htm We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic. This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes: [E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were 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 on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world.
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Ferdinand Schoeman, Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSIONS OF PRIVACY, 1984, p.21. (DRGCL/B1128)
Benn suggests that part of our notion of a person as free is that he is subject to the authority and scrutiny of others only within reasonable and legally safeguarded limits. In other words, people have a right to a private life. People can be held socially accountable only for respecting the rights of others, and can be thought to have obligations to promote the welfare of society only if these obligations have been voluntarily assumed or if especially pressing reasons are operative. George Orwells novel 1984 presents one picture of what life would be like in a society which did not limit itself in the way Benn prescribes.
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Victor Utgoff, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, SURVIVAL, Fall,2002, p. 87-90 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.
Alla Karimova, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Uzbekistan, Possibilities of a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Creation in Central Asia, 1997, http://www.uspid.dsi.unimi.it/proceed/cast97/karimova.html (MHHAR2216)
Proliferation of nuclear weapons on the planet is the major threat to the survival of humanity. Nuclear weapons are able to destroy not only what has been created by mankind throughout the past centuries, but the very life on earth. In the epoch of nuclear disarmament it is necessary to work out a new world conception based on the principles of refraining from the threat or use of force, as well as of respect of every nation's rights to self-determination: social, political and ideological, rejecting a policy aimed at the domination of one by another.
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Proliferation -- Miller
THE GREATEST RISK OF EDXTINCTION IS FROM PROLIFERATION
James D. Miller, professor of economics, Smith College, NATIONAL REVIEW, January 23, 2002, p. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-miller012302.shtml The U.S. should use whatever means necessary to stop our enemies from gaining the ability to kill millions of us. We should demand that countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea make no attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. We should further insist on the right to make surprise inspections of these countries to insure that they are complying with our proliferation policy. What if these nations refuse our demands? If they refuse we should destroy their industrial capacity and capture their leaders.True, the world's cultural elites would be shocked and appalled if we took preventive military action against countries that are currently doing us no harm. What is truly shocking, however, is that America is doing almost nothing while countries that have expressed hatred for us are building weapons of mass destruction. France and Britain allowed Nazi Germany's military power to grow until Hitler was strong enough to take Paris. America seems to be doing little while many of our foes acquire the strength to destroy U.S. cities. We can't rely upon deterrence to prevent an atomic powered dictator from striking at us. Remember, the Nazi's killed millions of Jews even though the Holocaust took resources away from their war effort. As September 11th also shows, there exist evil men in the world who would gladly sacrifice all other goals for the opportunity to commit mass murder. The U.S. should take not even the slightest unnecessary chance that some dictator, perhaps a dying Saddam Hussein, would be willing to give up his life for the opportunity to hit America with nuclear missiles. Once a dictator has the ability to hit a U.S., or perhaps even a European city, with atomic weapons it will be too late for America to pressure him to give up his weapons. His ability to hurt us will effectively put him beyond our military reach. Our conventional forces might even be made impotent by a nuclear-armed foe. Had Iraq possessed atomic weapons, for example, we would probably have been unwilling to expel them from Kuwait. What about the rights of those countries I have proposed threatening? America should not even pretend to care about the rights of dictators. In the 21st century the only leaders whom we should recognize as legitimate are those who were democratically elected. The U.S. should reinterpret international law to give no rights to tyrants, not even the right to exist. We should have an ethically based foreign policy towards democratic countries. With dictatorships, however, we should be entirely Machiavellian; we should deal with them based upon what is in our own best interests. It's obviously in our self-interest to prevent as many dictators as possible from acquiring the means to destroy us. We shouldn't demand that China abandon her nuclear weapons. This is not because China
has proved herself worthy to have the means of mass annihilation, but rather because her existing stockpile of atomic missiles would make it too costly for us to threaten China. It's too late to stop the Chinese from gaining the ability to decimate us, but for the next ten years or so it is not too late to stop some of our other rivals. If it's politically impossible for America to use military force against currently non-hostile dictators then we should use trade sanctions to punish nations who don't agree to our proliferation policy. Normal trade sanctions, however, do not provide the punishing power necessary to induce dictators to abandon their arms. If we simply don't trade with a nation other countries will sell them the goods that we used to provide. To make trade sanctions an effective weapon the U.S. needs to deploy secondary boycotts. America should create a treaty, the signatories of which would agree to: only trade with countries which have signed the treaty, and not trade with any country which violates our policy on weapons proliferation. believe that if only the U.S. and, say, Germany initially signed this treaty then nearly every other country would be forced to do so. For example, if France did not sign, they would be unable to trade with the U.S. or Germany. This would obviously be intolerable to France. Once the U.S., Germany and France adopted the treaty every European nation would have to sign or face a total economic collapse. The more countries which sign the treaty, the greater the pressure on other countries to sign. Once most every country has signed, any country which violated America's policy on weapons proliferation would face almost a complete economic boycott. Under this approach, the U.S. and Germany alone could use our economic power to dictate the enforcement mechanism of a treaty designed to protect against Armageddon. Even the short-term survival of humanity is in doubt. The greatest threat of extinction surely comes from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. America should refocus her foreign policy to prioritize protecting us all from atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.
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Donald Kagan, Professor of History and Classics at Yale, 1997 [Donald, ORBIS, Spring 1997, p. 188-9] America's most vital interest therefore, is maintaining the general peace for war has been the swiftest, most expensive, and most devastating means of changing the balance of international power. But peace does not keep itself, although one of the most common errors in modern thinking about international relations is the assumption that peace is natural and can be preserved merely by having peace-seeking nations avoid provocative actions. The last three-quarters of the twentieth century strongly suggest the opposite conclusion: major war is more likely to come when satisfied states neglect their defenses and fail to take active part in the preservation of peace. It is vital to understand that the current relatively peaceful and secure situation is neither inevitable nor immutable. It reflects two conditions built up with tremendous effort and expense during the last half century: the great power of the United States and the general expectation that Americans will be willing to use that power when necessary. The diminution of U.S. power and thus not be a neutral act that would leave the situation as it stands. Instead, it would be critical step in undermining the stability of the international situation. Calculations based on the absence of visible potential enemies would immediately be made invalid by America's withdrawal from its current position as the major bulwark supporting the world order. The cost of the resulting upheaval in wealth, in stability, and likelihood of war would be infinitely greater than the cost of continuing to uphold the existing
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not suffer civil war quietly or alone. An embattled Russian Federation might provoke opportunistic attacks from enemies such as China. Massive flows of refugees would pour into central and western Europe. Armed struggles in Russia could easily spill into its neighbors. Damage from the fighting, particularly attacks on nuclear plants, would poison the environment of much of Europe and Asia. Within Russia, the consequences would be even worse. Just as the sheer brutality of the last Russian civil war laid the basis for the privations of Soviet communism, a second civil war might produce another horrific regime. Most alarming is the real possibility that the violent disintegration of Russia could lead to loss of control over its nuclear arsenal. No nuclear state has ever fallen victim to civil war, but even without a clear precedent the grim consequences can be foreseen. Russia retains some 20,000 nuclear weapons and the raw material for tens of thousands more, in scores of sites scattered throughout the country. So far, the government has managed to prevent the loss of any weapons or much material. If war erupts, however, Moscow's already weak grip on nuclear sites will slacken, making weapons and supplies available to a wide range of antiAmerican groups and states. Such dispersal of nuclear weapons represents the greatest physical threat America now faces. And it is hard to think of anything that would increase this threat more than the chaos that would follow a Russian civil war.
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Steven David, political scientist, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, January/February 1999, p. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19990101faessay955/steven-r-david/saving-america-from-the-coming-civilwars.html AS LIKELY as is conflict in Mexico, there is even less hope for Saudi Arabia -- and if the kingdom succumbs to civil war, the outcome will be catastrophic not just for the United States but for the world. A country built on contradictions, Saudi Arabia is extremely vulnerable to internal war. The same factors that have kept its regime in power -- the oil economy, the military, Islam, the royal family -- could now fuel an insurrection. Meanwhile, global dependence on Saudi oil will only increase in coming years, making an interruption in its flow even more dangerous. Fabulous oil wealth has been a mixed blessing for Saudi Arabia. Oil has spared the Saudi government from the need to tax its citizens; as a result, the regime has never learned to convince its subjects to sacrifice for the good of the state (nor have the citizens learned to weather privation). The timid Saudi government must constantly buy the people's loyalty with material comforts. That might not have become a problem had oil prices not begun to drop in the 1980s. Saudi Arabia's per capita GDP plunged from $ 17,000 early in that decade to around $ 7,000 today. Unemployment among high school and university graduates rose to an alarming 25 percent. Struggling to cope with these problems, the government has incurred large deficits since 1983. Meanwhile, the estimated $ 65 billion it spent on the Gulf War only exacerbated matters. But as long as the royal family continues to benefit from government spending by receiving lavish kickbacks from foreign contractors, there seems little hope of major cuts in expenditures. Rather than reduce its reliance on oil, in the face of increased expenses the Saudi economy has become more and more dependent on it, even as oil revenues plummet (oil export earnings are expected to shrink from $ 43 billion in 1997 to just over $ 29 billion in 1998). The government thinks that the damage done to the economy by failing to raise taxes or make major spending cuts is less dangerous than the alternative, which might alienate large portions of the population. But if the economy continues to deteriorate, the government will have to make hard choices that could rock the Saudi state. Meanwhile, the Saudi military presents another possible source of division. Always afraid of a coup, Saudi rulers have split the military into the regular armed forces (roughly 100,000 men) and the National Guard (30,000 full time, 15,000 reserves). Led by different members of the royal family, the two forces pursue distinct missions and draw on separate segments of the population: the regular military gets its recruits mostly from cities and towns while the Guard uses rural tribesmen. To prevent a coordinated coup, communications between the Guard and the military are kept to a minimum, but this has the side effect of enhancing their distinct identities. While dividing the military in this way may make it more difficult for a discontented prince to seize power at the head of a united army, it also means that a struggle in the royal family could pit the armed forces against the Guard. Religion in Saudi Arabia also does more to undermine the current regime than to prop up its legitimacy. Since the Gulf War, when the Saudi government welcomed "infidel" troops from the West, Sunni Muslim religious leaders have launched unprecedented challenges to the royal family. Sunni notables have urged the government to sever ties with non-Muslim countries, questioned the royal family's business dealings, and called for the creation of a consultative council to assist the king in governing. Even if all of these demands are met (so far only the last has been addressed), the religious threat to the regime will persist. This extremist opposition is no longer just made up of the lower classes and fringe elements that violently took over Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979. Instead, it includes well-educated members of the middle class, many of them from the Najd region -- the traditional power base of the royal family. They enjoy substantial support in the cities and among the younger generation, especially those with religious educations who found no jobs waiting for them on graduation. And their ranks are swollen with the hundreds of disgruntled Saudi volunteers who fought a holy war against the Russians in Afghanistan, only to return home and find a government of questionable Islamic purity in a state
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where the standard of living had plummeted. Complicating matters still further are the 500,000 Saudi Shiites in the oil-rich east, whose 1980 riots shook the foundations of the Saudi regime. As the central government runs out of cash, its declining ability to buy their support may ignite a renewal of their violent protests. As the above suggests, Saudi Arabia suffers from the fact that the various threats to domestic peace all reinforce one another. The bad economy intensifies religious extremism, which in turn exacerbates divisions in the armed forces. The catalyst for civil war can therefore come from one of several different sources. A power struggle in the royal family over succession to the throne, squabbles over shares of an ever-shrinking economic pie, or disenchantment in the military with the royal family's selfish behavior could all set off a major conflagration. In a Saudi civil war, the oil fields will be a likely battle site, as belligerents seek the revenue and international recognition that come with control of petroleum. For either side to cripple oil production would not be difficult. The real risk lies not with the onshore oil wells themselves, which are spread over a 100-by-300 mile area, but in the country's dependence on only a few critical processing sites. Destruction of these facilities would paralyze production and take at least six months to repair. If unconventional weapons such as biological agents were used in the oil fields, production could be delayed for several more months until workers were convinced it was safe to return. Stanching the flow of Saudi oil would devastate the United States and much of the world community. Global demand for oil (especially in Asia) will increase in the coming decades, while non-Persian Gulf supplies are expected to diminish. A crisis in the planet's largest oil producer, with reserves estimated at 25 percent of the world's total, would have a massive and protracted impact on the price and availability of oil worldwide. As the disruptions of 1973 and 1979 showed, the mere threat of diminished oil supply can cause panic buying, national hysteria, gas lines, and infighting. Prices for oil shot up 400 percent in 1973, 150 percent in 1979, and 50 percent (in just 15 days) in 1990. The oil shocks of the 1970s threw the United States into recession, causing spiraling inflation and a decline in savings rates that plagues the U.S. economy even now. Trillions of dollars were lost worldwide. And all this occurred at a time when the United States was less dependent on foreign petroleum than it is now. Cutting the Saudi pipeline today would cause a severe worldwide recession or depression. Short of physical attack, it is the gravest threat imaginable to American interests.
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Kenneth Pollack, Direct or Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, July/August, 2003, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030701faessay15401/kenneth-m-pollack/securing-thegulf.html America's primary interest in the Persian Gulf lies in ensuring the free and stable flow of oil from the region to the world at large. This fact has nothing to do with the conspiracy theories leveled against the Bush administration during the run-up to the recent war. U.S. interests do not center on whether gas is $2 or $3 at the pump, or whether Exxon gets contracts instead of Lukoil or Total. Nor do they depend on the amount of oil that the United States itself imports from the Persian Gulf or anywhere else. The reason the United States has a legitimate and critical interest in seeing that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow copiously and relatively cheaply is simply that the global economy built over the last 50 years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil, and if that foundation were removed, the global economy would collapse. Today, roughly 25 percent of the world's oil production comes from the Persian Gulf, with Saudi Arabia alone responsible for roughly 15 percent -- a figure expected to increase rather than decrease in the future. The Persian Gulf region has as much as two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves, and its oil is absurdly economical to produce, with a barrel from Saudi Arabia costing anywhere from a fifth to a tenth of the price of a barrel from Russia. Saudi Arabia is not only the world's largest oil producer and the holder of the world's largest oil reserves, but it also has a majority of the world's excess production capacity, which the Saudis use to stabilize and control the price of oil by increasing or decreasing production as needed. Because of the importance of both Saudi production and Saudi slack capacity, the sudden loss of the Saudi oil network would paralyze the global economy, probably causing a global downturn at least as devastating as the Great Depression of the 1930s, if not worse. So the fact that the United States does not import most of its oil from the Persian Gulf is irrelevant: if Saudi oil production were to vanish, the price of oil in general would shoot through the ceiling, destroying the American economy along with everybody else's.
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Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute, PLAN B 2.0 RESCUING A PLANET UNDER STRESS AND A CIVILIZATION IN TROUBLE, 2006, p. 95 We are now in the early stage of the sixth great extinction. Unlike previous extinction events, which were caused by natural phenomena, this one is of human origin. For the first time in the earth's long history, one species has evolved, if that is the right word, to where it can eradicate much of life. As various life forms disappear, they diminish the services provided by nature, such as pollination, seed dispersal, insect control, and nutrient cycling. This loss of species is weakening the web of life, and if it continues it could tear huge gaps in its fabric, leading to irreversible changes in the earth's ecosystem. Species of all kinds are threatened by habitat destruction, principally through the loss of tropical rainforests. As we burn off the Amazon rainforest, we are in effect burning one of the great repositories of genetic information. Our descendents may one day view the wholesale burning of this genetic library much as we view the burning of the library in Alexandria in 48 BC
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James Hsiung, professor of politics and international law at NYU, 21ST CENTURY WORLD ORDER AND THE ASIA PACIFIC, 2001, p. 359-60 But decision-makers cannot afford such luxury. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapores Senior Minister, issued a grave warning presumably directed at all government leaders, including the United States, that the Taiwan power kege could ignite a conflagaration that would engulf the entire region. It might even embroil the United States in a nuclear holocaust that nobody wants. Often-times, well-meaning analysts raise the question whether China, with its present military capability and modest
defense expenditures (about U.S. $15 billion annually0, can or cannot take Taiwan by forces. But this is the wrong question to pose. As the late patriarch Deng Xiapoing put it, We rather have it proven that we trade but failed [to stop it[ even by force, than be accused [by our disgruntled compatriots and posterity] of not trying to stop Taiwan from going independent. Earlier, I raised the issue of stability within the U.S.-China-Japan triad, precisely with the U.S.-Japan alliance in view. Apparently, many in Japan have apprehensions about the stability. Japanese Nobel laureate (for literature) Ohe
Because of its alliance relationship, Japan would be embroiled in a conflict that it did not choose that might escalate into a nuclear holocaust. From the ashes of such a nuclear conflict, he figured, some form of life may still be found in the combatant nuclear giants, China and the United States, But, Kohaburo argued, there would be absolutely nothing left in Japan or Taiwan or in the conflicts wake.
Kenzaburo, for instance, once told a pen pal that he was fearful of the outcome of a conflict between the United States and China over the question of Taiwan.
Straits Times, June, 25, 2000, No one gains in war over Taiwan] (PDNSS2115) THE DOOMSDAY SCENARIO -THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase: Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilization. There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear Annaggedon over Taiwan might seem inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else.
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Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Al-Ahram Weekly political analyst, 2004 [Al-Ahram Weekly, "Extinction!" 8/26, no. 705, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm]
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further exacerbate the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights, tensions between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole planet, we will all be losers.
A NUCLEAR TERROR ATTACK ON THE U.S. WILL TRIGGER A GLOBAL DEPRESSION Richard Haas, President, Council on Foreign Relations, PREVENTING CATASTROPHIC NUCLEAR TERRORISM, March 2006, http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/NucTerrCSR.pdf
A nuclear attack by terrorists against the United States has the potential to make the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, look like a historical footnote. In addition to the immediate horrific devastation, such an attack could cost trillions of dollars in damages, potentially sparking a global economic depression. Although, during the 2004 presidential campaign,
President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Senator John F. Kerry agreed that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons worried them more than any other national security threat, the U.S. government has yet to elevate nuclear terrorism prevention to the highest priority. Despite several U.S. and international programs to secure nuclear weapons and the materials to make them, major gaps in policy remain.
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Ernesto Zedillo, Former President of Mexico Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, FORBES, January 9, 2006, p. 25
Even if you agree with what's being done in the war on terror, you still could be upset about what's not happening: doing the utmost to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack. We all should have a pretty clear idea of what would follow a nuclear weapon's detonation in any of the world's major cities. Depending on the potency of the device the loss of life could be in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), the destruction of property in the trillions of dollars, the escalation in conflicts and violence uncontrollable, the erosion of authority and government unstoppable and the disruption of global trade and finance unprecedented. In short, we could practically count on the beginning of another dark age. TERRORISM RISKS EXTINCTION
Yonah Alexander, Inter-University for Terrorism Studies Director, 2003 [The Washington Times, "Terrorism myths and realities," 8/28]
Last week's brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrated dramatically that the international community failed, thus far at least, to understand the magnitude and implications of the terrorist threats to the very survival of civilization itself. Even the United States and Israel have for decades tended to regard terrorism as a mere tactical nuisance or irritant rather than a critical strategic challenge to their national security concerns. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 11, 2001, Americans were stunned by the unprecedented tragedy of 19 al Qaeda terrorists striking a devastating blow at the center of the nation's commercial and military powers. Likewise, Israel and its citizens, despite the collapse of the Oslo Agreements of 1993 and numerous acts of terrorism triggered by the second intifada that began almost three years ago, are still "shocked" by each suicide attack at a time of intensive diplomatic efforts to revive the moribund peace process through the now revoked cease-fire arrangements [hudna]. Why are the United States and Israel, as well as scores of other countries affected by the universal nightmare of modern terrorism surprised by new terrorist "surprises"? There are many reasons, including misunderstanding of the manifold specific factors that contribute to terrorism's expansion, such as lack of a universal definition of terrorism, the religionization of politics, double standards of morality, weak punishment of terrorists, and the exploitation of the media by terrorist propaganda and psychological warfare. Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns.
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John D. Steinbrenner, Brookings Senior Fellow, 1997 [Foreign Policy, "Biological weapons: a plague upon all houses," Winter, InfoTrac]
Although human pathogens are often lumped with nuclear explosives and lethal chemicals as potential weapons of mass destruction, there is an obvious, fundamentally important difference: Pathogens are alive, weapons are not. Nuclear and chemical weapons do not reproduce themselves and do not independently engage in adaptive behavior; pathogens do both of these things. That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit. Nobody really knows how serious a possibility this might be, since there is no way to measure it reliably. BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM CAUSES EXTINCTION
Richard Ochs, Chemical Weapons Working Group Member, 2002 [Biological Weapons must be Abolished Immediately, June 9, http://www.freefromterror.net/other_articles/abolish.html]
Of all the weapons of mass destruction, the genetically engineered biological weapons, many without a known cure or vaccine, are an extreme danger to the continued survival of life on earth. Any perceived military value or deterrence pales in comparison to the great risk these weapons pose just sitting in vials in laboratories. While a "nuclear winter," resulting from a massive exchange of nuclear weapons, could also kill off most of life on earth and severely compromise the health of future generations, they are easier to control. Biological weapons, on the other hand, can get out of control very easily, as the recent anthrax attacks has demonstrated. There is no way to guarantee the security of these doomsday weapons because very tiny amounts can be stolen or accidentally released and then grow or be grown to horrendous proportions. The Black Death of the Middle Ages would be small in comparison to the potential damage bioweapons could cause. Abolition of chemical weapons is less of a priority because, while they can also kill millions of people outright, their persistence in the environment would be less than nuclear or biological agents or more localized. Hence, chemical weapons would have a lesser effect on future generations of innocent people and the natural environment. Like the Holocaust, once a localized chemical extermination is over, it is over. With nuclear and biological weapons, the killing will probably never end. Radioactive elements last tens of thousands of years and will keep causing cancers virtually forever. Potentially worse than that, bio-engineered agents by the hundreds with no known cure could wreck even greater calamity on the human race than could persistent radiation. AIDS and ebola viruses are just a small example of recently emerging plagues with no known cure or vaccine. Can we imagine hundreds of such plagues? HUMAN EXTINCTION IS NOW POSSIBLE.
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Jonathan S. Landay, National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, 2000 [Top Administration Officials Warn Stakes for U.S. Are High in Asian Conflicts, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, March 10, p. Lexis]
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea, or India and Pakistan are spoiling to fight. But even a minor miscalculation by any of them could destabilize Asia, jolt the global economy and even start a nuclear war. India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear weapons, and North Korea may have a few, too. Asia lacks the kinds of organizations, negotiations and diplomatic relationships that helped keep an uneasy peace for five decades in Cold War Europe. Nowhere else on Earth are the stakes as high and relationships so fragile, said Bates Gill, director of northeast Asian policy studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
We see the convergence of great power interest overlaid with lingering confrontations with no institutionalized security mechanism in place. There are elements for potential disaster. In an effort to cool the regions tempers, President Clinton, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger all will hopscotch Asias capitals this month. For America, the stakes could hardly be higher. There are 100,000 U.S. troops in Asia committed to defending Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and the United States would instantly become embroiled if Beijing moved against Taiwan or North Korea attacked South Korea. While Washington has no defense commitments to either India or Pakistan, a conflict between the two could end the global taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international nonproliferation regime. In addition, globalization has made a stable Asia _ with its massive markets, cheap labor, exports and resources _ indispensable to the U.S. economy. Numerous U.S. firms and millions of American jobs depend on trade with Asia that totaled $600 billion last year, according to the Commerce Department.
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Nor did the media go beyond Surat and explain how this largely inconsequential epidemic, a kind of false alarm in a much larger microbial saga, was another sharp warning of our species' growing vulnerability to infectious disease. Imagine, for a moment, if Surat had aroused a different airborne microbe, a so-called "emerging virus," beyond the waning reach of antibiotics. Suppose that the headliner germ had been a new strain of Ebola that dissolves internal organs into a bloody tar or the mysterious "X" virus that killed thousands in the Sudan last year. Had such a microbe been unleashed, the final death toll might have been millions, and the world might now be mourning a "new Black Death." The planet, in fact, might be an entirely different and emptier place altogether.
Viruses Franz
VIRUSES ARE THE NUMBER ON THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL David Franz, Chief Biological Scientist, Midwest Research Institute, MICROBE, 2005, p. x
As Nobel laureate Josh Lederberg stated, Pandemics are not acts of God, but are built into the ecological relations between viruses, animal species and human species. There will be more surprises, because our fertile imagination does not begin to match all the tricks that nature can play. The survival of humanity is not preordained. The single biggest threat to [hu]mans continued dominance is the virus.
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Viruses Ryan
VIRAL SPREADS RISK EXTINCTION
Frank Ryan, MD, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, VIRUS X: TRACKING THE NEW KILLER PLAGUES OUT OF THE PRESENT AND INTO THE FUTURE, 1998, p. 367
In virological circles such a doomsday virus is often referred to as the Andromeda strain, after the bestselling thriller by Michael Crichton. But this is a misnomer. The Andromeda strain was not a virus at all, but a crystalline entity that came to earth on a meteorite from outer space. It was devoid of DNA, RNA, or even protein, and imbibed carbon and oxygen from its environment, replicating as the perfect nanomachine. If ever an extinction strain does threaten the human species, it is more likely to be a virus, and it will emerge from the diversity of life on earth. For this reason, I have called it Virus X, with X the logical derivative of extinction. What would be the likely properties of such a virus? To cause our extinction, Virus X would need to take two steps. First, it would have to kill everybody, or almost everybody, it infected. The qualifier is needed because the end of human civilization might not require the death of all its members. Has any virus, or any other infectious agent, ever caused such lethality? The answer, unfortunately, is yes though the emergence of such catastrophic lethality is rare. Rabies was uniformly lethal in humans for at least four thousand years of history until Louis Pasteur discovered the first vaccine treatment. A member of the genus Lyssa viruses, from the Greek lyssa, which means frenzy rabies is one of over one hundred members of the family of Rhabdoviridae, which infect an incredible range of life, from plants to reptiles, fish, crustaceans, and mammals. In the opinion of Herve Bourhy, an expert at the Pasteur Institute, the human rabies virus lives in a symbiotic cycle with bats, from which it is capable of infecting a wide variety of mammals, particularly foxes, coyotes, jackals, and rodents. Could anybody conceive a more sinister expression of aggressive symbiosis? The virus is programmed to infect the centers in the animal brain that induce uncontrollable rage, while also replicating in the salivary glands to best spread the contagion through the provoked frenzy of biting. We should be very thankful that the manner of spread precludes the virus from ever causing a human pandemic. HIV-1 still appears almost uniformly lethal, though, occasional reports of survivors are now appearing, and the Zairian Ebola virus was a close rival, with 90 percent fatality to the people it infected. However, with HIV-1 and Ebola, the worry of a species threat is far greater than with rabies. Could such lethal agents every take the second step, and become sufficiently contagious to infect all or virtually all of the human species? The reassuring fact is that the vast majority of emerging viruses, including those with such huge lethality, fail in practice to become pandemic. We know some of the explanations. An infection directly contracted from an animal or biting insect will never pose such a problem because the numbers infected will be limited by the extent of the contact. This was the case, for example, with the Sin nombre hantavirus. Food- or water-borne epidemics, though they might infect large numbers of people, can be interrupted by appropriate recognition and introduced measures of hygiene. Even sexually transmitted disease, such as AIDS, can be controlled by mechanical prophylaxis and a reduction in promiscuity; and blood-borne infections by control of contaminated supply, syringes and needles. As far as we are aware and one always has to quality extrapolation based on past experience with caution the only route of contagion likely to prove universally threatening to humanity would be person-to-person spread by the respiratory route. The potential for respiratory spread of a plague microbe is unique. Each adult inhales bout 10,000 liters of air each day, and we cannot avoid inhaling one anothers expired discharges. Given a few minutes in a crowded room, the infected individual will, by coughing or sneezing, transmit the microbe to many of the others present. This was seen most tragically and historically in the switch from bubonic to pneumonic plague during the Black Death. Notable among present-day viruses that spread with high levels of contagion by the aerosol route are the rhinoviruses and corona viruses that cause common colds. We are all familiar with the rapid spread of the influenza virus, which has long proved its capability to cause pandemics. But to threaten our species, or to provoke a near enough catastrophe to destroy human civilization, a virus would need to combine the infectivity of influenza with the lethality of HIV-1 or Ebola Zaire.
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