Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

AT: Nuclear Apartheid – N/W Outwieghs

Impacts of nuclear weapons outweighs – The idea of nuclear equality destroys accountability

Biswas 1 (Shampa, Whitman College Politics Professor, Alternatives 26.4, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_4_26/ai_n28886584/, AD: 7/1/10) jl

At one level, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, the concept of apartheid relates to a discourse about "democracy." (49) To use apartheid to designate the unequal distribution of nuclear resources then is also simultaneously to draw attention to the undemocratic character of international relations--or, more literally, the exclusion of a group of people from some kind of legitimate and just entitlement. More specifically, to talk in terms of nuclear haves and have-nots is to talk in terms of a concept of democratic justice based on the "possession" (or lack thereof) of something. "Apartheid," as Sumit Sarkar points out, "implies as its valorised Other a notion of equal rights." (50) But that this something is "nuclear weapons" complicates the issue a great deal. If the vision of democracy that is implicit in the concept of nuclear apartheid implies a world of "equal possession" of nuclear weapons, a position implied in the Indian decision to test, that is a frightening thought indeed. Yet surely even India does not subscribe to that vision of democracy. "Would India," asks Sarkar, "welcome a nuclearised Nepal or Bangladesh?" (51) If Jaswant Singh is serious that "the country"s national security in a world of nuclear proliferation lies either in global disarmament or in exercise of the principle of equal and legitimate security for all," (52) then it should indeed support the "equal and legitimate" nuclearization of its neighbors, which is extremely unlikely given its own demonstrated hegemonic aspirations in the South Asian region. (53) Further, if India does indeed now sign the NPT and the CTBT, and sign them in the garb of a nuclear power as it wants to do, what does that say about its commitment to nuclear democracy? Even if India and Pakistan were to be included in the treaties as NWSs, all that would do is expand the size of the categories, not delegitimize the unequal privileges and burdens written into the categories themselves.

*Kato K*

Kato Shell

Predictive scenarios about nuclear war ignore the on-going nuclear genocide committed against the fourth world

Kato 93 (Masahide, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, Alternatives 18, 339-360) jl

Nuclear war has been enclosed by two seemingly opposite yet complementary regimes of discourse: nation-state strategic discourse (nuclear deterrence, nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and so on) and extra-nation-state (or extra-territorial) discourse (antinuclearism, nuclear criticism, and so on). The epistemology of the former is entrenched in the "possible" exchange(s) of nuclear warheads among nation states. The latter, which emerged in reaction to the former, holds the "possibility of extinction" at the center of its discursive production.

In delineating the notion of "nuclear war," both of these discourses share an intriguing leap: from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the "possible" nuclear explosions in an indefinite-yet-ever-closer-to-the-present future. Thus any nuclear explosions after World War II do not qualify as nuclear war in the cognitive grid of conventional nuclear discourse. Significandy, most nuclear explosions after World War II took place in the sovereign territories of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This critical historical fact has been contained in the domain of nuclear testing. Such obliteration of the history of undeclared nuclear warfare by nuclear discourse does not merely posit the deficiency of the discourse. Rather, what it does is reveal the late capitalist form of domination, whereby an ongoing extermination process of the periphery is blocked from constituting itself as a historical fact.

In the first half of this article, I trace this disqualification process of nuclear war against the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations to the mode of perception that objectifies the periphery in order to subordinate it to a reconstructed homogeneous time and space.

Kato Shell

The notion that nuclear war causes “extinction” ignores the on-going nuclear war conducting against indigenous nations

Kato 93 (Masahide, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, Alternatives 18, 339-360) jl

Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human extinction—whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about"35 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence: Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text. At least today apparendy.36 By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe." The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succincdy, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects."38 Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "derealization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of extinction" is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."39 Robert Lifton attributed such difficulty in locating the subject to the "numbing effect" of nuclear psychology. In other words, Lifton tied the difficulty involved here not to the question of subjectivity per se but to psychological defenses against the overwhelming possibility of extinction. The hollowness of extinction can be unraveled better if we locate it in the mode of perception rather than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is a result of "confusing figure with the object"40 This phenomenon, called "the delirium of interpretation" by Virilio, is a mechanical process in which incorporeal existence is given a meaning via the figure.41 It is no doubt a manifestation of technosubjectivity symptomatic of late capitalism. Hence, the obscurity of the subject in the configuration of extinction results from the dislocation of the subject by the technosubject functioning as a meaning-generating machine. Technosubjectivity deployed in configuring "extinction" is the product of interfaces among the camera's eyes, photo (or video) image, the ultimate speed materialized by rockets and satellite communications, and nuclear warheads. Carol Cohn persuasively analyzed one such aspect of the interface in shaping and structuring the discourse of defense intellectuals: in the discourse, of nuclear war, national security, and nuclear criticism, it is the bomb that is the subject of discourse.42 The satellite communications, rockets, camera's eye, nuclear warheads, and other technostrategic gadgets, which are rendered subject in the field of discourse and perception, are essentially a fixed capital. Therefore, although the problem of technosubjectivity seems to be a new phenomenon in the age of high technology, it remains part of an ongoing process of subject-object inversion inherent in the very concept of capital. Having established the link between the disqualification (or derealization) of the history ("real") of nuclear catastrophe on the one hand and the mode of Nuclear criticism offers preservation of self and matter as a solution to its own imaginary/ideological construct of extinction (as manifested in the buzzword "freeze"). Accordingly, preservation of self and matter as an alternative to the inertia of the "unthinkable" cannot be anything but an imaginary/ideological construct It is in this fantasy that one can find the ideological content of globalism. The proposition of preservation as a solution to the imagined extinction at the same time involves redefinition of the notion of "humanity." The image of extinction drove even a Marxist, namely, E. E Thompson, to abandon "class" analysis, embracing humanity instead: "exterminism itself is not a 'class issue': it is a human issue."43 In this sense, nuclear criticism recreates the Renaissance in the late capitalist era in its reinvention of humanity through technosubjectivity. Robert Lifton defined the collectivity in danger by comparing the threat of extinction with the hostage-taking, which I turn entails a very revealing redefinition of humanity: But unlike ordinary hostage taking, nuclear terror encompasses everyone. Precisely for that reason it throws us back on our collective humanity. In calling into question the idea of human future, it raises equally ultimate questions about our evolutionary equipment for shaping that threatened future.”