Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Alternative – Rejection

Rejection reframes the debate around the perspective of the oppressed solving nuclear racism
Muttimer 94 (David, professor of political science at suniversity of Vermont. Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation” 1994 http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP25-Mutimer.pdf TBC 6/29/10 Pg. 38)

These conclusions hold two implications for 'critical' security studies. First of all, the exploration of the metaphors underlying policy will form an important part of a general project of critique, understood as revealing the power relations hidden by security relations. Those power relations are masked by the metaphorical understandings of the images of security, and so to reveal them, the images must themselves be revealed. Secondly, the impulse to critique is rooted in a political stance opposed to the dominant powers, and thus supporting the struggles of the oppressed. In order to create alternative security policies from the perspective of the oppressed, the present argument suggests the need first to construct images of security problems which privilege their interests, rather than those of the dominant powers—(DIS)ARMAMENT rather than PROLIFERATION, for example.

Alternative – Rejection

Only by rejecting our current assumptions do we open up the possibility of a world without nuclear weapons

Gusterson 99 (Hugh, professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Stan-PS-314-2009-Q1_PNP/Syllabus/EReadings/Gusterson1999Nuclear.pdf, AD: 6/29/10) jl

This article has critiqued policy talk grounded in an unsustainable binary opposition between nations that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and nations that cannot-an opposition that can be found in some antinuclear as well as establishment discourse in the West. I do not want to minimize the potential dangers of nuclear proliferation, which are, surely, clear enough. I do want to argue that these dangers, such as they are, should not be spoken about in terms that demean the peoples of the Third World. Nor should they be represented in ways that obscure both the dangers inherent in the continued maintenance of our own nuclear arsenals and the fact that our own actions are often a source of the instabilities we so fear in Third World nations. So, where does this leave us? This article has set out to critique not a particular policy but the way our conversations about policy choices on the nuclear issue may unthinkingly incorporate certain neocolonial hierarchies and assumptions that, when drawn to our attention, many of us would disown. Nor is this just a matter of policing language, for the embedded orientalist assumptions I have been critiquing here underpin a global security regime that sanctifies a particular kind of Western military dominance in the world. Because I have set out to criticize a particular kind of policy talk rather than a specific policy, I will conclude not with a prescribed policy but by suggesting that there are three different discursive positions on proliferation, each pointing in the direction of a very different global security regime, that do not embody the double standard I have been concerned to criticize here. I call then1 "exclusion," "participation," and "renunciation." The strategy of exclusion is based pragmatically in the conventions of realpolitik. It involves the candid declaration that, while nuclear weapons may be no more dangerous in the hands of Muslims or Hindus than in those of Christians, they are a prerogative of power, and the powerful have no intention of allowing the powerless to acquire them. This is a position that, in its rejection of easy racism and phony moralism, is at least honorable in its frankness. It is the position of New York Times columnist Flora Lewis in her remark that "the 'rights' of nations are limited, and the limits must be imposed by those who can. They may not be more virtuous, but they must strive for it. That is the reason to keep insisting on nonproliferation" (1990:23). The second position, participation, is based on Kenneth Waltz's argument that all countries benefit from acquiring nuclear weapons. This position may have more appeal in certain parts of the Third World than in the West. It is the position of India, Israel, and Pakistan, for example, who have, like the older nuclear nations, sought to maximize their power and freedom by acquiring a nuclear capability. These countries pursued nuclear weapons in search of greater security vis-a-vis regional rivals and out of a desire to shift the balance of power in their client relationships with the superpowers. 134 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY The third strategy would be renunciation. This strategy breaks down the distinctions we have constructed between "us" and "them" and asks whether nuclear weapons are safe in anyone's hands. "What-must-on-no-account-beknown," says Salman Rushdie, is the "impossible verity that savagery could be concealed beneath decency's well-pressed shirt" (1984:219). Our orientalist discourse on nuclear proliferation is one of our ways not to know this. By breaking down the discourse, confronting those parts of our own personality and culture which appear as the childish, irrational, lawless, or feminine aspects of the Other, we could address our doubts about ourselves instead of harping continually on our doubts about others. Then we might accept that "the fact that we urge other nations not to depend on nuclear weapons in this way-and urge very strenuously-suggests that we have mixed feelings about how safe they make us" (Ground Zero 1982:221). This acceptance would lead us to the same conclusion reached by George Kennan, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and the originator of the policy of containment in the Cold War: I see the danger not in the number or quality of the weapons or in the intentions of those who hold them but in the very existence of weapons of this nature, regardless of whose hands they are in. I believe that unless we consent to recognize that the nuclear weapons we hold in our hands are as much a danger to us as those that repose in the hands of our supposed adversaries there will be no escape from the confusions and dilemmas to which such weapons have brought us, and must bring us increasingly as time goes on. For this reason, I see no solution to the problem other than the complete elimination of these and all other weapons of mass destruction from national arsenals; and the sooner we move toward that solution, and the greater courage we show in doing so, the safer we will be. [1981:62, quoted in Lichterman, Cabasso, and Burroughs 1995:22-231