Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Link – Unstable/Failed States

Instable States are a metaphor for irrational behavior that western societies project onto other nations – criticism exposes these contradictions

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

The Western discourse on proliferation also stresses the supposedly ancient quality of feuds and hatreds in South Asia and the Middle East. As British journalist Nigel Calder puts it, "In that troubled part of the world, where modern technology serves ancient bitterness and nuclear explosions seem like a just expression of the wrath of God, imagining sequences of events that could lead to a regional nuclear conflict is not difficult" (1979:83). Explaining why Pakistan named its new missile the Ghauri, Senator Moynihan said, "Ghauri was a Muslim prince who invaded India in the twelfth century. These things don't go away" (1998). "Nuclear missiles named for ancient warriors will probably be deployed by two nations with a history of warfare, religious strife, and a simmering border dispute," said an ABC News reporter (Wouters 1998). In this vein it was widely reported in the U.S. media that the Indian Prithvi missile was named after an ancient warrior-king and that India's Agni missile was named for the god of fire (e.g., Marquand 1998). This widely circulated claim is particularly striking because, while it resonates with our stereotypes of Hindus enslaved to religion and tradition, it is quite untrue. The word Prithvi means "world" or "earth," and Agni means fire itself and does not refer to a god. The Indians are naming their missiles after elements, not after warriors or gods (Ghosh 1998). Of course, if Western commentators were looking for a country that names its nuclear weapons after ancient gods and dead warriors, they need have looked no further than the United States, with its Jupiter, Thor, Poseidon, Atlas, Polaris, Minuteman, and Pershing missiles. After dictators and religious fanatics, the Western imagination is most afraid of Third World military officers. The academics Brito and Intriligator, for example, tell us that Third World governments might acquire nuclear weapons "mainly for deterrence purposes but might not be able to control such weapons once they were available. . . . Unilateral initiatives by junior officers could lead to these weapons going off' (Brito and Intriligator 1982:140). One finds the same presumption in the writings of Nigel Calder, who also worries about Third World military officers: "An American or Russian general in Europe is not going to let off the first nuclear weapon on his own initiative, even in the heat of battle, but will the same discipline apply to . . . a Pakistani general who has a private nuclear theory about how to liberate Kashmir?" (1979:77). Oliver North notwithstanding, it is taken as so obvious it does not need explaining that Third World junior officers, unlike our own, are prone to take dangerous unilateral initiatives. Calder's passage only makes sense if one accepts the contrast it states as unquestionably natural. It is the kind of ideological statement that the French theorist Roland Barthes characterized as "falsely obvious" (1972:ll). As Edward Said says, once a group has been orientalized, "virtually anything can be written or said about it, without challenge or demurral" (1978:287). This presumption that the Third World body politic cannot control its military loins is, I believe, a coded or metaphorical way of discussing a more general lack of control over impulses, a pervasive lack of discipline, assumed to afflict people of color. But what if one tries to turn these contrasts inside out, asking whether the historical behavior of the Western nuclear powers might also give rise to concerns about undemocratic nuclear bullying, religious fanaticism, and unilateral initiatives by military officers? Because of its contradictions, gaps, and silences, the discourse on proliferation can always be read backward so that our gaze is directed not toward the Other but toward the author. Then the flaws and double standards of the discourse are illuminated. Thus, instead of asking whether Third World countries can be trusted with nuclear weapons, one can ask, how safe are the official nuclear powers from coups d'etat, renegade officers, or reckless leaders?

Link – Prolif

Representations of proliferation are distorted to legitimize western domination over the globe

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

These falsely obvious arguments about the political unreliability of Third World nuclear powers are, I have been arguing, part of a broader orientalist rhetoric that seeks to bury disturbing similarities between "us" and "them" in a discourse that systematically produces the Third World as Other. In the process of producing the Third World, we also produce ourselves, for the Orient, one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the other," is essential in defining the West "as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (Said 1978: 1-2). The particular images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent Third World nations as criminals, women, and children. But these recurrent images and metaphors, all of which pertain in some way to disorder, can also be read as telling hints about the facets of our own psychology and culture which we find especially troubling in regard to our custodianship over nuclear weapons. The metaphors and images are part of the ideological armor the West wears in the nuclear age, but they are also clues that suggest buried, denied, and troubling parts of ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in our distorted representations of the Other. As Akhil Gupta has argued in his analysis of a different orientalist discourse, the discourse on development, "within development discourse . . . lies its shadowy double . . . a virtual presence, inappropriate objects that serve to open up the 'developed world' itself as an inappropriate object" (1998:4). In the era of so-called rogue states, one recurrent theme in this system of representations is that of the thief, liar, and criminal: the very attempt to come into possession of nuclear weapons is often cast in terms of racketeering and crime. After the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, one newspaper headline read, "G-8 Nations Move to Punish Nuclear Outlaws" (Reid 1998:1), thereby characterizing the two countries as criminals even though neither had signed-and hence violated-either the Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. When British customs officers intercepted a shipment of krytrons destined for Iraq's nuclear weapons program, one newspaper account said that Saddam Hussein was "caught red-handed trying to steal atomic detonators" (Perlmutter 1990, emphasis added)-a curious choice of words given that Iraq had paid good money to buy the krytrons from the company EG&G. (In fact, if any nation can be accused of theft here, surely it is the United States, which took $650 million from Pakistan for a shipment of F-16s, cancelled the shipment when the Bush administration determined that Pakistan was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but never refunded the money.) According to an article in the New York Times, "it required more than three decades, a global network of theft and espionage, and uncounted millions for Pakistan, one of the world's poorest countries, to explode that bomb" (Weiner 1998:6). Meanwhile the same paper's editorial page lamented that "for years Pakistan has lied to the U.S. about not having a nuclear weapons program" and insisted that the United States "punish Pakistan's perfidy on the Bomb" (New, York Tinles 1987a:A34, 1987b:A34). And Representative Stephen Solarz (Democrat, New York) warns that the bomb will give Pakistan "the nuclear equivalent of a Saturday Night Special" (Smith 1988:38). The image of the Saturday night special assimilates Pakistan symbolically to the disorderly underworld of ghetto hoodlums who rob corner stores and fight gang wars. U.S. nuclear weapons are, presumably, more like the "legitimate" weapons carried by the police to maintain order and keep the peace.'*