Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Link – Prolif – Stability

This objectivity also requires that both the objects of study and the subjects who study or who view those objects are also objectively knowable. Realism takes the objects of social life and the subjects of social action to be constituted prior to their entry into that action. Charles Krauthammer's short summation of the problem of weapons proliferation is much richer in its meaning than it might first appear. His quotation is founded on a series of assumptions, which seem at least problematic once exposed to view. Michel Foucault has written that “practicing criticism is the art of making facile gestures difficult. ” 5 By making difficult what seems at first blush so simple, not just in Krauthammer's formulations but in the general understanding of the agenda of proliferation control, I am joining a growing body of scholars who aim to practice criticism on questions of security. This scholarship begins by suspending what is commonly taken as given: the objects of international security (and security policy), the identities of the subjects of international actions, and even the interests these actors pursue. Each of these—the objects, identities, and interests—is assumed to be self-evident in Krauthammer's quotation, as in security studies in general. In the rest of this chapter I will question their self-evidence and suggest a way of thinking about how the formation of the objects, identities, and interests of weapons proliferation can be investigated rather than assumed.

Link – Chernus

Fear of proliferation replicates the logic of security that makes enemy creation and destruction inevitable

Chernus 91 (Ira, Professor of Religious studies at UC Boulder, Nuclear Madness: On Religion an Psychology in the Nuclear Age,, p. 92-93) jl

There is a nearly universal assumption that disarmament through the arms control negotiation process is the only viable way out of the nuclear trap. But this faith in arms control is faith in a process of mutual constriction. It looks forward to a day when the rational ego’s expertise will devise a set of agreements so perfectly balanced that each side will be eternally immobilized and prevented from moving against the other. The test of every prospective arms control treaty is its capacity to eliminate all risk. The disarmament movement’s most successful initiative of the eighties—the nuclear freeze—reflects the same desire to freeze reality as a way of defending ourselves. Images of political stasis, permanence, and rigidity also abound in eras of détente. If the situation can be eternally frozen, we hope, we and the whole world can be eternally safe. So the new-found friendship between the superpowers resembles the friendships developed by schizoids. They are mutually negotiated arrangements for interacting without the prerequisite of all genuine human interaction: The risk of mutual vulnerability. No new political or military initiative can gain popular support unless it is first proven to be virtually risk-free. All the emerging proposals for perfectly secure arms control treaties and negotiated settlements seem reasonable enough. In truth, though, all aim to defend us principally against the schizoid’s real enemy—the inevitable flux of reality itself, whose code name in our political discourse is “instability.” A society suffering acute ontological insecurity must see every change as a threat to its tenuous reality and therefore fear “instability” above all. No doubt the threat may be labeled differently at different times. In some eras it is “the Russians” or “the Communists”; in others it is the Bomb itself or the “terrorists” who could, with a bit of purloined plutonium and a suitcase, incinerate a city. But despite these changes our goal remains the same: “stability,” which is a political code word for the extreme of psychic numbing—a world too petrified even to contemplate change. Therefore, we increasingly pin our hopes for national security on the numbing power of the false self system and its apparently reasonable technological program. Just as we used to prize the “firmness” of a “rigid defense posture” above all, so we now prize “firmness” at the negotiating table as the only way to achieve the parity we must have at all costs. Since our goal is a stable balance that we believe will benefit the whole world, it seems perfectly reasonable, even benign, to cast ourselves as the immovable center from which the newly balanced world order proceeds, and as the rigidly vigilant center from which that balance that we believe will benefit the whole world, it seems perfectly reasonable, even benign, to cast ourselves as the immovable center from which the newly balanced world order proceeds, and as the rigidly vigilant center from which that balance is maintained—by threat of renewed force if necessary. Yet the “stability” we seek is actually the permanent petrifaction that the schizoid fears yet embraces, hoping to avoid death by becoming dead in life. If the world and the nations in it are already dead, it matters little whether a given nation be treated as enemy or friend. In either case, all danger is denied. So an enemy nation can become a friend (or vice versa) very easily, and sometimes surprisingly rapidly. Communist China was transformed from enemy to ally almost overnight by the Nixon administration. The Soviet Union was changed, more gradually but no less strikingly, from “evil empire” to dialogue partner during the Reagan administration. Such eras of détente, even more than eras of over enmity, validate Laing’s perception of the family of nations as a nexus, in which both sides cooperate in keeping the international false self system alive. As Laing notes: “The game’s the thing: not perhaps fundamentally even a matter of winning it, but of perpetuating it.” Détente means that the partners in the nexus openly admit their mutual desire to play the same game. In Laing’s analysis of the nexus, the partners continue to play the game largely because each hopes to get reality from the other. As the false self assumes more and more control, schizoids feel increasingly drained of reality, so they turn to others to try to get reality without incurring any risk. One way to do this is to let the other spy on oneself, as the superpowers do with their growing willingness for mutual inspection of military facilities and nuclear weapons tests. Indeed all the recent moves toward superpower cooperation may be seen as attempts to open oneself up to the other’s reality without risking one’s own. As in any nexus, though, the game still depends on mutual coercion masquerading as mutual concern. The transformation from enemy to ally is so easy because within the nexus one’s closest ally always remains one’s enemy. Therefore the pursuit of détente and disarmament need not mean a halt to weapons production. Most Americans believe that we must still keep up our guard, that new weapons can compel the enemy to negotiate arms reduction, that deterrence is necessary until the disarmament process is complete, and that some nuclear deterrence capability will thus be necessary for a very long time—perhaps forever. But deterrence and disarmament seem very compatible in the public mind because both reflect the same basic principle: that humanity can be saved by a technologically constructed and constricting static balance, using the Bomb itself to save us from its horrors.