Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Link – Chernus

Threats identified by the 1AC is a form of neurosis that allows us to disregard value in favor of identifying and destroying unidentifiable enemies

Chernus 91 (Ira, Professor of Religious studies at UC Boulder, Nuclear Madness: On Religion an Psychology in the Nuclear Age,, p. 56-59) jl

Tillich's understanding of neurosis, coupled with his critique of modernity, shows how the psychodynamics of nuclear images and nuclear numbing in the Cold War world are rooted in the neurotic nears characteristic of modernity. Neurosis tries to avoid unreality by refusing to face the fearful side of reality. "1'h<• t remcndous achievements of science and technology make it virtually fearless in the face of nature. The evil spirits that once populated waterways and wilderness and darkness are banished. So we learn to fear other people: the ethnic and racial minorities, the Communists, or whatever others are most convenient at the time. We cling to these fears so persistently just because our potential range of fears has become so narrow. Fixation on a small number of intensely held fears is a prime characteristic of neurosis.

Neurotic fears assume a special quality of unreality in two senses: they express the threat of unreality in especially vivid symbolic terms, and they are often unrealistic. The pervasive fears of our own day display both these qualities. Among all the others, we especially fear the shadowy, impalpable, unknowable other: the terrorist, the thief in the night, the infiltrating spy, the stranger on the other side of the street-or the tracks, otheR world-whom we will never meet. All these people are unreal to us, yet we guard ourselves against them with special caution, spending huge portions of our wealth to buy security, because we never know what They will do next. Our publicly shared fears do little to concretize our anxiety. For the most part, they simply reinforce our sense of helplessness in the face of intangible dangers. So we feel compelled to limit our anxiety bv neurotically limiting our world and our own possibilities. Many of these fears may be unfounded and others exaggerated, but we simply have no way to find out the facts.

Neurotics cherish their unrealistic fears as a buffer against reality. They strip genuine dangers of their reality for the same reason. Whenever possible, they ignore real dangers and refuse to feel fear at all. If fear cannot be avoided, the second-best line of defense is to talk about the danger (sometimes incessantly) without internalizing it or intending to respond to it. In our societal neurosis, this verbal defense is quite common. We cannot totally ignore our fears about environmental destruction, urban decay, or the threat of nuclear annihilation. "It's a terrible problem," we say. "Someone really ought to do something." With that we confirm our own impotence. We diminish our reality in the face of the problem so that we can diminish the reality of the fear and danger. In a life of radical finitude this maneuver is especially easy. Subject and object, person and world, life and death are permanently separated in any event. Thus the danger, even if it represents death itself, becomes just one more object "out there," too far away to touch-or to touch our lives. So we deaden ourselves to very real dangers and sink back into psychic numbing. The more dangers there are, the easier it is to feel totally detached and numb.

Yet as we take refuge in our pure subjectivity, we also take refuge in our sense that we are just objects, cogs in the machine, inert and incapable of response. Ignoring our capacity to act, we settle into a convenient fatalism. "It's all too overwhelming," we say. And in fact we are quite easily overwhelmed. In the narrow shelter of our finitized world, we systematically train ourselves to be incapable of contemplating threats to the whole. Embedded in temporality, we can only deal with concerns of the short run. Our minds boggle in trying to think of global centuries-long consequences. And a nuclear threat that conjures up eternity with its image of "the end of all life" is impossible to take in-which is just the way neurotics want it.

In the framework of Tillich's thought, this limited perspective must be linked directly to what he calls the dominant form of anxiety today: the anxiety of meaninglessness. Tillich traces the meaninglessness of Western modernity back to the demise of universally shared values, meanings, and symbols. Rapid social change, he says, undermines all specific beliefs and concerns in a whirlpool of relativism. But here again his own thought points beyond this focus on change to a broader view of modernity, for he sees the loss of particular meanings as a symptom of a much larger problem: the loss of ultimate concern, concern for the infinite meaning and purpose of the whole. Partial meanings can be fulfilling only when they point to and participate in a symbolic vision of perfect meaning and perfect reality. If that vision disappears, partial meanings merely confirm us in the anxiety of partial reality and soon lose their value.

Link – Accidents/Miscalc

Their accidents and miscalc args frames Western nations as rational actors, but actors in the East inherently become dangerous to them.

Gusterson ’99 (Gusterson, Hugh,”Nuclear Weapons and the Other in Western Imagination” Cultural Anthropology, 14.1 Feb 1999 http://www.jstor.org/stable/656531 Aug 17/2009, p.120-21)NAR

The discourse on proliferation assumes that the superpowers' massive interlocking arsenals of highly accurate MIRVed missiles deployed on hair-trigger alert and designed with first-strike capability backed by global satellite capability was stable and that the small, crude arsenals of new nuclear nations would be unstable, but one could quite plausibly argue the reverse. Indeed, as mentioned above, by the 1980s a number of analysts in the West were concerned that the MIRVing of missiles and the accuracy of new guidance systems were generating increasing pressure to strike first in a crisis. Although the strategic logic might be a little different, they saw temptations to preempt at the high end of the nuclear social system as well as at the low end (Aldridge 1983; Gray and Payne 1980; Scheer 1982). There were also concerns (explored in more detail below) that the complex computerized early-warning systems with which each superpower protected its weapons were generating false alarms that might lead to accidental war (Blair 1993; Sagan 1993). Thus one could argue-as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1986) and a number of others have-that deterrence between the United States and Russia would be safer and more stable if each side replaced their current massive strategic arsenals with a small force of about one hundred nuclear weapons-about the size India's nu-clear stockpile is believed to be, as it happens. Further, Bruce Blair (Blair, Feiveson, and von Hippel 1997), a former missile control officer turned strategic analyst, and Stansfield Turner (1997), a former CIA director, have suggested that the readiness posture of American and Russian nuclear forces makes them an accident waiting to happen. The United States and Russia, they argue, would be safer if they stored their warheads separate from their delivery vehicles-as, it so happens, India and Pakistan do.1" In the words of Scott Sagan, a political scientist and former Pentagon official concerned about U.S. nuclear weapons safety, The United States should not try to make new nuclear nations become like the superpowers during the Cold War, with large arsenals ready to launch at a moment's notice for the sake of deterrence, instead, for the sake of safety, the United States and Russia should try to become more like some of the nascent nuclear states, maintaining very small nuclear capabilities, with weapons components separated and located apart from the delivers systems, and with civilian organizations controlling the warheads. [Sagan 1995:90-91 ]12 Given, as I have shown, that the crisis stability of large nuclear arsenals can also be questioned and that it is not immediately self-evident why the leader of, say, India today should feel any more confident that he would not lose a city or two in a preemptive strike on Pakistan than his U.S. counterpart would in attacking Russia, I want to suggest that an argument that appears on the surface to be about numbers and configurations of weapons is really, when one looks more closely, about the psychology and culture of people. Put simply, the dominant discourse assumes that leaders in the Third World make decisions differently than their counterparts in the West: that they are more likely to take risks, gambling millions of lives, or to make rash and irresponsible calculations.