Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

*General Aff Answers*

Nuclear Reps Good

Using representations of Nuclear War allows us to criticize the existence of dangerous weapons
Foard 97 (Associate Professor of Religion, Arizona State, (James, “Imagining Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, Armageddon, and the Annihilation of the Students of Ichijo School,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/LXV/1/1.pdf TBC 7/1/10)

This ambivalence about Hiroshima has been partially ameliorated by displacing it with Armageddon in our imagination of nuclear weapons In America the images of the atomic bomb, particularly after the Soviet Union's successful test in 1949 (Boyer.341), were pressed into the service of apocalyptic speculations, both scientific and otherwise, a process which has until recently assigned the horror that Hiroshima represented to a superpower war in an imagined future (cf. Pease'562). Specifically, images of a nuclear Armageddon have helped us perform two sorts of cultural tasks fundamental for imagining nuclear weapons: those involving difference and those involving representation. By "difference" I mean both the articulation of what makes nuclear weapons different from other weapons and the consequent reflection on the different human situation engendered by them. By "representation" I mean the expressions which seek to describe the use of nuclear weapons and incorporate that description into structures of meaning Armageddon permits us to define the difference of nuclear weapons by their capacity to destroy the human species in a war that no one will win. It also has suggested to many, particularly literary critics but also some nuclear strategists, that nuclear war is but an imaginary event, divorced from reality, such that all representations are, to use the most famous phrase, "fabulously textual" (Derrida'23).
Imagery of Armageddon is crucial to understanding nuclear weapons
Foard 97 (Associate Professor of Religion, Arizona State, (James, “Imagining Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, Armageddon, and the Annihilation of the Students of Ichijo School,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/LXV/1/1.pdf TBC 7/1/10)

With the end of the Cold War, however, apocalyptic imagery itself appears doomed, as our geo-political situation no longer sustains its plausibility Our images of the nuclear threat are now as obsolete as our strategies. Without such imagery, though, we are left with little to think with in contemplating the meaning of these weapons, a situation that could well prove dangerous Since nuclear weapons now appear to threaten cities more than the human species as a whole, we might do well to return to Hiroshima to discover their difference and the possibilities for their representation. At the very least, doing so will expose the Armageddon imagery as a cultural construct rather than a selfevident fact

Nukespeak doesn’t naturalize nuclear weapons but allow us to challenge them
Foard 97 (Associate Professor of Religion, Arizona State, (James, “Imagining Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, Armageddon, and the Annihilation of the Students of Ichijo School,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/LXV/1/1.pdf TBC 7/1/10)

Despite their deep suspicion of the adequacy of any expressions, the survivors relate their narratives in formal ritual and pilgrimage settings in which their repetition and redundancy seem appropriate. (These are, of course, the public rather than the traditional settings ) They justify their attention to story and place in terms of preserving memory, not because their stories can ever be fully understood, but "to bring peace " Without any clear understanding of what political mechanisms might be required, they claim that the telling of stories itself can, in fact, help do this The experience of the Ichijo people, then, suggests that nuclear talk can neither be fully denied nor fully accommodated into our sense of community over time. The only representation possible, then, strives not to domesticate the experience of the bomb into human memory, but to use the memory of its reality for apotropaic purposes The reality of the bomb is asserted—indeed must be asserted—only so that it can be refused a permanent place in human history

Nuclear Reps Good

We still have to confront nuclear issues, apocalyptic imagery is one way to do so
Foard 97 (Associate Professor of Religion, Arizona State, (James, “Imagining Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, Armageddon, and the Annihilation of the Students of Ichijo School,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/LXV/1/1.pdf TBC 7/1/10)

Since the onset of the superpower conflict, nuclear reflection has yoked itself to the Cold War and indulged itself in opposing human extinction As a consequence, the end of the Cold War has meant the obsolescence of not only our strategies toward but also our images of the nuclear threat Although excluded from our apocalyptic obsession, harder moral issues have been with us since 1945, moral issues that are as pressing now as they were then: Is the instantaneous extinction of cities different from other war death? If using a nuclear weapon (or two) does not endanger the human species, is it permissible under certain conditions? If so, how do we represent such death in our religious and cultural systems of "just war" and other meanings7 Such questions are beyond the range of this historian of religions What is clear is that the efforts of Hiroshima survivors suggest measuring the difference of nuclear death by the impossibility of theodicy, of which the apocalyptic imagination is but one culturally specific and historically bound expression Following such a measurement of difference can help us see that we have not achieved freedom from nuclear danger in the past few years solely because the apocalyptic scenario seems less plausible and that we need new theological and philosophical reflections. Furthermore, the survivors' insistence on the reality of references for nuclear language, in contrast to our own critics' insistence on the opposite, affirms that the use of nuclear weapons is indeed possible because it has already happened. In the end, incorporating these victims' voices can transform our sense of difference and modes of representation to reflect more accurately our post-Cold War situation, when more than ever we should imagine the nuclear threat through Hiroshima rather than Armageddon As the Smithsonian controversy exposed, however, Americans still recoil from peeking under the mushroom cloud

Criticizing nuclear discourse prevents us from confronting pervasive nuclearism
James 94 (Doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Iowa, Clair, “Book Reviews,” Configurations, 2.2, 367-371)

Chaloupka first analyzes the politics of the antinuclear movement, arguing that it has failed to have a larger impact because it shares with pronuclear forces both a "confidence in a world that passes naturally into speech and writing" and, more tellingly, "the identification of a 'values' realm--limited but available for political debate" (p. xiii). Two of the antinuclear positions that he criticizes are the acceptance of survival as a universal value and the idea that nuclear war is unspeakable. Because the pronuclear camp argues that nuclear weapons are necessary for survival in the face of international threat, antinuclear rhetoric based on the need for human survival can either lead to a stalemate position or actually strengthen the other side. In order to emphasize the horrors of nuclear war and thereby discourage people from supporting pronuclear policies, some people would claim that nuclear weapons are "unspeakable": the horrors of nuclear war go beyond the human capacity for description and such a war would leave no survivors to describe it. But Chaloupka argues that the idea of unspeakability, instead of encouraging opposition to nuclear weapons, has silenced the voices of protest and abetted the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons management. A large portion of the book is devoted to demonstrating how thoroughly and covertly nuclear weapons influence our lives. In one chapter Chaloupka uses Jacques Lacan's analysis of metonymy, which Lacan calls the rhetorical trope of absence and desire, in order to argue that "the computer and the robot are the metonymic processes we use to deal with the nuke" (p. 61). In other words, "in the now out-dated metaphor of rationalism, the computer is the brains of this operation, the bomb the muscle. In its physicality, the robot is the encoded sign of nuclearism" (p. 45). At the same time that industrial robots are replacing humans in factories, fictional humanoid robots have become the model for the ideal human, exhibiting absolute efficiency and self-control--exactly the qualities necessary to operate well a nuclear arsenal. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this desire for widespread robot mentality was the popular "Just Say No" campaign, which refused to analyze the cultural conditions that make drug use an attractive alternative to many and instead asked us all, but especially children, to become automatic message machines.