Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Perm Solves – Individuals

Permutation, do both: The affirmative is an individual response to the state’s control of nuclear weapon. We stop engaging in the rhetoric described in the 1NC, that’s the status quo.

Lichterman 9

(lawyer and policy analyst Western States Legal Foundation, 09, Andrew Lichterman, Disarmament work amidst a global economic crisis, 8/6, disarmamentactivist, http://disarmamentactivist.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Lichterman%20Hiroshima%20Day%202009.pdf) NAR

We also must take back our politics from the technocrats and professionals, people with little to sell us except how to sell. Their language of “branding” and “entrepreneurship” pervades the political culture, reaching now far into the so-called “nonprofit” sector and even down to community groups. Far too many mouth the words without thinking about what they mean. They are in fact expressions of the corporate attitudes and practices that have pushed our economy into bankruptcy and our ecosphere to the brink of disaster. The path to a more just and peaceful world will be one of cooperation and solidarity, not more competition. The road to Martin Luther King’s revolution in values will not be “branded” or advertised. We face this dangerous and difficult moment without much in the way of recent analysis and discussion that helps us understand the relationship between nuclear weapons and the structures of a global society and politics that are in crisis and are changing fast. In these circumstances, we must discard much of the “expert” analysis, beginning again with what we know about nuclear weapons, what every human being can know about them. As the Russell- Einstein Manifesto put it over a half century ago, “remember your humanity and forget the rest.” Nuclear weapons represent the threat of unlimited violence, and of willingness to sacrifice the people for the State.6 The decision to acquire nuclear weapons raises to the level of an absolute the willingness of those in power to risk all of us, and everything, to achieve their ends. And it is a decision that in every case has first been taken in secret, with neither the means nor ends open to question, much less choice, by the vast majority of those affected. Both the decision to acquire nuclear weapons and the manner in which it always is taken should tell us that the “state” that we live in significant ways does not “represent” us. We must understand that it represents someone, or something, else– and that our very survival may depend on finding out who or what, and doing something about it. This is what it means for the state we live in to have nuclear weapons, at the simplest and most basic level. It is in this context that educating ourselves and others about the terrible realities of nuclear warfare can have positive meaning. This must not, however, be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. Stopping here, we risk contributing to a climate of fear and hopelessness that can demoralize those we hope to organize, and that can reinforce the fearbased ideologies of those who offer more armaments as the only “practical” form of “security” in a dangerous world. Starting here, we can begin to understand the violence that sustains both stratified societies and the inequities of the global system as a whole.

A2: Reps/Discourse Matters

Our rhetoric is irrelevant – outcomes are the only moral things that have weight in the political process, our intentions are irrelevant.

Isaac 2 (Jeffrey C Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002, Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p35-6)

Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught. An unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) it fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters: (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness: it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion- pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect: and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions: it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, this is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism on the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic: it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

No Impact – Movements

Nuclear movements fail
Totten 9 (M Samuel, U of Arkansas Professor Review of Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/genocide_studies_and_prevention/v004/4.1.totten01.html TBC 7/1/10

The authors correctly assert that ‘‘throughout American history, social movements have helped shape our government’s policy on a variety of issues’’ (13), but what they do not seem to appreciate (or do not want to admit, as it would interfere with their argument and their agenda) is that such social movements dealt with single self-contained national issues such as the emancipation of women, the Civil Rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement. Some, such as the anti-nuclear movement, had an international focus, but one has to question just how much good the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s did, given the nuclear arsenals that exist around the world today: both the number of weapons in these arsenals and the number of nations belonging to the so-called nuclear club are slowly but inexorably growing.

AT: Chaloupka

No Alt Solvency – Chaloupka’s method is completely inaccessible through political action

Brians 92 (Paul, Prof Department of English WSU, http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/ntc/NTC8.pdf, AD: 7/1/10) jl

One of Chaloupka’s greatest strengths is this penetration of political and nuclear paradoxes. The survival and accident arguments familiar to the antinuclear camp are riddled with contradiction (3-7, 13-16). Opponents argue for controls and then use them against nukes; proponents justify widespread surveillance and disciplinary measures and then proclaim the advancement of freedom. “Repeatedly, the sign of the paradox presents itself as the characteristic sign of an era that strains to ignore those signs and to present a politics of values in response” (16). And so on throughout the book. It is in this terrain of the paradoxical that Chaloupka affirms postmodernism as a better way to interact with power in a world without absolute values. For both nuclearists and their opponents, he argues, share “more than they dispute” regarding reality and values. (I will return later to this substratum critique of liberal humanistic values and procedures.) The result has been the perpetuation and extension of the “institutions, habits, and contexts” of nuclear arms. The Richland High School (near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation) students who defend their sports name—the Bombers— and their symbol—the mushroom cloud—suggest an alternative attention to “images and problematizations.” Chaloupka would engage “the conundrums and incongruities of the nuclear age” exhibited by both proponents and opponents by employing the philosophy and methods of postmodernism, which he links with postructuralism and deconstructionism (xiii) (à la Michel Foucault) and labels, for the specific context of his book “nuclear criticism.” Postmodernism is poststructuralist (deconstructive) literary analysis intended “to problematize institutions and practices [power] that had become so resistant to criticism” (ix); because nuclear power and all of its adjuncts are textual, enwoven in language, especially in paradoxical language, this new approach of literary criticism offers a new way to “interact with power.” But if the book were only this straightforward throughout. James Soderholm recently asked, “Why do progressive intellectuals often write and speak in a language foreign to the very audience in whose interests they claim to campaign?” He complains of Foucault’s, Fredric Jameson’s, and Gayatri Spivak’s “supernaturally difficult jargon” and “willful obscurantism,” which he contrasts to Vaclav Havel’s direct, non-technical language. Sometimes Chaloupka seems to be trying to out-Baudrillard Baudrillard. For example, he writes sympathetically of Baudrillard’s “notion of contemporary power” as spread “throughout society without acting.” “Such power implodes and leukemizes.... In this instance of power (which clarifies and exemplifies Foucault’s controversial argument), there is no action, intention, or conspiracy . . this is precisely postructuralist power” (17). He means that the nuclear mangers do not escalate to red alert and nuclear holocaust. But what would Baudrillard and Chaloupka have us do short of the bombs that would end all conversation? Yes, understand “how some of our fables have posed a very strange plot” (137). Nuclear opponents (Noam Chomsky notably) have done that extensively. The U.S. National Security State infects everything with systematic intent and action and even conspiracy, as Richard Curry’s and thousands of investigations have shown. So what does Buadrillard/Chaloupka means by non-intentional, non-active postructuralist power in a world of machination?

AT: Chaloupka

Chaloupka’s alternative is politically useless – no mechanism for deployment

Brians 92 (Paul, Prof Department of ENglish WSU, http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/ntc/NTC8.pdf, AD: 7/1/10) jl

The confusion underlying this apparent tangle has two closely related sources: Chaloupka plunges in, dismisses careful initial conceptualization, and defines by accretion. Of course this book’s audience is scholarly, but I do not believe anyone can say what Chaloupka means by “modernism,” without which “postmodernism” becomes a slippery term. In their anthology, Bradbury and McFarlane define modernism as a literary movement between 1890 and 1930. In the Preface to his anthology, Peter Brook describes postmodern as the capitalist world (television, mass production, and consumption) and its opponents. What is modernism to Chaloupka? We are provided a key summary of features near the end: liberal and Marxist commitment to scientific certainty (134). And he is still defining postmodern/postructural/deconstructive and liberal humanist discourse in the last chapter. I do not have space to describe all the reasons why this book makes difficult reading. (Is “nukespeak” criticism “a simple critique of euphemism,” when Hilgartner, et al.’s Nukespeak is a major analysis of secrecy and censorship in the United States?) But let me end mainly positively. By insisting upon the failure of the traditional Enlightenment liberal humanistic, scientific, opposition to nuclear war preparations (Chap. 4 on Star Wars and the Freeze), and by urging an alternative strategy of postmodern irony, he nudges all of us in the peace movement to rethink our assumptions and methods. Liberal humanist antinuclearist politics has offered (referring to Helen Caldicott) “a sober, anti-ironic terrorism of images” (133–34), but has it generally degenerated into finalities that resolve questions, reify value choices, and avoid realistic politics (137)? He too sweepingly dismisses the flexibility and the achievements of the liberal humanist antinuclearists. But of great value, postmodern politics seeks “to delegitimize the subtle, contemporary forms of authority” in both nuclearists and antinuclearists (128), an discards programs but offers ironic possibilities in the face of the paradoxes of power. However, the “discourse that would raise those discomforts in a critical manner has hardly begun to be identified” (138).

Alt can’t solve the links – Chaloupka’s exclusion of non-European perspective ignores the alternative casualties to the Ks impacts

Caputi 95 (Jane, University of New Mexico, American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 165-175, JSTOR) jl

While Chaloupka looks almost exclusively to European men such as Baudrillard, Derrida, and Foucault to offer essential insights, he ignores relevant perspectives from those who occupy less privileged realms (and use far more accessible language) but long have "problematized" nuclearism by deconstructing its signs and wrenching it out of traditional Western paradigms. For example, European-American feminist thinkers (including Diana E. H. Russell, Charlene Spretnak, and Carol Cohn) have pointed to the investiture of patriarchal (rapist and domineering) desire/sexuality into nuclear weaponry.4 Simultaneously, feminists of color (including June Jordan, Alice Walker, and Winona LaDuke) have pointed to a continuing legacy of colonialism, environmental racism, and genocide against peoples of color, particularly indigenous peoples, who have been disproportion- ately afflicted by the acknowledged and unacknowledged atomic experi- mentation and development.

AT: Chaloupka

Permutation solves best – the totalizing nature of Chaloupka’s critique fractures effective coalitions against nuclear weapons

Krishna 93 (Sankaran, Professor of Political Science, U of Hawaii, Alternatives 1993, v. 18. p. 400-1) jl

The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to “nostalgic,” essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions.

In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing “facts” and “realities,” while a “postmodern” President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4)

Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls “nuclear opposition” or “antinuclearists” at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms.

This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the “failure” of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives.

The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between total critique and “ineffective” partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics.

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