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1 -Util
2 -First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
3 -Opar 14 (Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 AT
4 -The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
5 -This proves util – a. If a person isn’t a continuous unit, it doesn’t matter how goods are distributed among people, which supports util since util only maximizes benefits, ignoring distribution across people. b. Other theories assume identity matters. Util’s the only possible theory if identity is irrelevant.
6 -Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
7 -Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
8 -It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
9 -Prefer this account of government legitimacy since it avoids falsely starting from the position of anarchy assumed by other frameworks, which is bad since it doesn’t accurately describe the justification of the state since individuals don’t actually have a choice to enter or not enter a state.
10 -2 impacts
11 -A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
12 -B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
13 -Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
14 -The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
15 -This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
16 -The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
17 -1AC – Prolif
18 -Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
19 -Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editor-in-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proliferation.html) RMT
20 -Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
21 -—President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
22 -The global nuclear order is changing. Concerns about climate change, the volatility of oil prices, and the security of energy supplies have contributed to a widespread and still-growing interest in the future use of nuclear power. Thirty states operate one or more nuclear power plants today, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some 50 others have requested technical assistance from the agency to explore the possibility of developing their own nuclear energy programs. It is certainly not possible to predict precisely how fast and how extensively the expansion of nuclear power will occur. But it does seem probable that in the future there will be more nuclear technology spread across more states than ever before. It will be a different world than the one that has existed in the past.
23 -This surge of interest in nuclear energy — labeled by some proponents as "the renaissance in nuclear power" — is, moreover, occurring simultaneously with mounting concern about the health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the regulatory framework that constrains and governs the world's civil and military-related nuclear affairs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and related institutions have been taxed by new worries, such as the growth in global terrorism, and have been painfully tested by protracted crises involving nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and potentially in Iran. (Indeed, some observers suspect that growing interest in nuclear power in some countries, especially in the Middle East, is not unrelated to Iran's uranium enrichment program and Tehran's movement closer to a nuclear weapons capability.) Confidence in the NPT regime seems to be eroding even as interest in nuclear power is expanding.
24 -This realization raises crucial questions for the future of global security. Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.
25 -On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built? Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs? How can physical protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents? The answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our nuclear future.
26 -The major political factors influencing the future of nuclear weapons are no less complex and no less important. Will Iran acquire nuclear weapons; will North Korea develop more weapons or disarm in the coming decade; how will neighboring states respond? Will the United States and Russia take significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and if so, will the other nuclear-weapons states follow suit or stand on the sidelines?
27 -The nuclear future will be strongly influenced, too, by the success or failure of efforts to strengthen the international organizations and the set of agreements that comprise the system developed over time to manage global nuclear affairs. Will new international or regional mechanisms be developed to control the front-end (the production of nuclear reactor fuel) and the back-end (the management of spent fuel containing plutonium) of the nuclear fuel cycle? What political agreements and disagreements are likely to emerge between the nuclear-weapons states (NWS) and the non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS) at the 2010 NPT Review Conference and beyond? What role will crucial actors among the NNWS — Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt, for example — play in determining the global nuclear future? And most broadly, will the nonproliferation regime be supported and strengthened or will it be questioned and weakened? As IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has emphasized, "The nonproliferation regime is, in many ways, at a critical juncture," and there is a need for a new "overarching multilateral nuclear framework."1 But there is no guarantee that such a framework will emerge, and there is wide doubt that the arrangements of the past will be adequate to manage our nuclear future effectively.
28 -Prolif overwhelms incentives for civilian use of nuclear reactors
29 -Li and Yim 13- Mang-Sung Yim is in the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Jun Li works at UNC Chapel Hill (“Examining relationship between nuclear proliferation and civilian nuclear power development” Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 66, July 2013, Pages 108–114http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197013000504) RMT
30 -This paper attempts to examine the relationship between nuclear weapons proliferation and civilian nuclear power development based on the history of Atoms for Peace Initiative. To investigate the relationship, a database was established by compiling information on a country's civilian nuclear power development and various national capabilities and situational factors. The results of correlation analysis indicated that the initial motivation to develop civilian nuclear power could be mostly dual purpose. However, for a civilian nuclear power program to be ultimately successful, the study finds the role of nuclear nonproliferation very important. The analysis indicated that the presence of nuclear weapons in a country and serious interest in nuclear weapons have a negative effect on the civilian nuclear power program. The study showed the importance of state level commitment to nuclear nonproliferation for the success of civilian nuclear power development. NPT ratification and IAEA safeguards were very important factors in the success of civilian nuclear power development. In addition, for a country's civilian nuclear power development to be successful, the country needs to possess strong economic capability and be well connected to the world economic market through international trade. Mature level of democracy and presence of nuclear technological capabilities were also found to be important for the success of civilian nuclear power program.
31 -Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.
32 -Kroenig 14 – Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair at Georgetown University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council (“The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future?”, April 2014, http://www.matthewkroenig.com/The20History20of20Proliferation20Optimism_Feb2014.pdf)
33 -The spread of nuclear weapons poses a number of severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global and regional instability, constrained freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Iran’s advanced nuclear program. Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.49 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.50 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a limited nuclear war.51 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority.52 As Russia’s conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.”53 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.54 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism. The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.55 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a “religious duty” for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.56 Unlike states, which can be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S. politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a break down in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability: The spread of nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the “stability-instability paradox” maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62
34 -
35 -Weak nuclear states are incentivized to REDUCE checks on nuclear escalation to increase the probability of threats
36 -Powell 15 Robert Powell (Robson Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.), "Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power," International Organization, Summer 2015 AZ
37 -These effects highlight in a very simple way some of the incentives a weak state has to “go nuclear” and thereby be able to transform a contest of strength into one of resolve. If a weak state has no nuclear weapons, it cannot threaten to engage in a process that may ultimately end in its launching a nuclear attack against its adversary. In other words, the potential and minimal risks are zero: () = ()=0 for all . Absent any risk of escalation, the stronger state brings all of its power to bear (∗ = ). Nuclear weapons and the latent threat of escalation compel it to bring less power to bear ( e ). More generally, a militarily weak but resolute state that already has nuclear weapons will be advantaged by a doctrine, posture, and force structure in which the potential risk rises rapidly as more power is brought to bear (a large ). We can see these incentives in the evolution of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine. In order to deter a militarily stronger adversary from threatening its vital interests, Pakistan, like NATO before it, has eschewed a no-first use nuclear doctrine. After becoming an overt nuclear state in 1998, Pakistan moved toward a nuclear posture which envisioned the possibly rapid, “first use of nuclear weapons against conventional attacks.” This in turned required the operationalization of nuclear weapons as “usable warfighting instruments.”57 As former Pakistani General Feroz Khan puts it, “With relatively smaller conventional forces, and lacking adequate technical means, especially in early warning and surveillance, Pakistan relies on a more proactive nuclear defensive policy.”58 Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States made the same point in the spring of 2001. Because of the growing conventional asymmetry with India, “Pakistan will be increasingly forced to rely on strategic capabilities... Risks of escalation through accident and miscalculation cannot be discounted.”59 In brief, Pakistan’s nuclear posture, which Narang describes as “asymmetric escalation,” entails a fundamental trade-off. When compared to a posture of “assured retaliation,” which emphasizes survivable second-strike forces targeted against an adversary’s key strategic centers, asymmetric escalation depends on being able to use or credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against invading conventional forces. However, the forces needed to implement this “can generate severe command and control pressures that increase the risk of inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.”60 Pakistan’s acceptance of a riskier force posture is in keeping with the incentives highlighted in the model. The potential risk of nuclear escalation if India brings a given amount of power to bear is higher if Pakistan has an asymmetric-escalation doctrine. That is,  is higher as illustrated in the shift from 0 to 1 in Figure 6. As a result, India brings less power to bear (e decreases) and Pakistan is better off ((e) increases).
38 -
39 -1AC – Accidents
40 -
41 -Accidents likely – large releases of radiation are more likely than before
42 -Wheatley et al 16 Spencer Wheatley (ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Switzerland), Benjamin Sovacool, Didier Sornette, "Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents," Risk Analysis, March 2016 AZ
43 -Regarding event severity, we found that the distribution of cost underwent a significant regime change shortly after the Three Mile Island major accident. Moderate cost events were suppressed, but extreme ones became more frequent, to the extent that the costs are now well described by the extremely heavy tailed Pareto distribution with parameter inline image. We noted in the introduction that the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 led to plant-specific full-scope control room simulators, plant-specific PSA models for finding and eliminating risks, and new sets of emergency operating instructions. The change of regime that we document here may be the concrete embodiment of these changes catalyzed by the TMI accident. We also identify statistically significant runaway disaster (“dragon-king”) regimes in both NAMS and cost, suggesting that extreme events are amplified to values even larger than those explained under the Pareto distribution with inline image. In view of the extreme risks, the need for better bonding and liability instruments associated with nuclear accident and incident property damage becomes clear. For instance, under the conservative assumption that the cost from Fukushima is the maximum possible, annual accident costs are on par with the construction costs of a single nuclear plant, with the expected annual cost being 1.5 billion USD with a standard deviation of 8 billion USD. If we do not limit the maximum possible cost, then the expected cost under the estimated Pareto model is mathematically infinite. Nuclear reactors are thus assets that can become liabilities in a matter of hours, and it is usually taxpayers, or society at large, that “pays” for these accidents rather than nuclear operators or even electricity consumers. This split of incentives improperly aligns those most responsible for an accident (the principals) from those suffering the cost of nuclear accidents (the agents). One policy suggestion is that we start holding plant operators liable for accident costs through an environmental or accident bonding system,65 which should work together with an appropriate economic model to incentivize the operators. Third, looking to the future, our analysis suggests that nuclear power has inherent safety risks that will likely recur. With the current model—which does not quantify improvements from the industry response to Fukushima—in terms of costs, there is a 50 chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in 62 years, and (ii) a TMI event (or larger) occurs in 15 years. Further, smaller but still expensive (⩾20 MM 2013 USD) incidents will occur with a frequency of about one per year, under the assumption of a roughly constant fleet of nuclear plants. To curb these risks of future events would require sweeping changes to the industry, as perhaps triggered by Fukushima, which include refinements to reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations. To be effective, any changes need to minimize the risk of extreme disasters. Unfortunately, given the shortage of data, it is too early to judge if the risk of events has significantly improved post-Fukushima. We can only raise attention to the fact that similar sweeping regime changes after both Chernobyl (leading to a decrease in frequency) and Three Mile Island (leading to a suppression of moderate events) failed to mitigate the very heavy tailed distribution of costs documented here.
44 -
45 -Contamination spreads rapidly – no one is safe
46 -Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) RMT
47 -25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres
48 -Subsequently, the researchers determined the geographic distribution of radioactive gases and particles around a possible accident site using a computer model that describes Earth's atmosphere. The model calculates meteorological conditions and flows, and also accounts for chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The model can compute the global distribution of trace gases, for example, and can also simulate the spreading of radioactive gases and particles. To approximate the radioactive contamination, the researchers calculated how the particles of radioactive caesium-137 (137Cs) disperse in the atmosphere, where they deposit on Earth's surface and in what quantities. The 137Cs isotope is a product of the nuclear fission of uranium. It has a half-life of 30 years and was one of the key elements in the radioactive contamination following the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
49 -The computer simulations revealed that, on average, only eight percent of the 137Cs particles are expected to deposit within an area of 50 kilometres around the nuclear accident site. Around 50 percent of the particles would be deposited outside a radius of 1,000 kilometres, and around 25 percent would spread even further than 2,000 kilometres. These results underscore that reactor accidents are likely to cause radioactive contamination well beyond national borders.
50 -The results of the dispersion calculations were combined with the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown and the actual density of reactors worldwide to calculate the current risk of radioactive contamination around the world. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area with more than 40 kilobecquerels of radioactivity per square meter is defined as contaminated.
51 -The team in Mainz found that in Western Europe, where the density of reactors is particularly high, the contamination by more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter is expected to occur once in about every 50 years. It appears that citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of Germany run the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination, associated with the numerous nuclear power plants situated near the borders between France, Belgium and Germany, and the dominant westerly wind direction.
52 -If a single nuclear meltdown were to occur in Western Europe, around 28 million people on average would be affected by contamination of more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter. This figure is even higher in southern Asia, due to the dense populations. A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people.
53 -"Germany's exit from the nuclear energy program will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination. However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany's neighbours were to switch off their reactors," says Jos Lelieveld. "Not only do we need an in-depth and public analysis of the actual risks of nuclear accidents. In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered ," adds the atmospheric chemist.
54 -It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
55 -Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) RMT
56 -Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years.
57 -Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
58 -Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
59 -Biodiversity loss risks extinction - ecosystems aren’t resilient or redundant
60 -Vule 13-School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University (Jeffrey V. Yule *, Robert J. Fournier and Patrick L. Hindmarsh, “Biodiversity, Extinction, and Humanity’s Future: The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Human Population and Resource Use”, 2 April 2013, manities 2013, 2, 147–159) RMT
61 -Ecologists recognize that the particulars of the relationship between biodiversity and community resilience in the face of disturbance (a broad range of phenomena including anything from drought, fire, and volcanic eruption to species introductions or removals) depend on context 16,17. Sometimes disturbed communities return relatively readily to pre-disturbance conditions; sometimes they do not. However, accepting as a general truism that biodiversity is an ecological stabilizer is sensible— roughly equivalent to viewing seatbelt use as a good idea: although seatbelts increase the risk of injury in a small minority of car accidents, their use overwhelmingly reduces risk. As humans continue to modify natural environments, we may be reducing their ability to return to pre-disturbance conditions. The concern is not merely academic. Communities provide the ecosystem services on which both human and nonhuman life depends, including the cycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen by photosynthetic organisms, nitrogen fixation and the filtration of water by microbes, and pollination by insects. If disturbances alter communities to the extent that they can no longer provide these crucial services, extinctions (including, possibly, our own) become more likely. In ecology as in science in general, absolutes are rare. Science deals mainly in probabilities, in large part because it attempts to address the universe’s abundant uncertainties. Species-rich, diverse communities characterized by large numbers of multi-species interactions are not immune to being pushed from one relatively stable state characterized by particular species and interactions to other, quite different states in which formerly abundant species are entirely or nearly entirely absent. Nonetheless, in speciose communities, the removal of any single species is less likely to result in radical change. That said, there are no guarantees that the removal of even a single species from a biodiverse community will not have significant, completely unforeseen consequences.
62 -Indirect interactions can be unexpectedly important to community structure and, historically, have been difficult to observe until some form of disturbance (especially the introduction or elimination of a species) occurs. Experiments have revealed how the presence of predators can increase the diversity of prey species in communities, as when predators of a superior competitor among prey species will allow inferior competing prey species to persist 18. Predators can have even more dramatic effects on communities. The presence or absence of sea otters determines whether inshore areas are characterized by diverse kelp forest communities or an alternative stable state of species poor urchin barrens 19. In the latter case, the absence of otters leaves urchin populations unchecked to overgraze kelp forests, eliminating a habitat feature that supports a wide range of species across a variety of age classes.
63 -Aldo Leopold observed that when trying to determine how a device works by tinkering with it, the first rule of doing the job intelligently is to save all the parts 20. The extinctions that humans have caused certainly represent a significant problem, but there is an additional difficulty with human investigations of and impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes. Often, our tinkering is unintentional and, as a result, recklessly ignores the necessity of caution. Following the logic inherited from Newtonian physics, humans expect single actions to have single effects. Desiring more game species, for instance, humans typically hunt predators (in North America, for instance, extirpating wolves so as to be able to have more deer or elk for themselves). Yet removing or adding predators has far reaching effects. Wolf removal has led to prey overpopulation, plant over browsing, and erosion 21. After wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park, the K of elk increased. This allowed for a shift in elk feeding patterns that left fewer trees alongside rivers, thus leaving less food for beaver and, consequently, fewer beaver dams and less wetland 22,23. Such a situation represents, in microcosm, the inherent risk of allowing for the erosion of species diversity. In addition to providing habitat for a wide variety of species, wetlands serve as natural water purification systems. Although the Yellowstone region might not need that particular ecosystem service as much as other parts of the world, freshwater resources and wetlands are threatened globally, and the same logic of reduced biodiversity equating to reduced ecosystem services applies.
64 -Humans take actions without considering that when tugging on single threads, they unavoidably affect adjacent areas of the tapestry. While human population and per capita resource use remain high, so does the probability of ongoing biodiversity loss. At the very least, in the future people will have an even more skewed perspective than we do about what constitutes a diverse community. In that regard, future generations will be even more ignorant than we are. Of course, we also experience that shifting baseline perspective on biodiversity and population sizes, failing to recognize how much is missing from the world because we are unaware of what past generations saw 11. But the consequences of diminished biodiversity might be more profound for humans than that. If the disturbance of communities and ecosystems results in species losses that reduce the availability of ecosystem services, human K and, sooner or later, human N will be reduced.
65 -1AC – Plan
66 -Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power by reactors powered by uranium-235.
67 -The plan shifts to thorium-powered reactors – improves energy efficiency and safety and prevents prolif
68 -Halper 13 Mark Halper, "Hans Blix: Shift to thorium, minimize weapons risk," The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, 10/29/2013 AZ
69 -Hans Blix, the disarmament advocate who famously found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, said today that thorium fuel could help reduce the risk of weapons proliferation from nuclear reactors. Addressing the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 here, Blix said that nuclear power operators should move away from their time-honoured practice of using uranium fuel with its links to potential nuclear weapons fabrication via both the uranium enrichment process and uranium’s plutonium waste. “Even though designers and operators are by no means at the end of the uranium road, it is desirable today, I am convinced, that the designers and the others use their skill and imagination to explore and test other avenues as well,” Blix said. “The propeller plane that served us long and still serves us gave way to the jet plane that now dominates,” said the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who also ran the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. “Diesel engines have migrated from their traditional home in trucks to a growing number of cars and cars with electric engines are now entering the market. Nuclear power should also not be stuck in one box.” Blix rattled off a list of thorium’s advantages, noting that “thorium fuel gives rise to waste that is smaller in volume, less toxic and much less long lived than the wastes that result from uranium fuel.” Another bonus: thorium is three to four times more plentiful than uranium, he noted. “The civilian nuclear community must do what it can to help reduce the risk that more nuclear weapons are made from uranium or plutonium,” Blix said. “Although it is enrichment plants and plutonium producing installations rather than power reactors that are key concerns, this community, this nuclear community, can and should use its considerable brain power to design reactors that can be easily safeguarded and fuel and supply organizations that do not lend themselves to proliferation. I think in these regards the thorium community may have very important contributions to make.” Blix described the obstacles that are in the way of a shift to thorium and other nuclear alternatives as “political” rather than “technical.”
EntryDate
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1 -2016-09-11 01:40:26.0
Judge
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1 -Rashed Islam
Opponent
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1 -Chaminade CC
ParentRound
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1 -0
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -3
Team
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -SEPOCT - Thorium Aff
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[1]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,41 +1,0 @@
1 -same framework as Thorium aff
2 -
3 -Advantage one is Isis.
4 -ISIS is expanding its influence in Egypt and the Sinai
5 -McFate et al 16 Jessica Lewis McFate (Director of Tradecraft and Innovation at the Institute for the Study of War. She joined ISW after eight years of service on Active Duty as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. Her military career includes 34 months deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where she provided intelligence support to tactical, operational, and theater commands. She has twice been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for her impact upon operations. She is the author of The ISIS Defense in Iraq and Syria: Countering an Adaptive Enemy, The Islamic State of Iraq Returns to Diyala, Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Parts I and II. Ms. McFate’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and she has made frequent appearances on both television and radio programs, including CNN, Al-Jazeera America, BBC, NPR, and Wall Street Journal Live. Ms. McFate holds a B.S. in Strategic and International History and International Relations from West Point and an M.A. in Strategic Intelligence from American Military University), "ISIS FORECAST: RAMADAN 2016," Institute for the Study of War, May 2016 AZ
6 -ISIS will implement its global strategy with simultaneous and linked campaigns across multiple geographic rings. ISW has refined its previous assessment of these geographic campaigns to identify the following four rings: core terrain, including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and the Sinai Peninsula; regional power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt; the remainder of the Muslim world; and the non-Muslim world. ISIS will pursue different strategic objectives in each ring in order to advance its grand strategic objective to expand its caliphate across all Muslim lands while provoking and winning an apocalyptic war against the West. ISIS has suffered numerous losses within Iraq and Syria that it will likely seek to reverse by setting new conditions during Ramadan. ISIS will attempt to exploit an ongoing political crisis in Iraq by targeting demonstrators or other soft targets in a mass casualty event that prompts the mobilization of Iraqi Shi’a and sparks reprisals against Iraqi Sunnis. ISIS will also launch attacks in Homs City, Tartous, and Latakia Provinces in Syria to exploit the current focus of pro-regime elements upon other major cities such as Aleppo and Damascus. ISIS has already demonstrated this capability in early 2016 and will continue to pursue these courses of action in April - May 2016 leading up to Ramadan. ISIS will also seek to generate new conditions in Iraq and Syria by launching attacks within neighboring countries, including Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. ISIS will likely select targets in neighboring states that relieve pressure from the group in Syria while setting conditions for future expansion in those states. Targets that serve this dual purpose include foreign tourists, state security forces, and U.S. military elements in Turkey and Jordan. ISIS has already accelerated its attacks within Turkey and Lebanon since November 2015. Jordanian Special Operations Forces uncovered an operational ISIS presence in Irbid in March 2016, indicating that ISIS is developing the capability to conduct attacks inside Jordan as well. ISIS is similarly organizing campaigns to weaken regional power centers - including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt – in order to eliminate its rivals for leadership within the Muslim world. ISIS has pursued an indirect campaign against Iran that focuses upon its proxies in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, ISIS is escalating its attacks against security forces in Saudi Arabia with targets including the capital of Riyadh, Shi’a populations of Eastern Saudi Arabia, and potentially the holy city of Mecca, based upon recent arrests. These attacks may serve to boost regional recruitment for ISIS while signaling its long-term intent to seize control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. ISIS will also likely take advantage of political discontent against Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to further drive disorder in mainland Egypt and delegitimize the rival version of Islamism espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood.
7 -Egypt’s nuclear deal makes it as a target—political instability and civil unrest.
8 -Follett 16 Andrew Follett, energy and environment reporter. “Egypt Gets $25 billion From Russia To Build Nuclear Reactors, Despite Terror Risk.” The Daily Caller News Foundation. May 23, 2016. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/23/egypt-gets-25-billion-from-russia-to-build-nuclear-reactors-despite-terror-risk/ MSG
9 -Egypt’s president announced Sunday the country will accept a Russian loan of $25 billion in order to build a nuclear power plant, despite recent terrorism and civil unrest in the country.¶ The loan will finance longstanding Egyptian plans to build a new reactor in Dabaa, despite long running terrorism concerns in the region. Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, signed a nuclear power plant deal with Russia last November, just days after the Kremlin announced a Russian aircraft was downed by an act of terrorism, killing all 224 people on board. The plane was heading from an Egyptian resort city to St. Petersburg in Russia.¶ Groups tied to the Islamic State (ISIS) have made repeated attacks in Egypt, even killing nine people, six of whom were police officers, with a bomb in Cairo in January. Egypt is also politically unstable, and has changed presidents three times since 2011. The country’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, was removed from office by a military coup in 2013 and sentenced to death last May.¶ Egypt has planned to build a nuclear reactor since 1955, but aborted most of its plans after the Chernobyl accident. Egyptian interest in nuclear power was renewed after the country signed nuclear cooperation agreements with Russia in 2004 and 2008, according to the World Nuclear Association. Egypt currently operates two extremely small and old reactors with technical assistance from Russia and Argentina.¶ ¶ Sponsored Content¶ ¶ I Was Voting for Hillary, Until I Read This...¶ LifeDaily¶ ¶ After Losing 100lbs Mama June is Actually Gorgeous¶ Look Damn Good¶ ¶ 25 Unseen Photos Of Bill The Clintons Don't Want You To See¶ Frank151¶ Sponsored Links by¶ The proposed Egyptian reactors would not produce the weapons-grade plutonium necessary for a nuclear bomb, but materials from the planned reactors could be used to create dirty bombs.¶ A dirty bomb combines radioactive material with conventional explosives that could contaminate the local area with high radiation levels for long periods of time and cause mass panic. ISIS has expressed interest in stealing radioactive material for a dirty bomb — though it would be millions of times weaker than an actual nuclear device.¶ Russia has supported the development of nuclear power in other countries with terrorism issues, such as Algeria.¶ Serious issues with terrorist groups in Algeria, like al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — a group of Islamist militants aimed to overthrow the Algerian government and create an Islamic state — have also not hampered Russia’s desire to build nuclear reactors. AQIM is designated as a terrorist organization by U.S. officials. The group even pledged allegiance to the ISIS in late Feburary.¶
10 -Now is key – Egypt is vulnerable
11 -McFate et al 16 Jessica Lewis McFate (Director of Tradecraft and Innovation at the Institute for the Study of War. She joined ISW after eight years of service on Active Duty as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. Her military career includes 34 months deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where she provided intelligence support to tactical, operational, and theater commands. She has twice been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for her impact upon operations. She is the author of The ISIS Defense in Iraq and Syria: Countering an Adaptive Enemy, The Islamic State of Iraq Returns to Diyala, Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Parts I and II. Ms. McFate’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and she has made frequent appearances on both television and radio programs, including CNN, Al-Jazeera America, BBC, NPR, and Wall Street Journal Live. Ms. McFate holds a B.S. in Strategic and International History and International Relations from West Point and an M.A. in Strategic Intelligence from American Military University), "ISIS FORECAST: RAMADAN 2016," Institute for the Study of War, May 2016 AZ
12 -Meanwhile, the Egyptian government has undertaken recent measures that ISIS may exploit. Egypt gave two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia in April 2016, sparking large protests by Muslim Brotherhood members and others in Cairo, Giza, and other cities.38 ISIS likely seeks opportunities in Egypt, Jordan and Syria to demonstrate that the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach to Islamism is invalid and ineffective. Muslim Brotherhood protests also provide an outlet for ISIS to tap into radicalizing populations and mount a wider campaign of attacks on the Egyptian mainland. ISIS can exploit Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s propensity to blame the Muslim Brotherhood for ISIS’s attacks. The attack claimed by ISIS against the Russian airliner departing Sinai in October 2015 demonstrates that ISIS is also incorporating covert explosive techniques previously used by al-Qaeda and conducting those attacks against Egypt’s airline industry. This capability may or may not be responsible for the Egyptian airliner downed on May 19, 2016 en route from Paris to Cairo.
13 -Causes a massive nuclear war
14 -Boyle 15 Darren Boyle, German Journalist. DailyMail.co. Isis planning 'nuclear holocaust' to wipe hundreds of millions from face of the earth', claims reporter who embedded with the extremists”. September 29, 2015. MSG
15 -Islamic terrorists Isis want to wipe the west off the face of the earth with a nuclear holocaust according to a journalist who spent ten days with the group while researching a book. ¶ The terror group allowed Jürgen Todenhöfer to embed with the group because he has been a high-profile critic of US policy in the Middle East. ¶ The German journalist claimed the terror group wants to launch a 'nuclear tsunami' against the west and anyone else that opposes their plans for an Islamic caliphate.¶ The 75-year-old former German MP wrote up his findings in a new book 'Inside IS - Ten Days In The Islamic State'.¶ He said that upon his arrival in ISIS controlled territory, that he and his son were forced to hand over their mobile phones to their hosts. ¶ He said he spent several months talking to the terror organisation over Skype before he was allowed to travel into their area. ¶ He told Allan Hall in The Express: 'Of course I'd seen the terrible, brutal beheading videos and it was of course after seeing this in the last few months that caused me the greatest concern in my negotiations to ensure how I can avoid this. Anyway, I made my will before I left.¶ 'People there live in shellholes, in barracks, in bombed-out houses. I slept on the floor, if I was lucky on a plastic mattress. I had a suitcase and a backpack, a sleeping bag.' ¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis uses its beheading videos to instill terror into the civilian population in order to make it easier for them to take an area under control.'¶ Mr Todenhöfer warned that ISIS was the most dangerous terror organization he ever witnessed. ¶ 'I don't see anyone who has a real chance to stop them. Only Arabs can stop IS. I came back very pessimistic.' ¶ RELATED ARTICLES¶ Previous¶ 1¶ Next¶ Elderly woman seriously injured after BLACK BEAR breaks into...¶ Corbyn's copy and paste politics: Labour leader's first big...¶ SHARE THIS ARTICLE¶ Share¶ He warned that the terror organisation is far more 'dangerous and organised' than people in the West realises. ¶ He said the West has 'no concept of the threat it faces' from the Islamic State and has underestimated the risk posed by ISIS 'dramatically'.¶ The German reporter spent most of his time in Mosul in northern Iraq, but he also traveled to the ISIS-controlled territories of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor in Syria. ¶ He added: 'They are extremely brutal. Not just head-cutting. I'm talking about the strategy of religious cleansing. That's their official philosophy. They are talking about 500 million people who have to die.'¶ Scroll down for video ¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis, pictured, were the most 'brutal and dangerous' enemy he has ever seen ¶ +3¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis, pictured, were the most 'brutal and dangerous' enemy he has ever seen ¶ He claimed the terror group would try and wipe out hundreds of millions of people if they had the chance¶ +3¶ He claimed the terror group would try and wipe out hundreds of millions of people if they had the chance¶ Hollande confirms jet fighters destroyed ISIS training camp¶ He went on to say that ISIS are 'completely sure they will win this fight'.¶ In a stark warning issued in a detailed post on Facebook, the journalist wrote in German: 'The West underestimated the risk posed by IS dramatically.¶ 'The ISIS fighters are much smarter and more dangerous than our leaders believe. In the Islamic State, there is an almost palpable enthusiasm and confidence of victory, which I have not seen in many war zones.'¶ Mr Todenhöfer went on to say that ISIS have plans for mass genocide, with the aim or eradicating all atheists and religions that are not 'people of the book' or who do not subscribe to their particular brand of Islam.¶ 'The IS want to kill... all non-believers and apostates and enslave their women and children. All Shiites, Yazidi, Hindus, atheists and polytheists should be killed,' he wrote.¶ 'Hundreds of millions of people are to be eliminated in the course of this religious 'cleansing'.¶ 'All moderate Muslims who promote democracy, should be killed. Because, from the IS perspective, they promote human laws over the laws of God.¶ 'This also applies to - after a successful conquest - the democratically-minded Muslims in the Western world.'¶ The reporter describes the Islamic State is currently operating as a functioning totalitarian state - one which, he claims, many Sunni residents in Mosul are unopposed to since it is preferable to the oppression they suffered under the previous regime.¶ He told German television that ISIS wants to 'conquer the world'.¶ 'This is the largest religious cleansing strategy that has ever been planned in human history,' the journalist added. ¶ ISIS executes ten men in blue jumpsuits as suspected spies¶ Read more:¶ ISIS plan Islamic nuclear holocaust to wipe hundreds of millions from face of earth | World | News | Daily Express
16 -WMD acquisition feasible – best data – kills the economy.
17 -Robichaud 14 Carl, Specialist in Nuclear Policy at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2014, “Preventing nuclear terrorism requires bold action,” http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/201395-preventing-nuclear-terrorism-requires-bold-action/AKG
18 -Nuclear terrorism is one of the most serious threats of the 21st century. Fortunately, the threat is a preventable one: consolidate and lock down weapons-usable materials and you dramatically reduce the risks. At the Nuclear Security Summit this week, President Obama and more than 50 world leaders will gather in The Hague with an opportunity to take a major step forward in doing just that. But taking the next step in this process will require strong leadership and skillful diplomacy. Though they rarely make the headlines, cases of smuggling, theft or loss of nuclear and radiological materials are alarmingly frequent. Over the past few years we’ve seen incidents from Moldova to India, South Africa to Japan. Just a few months ago in Mexico, carjackers unwittingly heisted radiological materials that, in the wrong hands, could have done significant harm. In fact, more than one hundred thefts and other incidents are reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) each year. In many of these instances we still do not know where the material came from, who stole it, or where it was headed. Nuclear technology is widespread, used not only in power production but in medicine, mining, and other industries. As a result, dozens of countries possess radiological materials that could be used in a “dirty bomb.” Beyond that, over 25 countries have highly-enriched uranium or plutonium—enough to build more than 20,000 new weapons like the one that destroyed Hiroshima and almost 80,000 like the one that destroyed Nagasaki. In the wrong hands, it wouldn’t take much plutonium or highly enriched uranium to fashion a nuclear device. You could fit a bombs-worth of this material into a lunch box. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the globe have expressed intent to acquire weapons-usable materials. If they succeed there is little doubt they would use such a device. Thus the spread of these materials is a grave threat—not only to the United States but to any country that relies upon the global economy, which would be severely disrupted if an attack ever succeeded. Robert Gates, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, noted that, “Every senior leader, when you’re asked what keeps you awake at night, it’s the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”
19 -Thus, the plan: The Arab Republic of Egypt should prohibit the production of nuclear power.
20 -Ross 11 Timothy Ross, "Avoiding Apocalypse: Congress Should Ban Nuclear Power," Environmental Advocacy Seminar UB Law, Fall 2011 AZ
21 -For almost as long as fission-produced nuclear power has existed as a viable energy source, there has been unending debate over whether or not, or to what extent, it should be used as a source of energy. Many see nuclear power as an efficient source of energy that is dependable, cost efficient and clean. That view fails to appreciate the true costs of nuclear power. The risks presented by nuclear power to human health and the environment are unparalleled. Nuclear power is not clean or safe when one considers the byproducts that come of its production or the potential ramifications of a nuclear accident. Nuclear power is also unnecessary to fulfill this nation’s energy needs. There are alternative sources of power, such as wind power or hydroelectric power, that should be used to a fuller extent in generating the nation’s electricity. Congress should 1) ban production, in the United States, of nuclear material for use in fission power plants, 2) prohibit the building of any new nuclear plant, and 3) phase out currently operating nuclear plants. If, at some point, a method is developed for producing fuels or processes that would eliminate instability and radioactive waste, then nuclear power might be acceptable. But so long as the only reliable method of producing nuclear power is through fission, which is unstable and produces radioactive waste, we should not place its convenience before the risks posed to health or environment
22 -Currently, Egypt lacks nuclear power but has entered into agreement with Russia to finance power plants.
23 -Reuters 16 Reuters News Agency. “Russia to Lend Egypt $25 billion to build nuclear power plant.” Thursday May 19, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-russia-nuclear-idUSKCN0YA1G5 MSG
24 -Russia will loan Egypt $25 billion to finance building and operating a nuclear power plant in Egypt, the official gazette said on Thursday.¶ ¶ Egypt and Russia signed an agreement on Nov. 19 for Russia to build Egypt's first nuclear power plant in Egypt and to extend Egypt a loan to cover the cost of construction.¶ ¶ It was not clear at the time what the deal was worth, but Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the loan would be paid off over 35 years.¶ ¶ Egypt will pay an interest rate of 3 percent annually, according to the country's official gazette. Installment payments will begin on Oct. 15, 2029.¶ ¶ "The loan will be used by the Egyptian side for a period of 13 years between 2016-2028 ... the Egyptian side will repay loan amounts used over 22 years in 43 installments," the gazette said.¶ ¶ The loan will finance 85 percent of the value of each contract for the work, services and equipment shipping, the gazette said. Egypt will finance the remaining 15 percent.¶ ¶ The plant will be built in Dabaa, a site in the north of the country that Egypt has been considering for a nuclear power plant on and off since the 1980s. It is due to be completed in 20022, and the first of its four reactors is expected to begin producing power in 2024.¶ ¶ Egypt, with a population of 90 million and vast energy requirements, is seeking to diversify its energy sources. As well as a nuclear plant, Sisi has talked of building solar and wind energy facilities in the coming three years to generate around 4,300 megawatts of power.¶ ¶ The country also recently discovered a large reserve of natural gas off the Mediterranean coast.¶ ¶ (Reporting by Asma Alsharif, editing by Larry King)
25 -Advantage two is relations
26 -The Egypt-Russia nuclear deal strengthens Russian influence and displaces the US
27 -Svet and Miller 15 Oleg Svet and Elissa Miller, security sector analyst and program assistant. “The United States Should Prevent an Egyptian Shift to Russia.” Middle East Institute. December 18, 2015. MSG
28 -Roughly five decades since the Soviet foray into the Middle East vis-à-vis the Czech arms deal with Egypt in September 1955, Russia is reasserting its influence in Egypt. The deal marked the beginning of a brief period that saw Moscow serve as the primary military supplier for a number of regional countries that formed an ‘anti-imperialist front’, such as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. Recent developments in Russo-Egyptian relations are reminiscent of Moscow’s dealings with Cairo during the mid-1950s, with the Russians hopeful of a similar outcome. While these developments do not present an immediate threat to the United States, Washington should not dismiss this ongoing strategic leveraging.¶ While the U.S. alliance with Egypt has largely been steady since the 1979 Camp David Accords, friction in recent years over the ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi and the increasing authoritarian style of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has strained this important relationship. Since 1987, the United States has supplied Egypt with $1.3 billion per year in military aid through Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The removal of Morsi, and a subsequent 18-month suspension of some military equipment, ultimately culminated in a decision to reform FMF to Egypt. Starting in 2018, FMF will be channeled through four categories—counterterrorism, border security, Sinai security and maritime security—and cash-flow financing (CFF), a perquisite that allowed Egypt to sign contracts for military equipment on credit, will come to an end.¶ The stresses in the U.S.-Egypt alliance have not gone unnoticed by Russia. Since assuming power in June 2014, Sisi has improved ties with Russia, making three trips to Moscow compared to none so far to Washington. Trade has been a key area of increased cooperation. During his visit to Egypt in February 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed “dynamic” bilateral relations, noting an 86 percent increase in trade in 2014. That month, Egypt agreed to establish a free trade zone with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. Recently, Cairo said it aims to replace Turkish goods restricted for import to Russia with Egyptian goods. Some analysts say that Egypt’s offer is not feasible, however, it nonetheless demonstrates Sisi’s intent to capitalize on opportunities to expand trade with Moscow. Energy has also been a sector of cooperation. Last month, Russia and Egypt signed an agreement to build Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, which Russian representatives called “a truly new chapter in the history of bilateral relations.”¶ Military cooperation has also increased. In March 2014, Egypt and Russia signed a protocol to expand bilateral military ties. Six months later, Cairo reached a preliminary deal to purchase $3.5 billion of arms from Moscow. Earlier reports cited Russian sources saying deals had been reached to sell Egypt MiG-29 fighter jets, air defense missile complexes, Mi-35 helicopters, coastal anti-ship complexes, light weapons, and ammunition. Cairo has also repeatedly expressed its desire to work closely with Moscow on counterterrorism. In October, Egypt praised Russia’s military intervention in Syria as a major step in the fight against terrorism. Most recently, following Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigus’s November visit to Egypt, Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said Russia would respond shortly to an arms purchasing request from Cairo. That much of the recent expansion in Egypt-Russia military cooperation occurred while U.S. military assistance to Egypt was suspended should not be overlooked.¶ Robust ties with Egypt offer Russia important strategic advantages, not least of which is enhanced regional influence as the Kremlin enmeshes itself in the Syrian civil war and the global Sunni-Shia rivalry. Ties with Egypt have bolstered Russia’s ability to act as a counterweight to U.S. interests in the region. Alignment on counterterrorism and mutually beneficial trade relations—Egypt serves as market for Russian goods amidst western sanctions and Russia as a source of much-needed investment for Egypt’s economy—provide a strong foundation for Russia’s strategic maneuvering.¶ It remains unclear whether Sisi’s cozying up to Russia reflects a genuine policy shift or a strategic signal of defiance meant to push Washington to increase support for Cairo out of concern that it will move into Russia’s orbit. But the Egyptian outreach to Moscow should not be understated given the current realignment of regional power structures. Discord with the United States comes not only as Russia seeks to expand its foothold in the Middle East, but as Sisi attempts to establish a foreign policy independent of Washington. The Egyptian president appears to be working toward that end, having already garnered substantial international support, both material and rhetorical, from European and Gulf powers. Egyptian-Israeli relations are and have been strong for decades, casting doubt on the need for an American mediator. And Russia is willing to provide military hardware to Cairo absent any democracy conditions, while the United States has demonstrated willingness to suspend weapons deliveries over human rights concerns dismissed by Egypt.¶ In the face of a possible Egyptian rebalancing towards Russia, the United States has three basic policy options. On one extreme, the United States could interpret Egypt’s warming to Russia as provocation by an entitled ally whose repressive behavior, which is contributing to the exacerbation of radical elements, flies in the face of U.S. democratic values. Under this option, the United States would impose strict democratization conditions on aid. However, the United States can ill-afford to threaten its relationship with Egypt in this way at a time of Russian resurgence. Furthermore, such a policy risks unravelling the foundations of Egyptian-Israeli peace.¶ On the other extreme, the United States could provide Egypt with unconditional military aid in an attempt to counter Russian influence. As this policy would overlook any repressive domestic behavior, it could embolden a regime unlikely to reform. Those troubled by this course of action must recognize that Egypt will have to go somewhere for military aid, and Moscow is Cairo’s most attractive alternative. Egypt would certainly be less likely to pursue democratic reform under Russian stewardship. However, while a policy of unconditional support for Egypt may make sense on purely strategic grounds, it would face fierce opposition from those concerned about the regime’s repression. ¶ Several experts have advocated of late for middle of the road approaches that would maintain a strategic relationship with Egypt, but also avoid “coddling” a repressive regime. This third course of action recognizes the threats Cairo faces, notably ISIS, but also seeks to maintain strategic distance from Egypt’s authoritarian measures. The qualitative nature of security assistance could be changed from external defense-type capabilities to equipment and training more appropriate for counterterrorism missions. This would enhance the capability of the Egyptian armed forces to fight ISIS in the Sinai, Libya, and possibly elsewhere in the region. The decision to reform FMF to Egypt starting in 2018 is a positive step in this direction. Recent congressional authorities should also serve as a model for assistance. For example, section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides the authority for training and equipping foreign security forces for counterterrorism operations, focuses on equipment for internal security rather than external defense.¶ A centered approach recognizes that currently, the gravest threat to U.S. and Egyptian shared interests is not the lack of democratic progress, but the onslaught of groups like ISIS. The United States can employ such an approach as it eyes Egyptian and Russian rapprochement. For the time being, Sisi’s outreach to the Kremlin seems to be posturing. However, a balanced approach would allow the United States to maintain a strategic position of power should a hypothesized shift to Moscow materialize.¶ Needs to be cut
29 -Egypt-US relations key to stability – it’s the lynchpin of American power projection, ensures counter-terror coop, moderates the Egyptian military, and keeps the Suez open – key to broader Middle East stability
30 -CFR 2 Council on Foreign Relations. “Strengthening the US-Egyptian Relationship. Council on Foreign Relations. May 2002. MSG
31 -The U.S.-Egyptian relationship is rooted in strategic calculation. It bolsters peace between Egypt and Israel and makes possible broader peace in the region. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship has helped Egypt modernize its military and has added weight to its position as a stabilizing regional force. America's support has also strengthened Egypt's economy. As has been true for the past two decades, a moderate Egypt is the key to peace and stability in the Middle East and a strong U.S.-Egyptian relationship is essential to securing American presence in the region.¶ The U.S.-Egyptian relationship has served the two sides well. Two decades of military cooperation and training have moderated Egypt's military establishment, the most powerful institution in Egypt, and made it a reliable U.S. partner. During the Gulf War, Egypt's support was central to Arab participation in the war against Iraq; Egypt's willingness to keep open its canal in crisis and allow overflight and refueling cannot be taken for granted. These ties remain central to the U.S. ability to project and protect its strategic interests in the world's most volatile region.¶ Washington has lost sight of what the Middle East would look like without a strong U.S.-Egyptian relationship. A nuclear-inclined or -armed Egypt, ambiguous on the issue of terror, uncertain on peace with Israel, and disinclined to negotiate would drastically recast the management of the Middle East.¶ Since September 11, it has become all too clear that U.S.-Egyptian ties are in trouble. Although the Egyptian government has stood firmly with the United States, the U.S. Congress has grown increasingly critical in its support for Egypt. Congress questions the line that Egypt has taken with Israel, its position on terrorism, issues of human rights, and economic and political reform.¶ A similar dissatisfaction with the U.S.-Egyptian relationship exists in Egypt. The events of recent months set loose demonstrations unprecedented in recent decades. The Egyptian public's perception of powerlessness is breeding alienation and intensifying anger. It underscores a key challenge to American statecraft- how to begin recreating a partnership that serves both Egyptian and American interests and helps further peace for the region. The United States needs Arab allies, especially in these challenging times; Egypt is our most important partner.¶ The generation of American statesmen and political leaders who forged the Egyptian-Israeli agreement and was committed to the political relationship between the United States and Egypt in the 1970s has largely passed. As the Mubarak era similarly draws to a close, Washington should work to ensure that the successor regime shares a commitment to the kind of relationship the United States has enjoyed over the past quarter century.¶ At the same time, both sides must recognize that the U.S.-Egyptian relationship has changed and now reflects new political realities, such as Egypt's struggling economic condition and concerns over governance and human rights. This generation of leaders must set new goals for the relationship and recalibrate the dialogue so that it reaches beyond the institutions of government and engages religious leaders, media, intellectuals, and the business establishment on both sides.¶ Foundations of the U.S.-Egypt Relationship¶ Political¶ Egypt is the most powerful moderate, balancing voice in the Arab world.¶ Its position in the region is critical to peace between Arab states and Israel.¶ Egypt's political clout shapes outlooks and guides agendas in the region.¶ Cairo's diplomatic corps has significant influence in regional and multinational bodies. Egypt plays an important role in the United Nations in shaping international consensus on issues important to peace and stability in the region.¶ Egypt's posture on key issues of importance provides cover for Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.¶ Egypt, a vigorous Organization of African Unity actor, has the ability to influence events in Africa.¶ Military¶ U.S.-Egyptian military ties are a key link in the U.S. relationship. They are a central stabilizing factor in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship. More broadly, the U.S.-Egyptian defense relationship sends a signal of domestic moderation and deterrence to the region. The Egyptian military is deeply opposed to Islamic political radicalism.¶ Overflight rights, the sharing of intelligence and military perceptions in the region, transit through the Suez Canal, military supply, etc., demonstrate the important nature of the military relationship, especially during times of war.¶ Egypt hosts Operation Bright Star, the largest military exercise the United States conducts in the world. These maneuvers send a strong signal to the region of the close ties the U.S. shares with Egypt and its ability to quickly deploy American military power during times of crisis.¶ Cultural¶ Egypt's intellectual and academic voice is the strongest in the region.¶ Washington needs the full cooperation of Egypt's government, intellectuals, and religious leaders to counter Islamic radicalism.¶ While no single set of voices defines modern Islam, Egypt's intelligentsia, religious hierarchy, and institutions are central in defining Islamic religious and secular perspectives and diminishing the influence of radical Islamic tendencies. For the past several decades, Egypt has been a battleground between moderate and radical Islamic forces. The role of Egyptian militants in al-Qaeda and other radical movements is considerable.¶ Egypt is the largest exporter of culture in the region, although the Gulf has overtaken Egypt as the hub of modern media in the Middle East.¶ Economic¶ Egypt is the most populous nation in the Arab world and its economy vies with Saudi Arabia in size. Its economy is in trouble and its poor performance is fueling discontent on the street.¶ Egypt hosts significant American investment; the discovery of substantial gas reserves will increase Egypt's role in regional energy markets.¶ Current Perceptions¶ Changing Relations¶ Egypt has been cast as an obstructionist force in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the U.S.-led war against terrorism. In fact, Egypt has worked quietly and consistently for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and for an expansion of the Arab world's acceptance of Israel. Frustration, however, is understandable in the United States-the relationship began with the expectation that peace in the region would have been achieved years ago. Egypt has consistently made clear its belief that there must be progress toward Palestinian statehood; where it sees that progress checked, Egypt is outspoken and its criticism has been interpreted in many American circles as obstructionist.¶ Public dialogue does not reflect the close military and government relationships between the two countries. Both the Egyptian and American publics are extremely critical of the relationship and criticism has increased sharply since September 11 and the second Intifada.¶ The United States has unrealistic expectations of the leadership powers of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and of Egypt in the Arab world, in pursuing U.S. interests. There has been a transition in the structure of the Arab and Egyptian political systems. While these systems are essentially top-down structures, they are not command structures.¶ Egypt and Saudi Arabia are an axis of political power in the Middle East; they backstop one another on key political issues. Any U.S. military operation against Iraq would require the understanding, if not the support, of both countries.¶ U.S. Aid to Egypt¶ One of the pillars of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship is the near $2 billion of U.S. economic and military aid given yearly.¶ Many believe that the U.S. investment in Egypt should compel the Egyptian government to accommodate American views on the region, particularly with regard to Egypt's relationship with Israel-or at the very least moderate the harsh rhetoric. Moreover, some in the United States question the benefits of aid to Egypt, pointing to its lagging political and economic reforms and poor human rights record.¶ american assistance has contributed to Egypt's stability and gives the United States considerable influence in key decisions about Egyptian policies. Using military supply or assistance as direct, visible leverage is extremely dangerous, reinforcing the impression on the Egyptian street that its government is subservient to the United States. Such signals weaken the ability of the United States to pursue mutually beneficial initiatives.¶ U.S. aid to Egypt was originally targeted for specific purposes and, in many ways, continues to successfully address significant U.S. political goals: consolidating the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement and strengthening U.S.-Egyptian ties. In reality American aid is a two-edged sword that must be viewed judiciously. It reinforces the American voice in Egyptian councils, but it cannot replace a consensus on political and economic objectives.¶ U.S. military aid to Egypt has created a solidly pro-American military establishment, which is the strongest institution in Egypt and the fundamental basis of the regime. Twenty years of military cooperation is producing an Egyptian military leadership comfortable with American approach and doctrine. U.S. military aid helps ensure that Egypt remains associated with the United States, despite criticism from the Egyptian elite. But like all relationships, this one is not immutable. The Soviet Union learned this harsh lesson in the 1970s.¶ U.S. aid to Egypt was never intended to push Egypt to reform according to America's priorities. U.S. aid has not resulted in the anticipated economic growth and political change in Egypt, nor has it secured peace between Israel and the Palestinians and all Arab states. And it cannot. American lawmakers must recognize the value that U.S. aid has brought to the relationship and accept its limitations, as well as its promise-the influence the United States accrues by having a seat at the Egyptian table.¶ Egypt as Battleground¶ Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 terrorist attack, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organizational force behind al-Qaeda, were Egyptian.¶ Islamic radicalism has a history deeply rooted in Egypt and the Egyptian government has been fighting radicalism since the time of Anwar Sadat. In the 1990s, Egypt conducted a hard fought campaign to root out Islamic militants after a series of deadly attacks. There is a direct line from the assassins of Sadat to the radicals that gave birth to the Egyptian components of al-Qaeda.¶ The threat of Islamic radicalism to Egypt's stability is real and continuing. Attacks are primarily aimed at overthrowing the current Egyptian regime and replacing it with an Islamic one. In fact, September 11 attacks were also aimed at Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where Islamic militants have been stymied.¶ The inspiration for al-Qaeda's ideology was Egyptian, and Osama bin Laden was advised heavily by Egyptians. Egypt's fundamentalists gave substance to al-Qaeda's tilt toward anti-Israel, anti-U.S., and anti-Arab regime rhetoric and action. Omar Abdel Rahman, "the blind sheikh," was an early and major force in Islamic radical militancy; the first attack on the World Trade Center was his handiwork.¶ September 11 demonstrated to the Egyptian people and government that their own war against terrorism is part of a larger phenomenon that threatens Egypt and the entire world. Egypt's support and full-hearted cooperation in the U.S.-led war on terrorism demonstrates its commitment to fight against terrorism both inside and outside of its borders. The United States needs to preserve and strengthen that commitment.¶ Even though Egypt's government and elites are bitterly opposed to Islamic radicalism, Egyptian intellectuals and state-sponsored media have contributed to the climate of denigration of Israel and the United States and are partially responsible for the intensity of hostility on the Egyptian street. Whatever short-term advantages are gained in public opinion from attacks against Israel and the United States, they are deeply unsettling to Americans and undermine the foundations on which peace must be built. Moreover, such denigration blurs key moral distinctions especially important in the debate over the future of modern Islam, and contributes to the justification of the use of terror.¶ The media reality in the Arab world, including Egypt, is changing. Independent Arab papers and television have created cross-border competition in the media heretofore unknown. Arab governments have effectively lost some of their ability to control the airwaves and print media, and are struggling to cope with the consequences. The Egyptian government never had perfect control of its media; today the degree of official control over the press and press opinion is diminishing.¶ Egyptian Middle Class¶ There is growing animosity in the secular elite establishment toward the United States focused specifically on U.S. policy toward Israel. This negative dialogue is damaging government relations. Egypt's regime is extremely sensitive to the attitude of its elites.¶ Among the Egyptian middle class, there is respect for the United States, its accomplishments and the role it can play in the Middle East. Regrettably, there is a strong belief that the problems in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship and in American policies in the region are caused by the American-Jewish community and its perceived control over U.S. government institutions and media. This attitude-and the rhetoric that goes with it-distorts perceptions and damages the dialogue. It undercuts Egypt's standing in the United States and must be an issue in any ongoing dialogue-one the United States is frank enough to address.¶ The United States should not expect a tame Egyptian press. It can expect, however, that the media and key intellectual institutions reverse the climate of denigration that has chilled relations. Strong signals of respect and the need for peace must come from the top and are a reasonable objective of U.S. diplomacy. Egypt's intellectuals will not break ranks with perceived orthodoxy and challenge conventional wisdom unless there is a strong signal from the top.¶ The Troubled Economy¶ The deplorable conditions of the Egyptian economy are fueling discontent. Growth is flat; reform has stopped.¶ U.S. assistance cannot bail Egypt out; rather Egypt must make hard decisions and move decisively toward a market-based economy.¶ But Egypt cannot do so alone. Egypt needs the United States as an economic partner and counselor with the International Monetary Fund and in mobilizing international support for debt rescheduling. President Mubarak needs confidence if he is to undertake politically sensitive but much needed reform.¶ Updating the U.S.-Egypt Relationship¶ The United States must set new goals and priorities for the U.S-Egyptian relationship that redefine the U.S. strategic view of the relationship within the context of Egypt's role in the Arab world.¶ The dialogue must recreate a sense of partnership in influencing events in the region.¶ The dialogue should be aimed at Egypt's leaders and also its elite and middle class.¶ Disagreement is best kept on official or private channels and out of the media. The dialogue must be candid and broad, addressing issues of immediate concern-the crisis in the region and Iraq. It can seek common ground in questions of importance to American policy outside the Middle East-Africa, for example.¶ The dialogue must broach sensitive questions-the intellectual debate in Islam, the way Egypt's media addresses the role of the American-Jewish community, Israel, and the United States. These consultations must address Egypt's virtually stagnant economic reform program and put on the table discrete steps that Egypt should take to create a properly functioning market economy. The United States should offer its influence with international financial institutions and the business community to match steps that Egypt takes.
32 -
33 -We’ll isolate two impacts~-~--
34 -1. Unique characteristics makes nuclear war uniquely likely in the Middle East – causes extinction.
35 -Russell 9
36 -James A. Russell (Senior Lecturer of National Security Affairs and Naval Postgraduate School). “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East”, IFRI (Proliferation Papers, #26, 2009). http://www.ifri.org/downloads/PP26_Russell_2009.pdf.
37 -Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
38 -2. Middle east presence is the lynchpin of global power projection – solves global conflict
39 -Mead 15 Walter Russell Mead Distinguished Scholar, American Strategy and Statesmanship, Hudson Institute August 5th, 2015 Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services
40 -The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the Military Balance in the Middle East http://www.hudson.org/research/11493-the-joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action-and-the-military-balance-in-the-middle-east
41 -Some might argue that, given the importance of Middle Eastern oil to the rest of the world, the United States could reduce our involvement in the Middle East with the assurance that other countries would step in to fill the vacuum. Why, some ask, should the United States assume the costs and risks of ensuring the flow of oil to other rich and powerful states around the world? The answers to this question go to the heart of American grand strategy for the last 100 years. As the bloodshed and destruction of warfare has increased, Americans have sought above all else to prevent wars between great powers from breaking out. While all war is destructive and horrifying, wars in which great powers, with their enormous technological and economic capabilities, turn their full strength against one another, have the potential to destroy civilization or human life itself. To make such wars less likely, the United States has worked to create an interdependent global system in which all countries depend so heavily on global flows of trade and investment that no country can contemplate cutting itself off from this system through starting wars. At the same time, the United States has worked to ensure the safe and secure passage of commerce across the world’s oceans, taking questions like energy out of the realm of geopolitical competition. In the Middle East, these policies have meant that since World War Two the United States has acted to prevent any power or combination of powers either inside or outside the region from gaining the ability to blackmail the world by threatening to interrupt the flow of oil to the great markets of Asia and Europe. Whether the danger came from external powers like the Soviet Union (which occupied part of Iran and threatened Turkey in the early years of the Cold War) or from ambitious leaders within the region (like Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait), the United States has acted to ensure the security and political independence of the oil producing states of the region. These policies have helped create the longest era of great power peace in modern times. They have also reduced the cost of America’s military commitments. Because other countries do not feel the need to maintain large forces with an intercontinental capacity to protect their global trade, the United States has been able to maintain a global presence at a far lower cost than would be feasible if the world’s major economic powers were engaged in competitive military build ups. A strong American presence in the Middle East and on the high seas has the effect of suppressing security competition worldwide, enabling America’s most important interests to be secured with much less cost than would otherwise be possible. Should the United States withdraw from this role, the world would likely see increased competition among other powers. China, for example, would see a greater need to protect its oil security, accelerating the build up of its armed forces. Japan and India would both likely see this build up as a threat to their own energy and maritime security and would accelerate build ups of their own. Trust among these powers, already weak, would erode, and the dynamics of a zero-sum competition for security and access to resources would drive them towards greater hostility and more dangerous policies. Under those circumstances, American prosperity and security would be much harder to defend than they are now, and the risks of great power conflict would intensify. America’s Middle East policy is not just about the Middle East; it is about America’s global interest in a peaceful and prosperous world. The starting point for any American strategy in the Middle East today must be the basic approach that has served us well since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. America’s vital interests require us to look to the safety and the security of the Middle Eastern oil producing states, ensuring that no power, either external or regional, gains the power to interfere with the smooth and stable supply of oil and gas to the great economic and industrial centers of the world.
EntryDate
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1 -2016-09-12 17:29:10.0
Judge
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1 -Steele, Tan, Bistagne
Opponent
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1 -West Ranch JW
ParentRound
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1 -1
Round
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1 -Quarters
Team
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
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1 -SEPOCT - Egypt Aff
Tournament
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1 -Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[2]
Cites
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1 -First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
2 -Opar 14 (Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 AT
3 -The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
4 -This proves util – a. If a person isn’t a continuous unit, it doesn’t matter how goods are distributed among people, which supports util since util only maximizes benefits, ignoring distribution across people. b. Other theories assume identity matters. Util’s the only possible theory if identity is irrelevant.
5 -Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
6 -Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
7 -It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
8 -2 impacts
9 -A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
10 -B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
11 -Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
12 -The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
13 -This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
14 -Third, states don’t have an act omission distinction.
15 -Sunstein and Vermeule 06 (Cass and Adrian law professors at Harvard, “IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? ACTS, OMISSIONS, AND LIFE- LIFE TRADEOFFS”, Stanford Law Review, 2006, BE)
16 -In our view, any effort to distinguish between acts and omissions goes wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. If correct, this point has broad implications for criminal and civil law. Whatever the general status of the act/omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy, the distinction is least impressive when applied to government, because the most plausible underlying considerations do not apply to official actors. The most fundamental point is that, unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference.
17 -Fourth, experience is the only sound justification for ethics
18 -Schwartz - “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Stephen P. Schwartz. Ithaca College. pp.1-14. No date Cited”
19 -The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible.
20 -Everyone takes pain as a reason to avoid an action
21 -Nagel - Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168.
22 -I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory Pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not backed up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure it is a means to their end, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether you can manage to withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical reason makes any sense at all, so that there is some judgment to withhold, it does not seem possible. If the general arguments against the reality of objective reasons are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. Oddly enough, however, we can think of a story that would go with such a denial. It might be suggested that the aversion to pain is a useful phobia—having nothing to do with the intrinsic undesirability of pain itself—which helps us avoid or escape the injuries that are signaled by pain. (The same type of purely instrumental value might be ascribed to sensory pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, and sex might be regarded as having no value in themselves, though our natural attraction to them assists survival and reproduction.) There would then be nothing wrong with pain in itself, and someone who was never motivated deliberately to do anything just because he knew it would reduce or avoid pain would have nothing the matter with him. He would still have involuntary avoidance reactions, otherwise it would be hard to say that he felt pain at all. And he would be motivated to reduce pain for other reasons—because it was an effective way to avoid the danger being signaled, or because interfered with some physical or mental activity that was important to him. He just wouldn't regard the pain as itself something he had any reason to avoid, even though he hated the feeling just as much as the rest of us. (And of course he wouldn't be able to justify the avoidance of pain in the way that we customarily justify avoiding what we hate without reason—that is, on the ground that even an irrational hatred makes its object very unpleasant!) There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal, but it seems nevertheless insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here.
23 -The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
24 -1AC – Plan
25 -
26 -The governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey should prohibit the production of nuclear power.
27 -Cottee 5/20/16 Matthew Cottee (research associate for non-proliferation and nuclear policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies) and Hassan Elbahtimy, "Russia's Nuclear Ambitions in the Middle East," Foreign Affairs AZ
28 -A few years ago, the Middle East’s nuclear energy prospects were in decline. Political instability made long-term investments in civil nuclear infrastructure risky. For one, Egypt was in the last stages of considering reactor bids when the popular uprising began in 2011. These plans were soon shelved by subsequent transitional governments. And the 2011 Fukushima Daichii meltdown in Japan had shaken public confidence across the world in the safety of nuclear power and raised questions about the industry's future. But now, at least in the Middle East, it appears that nuclear power is back in style. In April, Russian state nuclear firm Rosatom announced that it had opened an office in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. The office will help oversee the company’s many nuclear power projects in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Turkey. It is also hoped that Russian regional presence would open up new opportunities for its nuclear industry in the region. Rosatom’s new office comes at just the right time. The Middle East is now home to the greatest number of “nuclear newcomers” in the world, with at least six countries in total actively pursuing nuclear power. For one, in 2011, Iran became the first country in the region to operate a nuclear reactor. Tehran’s long-term plans include an ambitious expansion of its nuclear energy capacity by eight additional power reactors, something generally condoned by the recent nuclear deal. For their parts, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began to pursue nuclear power in 2010 and 2009, respectively. Both countries are driven by efforts to diversify their energy mix, and also use nuclear energy as a status symbol in the context of their strategic competition with Iran. Saudi Arabia has perhaps the most ambitious nuclear plans, with a goal of building 16 reactors by 2032. The United Arab Emirates’ first reactor is under construction, with an expected completion date in 2017. Egypt has also revived its plans to build a series of nuclear power reactors in Dabaa on the coast of the Mediterranean. It is joined by Turkey and Jordan, which are building nuclear power reactors that are expected to be operational by Russia 2020 and 2025, respectively.
29 -
30 -1AC – Relations S
31 -Russian funding for nuclear power displaces US influence and increases Russian power
32 -Guzansky et al 15 Yoel Guzansky (research fellow at INSS. Before he joined the Institute, he was in charge of strategic issues at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, coordinating work on the Iranian nuclear challenge and specializes in issues of Gulf security and Middle East strategic issues), Zvi Magen, Oded Eran, "Russian Nuclear Diplomacy in the Middle East," Insitute for National Security Studies, 12/29/2015 AZ
33 -The main stumbling block in the way of the project is the question of financing. Egypt’s economic situation does not enable it to carry out a venture of this size, and it is doubtful that Saudi Arabia, which economically supports the el-Sisi regime, can finance this ambitious project, given the considerable budgetary pressures it is experiencing due to the drop in oil prices. El-Sisi declared that Egypt would repay the loan by selling the electricity produced by the reactors after they begin operating in 2022. Moscow is supposed to lend Egypt the money needed to build the reactors as part of a comprehensive agreement, which includes the supply of fuel for the reactors, maintenance, training, and repairs. Against this background, and in addition to Russia’s efforts to end the war in Syria, it is imperative to look at the other Russian diplomatic track in the Middle East –plans to build civilian nuclear reactors. Russia is not a new player in the civilian nuclear market in the Middle East, but the desire of Moscow and countries in the region to cooperate in this sphere clearly has become more acute, as reflected in growing Russian involvement in the sale of nuclear know-how and facilities in the region. This mode of action fits in with the overall Russian efforts to rehabilitate and strengthen its ties with countries in the region, following the freeze in relations during the “Arab Spring.” This effort is intended to serve Russia’s array of objectives in the region as well as in the global theater as they pertain to its rivalry with the United States. Russia’s military intervention in Syria is conducted within the framework of a coalition with Assad’s army and Iran and its satellites, as part of its efforts to preempt the West in establishing diplomatic and economic cooperation with Iran. Russia’s actions in Syria are designed to combat Islamic terrorism, especially the Islamic State, in order to reduce the threat of extremist Islamic groups that are attempting to expand their influence within Russia’s territory. Russia’s major objective, however, is within the international sphere, and this includes influencing the future of Syria and taking a leading role in shaping the region. Indeed, Russia is interested in engaging in dialogue with the West, inter alia by obtaining bargaining chips for promoting a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East (Syria first) and Eastern Europe. For Egypt, and not only for her, the Russian nuclear option is attractive because it does not present the demands and restrictions that are attached to the nuclear cooperation with the West. Relations between the United States and several of its traditional allies in the region have soured in the past five years; it appears that these allies are signaling to the American administration that they have other options, including nuclear ones. Egypt’s desire to develop a nuclear program is also linked to its determination to find long-term solutions for growing energy needs, such as building a civilian nuclear capacity like the one Iran is building, following its nuclear agreement with the major powers. Nuclear cooperation with these countries is a vital interest for Russia, which seeks to use this cooperation to overcome its budgetary distress, which has been aggravated by plunging oil prices. Russia also may fear that the nuclear agreement signed between the major powers and Iran is liable to open up Iran for competition with other western players with relevant capabilities and drive Russia out of the Iranian market. Turning to alternative markets could be one of the Russian responses to the new conditions that are liable to emerge in the region with the ratification of the agreement with Iran.
34 -American diplomacy in the Middle East is key to stability – withdrawal ensures fill-in by Russia
35 -- reduction in military presence is inevitable
36 -- influence declining now
37 -- diplomacy = good governance which reduces terrorism
38 -Serwer 16 Daniel Serwer (Ph.D from Princeton University, directs the Conflict Management Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow at its Center for Transatlantic Relations and affiliated as a Scholar with the Middle East Institute. His current interests focus on the civilian instruments needed to protect U.S. national security as well as transition and state-building in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans. His book, Righting the Balance: How You Can Help Protect America, was published in November 2013 by Potomac Books), "Recalculating U.S. Policy in the Middle East: Less Military, More Civilian," Middle East Institute, 4/11/2016 AZ
39 -Our interests are shifting largely in ways that reduce the significance of military means and increase the importance of diplomacy and state-building. The big challenge for the next American administration will be constructing, through diplomacy, a regional security architecture that reduces reliance on military instruments and enables the region to avoid a nuclear arms race as well as future proxy wars. Preventing future generations of Muslims from resorting to terrorism will require a far more active civilian effort to counter extremism and build inclusive good governance than we have mounted so far.
40 -People in the Middle East are convinced that the United States is withdrawing from the region. They view America as smarting from less than successful, but colossally expensive interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also think the United States has shifted away from countering the rise of Iran, and know that Washington needs Middle East energy resources less than once it did.
41 -They are correct. The United States needs to reduce its military presence in the Middle East to correspond to its reduced and shifting interests. Some small portion of the savings should be devoted to building up civilian diplomatic efforts. The next administration should end the practice of reassuring our regional allies without extracting a price. If they want the United States to remain committed to their region, they need to begin to behave in a way that makes Americans think it worthwhile.
42 -Withdrawal creates the serious risk of a vacuum that American enemies will try to fill. Iran took advantage of American withdrawal from Iraq to expand its influence there. Russia took advantage of American reluctance to develop an alternative to the Assad regime to intervene on his behalf. The Islamic State took advantage of American unwillingness to intercede in Syria. The Middle East has a way of forcing itself back onto the agenda: energy, proliferation, human rights violations, extremism, and refugees. We need not allow a drawdown of military assets to signal American indifference or retreat. We need instead to get our civilian capacities—for diplomacy, state-building, and international assistance and cooperation—to fill the gap. Less military should mean more civilian.
43 -
44 -Preemptive Israeli strikes causes escalating conflicts and huge oil shocks
45 -- sparks another intifada
46 -- NATO retaliation
47 -- Proxy wars in other areas
48 -- Arab-Israel war
49 -Rieger and Schiller 12 Rene Rieger (PhD candidate in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter (UK), as well as a lecturer in international relations at the University of Munich) and Markus Schiller (aerospace engineer and senior analyst at Schmucker Technologie, Munich, and a former RAND Nuclear Security Fellow, with many years of experience in analyzing missile and space programs of various countries of interest), "Preemptive Strikes against Iran: Prelude to an Avoidable Disaster?" Middle East Policy Council, Winter 2012 AZ
50 -A pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran has the potential to destabilize pro-Western Arab regimes in the Gulf, despite the fact that several Arab Gulf monarchies have pushed the United States to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons capability by all means necessary. A strike on Iran would constitute an attack on a Muslim state. It is likely to evoke at least some sympathy for the Iranian regime among some segments of Arab Gulf population, predominantly the Shia. Iran's longstanding anti-Israeli rhetoric and Tehran's shameless use of the plight of the Palestinian people for propaganda purposes bolstered its reputation and influence on the Arab Street even in the traditionally anti-Iran Arab Gulf states.
51 -It can be expected that, following an Israeli attack on Iran, some in the Arab Gulf monarchies would sympathize with the regime in Tehran and confront their governments with calls for some sort of retaliation — at least of a diplomatic nature — against Israel and the United States, actions that would clearly contradict these regimes' interests. The dimension of popular calls for retaliation would increase with the number of Iranian victims. Those in the Arab Gulf monarchies most likely to sympathize with Tehran are the Shia in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, already in conflict with their governments over issues of discrimination.
52 -Further escalation, possibly instigated by Iranian proxies, would potentially weaken the regime and incur economic instability, particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia, where the Shia minority resides predominantly in the oil-rich Eastern Province, representing roughly half of the local population.
53 -Most advocates of a pre-emptive strike play down the possible economic consequences of an attack on Iran. They argue that the regime in Tehran would not be able to effectively disrupt oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz, and that the loss of supplies to the world market would only be temporary and limited. This hypothesis comprises several significant flaws.
54 -First, while Tehran could at best effect a complete disruption of oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz for a short period of time, it could curtail the oil trade in the Gulf significantly over an extended period. It would be impossible to compensate fully for the loss in oil shipments; and the longer the disruption lasted, the more difficult compensation attempts would become.
55 -Second, the dimensions of global spare oil capacity are obscure; in any case, they are very limited and largely reliant on the Strait of Hormuz for export. The world's spare capacity is held almost entirely by Saudi Arabia, though it is highly likely that it is considerably below the officially claimed 2.5 million barrels per day (mbd).
56 -Third, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing Gulf states have only limited capacity to redirect their oil exports away from the Strait of Hormuz. Only 1.5 mbd of Saudi oil (including spare production) could be redirected through the East-West pipeline to the Yanbu al-Bahr port on the Red Sea.23 The United Arab Emirates has recently completed the so-called Habshan-Fujairah oil pipeline, which also bypasses the Strait of Hormuz. However, the pipeline's current capacity does not exceed 1 mbd. Compared to the 17 million barrels that pass through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis (roughly 20 percent of the world's traded oil), the Gulf countries' compensation capacity is relatively limited.
57 -Fourth, there is the possibility, however remote, that Venezuela, a close ally of the Iranian regime and the fourth-largest oil supplier to the United States (roughly 900,000 bpd), would cut its exports. This would put even more pressure on the international oil market and directly affect the U.S. economy.24
58 -Fifth, to compensate a significant supply shortage provoked by massive curtailment or interruption of trade routes in the Gulf, oil-importing nations could tap their strategic stocks. However, particularly in the early stage of a massive supply crisis, commercial, logistical and political considerations would inhibit countries releasing enough reserve stocks to compensate fully for the shortage.25
59 -Sixth, Iran could commit acts of sabotage against oil installations in the Gulf, also interrupting supply.
60 -Finally, an essential factor in oil pricing is market psychology. Irrespective of actual changes in oil supply, market expectations or fears of supply cuts can have drastic effects on prices. As a significant portion of the global oil supply originates in the Gulf, the oil market is particularly sensitive to developments there. Hence, the mere possibility of a serious disruption of the transit routes in the Gulf following an attack on Iran has the potential to provoke skyrocketing oil prices. The more the conflict then escalates and the longer the crisis lasts, the more enduring would be the effect on the oil prices. In the current global economy a prolonged increase in oil prices would have disastrous consequences.
61 -To attack the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, the Israeli air force would have no feasible alternative to flying through foreign air space. There would be three potential routes, all presenting operational and political risks. The first runs northeast over the Mediterranean Sea along the coastline of Lebanon and Syria, then eastward along the Syrian-Turkish border, and finally through northern Iraq or alongside the Turkish-Iraqi border (northern route). The second runs east through Jordanian airspace or along the Jordanian-Syrian border and then east through Iraqi airspace (central route). The third follows the flight route of the 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor, entering Saudi Arabia at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, then flying northeast through Saudi airspace and eventually east through Iraqi airspace (southern route).
62 -The northern route carries relatively low operational risks as long as the Israeli jets would fly mainly on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border. However, a violation of Turkish airspace could have significant political consequences. Turkish-Israeli relations have already cooled considerably, particularly since the Gaza Flotilla incident of 2010. Judging from the Erdogan government's recent attitude towards Israel, there is a clear possibility that the Turkish military would attempt to ward off an Israeli intrusion into their airspace. A violation of Turkish airspace would be particularly problematic, moreover as it would constitute aggression against a NATO member.
63 -The central route, too, would involve taking significant risks. Since Jordan would likely not grant Israel overflight rights, an Israeli intrusion into Jordanian airspace would be an act of aggression entailing risks predominantly political in nature (jeopardizing the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty), but potentially also operational (Jordanian attempts to stop the intrusion and provide advance warning to neighboring countries).
64 -Since the early 1980s, Saudi air surveillance has improved so significantly that an Israeli intrusion into Saudi airspace would not go undetected. The Saudi government would be politically bound (both domestically and regionally) to protest with more than rhetoric an Israeli violation of their territorial integrity. Earlier reports suggesting that Saudi Arabia would look the other way while Israel overflew its territory are not credible. Any Saudi military reaction against the Israeli air fleet would cause operational problems for the Israeli mission and provoke a political crisis inimical to both Israeli and Saudi interests.
65 -Nuclear war uniquely likely in the Middle East – overcomes deterrence and causes extinction
66 -Russell 9
67 -James A. Russell (Senior Lecturer of National Security Affairs and Naval Postgraduate School). “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East”, IFRI (Proliferation Papers, #26, 2009). http://www.ifri.org/downloads/PP26_Russell_2009.pdf.
68 -Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
69 -
70 -Nuclear war causes extinction
71 -Starr 9 (Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict, October 2009, by Steven Starr Steven Starr is a Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. He has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the STAR (Strategic Arms Reduction) website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
72 -Despite a two-thirds reduction in global nuclear arsenals since 1986, new scientific research makes it clear that the environmental consequences of nuclear war can still end human history. A series of peer-reviewed studies, performed at several U.S. universities, predict the detonation of even a tiny fraction of the global nuclear arsenal within large urban centers will cause catastrophic disruptions of the global climate and massive destruction of the protective stratospheric ozone layer.
73 -1AC – Prolif
74 -Nuclear deals with Russia form the basis for further cooperation on weapons transfers and nuclear expertise – guarantees prolif
75 -Guzansky et al 15 Yoel Guzansky (research fellow at INSS. Before he joined the Institute, he was in charge of strategic issues at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, coordinating work on the Iranian nuclear challenge and specializes in issues of Gulf security and Middle East strategic issues), Zvi Magen, Oded Eran, "Russian Nuclear Diplomacy in the Middle East," Insitute for National Security Studies, 12/29/2015 AZ
76 -Russia is therefore increasing its cooperation in this area not only with Egypt, but also with Iran. According to reports, Iran plans to build two more nuclear reactors in Bushehr with Moscow’s assistance, near the site’s existing reactor, which has been active since 2011. In addition to Iran, Russia has signed various agreements, some to build reactors and others to transfer know-how to US allies in the region. Rosatom, the Russian nuclear corporation, has already begun building four reactors with a capacity of 1,200 megawatts each in Akkuyu, Turkey, with the first reactor slated to hook up to the electricity grid in 2023. The future of this project is uncertain, however, given the crisis that broke out between Russia and Turkey after Turkey took down a Russian plane. Jordan is seeking to build civilian nuclear capacity, due to its growing demand for energy, the country’s lack of oil reserves (90 percent of the energy sources Jordan consumes is imported), and the prolonged disruption in the oil supply from Iraq and gas from Egypt. In March 2015, Jordan signed an agreement with Rosatom for the construction of two reactors, the first of which is scheduled to begin operating in 2024, and the second in 2026. The cost of the transaction is approximately $10 billion. Jordan will own 51 percent of the reactors, and the rest will be under Russian ownership. Jordan, which initially asked Washington for assistance, began negotiating with the Russians after rejecting an American demand that it not operate a nuclear fuel cycle on its territory. When this essay was written, the parties had not yet reached agreement on the particulars for financing the project. Saudi Arabia has also launched a civilian nuclear program, which it claims is designed to meet its growing energy needs; at the present rate of consumption, Saudi Arabia is liable to find itself supplying most of the oil it produces for its own internal needs by the end of the next decade. Saudi Arabia is seeking external aid in order to obtain the same capability that the Iranians and others in the region are developing, or are about to develop. For this purpose, a number of ventures have been founded in the kingdom, and agreements have been signed – the most recent one with Russia. In June 2015, the two countries signed an agreement that Russia will build and support a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom. This is not the first agreement between the parties in the nuclear field, and it is not at all clear whether it will improve the relations between them, given the tension that has prevailed in recent years, mainly because of the conflicting positions of the two in the civil war in Syria and the Russian support for Assad. Saudi sources insist, however, that “Russia will play a key role in the kingdom’s ambitious nuclear venture.” Beyond the nuclear cooperation between Egypt and Russia, Egypt is procuring advanced warplanes from Russia, including the S-300 anti-aircraft defense system. Iran is also expected to arm itself with a system of this type, as well as advanced warplanes and other weapons systems. In addition to its nuclear cooperation with Russia, Saudi Arabia is also liable to expand its procurement of advanced Russian systems. Following Russian military intervention in Syria in a coalition with Iran, Israel recently has been faced with the combined forces of the Syrian army, the Iranian army, and Hizbollah, backed by the Russian military presence in Syria. In testimony that has not received much media coverage, Ed Royce, a US congressman and the chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asserted that the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States had told him that his country “no longer felt bound” to refrain from enriching uranium, following the nuclear agreement signed with Iran. Indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the Iranian precedent will encourage other countries in the Middle East to develop a nuclear program below the nuclear military threshold. “He told me, ‘Your worst enemy has achieved this right to enrich. It’s a right to enrich now that your friends are going to want, too, and we won’t be the only country,’” Royce, said, elaborating on his testimony in a phone interview with the Associated Press. Israel cannot ignore the procurement of advanced Russian weapons systems by its neighbors, or their accelerated entry into the nuclear field; these plans are liable to serve as a basis for obtaining greater know-how and as a cover for building nuclear weapons capability, certainly if the transfer of know-how includes enrichment capability. For its part, Russia is being careful to maintain positive relations with Israel, which it regards as an important regional player. Israel also regards Russia as a key player in the region, and the two countries are coordinating their moves in order to prevent a clash between their military forces in Syrian territory. At the same time, Israel expects Russia to take its security interests into consideration. The two countries seemingly are willing to engage in dialogue that will address their spheres of interest, but it is doubtful whether Israel will be able to convince Russia in its agreements with the countries in the region seeking nuclear reactors to include restrictive clauses. Furthermore, even if Israel is able to influence Moscow to some extent, it is highly doubtful whether some of these countries, which have hitherto rejected American demands that they accept conditions and restrictions, will accept such demands from Russia.
77 -Spread of nuclear power across the Middle East is primarily motivated by desire to proliferate – no other explanation is sufficient
78 -Vick 15 Karl Vick (reporter), "The Middle East Nuclear Race Is Already Under Way," TIME Magazine, 3/23/2015 AZ
79 -While the U.S. and other world powers work to constrain Iran's nuclear program, five rival nations plan atomic programs One of the most important reasons why the U.S. is trying to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran is to prevent an Iranian bomb from triggering a nuclear race in the Middle East. Yet even as talks continue now in Switzerland, Tehran’s regional rivals have already begun quietly acting on their own atomic ambitions. Nuclear power may be on the wane almost everywhere else in the world, but it’s all the rage in the place with all that oil. Egypt’s announcement last month that it was hiring Russia to build a reactor near Alexandria made it only the latest entrant in an emerging atomic derby. Every other major Sunni power in the region has announced similar plans. And though none appear either as ambitious nor as ambiguous as what’s taken place in Iran — which set out to master the entire atomic-fuel cycle, a red flag for a military program — each announcement lays down a marker in a region that, until recently, was notable as the one place on the planet where governments had made little progress on nuclear power. With the exception of Israel, which has never publicly acknowledged its widely known nuclear arsenal, no Middle Eastern country beyond Iran had a nuclear program — peaceful or otherwise — until the wealthy United Arab Emirates began building a reactor in July 2012 (due for completion in 2017). The list now includes, in addition to Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — the last Iran’s archrival, and which last year revealed plans to build 16 nuclear plants over the next two decades. When the President of South Korea — which has 23 nuclear plants of its own — visited the Kingdom earlier this month, leaders of both countries signed a memo of understanding calling for Seoul to build two of the nuclear plants. The Saudis have made similar arrangements with China, Argentina and France. “It’s not just because nuclear power is seen as a first step toward a nuclear-weapons option,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department nuclear expert who now runs the nonproliferation and disarmament program at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is also a prestige factor: keeping up with the neighbors.” Middle Eastern nations may have legitimate reasons to invest in nuclear energy. Jordan, for instance, has almost no oil in liquid form, and almost less water. Saudi Arabia and the UAE possess huge crude reserves, but lose potential export revenue when they burn oil at home to create electricity — huge amounts of which are sucked up by desalination plants. Turkey, despite impressive hydroelectric potential, must import oil and natural gas. But all that has been true for decades. What’s changed in recent years is the nuclear capabilities of Iran — a Shi‘ite Muslim country Sunni leaders have come to regard as major threat. Jordan’s King Abdullah II famously warned of a “Shia crescent” of Iran-aligned countries reaching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The Saudis have made it clear that they will acquire a nuclear weapon should Iran get one. “This is not the shortest way to a nuclear weapon, by any means,” says Sharon Squassoni, director of the proliferation-prevention program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “But if I put myself in their shoes, I’d think it probably makes sense to start down this path to see if we can develop a civilian nuclear program, and if we pick up some capabilities along the way, that’s all right.”‘ Suspicion rises with every new announcement partly because the Middle East is bucking a global trend. Worldwide, the number of nuclear plants has declined since the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011. Reactions differed by country. Germany forswore nuclear energy altogether after the disaster, while China pressed ahead, planning more than 100 new reactors. But in most places, the environmental risks and high costs have turned countries off nuclear power. “My beef with nuclear energy is that it’s sort of held up as this very prestigious thing,” Squassoni tells TIME. “We do nuclear deals with our best allies … all this stuff about strategic partnership. And really, it’s this extremely expensive, complicated, slightly dangerous way to boil water. And that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re boiling water to turn those turbines.” The expense alone may prevent some Middle Eastern nations from every actually joining the “nuclear club.” Building an atomic plant costs at least $5 billion, Fitzpatrick notes, and Egypt is desperately poor; Jordan relies heavily on remittances and foreign aid. But the Saudis still have money to burn and, according to former White House official Gary Samore, have consistently rebuffed U.S. imprecations to sign a pledge not to divert any nuclear program toward producing a bomb (a pledge the UAE took). Saudi Arabia has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but then so has Iran, and in the end a race can be run by as few as two: India and Pakistan, bitter neighbors, neither of which are rich, went nuclear in 1974 and 1998, respectively. They’ve gone to war once since, raising anxiety levels around the world.
80 -Middle East prolif causes an enormous nuclear war and increases the risk of nuclear terror – deterrence doesn't check
81 -Krepinevich 13 Andrew Krepinevich (the President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which he joined following a 21- year career in the U.S. Army. He has served in the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, on the personal staff of three secretaries of defense, the National Defense Panel, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Joint Experimentation, and the Defense Policy Board. He is the author of 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century and The Army and Vietnam. A West Point graduate, he holds an M.P.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University), "Critical Mass: Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East," Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2013 AZ
82 -Along these lines, it seems highly plausible that a major confrontation between Iran and another regional nuclear power could occur by design, due to miscalculation, or as a result of an Iranian proxy taking aggressive action beyond Tehran’s control—a case of the “tail wagging the dog.” If a conflict ensued and one side appeared on the brink of losing, it could execute a latter-day “shot across the bow” of its adversary, or even engage in a significant but limited use of nuclear weapons to restore its position. Any assessment of the military balance in a proliferated Middle East would need to take such scenarios into account. There were other worrisome scenarios that emerged during the Cold War involving accidental or unauthorized use, and catalytic war described earlier in this assessment. Motion pictures such as Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, and Failsafe, and books such as On the Beach brought such concerns to the public’s attention following traumatic crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Suez Crisis in 1956. Scenarios in a proliferated Middle East should examine the prospects that all or part of the nuclear arsenal of a new nuclear-armed state could fall under the control of a non-governmental faction in the event of a state failure. Nuclear weapons might be used internally as part of a civil war between factions vying for power, against an external power attempting to back one faction over another, by a radical terrorist element either within the failed state or against targets abroad, or some combination of these. Finally, a proliferated Middle East would be characterized by a geographically tight cluster of nuclear-armed states; a high level of mutual suspicion among these states; the likely absence of effective early warning systems; and the significant potential of cyber weapons to introduce false intelligence into the calculations of state leaders. This combination suggests the region would be a prime candidate for a catalytic nuclear war. A scenario (or perhaps a set of scenarios) should assess the prospects for such a conflict materializing. To sum up, this assessment concludes that a proliferated Middle East will pose significantly greater challenges than did the Cold War in terms of sustaining the U.S. objective of preventing the use of nuclear weapons. The challenge is not simply one of maintaining an “assured destruction” capability for each state; indeed, this Cold War-era metric was of dubious utility then and of no utility in the multipolar regional competition posited here. Rather, a rich menu of scenarios must be examined to inform any U.S. strategy that seeks to maximize the prospects of preserving key national interests in this critical region.
83 -Rosatom reactors in particular are vulnerable to infiltration and theft – corruption and management problems
84 -Ulrich et al 14 Kendra Ulrich (Senior Global Energy Campaigner, Greenpeace Japan), Jehki Harkonen and Brian Blomme, "Rosatom Risks: Exposing the troubled history of Russia’s state nuclear corporation," Greenpeace International, October 2014 AZ
85 -Adequacy of qualified staff In 2006, Rosatom had only approximately 5,000 professional construction workers, well below the number needed to scale up its ambitious programme to build new reactors.100 By 2012, Rosatom managed to considerably expand its construction staff. However, many of these workers were poorly paid migrants from the former Soviet republics. According to a local NGO working at the site of the Leningrad nuclear power plants, the workers were subjected to living conditions akin to slave labour. They lived in unhygienic, cold barracks, were paid very low salaries, and often Rosatom officers confiscated their passports to prevent them from leaving the site.101 Corruption in Rosatom’s activities Rosatom, and its predecessors, have had serious and widespread corruption problems, likely due, at least in part, to the structural lack of transparency and external accountability. Between 2009-2012, Rosatom fired 68 executives and 208 mid-level managers due to corruption charges.102 One recent allegation of corruption relating to the top management at Rosatom was the case of Rosatom’s Deputy Director General, Evgeny Yevstratov. He was responsible for nuclear safety. Yevstratov quit his job at Rosatom in April 2011, and was arrested in July on suspicion of embezzling 50 million roubles (around €1.2mn103).104 In November 2012, Yevstratov was released on bail but the case continued.105 Originally Yevstratov was only accused of collaborating with his staff in claiming that research material was his own rather than copies taken from the internet, and pocketing the money intended for research. Later investigators found that Yevstratov and another high-level Rosatom executive, Mustafa Kashka, the Deputy Director General of the corporation’s subsidiary Atomflot, may have embezzled an additional 60m roubles (around €1.5m106) intended for reprocessing of nuclear waste.107 The court case against Yevstratov is still pending as of June 2014. Besides its own corruption problems, Rosatom has also had serious issues with some of its subsidiaries. For example, in 2010, Transparency International Russia and a Kaliningrad-based NGO, Ecodefense, together conducted a detailed review of 200 orders that had been publicly placed on the Rosatom website. The NGOs found that 83 out of 200, or more than 40, of the orders violated the Russian procurement standards regarding compliance with order placement processes, transparency, and/or use of public money.108 Some of these cases connected with the violation of procurement standards have gained publicity inside Russia. In December 2010, investigative journalists at the Kommersant newspaper reported that Alexei Votyakov, the Director General of the Rosatom waste subsidiary, RosRAO, and his Managing Director, Maxim Belyaev, had purchased nuclear waste containers at a cost of 450m roubles (around €11m109).110 This was estimated to be several times above the normal market price. Rosatom’s own investigation found that the containers were bought without a legally required tender, and in violation of Rosatom’s internal procedures.111 RosRAO’s archives also had letters of acceptance for some undelivered containers. Both men were subsequently fired and prosecuted.112 As of June 2014, there has been no final ruling in this case. Rosatom’s corruption problems have resulted in potentially serious compromises of nuclear safety both domestically and abroad. One of the cases that gained broader international attention involved Sergei Shutov, the Procurement Director of ZIO-Podolsk, a nuclear construction subsidiary of Rosatom. He was charged in December 2011113 with collaborating to steal more than 145m roubles (€3.47m114) with his cohorts by forging supply certificates for reactors at home and abroad for what was low quality, cheaper steel in order to fake compliance with industry standards while keeping the difference in price for himself.115 Like the Votyakov-Belyaev case, this case is also still pending as of June 2014. Shutov’s case was not the only one of its kind. In 2007, workers at the Kalinin nuclear power plant noticed that some of the recently manufactured power switches had the on and off sides marked the wrong way around. A closer examination showed a number of defects in equipment arriving from the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. When confronted with the problems, it turned out that the Kharkov plant had not manufactured some of the parts. Instead, an intermediary had been forging the certificates and buying cheaper parts from somewhere else to increase profit margins.116 According to an inspection report on the Kalinin nuclear power plant from February 2014, the current procurement procedures failed to prevent the use of low-quality equipment and components and subpar subcontractors.117 The scale of the alleged and proven corruption cases, and the resulting potential financial and safety risks and costs, raise serious questions about whether Rosatom’s institutional framework can support the large nuclear expansion that its executives proclaim. Given these serious problems at this stage of nuclear operation, Rosatom’s ambition to own and operate multiple reactors across vast distances in other countries certainly raises the potential spectre of exacerbated problems. The corporation could be stretched even thinner and may try to fill in the gaps with cheap, unqualified labour as it has done domestically. It is worth restating, this endemic corruption involving falsified documentation and poor quality control relates to parts necessary for the operation of nuclear power plants. The Shutov case is one clear example of that. And, these are just the reports that have been uncovered; others may have gone undetected.
86 -
87 -ISIS is actively seeking nuclear weapons and possesses the technical expertise needed to launch a major attack – they just need the material
88 -Rudischhauser 15 Wolfgang Rudischhauser (currently Director of the WMD Non-proliferation Centre at NATO and has a long background in working on non-proliferation in various diplomatic posts for the German Foreign Ministry,) "Could ISIL go nuclear?" NATO Review Magazine, 2015 AZ
89 -But a further particular risk could become a major threat to Western societies. There is a very real - but not yet fully identified risk - of foreign fighters in ISIL’s ranks using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) materials as “weapons of terror” against the West. One can easily imagine the number of victims created by panic as well as the economic disruption if the ’Charlie Hebdo’ attacks had centred on “Chatelet les Halles”, the biggest Paris metro station, with an improvised explosive device containing radioactive sources or chemical material instead of using Kalashnikovs. The deadly Tokyo attacks in 1995 using toxic chemical material, (the so called “Sarin attack”), could have killed many more people. Had Aum Shinrikyo used all the Sarin they had actually produced, a large part of Tokyo’s population would have died. Thus the attacks led at the time to a complete rethinking of the threat perception, well before 9/11. Until now, the Tokyo attacks have fortunately remained an exception and most terrorist groups have used “conventional” explosives or weapons, simply because they lacked access to know-how and material. This may soon change. And there is a reason. A new threat scenario A lot has been written recently regarding the rising power of an organisation that calls itself the “Islamic State in the Levant” (ISIL) or “Daesh”. ISIL has attracted at least hundreds if not thousands of foreign fighters from Western countries to join its ranks. What makes ISIL different is exactly that. Hundreds of foreign fighters, some with solid academic and educational backgrounds and intellectual knowledge, have joined the cause and continue to do so every day. Furthermore ISIL’s success is based on an effective media strategy of looking at the utmost possible “news effect” of their attacks. Together with their access to high levels of funding, these three elements bear the real risk of the group turning into practice what up to now has been largely a theoretical possibility: to actually employ weapons of mass destruction or CBRN material in terrorist attacks. We might thus soon enter a stage of CBRN terrorism, never before imaginable. Worrying reports confirm that ISIL has gained (at least temporarily) access to former chemical weapons storage sites in Iraq. They might soon do so in Libya. They allegedly used toxic chemicals in the fighting around Kobane. Even more worrying, there are press reports about nuclear material from Iraqi scientific institutes having been seized by ISIL. This demonstrates that while no full scale plots have been unveiled so far, our governments need to be on alert. Generating improved military and civil prevention and response capabilities should be a high priority and should not fall victim to limited budgets in times of economic crisis. Apart from their ideology, an even more fundamentalist and aggressive version of jihad than Al Qaida’s, four unique features make ISIL different: First, their “possession” (or de facto control) of a huge “territory”, stretching from the Turkish border in Syria to close to Baghdad in Iraq and approaching the Lebanese border. Numerous air strikes by the international “Anti-ISIL coalition”, in which a number of NATO Allies are involved, tried to target ISIL and its strongholds. However, despite coalition and Iraqi Armed Forces successes in forcing ISIL to give up some territory, the group remains able to control and find refuge in large parts of Syria and Iraq, most recently by capturing the city of Ramadi. Second, the reported access to extraordinary levels of funding. ISIL is reputed (much more than Al Qaida ever did) to earn money through “economic” and fundraising activities inside their territories, from supporters abroad and from the collection of ransom money. Most recently, the Ambassador of Iraq to the UN even claimed that ISIL was selling human organs from victims to earn money. They are said to be already involved in human smuggling of migrants from Libya to Europe to create funding. Third, ISIL, in addition to its strong ideological motivation, is building its success on the use of social and other media in a way rarely seen before by other terrorist groups. This helps them gain attention at any cost for their atrocities, such as the decapitation or even the burning alive of hostages. Fourth and most dangerously, the hundreds if not thousands of foreign fighters from the Arab world and Western countries in ISIL’s ranks, some of them with solid knowledge including in chemical, physical and computer sciences, makes ISIL special. A full assessment is still very difficult, as only a limited amount of information on the backgrounds of the fighters is publicly available. Notwithstanding that, it is clear that ISIL attracts growing numbers of young foreigners daily from all levels of society. Clearly reported cases show that ISIL actually has already acquired the knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would allow it to use CBRN materials as “weapons of terror”.
1 +Countries should authorize the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators to run nuclear power plants as test facilities for new nuclear technologies when they are scheduled to close.
2 +The counterplan allows the development and testing of new tech that solves meltdowns.
3 +Terry 16 (Jeff Terry, Jeff Terry is a professor of physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his main research focus is on energy systems) Use failing power plants to improve the safety and efficiency of clean energy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 31 2016 AT
4 +Nuclear energy is currently the largest generator of low-carbon electricity in the United States. It could play an important role in mitigating climate change, but fears about safety impede its spread. These fears aren’t always grounded in reality. The US nuclear energy industry is overseen by two industry groups—the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators—and multiple government regulators dedicated to passing on lessons learned from nuclear accidents. It is one of the safest industries around in terms of occupational hazards. Severe accidents are rare, and nuclear professionals embrace a strong culture of safety. But is a culture of safety enough? And if it’s not, what can be done to improve? The answer may be found in some of the many US nuclear power plants in danger of closing their doors. The nuclear power industry could take a lesson from the history of car safety. The automobile industry saw a dramatic reduction in fatalities in recent years: From 1995 to 2009, the rate of fatalities per 100 million miles driven fell by 26 percent, with much of the decrease taking place from 2005 onward. What contributed to this large improvement in driver safety over such a short period? Certainly, there were big changes in cultural attitudes toward car safety. From 2006 to 2010, seat belt use by drivers increased from 81 to 85 percent. Calculations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest a change of this magnitude would save around 800 to 900 lives per year. In fact, though, by 2010, fatalities were down by nearly 10,000 lives per year, as shown in Figure 1. So while the change in safety culture was significant, another factor must have also contributed to improved driver safety. During the 2000s, car manufacturers implemented many technical improvements to increase safety. These measures were aimed at both improving the odds of surviving a crash and avoiding accidents in the first place. Airbag technology and better passenger restraint systems are now the norm in automobiles. Advanced technology such as lane-change warnings and front collision avoidance systems were also deployed during this time. It took both improved safety culture and technological advances to significantly reduce car fatalities. There is a strong culture of safety in the nuclear power industry, but as the auto industry shows, you need technological improvement as well. Terry-auto-industry-graph.jpg That’s where those old power plants come in. It still remains difficult to implement new technology in the nuclear industry. One reason is that US nuclear plants are producing electricity at more than 90 percent of capacity. It is hard to justify experimenting with commercial reactors running so reliably. That makes it hard to test new technology, such as new fuels or claddings designed to improve safety on a commercial scale. A number of US commercial nuclear reactors are either likely to close or have already. The James M. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York is among those on the shutdown list. As it is a significant source of low-carbon electricity for the region, the state is trying to save it, in part by providing $100 million for fuel purchase. For the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to have reversed plant operator Entergy’s decision to close in less than a year. (Entergy has said it is closing for financial reasons, but some of us remain skeptical.) It may be, though, that struggling nuclear facilities offer a way to improve safety across the industry. The sector needs to be able to test new technology. In order to do that, the US Energy Department could take over soon-to-close reactors and run them as commercial-scale test facilities that also continue to produce clean electricity. One useful test, for example, would involve new claddings. Claddings are the materials around the radioactive fuel pellets that prevent the coolant from being contaminated. During the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, Zircaloy cladding reacted with steam at high temperature, which produced hydrogen that exploded. The industry would like to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. As a test, a plant operator could rotate fuels with new, non-hydrogen-producing claddings into different bundles in the reactor. By monitoring the process, researchers could see how the new claddings performed under normal operating conditions, and use the process to develop and test new sensors. In short, an Energy Department takeover of this kind would enable researchers to test new safety technologies on a commercial scale, while still allowing states to meet their clean energy goals. For the inconvenience of dealing with a test site, electricity for those living with 15 miles of the reactor could be provided for free or at reduced cost, as has been suggested in relation to a proposed public-private nuclear project in South Australia. This would be a novel use of a reactor that would otherwise just be closed and allowed to sit and decay for decades. Outgoing nuclear power plant operators would still be financially responsible for decommissioning, as laid out by US law, but they would benefit from the arrangement: While the Energy Department used the reactor as a testbed, the previous operator’s decommissioning fund would grow, so that by the time of final decommissioning, the original owner would have more funds and newer technology available for the task. In fact, the Energy Department could bring commercial-scale testing to other industries, too. Recent reports put California’s Ivanpah concentrated solar power plant in danger of closing. It would be a tremendous waste to allow the $2.2 billion dollar facility to close without giving researchers the ability to study what problems occurred. The ability to data mine Ivanpah’s weather and production information would be invaluable for improving future facilities. The site could also be used to test methods for preventing bird deaths and mitigating visual impact on pilots. Instead of wasting away in the desert, Ivanpah would be of valuable service to society. The Energy Department should not pass up the opportunity to take over closing facilities as commercial-scale testbeds to improve current energy technology. Having seen how new technology has improved safety in other industries, we need to make sure there is a method for testing new methods and materials in the energy sector as well. Resources like the FitzPatrick nuclear plant and the Ivanpah solar plant are too valuable to let fade away. It is in our best interest to allow researchers to collect data using these facilities. Subjecting that trove of information to new experimental techniques and computational data mining will allow scientists and engineers to make other facilities more efficient and safe. The Energy Department should take a lead role in keeping these no-longer-competitive commercial facilities alive. The data they provide can be used to improve our future.
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1 -2016-09-12 20:24:43.0
1 +2016-09-10 16:30:36.0
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1 -Scoggin, Bistagne, Tan
1 +Adam Bistagne
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1 -Crossroads NS
1 +Harvard Westlake EE
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 -SEPOCT - Middle East Aff
1 +SEPOCT - Testing CP
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1 -Russian nuclear deals are extensions of power – reactors economically suture host countries to Russian hegemony and displace US influence
2 -Armstrong 15 Ian Armstrong (senior analyst and editor at Global Risk Insights, where he focuses on nuclear policy issues, missile defense), "Russia is creating a global nuclear power empire," Global Risk Insights, 10/29/2015 AZ
3 -Though these economic implications are worth considering, they are far overshadowed by the geopolitical impacts of Russia’s nuclear power expansion strategy. The same local governments that may experience economic upticks as a result of Russian-installed NPPs will also become sutured to the Russian nuclear industry — and therefore the broader Russian government.
4 -To be clear, the influence gained by Russia through each bilateral nuclear agreement should not be understated. For one, the construction timeline for nuclear power plants is typically long-term, ensuring that Russia will have a presence in any country it signs a nuclear contract with for a minimum of several years.
5 -In addition, Moscow has secured special comprehensive contracts with highly strategic countries like Turkey under the premise of “build-own-operate” — a system in which Russia builds, owns, and permanently operates a nuclear power plant.
6 -From this perspective, Russian-built nuclear power plants in foreign countries become more akin to embassies — or even military bases — than simple bilateral infrastructure projects. The long-term or permanent presence that accompanies the exportation of Russian nuclear power will afford President Vladimir Putin a notable influence in countries crucial to regional geopolitics.
7 -Western influence will subsequently be undermined in crucial ally states like Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria. This now-justified Russian presence abroad will also provide Moscow intelligence opportunities that would otherwise be significantly more difficult and risky. Russian nuclear expertise will also be required in some form for maintenance and operational purposes even in countries that do not sign on for the full build-own-operate package.
8 -All of these benefits — significant as stand-alone strategic gains — will be undergirded by the traditional Russian leverage that emerges when nations become dependent on Russia for their energy needs.
9 -At present, it appears that Russia is well-positioned to continue its expansive nuclear power diplomacy in pursuit of a broader sphere of influence. However, competition from other capable nuclear powers may emerge in the medium-term.
1 +The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing.
2 +1. No act omission distinction for states since their implicit approvals of actions still entail moral responsibility
3 +Sunstein 05
4 +Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 AJ
5 +In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it.
6 +2. Ethical uncertainty means we should prevent existential risk to ensure the future has value regardless of true moral theory. It’s an epistemic prerequisite
7 +Bostrom 11 Nick Bostrom. “Existential Risk Prevention As the Most Important Task for Humanity”, 2011, Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford
8 +These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain value.
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1 -2016-09-17 16:57:03.0
1 +2016-09-10 16:30:37.0
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1 -Sean Fee
1 +Adam Bistagne
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1 -Harvard Westlake WP
1 +Harvard Westlake EE
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 -SEPOCT - Middle East Aff - new Relations card
1 +SEPOCT - Util Framework
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1 -Greenhill
1 +Loyola
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1 -0
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1 -2016-09-11 01:40:24.0
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1 -Rashed Islam
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1 -Chaminade CC
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1 -1
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1 -2016-09-12 17:29:09.0
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1 -Steele, Tan, Bistagne
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1 -West Ranch JW
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1 -2016-09-12 20:24:42.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:20:14.0
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1 -Scoggin, Bistagne, Tan
1 +Rashed Islam
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1 -Crossroads NS
1 +Chaminade CC
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1 +5,6,7
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1 -2016-09-17 16:56:54.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:24:25.0
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1 -Sean Fee
1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 -Harvard Westlake WP
1 +Lynbrook NS
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1 -Greenhill
1 +Loyola
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1 +Util
2 +First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
3 +Opar 14 (Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 AT
4 +The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
5 +This proves util – a. If a person isn’t a continuous unit, it doesn’t matter how goods are distributed among people, which supports util since util only maximizes benefits, ignoring distribution across people. b. Other theories assume identity matters. Util’s the only possible theory if identity is irrelevant.
6 +Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
7 +Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
8 +It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
9 +Prefer this account of government legitimacy since it avoids falsely starting from the position of anarchy assumed by other frameworks, which is bad since it doesn’t accurately describe the justification of the state since individuals don’t actually have a choice to enter or not enter a state.
10 +2 impacts
11 +A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
12 +B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
13 +Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
14 +The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
15 +This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
16 +The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
17 +1AC – Prolif
18 +Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
19 +Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editor-in-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proliferation.html) RMT
20 +Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
21 +—President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
22 +The global nuclear order is changing. Concerns about climate change, the volatility of oil prices, and the security of energy supplies have contributed to a widespread and still-growing interest in the future use of nuclear power. Thirty states operate one or more nuclear power plants today, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some 50 others have requested technical assistance from the agency to explore the possibility of developing their own nuclear energy programs. It is certainly not possible to predict precisely how fast and how extensively the expansion of nuclear power will occur. But it does seem probable that in the future there will be more nuclear technology spread across more states than ever before. It will be a different world than the one that has existed in the past.
23 +This surge of interest in nuclear energy — labeled by some proponents as "the renaissance in nuclear power" — is, moreover, occurring simultaneously with mounting concern about the health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the regulatory framework that constrains and governs the world's civil and military-related nuclear affairs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and related institutions have been taxed by new worries, such as the growth in global terrorism, and have been painfully tested by protracted crises involving nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and potentially in Iran. (Indeed, some observers suspect that growing interest in nuclear power in some countries, especially in the Middle East, is not unrelated to Iran's uranium enrichment program and Tehran's movement closer to a nuclear weapons capability.) Confidence in the NPT regime seems to be eroding even as interest in nuclear power is expanding.
24 +This realization raises crucial questions for the future of global security. Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.
25 +On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built? Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs? How can physical protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents? The answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our nuclear future.
26 +The major political factors influencing the future of nuclear weapons are no less complex and no less important. Will Iran acquire nuclear weapons; will North Korea develop more weapons or disarm in the coming decade; how will neighboring states respond? Will the United States and Russia take significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and if so, will the other nuclear-weapons states follow suit or stand on the sidelines?
27 +The nuclear future will be strongly influenced, too, by the success or failure of efforts to strengthen the international organizations and the set of agreements that comprise the system developed over time to manage global nuclear affairs. Will new international or regional mechanisms be developed to control the front-end (the production of nuclear reactor fuel) and the back-end (the management of spent fuel containing plutonium) of the nuclear fuel cycle? What political agreements and disagreements are likely to emerge between the nuclear-weapons states (NWS) and the non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS) at the 2010 NPT Review Conference and beyond? What role will crucial actors among the NNWS — Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt, for example — play in determining the global nuclear future? And most broadly, will the nonproliferation regime be supported and strengthened or will it be questioned and weakened? As IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has emphasized, "The nonproliferation regime is, in many ways, at a critical juncture," and there is a need for a new "overarching multilateral nuclear framework."1 But there is no guarantee that such a framework will emerge, and there is wide doubt that the arrangements of the past will be adequate to manage our nuclear future effectively.
28 +Prolif overwhelms incentives for civilian use of nuclear reactors
29 +Li and Yim 13- Mang-Sung Yim is in the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Jun Li works at UNC Chapel Hill (“Examining relationship between nuclear proliferation and civilian nuclear power development” Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 66, July 2013, Pages 108–114http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197013000504) RMT
30 +This paper attempts to examine the relationship between nuclear weapons proliferation and civilian nuclear power development based on the history of Atoms for Peace Initiative. To investigate the relationship, a database was established by compiling information on a country's civilian nuclear power development and various national capabilities and situational factors. The results of correlation analysis indicated that the initial motivation to develop civilian nuclear power could be mostly dual purpose. However, for a civilian nuclear power program to be ultimately successful, the study finds the role of nuclear nonproliferation very important. The analysis indicated that the presence of nuclear weapons in a country and serious interest in nuclear weapons have a negative effect on the civilian nuclear power program. The study showed the importance of state level commitment to nuclear nonproliferation for the success of civilian nuclear power development. NPT ratification and IAEA safeguards were very important factors in the success of civilian nuclear power development. In addition, for a country's civilian nuclear power development to be successful, the country needs to possess strong economic capability and be well connected to the world economic market through international trade. Mature level of democracy and presence of nuclear technological capabilities were also found to be important for the success of civilian nuclear power program.
31 +Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.
32 +Kroenig 14 – Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair at Georgetown University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council (“The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future?”, April 2014, http://www.matthewkroenig.com/The20History20of20Proliferation20Optimism_Feb2014.pdf)
33 +The spread of nuclear weapons poses a number of severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global and regional instability, constrained freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Iran’s advanced nuclear program. Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.49 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.50 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a limited nuclear war.51 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority.52 As Russia’s conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.”53 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.54 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism. The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.55 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a “religious duty” for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.56 Unlike states, which can be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S. politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a break down in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability: The spread of nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the “stability-instability paradox” maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62
34 +
35 +Weak nuclear states are incentivized to REDUCE checks on nuclear escalation to increase the probability of threats
36 +Powell 15 Robert Powell (Robson Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.), "Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power," International Organization, Summer 2015 AZ
37 +These effects highlight in a very simple way some of the incentives a weak state has to “go nuclear” and thereby be able to transform a contest of strength into one of resolve. If a weak state has no nuclear weapons, it cannot threaten to engage in a process that may ultimately end in its launching a nuclear attack against its adversary. In other words, the potential and minimal risks are zero: () = ()=0 for all . Absent any risk of escalation, the stronger state brings all of its power to bear (∗ = ). Nuclear weapons and the latent threat of escalation compel it to bring less power to bear ( e ). More generally, a militarily weak but resolute state that already has nuclear weapons will be advantaged by a doctrine, posture, and force structure in which the potential risk rises rapidly as more power is brought to bear (a large ). We can see these incentives in the evolution of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine. In order to deter a militarily stronger adversary from threatening its vital interests, Pakistan, like NATO before it, has eschewed a no-first use nuclear doctrine. After becoming an overt nuclear state in 1998, Pakistan moved toward a nuclear posture which envisioned the possibly rapid, “first use of nuclear weapons against conventional attacks.” This in turned required the operationalization of nuclear weapons as “usable warfighting instruments.”57 As former Pakistani General Feroz Khan puts it, “With relatively smaller conventional forces, and lacking adequate technical means, especially in early warning and surveillance, Pakistan relies on a more proactive nuclear defensive policy.”58 Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States made the same point in the spring of 2001. Because of the growing conventional asymmetry with India, “Pakistan will be increasingly forced to rely on strategic capabilities... Risks of escalation through accident and miscalculation cannot be discounted.”59 In brief, Pakistan’s nuclear posture, which Narang describes as “asymmetric escalation,” entails a fundamental trade-off. When compared to a posture of “assured retaliation,” which emphasizes survivable second-strike forces targeted against an adversary’s key strategic centers, asymmetric escalation depends on being able to use or credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against invading conventional forces. However, the forces needed to implement this “can generate severe command and control pressures that increase the risk of inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.”60 Pakistan’s acceptance of a riskier force posture is in keeping with the incentives highlighted in the model. The potential risk of nuclear escalation if India brings a given amount of power to bear is higher if Pakistan has an asymmetric-escalation doctrine. That is,  is higher as illustrated in the shift from 0 to 1 in Figure 6. As a result, India brings less power to bear (e decreases) and Pakistan is better off ((e) increases).
38 +
39 +1AC – Accidents
40 +
41 +Accidents likely – large releases of radiation are more likely than before
42 +Wheatley et al 16 Spencer Wheatley (ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Switzerland), Benjamin Sovacool, Didier Sornette, "Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents," Risk Analysis, March 2016 AZ
43 +Regarding event severity, we found that the distribution of cost underwent a significant regime change shortly after the Three Mile Island major accident. Moderate cost events were suppressed, but extreme ones became more frequent, to the extent that the costs are now well described by the extremely heavy tailed Pareto distribution with parameter inline image. We noted in the introduction that the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 led to plant-specific full-scope control room simulators, plant-specific PSA models for finding and eliminating risks, and new sets of emergency operating instructions. The change of regime that we document here may be the concrete embodiment of these changes catalyzed by the TMI accident. We also identify statistically significant runaway disaster (“dragon-king”) regimes in both NAMS and cost, suggesting that extreme events are amplified to values even larger than those explained under the Pareto distribution with inline image. In view of the extreme risks, the need for better bonding and liability instruments associated with nuclear accident and incident property damage becomes clear. For instance, under the conservative assumption that the cost from Fukushima is the maximum possible, annual accident costs are on par with the construction costs of a single nuclear plant, with the expected annual cost being 1.5 billion USD with a standard deviation of 8 billion USD. If we do not limit the maximum possible cost, then the expected cost under the estimated Pareto model is mathematically infinite. Nuclear reactors are thus assets that can become liabilities in a matter of hours, and it is usually taxpayers, or society at large, that “pays” for these accidents rather than nuclear operators or even electricity consumers. This split of incentives improperly aligns those most responsible for an accident (the principals) from those suffering the cost of nuclear accidents (the agents). One policy suggestion is that we start holding plant operators liable for accident costs through an environmental or accident bonding system,65 which should work together with an appropriate economic model to incentivize the operators. Third, looking to the future, our analysis suggests that nuclear power has inherent safety risks that will likely recur. With the current model—which does not quantify improvements from the industry response to Fukushima—in terms of costs, there is a 50 chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in 62 years, and (ii) a TMI event (or larger) occurs in 15 years. Further, smaller but still expensive (⩾20 MM 2013 USD) incidents will occur with a frequency of about one per year, under the assumption of a roughly constant fleet of nuclear plants. To curb these risks of future events would require sweeping changes to the industry, as perhaps triggered by Fukushima, which include refinements to reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations. To be effective, any changes need to minimize the risk of extreme disasters. Unfortunately, given the shortage of data, it is too early to judge if the risk of events has significantly improved post-Fukushima. We can only raise attention to the fact that similar sweeping regime changes after both Chernobyl (leading to a decrease in frequency) and Three Mile Island (leading to a suppression of moderate events) failed to mitigate the very heavy tailed distribution of costs documented here.
44 +
45 +Contamination spreads rapidly – no one is safe
46 +Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) RMT
47 +25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres
48 +Subsequently, the researchers determined the geographic distribution of radioactive gases and particles around a possible accident site using a computer model that describes Earth's atmosphere. The model calculates meteorological conditions and flows, and also accounts for chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The model can compute the global distribution of trace gases, for example, and can also simulate the spreading of radioactive gases and particles. To approximate the radioactive contamination, the researchers calculated how the particles of radioactive caesium-137 (137Cs) disperse in the atmosphere, where they deposit on Earth's surface and in what quantities. The 137Cs isotope is a product of the nuclear fission of uranium. It has a half-life of 30 years and was one of the key elements in the radioactive contamination following the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
49 +The computer simulations revealed that, on average, only eight percent of the 137Cs particles are expected to deposit within an area of 50 kilometres around the nuclear accident site. Around 50 percent of the particles would be deposited outside a radius of 1,000 kilometres, and around 25 percent would spread even further than 2,000 kilometres. These results underscore that reactor accidents are likely to cause radioactive contamination well beyond national borders.
50 +The results of the dispersion calculations were combined with the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown and the actual density of reactors worldwide to calculate the current risk of radioactive contamination around the world. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area with more than 40 kilobecquerels of radioactivity per square meter is defined as contaminated.
51 +The team in Mainz found that in Western Europe, where the density of reactors is particularly high, the contamination by more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter is expected to occur once in about every 50 years. It appears that citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of Germany run the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination, associated with the numerous nuclear power plants situated near the borders between France, Belgium and Germany, and the dominant westerly wind direction.
52 +If a single nuclear meltdown were to occur in Western Europe, around 28 million people on average would be affected by contamination of more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter. This figure is even higher in southern Asia, due to the dense populations. A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people.
53 +"Germany's exit from the nuclear energy program will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination. However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany's neighbours were to switch off their reactors," says Jos Lelieveld. "Not only do we need an in-depth and public analysis of the actual risks of nuclear accidents. In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered ," adds the atmospheric chemist.
54 +It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
55 +Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) RMT
56 +Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years.
57 +Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
58 +Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
59 +Biodiversity loss risks extinction - ecosystems aren’t resilient or redundant
60 +Vule 13-School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University (Jeffrey V. Yule *, Robert J. Fournier and Patrick L. Hindmarsh, “Biodiversity, Extinction, and Humanity’s Future: The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Human Population and Resource Use”, 2 April 2013, manities 2013, 2, 147–159) RMT
61 +Ecologists recognize that the particulars of the relationship between biodiversity and community resilience in the face of disturbance (a broad range of phenomena including anything from drought, fire, and volcanic eruption to species introductions or removals) depend on context 16,17. Sometimes disturbed communities return relatively readily to pre-disturbance conditions; sometimes they do not. However, accepting as a general truism that biodiversity is an ecological stabilizer is sensible— roughly equivalent to viewing seatbelt use as a good idea: although seatbelts increase the risk of injury in a small minority of car accidents, their use overwhelmingly reduces risk. As humans continue to modify natural environments, we may be reducing their ability to return to pre-disturbance conditions. The concern is not merely academic. Communities provide the ecosystem services on which both human and nonhuman life depends, including the cycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen by photosynthetic organisms, nitrogen fixation and the filtration of water by microbes, and pollination by insects. If disturbances alter communities to the extent that they can no longer provide these crucial services, extinctions (including, possibly, our own) become more likely. In ecology as in science in general, absolutes are rare. Science deals mainly in probabilities, in large part because it attempts to address the universe’s abundant uncertainties. Species-rich, diverse communities characterized by large numbers of multi-species interactions are not immune to being pushed from one relatively stable state characterized by particular species and interactions to other, quite different states in which formerly abundant species are entirely or nearly entirely absent. Nonetheless, in speciose communities, the removal of any single species is less likely to result in radical change. That said, there are no guarantees that the removal of even a single species from a biodiverse community will not have significant, completely unforeseen consequences.
62 +Indirect interactions can be unexpectedly important to community structure and, historically, have been difficult to observe until some form of disturbance (especially the introduction or elimination of a species) occurs. Experiments have revealed how the presence of predators can increase the diversity of prey species in communities, as when predators of a superior competitor among prey species will allow inferior competing prey species to persist 18. Predators can have even more dramatic effects on communities. The presence or absence of sea otters determines whether inshore areas are characterized by diverse kelp forest communities or an alternative stable state of species poor urchin barrens 19. In the latter case, the absence of otters leaves urchin populations unchecked to overgraze kelp forests, eliminating a habitat feature that supports a wide range of species across a variety of age classes.
63 +Aldo Leopold observed that when trying to determine how a device works by tinkering with it, the first rule of doing the job intelligently is to save all the parts 20. The extinctions that humans have caused certainly represent a significant problem, but there is an additional difficulty with human investigations of and impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes. Often, our tinkering is unintentional and, as a result, recklessly ignores the necessity of caution. Following the logic inherited from Newtonian physics, humans expect single actions to have single effects. Desiring more game species, for instance, humans typically hunt predators (in North America, for instance, extirpating wolves so as to be able to have more deer or elk for themselves). Yet removing or adding predators has far reaching effects. Wolf removal has led to prey overpopulation, plant over browsing, and erosion 21. After wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park, the K of elk increased. This allowed for a shift in elk feeding patterns that left fewer trees alongside rivers, thus leaving less food for beaver and, consequently, fewer beaver dams and less wetland 22,23. Such a situation represents, in microcosm, the inherent risk of allowing for the erosion of species diversity. In addition to providing habitat for a wide variety of species, wetlands serve as natural water purification systems. Although the Yellowstone region might not need that particular ecosystem service as much as other parts of the world, freshwater resources and wetlands are threatened globally, and the same logic of reduced biodiversity equating to reduced ecosystem services applies.
64 +Humans take actions without considering that when tugging on single threads, they unavoidably affect adjacent areas of the tapestry. While human population and per capita resource use remain high, so does the probability of ongoing biodiversity loss. At the very least, in the future people will have an even more skewed perspective than we do about what constitutes a diverse community. In that regard, future generations will be even more ignorant than we are. Of course, we also experience that shifting baseline perspective on biodiversity and population sizes, failing to recognize how much is missing from the world because we are unaware of what past generations saw 11. But the consequences of diminished biodiversity might be more profound for humans than that. If the disturbance of communities and ecosystems results in species losses that reduce the availability of ecosystem services, human K and, sooner or later, human N will be reduced.
65 +1AC – Plan
66 +Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power by reactors powered by uranium-235.
67 +The plan shifts to thorium-powered reactors – improves energy efficiency and safety and prevents prolif
68 +Halper 13 Mark Halper, "Hans Blix: Shift to thorium, minimize weapons risk," The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, 10/29/2013 AZ
69 +Hans Blix, the disarmament advocate who famously found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, said today that thorium fuel could help reduce the risk of weapons proliferation from nuclear reactors. Addressing the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 here, Blix said that nuclear power operators should move away from their time-honoured practice of using uranium fuel with its links to potential nuclear weapons fabrication via both the uranium enrichment process and uranium’s plutonium waste. “Even though designers and operators are by no means at the end of the uranium road, it is desirable today, I am convinced, that the designers and the others use their skill and imagination to explore and test other avenues as well,” Blix said. “The propeller plane that served us long and still serves us gave way to the jet plane that now dominates,” said the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who also ran the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. “Diesel engines have migrated from their traditional home in trucks to a growing number of cars and cars with electric engines are now entering the market. Nuclear power should also not be stuck in one box.” Blix rattled off a list of thorium’s advantages, noting that “thorium fuel gives rise to waste that is smaller in volume, less toxic and much less long lived than the wastes that result from uranium fuel.” Another bonus: thorium is three to four times more plentiful than uranium, he noted. “The civilian nuclear community must do what it can to help reduce the risk that more nuclear weapons are made from uranium or plutonium,” Blix said. “Although it is enrichment plants and plutonium producing installations rather than power reactors that are key concerns, this community, this nuclear community, can and should use its considerable brain power to design reactors that can be easily safeguarded and fuel and supply organizations that do not lend themselves to proliferation. I think in these regards the thorium community may have very important contributions to make.” Blix described the obstacles that are in the way of a shift to thorium and other nuclear alternatives as “political” rather than “technical.”
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1 +2016-09-11 01:20:16.0
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1 +Rashed Islam
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1 +Chaminade CC
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Round
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1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 +SEPOCT - Thorium Aff
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1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[5]
Cites
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1 +Nuclear power is key to Belgian energy – makes half of its electricity and prevents carbon emissions
2 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
3 +Nuclear power plays a key role in Belgium’s energy supply, constituting about half the electricity generation and 16.6 of total primary energy supply (TPES) in 2014. In 2015, nuclear power generation fell further, to 26 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to FPS (Federal Public Service) Economy. In recent years, electricity generated from nuclear power, and consequently the share of nuclear energy in the generation mix, has significantly decreased because of long-term outages of several nuclear units. Despite that, the share of nuclear power in Belgium remains one of the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Seven units, all pressurised water reactors (PWRs), are currently operating in Belgium for a total net installed capacity of 5 913 megawatts (MW) at the end of 2015. The reactors are located at the sites of Doel, on the Scheldt estuary close to Antwerp, and of Tihange, on the river Meuse between Liège and Namur. Since the last (International Energy Agency (IEA) in-depth review in 2009, total net capacity has increased by about 100 MWe as a result of capacity upgrades at Doel 1, Doel 4 and Tihange 3. All nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Belgium are operated by Electrabel, a 100 subsidiary of Engie since 2003. Electrabel is the sole owner of Doel 1 and 2 units, and owns 50 of Tihange 1 and 89.8 of the other four units. The remaining 50 of Tihange 1 is owned by EDF which controls also the remaining 10.2 share of the other four units (see Table 10.1). Belgium has a long tradition in nuclear research and in civil nuclear power, dating from the early 1960s, and for many years the Belgian industry covered almost all activities in the nuclear fuel cycle. In 1962, the BR3 (Belgian Reactor 3) was the first pilot PWR connected to the grid in Western Europe. Belgium co-operated with France in the construction of the first full-scale PWR in Europe (Chooz A). The development of nuclear power in Belgium started at the end of the 1960s with the decision to build three nuclear units at the two sites of Doel and Tihange. Following the first oil crisis, another four units were ordered and connected to the grid by the end of 1985. The whole Belgian nuclear capacity has been commissioned in a relatively short period of about ten years, from February 1975 to October 1985; the lifetime of the nuclear fleet is therefore quite homogeneous, with an average of 35 years of operation. Over the course of operation, the Belgian nuclear fleet has generated about 1 420 TWh of baseload electricity and contributed significantly to the security of energy supply (see Figure 10.1). Nuclear power has also helped avoid emissions of large quantities of carbon dioxide2 , and had an important role in Belgium’s efforts to reduce air pollution (sulphur dioxide SO2 and oxides of nitrogen NOx).
4 +Nuclear power key to stop emissions in Belgium
5 +Toobin 16 Adam Toobin, "Why Target Belgium? For Terrorists, the Answer Is Complicated and Nuclear" Inverse Magazine, 3/22/2016 AZ
6 +Belgium remains heavily reliant on nuclear power to reach its clean energy goals under the Kyoto and Paris protocols, and support for the programs remains high. Some areas in Belgium even obtain as much as 50 percent of their energy from nuclear power. Despite the current old age of Belgian nuclear power reactors, theountry has no plans for new plants once the current facilities expire.
7 +Belgium is key – it's a lynchpin in international climate change
8 +NCC 10 National Climate Commission of Belgium, "BELGIAN NATIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION STRATEGY," December 2010 AZ
9 +Since 2008, the Belgian development cooperation has explicitly included the fight against climate change in its policy as a priority. This is due to the fact that the consequences of climate change in many countries in the south are an important source of instability in terms of food security, biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, (environmental) migration, public health and tensions that could lead to conflicts. Developing countries, especially the least developed countries, are the first victims of climate change, even though they are less responsible for the causes and have fewer tools to combat climate change or to adapt their societies. In many developing countries, especially African countries, climate change adds additional pressure to difficulties resulting from long existing problems, such as poverty, poor access to education, weak institutions and governance, inadequate infrastructure, low access to technology and information, poor access to health services, problems with income generation and armed conflicts. These structural problems come on top of the threats that originate from the overexploitation of available natural resources, a quickly increasing population, desertification and land degradation. These stress factors make developing countries, especially the least developed countries, more vulnerable for climate change and make adaptation more difficult. The Belgian development cooperation is active in many sectors where the impact of climate change must be taken into account, such as agriculture and rural development, water, energy, infrastructure and health care. Through its bilateral cooperation, by supporting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the northern and southern hemispheres and by supporting scientific institutions, Belgium is contributing to several programs and projects that all tackle adaptation to climate change in one way or another. In the framework of multilateral cooperation20, Belgium supports amongst others international agricultural research (mainly the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the European Research for Agriculture/Agricultural Research for Development (ERA/ARD). In 2009 Belgium contributed to the Least Developed Countries Fund to support implementation of the National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) of these least developed countries. Belgium is planning to increase this support significantly as part of its contribution to the fast start funding package, negotiated in Copenhagen.
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1 +2016-09-11 01:24:27.0
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1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 +Lynbrook NS
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1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 +SEPOCT - Warming Updates - Belgium
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1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[6]
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1 +Rapid shutdown of nuclear plants requires huge resources – trades off with funding for waste management –
2 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
3 +According to the current schedule of nuclear phase-out provided in Table 10.1, the shutdown of all Belgian NPPs is expected to occur in a very short time frame, between 2022 and 2025. A rapid phase-out of the nuclear units, which currently represent around half the electricity generation, would be extremely challenging and would have a significant impact on energy supply, on the level of electricity prices and on the country’s ability to meet its long-term GHG emission targets. It could also have an adverse impact on the financing of regulatory bodies, which is currently ensured by a levy on nuclear installations. It would also have an effect on the funding of the provisions for waste management and decommissioning. A recent OECD study has shown that the LTO of nuclear plants is the lowest-cost option available for power generation (OECD, 2012). Several utilities in OECD member countries have already obtained the licence to operate their nuclear plants beyond 40 years or are in the process of submitting applications to the safety authorities. The nuclear operator has estimated that investments of EUR 600 million are needed for the LTO of Tihange 1, and EUR 700 million for the long-term operation (LTO) of both units 1 and 2 at Doel.
4 +Nuclear power key to revenue generation – taxes
5 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
6 +In 2008, the government introduced a substantial levy on nuclear power generation. The contribution level has been revised several times; on average, the contribution volume has been more than EUR 200 million per year. Nuclear power generation is subject to several kinds of taxes and levies in more countries, probably because it is a relatively easy source of revenue: the plant operator cannot just shut down operations or move to a more favourable jurisdiction. The absolute level of contribution needs to be carefully considered, however. In general, limiting the utilities’ profits reduces their options for investing capacities in the LTO and/or other much-needed low-carbon capacity, and leads to a greater need for governments to encourage such investments, also financially.
7 +Turns case – increases likelihood of dirty bomb
8 +Rubin and Schreuer 16 ALISSA J. RUBIN and MILAN SCHREUER, Belgium Fears Nuclear Plants Are Vulnerable," NY Times, 3/25/2016 AZ
9 +Asked on Thursday at a London think tank whether there was a danger of the Islamic State’s obtaining a nuclear weapon, the British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, said that “was a new and emerging threat.”
10 +While the prospect that terrorists can obtain enough highly enriched uranium and then turn it into a nuclear fission bomb seems far-fetched to many experts, they say the fabrication of some kind of dirty bomb from radioactive waste or byproducts is more conceivable. There are a variety of other risks involving Belgium’s facilities, including that terrorists somehow shut down the privately operated plants, which provide nearly half of Belgium’s power.
11 +
12 +Revenues are used to fund renewables – no wind or solar without government subsidies
13 +WNA 16 World Nuclear Association, "Nuclear Power in Belgium," March 2016 AZ
14 +In May 2010, CREG estimated the cost of producing electricity from Belgian nuclear power plants as 1.7-2.1 € cents/kWh, including fuel cycle, operating, depreciation, and provisions for decommissioning and waste management. This compared with the forward market price of 6 ¢/kWh and the market price for green energy certificates at 8.8-10.7 ¢/kWh.In June 2013 Electrabel filed an appeal to Belgium's Constitutional Court against the €550 million ($734 million) annual federal tax on nuclear power generation. In 2012 the government passed laws doubling the size of the tax. As the dominant power generator and supplier, Electrabel bears the brunt of the tax – €479 million – while EDF-Luminus, Belgium's second-largest generator, has nuclear offtake rights and pays the remainder. GDF Suez said that raising the tax bill goes against the protocol signed by the company and the federal government in 2009, which set out a special tax of €215-245 million for 2010-14. Since 2010 the tax has doubled and market conditions for utilities have deteriorated.In April 2014 the Court of First Instance in Brussels rejected Electrabel's claim it was entitled to an exceptional tax refund of about one billion euros over profits from its Belgian nuclear plants, which it has been paying 2008 to 2012 as a tax increment. The company appealed, saying the €479 million for 2012 corresponded to its entire nuclear profits, but that appeal was rejected in July 2014, with the court saying that the appeal was “unfounded”. Electrabel’s contribution of €422 million for 2013 was higher than its entire operational activities in Belgium. "This confiscatory fiscal pressure on Electrabel at a time when the company's economic situation has deteriorated resulted in losses for Electrabel in 2013 for the second year in succession." The company lodged an appeal against the 2013 contribution, but in September 2015 the Constitutional Court rejected this and said the tax was "legitimate". In April 2015 CREG updated its 2010 calculations and said that the profit from all of Belgium's nuclear operators – Electrabel, EDF Luminus and EDF Belgium – totalled some €435 million in 2014. CREG reported that "the profits derived from nuclear activities are the difference between revenues and costs. The 'nuclear rent' can then be calculated by subtracting a fair remuneration of the invested capital." Electrabel noted that the nuclear contribution amounted to €479 million in 2014 – some €44 million more than CREG’s calculation of profits. "The nuclear operators are thus paying to the state more than they earn from this nuclear activity," and CREG's latest calculation clearly shows that the 'nuclear contribution' imposed by the government on nuclear operators since 2008 is confiscatory, it said.In July 2015 Electrabel agreed to pay €130 million in 2016 as the federal nuclear power ‘contribution’ or tax, substantially less than previously intended (and less than €479 million in 2014). This is alongside a fee for life extension of Doel 1and2 – see section below. From 2017 a formula will apply, with a minimum of €150 million per year to 2019. In mid-2013 the government approved an energy plan which would subsidise gas-fired generation and offshore wind capacity with taxes from nuclear power. Investors had been deterred from investing in planned 800 MWe of gas-fired plant by the relatively low cost of nuclear power and the grid priority of renewables input.
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1 +2016-09-11 01:24:27.0
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1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 +Lynbrook NS
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Round
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1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 +SEPOCT - Belgium Taxes DA
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1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[7]
Cites
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1 +The Kingdom of Belgium should continue production of nuclear power
2 +The Kingdom of Belgium should develop and fully integrate information systems that aid in combating terrorism.
3 +Information systems and networks are the only ways to challenge asymmetric war fighting and terrorism
4 +Garreau 05 Joel Garreau, staff writer for the Washington Post, “Intelligence Gathering Is the Best Way to Reduce Terrorism,” Are Efforts to Reduce Terrorism Successful?, published by Lauri Friedman, pg 57-58
5 +Terrorist organizations are human networks, not armies. They rely on trust, relationships, and communication to operate. Military operations and bombing campaigns will be ineffective against such groups because they will not destroy the trust and connections those networks are built upon. Therefore, the most effective way to reduce terrorism is to wage a war of wits. With good intelligence gathering techniques, authorities can learn who the key terrorists are and either eliminate them or tarnish their reputations in the eyes of others in the network. Unraveling the ties that bind terrorists will win the war on terrorism. The essence of this first war of the 21st century is that it’s not like the old ones. That’s why, as $40 billion is voted for the new war on terrorism, 35,000 reservists are called up and two aircraft carrier battle groups hover near Afghanistan,1 some warriors and analysts have questions: In the Information Age, they ask, how do you attack, degrade or destroy a small, shadowy, globally distributed, stateless network of intensely loyal partisans with few fixed assets or addresses? If bombers are not the right hammer for this nail, what is? Bombers worked well in wars in which one Industrial Age military threw steel at another. World War II, for instance, was a matchup of roughly symmetrical forces. This is not true today. That’s why people who think about these things call this new conflict “asymmetric warfare.” The terrorist side is different: different organization, different methods of attack—and of defense. “It takes a tank to fight a tank. It takes a network to fight a network,” says John Arquilla, senior consultant to the international security group Rand and co-author of the forthcoming “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy.” He asks: “How do you attack a trust structure—which is what a network is? You’re not going to do this with Tomahawk missiles or strategic bombardment.” “It’s a whole new playing field. You’re not attacking a nation, but a network,” says Karen Stephenson, who studies everything from corporations to the U.S. Navy as if they were tribes. Trained as a chemist and anthropologist, she now teaches at Harvard and the University of London. “You have to understand what holds those networks in place, what makes them strong and where the leverage points are. They’re not random connections,” she says. Human networks are distinct from electronic ones. They are not the Internet. They are political and emotional connections among people who must trust each other in order to function, like Colombian drug cartels and Spanish Basque separatists and the Irish Republican Army. Not to mention high-seas pirates, smugglers of illegal immigrants, and rogue brokers of weapons of mass destruction. But how to a network? The good news is that in the last decade we have developed a whole new set of weapons to figure that out.
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1 +2016-09-11 01:24:28.0
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1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 +Lynbrook NS
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1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 +SEPOCT - Nuclear Terror CP
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1 +Loyola

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