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  • Caselist.RoundClass[2]
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Caselist.RoundClass[2]

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1		-2016-09-11 01:20:14.268
	1	+2016-09-11 01:20:14.0

Caselist.CitesClass[4]

Cites

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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 01:20:16.508

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	1	+Rashed Islam

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	1	+Chaminade CC

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	1	+La Canada Zhao Neg

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	1	+SEPOCT - Thorium Aff

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	1	+Loyola