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  • Caselist.RoundClass[16]
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Caselist.RoundClass[16]

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1		-2016-11-14 05:17:29.290
	1	+2016-11-14 05:17:29.0

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Cites

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	1	+Nuclear phase-out in Armenia causes Armenia to become dependent on Russian oil – causes regional conflict and energy crash
	2	+Sahakyan ‘16: Armine Sahakyan writes for the Huffington Post on 04/27/2016 12:36 pm ET| Updated Apr 27, 2016. Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html; AB
	3	+Some nuclear experts agree, but some don’t. Even Armenians who worry about the plant’s safety don’t want to return to the days between 1989 and 1995 when it was shut down after a 1988 earthquake in Gyumri, 48 miles from Metsamor. The quake devastated Armenia’s second-largest city, killing 25,000 and leaving half a million homeless. Although the plant came through the 1988 quake without a hitch, it is located in an active seismic zone — and many Armenian nuclear officials feared a catastrophe if the next temblor involved a direct hit on Metsamor. At the time they recommended closing it, Armenia was able to obtain oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan for its thermal power plants. The government decided to increase its purchase of those supplies to produce additional power from thermal plants to cover the loss of electricity from the nuclear plant. The war between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which had long been Azerbaijani territory, dashed the thermal-plant plans, however. That’s because the oil and gas that Russia and Turkmenistan were sending to Armenia came through Azerbaijan, which refused to transport the fuel once the conflict started. With the nuclear plant shut down and thermal plants unable to be ramped up, Armenians went through the Dark Ages for several years. Power was available only one hour a day, bringing industry to a standstill and making life at home miserable. “You can imagine—it was as cold in the apartment as it was in the street” in winter, journalist Ara Tadevosyan recalled. Although a truce in the war was negotiated in 1994, Armenia was still unable to get oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan. Azerbaijan demanded nothing less than the return of Nagorno-Karabakh.
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	5	+Increased dependence on Russian energy increases Russian arctic energy expansion – leads to armed conflict escalation.
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	7	+Russia’s ambitions are to fundamentally alter the existing European security structure, to marginalize or sideline NATO, and to diminish the U.S. role in European security. In all these areas, Russia’s national interests fundamentally diverge from those of the U.S.; or, more precisely, the Russian leadership does not share Western interests or threat perceptions.4 To affirm its national interests, the Medvedev administration has released three major policy documents: the Foreign Policy Concept in July 2008, the Foreign and Security Policy Principles in August 2008, and the National Security Strategy in May 2009.5 The Foreign Policy Concept claims that Russia is a resurgent great power, exerting substantial influence over international affairs and determined to defend the interests of Russian citizens wherever they reside. According to the Foreign and Security Policy Principles, Moscow follows five key principles: the primacy of international law, multipolarity to replace U.S.-dominated unipolarity, the avoidance of Russian isolationism, the protection of Russians wherever they reside, and Russia’s privileged interests in regions adjacent to Russia. Russia’s National Security Strategy, which replaced the previous National Security Concepts, repeats some of the formulations in the other two documents and depicts NATO expansion and its expanded global role as a major threat to Russia’s national interests and to international security. The document asserts that Russia seeks to overcome its domestic problems and emerge as an economic powerhouse. Much attention was also devoted to the potential risk of future energy wars over regions such as the Arctic, where Russia would obviously defend its access to hydrocarbon resources. The document also envisages mounting competition over energy sources escalating into armed conflicts near Russia’s borders. Among the customary list of threats to Russia’s security, the National Security Strategy includes alleged falsifications of Russian history.6 The Kremlin is engaged in an extensive historical revisionist campaign in which it seeks to depict Russia’s Tsarist and Soviet empires as benevolent and civilizing missions pursued in neighboring countries. Systematized state-sponsored historical distortions have profound contemporary repercussions. Interpretations of the past are important for legitimizing the current government, which is committed to demonstrating Russia’s alleged greatness and re-establishing its privileged interests over former satellites.
	8	+Arctic war globalizes and goes nuclear.
	9	+Dhanapala ‘13: Jayantha Dhanapala writes in “The Arctic as a bridge” for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on 4 February 2013. Dhanapala is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors and president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Formerly, he was United Nations under-secretary-general for Disarmament Affairs (1998-2003) and ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States (1995-7). http://thebulletin.org/arctic-bridge; AB
	10	+No country owns the North Pole or the expanse of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The Arctic region has a population of about 4 million, including more than 30 distinct groups of indigenous people using dozens of languages; they have lived there for more than 10,000 years. The area also has a unique and diverse ecosystem that includes fish, marine mammals, birds, land animals, and a thriving web of bacteria, viruses, algae, worms, and crustaceans that live in sea ice. The natural resources are vast and largely untapped. The US Geological Survey has estimated that 22 percent of the world's undiscovered energy resources lie in the Arctic zone ~-~- especially in the submerged plateau, between the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea known as the Chukchi Cap. The Arctic has been vital to humanity's development, and history has a strange way of repeating itself. What is now the Bering Strait was once a land bridge, across which humans migrated from Asia to the Americas. It promises today to be a maritime conduit for increased global commerce through the Arctic as human-induced climate change causes ice to melt and shipping lanes to open. This development has the potential to bring nations and peoples together for peace and development ~-~- or to spawn dispute and conflict. There are in fact many reasons that the international community ~-~- and not just the countries with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean ~-~- should focus on the Arctic. First, the world is increasingly interdependent, and the hard evidence of climate change proves that the felling of Amazon forests in Brazil and increased carbon dioxide emissions in China have a cumulative global impact, leading to the incipient disappearance of Tuvalu into the Pacific Ocean and the gradual sinking of the Maldives. In a literal sense, English poet John Donne's celebrated line ~-~- "No man is an island, entire of itself" ~-~- is truer today than ever before. The environment of the Arctic affects the world environment. Beyond its contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of the Arctic ice cap will facilitate the mining of resources, especially oil and gas, and lead to an increase in commercial shipping. The ownership of the resources and the sovereignty of Arctic areas, including the Northwest Passage, are already being contested. The applicability of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has to be more sharply defined, especially in those areas of the Arctic where claims overlap. And clearly, access to the resources of the Arctic north is of concern to the global south, where the "bottom billion" people of the world live in extreme poverty. Increasingly, science shows that those people are going to be hit hardest by climate change. Some of those people also see the area outside the territory claimed by the littoral states of the Arctic as part of the global commons and, therefore, the shared heritage of humankind. A global regime could thus be established over the Arctic to mitigate the effects of climate change and to provide for the equitable use of its resources outside the territory of the eight circumpolar countries. Third, as someone who has devoted most of his working life to the cause of disarmament, and especially nuclear disarmament, I am deeply concerned that two nuclear weapon states ~-~- the United States and the Russian Federation, which together own 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world ~-~- face one another across the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims ~-~- not to mention those that could be made by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway ~-~- may lead to conflict that has the potential to escalate into the use of nuclear weapons. Thus the Arctic is ripe for conversion into a nuclear weapon free zone. I discussed a fourth reason the international community should focus on the Arctic with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (who has in fact visited the Arctic on an icebreaker) when I met him in New York last fall. The Arctic, I told him, is the one region in the world where the environment (and climate change in particular), the threat of nuclear weapons, the human rights of indigenous people, and the need to advance the rule of law converge as international issues. The Arctic, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to make international diplomacy work for the benefit of the entire international community. Security and interdependence. Security today is a concept that is much broader than military security alone. It encompasses international peace and security, human rights, and development. Twenty-first century security is also a cooperative and common security, in which one region's insecurity inevitably and negatively affects the security of other regions of the world. And so Arctic security is inextricably interwoven with global security, giving us all a role as stakeholders in the north. Geographer Jared Diamond's impressive book, Collapse, shows that not every society faced with environmental collapse has gone under like Norse Greenland or the Mayan civilization. The Inuits, for example, have done much better on Greenland than the Norse and are still with us. Diamond identifies a society's response to environmental problems as the most significant factor contributing to ~-~- or forestalling ~-~- its collapse. Long-term planning and a willingness to reconsider core values can stave off collapse, Diamond writes. This is the same lesson that British historian Arnold Toynbee provided in his A Study of History, with its descriptions of the challenges humankind has faced throughout history and the responses it has made. The point, of course, is that there are solutions to the problems of Arctic security, but they are solutions based on multidisciplinary and multilateral co-operation. States party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the Kyoto Protocol met in late November and early December of 2012 in Doha, Qatar, in the midst of heightened concerns over climate change after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States. Even so, there was an unmistakable air of "business as usual" in the policies pursued at those meetings. And the subject of climate change was never even discussed in the recently concluded US presidential election. The developed world has contributed disproportionately to the carbon emissions that cause climate change. Developing countries ~-~- notably China and India ~-~- are poised to follow this bad example. The Arctic circumpolar countries, linked together in the Arctic Council, are developed countries, and they could set a major precedent by taking steps to achieve cooperative solutions to the problems of Arctic security across the entire gamut of political, economic, ecological, social, and cultural aspects. It would be an example welcomed by the rest of the global community. Observers from non-Arctic states, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations are included in the Arctic Council; China is applying for permanent observer status, presumably out of a strong interest in using the shorter shipping routes to Europe and the East Coast of North America via the Arctic Ocean, and in gaining access to resources in the region. A Chinese icebreaker conducted a three-month voyage through the Arctic in 2012; Chinese interest in mineral deposits has been evident. As Canadian international law and politics expert Michael Byers writes, "China and other non-Arctic countries are fully entitled to navigate freely beyond 12 miles from shore, to fish beyond 200 miles from shore, and to exploit seabed resources that lie beyond the continental shelf. … China is respecting international law and has legitimate interests in the Arctic. Its request for permanent observer status should be granted forthwith ~-~- and Canada should make this a priority of its chairmanship of the Arctic Council." An all-encompassing Arctic Treaty, signed a half century after the Antarctic Treaty, would be a major achievement. To those skeptics who dismiss a wide-ranging agreement as unrealistic and impossible, let me quote the great Norwegian explorer, scientist, and Nobel Peace Prize-winning diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, who said, "The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes longer."
	11	+Nuke war causes extinction.
	12	+Germanos ‘13: Andrea Germanos writes in “Nuclear War Could Mean ‘Extinction of the Human Race” for Common Dreams on December 10th, 2013. Andrea Germanos is senior editor and a staff writer at Common Dreams. Common Dreams NewsCenter, often referred to simply as Common Dreams, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit U.S.-based progressive news website.1 Common Dreams publishes news stories, editorials and a newswire of current breaking news. Common Dreams also re-publishes relevant content from numerous other sources such as the Associated Press and writers such as Robert Reich and Molly Ivins. The website also provides links to other relevant columnists, periodicals, radio outlets, news services, and websites. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/12/10/nuclear-war-could-mean-extinction-human-race; AB
	13	+A war using even a small percentage of the world's nuclear weapons threatens the lives of two billion people, a new report warns. The findings in the report issued by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) are based on studies by climate scientists that show how nuclear war would alter the climate and agriculture, thereby threatening one quarter of the world's population with famine. Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? offers an updated edition to the groups' April of 2012 report, which the groups say "may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited nuclear war." "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive casualties on a global scale—far more than we had previously believed," Dr. Ira Helfand, the report’s author and IPPNW co-president, said in a statement. As their previous report showed, years after even a limited nuclear war, production of corn in the U.S. and China's middle season rice production would severely decline, and fears over dwindling food supplies would lead to hoarding and increases in food prices, creating further food insecurity for those already reliant on food imports. The updated report adds that Chinese winter wheat production would plummet if such a war broke out. Based on information from new studies combining reductions in wheat, corn and rice, this new edition doubles the number of people they expect to be threatened by nuclear-war induced famine to over two billion. "The prospect of a decade of widespread hunger and intense social and economic instability in the world’s largest country has immense implications for the entire global community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will be matched by similar declines in other wheat producing countries," Helfand stated. The crops would be impacted, the report explains, citing previous studies, because of the black carbon particles that would be released, causing widespread changes like cooling temperatures, decreased precipitation and decline in solar radiation. In this scenario of famine, epidemics of infectious diseases would be likely, the report states, and could lead to armed conflict. From the report: Within nations where famine is widespread, there would almost certainly be food riots, and competition for limited food resources might well exacerbate ethnic and regional animosities. Among nations, armed conflict would be a very real possibility as states dependent on imports attempted to maintain access to food supplies. While a limited nuclear war would bring dire circumstances, the impacts if the world's biggest nuclear arms holders were involved would be even worse. "With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible —not certain, but possible—extinction of the human race," Helfand told Agence-France Presse. "In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this will dwarf anything we've ever seen," Helfand told the news agency. As Helfand writes, the data cited in the report "raises a giant red flag about the threat to humanity posed." Yet, as Dr. Peter Wilk, former national executive director of PSR writes in an op-ed today, the "threat is of our own creation." As a joint statement by 124 states delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in October stated: "It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances." "Countries around the world—those who are nuclear-armed and those who are not—must work together to eliminate the threat and consequences of nuclear war," Helfand said. “In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate nuclear weapons.”
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	15	+Increased dependence on Russian energy increases Russian arctic expansion – leads to armed conflict escalation.
	16	+Axe ‘15: David Axe wrote in “Russia and America prep forces for Arctic War” on October 5th, 2015. “As a freelance and staff writer for many publications I have covered local, national and international politics, crime, the arts and war. I have reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Japan, East Timor, Kenya, Somalia, Chad, Congo and the U.K. My work has appeared in Wired, Esquire, The Washington Times, The Village Voice, Popular Science, Fast Company, Cosmopolitan and many others. I have also shot video for C-SPAN and Voice of America. I have written several books and graphic novels. In 2013 I began editing the national security collection at Medium.com.” – From his LinkedIn. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/10/04/russia-and-america-prep-forces-for-arctic-war/; AB
	17	+President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Alaska helped draw attention to global climate change — and to the national-security tensions that could result from a warming Arctic region. Surveyors believe that the seabed under Arctic waters could contain hundreds of billions of barrels of untapped oil. As the North Pole becomes more accessible, and so more valuable, Arctic countries — each with its own and in some cases overlapping territorial claims — are getting ready for some serious competition. The United States and Russia are geopolitical rivals and uneasy Arctic neighbors. More and more Russian and U.S. military forces are deploying on and under the Arctic Ocean. But Washington and Moscow are approaching their Arctic build-ups quite differently. The Kremlin holds the advantage on the ocean’s surface; the Pentagon dominates beneath the waves. Though Russia and the United States both train Arctic ground troops, Washington is also building a northern strike force of high-tech stealth warplanes. These different approaches are the results of military policies and priorities going back decades. Moscow chose to invest in icebreakers to work along its vast Arctic frontier, while Washington spent its money on submarines and warplanes that are equally useful outside the polar regions. While Obama was in Alaska, the White House announced that the administration would push for more and better icebreakers. After decades of neglect, the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates all U.S. icebreakers, possesses just three of the tough, ice-shattering vessels, and American companies own another two. These five ships must divide their time between the north and south poles, plowing paths through sea ice so other vessels can safely navigate frigid waters. “The administration will propose,” the White House explained on its official website, “to accelerate acquisition of a replacement heavy icebreaker to 2020 from 2022, begin planning for construction of additional icebreakers and call on Congress to work with the administration to provide sufficient resources to fund these critical investments.” But even after adding a few icebreakers, Washington will still be far behind Moscow in this category of Arctic weaponry. The Russian government owns 22 icebreakers; Russian industry possesses another 19 of the specialized vessels. Moscow has another 11 icebreakers under construction or in planning. To be fair, Russia’s Arctic coastline is many hundreds of miles longer than that of the United States. In theory, Russia’s icebreakers are spread out over a wider area during routine, peacetime operations. In wartime, however, the Kremlin could quickly concentrate its icebreakers, which could carve channels for Russian warships far more quickly than the Pentagon could do for its own ships. But the United States’ Arctic strategy depends less on surface ships than Russia’s strategy does. Instead, the U.S. military is betting on submarines to exert its influence in the far north. “The submarine is the best platform to operate in the Arctic,” Commander Jeff Bierley, skipper of the U.S. Navy submarine Seawolf, told Reuters, “because it can spend the majority of its time under the ice.” The U.S. fleet operates 41 nuclear-powered attack subs with equipment for sailing under — and punching through — Arctic ice. Russia’s ice-capable attack-submarine force numbers just 25 vessels. These U.S. subs likely deploy more regularly than Russia’s do. Amid economic volatility, the Kremlin has struggled to consistently fund naval deployments. Meanwhile, every two years the U.S. Navy sends a pair of attack subs into the Arctic Circle on a training and scientific mission. In the years between these ice experiments, Seawolf-class subs based in Washington state sail through the Bering Strait and under the ice cap, crossing over the top of the world and traveling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and then back. The Navy designed Seawolf and her two sister ships specifically for Arctic operations. The vessels have ice-scanning sonar and equipment to help the subs force their way through the ice cap to reach the surface during emergencies. On the ice, the two countries are at near-parity. The U.S. Army oversees three combat brigades in Alaska, each composed of roughly 3,000 soldiers. One brigade features paratroopers, another is in Stryker armored vehicles and a third is made up of reconnaissance troops. The paratroopers regularly practice parachuting onto the Arctic ice. During one February 2015 training exercise, called Spartan Pegasus, two C-17 and two C-130 transport planes based in Alaska dropped 180 paratroopers plus two vehicles and supplies onto a training range north of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures hover around 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “The purpose of Spartan Pegasus,” the Army stated on its website, “was to validate soldier mobility across frozen terrain, a key fundamental of U.S. Army Alaska’s capacity as the Army’s northernmost command.” The Strykers are less mobile. A C-17 — the U.S. Air Force keeps eight of the four-engine cargo planes in Alaska — can carry several Strykers, which weigh roughly 25 tons each, but the Air Force doesn’t often practice landings on Arctic runways. The Canadian air force does, however. It staged its own C-17s landings and take-offs from Arctic villages in temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So in theory the U.S. Air Force could move the Army’s Alaska-based Stryker brigade to Arctic battlegrounds. A C-17 can also drop Strykers via parachute, though the Air Force has only done this in tests. The Russian army’s Arctic command is smaller. It controls just two brigades with armored vehicles. But combat units from outside the command regularly head north for training, in particular, paratroopers and the transport planes that ferry them. One Arctic exercise in March reportedly involved 80,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen plus more than 200 aircraft. An official photo from the war game depicts an An-72 transport plane and white-clad infantry on an airfield carved in the snow. Russia has proved it can patrol the airspace over the Arctic. The U.S. Air Force, however, holds the northern advantage. In addition to C-17 and C-130 transports, the American air arm maintains E-3 radar planes and three fighter squadrons in Alaska — two with 20 high-tech F-22 stealth fighters each and one with 18 older F-16s. In coming years, up to two squadrons of new F-35 stealth fighters will join the F-16s at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, which will increase the Alaskan fighter fleet by at least a third. In February, the Air Force wrapped up cold-weather testing of the F-35 that proved the new radar-evading warplane can function in the Arctic climate. “We’re pushing the F-35 to its environmental limits,” said Billie Flynn, an F-35 test pilot, “ranging from 120 degrees Fahrenheit to negative 40 degrees, and every possible weather condition in between.” In a kind of literal Cold War, Russian forces will continue to dominate the surface of the Arctic Ocean while the American military preserves its edge below and above the ice. Meanwhile, both countries are training thousands of ground troops for Arctic ops — just in case the Cold War turns hot in the thawing polar region.

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	1	+2016-11-14 05:17:32.125

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	1	+Sunset bhat Neg

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	1	+SO - Armenia Dependence DA

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