Tournament: Loyola | Round: 1 | Opponent: Polytechnic JL | Judge: Felix Tan
The standard is maximizing expected well-being.
Personal Identity is irrelevant, we can separate our brains and become separate streams of thought.
Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands
Given the absence of identity only utilitarianism makes sense
Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory
Only utilitarianism can serve as the basis to legitimately justify policy to the public. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens. The only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is utilitarianism.
Gary Woller BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, Also, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
Meltdowns are inevitable – other models are flawed
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) LADI
Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more often than estimated in the past. The researchers also determined that, in the event of such a major accident, half of the radioactive caesium-137 would be spread over an area of more than 1,000 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor. Their results show that Western Europe is likely to be contaminated about once in 50 years by more than 40 kilobecquerel of caesium-137 per square meter. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an area is defined as being contaminated with radiation from this amount onwards. In view of their findings, the researchers call for an in-depth analysis and reassessment of the risks associated with nuclear power plants. The reactor accident in Fukushima has fuelled the discussion about nuclear energy and triggered Germany's exit from their nuclear power program. It appears that the global risk of such a catastrophe is higher than previously thought, a result of a study carried out by a research team led by Jos Lelieveld, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz: "After Fukushima, the prospect of such an incident occurring again came into question, and whether we can actually calculate the radioactive fallout using our atmospheric models." According to the results of the study, a nuclear meltdown in one of the reactors in operation worldwide is likely to occur once in 10 to 20 years. Currently, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation, and 60 more are planned. To determine the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown, the researchers applied a simple calculation. They divided the operating hours of all civilian nuclear reactors in the world, from the commissioning of the first up to the present, by the number of reactor meltdowns that have actually occurred. The total number of operating hours is 14,500 years, the number of reactor meltdowns comes to four -- one in Chernobyl and three in Fukushima. This translates into one major accident, being defined according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), every 3,625 years. Even if this result is conservatively rounded to one major accident every 5,000 reactor years, the risk is 200 times higher than the estimate for catastrophic, non-contained core meltdowns made by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1990. The Mainz researchers did not distinguish ages and types of reactors, or whether they are located in regions of enhanced risks, for example by earthquakes. After all, nobody had anticipated the reactor catastrophe in Japan.
Contamination spreads rapidly – no one is safe
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) LADI
25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. "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.
Fukushima proves the damage to the environment and human health is irreversible
Rosen 12 -- Dr Alex Rosen, University Clinic Düsseldorf, Department of General Pediatrics, (“Effects of the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns on environment and health” March 9th, 2012, https://www.ippnw.de/commonFiles/pdfs/Atomenergie/FukushimaBackgroundPaper.pdf) LADI
The Tōhoku earthquake on March 11th, 2011 led to multiple nuclear meltdowns in the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Northern Japan. Radioactive emissions from the plant caused widespread radioactive contamination of the entire region. The vast majority of the nuclear fallout occurred over the North Pacific, constituting the largest radioactive contamination of the oceans ever recorded. Soil and water samples, as well as marine animals have been found to be highly contaminated. Increased levels of radioactivity were recorded at all radiation measuring posts in the Northern Hemisphere. Fallout contaminated large parts of Eastern Honshu island, including the Tokyo metropolitan area. Within a 20 km radius, up to 200,000 people had to leave their homes. Outside of this evacuation zone, the radioactive fallout contaminated more than 870 km2 of land, home to about 70,000 people who were not evacuated. These people were exposed to harmful radioisotopes and now have an increased risk to develop cancer or other radiation-induced diseases. Many people still live in areas with high contamination. Food, milk and drinking water have been contaminated as well, leading to internal radiation exposure. Most severely affected are children, as their bodies are more susceptible to radiation damage. Preliminary tests have shown internal radioactive contamination of children with iodine-131 and caesium-137. It is too early to estimate the extent of health effects caused by the nuclear disaster. Taking into consideration the studies on Chernobyl survivors and the findings of the BEIR VII report, scientists will be able to estimate the effects once the true extent of radioactive emissions, fallout and contamination are better studied. Large-scale independent epidemiological studies are needed in order to better help the victims of this catastrophe. Claims by scientists affiliated with the nuclear industry that no health effects are to be expected are unscientific and immoral.
It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
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) LADI
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. 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. 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.
Biodiversity loss risks mass death of human and animal life - ecosystems aren’t resilient or redundant
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) LADI
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. 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. 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. 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.
Try or die— our efforts to improve tech aren’t working, only a shift away from nuclear solves
Byrne et al 09 - John Byrne - Distinguished Professor of Energy Climate Policy at the University of Delaware, Cecilia Martinez - research professor at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, Colin Ruggero - PhD Candidate at the New School for Social Research, teaching Sociology at the Community College of Philadelphia: (“Relocating Energy in the Social Commons Ideas for a Sustainable Energy Utility”, Sagepub Journals, Available at http://bst.sagepub.com/content/29/2/81.full.pdf+html, Accessed 8/13/16)IG
Shedding the institutions that created the prospect of climate change will not happen on the watch of the green titans or extra large nuclear power. The modern cornucopian political economy fueled by abundant, carbon-free energy machines will, in fact, risk the possibility of climate change continually because of the core properties of the modern institutional design. Although the abundant energy machine originated and matured in the United States and industrial Europe, the logic of unending growth built into the modern model has promoted its global spread. Today, both extra-large nuclear power and industrial-scale renewables are at the forefront of the trillion dollar clean energy technology development and transfer process envisioned for the globe (International Energy Agency, 2006). Nuclear energy is seen as offering unlimited potential for rapid development in India and China, while large-scale renewables seamlessly fit into existing international financial aid schemes. A burgeoning renewables industry boasts economic opportunities in standardization and certification for delivering green titans to developing countries. If institutional change is to occur, if energy-society relations are to be transformed, and if the threat of global warming is to be earnestly addressed, we will have to design and experiment with alternatives other than these. Given the global character of the challenge, cookie cutter counter-strategies are certain to fail. Often, outside the box alternatives may not be sensible in the modern context. Like a paradigm shift, we need ideas, and actions guided by them, which fail in one context (here, specifically, the context of energy obesity) in order hopefully to support the appearance of a new context. The concept and practice of a sustainable energy utility is offered in this spirit.11 The sustainable energy utility (SEU) involves the creation of an institution with the explicit purpose of enabling communities to reduce and eventually eliminate use of obese energy resources and reliance on obese energy organizations. It is formed as a nonprofit organization to support commons energy development and management. Unlike its for-profit contemporaries, it has no financial or other interest in commodification of energy, ecological, or social relations; its success lies wholly in the creation of shared benefits and responsibilities. The SEU is not a panacea nor is it a blueprint for fixing our energy-carbon problems. It is a strategy to change energy-ecology-society relations. It may not work, but we believe it is worth the effort to invent and pursue the possibility. There should be little doubt about the difficulty of the task. Regimes develop through the interplay of technology and society over time, rather than through prescribed programs. They alter history and then seek to prevent its change, except in ways that bolster regime power. Of specific importance here, obese utilities will not simply cede political and economic success to an antithetical institution—the SEU. That is why change is so hard to realize. Shifting a society towards a new energy regime requires diverse actors working in tandem, across all areas of regime influence. Economic models, political will, social norm development, all these things must be shifted, rather than pulled, from the current paradigm. The SEU constructs energy–ecology-society relations as phenomena of a commons governance regime. It explicitly reframes the preeminent obese energy regime organization—the energy utility—in the antithetical context of using less energy. And, when energy use is needed, it relies on renewable sources available to and therefore governable by the community of users (rather than the titan technology approach of governance by producers). In contrast to the cornucopian strategy of expanding inputs in an effort to endlessly feed the obese regime, the SEU focuses on techniques and social arrangements which can serve the aims of sustainability and equity. It combines political and economic change for the purpose of building a postmodern energy commons; that is, a form of political economy that relies on commons, rather than commodity, relations for its evolution. Specifically, it uses the ideas of a commonwealth economy and a community trust to achieve the goal of postmodern energy sustainability. The meanings of commonwealth, community trust, and commons, relevant to a SEU, are explored below.
BioD key to the poverty and the economy
PLTA 14 (Pennsylvania Land Trust Association) “Economic Benefits of Biodiversity” Conservationtools.org Feb 24 AT
Biodiversity Underpins Economic Activity Agriculture, forestry and fisheries products, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services depend upon the conservation of biological diversity. Food production relies on biodiversity for a variety of food plants, pollination, pest control, nutrient provision, genetic diversity, and disease prevention and control. Both medicinal plants and manufactured pharmaceuticals rely on biodiversity. Decreased biodiversity can lead to increased transmission of diseases to humans and increased healthcare costs. The outdoor tourism industry relies on biodiversity to create and maintain that which tourists come to see, as does the multi-billion dollar fishing and hunting industry. Related Benefits While this guide focuses on economic benefits, it is not meant to diminish the importance of the environmental and social benefits of biodiversity. Related guides at ConservationTools.org include: Economic Benefits of Land Conservation Economic Benefits of Parks Economic Benefits of Trails Economic Benefits of Smart Growth and Costs of Sprawl Organization of This Guide This guide presents an inventory of studies. The heading of each section is the title of the study and is hyperlinked to the ConservationTools.org library listing where the study can be viewed or downloaded. The organization responsible for the study is given, followed by a summary of the key economic findings of the study. Economic Impact Studies Economic and Environmental Benefits of Biodiversity BioScience Maintaining biodiversity is essential for organic waste disposal, soil formation, biological nitrogen fixation, crop and livestock genetics, biological pest control, plant pollination, and pharmaceuticals. Plants and microbes help to degrade chemical pollutants and organic wastes and cycle nutrients through the ecosystem. For example: Pollinators, including bees and butterflies, provide significant environmental and economic benefits to agricultural and natural ecosystems, including adding diversity and productivity to food crops. As many as one-third of the world’s food production relies directly or indirectly on insect pollination. About 130 of the crops gown in the United States are insect pollinated. Habitat fragmentation and loss adversely affects pollinator food sources, nesting sites, and mating sites, causing precipitous declines in the populations of wild pollinators. There are 6 million tons of food products harvested annually from terrestrial wild biota in the United States including large and small animals, maple syrup, nuts, blueberries and algae. The 6 billion tons of food are valued at $57 million and add $3 billion to the country’s economy (1995 calculations). Approximately 75 (by weight) of the 100,000 chemicals released into the environment can be degraded by biological organisms and are potential targets of both bioremediation and biotreatment. The savings gained by using bioremediation instead of the other available techniques; physical, chemical and thermal; to remediate chemical pollution worldwide give an annual benefit of $135 billion (1997 calculation). Maintaining biodiversity in soils and water is imperative to the continued and improved effectiveness of bioremediation and biotreatment. Biodiversity is essential for the sustainable functioning of the agricultural, forest, and natural ecosystems on which humans depend, but human activities, especially the development of natural lands, are causing a species extinction rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. The authors estimate that in the United States, biodiversity provides a total of $319 billion dollars in annual benefits and $2,928 billion in annual benefits worldwide (1997 calculation) Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Poverty Alleviation: A State of Knowledge Review Convention on Biological Diversity Biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction are two global challenges that are inextricably linked. But biodiversity is generally a public good, so it is under-valued, or not valued at all, in national economies. This paper focuses on the question “which groups of the (differentiated) poor depend, in which types of ways, on different elements of biological diversity?” It focuses on biodiversity as a means of subsistence and income to the poor and biodiversity as insurance to prevent the poor from falling even deeper into poverty. Ten conservation mechanisms that can reduce poverty in the rural poor are identified: non-timber forest products, community timber enterprises, payments for environmental services, nature-based tourism, fish spillover, mangrove restoration, protected area jobs, agroforestry, grasslands management, and agrobiodiversity conservation. There are caveats to these links. The poor depend disproportionately on biodiversity for their subsistence needs and biodiversity conservation can be a route out of poverty under some circumstances. However, it is often the relatively low value or inferior goods that are most significant to the poor, and the more affluent’s pursuit of the higher commercial value often crowds out the poor. The scale of poverty reduction may be small; conservation interventions do not necessarily lend themselves to poverty interventions. A focus on the cash benefits of biodiversity conservation is too limited; it excludes the ability to meet basic human needs. And biomass may matter more in the short term, biodiversity (as the foundation for biomass) more in the long term. Conserving Biological Diversity in Agricultural/Forestry Systems Bioscience Both high agricultural productivity and human health depend on the activity of a diverse natural biota. Efforts to curb the loss of biodiversity have intensified in recent years, but they have not kept pace with the growing encroachment of human activities. An estimated $20 billion year is spent worldwide on pesticides. Yet, parasites and predators existing in natural ecosystems provide an estimated 5-10 times this amount of the pest control. Without the existence of natural enemies, crop losses by pests in agriculture and forestry would be catastrophic and costs of chemical pest controls would escalate enormously. A diverse group of microbes fix nitrogen from the atmosphere for use by crops and forests. An estimated $7 billion of nitrogen is supplied to US agriculture each year by nitrogen-fixing microbes and 90 million tons a year for use by agriculture worldwide with a value of almost $50 billion.
Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
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) LADI
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.
—President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Risk of nuclear terrorism is real and high now – extinction
Bunn et al 14 Matthew, Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, with Martin Malin, Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Nickolas Roth, Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom, and William Tobey, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, March, “Advancing Nuclear Security: Evaluating Progress and Setting New Goals,” The Project on Managing the Atom, pg. 5-9/AKG
Unfortunately, nuclear and radiological terrorism remain real and dangerous threats.1 The conclusion the assembled leaders reached at the Washington Nuclear Security Summit and reaffirmed in Seoul remains correct: “Nuclear terrorism continues to be one of the most challenging threats to international security. Defeating this threat requires strong national measures and international cooperation given its potential global political, economic, social, and psychological consequences.”2 There are three types of nuclear or radiological terrorist attack: • Nuclear weapons. Terrorists might be able to get and detonate an assembled nuclear weapon made by a state, or make a crude nuclear bomb from stolen separated plutonium or HEU. This would be the most difficult type of nuclear terrorism for terrorists to accomplish—but the devastation could be absolutely horrifying, with political and economic aftershocks reverberating around the world. • “Dirty bombs.” A far simpler approach would be for terrorists to obtain radiological materials—available in hospitals, industrial sites, and more—and disperse them to contaminate an area with radioactivity, using explosives or any number of other means. In most scenarios of such attacks, few people would die from the radiation—but the attack could spread fear, force the evacuation of many blocks of a major city, and inflict billions of dollars in costs of cleanup and economic disruption. While a dirty bomb attack would be much easier for terrorists to carry out than an attack using a nuclear explosive, the consequences would be far less—an expensive and disruptive mess, but not the heart of a major city going up in smoke. • Nuclear sabotage. Terrorists could potentially cause a Fukushima-like meltdown at a nuclear reactor or sabotage a spent fuel pool or high-level waste store. An unsuccessful sabotage would have little effect, but a successful one could spread radioactive material over a huge area. Both the scale of the consequences and the difficulty of carrying out a successful attack would be intermediate between nuclear weapons and dirty bombs. Overall, while actual terrorist use of a nuclear weapon may be the least likely of these dangers, its consequences would be so overwhelming that we believe it poses the most significant risk. A similar judgment drove the decision to focus the four-year effort on securing nuclear weapons and the materials needed to make them. Most of this report will focus on the threat of terrorist use of nuclear explosives, but the overall global governance framework for nuclear security is relevant to all of these dangers. The danger of nuclear terrorism is driven by three key factors—terrorist intent to escalate to the nuclear level of violence; potential terrorist capability to do so; and the vulnerability of nuclear weapons and the materials needed to enable terrorists to carry out such an attack—the motive, means, and opportunity of a monstrous crime. Terrorist intent. While most terrorist groups are still focused on small-scale violence for local political purposes, we now live in an age that includes some groups intent on inflicting large-scale destruction to achieve their objectives. Over the past quarter century, both al Qaeda and the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo seriously sought nuclear weapons and the nuclear materials and expertise needed to make them. Al Qaeda had a focused program reporting directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri (now head of the group), which progressed as far as carrying out crude but sensible conventional explosive tests for the nuclear program in the desert of Afghanistan. There is some evidence that North Caucusus terrorists also sought nuclear weapons—including incidents in which terrorist teams were caught carrying out reconnaissance on Russian nuclear weapon storage sites, whose locations are secret.3 Despite the death of Osama bin Laden and the severe disruption of the core of al Qaeda, there are no grounds for complacency. There is every reason to believe Zawahiri remains eager to inflict destruction on a nuclear scale. Indeed, despite the large number of al Qaeda leaders who have been killed or captured, nearly all of the key players in al Qaeda’s nuclear program remain alive and at large—including Abdel Aziz al-Masri, an Egyptian explosives expert who was al Qaeda’s “nuclear CEO.” In 2003, when al Qaeda operatives were negotiating to buy three of what they thought were nuclear weapons, senior al Qaeda officials told them to go ahead and make the purchase if a Pakistani expert with equipment confirmed the items were genuine. The US government has never managed to determine who the Pakistani nuclear weapons expert was in whom al Qaeda had such confidence—and what he may have been doing in the intervening decade. More fundamentally, with at least two, and probably three, groups having gone down this path in the past 25 years, there is no reason to expect they will be the last. The danger of nuclear terrorism will remain as long as nuclear weapons, the materials needed to make them, and terrorist groups bent on large-scale destruction co-exist. Potential terrorist capabilities. No one knows what capabilities a secret cell of al Qaeda may have managed to retain or build. Unfortunately, it does not take a Manhattan Project to make a nuclear bomb—indeed, over 90 percent of the Manhattan Project effort was focused on making the nuclear materials, not on designing and building the weapons. Numerous studies by the United States and other governments have concluded that it is plausible that a sophisticated terrorist group could make a crude nuclear bomb if it got enough separated plutonium or HEU.4 A “gun-type” bomb, such as the weapon that obliterated Hiroshima, fundamentally involves slamming two pieces of HEU together at high speed. An “implosion-type” bomb, which is needed to get a sub-stantial explosive yield from plutonium, requires crushing nuclear material to a higher density—a more complex task, but still plausible for terrorists, especially if they got knowledgeable help. Many analysts argue that, since states spend billions of dollars and assign hundreds or thousands of people to building nuclear weapons, it is totally implausible that terrorists could carry out this task. Unfortunately, this argument is wrong, for two reasons. First, as the Manhattan Project statistic suggests, the difficult part of making a nuclear bomb is making the nuclear material. That is what states spend billions seeking to accomplish. Terrorists are highly unlikely to ever be able to make their own bomb material—but if they could get stolen material, that step would be bypassed. Second, it is far easier to make a crude, unsafe, unreliable bomb of uncertain yield, which might be delivered in the back of a truck, than to make the kind of nuclear weapon a state would want in its arsenal—a safe, reliable weapon of known yield that can be delivered by missile or combat aircraft. It is highly unlikely terrorists will ever be able to build that kind of nuclear weapon. Remaining vulnerabilities. While many countries have done a great deal to strengthen nuclear security, serious vulnerabilities remain. Around the world, there are stocks of nuclear weapons or materials whose security systems are not sufficient to protect against the full range of plausible outsider and insider threats they may face. As incidents like the intrusion at Y-12 in the United States in 2012 make clear, many nuclear facilities and transporters still grapple with serious problems of security culture. It is fair to say that every country where nuclear weapons, weapons-usable nuclear materials, major nuclear facilities, or dangerous radiological sources exist has more to do to ensure that these items are sustainably secured and accounted for. At least three lines of evidence confirm that important nuclear security weaknesses continue to exist. First, seizures of stolen HEU and separated plutonium continue to occur, including, mostly recently HEU seizures in 2003, 2006, 2010, and 2011.5 These seizures may result from material stolen long ago, but, at a minimum, they make clear that stocks of HEU and plutonium remain outside of regulatory control. Second, in cases where countries do realistic tests to probe whether security systems can protect against teams of clever adversaries determined to find a weak point, the adversaries sometimes succeed—even when their capabilities are within the set of threats the security system is designed to protect against. This happens with some regularity in the United States (though less often than before the 9/11 attacks); if more countries carried out comparable performance tests, one would likely see similar results. Third, in real non-nuclear thefts and terrorist attacks around the world, adversaries sometimes demonstrate capabilities and tactics well beyond what many nuclear security systems would likely be able to handle (see the discussion of the recent Västberga incident in Sweden). Of course, the initial theft of nuclear material would be only the first step. Adversaries would have to smuggle the material to wherever they wanted to make their bomb, and ultimately to the target. A variety of measures have been put in place in recent years to try to stop nuclear smuggling, from radiation detectors to national teams trained and equipped to deal with nuclear smuggling cases—and more should certainly be done. But once nuclear material has left the facility where it is supposed to be, it could be anywhere, and finding and recovering it poses an enormous challenge. The immense length of national borders, the huge scale of legitimate traffic, the myriad potential pathways across these borders, and the small size and weak radiation signal of the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb make nuclear smuggling extraordinarily difficult to stop. There is also the danger that a state such as North Korea might consciously decide to provide nuclear weapons or the materials needed to make them to terrorists. This possibility cannot be ruled out, but there is strong reason to believe that such conscious state decisions to provide these capabilities are a small part of the overall risk of nuclear terrorism. Dictators determined to maintain their power are highly unlikely to hand over the greatest weapon they have to terrorist groups they cannot control, who might well use it in ways that would provoke retaliation that would remove the dictator from power forever. Although nuclear forensics is by no means perfect, it would be only one of many lines of evidence that could potentially point back to the state that provided the materials; no state could ever be confident they could make such a transfer withoutbeing caught.6 And terrorists are unlikely to have enough money to make a substantial difference in either the odds of regime survival or the wealth of a regime’s elites, even in North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth. On the other hand, serious risks would arise in North Korea, or other nuclear-armed states, in the event of state collapse—and as North Korea’s stockpile grows, one could imagine a general managing some of that stockpile concluding he could sell a piece of it and provide a golden parachute for himself and his family without getting caught. No one knows the real likelihood of nuclear terrorism. But the consequences of a terrorist nuclear blast would be so catastrophic that even a small chance is enough to justify urgent action to reduce the risk. The heart of a major city could be reduced to a smoldering radioactive ruin, leaving tens to hundreds of thousands of people dead. The perpetrators or others might claim to have more weapons already hidden in other major cities and threaten to set them off if their demands were not met—potentially provoking uncontrolled evacuation of many urban centers. Devastating economic consequences would reverberate worldwide. Kofi Annan, while serving as Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned that the global economic effects of a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city would push “tens of millions of people into dire poverty,” creating a “second death toll throughout the developing world.”7
Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.
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)
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
War is the root cause of structural violence
Goldstein 2001 – IR professor at American University (Joshua, War and Gender, p. 412, Google Books)
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps. among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So, “if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
It overwhelms barriers for expertise
Ackland 9 - Len Ackland, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism., (“Weapons proliferation a big risk with nuclear power” February 10, 2009, http://www.cejournal.net/?p=903) LADI
As Tom Yulsman points out in his Feb. 5 posting, the tight connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is seriously underplayed and often ignored in discussions about the so-called “need” for nuclear power to help meet energy demand while addressing global warming concerns. (Issues including accidents, terrorism, high-level nuclear waste disposal and economic costs are also important, but I won’t deal with them in this brief commentary.) While Tom mentions the concern over plutonium, which I’ll return to momentarily in responding to the questions from the commenter on the Feb. 5 post, remember that the convergence between nuclear power and weapons occurs at two points in the nuclear “fuel cycle” — the cradle-to-grave process beginning with uranium mining and ending with nuclear waste or incredible explosions. The first power-weapons crossover comes during uranium “enrichment,” after uranium ore is milled to extract uranium in the form called “yellow cake” that is then converted to uranium hexafluoride gas. Enrichment of the gas means increasing the amount of the fissile uranium-235 isotope, which comprises 0.7 percent of natural uranium, to the 3-6 percent needed to make fuel rods for commercial nuclear reactors. The same centrifuges (the modern technology of choice) that separate the U-235 from the U-238 can be kept running until the percentage of U-235 reaches about 90 percent and can be used for the kind of nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Enrichment — low for nuclear power plants and high for bombs — is at the heart of the current controversy over Iran’s plans and capabilities. The second power-weapons crossover comes when low-enriched uranium fuel is burned in nuclear reactors, whether military, civilian, or dual use. Neutrons produced in the chain reaction are captured by the U-238 to form U-239 then neptunium-239 which decays into plutonium-239, the key fissile isotope for nuclear weapons. Other plutonium isotopes, such as Pu-240, Pu-241, and Pu-242 are also produced. The extent to which the uranium fuel elements are irradiated is called “fuel burnup.” Basically, military reactors designed specifically to produce Pu-239 burn the fuel for shorter periods, a few weeks, before the fuel rods are removed from the reactors in order to minimize the buildup of Pu-240 and other elements. Commercial reactors, aimed at maximizing the energy output in order to produce electricity, burn the fuel for a year or so before the fuel rod assemblies are changed out. The used or “spent” fuel contains higher percentages of the undesirable (for bomb builders) plutonium isotopes. Dual-use reactors, such as the one that caused the Chernobyl accident in 1986, tend toward the shorter fuel burnup times. The plutonium in the spent fuel is the 20,000 kilograms that the Federation of American Scientists estimates is produced each year by the world’s currently operating 438 reactors. Other sources estimate the amount of plutonium in spent fuel as much higher. For a good description of these issues, see David Albright, et. al., “Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies,” SIPRI, Oxford U. Press, 1997. Finally, before the plutonium-239 created in nuclear reactors can be used in weapons, it must first be separated from the uranium, transuranics and other fission products. This is done in “reprocessing” plants and is often benignly referred to as plutonium recycling. Currently there are only a handful of commercial reprocessing facilities, the one in France and the one in the United Kingdom having operated the longest. Much of the plutonium extracted by these plants is mixed with uranium and reused for nuclear fuel in commercial reactors. But reprocessing plants also exist in countries using plutonium for nuclear weapons. Thus, North Korea, the most recent country to join the nine-member nuclear weapons “club,” made weapons through its reprocessing facility. The fact that a country like North Korea could accomplish the manufacture of nuclear weapons should give pause to those who advocate nuclear power plants as an answer to global warming. A plutonium economy and/or the presence of uranium enrichment facilities in many nations around the world are dangerous prospects. Even accepting the arguments that life-cycle analysis of nuclear plants — which takes into account the emissions from mining, construction and so forth — puts them on a par with renewable energy sources in terms of greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t overcome their disadvantages. And the assurance from nuclear advocates that the next generation of plants (Generation IV, still under development) will be more “proliferation resistant,” isn’t comforting given the technologists’ track record. And that still would be a long way from proliferation proof.
