Yes/No Warno war counterforcingcounter-forcing solves escalation of warsMueller 09 Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University(John, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda p. 8, Google Books)

To begin to approach a condition that can credibly justify applying such extreme characterizations as societal annihilation, a full-out attack with hundreds, probably thousands, of thermonuclear bombs would be required. Even in such extreme cases, the area actually devastated by the bombs' blast and thermal pulse effective would be limited: 2,000 1-MT explosions with a destructive radius of 5 miles each would directly demolish less than 5 percent of the territory of the United States, for example. Obviously, if major population centers were targeted, this sort of attack could inflict massive casualties. Back in cold war days, when such devastating events sometimes seemed uncomfortably likely, a number of studies were conducted to estimate the consequences of massive thermonuclear attacks. One of the most prominent of these considered several probabilities. The most likely scenario--one that could be perhaps considered at least to begin to approach the rational--was a "counterforce" strike in which well over 1,000 thermonuclear weapons would be targeted at America's ballistic missile silos, strategic airfields, and nuclear submarine bases in an effort to destroy the countrys strategic ability to retaliate. Since the attack would not directly target population centers, most of the ensuing deaths would be from radioactive fallout, and the study estimates that from 2 to 20 million, depending mostly on wind, weather, and sheltering, would perish during the first month.15

deterrencenuclear deterrence and unidirectional evolutionary trends check the impact Tepperman 09 Jonathan Tepperman, Deputy Editor of Newsweek, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, now Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, holds a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University, an M.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University, and an LL.M. in International Law from New York University, 2009 (Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb, The Daily Beast, August 28th, Available Online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/08/28/why-obama-should-learn-to-love-the-bomb.print.html, Accessed 01-27-2012)

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly undesirable. The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states." To understand whyand why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same wayyou need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win. The problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the other sideand millions of innocents pay the price. Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a buttonand everybody knows itthe basic math shifts. Even the craziest tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth the effort. As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?" Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the nuclear powers have scrupulously avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they always will. There have been some near misses, but a close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuringbecause in each instance, very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion. Take the mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time." The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flare-up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each country did what they had to do to avoid it. Nuclear pessimistsand there are manyinsist that even if this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goesand there's no deterring rogues. But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorismbut so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens. Yet when push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen. For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war, has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they have a death wish.

econNo scenario for great power war laundry listDeudney and Ikenberry, 09 Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins AND Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University (Jan/Feb, 2009, Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry, The Myth of the Autocratic Revival: Why Liberal Democracy Will Prevail, Foreign Affairs, NG)

This bleak outlook is based on an exaggeration of recent developments and ignores powerful countervailing factors and forces. Indeed, contrary to what the revivalists describe, the most striking features of the contemporary international landscape are the intensification of economic globalization, thickening institutions, and shared problems of interdependence. The overall structure of the international system today is quite unlike that of the nineteenth century. Compared to older orders, the contemporary liberal-centered international order provides a set of constraints and opportunities-of pushes and pulls-that reduce the likelihood of severe conflict while creating strong imperatives for cooperative problem solving. Those invoking the nineteenth century as a model for the twenty-first also fail to acknowledge the extent to which war as a path to conflict resolution and great-power expansion has become largely obsolete. Most important, nuclear weapons have transformed great-power war from a routine feature of international politics into an exercise in national suicide. With all of the great powers possessing nuclear weapons and ample means to rapidly expand their deterrent forces, warfare among these states has truly become an option of last resort. The prospect of such great losses has instilled in the great powers a level of caution and restraint that effectively precludes major revisionist efforts. Furthermore, the diffusion of small arms and the near universality of nationalism have severely limited the ability of great powers to conquer and occupy territory inhabited by resisting populations (as Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Iraq have demonstrated). Unlike during the days of empire building in the nineteenth century, states today cannot translate great asymmetries of power into effective territorial control; at most, they can hope for loose hegemonic relationships that require them to give something in return. Also unlike in the nineteenth century, today the density of trade, investment, and production networks across international borders raises even more the costs of war. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, to take one of the most plausible cases of a future interstate war, would pose for the Chinese communist regime daunting economic costs, both domestic and international. Taken together, these changes in the economy of violence mean that the international system is far more primed for peace than the autocratic revivalists acknowledge.

miscalcNo miscalc or escalationevery crisis ever disproves and neither side would launchQuinlan 9 (Michael, Former Permanent Under-Sec. State UK Ministry of Defense, Thinking about Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-69) *we dont endorse gendered languageEven if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable momentum in a developing exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what the situation of the decisionmakers would really be. Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to call a halt. Both, given the capacity for evasion or concealment which modem delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether newer nuclear-weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any substantial state with advanced technological capabilities, and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in the development of forces.) As a result, neither side can have any predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on copiously launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a judgement that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the attacked possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressor's own first use, this judgement would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial possibility of the aggressor leaders' concluding that their initial judgement had been mistakenthat the risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had been seeking, and that for their own country's survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgement and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the chance of its working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them the less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask what is the alternativeit can only be surrender. But a more positive and hopeful answer lies in the fact that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context. The context which concerned NATO during the cold war, for example, was one of defending vital interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged, or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital interests have been defined in a way that is dear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary, a credible basis has been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military environment of nuclear warfareparticularly difficulties of communication and controlwould drive escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as inevitably .so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle 'When in doubt, lash out', the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is `If this goes on to the end, we are all ruined'. Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction. Many types of weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as PALs incorporated to reinforce organizational ones. There were multiple communication and control systems for passing information, orders, and prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level of strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of conflict an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general fail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the arrangements which 1 a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption. The likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixedit would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him options for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a nuclear armoury of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if conflict does break out, for managing it, to a tolerable outcome--the only route, indeed, intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working out of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making the bigger, and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor volib wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. (The customary shorthand for this desirable posture used to be 'escalation dominance'.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state, with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-prevention structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear explosiona technical disaster at a storage site, for example, Dr the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live nuclear warhead. The second is that of some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended. No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an opposite extreme it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having happened for over sixty years). But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and weigh their reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life. There have certainly been, across the decades since 1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried (in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements----it no longer is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts of this long experience would however be that the probability of any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely low. It might be further noted that the mechanisms needed to set off such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in a large number of ways the past sixty years have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized detonation have included early decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments more widespread and diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by, indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear launch--extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival and more logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty years of experience presents itself once more: that the probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear-weapon possessor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely offers any ready example of major war started by accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase in caution. It was occasionally conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a potential adversary. No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years. The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decision-makers as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction.

trendsempirics and longitudinal trends the world is entering a new era of great power peaceFettweis, 10 Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs in the National Security Decision Making Department at the U.S. Naval War College, holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Comparative Politics from the University of Maryland-College Park, October 27, 2010 (Christopher J., Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace, Georgetown University Press, ISBN 978-1-58901-710-8, Chapter 4: Evaluating the Crystal Balls, p. 83-85)

The obsolescence-of-major-war vision of the future differs most drastically from all the others, including the neorealist, in its expectations of the future of conflict in the international system. If the post Cold War world conformed to neorealist and other pessimistic predictions, warfare ought to continue to be present at all levels of the system, appearing with increasing regularity once the stabilizing influence of bipolarity was removed. If the liberal-constructivist vision is correct, then the world ought to have seen not only no major wars, but also a decrease in the volume and intensity of all kinds of conflict in every region as well. The evidence supports the latter. Major wars tend to be rather memorable, so there is little need to demonstrate that there has been no such conflict since the end of the Cold War. But the data seem to support the trickledown theory of stability as well. Empirical analyses of warfare have consistently shown that the number of all types of warsinterstate, civil, ethnic, revolutionary, and so forth declined throughout the 1990s and into the new century, after a brief surge of postcolonial conflicts in the first few years of that decade. 2 Overall levels of conflict tell only part of the story, however. Many other aspects of international behavior, including some that might be considered secondary effects of warfare, are on the decline as well. Some of the more important, if perhaps under reported, aggregate global trends include the following: Ethnic conflict. Ethnonational wars for independence have declined to their lowest level since 1960, the first year for which we have data. 3 Repression and political discrimination against ethnic minorities. The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland has tracked a decline in the number of minority groups around the world that experience discrimination at the hands of states, from seventy-five in 1991 to forty-one in 2003. 4 War termination versus outbreak. War termination settlements have proven to be more stable over time, and the number of new conflicts is lower than ever before. 5 Magnitude of conflict/battle deaths. The average number of battle deaths per conflict per year has been steadily declining. 6 The risk for the average person of dying in battle has been plummeting since World War II and rather drastically so since the end of the Cold War. 7 Genocide. Since war is usually a necessary condition for genocide, 8 perhaps it should be unsurprising that the incidence of genocide and other mass slaughters declined by 90 percent between 1989 and 2005, memorable tragedies notwithstanding. 9 Coups. Armed overthrow of government is becoming increasingly rare, even as the number of national governments is expanding along with the number of states. 10 Would be coup plotters no longer garner the kind of automatic outside support that they could have expected during the Cold War, or at virtually any time of great power tension. Third party intervention. Those conflicts that do persist have less support from outside actors, just as the constructivists expected. When the great powers have intervened in local conflicts, it has usually been in the attempt to bring a conflict to an end or, in the case of Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, to punish aggression. 11 Human rights abuses. Though not completely gone, the number of large scale abuses of human rights is also declining. Overall, there has been a clear, if uneven, decrease in what the Human Security Centre calls one-sided violence against civilians since 1989. 12 Global military spending. World military spending declined by one third in the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 13 Today that spending is less than 2.5 percent of global GDP, which is about two-thirds of what it was during the Cold War. Terrorist attacks. In perhaps the most counterintuitive trend, the number of worldwide terrorist incidents is far smaller than it was during the Cold War. If Iraq and South Asia were to be removed from the data, a clear, steady downward trend would become apparent. There were 300 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1991, for instance, and 58 in 2005. 14 International conflict and crises have steadily declined in number and intensity since the end of the Cold War. By virtually all measures, the world is a far more peaceful place than it has been at any time in recorded history. Taken together, these trends seem to suggest that the rules by which international politics are run may indeed be changing.

Yes War1NCWar is possible--geopoliticsFerguson 8 [Niall Prof History @ Harvard. Hoover Digest, No 1 Winter 2008]The risk of a major geopolitical crisis in 2007 is certainly lower than it was in 1914. Yet it is not so low as to lie altogether beyond the realm of probability. The escalation of violence in the Middle East as Iraq disintegrates and Iran presses on with its nuclear program is close to being a certainty, as are the growing insecurity of Israel and the impossibility of any meaningful U.S. exit from the region. All may be harmonious between the United States and China today, yet the potential for tension over trade and exchange rates has unquestionably increased since the Democrats gained control of Congress. Nor should we forget about security flashpoints such as the independence of Taiwan, the threat of North Korea, and the nonnuclear status of Japan. To consign political risk to the realm of uncertainty seems almost as rash today as it was in the years leading up the First World War. Anglo-German economic commercial ties reached a peak in 1914, but geopolitics trumped economics. It often does.

Great power wars are possibleour DA proves its likelyKagan 99 [Donald. Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics at Yale University History Is Full Of Surprises, Survival, Volume 41, Number 2, Summer, p. 141]Now having said all this, even if all these men were wrong, this does not mean that Michael Mandelbaum cannot be right. But it should inspire some degree of modesty and caution. In fact Mandelbaum is very cautious in the language that he uses. Major war is not necessarily finished, he concedes. It's not dead, it's obsolete. This is a charming term that seems to say more than it does, because that allows Mandelbaum to draw back from the more total claims later on. A major war is unlikely but not unthinkable, which is to say he thinks it can happen. It is obsolete, he writes, in the sense that it is no longer fashionable. To pick up the metaphor is to see some of its limitations as well as its charm. Is war really a matter of fashion? And even if it is, don't we have to face the fact that there are some people who choose to be unfashionable, and then there are other people who have never heard of fashion in the first place? China and Russia are two cases to which the writer points. He identifies the Taiwan Straits and the Russo-Ukrainian border as places where wars may well break out, should they erupt anywhere. They are the 'potential Sarajevos of the twenty-first century'. He is right. And, of course, it is this concession, however genuinely and generously and modestly expressed, that gives away the game. Since there are at least two places where major wars between great powers might well break out even today and two are quite enough it seems to me that his entire thesis is undermined.

Breaking the nuclear taboo ensures escalationAlagappa 9 [Muthiah. The Long Shadow, 2009, Pg 480-1]Nuclear weapons cast a long shadow that informs in fundamental ways the strategic policies and behavior of major powers (all but one of which possess nuclear weapons), their allies, and those states facing existential threats. They induce caution and set boundaries to the strategic interaction of nuclear weapon states and condition the role and use of force in their interactions. The danger of escalation limits military options in a crisis between nuclear weapon states and shapes the purpose and manner in which military force is used. Although relevant only in a small number of situations, these include the most serious regional conflicts that could escalate to large-scale war. Nuclear weapons help prevent the outbreak of hostilities, keep hostilities limited when they do break out, and prevent their escalation to major wars. Nuclear weapons enable weaker powers to deter stronger adversaries and help ameliorate the effects of imbalance in conventional military capability. By providing insurance to cope with unanticipated contingencies, they reduce immediate anxieties over military imbalances and vulnerabilities. Nuclear weapons enable major powers to take a long view of the strategic environment, set a moderate pace for their force development, and focus on other national priorities, including mutually beneficial interaction with other nuclear weapon states. Although nuclear weapons by themselves do not confer major power status, they are an important ingredient of power for countries that conduct themselves in a responsible manner and are experiencing rapid growth in other dimensions of power.

The magnitude of our impact means it should come firstKrieger 9 [David. President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Still Loving the Bomb after All These Years www.wagingpeace.org September 2009]Jonathan Teppermans article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb, provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous. Rather, in Teppermans world, The bomb may actually make us safer. Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as the leading nuclear optimist. Waltz expresses his optimism in this way: Weve now had 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. Its striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states. Actually, there were a number of proxy wars between nuclear weapons states, such as those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and some near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltzs logic is akin to observing a man falling from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64 floors without anything bad happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that others should try it. Dangerous logic! Tepperman builds upon Waltzs logic, and concludes that all states are rational, even though their leaders may have a lot of bad qualities, including being stupid, petty, venal, even evil. He asks us to trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear retaliation, because these weapons make the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Actually, he is asking us to do more than trust in the rationality of leaders; he is asking us to gamble the future on this proposition. The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, Tepperman argues, its led to whats known as the nuclear peace. But if this is a peace worthy of the name, which it isnt, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization. One irrational leader with control over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a global Hiroshima. Tepperman celebrates the iron logic of deterrence, but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted in iron logic. It is a theory based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the other countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out. The longer that nuclear weapons are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A with impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and therefore precarious. Most of the countries in the world reject the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that the spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in which some states possess nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even unwise. If some additional states, including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldnt be so bad given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior. Those who oppose Teppermans favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as nuclear pessimists. These would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see nuclear weapons as presenting an urgent danger to our security, our species and our future. Tepperman finds that when viewed from his nuclear optimist perspective, nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. Nuclear peace, he tells us, rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad conventional war wont happen. But the extremely bad thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species. Yes, that would be serious. He also doesnt make the case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional war would increase dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have prevented wars, or would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war. As an ultimate celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a survivable second strike option. Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security. Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other nuclear weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack. Do we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman? Nuclear deterrence fails four reasonsLieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

Unfortunately, the increasingly influential perspective in Washington and the broader analytical community rests on a weak understanding of the role that nuclear weapons played during the Cold War, and it therefore overlooks the strategic continuities between the Cold War and the present. When one examines why NATO once relied so heavily on nuclear weapons, the continuities between past and present become clear, and the policies of those countries that are hold outs against the global campaign for nuclear arms reductions begin to make sense. In fact, nuclear deterrence will continue to be central to the conduct of international politics, now and long into the future. Moreover, the likelihood of intentional nuclear attacks - even against the United States - is far higher than most scholars and analysts realize. In short, nuclear deterrence is likely to be quite difficult in the foreseeable future. This report argues that the U.S. policy community has given too little attention to the problem of intra-war nuclear deterrence. Specifically, relatively weak but nuclear-armed countries - including potential adversaries of the United States - will face intense pressures during conventional wars to use nuclear weapons coercively to create a stalemate and avoid a calamitous military defeat. The United States has little experience at deterring intra-war nuclear escalation. It has fought conventional wars against states with nuclear-armed allies, but never directly against a nuclear-armed adversary. That fact may soon change. Given the United States global military commitments and the spread of nuclear weapons to potential U.S. adversaries, the United States could soon find itself engaged in conventional operations against a regional nuclear-armed adversary. Regional adversaries cannot match U.S. conventional military power, and conventional defeat is often extraordinarily costly for adversary leaders and their regimes. Therefore, regional adversaries face powerful incentives to employ nuclear weapons coercively to stalemate the United States before suffering major battlefield defeats and the attendant catastrophic consequences. This report makes four principal arguments: First, nuclear weapons are just as salient today as they were in the past. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were enormously valuable because one set of countries (members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO) lacked the conventional military power to defend itself from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Nuclear weapons allowed the weak side to deter the strong one. And had war erupted, nuclear weapons would have given the weak side its best hope of fighting the strong side to a stalemate. The Cold War is over, but the underlying conditions that made nuclear weapons vital then still exist today. All that has changed are the seats at the table. In the past the United States and its allies felt weak, and not surprisingly they tightly gripped their nuclear weapons. Today, most of those countries feel strong, and - not surprisingly - nuclear weapons suddenly seem anachronistic to them. But the end of the Cold War did not make every country safe; in fact, many of Americas potential adversaries face the same overarching problem today that NATO faced during the Cold War: how to deter and if necessary stalemate an adversary that possesses overwhelming conventional military power. The platitude that nuclear weapons are not well suited to the security threats of the 21st century is incorrect; it is more accurate to say that they are not well suited to the security problems that confront the United States in the 21st century. But for those who fear U.S. military might - or who fear other strong states - nuclear weapons are as helpful as they were for NATO during the Cold War. Second, weak states face powerful incentives to use nuclear weapons if they find themselves in a conventional war against a much stronger adversary. Scholars and policy analysts who study deterrence often claim that no rational leader would use nuclear weapons against a country that could respond in kind - let alone a country that could respond with far greater force. But this is incorrect. Analysts who make this claim conflate the logic of peacetime deterrence with the logic of war. Leaders facing the prospect of imminent defeat have compelling reasons to escalate coercively - with nuclear weapons - to bring about a ceasefire. Coercive nuclear escalation by the weaker side forces the stronger side to choose among several options - all of which are grim. It is because all of those options are unattractive that an adversary will be tempted to escalate in the first place. Viewed through this lens, Pakistan may have powerful, rational reasons to use nuclear weapons if it is losing a conventional war to India; North Korea has powerful reasons to use nuclear weapons coercively, rather than permit its enemies to prevail in a war. And Chinese leaders would face some of these same incentives if their armed forces were suffering a humiliating defeat in a war in maritime East Asia. In short, an escalatory strategy is cold-blooded, but not far-fetched - indeed, it was NATOs policy for nearly thirty years. Third, this report shows that the logic of coercive nuclear escalation is well understood by countries around the world. Coercive nuclear escalation is not a theoretical possibility; it is reflected in the defense plans and nuclear employment doctrines of several nuclear-armed states. We identify the conditions under which states would be most likely to build defense plans around doctrines of coercive nuclear escalation; we then sort nuclear-armed countries according to those conditions; finally, we show that those states that should have adopted coercive nuclear doctrines (according to our argument) have actually done so. Fourth, this report identifies global hotspots where plausible conventional conflicts are most likely to trigger dangerous escalatory dynamics. We posit a set of exacerbating conditions - including the prospect of conquest, regime change, and the escalatory nature of certain military operations - which make escalation during conventional war more likely, and then we use those conditions to distinguish the hotspots which pose high risks of escalation from those that pose lower levels of risk. We find that most of the worlds most dangerous conflicts - i.e., those that create the greatest incentives for combatants to use nuclear weapons -involve the United States: including war on the Korean Peninsula, conflicts in maritime East Asia, and (in the future) war in the Strait of Hormuz. To be sure, an India-Pakistan conflict would trigger dangerous escalatory dynamics, but a South Asian conflict - which has appropriately attracted considerable attention because of the grave risks of escalation - appears no more dangerous (and, in fact, may be less combustible) than several quite plausible future U.S. wars . Why do so many other analysts reach a different conclusion about the likelihood of deliberate nuclear escalation? One possibility is that scholars and other analysts typically think about peacetime nuclear deterrence (preventing a surprise nuclear attack), rather than wartime deterrence (deterring nuclear escalation during conventional wars), the exception being the extensive literature on escalation risks during an India-Pakistan war. But surprisingly, even scholars who understand the difficulty of deterring escalation during a conventional war when applied to South Asian security dynamics, argue elsewhere that rational leaders would never use nuclear weapons against the United States. But if analysts believe that Pakistan (the weak) could use nuclear weapons to prevent conventional defeat (even though Pakistan cannot win a nuclear war), why would the same analysts dismiss the possibility that North Korea, or in the future Iran, or possibly China, would use nuclear weapons in an escalatory fashion against a strong nemesis?

AT: DemocracyDemocracy doesnt solveTaner 2 [Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political science at Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; Research Associate at Syracuse Universitys global Affairs Institute; Editorial Assistant, International studies Review (Binnur Ozkececi-Taner, The Myth of Democratic Peace Theory: Theoretical and Empirical Shortcomings of The Democratic Peace Theory, Turkish School of international Relations, Vol. 1.3, http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume1/number3/binnurozkececi.htm]The discussion above suggests that the most important drawback of the "democratic peace" theory is the essentialization of the political regime as the only factor contributing to international peace and war. The 'democratic peace' theory underemphasizes, and most often neglects, the importance of other domestic factors such as political culture,(35) degree of development, socio-economic and military considerations,(36) the role of interest-groups and other domestic constituencies,(37) strategic culture(38) among others in decision-making. In other words, it is easily the case that the "democratic peace theory" lacks sensitivity to context and decision-making process. Although one should not dispute the fact that domestic political structure/regime type is an important component of any analysis of war and peace, this should be seen as only one of domestic variables, not necessarily the variable. Devoid of an analysis that gives respect to a number of other factors, superficial and sweeping generalizations will leave many details in decision-making unaccounted for. Consequently, although "democratic peace" theory should not be discarded entirely, current emphasis on the importance of "democracy" in eliminating bloody conflicts in the world should not blind scholars and policy circles alike to the fact that "democratic peace" is theoretically and empirically overdetermined

AT: MADMAD failsCimbala 7 [Stephen. Prof Poli Sci @ Penn State. Nuclear Proliferation and Deterrence in Asia: The View from Vladivostok Military Studies, Vol 20. 2007, Ebsco//GBS-JV]There is no magic number of nuclear-armed states that guarantees a first use of nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century. States will not become irrational on account of the possession of nuclear weapons: indeed, there is some experience during and after the Cold War to suggest that states might become more careful, rather than less. Many variables intrude here: including the intensity of regional rivalries; ethno-national and religious feelings; and, most immediately pertinent to our concerns, the pros and cons for deterrence and crisis stability of the forces themselves. Nevertheless, the propensity of heads of state for committing military follies should never be underestimated: especially by students of history and political science. The rationalities of states are not of the black box variety. States world views and decision making processes are the product of internal as much as external forces. A U.S. model of deterrence rationality may fail drastically in the imminent circumstances of a regional crisis. The strategic reach of Russian or American nuclear forces against lesser nuclear powers should not be overestimated. Iranians with scores to settle against Israel, Chinese intent upon annexation of Taiwan, or North Koreans seeking to intimidate Japan and South Korea, may not believe U.S. threats of preemption or retaliation. Russias policy of providing air defense missiles to Iran, increasing the difficulty of Israeli or American preemptive air strikes against Irans nuclear facilities, ironically invites the erosion of Russias own deterrence perimeter once the Iranians are nuclear capable. U.S. intelligence cannot be guaranteed to provide timely and accurate warning of nuclear attack by regional revisionist actors against neighbors: or others. U.S. intelligence has not infrequently been the victim of strategic or operational-tactical military surprise by non-Western opponents: from Pearl Harbor to 911. Timely and accurate intelligence is even less likely on the intentions or capabilities of non-state actors, compared to states. Intelligence on the best of days can give likelihoods and maybes for policy makers to mull over. One of the major risks of nuclear weapons spread in Asia is the possibility that states with first strike vulnerable nuclear forces will use them or lose them on the basis of faulty indications and warning.AT: Rationality

Rationality doesnt checkMozley 98 [Rob. Prof Physics Stanford.The Politics and Technology of Nuclear Proliferation 1998. Pg 15]Kenneth N. Waltz, who over a decade ago published The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, has been very influentia1. 10 In that paper he concluded that general proliferation would create a more stable situation among nations. His only qualification of this argument is the suggestion that the proliferation be gradual. His paper is comprehensive in its discussion of the dangers of proliferation. However, through his best-case analysis of these dangers, he reached the conclusion that more proliferation was better. Waltz's paper ignores the limitations of a generalization based on the single example of the Cold War. He is not bothered by the knowledge that each situation of conflict is different. He assumes that all national decisions are made rationally and that nations actually carry out the wishes of their leaders. He does not allow for errors, incompetence, or insubordination. In the case of nuclear war, this omission is particularly significant. In a situation in which a national leader does not want to start a conventional war, and finds that some of his directives are being ignored by the national bureaucracy, he will generally have time, measured in weeks, to correct any national actions he did not intend. If he is trying to correct actions that lead to nuclear war, he may have only a few minutes.AT: No RetaliationRetaliation is the policy of every nuclear stateit is certain in the world of one nuke Lindberg 4 [Tod, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB585.pdf 2004]This focus of attention is important. It reminds us that there is no sense in which the possession of a deterrent automatically deters. We must inquire into the mind of the party we wish to deter in order to determine whether deterrence is working.12 But in another sense, the focus is incomplete. Before we spend too much time on the mind of the party meant to be deterred, we should focus on the details of whats going on in the mind of the party trying to do the deterring. If a deterrent works better because it is more credible, then the exercise of proving it credible to the party one wishes to deter begins with the effort to persuade oneself that it is credible. Credibility begins at home. So we ask ourselves the following question: What would we do if someone launched an all-out nuclear attack on us? Or, what would we do in certain horrendous circumstances short of all-out nuclear attack? The answer we proffer is that we would unleash fury in return, up to the limit case, the complete annihilation of our enemy. And we do a number of things to demonstrate our intention, first of all to ourselves. We build an arsenal of vast power. We ensure that the inevitable vulnerabilities of any given component of it are offset by capabilities in other components. We have the triad; the ability to deliver strategic nuclear weapons by land-based missile, by long-range bomber, or by submarine-based missile. We develop weapons systems across a wide range of potential utility, from short-range nuclear artillery shells to intermediate-range missiles to multiwarhead long-range missiles. We have explosive power at our disposal in all magnitudes of which nuclear weapons are capable, from small charges for the local battlefield to the behemoth city incinerators of Armageddon.13 We have sought and achieved greater and greater precision in our targeting, enabling us to reduce the size of our warheads while still ensuring that the targets we are seeking will be destroyed. And we have hardened our nuclear facilities as well as command-communications-control (C3) links to the national command authority in order to withstand the worst an enemy offers and yet be able to strike back.14 This is not just a matter of hardware, of course. There is an extensive body of military doctrine on how use the weapons effectively. War games simulate every imaginable contingency to test these doctrines. The U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, one of nine unified commands world wide, has 2,500 personnel and coordinates the nuclear warfighting capability of personnel and equipment ranging in location from the White House and the Pentagon to Minuteman missile silos in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, to strategic submarine bases in Georgia and Washington, to communications satellites miles overhead.15 The literature of military affairs journals takes up warfighting questions at the unclassified level and the Pentagon is full of classified studies on the subject, from the January 10, 2002, Nuclear Posture Review on down. Beyond the capacity to wage nuclear war in response to a nuclear or other attack, the United States approaches the subject with a certain lan as well. Consider the mythos that has grown up around the football, the satchel containing the nuclear attack codes that is carried by a military officer who shadows the president of the United States at all times in case of surprise attack. Or consider further the psychological testing of military personnel who have nuclear warfighting responsibilities. We do not want a madman in close proximity to these weapons. Neither do we want someone unwilling, in a pinch, to unleash incineration when ordered. All of this is very real. There is no doubt that the United States could unleash all-out nuclear war. One day the drill could turn out to be the real thing and the hardware, personnel, doctrine, and lan (yes, sir, it is necessary, lawful, and just to fire this missile) could come together as planned. The worst-case scenario of planners nightmares could simply be the worst caseglobal devastation. We have ensured that all of this is entirely possible. We set out to persuade others about what we would do. But the first order of business in doing so is to persuade ourselves. It is not surprising that we were able to do so, nor is the fact that we have done so very illuminating. Whenever we found something that was less than convincing in our nuclear weaponry or our doctrine, we tried to replace it or improve upon it. The problem is that while the apparatus is real, in relation to the central questionwhat would the United States do if attacked in certain ways?it is only a simulacrum, an elaboration of a central contention that could never be proved by the apparatus because the construction of the apparatus presupposes it, namely, that we would retaliate with everything we have.

AT: No EscalationOne nuke is all it takesBetts 2k [Richard Professor and the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, ed. Utgoff p. 82]Quite opposite reactions are imaginable. The shock might jar sluggish statesmen into taking the danger seriously, cutting through diplomatic and military red tape, and undertaking dramatic actions to push the genie back in the bottle. Or the shock might prompt panic and a rush to stock up on WMD, as the possibility of use underlines the need for deterrent capability, or the effectiveness of such weapons as instruments of policy One seldom-noticed danger is that breakage of the taboo could demystify the weapons and make them look more conventional than our post-Hiroshima images of them. It helps to recall that in the 1930s, popular images of conventional strategic bombing were that it would be apocalyptic, bringing belligerent countries to their knees quickly. The apocalyptic image was fed by the German bombing of Guernica, a comparatively small city in Spain. When World War II came in Europe, both British and Germans initially refrained from bombing attacks on cities. Once city bombing began and gathered steam, however, it proved to be far less decisive than many had expected. British and German populations managed to adjust and absorb it. Over time, however, the ferocity of Allied bombing of Germany and Japan did approach the apocalyptic levels originally envisioned. In short, dire assumptions about the awesomeness of strategic bombing deterred its initiation, but once initiated did not prevent gradual escalation to the devastating level originally envisioned. Nuclear weapon inventories of countries like India and Pakistan are likely to remain small in number and yield for some time. According to press reports, by some U.S. estimates the yields of the 1998 tests were only a few kilotons. If the first weapon detonated in combat is a low-yield device in a large city with uneven terrain and lots of reinforced concrete, it might only destroy a small part of the city A bomb that killed 10,000 to 20,000 people would be seen as a stunning catastrophe, but there are now many parts of the world where that number would be less than 1 percent of a citys population. The disaster could seem surprisingly limited, since in the popular imagination (underwritten by the results in the small and flimsy cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), nuclear weapons mean one bomb, one city Awful destruction that yet seems surprisingly limited could prompt revisionist reactions among lay elites in some countries about the meaning of nuclear ordnance.

AT: Interdependence Interdependence doesnt solveJervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, Theories of War in an Era of Leading Power Peace, American Political Science Review 96:114]There are four general arguments against the pacific influence of interdependence. First, it is hard to go from the magnitude of economic flows to the costs that would be incurred if they were disrupted, and even more difficult to estimate how much political impact these costs will have, which depends on the other considerations at play and the political context. This means that we do not have a theory that tells us the magnitude of the effect. Second, even the sign of the effect can be disputed: interdependence can increase conflict as states gain bar- gaining leverage over each other, fear that others will exploit them, and face additional sources of disputes (Barbieri 1996; Keohane 2000, 2001; Waltz 1970, 1979, Chap. 7). These effects might not arise if states expect to remain at peace with each other, however. Third, it is clear that interdependence does not guarantee peace. High levels of economic integration did not prevent World War I, and nations that were much more unified than any security community have peacefully dissolved or fought civil wars. But this does not mean that inter- dependence is not conducive to peace. Fourth, interdependence may be more an effect than a cause, more the product than a generator of expectations of peace and cooperation. Russett and Oneal (2001, 136) try to meet this objection by correlating the level of trade in one year, not with peace in that year, but with peace in the following one. But this does not get to the heart of the matter since trade the year be- fore could be a product of expectations of future good relations.AT: International Organizations Organizations failJervis 2 [Robert, Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, Theories of War in an Era of Leading Power Peace, American Political Science Review 96:114]International Organizations. Even those who argue for the pacifying effect of common memberships in international organizations aver that the magnitude of this effect is relatively slight, at least in the short run (Russett and Oneal 2001, Chap. 5), and so my discussion is brief. The causal mechanisms are believed to be several: enhanced information flows, greater ability to solve problems peacefully, an increased stake in cooperative behavior linked to the risk of being ex- cluded from the organization if the state behaves badly, and possibly a heightened sense of common identity (Keohane 1984; much of the literature is summarized by Martin and Simmons 1998). Harder to pin down but perhaps most important are processes by which joint membership alters states' conceptions of their interest, leading them to see it not only as calling for cooperative reciprocations, but also as extending over a longer time- horizon and including benefits to others (Jervis 1999, 2001; March and Olsen 1998). The obvious reasons to doubt the importance of shared institutional membership are that the incentives do not seem great enough to tame strong conflicts of interest and that membership may be endogenous to common interests and peaceful relations. States that expect war with each other are less likely to join the same international organizations and political conflicts that are the precursors to war may destroy the institutions or drive some members out, as Japan and Germany withdrew from the League of Nations during the 1930s. Even with a strong correlation and reasonable con- trol variables, the direction of causality is difficult to establish.

AT: International Law ILaw failsGoldsmith and Posner 5 [American enterprise inst, book review, inst for public policy research (The Limits of International Law Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/sugimoto/law.pdf] As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law was as high as it had ever beenas high as it was at the end of World War I and World War II, for example. We can conveniently use 9/11 as the date on which this optimism ended, but there were undercurrents of pessimism even earlier. The UN played a relatively minor role in bringing the conflicts in the Balkans to the end. Members of the Security Council could not agree on the use of force in Kosovo, and the NATO intervention was thus a violation of international law. The various international criminal tribunals turned out to be cumbersome and expensive institutions, they brought relatively few people to justice, and they stirred up the ethnic tensions they were meant to quell. Aggressive international trade integration produced a violent backlash in many countries. Treaty mechanisms seemed too weak to solve the most serious global problems, including environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

AT: War is Slow Prolif ensures rapid escalationCirincione 7 [Joe, Pres. Ploughshares Fund and Senior Fellow and Dir. Nuclear Policy Center for American Progress, National Interest, Symposium: Apocalypse When? November/December ln]Let me be clear: Nuclear proliferation is a real danger. George Bush and John Kerry were correct when they agreed in a 2004 debate that it is the number one threat to America. The threat comes in four flavors. Most serious is nuclear terrorism. As terrible as another 9/11 attack would be, a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city, kill hundreds of thousands, wreck the economy and change the political life of the nation, perhaps permanently. Our number one priority must be to make sure any further terrorist attack is non-nuclear. Second is the danger from existing arsenals. There are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the planet several times over. Even a small regional war in South Asia using one hundred weapons would trigger a nuclear winter that could devastate food crops around the world. Accidental or unauthorized use is a real risk. Consider the September flight of a B-52 with six nuclear weapons that the crew didn't know they had. If the most sophisticated command-and-control mechanism in the world fails to stop the unauthorized possession of the equivalent of sixty Hiroshimas, what is going on in other nations? Third is the risk of new nuclear nations. I agree with Mueller that the danger here is not that Iran or North Korea would use a nuclear bomb against America or their neighbors. Deterrence is alive and well; they know what would happen next. Nor is it that these states would intentionally give a weapon they worked so hard to make to a terrorist group they could not control. Rather it is the risk of what could happen in the neighborhood: a nuclear reaction chain where states feel they must match each other's nuclear capability. Just such a reaction is underway already in the Middle East, as over a dozen Muslim nations suddenly declared interest in starting nuclear-power programs. This is not about energy; it is a nuclear hedge against Iran. It could lead to a Middle East with not one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, but four or five. That is a recipe for nuclear war. Finally, there is the risk of the collapse of the entire non-proliferation regime. Kennedy was right to worry about ten, fifteen or twenty nuclear nations. He did not make this number up. It was based on a 1958 NPT that warned that while there were then only three nuclear nations (the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom), "within the next decade a large number of individual countries could produce at least a few nominal-yield weapons." Indeed, several nations already had programs underway. Subsequent NPTs confirmed the proliferation danger and the linkage to existing arsenals. Other nations' decisions on proceeding with programs, the intelligence agencies concluded, were linked to "further progress in disarmament-aimed at effective controls and reduction of stockpiles." Kennedy negotiated a limited nuclear test ban and began the process to get the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty completed by Lyndon Johnson and ratified by Richard Nixon. This bipartisan dam held back the nuclear wave; its abandonment by the current administration risks a return to the 1950s nuclear free-for-all.AT: Try or DieDefault to short term impactsBarnhizer 6 [David Barnhizer, 6, prof of law, cleveland st U, waking from sustainabilitys impossible dream, Geo intl envtl law rev, ln]We need to abandon the rhetoric of sustainability and adapt strategies of accountability. Accept the clich that politics is indeed the art of the possible. You cant force reality into a controlled pattern. It is more important and more effective to monitor conditions, create buffers against the worst consequences, and develop the means to adapt our behavior to events. Utopian strategies are like King Canute ordering the unheeding tides to recede. There are too many unforeseeable variables and feedback loops with multiplier effects. There are too many butterflies to capture in our data nets and projections. We are in the midst of a transformative Kondratiev Wave that has been going on for about fifteen years and will last another two decades.192 We cannot know its real costs and consequences until it has dissipated and the new structure that is being created settles in. Even then we will not be in a condition of stasis. We must improve our decision-making in order to cope with this environment. We need to learn how to ride the wave of continual change and adaptation but this doesnt mean we cant do some good things. There are some basic areas where we can create protective zones and produce some positive effects. These include issues of land rights, social organization, food security, careful economic development, equity and human rights. Part of what is required is the abandoning of false ideals such as sustainable development. Beyond that we need to focus on strategies involving what have been called small wins. This needs to be based on the identification of what business strategist Kenichi Ohmae described as Key Factors for Success (KFS) and Key Factors for Failure (KFF).193 These approachessmall wins, KFS and KFFmust be applied inside strategies aimed at specific systems based on an analysis that I think of as Key Points of Leverage or, since we are using acronyms, KPL. In every situation there are key factors that provide maximum leverage. There are others that lead to success or other paths of action that result in failure. Achieving goals requires honest and simple strategies to which we can commit ourselves and that ordinary people can understand and implement within the constraints of existing institutions. It is important to concentrate on small wins that are achievable over a relatively short period of time rather than anticipating a vast retooling of existing institutions and fundamental changes in human behavior. Such transformational shifts would require that we collectively gain a level of understanding beyond our capability. Even if we somehow changed our character and that of our institutions special interests would remain that would sabotage the efforts. 194 Many of the governments upon which we must rely to regulate effectively change composition frequently. New office holders often fail to understand the reasons for pre-existing policies or they the policies as those of their opponents. A result is weakening or abandonment of the effort.AT: No conflicts/WaltzWaltz is wrong multiple empirical examples disproveLieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

Critics might concede that conventional wars between nuclear-armed adversaries would be highly escalatory, yet counter that such wars are unlikely to occur in the first place. In fact, critics might say, the arguments that we present here about the dangers of wartime escalation are exactly the reason that these conventional wars will not occur. As Kenneth Waltz argues, nuclear weapons do not merely deter nuclear attacks; they deter conventional attacks as well. As he explains, launching a major conventional offensive against a nuclear-armed state would be foolhardy; yet, launching a limited conventional attack would be equally senseless - as the small potential gains would be trivial compared to any residual risk of escalation. In short, critics might argue that it is precisely because our arguments about the danger of escalation are correct that these wars will not happen. The lack of high-intensity conventional war between two nuclear weapon states is evidence on the side of Waltz, but there is worrisome evidence, as well. First, if Waltz is right that the risk of nuclear escalation will reliably deter conventional attacks, then conventional attacks on nuclear-armed countries should not occur - yet they do. In some cases these were highly limited conventional operations, in locations whose geography limited the fighting (e.g., Kargil 1999; Falklands 19 82). But on other occasions, countries have launched major conventional military operations that inflicted substantial losses on nuclear-armed adversaries, or which threatened their vital interests. In 1950 China launched a major land attack against U.S. and allied forces on the Korean Peninsula, dealing the United States a major defeat, denying the United States victory on the Korean Peninsula, and killing thousands of U.S. military personnel. Whatever calculations led Chinas leaders to believe they could inflict such a serious defeat on the United States without prohibitive risk of nuclear escalation surely does not resemble the line of reasoning - and the overwhelming caution - that Waltz expects to observe in states facing nuclear-armed enemies. Further, the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War reflects a level of risk acceptance that does not jibe well with Waltzs arguments. On October 6, five divisions of Syrian ground forces launched a major surprise attack on Israeli defenses along the Golan Heights. The Syrian ground forces nearly broke through the Israeli line; at the worst moment for Israel, roughly a dozen tanks stood in front of the Syrian Army - and there were no additional Israeli reserves between the Golan Heights and Tel Aviv. (Some accounts of the war claim that Israel took steps during the war to prepare its nuclear arsenal in case the Syrian Army broke through.) Syria was fortunate: its attack on the Golan Heights failed. But their decision process does not match the level of caution one will require if conventional wars against nuclear-armed states are to be banished. More recently, the apparent North Korean sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010, or the Norths shelling of Yeonpyeong Island near Seoul, could have led to a substantial conventional response by Seoul - triggering war. Waltzs view may correctly explain Seouls reluctance to respond to those attacks with force; but it does not explain Pyongyangs willingness to instigate violence and keep walking along the edge of war. More broadly, the claim that the risk of catastrophe will reliably deter conventional wars seems to contradict much of history. For most of history, starting a war meant risking catastrophe. Leaders who lost surrendered not merely their crowns, but also their heads. In the era of dynastic succession, defeat often meant that ones children were killed as well to prevent future claims to rule. Throughout history, those who led rebellions - against ancient empires, colonial powers, or even against modern occupiers - usually paid with their lives (and often died gruesomely). And the populations on whose behalf the insurgents rebelled were sometimes slaughtered, to teach others not to emulate their disloyalty. In more modern times, the Japanese who planned Pearl Harbor understood that they were attacking a country with ten times their economic power, and they understood that if the war went badly it meant catastrophe for themselves and Japan. (They were right.) But despite those risks, the Japanese attacked. Germanys leaders understood that they were risking personal and national calamity when they invaded France, and especially when they invaded the Soviet Union. But they attacked anyway. In 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, a country with three times Iraqs population - a gamble that nearly led to his overthrow and death. If it were true that leaders do not start conventional wars if the possibility of catastrophe looms, human history would be much more pacific. To be clear, we agree with the premise underlying Waltzs argument: that conventional wars could only occur between nuclear-armed states if leaders were willing to embrace major risks. He does not think that will happen; we see that occurring throughout the pages of history. If leaders were not willing to take enormous risks, China and Syria would not have launched major ground attacks on nuclear-armed states, people would have never rebelled against empires, and few of the major wars of the modern era would have occurred.

AT: weak countries will surrenderUS involvement guarantees escalationLieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC, Proquest, NG)

THE LOGIC OF COERCIVE NUCLEAR ESCALATION The core national security problem for many militarily weak countries is straightforward: how to keep powerful enemies at bay. For weak countries, military defeat can be disastrous. In some circumstances, battlefield losses are followed by conquest and harsh treatment of the defeated society: e.g., a brutal occupation, the loss of sovereignty, or in rare cases genocide. But even when those terrible outcomes are not likely, war is often disastrous for the leaders of the defeated. Military planners in weak states - particularly those with adversarial relations with the United States (which has easily vanquished a halfdozen military opponents since the end of the Cold War) - must, therefore, address a fundamental question: if war occurs, and conventional victory is impossible, what strategies might create a stalemate and avoid catastrophic defeat? Escalation and the Fate of Enemy Leaders Although the United States has a long history of treating defeated enemy societies well - e.g., in Germany, Japan, and more recently Iraq - the leaders of countries that recently fought the United States have suffered severe consequences. In 1989, the United States conquered Panama and arrested its leader, Manuel Noriega. For most Americans, this short war is forgotten. For Noriega, it triggered a calamitous reversal of fortune: he exchanged a life of power and riches for twenty-three years in prison - and counting. Saddam Hussein suffered a worse fate; he lost power, he was humiliated, his sons were killed, and he was hanged in front of jeering enemies. Muammar Qaddafi spent his last days hiding from U.S.-supported rebels before being caught cowering in a culvert. He was then beaten and shot to death. Dozens of Qaddafi loyalists, including his son, were also rounded up and executed. Even leaders whose countries were never conquered - those that suffered only limited defeats - often paid a high price. Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are still in prison in the Hague, where Serbias former leader, Milosevic, died in detention. More broadly, studies demonstrate that leaders have a powerful, personal incentive to force a stalemate on the battlefield rather than accept defeat. One study used data covering more than 80 years of leadership changes around the world and found that those leaders who achieved a stalemate in a war were nearly twice as likely to remain in power as those countries that suffered military defeat. Even more tellingly, the leaders of countries who lost were approximately four times as likely to be punished - exiled, jailed, or killed - as those who managed to achieve stalemate. Not only do leaders face great pressure to create battlefield stalemate before they suffer irredeemable losses, they must do so quickly. A limited conventional defeat that merely destroys a large fraction of a countrys military, or substantially degrades the institutions that ensure government control (for example, the leaderships security force, domestic intelligence services, internal security troops, and party militias), could trigger a wartime or post-war coup. Even if the military and security services remain loyal, the war must end before they are too degraded to suppress uprisings in the wake of the conflict. Furthermore, military operations - especially those conducted by the United States - Increasingly involve intense campaigns against enemy command bunkers and other leadership sites, posing direct, daily threats to the leaders, their key political allies, and their families. Leaders who see their military being destroyed, their security services being savaged, and who have bombs raining down upon their command bunkers, may feel great pressure to halt the war as soon as possible. In short, losing wars is often a terrible outcome. Sometimes it results in horrendous consequences for the defeated society. In the early decades of the Cold War, West Europeans were understandably horrified by the notion of being conquered by the Soviet Union, losing their democratic institutions, and living under a murderous Stalinist tyranny. Today, many Israelis believe that a military defeat at the hands of their neighbors would usher in another tragic era in Jewish history - including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But even when the outcomes of war are unlikely to lead to mass societal suffering among the defeated, enemy leaders (not just the supreme leader, but ruling party officials, military officers, and members of the domestic security services) rightly fear the consequences. The critical message is this: Americas recent conflicts are considered regional wars in Washington; for adversaries there is nothing regional or limited about them. For the weak, these are existential struggles. Escalation and the Role of Nuclear Weapons The leaders of weak states face life-and-death incentives to quickly halt wars that are going badly for them. But why are nuclear weapons needed for this mission? Several attributes of nuclear weapons make them uniquely useful for stalemating a stronger enemy. Nuclear weapons are small and hence relatively easy to hide - enhancing their chance of surviving the early stages of a conflict. Furthermore, not many nuclear weapons need to survive: each bomb is so destructive that an adversary who can credibly threaten to deliver even a few weapons against its enemys cities would possess a powerful coercive tool. Finally, modern delivery systems - particularly ballistic missiles - allow states to deliver nuclear weapons to their target, even if its enemy controls the ground, air, and sea. In contrast, most conventional weapons become progressively harder to deliver against enemy cities as the enemy gains the upper hand militarily, and they inflict too little damage to shock the winning side into submitting to stalemate. Taken together, these three characteristics mean that even a state on the verge of being vanquished can conceivably destroy the potential victor. The implication: nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of the weak.

AT: States use other weaponsNuclear weapons are the favored weapons of small states three reasonsLieber & Press, 13 Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Ph. D in Political Science from UChicago AND Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Ph. D in Political Science from MIT (Kier A. AND Daryl G., January 2013, Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives And Options for Nuclear Escalation, PASCC,