No War Contention Answers

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1NC – A2: No Great Power War Contention Even a limited nuclear war causes extinctionGermanos 13 (Andrea , December 10, 2013, Nuclear War Could Mean 'Extinction of the Human Race'

A war using even a small percentage of the world's nuclear weapons threatens the lives of two billion people, a new report warns. "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive casualties on a global scale—far more than we had previously believed," said Dr. Ira Helfand The findings in the report issued by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) are based on studies by climate scientists that show how nuclear war would alter the climate and agriculture, thereby threatening one quarter of the world's population with famine. Nuclear

Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? offers an updated edition to the groups' April of 2012 report, which the groups say "may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited nuclear war." "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive casualties on a global scale—far more than we had previously believed," Dr. Ira

Helfand, the report’s author and IPPNW co-president, said in a statement. As their previous report showed, years after even a limited nuclear war, production of corn in the U.S. and China's middle season rice production would severely decline, and fears over dwindling food supplies would lead to hoarding and increases in food prices, creating further food insecurity for those already reliant on food imports. The updated report adds that

Chinese winter wheat production would plummet if such a war broke out. Based on information from new studies combining reductions in wheat, corn and rice, this new edition doubles the number of people they expect to be threatened by nuclear-war induced famine to over two billion. "The prospect of a decade of widespread hunger and intense social and economic instability in the world’s largest country has immense implications for the entire global community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will be matched by similar declines in other wheat

producing countries," Helfand stated. The crops would be impacted, the report explains, citing previous studies, because of the black carbon particles that would be released, causing widespread changes like cooling temperatures, decreased precipitation and decline in solar radiation. In this scenario of famine, epidemics of infectious diseases would be likely, the report states, and could lead to armed conflict. From the report:

Within nations where famine is widespread, there would almost certainly be food riots, and competition for limited food resources might well exacerbate ethnic and regional animosities. Among nations, armed conflict would be a very real possibility as states dependent on imports attempted to maintain access to food supplies. While a limited nuclear war would bring dire circumstances, the

impacts if the world's biggest nuclear arms holders were involved would be even worse. "With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible —not certain, but possible—extinction of the human race," Helfand told Agence-France Presse. “In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate nuclear weapons," Helfand stated. (Photo: MAPWcommunications/cc/flickr) "In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this will dwarf anything we've ever seen," Helfand told the news agency. As Helfand writes, the data cited in the report "raises a giant red flag about the threat to humanity posed." Yet, as Dr. Peter Wilk, former national executive director of PSR writes in an op-ed today, the "threat is of our own creation." As a joint statement by 124 states delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in October stated: "It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances." "Countries around the world—those who are nuclear-armed and those who are not—must work together to eliminate the threat and consequences of nuclear war," Helfand said. “In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate nuclear weapons.”

2NC – Yes Great Power WarGreat power war is likely --- extend Ferguson --- geopolitical shocks are likely --- more states are at war now than at any other time in history --- military clashes involving China, Taiwan, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are probable --- even if they’re not --- risk analysis demands you consider worst case scenarios

**War still likely --- the world is more dangerous now than during the Cold War.

Paul Miller, 12/20/2011. Assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University, former director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council and political analyst in the U.S. intelligence community, specializing in South Asia. “How Dangerous is the World? Part IV,” Foreign Policy, http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/19/how_dangerous_is_the_world_part_iv.

In my previous three posts, I argued that the world today is more dangerous than it was during the Cold War because the threat from Russia and China is still present , on top of which we face new threats from new nuclear autocracies hostile to the U nited S tates, including North Korea , soon Iran , and possibly Pakistan .

In addition to the old-fashioned state-centric threats of hostile nuclear powers, the U nited S tates now faces a whole new category of threats that simply did not exist during the Cold War: the threats that come when state failure meets globalization , when non-state actors can operate with impunity outside the write of any law but act with global reach because of new technology . These are the threats that are the current fads of IR and security studies: pirates, organized crime, drug cartels, human traffickers, WikiLeaks, hackers, the global Islamist "pansurgency," and, yes, terrorists. (Throw in pandemic disease and ecological disaster and you get all the research funding you want.)

There is nothing new about the existence of many of these actors, of course. Pirates and terrorists have existed for centuries. However, their ability to present an immediate and large-scale threat to the United States is new, or at least greater than during the Cold War. Travel and communication is easier and weapons technology is more lethal, state failure is more widespread (giving them more space to operate with impunity), while U.S. and allied border, port, and infrastructure security has not kept up.

I earlier argued that the faddish, new-fangled theories about non-state actors were overstated. They are, but that doesn't mean they're completely wrong. Osama bin Laden and Julian Assange clearly did massive and irrevocable harm to the United States in ways literally inconceivable for a non-state actor during the Cold War; the same may be true of the drug gangs in Mexico today. Coupled with the United States' almost complete lack of homeland security, and there is a very real possibility of large-scale, massive, direct harm to the U.S. homeland from a globalized non-state actor.

The preeminent threat of this type is, of course, the global campaign by violent Islamist militants and terrorists to eject the "west" from "Muslim lands," overthrow secular governments and replace them with Islamic regimes, and establish the supremacy of their brand of Islam across the world. (I agree here with David Kilcullen's characterization of the conflict as a global insurgency). Violent Islamist movements have done most of their direct damage to people and states across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. But those attacks certainly don't make the world safer for the United States, nor would their victory in, for example, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. And the movement has, of course, directly attacked the United States and our European allies. Note that violent Islamist groups-whether al Qaida or Hamas or Hezbollah or al Shabaab or Lashkar-e Taiba-typically flourish in and around weak and failing states.

The only thing comparable to the global proliferation of Islamist insurgencies and terrorist movements over the last two decades was the Soviet Union's sponsorship of communist insurgencies around the world during the Cold War. But the Islamist insurgencies are likely to be more resilient, harder to defeat, and more dangerous because they are decentralized, because their ideology is not linked to the fate of one particular regime, because globalization has made it easier for them to operate on a global scale, and because of the higher risk that Islamists will acquire and use weapons of mass destruction since they are not accountable to a deterable sponsoring power.

Even setting the threat from violent Islamism aside, a host of other non-state actors threaten the world order and make American leadership more costly. In fact, the aggregate effect of state failure multiplied across scores of states across the world is so great that " failed states may eventually present a systemic risk to the liberal world order , of which the United States is the principal architect and beneficiary," as I argue in the current issue of PRISM. State failure and the rise of non-state actors-a problem non-existent during the cold war-is a threat to American national security.

Conclusion

Essentially, the U nited S tates thus faces two great families of threats today:   first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers , of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world , which is a wholly new

development since the Cold War. On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989. Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.

I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War . During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment. We no longer feel that way.

Our feelings are wrong .   The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties.   Today's environment is more complex and many- sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to .   Nonetheless , the danger is real .

***Nuclear war is specifically likely

Perkins, 7 – Staff Writer @ My Wire (Sid, http://www.mywire.com/a/ScienceNews/Sudden-chill-even-limitednuclear/2906831?page=2)

"While there's a perception that a nuclear build down by the world's major powers in recent decades has somehow resolved the global nuclear threat, a more accurate portrayal is that we're at a perilous crossroads," says Brian Toon , an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the researchers who first floated the idea of a nuclear winter. Today's threat stems from a variety of factors, Toon and his colleagues say. Nations are joining the nuclear club with unnerving regularity, others are suspected of having ambitions to do so, and dozens more have enough uranium and plutonium on hand to build at least a few Hiroshima-size bombs. The leaders of some of these nations may have no qualms about using such weapons , even against a nonnuclear neighbor . Increasingly, people are living in large cities, which make tempting targets. Finally, the results of today's climate

simulations--which are much more sophisticated than those that were available in the 1980s--suggest that even a nuclear exchange of just a few dozen weapons could cool Earth substantially for a decade or more. The current combination of nuclear proliferation, political instability , and urban demographics "forms perhaps the greatest danger to the stability of human society since the dawn of man ," warns Toon. Recognizing this danger, on Jan. 17, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand on its "doomsday clock" 2 minutes closer to midnight. "It's been 60 years since nuclear weapons have been used in war, but the psychological barriers that have helped limit the potential for the use of nuclear weapons in this country and others seems to be breaking down" says Lawrence M. Krauss, a member of the group and a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. JOIN THE CLUB In 1950, there were two nuclear powers--the United States, whose Manhattan Project developed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, and the Soviet Union, which conducted its first nuclear test in August 1949. By 1968, when the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was proposed, France, the United Kingdom, and China had joined the pack. Outside that treaty from its beginning, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have developed weapons and conducted tests. Also, Israel is widely suspected of possessing nuclear weapons. A handful of nations once possessed nuclear weapons but abandoned them. Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan inherited warheads when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 but have since transferred those weapons to Russia. South Africa has admitted constructing, but later disassembling, six nuclear devices, possibly after one test, says Toon. In total, he says, at least 19 nations are now known to have programs to develop nuclear weapons or to have previously pursued that goal. Many more nations, through their power-generating and research nuclear reactor programs, have the raw materials for constructing nuclear devices, he and his colleagues reported in December 2006 at a meeting of

the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Those raw materials aren't scarce: At least 40 nations have enough uranium and plutonium on hand to construct substantial nuclear arsenals. Disturbingly, some of the nations with abundant bomb material have or have recently had strained relations with their neighbors. At the end of 2003, for example, Brazil probably had enough plutonium on hand to make more than 200 Hiroshima-size bombs, while its former rival Argentina could have produced 1300 such bombs. Although North Korea probably has enough nuclear material to fabricate only a handful of the devices, South Korea has enough plutonium to construct at least 4,400. Pakistan could make 100 or more nuclear bombs, and its neighbor India could put together well over 10 times as many, the researchers estimate. Today, at least 13 nations operate facilities that enrich uranium, plutonium, or both, says Toon. Altogether, 45 nations are known to have previous nuclear weapons programs, current weapons stockpiles, or the potential to become nuclear states.

Most recent global problems increase the likelihood of nuclear war – empirics prove.

Bay, Author and Syndicated columnist, professor, developmental aid advocate, radio commentator, retired reserve soldier, war game designer, principal in a training simulations and technology consulting company, ‘12

[Austin, “Greek Tragedy: Political Effects of a Deep Global Depression,” http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/2012010319150.aspx]

Colossal sovereign debts owed by member nations may yet shatter the eurozone. The political effects of a euro-breakup are uncertain , though Greece may be serving as an unfortunate indicator of what a small state can expect in terms of troubling future history if the world's fragile economic circumstances deteriorate. Greece has witnessed a loss of faith in government and its leaders, leaving state institutions that much weaker. After it announced austerity measures to facilitate debt payment, popular rage forced Greece's former government to resign. Its caretaker government begs for domestic cooperation

and international help. Yet local turmoil continues , to include terrorist threats in the name of economic justice and national identity. This anger seeds an ugly intra-European war waged with inflammatory words. Germans are called Nazis, of course, but now the French are also slandered as greedy imperialists. Have-nots in Europe's debt-burdened south reproach the haves (who loaned them money) in Europe's debt-wary north. Greece's shrinking economy has, logically, led to

defense budget cuts. The Greek Navy's squadron of German Type 219 submarines is, if not sunk, beached in payment disputes. According to StrategyPage.com, the army may eliminate several brigades. The government, however, does not want to cut back on the regular force's personnel strength because that would increase unemployment. Meanwhile, Greece's traditional foe, Turkey, is buying Type 219s. Despite being NATO allies, military competition with Turkey has shaped Greek defense budgets. Greece can no longer afford it. Defense, of course, is

only one element of national security. Besides, Muslim Turkey won't bait Christian Greece, will it? Well, the brewing confrontation over natural gas in Cypriot waters, with Turkish Navy ships shadowing oil exploration vessels , may argue otherwise. Turkey wants the division of Cyprus (a frozen war) resolved before gas production starts. In 2012, Greece is, as stipulated, a small state. If it leaves the euro-zone, Europe's big economies will adjust. If frictions develop over Cyprus, the U.S. would defuse Greco-Turk tensions.

That's the betting line. In 1912, however, Balkan resentments ignited the First Balkan War. World War I followed in 1914. Europe's Great Powers failed to adjust. So what happens if the current doldrums get worse , producing a deep, prolonged global depression? The Greek model indicates governments weaken and angry populations get angrier . Desperation creates a political market for the hucksters who peddle quick and easy solutions. When Greece first experienced trouble three years ago, Greek leftists crowed that the time for the workers revolt had finally come, never mind

communism's systemic disaster. Small groups of radicals , whatever their agenda, can use media to magnify their strength. Nazis did that in the early 1930s . Today ,international coordination of demonstrations simply requires cell

phones. Exploitation of ethnic, nationalist, religious and economic resentments requires a YouTube video. States facing anarchic stress are not only candidates for debt default, but coups and civil war . Rash dictators or jingoist parties, seeking domestic support, may unfreeze a frozen war. What a future -- a powder keg mosaic of destructive little wars, some potentially nuclear.

We are in a global environment parallel to pre-world war 1- nuclear war likelyMacMillian 13 (Margaret MacMillian portrait is a professor of international history at Oxford University where she is warden of St. Antony’s College. She is also a history professor at the University of Toronto. MacMillan is an acclaimed author, whose titles include The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History; Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India; and the multiple-award-winning Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, among others. MacMillan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a member of numerous editorial boards, including First World War Studies, “The Rhyme of History”, http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/rhyme-of-history?cid=tco_1219131, December 14, 2013)

Earlier this year I was on holiday in Corsica and happened to wander into the church of a tiny hamlet in the hills where I found a memorial to the dead from World War I. Out of a population that can have been no more than 150, eight young men, bearing among them only three last names, had died in that conflict. Such lists can be found all over Europe, in great cities and in small villages. Similar memorials are spread around the globe, for the Great War, as it was known prior to 1940, also drew soldiers from Asia, Africa, and North America. World War I still haunts us , partly because of the sheer scale of the carnage—10 million combatants killed and many more wounded. Countless civilians lost their lives, too, whether through military action, starvation, or disease. Whole empires were destroyed and societies brutalized. But there’s another reason the war continues to haunt us: we still cannot agree

why it happened. Was it caused by the overweening ambitions of some of the men in power at the time? Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers, for example, wanted a greater Germany with a global reach, so they challenged the naval supremacy of Great Britain. Or does the explanation lie in competing ideologies? National rivalries? Or in the sheer and seemingly unstoppable momentum of militarism? As an arms race accelerated, generals and admirals made plans that became ever more aggressive as

well as rigid. Did that make an explosion inevitable? Or would it never have happened had a random event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater not lit the fuse? In the second year of the conflagration that engulfed most of Europe a bitter joke made the rounds: “Have you seen today’s headline? ‘Archduke Found Alive: War a Mistake.’” That is the most dispiriting explanation of all—that the war was simply a blunder that could have been avoided. The search for explanations began almost as soon as the guns opened fire in the summer of 1914 and has never stopped. Scholars have combed through archives from Belgrade to Berlin looking for the causes. An estimated 32,000 articles, treatises, and books on World War I have been published in English alone. So when a British publisher took me out to lunch on a lovely spring day in Oxford five years ago and asked me if I would like to try my hand at one of history’s greatest puzzles, my first reaction was a firm no. Yet afterward I could not stop thinking about this question that has haunted so many. In the end I succumbed. The result is yet another book, my own effort to understand what happened a century ago and why. It was not just academic curiosity that drove me, but a sense of urgency as well. If we cannot determine how one of the most momentous conflicts in history happened, how can we hope to avoid another such catastrophe in the future? Just look at the actual and potential conflicts that dominate the news today . The Middle East , made up largely of countries that received their present borders as a consequence of World War I, is but one of many areas around the globe that is in turmoil, and has been for decades. Now there’s a civil war in Syria , which has raised the spectre of a wider conflict in the region while also troubling relations among the major powers and testing their diplomatic skills. The Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of poison gas—a weapon first deployed in the trench warfare of 1914, then outlawed because world opinion viewed it as barbaric—nearly precipitated American airstrikes. Commentary on these developments was filled with references to the guns of that long-ago August. Just as policymakers then discovered they had started something they could not stop, so this past summer we feared that such airstrikes might lead to a wider and more long-lasting conflict than anyone in President Barack Obama’s administration could foresee. The one-hundredth anniversary of 1914 should make us reflect anew on our vulnerability to

human error, sudden catastrophes, and sheer accident . So we have good reason to glance over our shoulders even as we look ahead. History, said Mark Twain, never repeats itself but it rhymes. The past cannot provide us with clear blueprints for how to act, for it offers such a multitude of lessons that it leaves us free to pick and choose among them to suit our own political and ideological inclinations. Still, if we can see past our blinders and take note of the telling parallels between then and now, the ways in which our world resembles that of a hundred years ago, history does give us valuable warnings. THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF GLOBALIZATION, THEN AND NOW Though the era just before World War I, with its gas lighting and its horse-drawn carriages, seems very far off and quaint, it is similar in many ways—often unsettlingly so—to ours, as a look below the surface reveals. The decades leading up to 1914 were, like our own time , a period of dramatic shifts and upheavals, which those who experienced them thought of as unprecedented in speed and scale. The use of electricity to light streets and homes had become widespread; Einstein was developing his general theory of relativity; radical new ideas like psychoanalysis were finding a following; and the roots of the predatory ideologies of fascism and Soviet communism were taking hold. Globalization—which we tend to think of as a modern phenomenon, created by the spread of international businesses and investment, the growth of the Internet, and the widespread migration of peoples—was also characteristic of that era. Made possible by many of the changes that were taking place at the time, it meant that even remote parts of the world were being linked by new means of transport, from railways to steamships, and by new means of communication, including the telephone, telegraph, and wireless. Then, as now, there was a

huge expansion in global trade and investment. And then as now waves of immigrants were finding their way to foreign lands—Indians to the Caribbean and Africa, Japanese and Chinese to North America, and millions of Europeans to the New World and the Antipodes. Taken together, all these changes were widely seen, particularly in Europe and America, as clear evidence of humanity’s progress, suggesting to many that Europeans, at least, were becoming too interconnected and too civilized to resort to war as a means of settling disputes. The growth of international law , the Hague disarmament conferences of 1899 and 1907, and the increasing use of arbitration between nations (of the 300 arbitrations between 1794 and 1914 more than half occurred after 1890) lulled Europeans into the comforting belief that they had moved beyond savagery. The fact that there had been an extraordinary period of general peace since 1815 , when the Napoleonic wars ended, further reinforced this illusion, as did the idea that the interdependence of the countries of the world was so great that they could never afford to go to war again. This was the argument made by Norman Angell, a small, frail, and intense Englishman who had knocked around the world as everything from a pig farmer to a cowboy in the American West before he found his calling as a popular journalist. National economies were bound so tightly together, he maintained in his book, The Great Illusion, that war, far from profiting anyone, would ruin everyone. Moreover, in a view widely shared by bankers and economists at the time, a large-scale war could not last very long because there would be no way of paying for it ( though we now know that societies have, when they choose, huge resources they can tap for destructive purposes). A sensational best-seller after it was published in Britain in 1909 and in the United States the following year, its title—meant to make the point that it was an illusion to believe there was anything to be gained by taking up arms—took on a cruel and unintended irony only a few short years later. What Angell and others failed to see was the downside of interdependence. In Europe a hundred years ago the landowning classes saw their prosperity undermined by cheap agricultural imports from abroad and their dominance over much of society undercut by a rising middle class and a new urban plutocracy. As a result, many of the old upper classes flocked to conservative, even reactionary, political movements. In the cities, artisans and small shopkeepers whose services were no longer needed were also drawn to radical right-wing movements. Anti-Semitism flourished as Jews were made the scapegoat for the march of capitalism and the modern world. The world is witnessing unsettling parallels today . Across Europe and North America, radical right-wing movements like the British National Party and the Tea Party provide outlets for the frustration and fears that many feel as the world changes around them and the jobs and security they had counted on disappear. Certain immigrants—such as Muslims—come to stand in as the enemy in some communities. Globalization can also have the paradoxical effect of fostering intense localism and nativism , frightening people into taking refuge in the comfort of small, like-minded groups. One of the unexpected results of the Internet, for example, is how it can narrow horizons so that users seek out only those whose views echo their own and avoid websites that might challenge their assumptions. Globalization also makes possible the widespread transmission of radical ideologies and the bringing together of fanatics who will stop at nothing in their quest for the perfect society. In the period before World War I, anarchists and revolutionary socialists across Europe and North America read the same works and had the same aim: to overthrow the existing social order. The young Serbs who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo were inspired by Nietzsche and Bakunin, just as their Russian and French counterparts were. Terrorists from Calcutta to Buffalo imitated each other as they hurled bombs onto the floors of stock exchanges, blew up railway lines, and stabbed and shot those they saw as oppressors, whether the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary or U.S. President William McKinley. Today new technologies and social

media platforms provide new rallying points for fanatics, enabling them to spread their messages even more rapidly and to even wider audiences around the globe. Often they claim divine inspiration. All of the world’s major religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have produced their share of terrorists prepared to commit murder and mayhem in their name. Thus we see the young offspring of Muslim parents from Pakistan and Bangladesh, even those born or raised in the United Kingdom and North America, going off to make common cause with Syrian rebels, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or one of the branches of al Qaeda in North Africa or Yemen, despite sharing almost nothing—culturally or ethnically—with those whose cause they have taken up. Many Germans held reciprocal views. Germany, they said, was due its place in the sun—and an empire on which the sun would never set—but Britain and the British navy were standing in its way. When Kaiser Wilhelm and his naval secretary Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz decided to build a deep-water navy to challenge British naval supremacy, the unease in Britain about Germany’s growing commercial and military power turned into something close to panic. Erskine Childers’ 1903 best-seller, The Riddle of the Sands, described a German invasion plot, stirring British fears about their lack of military preparedness. Rumours spread, fanned by the new mass circulation newspapers, of German guns buried under London in preparation for war, and 50,000 waiters in British restaurants who were really German soldiers. For its part, the German government seriously feared a pre-emptive attack on its fleet by the British navy, and the German public had its own share of invasion scares. On several occasions before 1914 parents in coastal towns kept their children home from school in anticipation of an imminent landing by British marines. Cooler heads on both sides hoped to wind down the increasingly expensive naval race, but in each country, public opinion, then a new and incalculable factor in the making of policy, pushed in the direction of hostility rather than friendship. Even the blood ties between the German and the British royal families, which might have been expected to ameliorate these mutual antipathies, did quite the opposite. Kaiser Wilhelm, that strange and erratic ruler, hated his uncle King Edward VII, “the arch-intriguer and mischief-maker in Europe,” who, in turn, dismissed his nephew as a bully and a show-off. It is tempting—and sobering—to compare today’s relationship between China and the U.S. with that between Germany and England a century ago. Now, as then, the march of globalization has lulled us into a false sense of safety. Countries that have McDonald’s, we are told, will never fight each other. Or as President George W. Bush put it when he issued his National Security Strategy in 2002, the spread of democracy and free trade across the world is the surest guarantee of international stability and peace. What happens when an established hegemonic power is challenged by rising powers? And what does it take to successfully manage such transitions? Yet the extraordinary growth in trade and investment between China and the U.S. since the 1980s has not served to allay mutual suspicions. Far

from it. As China’s investment in the U.S. increases, especially in sensitive sectors such as electronics and biotechnology, so does public apprehension that the Chinese are acquiring information that will put them in a position to threaten American security. For their part, the Chinese complain that the U.S. treats them as a second-rate power and, while objecting to the continuing American support for Taiwan, they seem dedicated to backing North Korea, no matter how great the provocations of that maverick state. At a time when the two countries are competing for markets, resources, and influence from the Caribbean to Central Asia, China has become increasingly ready to translate its economic strength into military power. Increased Chinese military spending and the build-up of its naval capacity suggest to many American strategists that China intends to challenge the U.S. as a Pacific power, and we are

now seeing an arms race between the two countries in that region. The Wall Street Journal has

published authoritative reports that the Pentagon is preparing war plans against China—just in case. Will popular feeling, fanned and inflamed by the mass media in the same way that it was in the early years of the 20th century, make these hostilities even more difficult to control? Today the speed of communications puts greater than ever pressure on governments to respond to crises, and to do so quickly, often before they have time to formulate a measured response. RISING TIDES OF

NATIONALISM AND SECTARIANISM We are witnessing, as much as the world of 1914, shifts in the international power structure, with emerging powers challenging the established ones . Just as national rivalries led to mutual suspicions between Britain and the newly ascendant Germany before 1914, the same is happening between the U.S. and China now, and also between China and Japan. And now as then, public opinion can make it difficult for statesmen to maneuver and defuse hostilities. Although political leaders like to think they can use popular feeling for their own ends, they often find that it can be unpredictable. In the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party launched what it called a Patriotic Education Campaign to inculcate the young with nationalist sentiments, but the leaders lost control of their followers. A propaganda campaign against Japan inspired mobs to sack Japanese businesses and offices. For their part the Japanese, who have attempted to lower the temperature in the past—apologizing for Japanese crimes during World War II for example—are less willing to do so today. The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, plays to a growing and vociferous Japanese nationalism. He has announced that he intends to revise the constitution so that he can increase Japan’s military spending, and during this year’s election campaign he made a point of visiting one of the obscure and largely uninhabited islands which is in dispute with China in the East China Sea. As a result of the current standoff and occasional naval muscle flexing there and in the South China Sea over these islands, attitudes in both countries are hardening, limiting the options for their leaders. And there is potential for conflict between China and two of its other neighbors—Vietnam and Malaysia—as well. Once lines are drawn between nations, it can be difficult to reach across them. The U.S. and Iran have had a difficult relationship ever since the Shah was overthrown in 1979 (and indeed it was not all that easy even during his reign). The events of subsequent years—including the hostage taking, the American shooting down of an Iranian airliner, Iran’s quest for its own bomb, and the U.S.’s attempt to block it, all to the accompaniment of much angry rhetoric—have kept them far apart. When one side does make conciliatory noises, as Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani has done recently, memories of past wrongs perpetuate suspicions about present intentions, complicating such attempts. Misreadings and manipulations of history can also fuel national grievances and bring war closer. In the Europe of a hundred years ago the growth of nationalist feeling—encouraged from above but rising from the grass roots where historians, linguists, and folklorists were busy creating stories of ancient and eternal enmities—did much to cause ill will among nations who might otherwise have been friends. Teutons had always been menaced by Slavs from the east, or so learned German professors assured their audiences before 1914, and therefore peace between Germany and Russia must be impossible. In the Balkans, competing nationalisms, each with its own story of triumphs and defeats, drove apart peoples such as Serbs, Albanians, and Bulgars who had lived in relative harmony for centuries—and are still driving them apart today. Often, as in families, the most bitter of these sectarian quarrels arise among those most similar to each other. Witness the religious and ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia , or the spreading civil wars in the Middle East , and indeed throughout the Muslim world, where the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia are hardening into ideological and political conflict. What Freud called the “narcissism of small differences” can lead to violence and death—a danger amplified if the greater powers choose to intervene as protectors of groups outside their own borders who share a

religious or ethnic identity with them. Here too we can see ominous parallels between present and past. Before World War I Serbia financed and armed Serbs within the Austrian Empire, while both Russia and Austria stirred up the peoples along each other’s borders. And we all know how Hitler used the existence of German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia to dismember those countries. Today Saudi Arabia backs Sunnis—and Sunni-majority states—around the world, while Iran has made itself the protector of the Shia, funding radical movements such as Hezbollah. FIRST COUSINS AT WAR Enmities between lesser powers can have unexpected and far-reaching consequences when outside powers choose sides to promote their own interests. In the years before World War I, Russia chose to become Serbia's protector, both in the name of Pan-Slavism and also to extend its influence down to Istanbul and the straits leading out of the Black Sea. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany, feeling it had to support Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia, even at the risk of a world war. Because of alliances and friendships developed over the previous decades, France and then Britain were also drawn in to fight alongside Russia. Thus the war turned almost at once into a wider one. While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the

Balkans then. A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the U.S., Turkey, Russia, and Iran all look to protect their interests and their clients. Will Russia feel it has to support Syria, the same way it once felt it had to support its client Serbia, and Germany felt it had to support Austria-Hungary? We must hope that Russia will have more control over the Damascus government than it had over Serbia in 1914. But so far international efforts to defuse the Syria crisis have been complicated by Russia's investment in the survival of the Assad regime in the face of the threat of U.S. military action. Great powers often face the dilemma that their very support for smaller ones encourages their clients to be reckless. And their clients often slip the leading strings of their patrons. The U.S. has funnelled huge amounts of money and equipment to Israel and Pakistan, for example, as China has done to North Korea, yet that has not given either the Americans or the Chinese commensurate influence over the policies of those countries. Israel, while hugely dependent on America, has sometimes tried to push Washington into taking pre-emptive military action. And Pakistan gave sanctuary to America's global enemy number one, Osama bin Laden. Before 1914 the great powers talked of their honor. Today U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry refers to America's credibility or prestige. It amounts to much the same thing. Moreover, alliances and friendships forged for defensive reasons or mutual advantage can look quite different from other perspectives. Before 1914 German statesmen assumed that the military pact between France and Russia was really designed to destroy Germany. Today Pakistan feels threatened by the links between India and Afghanistan, while the U.S. tends to see a challenge in China's increasing influence in Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Making matters worse, patron nations are reluctant to abandon their clients, no matter how far they have run amok and no matter what dangers they themselves are being led into, because to do so incurs the risk of making the greater power appear weak and indecisive. Before 1914 the great powers talked of their honor. Today U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry refers to America's credibility or prestige. It amounts to much the same thing. THE COMPLACENCIES OF PEACE Like our predecessors a century ago, we assume that large-scale, all-out war is something we no longer do. To be sure, we are aware that people are still being killed in conflicts around the world, many of them civil, ethnic, or religious, as in Syria and Iraq today. But since 1945 the world has seen far fewer wars between states and it has survived dozens of relatively minor conflicts, from Korea to the Congo, with the number of casualties dwarfed by those sustained in the two world wars. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, with perhaps as many as 500,000 dead, and the protracted war in the Great Lakes region of Africa stand out

as the main exceptions in recent years. In short, we have grown accustomed to peace as the normal state of affairs. We expect that the international community will deal with conflicts when they arise, and that they will be short-lived and easily containable. But this is not necessarily true. The Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, a man of great wisdom who tried unsuccessfully to staunch the rise of militarism in France in the early years of the 20th century, understood this very well. “Europe has been afflicted by so many crises for so many years,” he said on the eve of World War I, and “it has been put dangerously to the test so many times without war breaking out, that it has almost ceased to believe in the threat and is watching the further development of the interminable Balkan conflict with decreased attention and reduced disquiet.” The international community as a whole has created institutions dedicated to defusing conflict and forcing aggressors to back down—and they can be effective for long periods of time. The Concert of Europe, that collection of the Great Powers, kept the peace for much of the century after 1815. Yet we should keep in mind that it did not last forever. Institutions as much as people get old and tired . Although they gave it lip service, the Great Powers eventually ceased to believe in the idea of effective and concerted action to avoid conflict, and the world order began to break down—with disastrous consequences. In 1908, when Austria-Hungary enraged Serbia by annexing Bosnia, where some 44 percent of the population were Serbs, Germany forced Russia, Serbia’s protector, to back down. Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his mother: “It is quite true that the form and method of Germany’s action—I mean towards us—has simply been brutal and we won’t forget it.” He didn’t. And when the crisis of 1914 erupted, Tsar Nicholas, a weak man who had until then preferred peace to war, was determined, like most of his ministers, that this time Russia would not give in to pressure from Germany or its ally Austria-Hungary. In 1911 Italy defied an unwritten agreement among the powers to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and seized Tripoli and Cyrenaica, the two North African provinces which later became Libya. The Powers made disapproving noises but did nothing. In the Balkans Wars of 1912 and 1913 the Powers managed to impose a settlement of sorts, but increasingly they saw themselves as being on opposing sides. By the time of the crisis of 1914, the kaiser and his ministers greeted British suggestions that the Great Powers work together to bring a peaceful solution with derision. We expect that the international community will deal with conflicts when they arise, and that they will be short-lived and easily containable. But this is not necessarily true. Are we seeing a similar weakening of the international order today? The United Nations, which might be seen as a successor to the Concert of Europe, has at times intervened successfully to maintain the peace or restore it after war has broken out. But in the Security Council today, Russia and China habitually vote against U.N. interventions, which they see as a cover for promoting Western interests. In the case of Syria, Assad has so far been able to defy international opinion and kill his own people because he has the Russians as well as the Iranians with him. President Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister dismissed the charges that Assad has used poison gas as “absurd.” THE ULTIMATE DETERRENT—AND OTHER DELUSIONS The pre-war arms race was actually a good thing, a British diplomat, Sir Francis Bertie, told his king, George V: “The best guarantee of peace between the Great Powers is that they are all afraid of each other.” However, he was wrong to put his faith in that early version of the theory of mutually assured destruction. Too many of those who commanded Europe’s armies were only too ready to go to war, either because they thought the time was advantageous or they believed they could win. But in the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union possessed almost all of the world’s nuclear weapons, mutually assured destruction did work. Both sides recognized that atomic and hydrogen bombs were so destructive that they had in effect rendered themselves unusable. If the two countries had waged all-out war, the thermonuclear Armageddon

would have left no winners anywhere in the world, only losers. Can we assume that deterrence will continue to work today? We have entered a new and potentially perilous era. There are now nine

countries with nuclear arsenals , including Pakistan, a fractious if not failing state, and North Korea, which has proved itself as reckless as it is repressive. Depending on whether Iran gets the bomb, numerous other states— including Japan perhaps — are likely to exercise their own nuclear options. That would make for a very dangerous world indeed, which could lead to a recreation of the kind of

tinderbox that exploded in the Balkans a hundred years ago—only this time with mushroom clouds.

Like the world of 1914, we are living through changes in the nature of war whose significance we are only starting to grasp. But even if all nations were to agree that nuclear war simply does not make sense, there are drawbacks and dangers to the wars being waged with conventional weapons , which many of our military leaders fail to understand. Like the world of 1914, we are living through changes in the nature of war whose significance we are only starting to grasp. A hundred years ago, most military planners and the civilian governments who watched from the sidelines got the nature of the coming war catastrophically wrong. The great advances of Europe’s science and technology and the increasing output of its factories during its long period of peace had made going on the attack much more costly to human life. The killing zone—the area that attacking soldiers had to cross in the face of deadly enemy fire—had expanded hugely from 100 yards in the Napoleonic wars to over 1,000 yards by 1914. And the rifles, machine guns, and artillery they faced were firing faster, more accurately, and with more deadly explosives. There was plenty of evidence from the smaller wars fought before 1914—the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5—about what this would mean on the battlefield. Soldiers attacking, no matter how brave, would suffer horrific losses, while defenders sat in the relative security of their trenches, behind sandbags and barbed wire. Yet the best brains in Europe’s general staffs refused to face the new reality, explaining away or ignoring the uncomfortable facts, just as today many choose to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming. The European powers went into war in 1914 with plans that, without exception, were predicated on an offensive strategy. As a British major general said in 1914, “The defensive is never an acceptable role to the Briton, and he makes little or no study of it.” The British—and the soldiers of many other nations—paid a high price for that willful blindness. A comparable fallacy in our own time is that because of our advanced technology, we can deliver quick, focused, and overpowering military actions—“surgical strikes,” “shock and awe”—resulting in conflicts that will be short and limited in their impact, and victories that will be decisive. Challenging the faith that such low-cost victories are possible, Major General H.R. McMaster, the commanding officer at Fort Benning, Georgia, and something of an iconoclast, recently wrote in the New York Times that many of the assumptions that had guided the American military before 9/11 and up to and through the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were wishful thinking. To view “successful military operations as ends in themselves, rather than just one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve, and sustain, political goals” is, he believes, a mistake. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, were not just matters of military strength but “contests of will.” Fighting them without an understanding of the social, economic, and historical factors involved will doom us to “the pipe dream of easy war,” as the title of his piece puts it. And indeed there do not seem to be any easy wars. Increasingly we are seeing asymmetrical wars between well-armed, organized forces on one side and low-level insurgencies on the other, which can span not just a region but a continent or even the globe, and

where there is not one enemy but a shifting coalition of local warlords, religious warriors, and other interested parties. Think of Afghanistan or Syria, where local and international players are mingled and what constitutes victory is difficult to define. In such wars those ordering military action must consider not just the combatants on the ground but the elusive yet critical factor of public opinion. Thanks to social media, every air strike, artillery shell, and cloud of poison gas that hits civilian targets is now filmed and tweeted around the world. The ultimate goal of military action must be to achieve political ends, whether to win over local opinion by providing security, to bring competing parties to the table to negotiate, or to persuade the world at large of the rightness of its actions. Those who believe in “precision strikes” and their potential to deliver meaningful victories must understand that or else we, like those who preceded us a hundred years ago, will continue to fight the wrong kinds of battles. FAILURES AT THE TOP "You can't always get the leaders you want…but the world wants leaders who can see the other side." Listen to the author's take on the requirements of leadership in today's world. With different leadership World War I might have been avoided. Europe in 1914 needed a Bismarck or a Churchill with the strength of character to stand up to pressure and the capacity to see the large strategic picture. Instead the key powers had weak, divided, or distracted leaders. Kaiser Wilhelm had come down on the side of peace in earlier crises, but he knew that officers in his beloved army referred to him contemptuously as Wilhelm the Timid. Thus, in 1914, when his generals were urging him that the time had come for a preventive war on Russia, he was afraid of appearing weak. Just after the assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo, when Germany issued the infamous “blank cheque” promising to back Austria-Hungary come what may, Wilhelm said—repeatedly—to a close friend: “This time I shall not give in.” His chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, devastated by the recent death of his wife, accepted the prospect of war with glum resignation. And in Austria-Hungary itself, the war party led by the generals now had the upper hand, for the assassination of the archduke had ironically removed the one man who might have resisted the drift to war. As it was, the old and ailing emperor, Franz Josef I, was left alone to face the hawks. On the other side, Russia, like Germany, had a weak ruler with too much power—and too great a fear of appearing weak. Tsar Nicholas hesitated but in the end gave way to his own war party and ordered the general mobilization that made war with Germany inevitable. The clinching argument, apparently, came from one of his ministers, who told him he could not save his throne or the lives of himself and his family unless he showed himself to be resolute against Russia’s enemies. The British government, which might have acted decisively enough early in the crisis to have deterred Germany, was preoccupied by the prospect of a civil war over Ireland. And the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, who was also distracted by a new love affair, allowed the slide to war to gather momentum, even as Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, floated ineffectual proposals for negotiations. In Washington President Woodrow Wilson watched the events with dismay from his place at the side of his dying wife, but at first he saw no good reason why the U.S. should intervene in a European quarrel. Contrast the behavior of the men in power in 1914 with that of John F. Kennedy nearly five decades later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world faced an even greater threat. The young and relatively untried U.S. president was urged by virtually his entire top military leadership as well as many of the civilians in his administration to confront the Soviet Union vigorously, up to the point of invading Cuba and so risking an all-out nuclear war. Standing up to them, he opted instead for negotiations with Moscow and, in the end, preserved the peace. It was perhaps fortunate that he had just read Barbara Tuchman’s great The Guns of August and was very mindful of the ways nations can blunder into war. Today the American president is facing a series of politicians in China who, like those in Germany a century ago, are deeply concerned that their nation be taken

seriously. In Putin he must deal with a Russian nationalist who is both wilier and stronger than the unfortunate Tsar Nicholas. Barack Obama, like Woodrow Wilson, is a great orator, capable of laying out his vision of the world and inspiring Americans. But like Wilson at the end of the 1914-18 war, Obama is dealing with a partisan and uncooperative Congress. Perhaps even more worrying, he may be in a position similar to Asquith’s in 1914, presiding over a country so divided internally that it is unwilling or unable to play an active and constructive role in the world. WANTED: A WORLD POLICEMAN Britain, which once played an international leadership role during the 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries, in the end found the demands too great and the costs too high. After World War II the British people were no longer willing and the British economy no longer capable of sustaining such a role. The U.S. has so far been prepared to act as the guarantor of international stability, but may not be willing—or able—to do so indefinitely. Over a century ago, at a time when it was well-launched on its rise to world power status and in the process of translating its huge and growing economic strength into military and foreign policy, it began to assume the mantle of leadership. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, though they were two very different types of men, shared the feeling that the U.S. had a moral obligation to the world. “We have become a great nation,” Roosevelt said, “and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.” Since then, there have been times when isolationist sentiments have threatened this commitment, but the U.S. has for the most part remained deeply engaged in world affairs, through World War II, to the effort to contain Soviet aggression during the Cold War, and to the present global war on terrorism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire at the end of the 1980s, the U.S., perhaps without reflecting, continued to act as the world’s hegemon, assuming responsibilities that ranged from stabilizing the international economy to ensuring security. The long agony of Bosnia finally came to an end in 1995 when American pressure in combination with NATO military action persuaded the Serbs to enter into the Dayton Agreement. And although America’s actions in Iraq and Libya were certainly not met with universal acclaim, even in the U.S. itself, Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi had few friends and many enemies by the time they met their ends at American hands. Today, however, the U.S., while still the strongest power in the world, is not as powerful as it once was. It has suffered military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has had difficulty finding allies who will stand by it, as the current Syrian crisis demonstrates. Uncomfortably aware that they have few reliable friends and many potential enemies, the Americans are now considering a return to a more isolationist policy. Is the U.S. now reaching the end of its tether, as Britain did before it? If it retreats even partially from its global role, which powers will dominate the international order, and what will that mean for the prospects of world peace? It is difficult to guess what might come next. Russia may dream of its Soviet past when it was a superpower, but with a chaotic economy and a declining population its ambitions far outrun its capacities. China is a rising power but its preoccupations are likely to be focused on Asia. Further afield it will concentrate, as it is doing at present, on securing the resources it needs for its economy, while probably being reluctant to intervene in far-off conflicts where it has little at stake. The European Union talks of a world role but so far has shown little inclination to develop its military resources, and its internal divisions make it increasingly difficult for Brussels to get agreement on foreign policy. The countries in the BRICS group—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are joined together more in theory than reality. The hope of a coalition of democracies, from Asia to America, willing to intervene in the name of humanitarianism or international stability, reminds me of the old story of the mice and the cat—who is going to be first to put the bell around the animal’s neck? As for public opinion, the citizenry within individual countries, preoccupied with domestic issues, has become

increasingly unwilling to fund or take part in foreign adventures. It may take a moment of real danger to force the major powers of this new world order to come together in coalitions able and willing to act. Action , if it does come, may be too little and too late , and the price we all pay for that delay may

well be high. Instead of muddling along from one crisis to another, now is the time to think again

about those dreadful lessons of a century ago in the hope that our leaders, with our encouragement, will think about how they can work together to build a stable international order.

A2: Deterrence Checks

Deterrence doesn’t take into account irrational decision-making, global alliances, and hazardous situations – history proves that war is still likely.

Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, ‘8

[Martin, “Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons,” 10/21/2008, http://nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php]

A similar situation exists with nuclear weapons. Many people point to the absence of global war since the dawn of the nuclear era as proof that these weapons ensure peace. The MX missile was even christened the Peacekeeper. Just as the laws of physics are used to ensure that a pilot executing a low pass will gain enough altitude to make a safe landing, a law of nuclear deterrence is invoked to quiet any concern over possibly killing billions of innocent people: Since World War III would mean the end of civilization, no one would dare start it. Each side is deterred from attacking the other by the prospect of certain destruction. That's why our

current strategy is called nuclear deterrence or mutually assured destruction (MAD). But again, it's important to read the fine print. It is true that no one in his right mind would start a nuclear war, but when people are highly stressed they often behave irrationally and even seemingly rational decisions can lead to places that no one wants to visit. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted to teeter on the edge of the nuclear abyss during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but that is exactly what they did . Less well known nuclear near misses occurred during

the Berlin crisis of 1961, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and NATO's Able Archer exercise of 1983. In each of those episodes, the law of unintended consequences combined with the danger of irrational decision making under stress created a n extremely hazardous situation . Because the last date for a nuclear near miss listed above was 1983, it might be hoped that the end of the Cold War removed the nuclear sword hanging over humanity's head. Aside from the fact that other potential crises

such as Taiwan were unaffected, a closer look shows that the Cold War, rather than ending, merely went into hibernation. In the West, the reawakening of this specter is usually attributed to resurgent Russian nationalism, but as in most disagreements the other side sees things very differently. The Russian perspective sees the United States behaving irresponsibly in recognizing Kosovo, in putting missiles (albeit defensive ones) in Eastern Europe, and in expanding NATO right up to the Russian border. For our current purposes, the last of these concerns is the most relevant because it involves reading the fine print – in this case, Article 5 of the NATO charter which states that an attack on any NATO member shall be regarded as an attack on them all. It is partly for that reason that a number of former Soviet republics and client states have been brought into NATO and that President Bush is pressing for Georgia and the Ukraine to be admitted. Once these nations are in NATO, the thinking goes, Russia would not dare try to subjugate them again since that would invite nuclear devastation by the United States, which would be treaty bound to come to the victim's aid. But, just as the laws of physics depended on a

model that was not always applicable during a glider's low pass, the law of deterrence which seems to guarantee peace and stability is model-dependent . In the simplified model, an attack by Russia would be unprovoked. But what if Russia should feel provoked into an attack and a different perspective caused the West to see the attack as unprovoked? Just such a situation sparked the First World War . The assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist led Austria to demand that it be allowed to enter Serbian territory to deal with terrorist organizations. This demand was not unreasonable since interrogation of the captured assassins had shown complicity by the Serbian military and it was later determined that the head of Serbian military intelligence was a leader of the secret Black Hand terrorist society. Serbia saw things differently and rejected the demand. War between Austria and Serbia resulted, and alliance obligations similar to NATO's Article 5 then produced a global conflict.

Yes Miscalc

Even conventional strikes would unintentionally spark a global nuclear exchange.

Drum, Staff Writer, ‘10

[Kevin, Mother Jones, Smart, Fearless Journalism, “The Non-Nuclear Nuke,” 4/23, http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/04/non-nuclear-nuke AD: 4/23/10]

For years the Pentagon has been wrestling with a problem: when you get intel telling you that a high-value terrorist has been located somewhere, how do you take him out? They aren't likely to stick around at the target location for long, so you need something that can (a) get there quickly and (b) cause a lot of damage once it does. Bombers and cruise missiles take hours. Local forces, even if they're in place, aren't always lethal enough. What to do? One answer is to use ICBMs. Not nuclear-tipped ICBMs, but missiles with a big conventional payload. The Obama administration is apparently planning to revive this idea, and Noah Shachtman explains why it's crazy: Over and over again, the Bush

administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs . Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it.

The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to

be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “ The launch of such a missile ,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement

of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces .” I guess I can imagine

possible ways to fix this. I just can't imagine any good ways. Even if the Russians and Chinese and Indians and Pakistanis are provided with some reliable way of identifying non-nuclear ICBM launches, they could never be sure that the U nited S tates hadn't figured out some way to fool them . So they'd always be on a short fuse. And do we really want to make that particular fuse even shorter than it already is? Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. This really seems like one of them.

UNIQUENESS

PEACE DECREASINGGLOBAL PEACE IS ON THE DECLINE – MULTIPLE POTENTIAL FLASHPOINTS FOR WARGeorge Dvorsky (io9 staff) 6/19/2014 [“For The First Time Since WWII, Global Peace Is On The Decline” online @ http://io9.com/for-the-first-time-since-wwii-global-peace-is-on-the-d-1593251722, loghry]

It what should be a surprise to nobody, a new report by the Institute for Economics and Peace shows that world peace is on the decline — a reversal of six decades of steady improvement. The annual report, called the Global Peace Index, cites militant attacks and growing crime as the primary culprits, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. The number of people killed in militant attacks has risen in such areas as the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Murder rates are escalating in growing urban centers and more refugees are having to flee war zones. Results show that: Since 2008, 111 countries have deteriorated in levels of peace , while only 51 have increased Europe retains its position as the most peaceful region with 14 of the top 20 most peaceful countries The world has become less peaceful over the last year, mainly due to a rise in terrorist activity, the number of conflicts fought and the number of refugees and displaced people 500 million people live in countries at risk of instability and conflict — 200 million of whom live below the poverty line. The Global Economic Impact of violence reached US$9.8 trillion last year, which is equal to 2 times the total GDP of Africa

WORLD PEACE AT LOWEST SINCE WORLD WAR 2 – HIGH LIKELIHOOD FOR GLOBAL WARSPETER APPS (Reuters staff) 6/18/2014 [“World peace declining after long post-WWII improvement – study” online @ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/18/uk-global-security-peace-idUKKBN0ET1OS20140618, loghry]

(Reuters) - World peace has deteriorated steadily over the last seven years, with wars, militant attacks and crime reversing six earlier decades of gradual improvement , a global security report said on Wednesday. Conflict in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Central African Republic in particular helped drag down the annual Global Peace Index, according to research by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). In particular, rising numbers of people were killed in militant attacks across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa while murder rates rose in the emerging world's growing urban centres. More people also became refugees by fleeing fighting. Crime and conflict rates in more developed regions, particularly Europe, generally fell, said the report. The deterioration appeared the most significant fall in 60 years, the IEP said. Estimates of what the index would have been prior to its launch in 2007 showed world peace improving more or less continuously since the end of World War Two. "There seem to be a range of causes," Steve Killelea, founder and executive chairman of the IEP, told Reuters. "You have the repercussions of the "Arab Spring", the rise of terrorism particularly following the invasion of Iraq and the repercussions of the global financial crisis." The study examines 22 indicators across 162 countries, including military spending, homicide rates and deaths from conflict, civil disobedience and terrorism.

YES WARS

NUCLEAR WARUSE NUCLEAR FORCE POSTURE AND FORWARD BASING MAKES NUCLEAR EXCHANGES HIGHLY LIKELYDr. Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal) 6/3/2014 [“Are You Ready For Nuclear War?” online @ http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/06/03/ready-nuclear-war-paul-craig-roberts/, loghry]

The Russian government understands that the change in US war doctrine and the US ABM bases on its borders are directed at Russia and are indications that Washington plans a first strike with nuclear weapons on Russia. China has also understood that Washington has similar intentions toward China. As I reported several months ago, in response to Washington’s threat China called the world’s attention to China’s ability to destroy the US should Washington initiate such a conflict. However, Washington believes that it can win a nuclear war with little or no damage to the US. This belief makes nuclear war likely . As Steven Starr makes clear, this belief is based in ignorance. Nuclear war has no winner. Even if US cities were saved from retaliation by ABMs, the radiation and nuclear winter effects of the weapons that hit Russia and China would destroy the US as well. The media, conveniently concentrated into a few hands during the corrupt Clinton regime, is complicit by ignoring the issue . The governments of Washington’s vassal states in Western and Eastern Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan are also complicit, because they accept Washington’s plan and provide the bases for implementing it. The demented Polish government has probably signed the death warrant for humanity. The US Congress is complicit, because no hearings are held about the executive branch’s plans for initiating nuclear war. Washington has created a dangerous situation. As Russia and China are clearly threatened with a first strike, they might decide to strike first themselves . Why should Russia and China sit and await the inevitable while their adversary creates the ability to protect itself by developing its ABM shield? Once Washington completes the shield, Russia and China are certain to be attacked, unless they surrender in advance.

Escalation and accidental launch are very probable – newest evidence again Myers 2/1/14 (2/1/14, Rupert Myers, Woodbridge scholar, Cambridge graduate, writer for the Guardian “The more we learn about nuclear past, the more an ‘accident’ seem likely,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/01/are-we-ready-for-nuclear-consequences)

The more we learn about nuclear past, the more an 'accident' seems likely As more countries develop nuclear

arsenals, an ever larger group of people must be trusted with power to trigger catastrophe How have we not had a nuclear war? It is hard to maintain much faith in the long-term safety of our nuclear deterrent with each glimpse of the all-too human flaws of

those with their finger on the button. Thirty-four Air Force officers in charge of launching nuclear missiles have been suspended over accusations that they cheated in proficiency tests about their knowledge of how to operate the weapons. The cheating, uncovered during a probe into the use of drugs by nuclear launch officers, betrays the complacency and boredom of men and women

whose job is to refrain from doing the one thing they are trained to do. Officials have been quick to reassure the public that these suspensions pose no risk of nuclear accident, but it's hard to be convinced. Consider the types of incidents that we now know happened during the cold war era: bombs almost detonating by accident and military exercises being twitchily misunderstood by officers on the other side. The pattern has been one in which the government reassures the public that no danger exists, while privately acknowledging their fears that

human and technical error could conspire to catastrophic effect. The classification of military documents will hide current blushes

for decades to come.In 1961, a B-52 Stratofortress fell apart midair in an incident above North Carolina. The crash resulted in the release of two nuclear bombs, described at the time by a US Department of Defense spokesman as being unarmed and incapable of exploding. In 2013, declassifieddocuments revealed that only one of the four safety mechanisms on the bombs worked.The minutes from a now-declassified meeting with Secretary Of State for Defense Robert McNamara in 1963 says that he complained that this was one of two air crashes – the other

in Texas – where "by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted." McNamara was demanding an end to the delegation of responsibility for launching nuclear weapons by anyone other than the president, noting that "despite our best efforts, the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion still existed."

Publicly, the military had no option but to reassure the public, whilst privately acknowledging the real risk created by the possibility of technical failure and human error.The difficulty with the role of nuclear launch officers is that their job is almost entirely uneventful. It's easy to see how this would lead to professional frustration. In a post-cold war era, it is unlikely to be a career which attracts the brightest and the best, and 99.9% of the role would simply not require the Air Force's top talent. Responsibility for the inception of all-out nuclear war is not without its pressures; occasionally there are moments when the world has to trust that the person making the decision isn't one of those bored, drug-taking nuclear launch officers who cheated on the proficiency exam. Take Vasili Arkhipov, a high-ranking Russian officer on board the B-59 submarine off the coast of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. With tensions running high, the B-59 was forced to dive and lose radio contact with its commanders. Fearing that nuclear war had already begun, Arkhipov was asked by his captain and the boat's political officer to give his vote to launch a nuclear torpedo. Rules dictated that the vote among the top three officers be unanimous, and

Arkhipov vetoed the action, averting nuclear war. US submarines today have the same capability to launch nuclear weapons, although it's not clear they have the authority to do so. In these rare situations, it is vital that the person making the decision is trained, clear-

headed and reliable. Failures of vetting mean that less than ideal candidates can slip through into jobs with high levels of responsibility. The mental health of nuclear launch officers who have been said to suffer from serious "morale issues" can never be entirely guaranteed. If an accidental nuclear explosion were to occur on US soil, it is of little reassurance to learn that the men and women responsible for our military response are, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, in need of immediate review. As long as we have nuclear weapons, we are compelled to place the ability to launch them in the hands of mere mortals. It is an unlikely gamble on human nature. Classification of information means that we usually only learn of the truly scary moments long after the fact, by which time they lose their ability to horrify us. A rare exception to this is 1995, when the Russians mistook a Norwegian research rocket for a US ballistic missile heading for Russia. Despite the end of the Cold War, it was the first time that the leader of a nuclear country was forced to literally open the "nuclear

briefcase". Boris Yeltsin had inserted his nuclear key and was two minutes away from launching Russia's own nuclear missiles, when the flying object detected by Russian radars fell into the sea. As we learn of near misses, and the failings of our last

line of defense, it becomes harder to believe that nuclear proliferation will not ultimately lead to an accident. There is no knowing how professional the launch officers of other nuclear states are, or how they would react to a nuclear incident. As more countries develop their nuclear arsenals, an ever larger group of people must be trusted with the power to trigger nuclear

catastrophe. The greater the number of men and women with the responsibility of not launching nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood that the weakest link in this deadly international standoff will fail . Clouded in secrecy, the dangers are hard to quantify. The greatest danger might not be in a bunker near Tehran, but a silo in Montana.

INDO PAKYES INDO-PAK WAR, DRAWS IN U.S. MULTIPLE WARRANTSGeorge Dvorsky (io9 staff) 4/24/2013 [“The Geopolitical Powderkegs Most Likely to Start the Next Major War” online @ http://io9.com/the-geopolitical-powderkegs-most-likely-to-start-the-ne-479636407, loghry]

Nuclear-capable Pakistan continues to be a headache for international observers. Ongoing drone strikes by U.S. forces have largely alienated its population of 176 million. The country is notorious for serving as a springboard for extremist groups , including those set against its mortal enemy, India. Pakistan has also suffered through three consecutive years of devastating floods, and thousands of civilians have been displaced on account of military occupations and militancy. The nation’s transition to democracy has been slow-going — a process that could be disrupted if extremist parties take power in the elections later this year. I asked Georgia Tech’s Margaret Kosal about Pakistan, and she expressed her concerns with its government and the upper echelons of Pakistan’s military. The country is currently experiencing internal anti-government problems, which include, but are not limited to, Islamist radicals. “The risk,” she told io9, is that “nuclear weapons may be acquired by groups outside the military or by those affiliated with such groups who would transfer them to transnationalist groups who will use them.” This, she contends, is just as likely a threat against India as the U.S. or other western nation. (image: Associated Press)

NORTH KOREAYES NORTH KOREA WAR – SABRE RATTLING HAS PUSHED TENSIONS TO THE BRINKGeorge Dvorsky (io9 staff) 4/24/2013 [“The Geopolitical Powderkegs Most Likely to Start the Next Major War” online @ http://io9.com/the-geopolitical-powderkegs-most-likely-to-start-the-ne-479636407, loghry]

The isolated and nuclear-capable nation of the D emocratic People’s Republic of Korea is the last true Marxist hold-out. It's alone in a world dominated by capitalist interests. Kim Jong-un’s seemingly erratic and perplexingly belligerent behavior has even served to alienate its longtime ally, the People’s Republic of China. While it’s tempting to poke fun at Kim for his recent tirade, his actions were actually quite calculated. Knowing that full-scale war would be certain suicide, Kim’s sabre rattling was a blatant attempt to rouse international attention (possibly for the purposes of forcing an easing of sanctions, or having its nuclear status recognized) and to compel its enemies into action and military overspending (the U.S. reacted by spending $1 billion to deploy additional ballistic missile interceptors along the Pacific Coast). Trouble is , Kim’s foot-stomping has increased tensions to such a considerable degree that even the slightest misunderstanding or provocation could result in an actual military exchange . It’s for this reason that the Korean situation remains an extremely dangerous one.

SYRIAYES SYRIA SPILL OVER – HIGH PROPENSITY FOR DRAW IN OF RUSSIA AND THE U.S. RESULTS IN THIRD WORLD WARGeorge Dvorsky (io9 staff) 4/24/2013 [“The Geopolitical Powderkegs Most Likely to Start the Next Major War” online @ http://io9.com/the-geopolitical-powderkegs-most-likely-to-start-the-ne-479636407, loghry]

Syria is already embroiled in war — a conflict that has resulted in nearly 80,000 deaths. Frighteningly, and as history has repeatedly shown, wars have a nasty tendency to drag other nations in, whether they like it or not . Though it’s been two years since the civil war began, the conflict shows no sign of ebbing; the Assad regime is proving difficult to topple. Moreover, the insurgency is divided, leading many experts to predict a second — and perhaps even more brutal — stage of the war, if and when the government is overthrown. The hardline Sunni Islamists are certainly bracing themselves for a fight. At the same time, the conflict threatens to trickle over into neighboring areas like Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, and Turkey — which could in turn work to further destabilize the Middle East. Add to this the potential for the U.S. and Russia to fight a proxy war in Syria , and you have a situation that bears an eerie resemblance to the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s — a precursor to the Second World War . (image: Alessio Romenzi/AFP/Getty Images)

CHINAYES CHINA WAR – MULTIPLE POLITICAL AND DOMESTIC FACTORS PROVEGeorge Dvorsky (io9 staff) 4/24/2013 [“The Geopolitical Powderkegs Most Likely to Start the Next Major War” online @ http://io9.com/the-geopolitical-powderkegs-most-likely-to-start-the-ne-479636407, loghry]

As the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union starkly demonstrated, it’s often difficult to predict momentous disruptions in authoritarian states. A revolution or coup in one-party China certainly seems unlikely, but it’s definitely not an impossibility . The Brookings Institute, for example, considers a revolution in China to be a potential black swan event . Margaret Kosal shares this concern, citing simmering internal challenges and the prospect of internal unrest. Factors at play in China include its highly problematic housing boom, the government’s growing emphasis on economic growth to ameliorate underlying civil discord, the rising (lower) middle class, corruption, lack of rule of law, and the huge disparity between a few enormously wealthy people and the rest of the population (many of whom are familiar with conditions in Hong Kong, thanks to the Internet). “Over the last 25 years, the CCP has fomented very strong nationalism,” Kosal told io9. So, with greater attention from the global community, potential instability from a rise of China competing with the West (and especially the U.S.), along with long-standing unresolved internal tensions, we have what Kosal calls “a very worrisome mix.” And indeed, given China’s recent row with Japan over islands in the East China Sea, the region is perhaps not as stable as it appears to be. Add North Korea to the mix as a possible troublemaker, and the potential for increased tensions in the area is likewise heightened. (image: Xinhua)

Great power war is still conceivable – especially involving ChinaAllison 14 – January 1, 2014 - Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (Graham, 2014: Good Year for a Great War?, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/2014-good-year-great-war-9652?page=3, JZG)

Precisely a hundred years ago today, the richest man in the world sent New Year’s greetings to a thousand of the

most influential leaders in the U.S. and Europe announcing: mission accomplished. “International Peace,” he proclaimed, “is to prevail through the Great Powers agreeing to settle their disputes by International Law, the pen thus proving mightier than the sword.” Having immigrated to the US penniless, created the steel industry as a pillar of America's rise to preeminence, and become fabulously wealthy in the process, Andrew Carnegie had the confidence of a man who had achieved the impossible. When he turned from making money to spending it for public purposes, his goals were universal literacy at home (funding public libraries in

cities and towns across America), and perpetual peace abroad, starting with the great powers of Europe and the US. Events in the year that had just ended convinced Carnegie that 1914 would be the decisive turning point towards peace.

Just six months earlier, his decade-long campaign culminated in the inauguration of the Peace Palace at the Hague, which he believed would become the Supreme Court of nations. The Palace was built to house the new International Court of Arbitration that would now arbitrate disputes among nations that had historically been settled by war. As the Economist noted, “the Palace of Peace embodies the great idea that gradually law will take the place of war." Carnegie's Peace Palace captured the zeitgeist of the era. The most celebrated book of the decade, The Great Illusion, published in 1910, sold over two million copies. In it, Norman Angell exposed the long-held belief that nations could advance their interests by war as an "illusion." His analysis showed that conquest was

"futile" because "the war-like do not inherit the earth." However inspiring his hopes, Carnegie’s vision proved the illusion. Six months after his New Year’s greeting, a Serbian terrorist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke. Nine months on, the guns of August began a slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: "World War.” By 1918, Europe lay devastated, and a millennium in which it had been the creative center of the

world was over. As we enter 2014, war between great powers seems almost inconceivable. But if we start at the

other end of the telescope by imagining that a Great War with some similarities to World War I actually happened, what could future historians

find in current conditions that permitted events to ride mankind to another catastrophe? If we start with the fact that it happened, we know who the primary combatants had to be. Russia is no longer a great power player; Europe has disarmed itself; the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are arenas for local wars. In the growing competition between the U.S. and China, however, one can hear echoes of 1914. First, a tangled cluster of factors can be summarized as "Thucydides Trap." When a rapidly rising power rivals an established ruling power, trouble ensues. In 11 of 15 cases in which this has occurred in the past 500 years, the result was war. The great Greek historian Thucydides identified these structural stresses as the primary cause of the war between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece. In his oft-quoted insight, “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta

that made war inevitable.” Note that Thucydides identified two factors: rise and fear. Today, a rising China naturally expects more respect and predictably demands greater say and sway in the resolution of differences among nations. It becomes more conscious of past grievances, especially in relations with Japan, and

more determined to revise previous arrangements and practices to reflect new realities. For the US, accustomed to our position in the pecking order, calls for revision in the status quo raise concerns. The Pax Pacifica established and enforced by the US for seven decades since World War II has provided an economic and security order in which the nations of Asia, including China, have enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity. Demands for change, especially through unilateral actions, not only seem ungrateful, but raise alarms. Historically, when rising assertiveness becomes hubristic, and fears paranoid, mutual exaggeration can feed misperceptions and miscalculations, spurring posturing and provocations that lead to unintended consequences. Prospects for peace seemed to be looking up in

1913, as in 2013. What are the chances we're wrong again? Both Thucydides and 1914 remind us of a second cluster of factors that in these conditions can become the trigger for war: namely, entangling relationships with allies. In ancient Greece, an attack by Corcyra (now Corfu) on Corinth forced Sparta to come to its defense, leaving Athens little choice but to back up its ally. In 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Emperor took the assassination as an opportunity to reestablish his authority in Serbia, Russia felt obliged to come to the rescue of its Orthodox cousins in the Balkans, Germany supported its Austro-Hungarian ally in the hope that success in the Balkans would make it a more valuable counterbalance to the Russian-French threat, and the rest became history. As Chris Clark's new book, The Sleepwalkers, explains, these leaders proceeded "watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror

they were about to bring into the world." What about 2014? Can we sketch a scenario today that could sleepwalk to war? Fortunately,

not easily. Of course, there could well be incidents in or over the South or East China Sea in which US and Chinese warships or aircraft collide. Recall, this occurred in 2001 near Hainan Island, when a hotrodding Chinese pilot caused a U.S. spycraft to make an emergency landing in China. Tense moments ensued, but both governments contained themselves and the crisis was resolved. Recently a Chinese ship in the South China Sea would have rammed an American warship had the US captain not changed course at the last minute. While playing chicken with military ships and aircraft is foolish, both the US and China have "wargamed" these possibilities so

thoroughly that it is reasonable to expect adult supervision before matters get out of hand. More problematic are potential confrontations between Japan and China. Japan is America's principal ally in Asia, and the US-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty commits the US to come to its defense. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, when the US returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972, it included a string of largely unknown islands in the East China Sea called the Senkakus. On Chinese maps, these are named the Diaoyus,

and China claims them as its own. Historically, one of the surest predictors of hostility between nations are territorial disputes. (Japan and Russia have still not signed a peace treaty for the war that ended in 1945 because the Russians control four islands the Japanese regard as theirs.) Claims about others seizing "our territory" stir nationalistic passions in autocracies and democracies alike. Moreover, as the Austro-Hungarian case demonstrates vividly, nations in decline feel increasingly insecure and become more susceptible to fantasies that promise to restore their rightful place by a bold stroke. For Japanese, the last twenty years are "lost decades" of economic stagnation and national decline in which China overtook and then displaced them as the second largest economy in the world. Japan's Prime Minister Abe came to power determined to revive economic growth at home and respect for Japan abroad. By radical changes in Japanese monetary policy, including its own version of quantitative easing, decades of disinflation have been reversed, and Japan's economy is showing modest signs of recovery. Abe's grander ambitions, however, are to rebuild Japan's military power, revise what many Japanese see as a US-imposed peace treaty that ended World War II, significantly increase Japan's defense spending, and demonstrate that Japan can stand up to

defend its own territory. Thus my most likely scenario for war in 2014 would begin with initiatives like China's recent unilateral declaration of an exclusive air zone over the islands in the East China Sea that trigger escalatory responses by Japan leading to the downing of a plane or sinking of a ship with scores of casualties. There could follow a process of retaliatory risk-taking in which each responds to the other, producing a small naval and air conflict between Japan and China at sea in which dozens of ships and planes are destroyed. Expecting the US Navy and Air Force to have its back, and certain that together, Japanese and US military forces currently have decisive superiority, Japanese politicians could adopt a strategy of "tit +" for "tat" and expect China to back down. Students of decisions by the regime that has governed China since 1949 would not be so sure. As Taylor Fravel’s analysis of Chinese

uses or force in territorial disputes over the past six decades finds, in cases where they were unambiguously militarily weaker than their opponent, China has been three times as likely to go to war as in cases in which they had the upper hand. Americans should recall the Korean War where a Chinese Communist regime that had not yet even consolidated control over its core entered the war as the US marched just south

of the Yalu, fought the US back to the 38th parallel, and forced the US to settle for an armistice. Will 2014 bring another Great War? My bet is almost certainly not, but with a note of caution. Claims that war is "inconceivable" are not statements about what is possible in the world, but rather, about what our limited minds can conceive. The fact that Presidents Obama and Xi understand that war would be folly for both China and the US is relevant but not

dispositive. None of the leaders in Europe of 1914 would have chosen the war they got and that in the end they all lost. By 1918, the Kaiser was gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France

bled for a generation, and England shorn of the flower of its youth and treasure. Given a chance for a do-over, none of the leaders would have made the choices he did. Thus as we look forward with hope to the year ahead, reflection on mistakes made a century ago reminds us of the perils of complacency.

RUSSIAYES RUSSIA NUCLEAR WAR – POOR INTELLIGENCE, BAD COMMUNICATION, BATTLEFIELD SETBACKS, AND A HOST OF OTHER INFLUENCES MAKE NUCLEAR UES EXTREMELY LIKELYLoren Thompson (Forbes Contributor) 4/24/2014 [“Four Ways The Ukraine Crisis Could Escalate To Use Of Nuclear Weapons” online @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/04/24/four-ways-the-ukraine-crisis-could-escalate-to-use-of-nuclear-weapons/, loghry]

A 2011 study by the respected RAND Corporation came to much the same conclusion, stating that Russian doctrine explicitly recognizes the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to conventional aggression. Not only does Moscow see nuclear use as a potential escalatory option in a regional war, but it also envisions using nuclear weapons to de-escalate a conflict. This isn’t just Russian saber-rattling. The U.S. and its NATO partners too envision the possibility of nuclear use in a European war. The Obama Administration had the opportunity to back away from such thinking in a 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, and instead decided it would retain forward-deployed nuclear weapons in Europe under a doctrine known as extended deterrence. Eastern European nations that joined NATO after the Soviet collapse have been especially supportive of having U.S. nuclear weapons nearby. So improbable though it may seem, doctrine and capabilities exist on both sides that could lead to nuclear use in a confrontation over Ukraine. Here are four ways that what started out as a local crisis could turn into something much worse. Bad intelligence. As the U.S. has stumbled from one military mis-adventure to another over the last several decades, it has become clear that Washington isn’t very good at interpreting intelligence. Even when vital information is available, it gets filtered by preconceptions and bureaucratic processes so that the wrong conclusions are drawn. Similar problems exist in Moscow. For instance, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 arose partly from Soviet leader Khrushchev’s assessment that President Kennedy was weaker than he turned out to be, and the U.S. Navy nearly provoked use of a nuclear torpedo by a Russian submarine during the blockade because it misjudged the enemy’s likely reaction to being threatened. It is easy to imagine similar misjudgments in Ukraine, which Washington and Moscow approach from very different perspectives. Any sizable deployment of U.S. forces in the region could provoke Russian escalation. Defective signaling. When tensions are high, rival leaders often seek to send signals about their intentions as a way of shaping outcomes. But the meaning of such signals can easily be confused by the need of leaders to address multiple audiences at the same time, and by the different frames of reference each side is applying. Even the process of translation can change the apparent meaning of messages in subtle ways. So when Russian foreign minister Lavrov spoke this week (in English) about the possible need to come to the aid of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, Washington had to guess whether he was stating the public rationale for an invasion, sending a warning signal to Kiev about its internal counter-terror campaign, or trying to accomplish some other purpose. Misinterpretation of such signals can become a reciprocal process that sends both sides up the “ladder of escalation” quickly, to a point where nuclear use seems like the logical next step. Looming defeat. If military confrontation between Russia and NATO gave way to conventional conflict, one side or the other would eventually face defeat. Russia has a distinct numerical advantage in the area around Ukraine, but its military consists mainly of conscripts and is poorly equipped compared with Western counterparts. Whichever side found itself losing would have to weigh the drawbacks of losing against those of escalating to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Moscow would have to contemplate the possibility of a permanent enemy presence near its heartland, while Washington might face the collapse of NATO, its most important alliance. In such circumstances, the use of “only” one or two tactical nuclear warheads to avert an outcome with such far-reaching consequences might seem reasonable — especially given the existence of relevant capabilities and supportive doctrine on both sides. Command breakdown. Strategic nuclear weapons like intercontinental ballistic missiles are tightly controlled by senior military leaders in Russia and America, making their unauthorized or accidental use nearly impossible. That is less the case with nonstrategic nuclear weapons, which at some point in the course of an escalatory process need to be released to the control of local commanders if they are to have military utility. U.S. policy even envisions letting allies deliver tactical warheads against enemy targets. Moscow probably doesn’t trust its allies to that degree, but with more tactical nuclear weapons in more locations, there is a greater likelihood that local Russian commanders might have the latitude to initiate nuclear use in the chaos of battle. Russian doctrine endorses nuclear-weapons use in response to conventional aggression threatening the homeland, and obstacles to local initiative often break down once hostilities commence. When you consider all the processes working to degrade restraint in wartime — poor intelligence, garbled communication, battlefield setbacks, command attenuation, and a host of other influences — it seems reasonable to consider that a military confrontation between NATO and Russia might in some manner escalate out of control, even to the point of using nuclear weapons . And because Ukraine is so close to the Russian heartland (about 250 miles from Moscow) there’s no telling what might happen once the nuclear “firebreak” is crossed. All this terminology — firebreaks, ladders of escalation, extended deterrence — was devised during the Cold War to deal with potential warfighting scenarios in Europe. So if there is a renewed possibility of tensions leading to war over Ukraine (or some other former Soviet possession), perhaps the time has come to revive such thinking.

RUSSIA IMPACTUS-RUSSIA WAR CAUSES HUMAN EXTINCTION AND LEAVES THE EARTH UNINHABITABLE FOR MOST HIGHER FORMS OF LIFE, BEST STUDIES PROVE MULTIPLE INTERNAL LINKS TO EXTINCTIONSteven Starr (Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility) 5/30/2014 [“The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons” online @ http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/30/lethality-nuclear-weapons/, loghry]

Nuclear war has no winner. Beginning in 2006, several of the world’s leading climatologists (at Rutgers, UCLA, John Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado-Boulder) published a series of studies that evaluated the long-term environmental consequences of a nuclear war, including baseline scenarios fought with merely 1% of the explosive power in the US and/or Russian launch-ready nuclear arsenals. They concluded that the consequences of even a “small” nuclear war would include catastrophic disruptions of global climate [i] and massive destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layer[ii]. These and more recent studies predict that global agriculture would be so negatively affected by such a war, a global famine would result, which would cause up to 2 billion people to starve to death . [iii] These peer-reviewed studies – which were analyzed by the best scientists in the world and found to be without error – also predict that a war fought with less than half of US or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would destroy the human race .[iv] In other words, a US-Russian nuclear war would create such extreme long-term damage to the global environment that it would leave the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most animal forms of life .

Authors

A2: mandelbaum

Mandelbaum concedes he is on the wrong side of the debate

Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, “Is Major War Obsolete?”, February 25, 1999, http://www.ciaonet.org/conf/cfr10/

An introductory note: The position I’m proposing in this discussion occupies the high ground morally . After all, we all wish to believe that major war is obsolete. But it does not occupy , I must in all honesty say, the high ground intellectually . History and logic weigh on the other side. The burden of proof or, I should say, the burden of argument, for this is a proposition that cannot be proven, is on me. And many of you here will recognize this argument as the descendant of a familiar one, one two centuries old that originates with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which was proposed in dramatic form by the American President Woodrow Wilson, which is identified with the liberal Anglo-American view of the world.

Mandelbaum admits the conditions the plan creates reverses the trends that make war obsolete

Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, “Is Major War Obsolete”, Survival, Winter 1998/1999, Proquest

Still, if major war is obsolete, or obsolescent, and modern war is in decline, neither is impossible. The impossibility of war has been confidently predicted in the past - before 1914, for example - and subsequent events have decisively falsified these predictions. This could happen again. The trends that have contributed to debellicisation are not as firmly entrenched in Russia or China as in the countries that were their adversaries during the Cold War. Even in the West, warlessness could erode: the barriers to war could weaken, for example, if democracy were to become less robust. Or, as the world moves away from the era of battles in the first half of the twentieth century, and the period of nuclear-induced anxiety punctuated by occasional crises in the second half, the memories and anticipations of destruction that helped to keep the world's mightiest military machines in check could fade. Or the obsolescence of modem war could be undercut by what bureaucracies call 'unk-unks' unknown unknowns - things about which there is not merely uncertainty but a complete lack of awareness. Militant religious beliefs, messianic ideologies, conflicts over resources or other currently unforeseen causes of conflict may lurk over the horizon.

A2: fetweissFettweis is wrongBeede 11 (Librarian Emeritus at Rutgers University, Princeton University graduate and author of The Small Wars of the United States, 1899-2009: An Annotated Bibliography (Routledge Research Guides to American Military Studies) , Military and Strategic Policy: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Military Studies) , Index to Contemporary Military Articles of the World War II Era, 1939-1949 (Bibliographies and Indexes in Military Studies), Independence Documents of the World, The War of 1898 and U.S. Interventions, 1898T1934: An Encyclopedia (Military History of the United States), The legal sources of public policy. October 2011, “Losing Hurts Twice as Bad: The Four States to Moving Beyond Iraq – By Christopher J. Fettweis,” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00321.x/pdf)

Fettweis uses Iraq to argue for a strategy of restraint based on his sanguine view that “we [the United States and, indeed, the entire world] are living in a golden age” (31, emphasis in the original), and that “[g]reat power conflict today is all but unthinkable; therefore, calculations surrounding the dangers posed by a united Eurasia should change, since the threats it once posed no longer exist” (208). With the end of the Cold War, the ability of the enemies of the United States to harm this country is quite limited. Hostile acts can be perpetrated, but such attacks cannot overthrow the United States (31). This strategy is hardly new. Years ago, it was summarized in these words, “Instead of preserving obsolete Cold War alliances and embarking on an expensive and dangerous campaign for global stability, the United States should view the collapse of Soviet power as an opportunity to adopt a less interventionist policy” (Carpenter 1992, 167). Despite the optimistic picture painted by some national security theorists, the world does contain some dangerous elements. David E. Sanger (2009), for example, presents a chilling picture of nuclear weapons in very possibly unsteady hands.

Much is said in the book concerning national “credibility,” that is, the ability of a country to maintain its prestige and its reputation for decisive action based on its past performance. Fettweis argues that many governmental leaders, academic commentators, and journalists have been obsessed with this element of national power and have wanted the United States to deal with virtually any political crisis that occurs (161-75). Fettweis states that “[f]or some reason, U.S. policymakers seem to be especially prone to overestimate the threats they face” (116). There is no explanation of why this should be the case, nor is there any comparison with the propensity of leaders in other countries to make similar inaccurate projections.

NUKE WAR IMPACTS

EXTINCTION – LAUNDRY (FAMINE/MELTDOWNS/WINTER)NUCLEAR WAR KILLS ALL HUMANS – RESULTS IN GLOBAL FAMINE, THE ELIMINATION OF GROWING SEASONS FOR A DECADE, AN ICE AGE, IMMEDIATE WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT MELTDOWNS AND MASSIVE RADIOACTIVITY THAT WOULD RENDER MOST OF THE GLOBE UNINHABITABLESteven Starr (Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility) 5/30/2014 [“The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons” online @ http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/30/lethality-nuclear-weapons/, loghry]

A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”,[v] begins by stating:

“A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.” In 2009, I wrote an article[vi] for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that summarizes the findings of these studies. It explains that nuclear firestorms would produce millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B reaching Earth[vii]) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last 10 years or longer . Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years ; the intense cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations. E lectromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated circuits in all modern electronic devices[viii], including those in commercial nuclear power plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown ; every nuclear spent fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity . The fallout would make most of the US and Europe uninhabitable. Of course, the survivors of the nuclear war would be starving to death anyway. Once nuclear weapons were introduced into a US-Russian conflict, there would be little chance that a nuclear holocaust could be avoided . Theories of “limited nuclear war” and “nuclear de-escalation” are unrealistic.[ix] In 2002 the Bush administration modified US strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit preemptive nuclear attack; in 2010, the Obama administration made only incremental and miniscule changes to this doctrine, leaving it essentially unchanged. Furthermore, Counterforce doctrinex – used by both the US and Russian military – emphasizes the need for preemptive strikes once nuclear war begins Both sides would be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield.

Yes extinction—consensus of recent studies—Robock indicts don’t apply

Farnsworth 2011 – editor and a contributor for Arms Control Now (2/18, Tim, Arms Control Now, “Thinking Existentially about the Worldwide Threat”, http://armscontrolnow.org/2011/02/18/thinking-existentially-about-the-worldwide-threat/)

A panel of scientists provided a useful update today on the latest thinking about the climatic consequences of nuclear

weapons use. The presentation provided a grim reminder that the nuclear Sword of Damocles still hangs over all nations of the earth, nuclear and non-nuclear powers alike – notwithstanding the significant achievement of New START ratification by the United States and Russia.¶ At the

annual meeting in Washington of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Georgiy Stenchikov (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), Luke Oman ( NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and Michael Mills ( N ational C enter for A tmospheric R esearch) shared results of their research, benefiting from extensive studies

of related phenomenon in recent decades, such as massive forest fires , volcanic eruptions, and oil well fires. Unlike the “nuclear winter” studies of the 1980s, which focused on the impact of an all-out US-Soviet nuclear exchange, the latest research looked at the environment effects of a more limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan.¶ The speakers reported on their estimates of the environmental consequences resulting from theoretical detonation of 100 15kt-yield nuclear weapons over Indian and Pakistani cities. In such an

exchange, millions of tons of soot in the smoke plumes from urban fires would be lofted into the stratosphere , circulating around the earth

within days, but adversely affecting the ozone layer, world temperatures, and precipitation for years.

New sources and models all forecast extinction—none of their indicts apply

Mosher 2011 (2/25, Dave, Wired Science, “How one nuclear skirmish could wreck the planet”, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/nuclear-war-climate-change/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wiredscience+(Blog+-+Wired+Science))

WASHINGTON — Even a small nuclear exchange could ignite mega-firestorms and wreck the planet’s atmosphere.

New climatological simulations show 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs — relatively small warheads, compared to the arsenals military

superpowers stow today — detonated by neighboring countries would destroy more than a quarter of the Earth’s ozone layer in about two years.

Regions closer to the poles would see even more precipitous drops in the protective gas, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. New York and Sydney, for example, would see declines rivaling the perpetual hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. And it may take more than six years for the ozone layer to reach half of its former levels.

Researchers described the results during a panel Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, calling it “a real bummer” that such a localized nuclear war could bring the modern world to its knees.

“This is tremendously dangerous,” said environmental scientist Alan Robock of Rutgers University , one of the climate scientists presenting at

the meeting. “The climate change would be unprecedented in human history, and you can imagine the world … would just shut down.”

To defuse the complexity involved in a nuclear climate catastrophe, Wired.com sat down with Michael Mills , an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who led some of the latest simulation efforts.

‘It’s pretty clear this would lead to a global nuclear famine .’

Wired.com: In your simulation, a war between India and Pakistan breaks out. Each country launches 50 nukes at their opponent’s cities. What happens after the first bomb goes off?

Michael Mills: The initial explosions ignite fires in the cities, and those fires would build up for hours. What you eventually get is a firestorm, something on the level we saw in World War II in cities like Dresden, in Tokyo, Hiroshima and so on.

Today we have larger cities than we did then — mega cities. And using 100 weapons on these different mega cities, like those in India and

Pakistan, would cause these firestorms to build on themselves. They would create their own weather and start sucking air through bottom. People and objects would be sucked into buildings from the winds, basically burning everything in the city. It’ll burn concrete, the temperatures get so hot. It converts mega cities into black carbon smoke.

Wired.com: I see — the firestorms push up the air, and ash, into the atmosphere?

Mills: Yeah. You sometimes see these firestorms in large forest fires in Canada, in Siberia. In those cases, you see a lot of this black carbon getting into the stratosphere, but not on the level we’re talking about in a nuclear exchange.

The primary cause of ozone loss is the heating of the stratosphere by that smoke. Temperatures initially increase by more than 100 degrees Celsius, and remain more than 30 degrees higher

than normal for more than 3 years. The higher temperatures increase the rates of two reaction cycles that deplete ozone .

Wired.com: And the ozone layer is in the stratosphere, correct?

Mills: OK, so we live in the troposphere, which is about 8 kilometers [5 miles] thick at the poles, and 16 km [10 miles] at the equator.

At the top of the troposphere, you start to encounter the stratosphere. It’s defined by the presence of the ozone layer, with the densest ozone at the lowest part, then it tails off at the stratopause, where the stratosphere ends about 50 km [30 miles] up.

We have a lot of weather in the troposphere. That’s because energy is being absorbed at the Earth’s surface, so it’s warmest at the surface. As you go up in the atmosphere it gets colder. Well, that all turns around as you get to the ozone layer. It starts getting hotter because ozone is absorbing ultraviolet radiation, until you run out of ozone and it starts getting colder again. Then you’re at the mesosphere.

How Nukes Gobble Up Ozone

When we talk about ozone, we’re talking about the odd oxygen family, which includes both ozone (O3) and atomic oxygen (O). Those two gases can interchange rapidly within hours.

Ozone is produced naturally by the breakdown of molecules of oxygen, O2, which makes up 20 percent of the atmosphere. O2 breaks down from ultraviolet solar radiation and splits it into two molecules of O. Then the O, very quickly, runs into another O2 and forms O3. And the way O3 forms O again is by absorbing more UV light, so it’s actually more protective than O2.

Ozone is always being created and destroyed by many reactions. Some of those are catalytic cycles that destroy ozone, and in those you have something like NO2 plus O to produce NO plus O2. In that case, you’ve gotten rid of a member of the odd oxygen family and converted it to O2. Well, then you’ve got an NO which can react with ozone and produce the NO2 back again and another O2. So the NO and NO2 can go back and forth and in the process one molecule can deplete thousands of molecules of ozone.

It’s a similar process to chlorofluorocarbons, Those are the larger molecules that we’ve manufactured that don’t exist naturally. They break down into chlorine in the stratosphere, which has a powerful ozone-depleting ability . —Michael Mills

Wired.com: Where do the nukes come in? I mean, in eroding the ozone layer?

Mills: It’s not the explosions that do it, but the firestorms. Those push up gases that lead to oxides of nitrogen, which act likechlorofluorocarbons. But let’s back up a little.

There are two important elements that destroy ozone, or O3, which is made of three atoms of oxygen. One element involves oxides of nitrogen, including nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, which can be made from nitrous oxide, or N2O — laughing gas.

The other element is a self-destructive process that happens when ozone reacts with atomic oxygen, called O. When they react together, they form O2, which is the most common form of oxygen on the planet. This self-reaction is natural, but takes off the fastest in the first year after the nuclear war.

In years two, three and four, the NO2 builds up. It peaks in year two because the N2O, the stuff that’s abundant in the troposphere, rose so rapidly with the smoke that it’s pushed up into the stratosphere. There, it breaks down into the oxides like NO2, which deplete ozone.

Wired.com: So firestorms suck up the N2O, push it up into the stratosphere, and degrade the ozone layer. But where does this stuff come from?

Mills: N2O is among a wide class of what we call tracers that are emitted at the ground. It’s produced by bacterias in soil, and it’s been increasing due to human activities like nitrogen fertilizers used in farming. N2O is actually now the most significant human impact on the ozone, now that we’ve mostly taken care of CFCs.

Wired.com: You did similar computer simulations in the past few years and saw this ozone-depleting effect. What do the new simulations tell us?

Mills: Before, we couldn’t look at the ozone depletion’s effects on surface temperatures; we lacked a full ocean model

that would respond realistically. The latest runs are ones I’ve done in the Community Earth System Model. It has an atmospheric model, a full-ocean model, full-land and sea-ice models, and even a glacier model.

We see significantly greater cooling than other studies, perhaps because of ozone loss . Instead of a globally averaged 1.3-degree–Celsius drop, which Robock’s atmospheric mode l produced, it’s more like 2 degrees. But we both see a 7 percent decrease in global average precipitation in both models. And in our model we see a much greater global average loss of ozone for many years, with even larger losses everywhere outside of the tropics.

I also gave this to my colleague Julia Lee-Taylor at NCAR. She calculated the UV indexes across the planet, and a lot of major cities and farming areas would be

exposed to a UV index similar to the Himalayas, or the hole over the Antarctic. We’re starting to look at the response of sea ice and land ice in the model, and it seems to be heavily increasing in just a few years after the hypothetical war.

Wired.com: What would all of this do to the planet, to civilization?

Mills: UV has big impacts on whole ecosystems. Plant height reduction, decreased shoot mass , reduction in foliage area. It can affect

genetic stability of plants, increase susceptibility to attacks by insects and pathogens, and so on. It changes the whole competitive balance of plants and nutrients, and it can affect processes from which plants get their nitrogen.

Then there’s marine life, which depends heavily on phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are essential; they live in top layer of the ocean and they’re the plants of the ocean.

They can go a little lower in the ocean if there’s UV, but then they can’t get as much sunlight and produce as much energy. As soon as you cut off plants in the ocean, the animals would die pretty quickly. You also get damage to larval development and reproduction in fish, shrimp, crabs and other animals. Amphibians are also very susceptible to UV.

EXTINCTION – OZONE LOSS POD 1. ALTERNATE CAUSES NOT ENOUGH FOR OZONE DESTRUCTION – EVEN A LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR WOULD DESTROY THE OZONE, MAKES NUCLEAR WINTER LOOK GOODReuters 4/8/2008 [“South Asian nuclear war would destroy ozone” online @ http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/04/08/2210789.htm, loghry]

Eight nations are known to have nuclear weapons, and Pakistan and India are believed to have at least 50 weapons apiece,

each with the power of the weapon the US used to destroy Hiroshima in 1945. Mills says the study adds a new factor to the worries about what might damage the world's ozone layer, as well as to research about the effects of even a limited

nuclear exchange. "The smoke is the key and it is coming from these firestorms that build up actually several hours after

the explosions," he says. "We are talking about modern megacities that have a lot of material in them that would burn. We

saw these kinds of megafires in World War Two in Dresden and Tokyo. The difference is we are talking about a large number of cities that would be bombed within a few days." Nothing natural could create this much black smoke in the same way, Mill notes. Volcanic ash, dust and smoke are of a different nature, for example,

and forest fires are not big or hot enough . The University of Colorado's Professor Brian Toon, who also worked on the study,

says the damage to the ozone layer would be worse than what has been predicted by 'nuclear winter' and 'ultraviolet spring' scenarios . "The big surprise is that this study demonstrates that a small-scale, regional nuclear conflict is capable of triggering ozone losses even larger than losses that were predicted following a full-scale nuclear war," Toon says

2. OZONE LOSS TRIGGERS GLOBAL EXTINCTIONSPavlov, et al. (PAVLOV Alexander A. (1) ; PAVLOV Anatoli K. (2) ; MILLS Michael J. (1) ; OSTRYAKOV Valery M. (3) ; VASILYEV Gennadiy I. (4) ; TOON Owen B. (1 5) (1) Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, ETATS-UNIS 2) Russian Astrobiology Center, Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, RUSSIE, FEDERATION DE (3) Cosmic Research Unit, Physical-Technical Department, St. Petersburg Polytechnical University, St. Petersburg, RUSSIE, FEDERATION DE (4) Laboratory of Space Spectrometry, loffe Physical Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, RUSSIE, FEDERATION DE (5) Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Colorado,

Boulder, Colorado, ETATS-UNIS) 2005 [“Catastrophic ozone loss during passage of the Solar system through an interstellar cloud” online @ http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16639865, loghry]

When Solar system passes through moderately dense interstellar clouds, Earth experiences a dramatic increase in the flux of the anomalous component of cosmic rays (ACRs) along with an increased flux of galactic cosmic rays. ACR flux across the Earth's orbit lasts as long as it takes to cross a moderately dense interstellar cloud, about 1 Myr years. A period of 1 Myr is long enough for Earth to experience at least one magnetic∼

reversal allowing penetration of the cosmic rays deep into the atmosphere even at low latitudes. Such increased cosmic ray fluxes would enhance the abundance of stratospheric NOx ∼ 100 times between 20-40 km, which in turn would decrease the ozone column globally by at least 40% and in the polar regions up to 80%. Such ozone loss would last for the duration of the magnetic reversal and could trigger global extinctions .

OZONE LOSS IMPACT OZONE LOSS CAUSES EXTINCTIONGreenpeace 1995 [“Full of Holes: Montreal Protocol and the Continuing Destruction of the Ozone Layer” online @ http://archive.greenpeace.org/ozone/holes/holebg.html, loghry]

When chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina first postulated a link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone layer depletion in 1974, the news was greeted with scepticism, but taken seriously nonetheless. The vast majority of credible scientists have since confirmed this hypothesis. The ozone layer around the Earth shields us all from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without the ozone layer, life on earth would not exist. Exposure to increased levels of ultraviolet radiation can cause cataracts, skin cancer, and immune system suppression in humans as well as innumerable effects on other living systems. This is why Rowland's and Molina's theory was taken so seriously, so quickly - the stakes are literally the continuation of life on earth.

Nuke War Bad – PlanktonA) Turn---Limited nuclear war will kill phytoplanktonTime 2-25-11

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/02/25/why-nukes-are-the-most-urgent-environmental-threat/

Presenting the research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Washington D.C. last week, NCAR scientist Michael Mills explained that the heat and soot in the stratosphere following limited nuclear war would lead to "low-ozone" columns over cities, which would increase cancer rates and eye damage dramatically . But the ozone loss would be so great that it would also have serious repercussions for plant life, including “plant height reduction, decreased shoot mass, and reduction in foliage area” and long-term genetic instability. Another risk is depletion of phytoplankton that feed sea life.

B) Phytoplankton collapse causes extinction and destroys the world’s most important carbon sink – that will spark quick warmingBryant ‘03(Donald, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “The beauty in small things revealed”, Volume 100, Number 17, August 19, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/17/9647)

Oxygenic photosynthesis accounts for nearly all the primary biochemical production of organic matter on Earth. The byproduct of this process, oxygen, facilitated the evolution of complex eukaryotes and supports their/our continuing existence . Because macroscopic plants are responsible for most terrestrial photosynthesis, it is relatively easy to appreciate the importance of photosynthesis on land when one views the lush green diversity of grasslands or forests. However, Earth is the "blue planet," and oceans cover nearly 75% of its surface. All life on Earth equally depends on the photosynthesis that occurs in Earth's oceans. A rich diversity of marine phytoplankton, found in the upper 100 m of oceans, accounts only for 1% of the total photosynthetic biomass, but this virtually invisible forest accounts for nearly 50% of the net primary productivity of the biosphere (1). Moreover, the importance of these organisms in the biological pump, which traps CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in the deep sea, is increasingly recognized as a major component of the global geochemical carbon cycle (2). It seems obvious that it is as important to understand marine photosynthesis as terrestrial photosynthesis, but the contribution of marine photosynthesis to the global carbon cycle was grossly underestimated until recently. Satellite-based remote sensing (e.g., NASA sea-wide field sensor) has allowed more reliable determinations of oceanic photosynthetic productivity to be made (refs. 1 and 2; see Fig. 1).

EXTINCTION – NUKE WINTER PODDESPITE RECENT ARMS REDUCTIONS NUCLEAR WINTER IS STILL POSSIBLE – THE USE OF EVEN A FRACTION OF EXISTING WEAPONS WILL RESULT IN THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL LIFE ON EARTHMuchkund Dubey (staff) 5/18/2009 [“President Obama’s Initiative for Achieving a Nuclear Weapons-Free World” Mainstream, Vol XLVII, No 22, online @ http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article1362.html, loghry]

A key provision in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) which came into force from 1970, was that the five nuclear weapon states, so recognised in the Treaty, will undertake negotiations in good faith for achieving nuclear disarmament. The international community achieved the highest level of consensus in favour of nuclear disarmament at the Tenth Special Session of the General Assembly, which was the First Special Session on Disarmament (SSOD-I). In the Final Document adopted at the Session, it was stated: It is essential to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race in all its aspects in order to avert the danger of war involving nuclear weapons. The ultimate goal in this context is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, after the SSOD-I, the world started moving back from the goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons. The Cold War got intensified from the beginning of the 1980s, and reached its apex during the first half of the decade. Consequently, the nuclear arms race was intensified and acquired new dimensions. The nuclear arsenals in the possession of the two rival groups led by the USA and the USSR, competing for hegemony in the world, acquired a huge and frightening proportion. This prompted a group of eminent scientists of the world to propound the hypothesis of ’Nuclear Winter’. According to this, the use of even a fraction of the existing stockpile of nuclear weapons will result in the annihilation of not only humankind but also of all lives on earth and the destruction of all centres and traces of human civilisation. In spite of the recent reductions in nuclear weapons, mainly through the treaties between the United States and USSR/Russia, the ’Nuclear Winter’ still remains not only a plausible hypothesis but also a distinct possibility.

NUKE WINTER – INTERNALS NUCLEAR WAR CAUSES NUCLEAR WINTER AND MASSIVE FAMINESteven Starr (independent writer who has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies) 2009 [“Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict” International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation, online @ http://inesap.org/node/11, loghry]

Nuclear detonations within urban and industrial areas would ignite immense mass fires which would burn everything imaginable and create millions of tons of thick, black smoke (soot). This soot would ultimately be lofted into the stratosphere. There it would absorb and block sunlight from reaching the lower atmosphere where greenhouse gases mainly reside, and thus act to reduce the natural greenhouse effect.4 The profound darkness and global cooling predicted to be result of this process (along with massive amounts of radioactive fallout and pyrotoxins,5 and ozone depletion) was first described in 1983 as nuclear winter.6 Joint research by Western and Soviet scientists led to the realization that the climatic and environmental consequences of nuclear war, in combination with the indirect effects of the collapse of society, could produce a nuclear winter which would cause famine for billions of people far from the war zones.7 These predictions led to extensive international research and peer review during the mid-1980s. A large body of work which essentially supported the initial findings of the 1983 studies was done by such groups as the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE),8 the World Meteorological Organization,9 and the U.S. National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.10 The idea of nuclear winter, published and supported by prominent scientists, generated extensive public alarm and put political pressure on the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to terminate a runaway nuclear arms race which, by 1986, had created a global nuclear arsenal of more than 65,000 nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this was anathema to the nuclear weapons establishment and thus nuclear winter created a backlash among many powerful conservative groups, who undertook an extensive media campaign to brand it as “bad science” and the scientists who discovered it as “irresponsible.” Critics used various uncertainties in the studies and the first climate models (which are relatively primitive by current standards) as a basis to denigrate and reject the concept of nuclear winter. In 1986, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), who predicted drops in global cooling about half as large as those first predicted by the 1983 studies and described this as a ‘nuclear autumn.’ Subsequent widespread criticism, in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine, often used the term “nuclear autumn” to imply that no important climatic change would result from nuclear war. In 1987, the National Review called nuclear winter a “fraud.” In 2000, Discover Magazine published an article which described nuclear winter as one of “The Twenty Greatest Scientific Blunders in History.”11 Sadly enough, for almost two decades this smear campaign limited serious discussion and prevented further studies of nuclear winter – and such criticism will continue.12 Yet the basic findings of the nuclear winter research, that extreme climatic changes would result from nuclear war, were never scientifically disproved and have been strengthened by the latest studies.

EVEN A REGIONAL NUCLEAR WAR WILL CAUSE GLOBAL NUCLEAR WINTER – BORES HOLES IN THE ATMOSPHERE AND COLLAPSES AGRICULTUREKeay Davidson (Chronicle Science Writer) 12/12/2006 [“Small nuclear war could severely cool the planet” San Francisco Chronicle, online @ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/12/MNGE5MTRI31.DTL, loghry]

A regional nuclear war between Third World nations could trigger planetwide cooling that would likely ravage agriculture and kill millions of people, scientists reported Monday. For many years, Western military scientists and strategists have assumed that the damage from small-scale regional nuclear wars would be limited to continents on which they occurred.

Now, in a revamping of the "nuclear winter" debate of the 1980s, new and far more sophisticated computer models show that even these little nuclear wars could create global devastation. Scientists, reporting their findings at the

American Geophysical Conference in San Francisco, said vast urban firestorms ignited by war would send thick, dark clouds into the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays and cooling much of the planet, with severe climatic and agricultural results. The soot might remain in the upper atmosphere for up to a decade. "All hell would break loose," said Prof. Richard Turco of UCLA's department of atmospheric and ocean sciences. In some places, the planet could cool more than it did during the so-called Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when glaciers advanced over much of northern Europe, said Alan Robock of Rutgers University,

speaking Monday at a news conference at the Moscone Center, where the conference is being held this week. "It would be very difficult for agriculture," he said. The scientists' research is a new twist on the nuclear winter hypothesis, which attracted attention in the early 1980s. Back then, planetary scientist Carl Sagan and others warned that a much larger nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union would lead to extensive atmospheric cooling and agricultural failure on a much greater scale and kill far more people. The hypothesis sparked widespread scientific and political controversy. It faded from public attention toward the end of the Cold War, after which many U.S. strategists concluded that major nuclear wars that threatened all civilization were improbable. But that judgment was premature, because of the recent emergence of small- and medium-sized nations that either have or are trying to develop nuclear weapons, the scientists

warned. They said that worldwide, a regional nuclear war could kill tens of millions of people, partly because even a small number of nuclear blasts could generate enough smoke to trigger a global climate change. The nuclear explosions and smoke could also damage the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, they said. That layer shields Earth's surface from cancer-causing radiation from the sun. Initially, about 20 percent of the soot would be washed out of the atmosphere by rainfall, said Turco, who was one of the pioneers of the original

nuclear winter hypothesis. However, much of the rest of the soot would rise skyward and warm as it was baked by the sun. That warming would make the soot more buoyant and force it even higher into the sky until it penetrated the stratosphere -- just above the tops of thunderclouds -- where high-speed winds would quickly spread the soot throughout the atmosphere, Turco and his colleagues said.

NUKE WINTER – WARMING INTERNALS

Nuclear war accelerates warming

Jacobson 8 *Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere/ Energy Program at Stanford University. He has received a B.S. in Civil Engineering a B.A. in Economics (1988, Stanford), an M.S. in Environmental Engineering (1988 Stanford), an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences (, UCLA), and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences [UCLA (Mark, 1991 1994, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security†”]

Because the production of nuclear weapons material is occurring only in countries that have developed civilian nuclear energy programs, the risk of a limited nuclear exchange between countries or the detonation of a nuclear device by terrorists has increased due to the dissemination of nuclear energy facilities worldwide . As such, it is a valid exercise to estimate the potential number of immediate deaths and c arbon emissions due to the burning of buildings and infrastructure associated with the proliferation of nuclear energy facilities and the resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons. The number of deaths and carbon emissions, though, must be multiplied by a probability range of an exchange or explosion occurring to estimate the overall risk of nuclear energy proliferation. Although concern at the time of an explosion will be the deaths and not carbon emissions, policy makers today must weigh all the potential future risks of mortality and carbon emissions when comparing energy sources. Here, we detail the link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and estimate the emissions of

nuclear explosions attributable to nuclear energy. The primary limitation to building a nuclear weapon is the availability of purified fissionable fuel (highly-enriched uranium or plutonium).68 Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea). In addition, Iran is pursuing uranium enrichment, and 32 other countries have sufficient fissionable material to produce weapons. Among the 42 countries with fissionable material, 22 have facilities as part of their civilian nuclear energy program, either to

produce highly-enriched uranium or to separate plutonium, and facilities in 13 countries are active.68 Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power . In fact,

producing material for a weapon requires merely operating a civilian nuclear power plant together with a sophisticated plutonium separation facility. The Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has been signed by 190 countries. However,

international treaties safeguard only about 1% of the world’s highly-enriched uranium and 35% of the world’s plutonium.68 Currently, about 30 000 nuclear warheads exist worldwide, with 95% in the US and Russia, but enough refined and

unrefined material to produce another 100 000 weapons.69 The explosion of fifty 15 kt nuclear devices (a total of 1.5 MT, or 0.1% of the yields proposed for a full-scale nuclear war ) during a limited nuclear exchange in megacities could burn 63–313 Tg of fuel, adding 1–5 Tg of soot to the atmosphere , much of it to the stratosphere, and killing 2.6–16.7 million people.68 The soot emissions would cause significant short- and medium-term regional cooling.70 Despite short-term cooling, the CO 2 emissions would cause long-term warming , as they do with biomass burning.62 The CO 2 emissions from such a conflict are estimated here from the fuel burn rate and the carbon content of fuels . Materials have the following carbon contents: plastics, 38–92%; tires and other rubbers, 59–91%; synthetic fibers, 63–86%;71 woody biomass, 41–45%; charcoal, 71%;72 asphalt, 80%; steel, 0.05–2%. We approximate

roughly the carbon content of all combustible material in a city as 40–60%. Applying these percentages to the fuel burn gives CO 2 emissions during an exchange as 92–690 Tg CO 2 . The annual electricity production due to

nuclear energy in 2005 was 2768 TWh yr_1. If one nuclear exchange as described above occurs over the next 30 yr, the net carbon emissions due to nuclear weapons proliferation caused by the expansion of nuclear energy worldwide would be 1.1– 4.1 g CO 2 kWh_1, where the energy generation assumed is the annual 2005 generation for

nuclear power multiplied by the number of yr being considered. This emission rate depends on the probability of a nuclear exchange over a given period and the strengths of nuclear devices used. Here, we bound the probability of the event occurring over 30 yr as between 0 and 1 to give the range of possible emissions for one such event as 0 to 4.1 g CO2 kWh_1. This emission rate is placed in context in Table 3.

WINTER CAUSES CLIMATE CHANGE THAT IS THOUSANDS OF TIMES WORSE THAN GLOBAL WARMINGSteven Starr (independent writer who has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies) 2009 [“Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict” International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation, online @ http://inesap.org/node/11, loghry]

Climatic changes resulting from nuclear conflict would occur many thousands of times faster – and thus would likely be far more catastrophic – than the climatic changes predicted as a result of global warming.40 The rapidity of the war-induced changes, appearing in a matter of days and weeks, would allow human populations and the whole plant and animal kingdoms no time to adapt.

It is worth noting that the same methods and climate models used to predict global warming were used in these studies to predict global cooling resulting from nuclear war. These climate models have proved highly successful in describing the cooling effects of volcanic clouds during extensive U.S. evaluations and in international intercomparisons performed as part of the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.41

Predicted drops in average global temperatures caused by small, moderate, and large nuclear conflicts are contrasted with the effects of global warming during the last century in Figure 4 and with average surface air temperatures during the last 1,000 years in Figure 5.

There are, of course, other important considerations which must be made when estimating the overall environmental and ecological impacts of nuclear war. These must include the release of enormous amounts of radioactive fallout, pyrotoxins, and toxic industrial chemicals into the ecosystems. A decade after the conflict, when the smoke begins to clear, there will also be massive increases in the amount of deadly ultraviolet light which will reach the surface of the Earth as a result of ozone depletion. All these by-products of nuclear war must be taken into account when comparing the danger of nuclear conflict to other potential dangers now confronting humanity and life on Earth.

A2: Counterforce Targeting Checks

Shorter flight times and lack of second strike capacity make miscalculation more likely. Also, answers counterforce checking.

Cimbala 8 (Stephen, Political Science Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, March, “Anticipatory Attacks: Nuclear Crisis Stability in Future Asia” Comparative Strategy, Vol 27 No 2, p 113-132, InformaWorld)

The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia presents a complicated mosaic of possibilities in this regard. States with nuclear forces of variable force structure , operational experience, and command-control systems will be thrown into a matrix of complex political, social, and cultural crosscurrents contributory to the possibility of war . In addition to the existing nuclear powers in Asia, others may seek nuclear weapons if they feel threatened by regional rivals or hostile alliances.

Containment of nuclear proliferation in Asia is a desirable political objective for all of the obvious reasons. Nevertheless, the present century is unlikely to see the nuclear hesitancy or risk aversion that marked the Cold War , in part, because the military and political discipline imposed by the Cold War superpowers no longer exists , but also because states in Asia have new aspirations for regional or global respect.12 The spread of ballistic missiles and other nuclear-capable

delivery systems in Asia , or in the Middle East with reach into Asia, is especially dangerous because plausible adversaries live close together and are already engaged in ongoing disputes about territory or other issues.13 The Cold War Americans and Soviets required missiles and airborne delivery systems of intercontinental range to strike at one another's vitals. But short-range ballistic missiles or fighter-bombers suffice for India and Pakistan to launch attacks at one another with potentially “strategic” effects. China shares borders with Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan; Russia, with China and North Korea; India, with Pakistan and China; Pakistan, with India

and China; and so on. The short flight times of ballistic missiles between the cities or military forces of contiguous states means that very little time will be available for warning and attack assessment by the defender. Conventionally armed missiles could easily be mistaken for a tactical nuclear first use. Fighter-bombers appearing over the horizon could just as easily be carrying nuclear weapons as conventional ordnance. In addition to the challenges posed by shorter flight times and uncertain

weapons loads, potential victims of nuclear attack in Asia may also have first strike- vulnerable forces and command-control systems that increase decision pressures for rapid, and possibly mistaken, retaliation . This potpourri of possibilities challenges conventional wisdom about nuclear deterrence and proliferation on the part of policymakers and academic theorists. For policymakers in the United States and NATO, spreading nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in Asia could profoundly shift the geopolitics of mass destruction from a European center of gravity (in the twentieth century) to an Asian and/or Middle Eastern center of gravity (in the present century).14 This would profoundly shake up prognostications to the effect that wars of mass destruction are now passe, on account of the emergence of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and its encouragement of information-based warfare.15 Together with this, there has emerged the argument that large-scale wars between states or coalitions of states, as opposed to varieties of unconventional warfare and failed states, are exceptional and potentially obsolete.16 The spread of WMD and ballistic missiles in Asia could overturn these expectations for the obsolescence or marginalization of major interstate warfare. For theorists, the argument that the spread of nuclear weapons might be fully compatible with international stability, and perhaps even supportive of international security, may be less sustainable than hitherto.17 Theorists optimistic about the ability of the international order to accommodate the proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in the present century have made several plausible arguments based on international systems and deterrence theory. First, nuclear weapons may make states more risk averse as opposed to risk acceptant, with regard to brandishing military power in support of foreign policy objectives. Second, if states' nuclear forces are second-strike survivable, they contribute to reduced fears of surprise attack. Third, the motives of states with respect to the existing international order are crucial. Revisionists will seek to use nuclear weapons to overturn the existing balance of power; status quo-oriented states will use nuclear forces to support the existing distribution of power, and therefore, slow and peaceful change, as opposed to sudden and radical power transitions. These arguments, for a less alarmist view of nuclear proliferation, take comfort from the history of nuclear policy in the “first nuclear age,” roughly corresponding to the Cold War.18 Pessimists who predicted that some thirty or more states might have nuclear weapons by the end of the century were proved wrong. However, the Cold War is a dubious precedent for the control of nuclear weapons spread outside of Europe. The military and security agenda of the Cold War was

dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. Ideas about mutual deterrence based on second-strike capability and the deterrence “rationality” according to American or allied Western concepts might be inaccurate guides to the avoidance of war outside of Europe.19

Nuke War O/W WarmingWe outweighTime Feb. 25, 2011

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/02/25/why-nukes-are-the-most-urgent-environmental-threat/

Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons . Why are nuclear bombs an environmental problem? We have long known that a large-scale nuclear war would lead to a sudden change in climate—called a nuclear winter — that could threaten all life on earth . But in the past decade, climate scientists have used advanced climate modeling to show that even a small exchange of nuclear weapons —between 50-100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, which India and Pakistan already have their in arsenal—would produce enough soot and smoke to block out sunlight, cool the planet, and produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history .

NUKE WAR IMPACT ANSWERS

NUKE WAR NOT CAUSE EXTINCTION ONLY 10% OF THE GLOBAL POPULATION DIES IN AN ALL OUT NUCLEAR WAR – THIS ASSUMES EPIDEMICS, FAMINE AND FALLOUTBrian Martin (Professor of Social Sciences @ the University of Wollongong) December 1982 [“The global health effects of nuclear war” Current Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 7, pp. 14-26, online @ http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/82cab/index.html, loghry]

In the following article Dr Brian Martin, without belittling the horrendous effects of nuclear war, dispels a little of the gloom surrounding the subject - from Australia's point of view at least - by arguing that contrary to Tom Lehrer's assertions we may not 'all go together when we go'. While a full-scale nuclear war would devastate some parts of the earth, particularly in the northern hemisphere, present evidence indicates that 'nuclear war poses no threat to the survival of the human species'. Ever since the first nuclear bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, the threat of nuclear war has existed. So far the only nuclear bombs used in war were the two dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the sixth and ninth of August 1945. Today the United States possesses some 30,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union some 20,000, and China, France and Britain several hundred to a few thousand each.[1] A few other countries such as Israel have or may soon have small nuclear arsenals. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs killed a total of perhaps 300,000 people - different estimates have been offered.[2] What would be the result of all-out nuclear war using today's weapon arsenals? This question has become more important in many people's minds in the 1980s as world attention has again focussed on the threat of nuclear war. In the immediate vicinity of a nuclear explosion, most casualties result from blast, heat and fallout during the first few days.[3] The blast or heat from a one megatonne bomb - about 75 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, and a size often found in nuclear arsenals - would kill almost all people, even those in shelters, out to a distance of two kilometres. Beyond ten kilometres the chance of death even for people without special protection would be very small. If the bomb is exploded at an altitude higher than the radius of the fireball from the explosion, as happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, local fallout is minimal. If exploded at or near the earth's surface, fallout lethal to unprotected people will be deposited downwind - most often to the east toward which prevailing upper atmospheric winds blow - for a distance of up to hundreds of kilometres. After a fortnight the radiation levels will have dropped to about one thousandth of what they were one hour after the blast. A major global nuclear war could kill up to 400-500 million people from these effects, mainly in the United States, Soviet Union and Europe, and to a lesser extent China and Japan.[4] The death toll would depend on a range of factors, such as the areas actually hit by weapons and the extent of evacuation and fallout protection. This death toll would be made up mainly of the people in the immediate vicinity or downwind of nuclear explosions, and would total about ten percent of the world's population. This figure would be much higher if most of the largest population centres in countries all around the world were bombed,[5] but there are no known plans for systematically bombing the largest population centres in areas such as India, Southeast Asia and China.[6] On the other hand, if a nuclear war were limited in any sense - for example, restricted to Europe or to military targets - the immediate death toll would be less. If agricultural or economic breakdown or epidemics occurred in the aftermath of nuclear war, many more people could die, perhaps as many as a few hundred million in the worst case.[7] These would be primarily in the most heavily bombed areas, namely the United States, Soviet Union and Europe. Nuclear war would also

result in various long range effects, beyond the range of blast, heat and local fallout. These effects - effects hundreds or thousands of kilometres from nuclear explosions - are known as 'global' effects. The most well known is global radioactive fallout. Many people believe that this fallout, or some other effect, would cause the death of most or all the people on earth in the event of major nuclear war. This is the idea portrayed in the popular novel On the Beach.[8] However, the available scientific evidence provides no support for such a doomsday scenario. My aim here is to describe in general terms the main global effects of nuclear war with direct consequences for human health. Four main categories will be treated: global fallout,[9] ozone, climate and fires.

CURRENT ARSENALS ARE ONLY 6 TIMES AS POWERFUL AS TESTING FROM 1961-62, NO EXTINCTIONBrian Wang (Director of Research, Lifeboat Foundation; a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies) 2/7/2009 [“The Science of Nuclear War Effects and Battlestar Galactica” online @ http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/nuclear-war-effects-and-battlestar.html, loghry]

Executive Summary on Nuclear War 200 million megaton of explosions will not kill the biosphere. The current nuclear arsenal will not kill all humans and the pattern of nuclear explosions for a nuclear war between the largest nuclear powers will not destroy civilization, let alone kill all people or even half of all people. The greatest risks from a total nuclear war are from fire and starvation and not from the radiation or the blasts. The historic high for megatonnage was reached in 1960 with nearly 20,500 megatons (that’s 20 billion tons, or 40 trillion pounds, of TNT)—the equivalent of about 1,400,000 Hiroshimas. Today the total is about one-tenth the 1960 level, or about 2,000 megatons, or 140,000 Hiroshimas. This is only 6 times more than the peak years for nuclear bomb testing 1961-1962 when 340 megatons were exploded in above ground tests.

COUNTERFORCE STRIKES MEAN ONLY 20 MILLION DIE.Mueller 2009 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. “Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda” p. 8)

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 effects would be limited: 2,000 I-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 possibilities. The most likely scenario--one that could be perhaps be 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 country's 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.

A2: OZONE MULTI-MEGATON NUKES HAVE BEEN REPLACED BY MANY SMALLER WARHEADS, MEANS NOT ENOUGH NITROGEN OXIDE TO DESTROY THE OZONE LAYERBrian Martin (Professor of Social Sciences @ the University of Wollongong) October 1988 [“Nuclear winter: science and politics” Science and Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 321-334, online @ http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html, loghry]

The resurgence of the peace movement in the early 1980s provided fertile ground for discovering the nuclear winter effect. The upsurge in peace activism spread throughout numerous organisations and occupational groups, including doctors, scientists and engineers. In this context, the editors of the environmental journal Ambio, published by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, planned a special issue in 1982 to cover the effects of nuclear war. Paul Crutzen was asked to deal with the effects of nuclear war on the atmosphere for this issue. Crutzen in his Ph.D. did pioneering work in showing the important effect of nitrogen oxides in regulating the amount of ozone in the stratosphere[8]. His work came just at the height of the debate over supersonic transport (SST) aircraft in the United States. Crutzen, along with Harold Johnston, was the first to draw attention to the possible impact of SSTs on ozone due to the nitrogen oxides in their exhaust[9-10]. So from an early stage Crutzen was attuned to the sensitivity of natural systems to human impacts. A later development in the SST debate was comparison of the effects of SST exhausts on ozone with the effects of nuclear explosions, which also produce nitrogen oxides. Ironically, the first studies of the effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions on ozone were done in the early 1970s to show that SSTs would not affect ozone significantly[11]. The debate over the effects of past nuclear tests on ozone continued[12] for a couple of years before a few researchers pointed out that a full-scale nuclear war could have catastrophic effects on ozone[13]. This led to a study in 1975 by the US National Academy of Sciences on the long-term effects of nuclear weapons[14]. In 1981 journalist Jonathan Schell wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker arguing that nuclear war could cause extinction of human life, principally through destruction of stratospheric ozone. Schell's articles, made into a book[15], were inspired by the burgeoning peace movement and in turn were widely taken up by it. Yet by the time he made his argument, the basis for massive ozone destruction by nuclear weapons had largely evaporated. This is what Crutzen and his collaborator John Birks found in 1982 as they ran their computer models dealing with stratospheric ozone to determine the effects of a nuclear war. Because the large multi-megatonne nuclear bombs deployed in the 1950s were being replaced by larger numbers of smaller warheads, not as much nitrogen oxides would be lofted far up into the stratosphere. Crutzen and Birks' model did not predict a significant reduction in stratospheric ozone using the Ambio reference scenario.

LIFE CAN THRIVE WITHOUT OZONEJOSEPH 1990

[Lawrence E. (Environmental Analyst). Gale. St. Martin’s Press)]

In fact, life arose and flourished for at least a billion years without any absorbent ozone shield at all. Lynn Margulis has done numerous experiments illustrating this, showing that photosynthetic algae survive exposure to ultraviolet radiation equivalent in intensity to pure sunlight unfiltered by the atmosphere .

DEPLETION WOULD ONLY LAST 2 YEARSTELLER 1988

[Edward, (Member of the White House Science Council, National Medal of Science, One of the first ones to work on the freakin’ bomb). Would the insects inherit the earth?]

The ozone molecules are steadily regenerated by solar radiation, but the precence of the NOx residue from large nuclear explosions could reduce the effective thickness of the ozone layer by an average of 30 to 40 percent from its usual level for a period of a year or two (chang et al., 1979; Luther, 1983).

A2: NUCLEAR WINTER – MODELS FAIL CAN’T RELY ON MODELS – NUCLEAR WINTER MODELING PRODUCES CONFLICTING RESULTS WITH THE SAME DATA SETSDavid D. Kemp (Professor of Geography at Lakehead University, Ontario) 1994 [Global Environmental Issues: A Climatological Approach p.183-185, loghry]

Such arguments are no longer possible now that sufficient data are available, yet there remains a very real need for further study of many aspects of the earth/atmosphere system. The roles of the various atmospheric processes require particular attention since they are intimately involved in all of the major problems currently confronting the environment. Traditionally, the study of the atmosphere was based on the collection and analysis of observational data. That approach is time-consuming and costly; it is also of limited overall accuracy because of gaps in the meteorological network, particularly in high latitudes and over the oceans. Modern attempts at exploring the workings of the atmosphere are almost exclusively dependent upon computer models, which range in complexity from simple 1-D formats providing information on one element in the system to highly sophisticated models employing as many as 100 variables, and including consideration of the oceans as well as the atmosphere. Studies of such topics as nuclear winter, global warming and ozone depletion have benefited greatly from the use of computer modelling techniques. The models are becoming increasingly complex and comprehensive, but a high level of sophistication is no guarantee of perfection. Even state-of-the-art, 3-D general circulation models include some degree of simplification, and certain variables—cloudiness, for example—are very difficult to deal with whatever the level of model employed. In short, there is as yet no model capable of simulating exactly the conditions and processes in the real atmosphere. As a result, models using the same data often generate different results (see Figure 8.2). That should not be used as an excuse to do nothing, however. It might be tempting to wait for the perfect model, but that may prove impossible to develop. Existing models do have flaws, but they can be used provided their limitations are understood, and despite their inherent problems there is probably no better way of studying environmental problems involving the atmosphere.

CLIMACTIC EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WAR HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OVERSTATED – THE MODELS ARE NOT SUITED FOR PREDICTING THE FUTURE AND OFTEN RETURN OPPOSITE RESULTSS. Fred Singer (atmospheric physicist) 2008 [“Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” The Heartland Institute, online @ http://www.bobbrinsmead.com/e_NIPCC_final.pdf, logs]

Computer models are notoriously inadequate in simulating or projecting regional effects, particularly when it comes to precipitation. This fact can be demonstrated most clearly in the U.S.-National Assessment of Climate Change report [NACC 2000] that used both the Hadley model and Canadian model to project future changes for 18 regions of the United States. As can be seen from Figure 16, in about half the regions the two models gave opposite results. For example, the Dakotas would become either a desert or a swamp by 2100, depending on the model chosen. It is significant that the U.S.-NACC report failed to meet the tests of the Information Quality Act [2004] and was withdrawn from official government report status. While useful in experiments to study the sensitivity of changes in climate parameters, computer models are unsuited for predictions of future climate. Kevin Trenberth, a lead

author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote [Trenberth 2007]: In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent ‘story lines’ that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess. Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific Rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes, and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. The starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized. The ‘nuclear winter’ episode of 1983-84 represents a good example of how global climate models can give false results and mislead the public and even many experts. Ideologically driven, the ‘nuclear-winter’ hypothesis relied on a model calculation that used artificial assumptions designed to give the desired result, incomplete physics that neglected important atmospheric processes, and also some physics that was plain wrong. The ‘phenomenon’ was hyped by the popular press, endorsed by a National Academy of Sciences panel, and taken quite seriously by government agencies, including the Pentagon. It is now being resurrected in an ‘improved’ form [Robock 2007], but with the same problems as the original version. Conclusion: The climate models used by the IPCC do not depict the chaotic, open-ended climate system. They cannot make reliable predictions and should not be used in formulating government policy.

A2: NUCLEAR WINTER – OIL FIRES DISPROVE 1991 KUWAITI OIL FIRES DISPROVE THE NUCLEAR WINTER HYPOTHESISDavid Morrison (CSI Fellow, is the Senior Scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute) February 2007 [“Carl Sagan’s Life and Legacy as Scientist, Teacher, and Skeptic” online @ http://www.csicop.org/si/show/carl_saganrsquos_life_and_legacy_as_scientist_teacher_and_skeptic, loghry]

In the autumn of 1990, Sagan made his most serious scientific blunder. Threatened with military opposition to its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq threatened to set fire to the nation’s oil wells. Sagan became concerned that the quantity of petrochemical smoke generated by these oil-field fires could generate a small-scale nuclear winter, endangering crops across Asia and threatening world food production. Of his four TTAPS co-authors, only Turco supported this hypothesis; Pollack, Toon, and Ackerman could not see how sufficient smoke could get into the stratosphere. However, Sagan went public with dire predictions. While he kept his predictions conditional, saying only that we could not show that massive oil-field fires would not have

major climatological consequences (a “double negative” logic that he used frequently), his doomsday warning was widely reported. The oil fields were torched in January 1991, blackening the sky over most of Kuwait and disrupting the coastal ecosystem, but there were no climatic effects, even on a local scale. Sagan was widely criticized, and the episode had the further effect of undermining the credibility of the entire nuclear winter scenario.

A2: NUCLEAR WINTER – CITY COMPOSITION / TARGETING SCHEMANEW MODELS ASSUME TOO MUCH – COMPOSITION OF CITIES LARGELY SHIELD AGAINST MASSIVE FIRES, COUNTERFORCE TARGETING MEANS CITIES DON’T BURN AND KUWAIT DISPROVES THE UNDERLYING PREMISE OF STRATOSPHERIC DISPERSAL OF SOOTBrian Wang (Dir. of Research, Lifeboat Foundation a nonprofit NGO dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements) 12/23/2009 [“Nuclear Winter and City Firestorms” online @ http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/nuclear-winter-and-city-firestorms.html, loghry]

The Steps needed to prove nuclear winter: 1. Prove that enough cities will have firestorms (the claim here is that does not happen) 2. Prove that when enough cities in a sufficient area have firestorms that enough smoke and soot gets into the stratosphere (trouble with this claim because of the Kuwait fires) 3. Prove that condition persists and effects climate as per models (others have questioned that but this issue is not addressed here Nuclear war is definitely to be avoided but we can be precise about effects for proper planning, policy and civil defence. Nextbigfuture has looked at Nuclear war effects before. Here we look at some more information on city firestorms. This Glasstone Blogpost with a lot of links to the effect of fires and thermal

radiation Basically there would need to be an analysis of the building density and composition and loading

in cities in Pakistan and India. Plus there would need to be an analysis of likely war targeting. Would it be cities or miitary installations ? After the discussion of firestorm prerequisitites, I look at the composition of cities in India and Pakistan and

do not see a correlation for a firestorm. If there are not multiple citywide firestorms then there is no trigger for nuclear winter even if the later modeling (which is still uncertain) would even need to be considered. It also shows that civil defence that reduces the likelihood of fires and firestorms is relevant and useful. Firestorms have always required at least 50% of buildings to be ignited. A 71 pages long report by Robert M. Rodden, Floyd I. John, and Richard Laurino, Exploratory Analysis of Fire Storms, Stanford Research Institute, California, report AD616638, May 1965, identified the following parameters required by all firestorms: (1) More than 8 pounds of fuel per square foot (40 kg per square metre) of ground area. Hence firestorms occurred in wooden buildings, like Hiroshima or the medieval part of Hamburg. The combustible fuel load in London is just 24 kg/m2, whereas in the firestorm area of Hamburg in 1943 it was 156 kg/m2. The real reason for all the historical fire conflagrations was only exposed in 1989 by the analysis of L. E. Frost and E.L. Jones, ‘The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-Century Cities’ (Planning Perspectives, vol.4, pp. 333-47). Each medieval city was built cheaply from inflammable ‘tinderbox’ wooden houses, using trees from the surrounding countryside. By 1800, Britain had cut down most of its forests to build wood houses and to burn for heating, so the price of wood rapidly increased (due to the expense of transporting trees long distances), until it finally exceeded the originally higher price of brick and stone; so from then on all new buildings were built of brick when wooden ones decayed. This rapidly reduced the fire risk. Also, in 1932, British Standard 476 was issued, which specified the fire resistance of building materials. In addition, new cities were built with wider streets and rubbish disposal to prevent tinder accumulation in alleys, which created more effective fire breaks. (2) More than 50% of structures ignited initially. (3) Initial surface winds of less than 8 miles per hour. (4) Initial ignition area exceeding 0.5 square mile. The fuel loading per unit ground area is equal to fuel loading per unit area of a building, multiplied by the builtupness fraction of the area. E.g., Hamburg had a 45% builtupness (45% of the ground area was actually covered by buildings), and the buildings were multistorey medieval wooden constructions containing 70 pounds of fuel per square foot. Hence, in Hamburg the fuel loading of ground area was 0.45*70 = 32 pounds per square foot, which was enough for a firestorm. By contrast, modern cities have a builtupness of only 10-25% in most residential areas and 40% in commercial and downtown areas. Modern wooden American houses have a fuel loading of 20 pounds per square foot of building area with a builtupness below 25%, so the fuel loading per square foot of ground is below 20*0.25 = 5 pounds per square foot, and would not produce a firestorm. Brick and concrete buildings contain on the average about 3.5 pounds per square foot of floor area, so they can't produce firestorms either, even if they are all ignited Theodore Poston in his ignorant paper 'Possible Fatalities from Superfires following Nuclear Attacks in or Near Urban Areas', in the 1986

U.S. National Academy of Sciences book The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, assumes falsely that brick and concrete cities can burn like the small areas of medieval German cities and like Brode and Small, he simply ignores the mechanism for the firestorm in Hiroshima which had nothing to do with thermal radiation but was just due to overturned breakfast charcoal braziers. Theodore Poston also falsely complains that wooden houses exposed to nuclear tests didn't burn because they had white paint on them and shutters over the windows. That discredits Theodore Poston's whole anti-civil defence countermeasure tirade by actually PROVING the value of simple

civil defense; but actually if you open your eyes, you find that most wooden houses are painted white, and in a real city -

unlike the empty Nevada desert - few windows will have a line of sight to the fireball anyway. The Material of the

Houses in India and Pakistan do not Appear to be Right for Firestorms India Housing census of 2001 Material of Roofs in India Concrete 19.8% Tiles 32.6% Grass, thatch,bamboo, wood, mud 21.9% Other 25.7% Material of Walls in India Burnt Brick 43.7% Mud, Unburnt Brick 32.2% Grass, thatch, bamboo, Wood, etc. 10.2% Other 13.9% Material Used in Houses in India : Floors Mosaic, Floor tiles 7.3% Cement 26.5% Mud 57.1% Other 9.1% Kerosene was used in 43% of homes for lighting. Kerosene is flammable but how much kersone per home ? How much more electrification has occurred. Fuel was used for cooking. However, natural gas is often used in developed countries. So the cooking fuel would

burn but how much per house ? Pakistan also has a lot of mud and brick homes Kuwait Oil Fires The Kuwaiti oil fires were a result of the scorched earth policy of Iraqi military forces retreating from Kuwait in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces .... during the Persian Gulf War, the First Gulf War,or often as the Second Gulf War and by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as The

Mother of all Battles, or commonly as Desert Storm, for the military response... showed the effects of vast emissions of particulate matter into the atmosphere in a geographically limited area; directly underneath the smoke plume constrained

model calculations suggested that daytime temperature may have dropped by ~10°C within ~200 km of the source. Carl Sagan of the TTAPS study warned in January 1991 that so much smoke from the fires "might get so high as to disrupt agriculture in much of South Asia...." Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, which was first published in 1995.The book is intended to explain the scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical or skeptical thinking...that this prediction did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4°-6°C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was

spared." The 2007 study discussed above noted that modern computer models have been applied to the Kuwait oil fires, finding that individual smoke plumes are not able to loft smoke into the stratosphere, but that smoke from fires covering a large area, like some forest fires or the burning of cities that would be

expected to follow a nuclear strike, would loft significant amounts of smoke into the stratosphere.

A2: PLANKTON / OCEANSEITHER OCEAN COLLAPSE IS INEVITABLE FROM INDUSTRY INDUCED ACIDITY INCREASES OR PHYTOPLANKTON CAN ADAPT TO QUICK CHANGES – TRY OR DIE FOR THE NEGATIVEJeffrey Masters, (Ph.D. — Director of Meteorology, Weather Underground, Inc.) 2009

[“Our Acidifying Oceans” online @ http://www.wunderground.com/education/acidoceans.asp, loghry]

Ocean life can adapt to higher acidity. One study (Spivack et al., 1993) found that pH levels in the ocean 7.5 million years ago were about 7.4, well below today's pH. The big concern with the current increase in acidity and drop of ocean pH levels is that it is being compressed into such a short period of time. Past changes in oceanic acidity have presumably occurred over tens of thousands of years, giving time for life to adapt. A July 2006 study, Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs and Other Marine Calcifiers: A Guide for Future Research, put out by 50 of the world's leading experts in ocean chemistry, warned that modern sea life will probably adapt poorly to more acidic waters. This is because the oceans have not been as acidic as they now are for at least 650,000 years, and probably millions of years beyond that. Modern ocean life has evolved for a great deal of time under balanced ocean conditions, and the current change may occur so fast that a partial collapse of the food chain in some regions may occur. One note of optimism: similar concerns were voiced when the Antarctic ozone hole opened up, exposing phytoplankton in the Southern Hemisphere oceans to a rapid and unprecedented increase in levels of damaging ultraviolet radiation. It was widely feared that this increase in UV light would destroy enough phytoplankton to trigger a collapse of the food chain in the waters off of Antarctica. This has not happened. One study (Smith et. al., 1992) found a 6-12% decrease in phytoplankton during the time the ozone hole opens up, typically about 10-12 weeks of the year. So, at least in this one case, the marine ecosystem was able to adapt to a rapid, unprecedented change and not collapse.

OCEANIC LIFE SURVIVES AND THRIVES DESPITE NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONSNew York Times 08

[New York Times (staff) 4/15/2008, “Fish and coral thriving at site of U.S. atomic test on Bikini Atoll in 1954” online @ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/world/asia/15iht-bikini.1.11998906.html, loghry]

CANBERRA — Coral is again flourishing in the crater left by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States, 54 years after the blast on Bikini Atoll, marine scientists said Tuesday. A team of research divers visited Bravo crater, ground zero for the test of a thermonuclear weapon in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, and found large numbers of fish and coral growing, although some species appeared to be locally extinct. "I didn't know what to expect, some kind of moonscape perhaps, but it was incredible," Zoe Richards, from Australia's James Cook University, said about the team's trip to the atoll in the South Pacific. "We saw communities not too far from any coral reef, with plenty of fish, corals and action going on, some really striking individual colonies," she said. The 15-megaton hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and it vaporized islands with temperatures hitting 55,000 degrees Celsius, or about 99,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The Bikini blast shook islands as far away as 200 kilometers, or 125 miles.

WARMING OUTWEIGHS NUCLEAR WARGLOBAL WARMING IS THE GREATEST CHALLENGE FACING HUMANITY – OUTWEIGHS NUCLEAR WARDurham Times (staff) 11/27/2009[“Warming ‘worse than nuclear war’” online @ http://www.durhamtimes.co.uk/news/4764626.Warming____worse_than_nuclear_war___/, loghry]

CLIMATE change is the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced. That was the stark message preached by Lord Puttnam in Durham Cathedral. The man better known as the award-winning Chariots of Fire film producer David Puttnam delivered his dramatic view in his sermon at the Commemoration of Founders and Benefactors service in the cathedral on Sunday afternoon. Recalling the sense of imminent world disaster in his childhood, at the time of the 1962 Cuban missiles stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union, Lord Puttnam said the potential disaster awaiting the world because of global warming was even more devastating than nuclear war.

Global warming is comparatively worse than nuclear warThe Tablet (staff) 3/10/2007 [“Ethics of Global Warming” online @ http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/9460, loghry]

Planet Earth should in theory be capable of supporting life, including human life, for thousands of years to come - indeed, some estimates say millions. It all depends on the human race. Not long ago the greatest danger seemed to come from nuclear war between the superpowers. Now the major threat is environmental damage, particularly the heating up of the atmosphere owing to the discharge into it of so-called greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. The prospect is not of an overnight catastrophe wiping out the human race in one sweep, but of a planet which can currently sustain a human population of six billion - and growing - finding within a generation or two that, due to global warming, the sustainable population is only a fraction of that - and falling. The effect would be something like that of the Irish potato famine, but on a global scale and lasting for centuries. Clearly millions would die in acute hardship and misery, and the poorest and most vulnerable would be the first to go.

NUCLEAR WAR ENDS WARMING NUCLEAR WAR FUNCTIONALLY ENDS GLOBAL WARMINGRhett Butler (mongabay) 12/11/2006

[“Nuclear war could cause global cooling (i.e. block global warming)” online @ http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1211-nuclear.html, loghry]

Nuclear war would disrupt global climate for at least a decade according to new research presented Dec. 11 at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The research, based on findings from historic volcano eruptions, found that a small-scale, regional nuclear war could produce millions of tons of "soot" particles that could block solar radiation, in effect, cooling the planet. "We examined the climatic effects of the smoke produced in a regional conflict in the subtropics between two opposing nations, each using 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons to attack the other's most populated urban areas," said Alan Robock, a professor in the department of environmental sciences at Rutgers University. "A cooling of several degrees would occur over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions. As in the case with earlier nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects would occur in regions far removed from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict."

OTHER USEFUL ARGS

ECON DOWNTURN = WARMING / EXTINCTIONECONOMIC DOWNTURN CAUSES EXTINCTIONLovelock (Inventor: Gaia theory, fellow Royal Society, fellow Green College: Oxford) 2006 [James, The Revenge of Gaia p. xiii-xiv, loghry]

This is no sci-fi speculation; we now have evidence from the Earth's history that a similar event happened fifty-five million years ago when a geological accident released into the air more than a terraton of gaseous carbon compounds. As a consequence the temperature in the arctic and temperate regions rose eight degree Celsius and in tropical regions about five degrees, and it took over one hundred thousand years before normality was restored. We have already put more than half this quantity of carbon gases into the air and now the Earth is weakened by the loss of land we took to feed and house ourselves. In addition, the sun is now warmer, and as a consequence the Earth is now returning to the hot state it was in before, millions of years ago, and as it warms, most living things will die. Once started, the move to a hot state is irreversible, and even if all the good intentions expressed at the Kyoto and Montreal meetings were executed immediately, they would not alter the outcome. Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert and will no longer serve for regulation, thus adding to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have already depleted to feed ourselves. Curiously, smoke and dust pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This 'global dimming' is transient and could disappear in a few days if there were an economic downturn or a reduction of fossil fuel burning. This would leave us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the arctic region where the climate remains tolerable.

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE CAUSES QUICK WARMINGLovelock (Inventor: Gaia theory, fellow Royal Society, fellow Green College: Oxford) 2006 [James, The Revenge of Gaia p. 56-57, loghry]

Recently the BBC broadcast in their Horizon series of science programmes an account of 'global dimming'; in it climate scientists, among them V. Ramanathan and Peter Cox, voiced their concern that we have already, in a sense, passed the point of no return in global heating. The science behind this programme appeared in a Nature article in 2005 which included as an author the distinguished German scientist, M. O. Andreae. Industrial civilization has released into the atmosphere, in addition to greenhouse gases, a huge quantity of aerosol particles, and these tiny floating motes reflect incoming sunlight back to space and cause global cooling. On large areas of the Earth's surface the aerosol haze reflects sunlight back to space sufficiently to offset global warming. By themselves they cause a global cooling of 2 to 3°C. Back in the 1960s, when we knew much less about the Earth and its atmosphere, a few scientists even speculated that continued economic growth would increase the density of the aerosol and lead to global cooling and even precipitate the next glaciation. The present extent of aerosol cooling is real and seriously worrying. It may have allowed us to continue our business as usual, not noticing how much we had changed the Earth nor realizing that we would have to pay back the borrowed time. Aerosol particles stay only a brief time in the atmosphere: within weeks they settle to the ground. This means that any large economic downturn, or a planned reduction in fossil-fuel usage, or unwise legislation to stop sulphur emissions, as the Europeans are now enacting to stop acid rain, will

allow the immediate expression of greenhouse warming. It has been suggested that part of the excessive heat of the 2003 summer in Europe was caused by the European Union's efforts to remove the aerosol which is the source of acid rain. Peter Cox reminded us that because the aerosol was not fully included, climate modellers may have underestimated the sensitivity of their models to greenhouse gas abundance and failed to notice that we may already be beyond the point of no return.