1NCCritique

Proliferation constructs the world in imperialist and Orientalist termsthis

condemns the global South to violent intervention and discipline. The 1AC is part
of a process of knowledge-creation that restricts our understanding of
proliferation to Western ideology
Behnke 2kAndreas Behnke, Prof. of Poli Sci @ Towson [January, International Journal of
Peace Studies 5.1, Inscriptions of the Imperial Order,
http://www.gmu.edu/academic/ijps/vol5_1/behnke.htm]
David Mutimer (1997) has argued that the use of the

metaphor 'proliferation' carries certain entailments. That is to say, it

structures our understanding and handling of the problem . In particular, he refers to the "image of a
spread outward from a point or source", and the "technological bias" introduced in the discourse
(Mutimer 1997:201-2). As concerns the first point, 'proliferation' presupposes a center at which WMD are to
be held and controlled, and from which these weapons disseminate into the body of the international society. To the extent
that this process gets out of the center's control, certain measures have to be taken to 'suffocate', limit, or curb the 'spread' of these
weapons. As concerns the second point, Mutimer (1997:203) points out the peculiar agency implied in the concept: "Notice that

the

weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by an external agent of some form - say, a human being or
political institution". The fact that a large number of these weapons were actually 'spread' by Western
states is consequently hidden through this discursive structure. These points are also relevant for the
Mediterranean Initiative. We can add a third entailment to the list which appears through a critical reading of the NATO/RAND
narrative. As the RAND authors (1998:15) observe, "The mere existence of ballistic missile technology with ranges in excess of 1,000
km on world markets and available to proliferators around the Mediterranean basin would not necessarily pose serious strategic
dilemmas for Europe."
In fact, we

might even agree with the neorealist proposition that 'more might be better', above all
in terms of nuclear weapons. This is certainly the preferred solution of John Mearsheimer (1990) for the stabilization of
European political order after the end of the cold war. After all, conventional wisdom has it that nuclear weapons and the threat of
mutually assured destruction preserved stability and peace during the Cold War. The RAND authors, however, fail

to grasp
the irony in their identification of WMD proliferation, which ends up denying this central tenet
of cold war strategy. According to them, "the WMD and ballistic missile threat will acquire more
serious dimensions where it is coupled with a proliferator's revolutionary orientation. Today, this is
the case with regard to Iran, Iraq, Libya, and arguably Syria" (RAND, 1998:16).
What preserved the peace during the cold war -- mutual deterrence -- is now re-written as a strategic
problem:
As a result of proliferation trends, Europe will be increasingly exposed to the retaliatory consequences of U.S. and European actions
around the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, including the Balkans. ... As a political threat and a weapon of terror capable
of influencing the NATO decisionmaking during a crisis, their significance [of conventionally armed ballistic missiles] could be
considerable (RAND, 1998:16).
Two implications of these arguments deserve elaboration. First, there

is the reversal of the traditional relationship

between WMD and rationality. For what makes the presence of WMD in the South so worrisome
is the absence of the requirements of reason and rationality. Within NATO's discourse on the South,
'revolutionary orientation' accounts for the undesirability of distributing these weapons to such unfit hands. In order to qualify for
their possession, reason and rationality must be present -- as they are obviously assumed to be in the West. The

discourse of
proliferation consequently produces a third entailment by constructing the relationship between West
and South in 'orientalist' terms. In this rendition, the South becomes the quintessential antithesis of
the West, the site of irrationality, passion, and terror (Said, 1995). Within this site, different rules
apply, which are not necessarily subject to Western ideals of enlightened reason. 'Proliferation'
articulates a hierarchical structure in global politics, with the West as the privileged site of from
which to surveil, control, and engage the rest of the world.

This privilege is further dramatized in the above complaint about the possibility of retaliation. For the South to achieve the
possibility of influencing NATO decisionmaking is to violate the epistemic sovereignty of the West. 'U.S.

and European
actions' and interventions have to be unrestrained in order to constitute proper crisis management.
NATO demands a docile subjectivity and accessible territory from the South, the latter's identity cannot be ascertained against the
West. Its arms have to be surrendered, its retaliatory capabilities to be revoked.
'Information' is the third mode besides 'Securitization' and 'Proliferation' within which we can discern the subjugation of the South
to the strategic Western gaze. A central purpose of the Mediterranean Initiative/Dialogue is to improve 'mutual understanding' and
to 'dispel some of the misperceptions and apprehensions that exist, on both sides of the Mediterranean' (Solana, 1997a:5). And both
the RAND Corporation and NATO put some emphasis on public information and perception. Yet the structure of this relationship
proves to be unbalanced and virtually unilateral. As mentioned above, for NATO, the prime task is above all the "further refinement
of its definition of security" (de Santis, 1998). The general identity of the South as a site of danger and insecurity is consequently
never in question. Western perceptions are never problematized. Knowledge of the South is, it appears, a matter of matching more
and better information with proper conceptual tools.
On the other hand, (mis)perceptions take the place of knowledge in the South.
NATO is perceived widely as a Cold War institution searching for a new enemy. That is why the best course to change the perception
of NATO in these countries is to focus more on "soft" security, building mutual understanding and confidence before engaging in
"hard" military cooperation. Measures should be developed with the aim of promoting transparency and defusing threat
perceptions, and promoting a better understanding of NATO's policies and objectives (de Santis, 1998:34).
To interpret political misgivings about NATO and its post-cold war diplomacy as 'misperceptions' which can be put straight by
"educat[ing] opinion-makers in the dialogue-countries"(RAND, 1998:75) tends to naturalize and objectify the Western rendition of
NATO's identity. The possibility that from the perspective of the 'Southern' countries NATO's political and strategic design might
look quite different is lost in this narrative. NATO's identity is decontextualized and objectified, the productive role of different
cultural and strategic settings in the establishment of identities and formulation of interests denied. To maintain such a lofty
position becomes more difficult if we let the Mediterranean participants voice their concerns openly. Far from being 'misperceptions
and misunderstandings', these countries' less than enthusiastic attitudes towards NATO are based on, for instance, the
establishment of powerful Western military intervention capabilities off their beaches. Also, NATO's attempts to institutionalize a
military cooperation is interpreted as an attempt to gain a strategic foothold in the region in order to monitor the flow of missile
technology and the possession of WMD (Selim 1998:12-14). In other words, we encounter rather rational and reasonable security
political and strategic concerns. The fact that NATO is unwilling or unable to acknowledge their concerns once again demonstrates
the 'imperial' nature of the purported dialogue.
Conclusion: The Imperial Encounter
In her exploration of Western representations of the South, Roxanne Doty (1996:3) describes

the relationship
between these two subjectivities as an "imperial encounter" which is meant "to convey the idea of
asymmetrical encounters in which one entity has been able to construct 'realities' that were taken
seriously and acted upon and the other entity has been denied equal degrees or kinds of agency".
Her focus is on an aspect of power which has received increasing treatment within critical International Relations (IR) theory during
the last years, that is, the power to define and articulate identities and to determine the relations between them.
As was argued above, the

Western invention of the South during the cold war can be interpreted as an

imperial gesture. The South was rendered into a West-in-the-making, with its own distinguished historical, cultural, and
social features reduced to indicators of 'underdevelopment'. Ultimately, the narrative proclaimed, the South would become part of
the Western 'Empire', the latter would be able to expand into 'barbaric' areas of the world -- provided it could win the war against
Communism.

The end of the cold war saw this 'expansionist' logic give way to a exclusive posture . The relations
between the West and the South are no longer mediated through time. Instead, a spatial differentiation now
structures the imperial encounter, the South is no longer to be 'developed' and 'Westernized'. It
is to be surveilled, controlled and disciplined, its 'spillage' of crisis and instability to be
contained.
NATO's Mediterranean Initiative is a cornerstone in this new rendition. For while we so far cannot observe any direct military
intervention by the Alliance in the Mediterranean region, NATO's discourse on the South in general, and the Initiative in particular
render it accessible and available for such action. Strategic knowledge is produced as an expression of, and in anticipation of,
strategic power. The 'self-determination' of NATO as a continuously capable and competent military agent is effected through a
discourse that inscribes a particular, securitizing, strategic order upon the South, positing it as a site of danger, irrationality and
insecurity against the West. In this context it is interesting to observe the exclusion of states from the Mediterranean Initiative that
are not considered to be 'moderate, Western-looking [and] constructivist' (RAND 1998:57). This differentiation between insiders

and outsiders appears to be based on the degree to which the respective countries are willing to subject themselves to the imperial
encounter with the West, and to open themselves to the strategic gaze and control of NATO.
The imperial encounter is then made possible and supported by what one may call the Emperor's two bodies. On one hand, the West
appears as a cultural identity among others, located in space (North of the Mediterranean) and time (in the post-cold war era). In
this sense, the West is the entity that needs to be protected from the dangers and threats which 'spill over' from the South through
adequate strategic means.
On the other hand, the

West is presented as a 'site of knowledge', as the source or author of the proper and
objective 'world-picture' that depicts the realities of post-cold war global politics. In this sense, the
West becomes the metaphysical grounds from which knowledge can be gathered and
disseminated. And in its different versions -- securitization, proliferation, and information -- this knowledge
draws on and reproduces this metaphysics. There are consequently reasons to be skeptical about NATO's ability to
conduct a 'dialogue' with an other it is unwilling to listen to.

The nuclear apartheid is a manifestation of racismensures genocide and war is

inevitable rejection is a decision rule
Batur 7 [Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and
Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3]

War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our
problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not
noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial
inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of
segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior
through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not
inevitable. This article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and
genocide, to examine the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE
AGE OF CULTURE WARS Racist

legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed

biological inferiority to assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence,
much less equality. The Jim Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and
modern racism (Baker 1981; Ansell 1997) with culture war as the key to justify difference, hierarchy,
and oppression. The ideology of culture war is becoming embedded in institutions , defining the
workings of organizations, and is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but
are not blind to the inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese , or whomever,
and us. Us as a concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a
superior value to its institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with them will be harmful to
its existence (Hunter 1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past
century and what has remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to
explore societal complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism
persists due to a white racial frame, defining and maintaining an organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and
inclinations to discriminate (Feagin 2006: 25). The

white racial frame arranges the routine operation of

racist institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial
privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the
white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of
racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial
oppression and now frames culture war, or clash of civilizations, to legitimate the racist oppression of
domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of culture war emerged to define opposing ideas
in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through
conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the war on terrorism. Its discourse and action articulate to
flood the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies

based on racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering
inequality even while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to
maintain the structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame,
defining the terms of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism
(Du Bois 1942; Winant 1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between
racist systems of oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create
such oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy
manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by
enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and
synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection
between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections of
words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an
articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between
capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism
expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and
accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In

colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has

been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the
creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and
construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges
connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts
and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence
(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites.

Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized other, as the adversary and challenger of the
the ideal self, not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to
racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained
segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of
advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when
tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered
by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the
inferior other led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together
into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in
exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the
perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial
differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of
violence during and after colonialism: Manichaeism [division of the universe into opposites of good
and evil] goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing
framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of
self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by
integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new geography of hunger and
exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The geography of hunger marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation
continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial
frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of
the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers,
spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this geography of hunger and exploitation are Iraq and New
Orleans.

The alternative is to critique the affs discourse. Rejecting their demand for
immediate yes/no policy response is the only way to raise critical ethical questions
about the racialized discourse and practice of IR.
Biswas 7Shampa Biswas, Politics at Whitman [Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an
International Relations Theorist Millennium 36 (1) p. 117-125]

The recent resuscitation of the project of Empire should give International Relations scholars particular pause.1 For a discipline long
premised on a triumphant Westphalian sovereignty, there should be something remarkable about the ease with which the case for
brute force, regime change and empire-building is being formulated in widespread commentary spanning the political spectrum.
Writing after the 1991 Gulf War, Edward Said notes the US hesitance to use the word empire despite its long imperial history.2 This
hesitance too is increasingly under attack as even self-designated liberal commentators such as Michael Ignatieff urge the US to
overcome its unease with the e-word and selfconsciously don the mantle of imperial power, contravening the limits of sovereign
authority and remaking the world in its universalist image of democracy and freedom.3 Rashid Khalidi has argued that the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq does indeed mark a new stage in American world hegemony, replacing the indirect and proxy forms

The ease
with which a defence of empire has been mounted and a colonial project so unabashedly resurrected makes
this a particularly opportune, if not necessary, moment, as scholars of the global, to take stock of our
disciplinary complicities with power, to account for colonialist imaginaries that are lodged at the
heart of a discipline ostensibly interested in power but perhaps far too deluded by the formal equality of state
sovereignty and overly concerned with security and order.
of Cold War domination with a regime much more reminiscent of European colonial empires in the Middle East.4

Perhaps more than any other scholar, Edward Saids groundbreaking work in Orientalism has argued and demonstrated the long
and deep complicity of academic scholarship with colonial domination.5 In addition to spawning whole new areas of scholarship
such as postcolonial studies, Saids writings have had considerable influence in his own discipline of comparative literature but also
in such varied disciplines as anthropology, geography and history, all of which have taken serious and sustained stock of their own
participation in imperial projects and in fact regrouped around that consciousness in a way that has simply not happened with
International Relations.6 It has been 30 years since Stanley Hoffman

accused IR of being an American social

science and noted its too close connections to US foreign policy elites and US preoccupations of the Cold
War to be able to make any universal claims,7 yet there seems to be a curious amnesia and lack of curiosity about the
political history of the discipline, and in particular its own complicities in the production of empire.8
Through what discourses the imperial gets reproduced, resurrected and re-energised is a question that should
be very much at the heart of a discipline whose task it is to examine the contours of global power.
Thinking this failure of IR through some of Edward Saids critical scholarly work from his long distinguished career as an intellectual
and activist, this article is

an attempt to politicise and hence render questionable the

disciplinary traps that have, ironically, circumscribed the ability of scholars whose very business it is to
think about global politics to actually think globally and politically. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I
believe, is a certain kind of global sensibility, a critical but sympathetic and felt awareness of an inhabited and cohabited world.
Furthermore, it is a profoundly political sensibility whose globalism is predicated on a cognisance of the imperial and a firm nonimperial ethic in its formulation. I make this argument by travelling through a couple of Saids thematic foci in his enormous corpus

IR scholars need to
develop what I call a global intellectual posture. In the 1993 Reith Lectures delivered on BBC channels, Said
outlines three positions for public intellectuals to assume as an outsider/exile/marginal, as an amateur, and as a disturber
of the status quo speaking truth to power and self-consciously siding with those who are
underrepresented and disadvantaged.9 Beginning with a discussion of Saids critique of professionalism and the cult of
of writing. Using a lot of Saids reflections on the role of public intellectuals, I argue in this article that

expertise as it applies to International Relations, I first argue the importance, for scholars of global politics, of taking politics
seriously. Second, I turn to Saids comments on the posture of exile and his critique of identity politics, particularly in its nationalist
formulations, to ask what it means for students of global politics to take the global seriously. Finally, I attend to some of Saids
comments on humanism and contrapuntality to examine what IR scholars can learn from Said about feeling and thinking globally
concretely, thoroughly and carefully.
IR Professionals in an Age of Empire: From International Experts to Global Public Intellectuals
One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been a

significant constriction of
a democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive curtailment of
intellectual and political dissent and a sharp delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of state power.
The academy in this context has become a particularly embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts
on academic freedom. At the most obvious level, this has involved fairly well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher
education that have invoked the mantra of liberal bias and demanded legislative regulation and reform10, an onslaught
supported by a well-funded network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and concerned citizen groups within and
outside the higher education establishment11 and with considerable reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as
well as the media. But what

has in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist and statist

agendas has been a larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying
professionalisation that goes with it. Expressing concern with academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in
the United States, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which the university is beginning to operate as another transnational
corporation12, and critiqued the consolidation of a culture of professionalism where academic
bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask
the larger managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively
autonomous administrative elite and the rise of insular expert cultures have led to academics
relinquishing their claims to public space and authority.13
While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and
exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason
for concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic process. This is especially true
for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written extensively on the place of the
academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public
intellectuals immured from the seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, the
one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in
the world today15, and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his
work, Said also complains that the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has
defanged (intellectuals)16. The

most serious threat to the intellectual vocation, he argues, is professionalism

and mounts a pointed attack on the proliferation of specializations and the cult of expertise with their focus on
relatively narrow areas of knowledge, technical formalism, impersonal theories and
methodologies, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power.17 Said
mentions in this context the funding of academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an
area in which there was considerable traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with
institutions of policy-making. Looking at various influential US academics as organic intellectuals involved in a dialectical
relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and
universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World

This is not
simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual
orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly
conclusions in terms of its relevance for global politics, where relevance is measured entirely in terms of policy
wisdom. Edward Saids searing indictment of US intellectuals policy-experts and Middle East
experts - in the context of the first Gulf War20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context
preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war
has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions
irreducible to formulaic for or against and costs and benefits analysis can simply
not be raised. In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an
understanding of intellectual relevance that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the
posing of critical, historical, ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of
recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and
both during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms of intellectual articulation.19

important senses of the vocation.21

1NCHegemony
Pfeffer ev says regional conflicts are more probable than all-out war concede
it, no risk of kzad or prolif impacts
Cant solve islanding U.S. military installations in Loudermilk aff is exclusively
offshore
Grid is resilient and sustainable
Clark 12, MA candidate Intelligence Studies @ American Military University, senior analyst Chenega Federal Systems,
4/28/12 (Paul, The Risk of Disruption or Destruction of Critical U.S. Infrastructure by an Offensive Cyber Attack, American
Military University)
An attack against the electrical grid is a reasonable threat scenario since power systems are "a high priority target for military and
insurgents" and there has been a trend towards utilizing commercial software and integrating utilities into the public Internet that
has "increased vulnerability across the board" (Lewis 2010). Yet the increased vulnerabilities are mitigated by an

increased detection and deterrent capability that has been "honed over many years
of practical application" now that power systems are using standard, rather than proprietary and specialized, applications and
components (Leita and Dacier 2012). The security of the electrical grid is also enhanced by

increased awareness after a smart-grid hacking demonstration in 2009 and the identification of the Stuxnet malware in
2010: as a result the public and private sector are working together in an "unprecedented
effort" to establish robust security guidelines and cyber security measures (Gohn and
Wheelock 2010). In 2003, a simple physical breakdown occurred trees shorted a power line and caused a fault
that had a cascading effect and caused a power blackout across the Northeast (Lewis 2010). This singular occurrence
has been used as evidence that the electrical grid is fragile and subject to severe disruption through
cyber-attack, a disruption that could cost billions of dollars, brings business to a halt, and could even endanger lives if
compounded by other catastrophic events (Brennan 2012). A power disruption the size of the 2003 blackout, the worst in
American history at that time (Minkel 2008), is

a worst case scenario and used as an example of the fragility of the

perceived fragility is not real when viewed in the context of the
robustness of the electrical grid. When asked about cyber-attacks against the electrical grid in April of 2012, the
intelligence chief of U.S. Cyber Command Rear Admiral Samuel Cox stated that an attack was unlikely
to succeed because of the huge amounts of resiliency built into the [electrical] system that
makes that kind of catastrophic thing very difficult (Capaccio 2012). This optimistic view is
supported by an electrical grid that has proven to be robust in the face of large natural
catastrophes. Complex systems like the electrical grid in the U.S. are prone to failures and the U.S.
grid fails frequently. Despite efforts to reduce the risk out power outages, the risk is always present. Power outages that
affect more than 50,000 people have occurred steadily over the last 20 years at a rate of 12% annually and the
U.S. energy grid. This

frequency of large catastrophes remains relatively high and outages the size of the 2003 blackout are predicted to occur every 25
years (Minkel 2008). In a complex system that is always at risk of disruption, the effect is mitigated by policies and

procedures that are meant to restore services as quickly as possible. The most visible of these
policies is the interstate Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a legally binding agreement
allowing combined resources to be quickly deployed in response to a catastrophic disaster such as
power outages following a severe hurricane (Kapucu, Augustin and Garayev 2009). The electrical grid suffers
service interruptions regularly, it is a large and complex system supporting the largest economy in the world, and yet
commerce does not collapse (Lewis 2010). Despite blizzards, earthquakes, fires, and hurricanes that cause
blackouts, the economy is affected but does not collapse and even after massive damage like that caused
by Hurricane Katrina, national security is not affected because U.S. military capability is not degraded (Lewis
2010). Cyber-security is an ever-increasing concern in an increasingly electronic and interconnected world.
Cyber-security is a high priority economic and national security challenge (National Security Council
n.d.) because cyber-attacks are expected to become the top national security threat (Robert S. Mueller 2012). In response to
the threat Congress is crafting legislation to enhance cyber-security (Brito and Watkins 2012) and the

Department of Homeland Security budget for cyber-security has been significantly increased (U.S.
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 2012).

DOD wont lose oil accessany alternative is less efficient

Sarewitz 12, Co-Director Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and Thernstrom, senior climate policy advisor Clean
Air Task Force, 12 (Daniel and Samuel, Introduction, in Energy Innovation at the Department of Defense: Assessing the
Opportunities, March)
Even so, given

adequate forward planning, DoD has little reason to fear constraints on

supply of petroleum-based fuels for several decades, perhaps many. A tightening international oil market,
resulting in continuing price increases, would pose greater difficulties for other segments of the
U.S. economy and society, and for other countries. DoDs expenditures on fuel may seem large, but
should be viewed in the context of other routine expenditures. Even for the Air Force, the principal
consumer with its fleet of nearly 6,000 planes, fuel accounts for only around one-fifth of operations and
maintenance costs.12 In Afghanistan and Iraq, fuel and water have made up 70 percent (by weight) of the supplies delivered
to forward areas.13 Transport convoys have drawn frequent and deadly attacks, but the only way to reduce
risks, casualties, and delivery costs is to cut consumption (of water as well as fuel)not something that
alternative fuels can promise. Alternative fuels might have somewhat lower energy densities than
petroleum (less energy content per gallon or per pound), meaning somewhat more fuel would have to be burned for
the same power output, but not higher (by any significant amount). Indeed, alternative fuels cannot
promise performance advantages of any sort.
Andres ev says wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are indicative of future operations
floating SMRs cant provide energy to landlocked or almost completely landlocked
countries
Cant forward deploy SMRs
A. Insurgents would obviously blow them up first
B. No available infrastructure for energy distribution
Dorfman doesnt assume status quo decline if they win pursuit is inevitable, then
either the squo solves the aff or its not key to heg
No benefits to BIWs grand strategysecurity competitions declining, no impact to
the transition, and primacy makes it worseprefer restraint
Friedman et al 13 [Benjamin, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute, with
Brendan Green, Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science and Leadership Studies at Williams College, and Justin
Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Fall, Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand
Strategy, International Security, Vol. 38 No. 2, pg. 184-7/AKG]
The Questionable Security Benefits of Primacy Brooks

et al. argue that the specter of U.S. power eliminates

some of the most baleful consequences of anarchy, producing a more peaceful world. U.S. security
guarantees deter aggressors, reassure allies, and dampen security dilemmas (p. 34). By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and
active management, Brooks et al. write, primacy reduces security competition and does so in a way that slows the diffusion of
power away from the United States (pp. 3940). There

are three reasons to reject this logic: security

competition is declining anyway; if competition increases, primacy will have difficulty

stopping it; and even if competition occurred, it would pose little threat to the United States. An
Increasingly Peaceful World An array of research, some of which Brooks et al. cite, indicates that factors
other than U.S. power are diminishing interstate war and security competition.2 These factors combine to
make the costs of military aggression very high, and its benefits low. 3 A major reason for peace is that
conquest has grown more costly. Nuclear weapons make it nearly suicidal in some cases.4 Asia, the
region where future great power competition is most likely, has a geography of peace: its maritime and mountainous regions are
formidable barriers to conflict.5 [End Page 184] Conquest

also yields lower economic returns than in the past.

Post-industrial economies that rely heavily on human capital and information are more difficult
to exploit.6 Communications and transport technologies aid nationalism and other identity politics that make foreigners
harder to manage. The lowering of trade barriers limits the returns from their forcible opening.7 Although
states are slow learners, they increasingly appreciate these trends. That should not surprise structural realists. Through two world
wars, the international system selected against hyperaggressive states and demonstrated even to victors the costs of major war.
Others adapt to the changed calculus of military aggression through socialization.8 Managing Revisionist States Brooks

et al.
that if states behave the way offensive realism
predicts, then security competition will be fierce even if its costs are high. Or, if nonsecurity preferences such as
prestige, status, or glory motivate states, even secure states may become aggressive (pp. 3637).9 These scenarios, however,
are a bigger problem for primacy than for restraint. Offensive realist security paranoia stems
from states uncertainty about intentions; such states see alliances as temporary expedients of last resort, and U.S.
military commitments are unlikely to comfort or deter them.10 Nonsecurity preferences are, by
definition, resistant to the security blandishments that the United States can offer under primacy.
caution against betting on these positive trends. They worry

Brooks et al.s revisionist actors are unlikely to find additional costs sufficient reason to hold back, or the threat of those costs to be
particularly credible. The

literature that Brooks et al. cite in arguing that the United States restrains allies actually
suggests that offensive realist and prestige-oriented states will be the most resistant to the
restraining effects of U.S. power. These studies suggest that it is most difficult for strong states to
prevent conflict between weaker allies and their rivals when the restraining state is defending nonvital interests; when
potential adversaries and allies have other alignment options;11 when the stronger state struggles to mobilize [End Page 185] power
domestically12 ; when the stronger state perceives reputational costs for non-involvement;13 and when allies have hawkish interests
and the stronger state has only moderately dovish interests.14 In other words, the

cases where it would be most

important to restrain U.S. allies are those in which Washingtons efforts at restraint would be
least effective. Highly motivated actors, by definition, have strong hawkish interests. Primacy puts limits on
U.S. dovishness, lest its commitments lack the credibility to deter or reassure. Such credibility concerns create
perceived reputational costs for restraining or not bailing out allies. The United States will be
defending secondary interests, which will create domestic obstacles to mobilizing power.
U.S. allies have other alliance options, especially in Asia. In short, if states are insensitive to the factors incentivizing peace, then the
United States ability to manage global security will be doubtful. Third-party security competition
will likely ensue anyway. Costs for Whom? Fortunately, foreign security competition poses little risk to the
United States. Its wealth and geography create natural security. Historically, the only threats to U.S.
sovereignty, territorial integrity, safety, or power position have been potential regional hegemons that could
mobilize their resources to project political and military power into the Western Hemisphere. Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union arguably posed such threats. None exist today. Brooks et al. argue that Chinas rise puts the possibility of its
attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term (p. 38). That possibility is remote,
even assuming that China sustains its rapid wealth creation. Regional hegemony requires China to develop
the capacity to conquer Asias other regional powers. India lies across the Himalayas and has nuclear weapons.
Japan is across a sea and has the wealth to quickly build up its military and develop nuclear weapons. A disengaged
United States would have ample warning and time to form alliances or regenerate
forces before China realizes such vast ambitions. Brooks et al. warn that a variety of states
would develop nuclear weapons absent U.S. protection. We agree that a proliferation cascade would create danger and
that restraint may cause some new states to seek nuclear weapons. Proliferation cascades are nonetheless an
unconvincing rationale for primacy. Primacy likely causes more proliferation among

adversaries than it prevents among allies. States crosswise with the United States realize that
nuclear arsenals deter U.S. attack and diminish its coercive power. U.S. protection, meanwhile, does
not reliably stop allied and friendly states from building nuclear weapons. Witness British, French, and
Israeli decisionmaking. Proliferation cascades were frequently predicted but never realized during the Cold War, when security was
scarcer.15 New research argues that security

considerations are [End Page 186] often a secondary factor in the

proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that states with the strongest appetites for proliferation often
lack the technical and managerial capacities to acquire the bomb.16 Finally, even if proliferation
cascades occur, they do not threaten U.S. security. Few, if any, states would be irrational
enough to court destruction at the hands of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, especially if the United States
is not enmeshed in their conflicts.

Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Vietnam, IsraelPalestine, recent Chinese balancing, Russian Arctic claims, and Ukraine prove
hegemony doesnt work
Framing issue CX proves the aff only increases military hegemony magnifies
the link
Hegemony fails and destabilizes regional powers no impact to the transition
turns case disregard their fearmongering
Posen 14 [Barry, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT's Security Studies Program,
June 24, Restraint : A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Cornell University Press, pg. 60-2/AKG]

Partisans of Liberal Hegemony might accept some of the factual statements above but would argue that the
good the strategy has achieved far outweighs the bad. As noted in the introduction, partisans assume
that liberal democracy, human rights, market economies, free trade, nuclear nonproliferation, middle and great powers that do not
take responsibility for their own security, and U.S. political and military hegemony are all mutually
causative, and all lead ineluctably to a vast improvement in the security and welfare of others,
and hence to the U.S. security position. 124 They also posit that the world is fragile; damage to one of
these good things will lead to damage to other good things, so the United States must defend all. The fragile and
interconnected argument is politically effective. By accident or design, the argument derives an inherent plausibility
due to the inevitable limits of our substantive knowledge, fear, uncertainty, liberal ideology, and
U.S. national pride. Most targets of the argument do not know enough about the world
to argue with experts who claim these connections; the chain of posited connections always leads to danger for
the United States, and fear is a powerful selling tool. Once fear is involved, even low-probability chains of
causation can be made to seem frightening enough to do something about, especially if you believe your country has overwhelming
power. It

is pleasant to believe that the spread of U.S. values such as liberty and democracy
depend on U.S. power and leadership. The argument does not stand close scrutiny.
First, it obscures the inherently strong security position of the United States, which I have already
reviewed. The economic, geographic, demographic, and technological facts supporting this point
are seldom discussed, precisely because they are facts. It takes very large events abroad to
significantly threaten the United States, and more moderate strategies can address these
possibilities at lower costs. Typical Liberal Hegemony arguments for any new project take the form
of domino theory. One small untended problem is expected easily and quickly to produce another and
another until the small problems become big ones, or the collection of problems becomes
overwhelming. Whether these connections are valid in any particular case will always be open to debate.

Even if the connections are plausible, however, it is unlikely given the inherent U.S. security
position that the United States need prop up the first domino. It has the luxury of waiting for
information and choosing the dominos it wishes to shore up , if any.
Second, proponents of Liberal Hegemony often elide the difference between those benefits of the
strategy that flow to others, and those that flow to the U nited States. Individually, it is surely true that
cheap-riders and reckless-drivers like the current situation because of the welfare, security, or
power gains that accrue to them. United States commitments may make the international politics of some regions less
exciting than would otherwise be the case. The United States, however, pays a significant price and
assumes significant risks to provide these benefits to others, while the gains to the United
States are exaggerated because the United States is inherently quite secure.
Third, Liberal Hegemonists argue that U.S. commitments reduce the intensity of regional
security competitions, limit the spread of nuclear weaponry, and lower the general odds of conflict,
and that this helps keep the United States out of wars that would emerge in these unstable regions.
This chain of interconnected benefits is not self-evident. United States activism does change the
nature of regional competitions; it does not necessarily suppress them. For example,
where U.S. commitments encourage free-riding, this attracts coercion, which the
United States must then do more to deter. Where the United States encourages reckless driving, it
produces regional instability. United States activism probably helps cause some nuclear
proliferation, because some states will want nuclear weapons to deter an activist United States. When the
United States makes extended deterrence commitments to discourage prolif eration, the U.S. military
is encouraged to adopt conventional and nuclear military strategies that are themselves
destabilizing. Finally, as is clear from the evidence of the last twenty years, the United States ends
up in regional wars in any case.
Fourth, one key set of interconnections posited by Liberal Hegemonists is that between U.S.
security provision, free trade, and U.S. prosperity. This is a prescriptive extension of hegemonic stability theory,
developed by economist Charles Kindleberger from a close study of the collapse of global liquidity in 1931 and the ensuing great
depression. 125 Professor Kindleberger concluded from this one case that a global system of free trade and finance would more
easily survive crises if there was a leader, a hegemon with sufficient economic power such that its policies could save a system in
crisis, which would also have the interest and the will to do so, precisely because it was so strong. 126 Subsequent theorists, such as
Robert Gilpin, extended this to the idea that a global economic and security hegemon would be even better. 127 Robert Keohane, and
later John Ikenberry, added to this theory the notion that a liberal hegemon would be still better, because it would graft
transparent and legitimate rules onto the hegemonic system, which would make it more acceptable to the subjects and hence less
costly to run. 128 A comprehensive rebuttal of hegemonic stability theory is beyond the scope of this book. But this

theory
has fallen into desuetude in the study of international politics in the last twenty years. Proponents did not
produce a clear, consolidated version of the theory that integrated economics, security, and
institutional variables in a systematic way that gives us a sense of their relative importance and
interdependence, and how they work in practice. The theory is difficult to test because there
are only two cases: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, and postWorld War II United States, and they
operated in very different ways under very different conditions. Finally, testing of narrow versions of
the theory did not show compelling results. 129 These problems should make us somewhat
skeptical about making the theory the basis for U.S. grand strategy.

Decline is inevitable results in a grand strategy of restraint which solves the

impact clinging to hegemony makes it worse
Posen 14 [Barry, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT's Security Studies Program,
June 24, Restraint : A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Cornell University Press, pg. 174-5/AKG]

The Grand Strategy of Restraint

is responsive to these powerful facts.

There are three possible paths to adjustment:

The

least likely is that politicians will read arguments offered by advocates of Restraint, have a eureka moment,
and decide to transform our grand strategy. There is little to suggest that this moment is imminent.
A

second path to reform would arise from crisis. Had the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the ensuing
contraction of global liquidity in 2008 been permitted to run its course, the United States and much of the
world would probably have entered a great depression. It is hard to believe that the United States would have
continued lavish spending on security projects far from home under those circumstances. I
would rather not have reform come this way, but it could.
The

final path to reform is typical of modern pluralist democracies, change would be

incremental. If Liberal Hegemony is to be replaced, this seems the most likely path. Slowly but surely the big facts
outlined above would begin to make themselves felt in U.S. choices. Economic scarcity may
yet break the privileged hold that lavish military spending now has on both parties: advocates of an
expansive grand strategy, fiscal restraint, and social spending may all find themselves in open
conflict with one another. Defense budgets will be cut, costly wars will be brought to a n
indeterminate and unsatisfying close, new wars may be avoided, military forces will slowly be
withdrawn from positions abroad. Writing in the spring of 2013, when the first year of cuts
imposed by the bipartisan Budget Control Act has resulted in the sequestration of some defense
expenditures in a manner observers agree to be entirely irrational, it seems this open conflict is upon us. The
incremental process will likely continue to prove inefficient. Allies can continue to console themselves with the knowledge that the
United States still seems to be present, even if the intensity of the commitment appears to wane, so their progress toward
true independence will be slow, and perhaps nonexistent. Failure to admit what we are doing will
ensure that U.S. resources will not be focused on the main capabilities that support the most crucial
interests of the United States, but will be spread like peanut butter. Ambiguity may permit the
advocates of Liberal Hegemony to promote policies that involve the United States in more halfbaked and costly misadventures.

Restraint solves maintains key interests without overstretch or overcommitment

Posen 14 [Barry, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT's Security Studies Program,
June 24, Restraint : A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Cornell University Press, pg. 162-3/AKG]
A Restraint Strategy is

best supported by a maritime military strategy, a strategy that relies on U.S.

command of the commonsnaval, air, and space superiority. This military strategy focuses U.S.
military power on key interests and threats: the maintenance of an ability to intervene in
Eurasia if necessary, counterterror, and counterproliferation.
The preservation of command of the commons is itself a demanding project. The United States must credibly demonstrate that it
retains the capability to reengage on the Eurasian land mass in a timely fashion and to organize coalitions against expansionist
states, if these expedients prove necessary. The United States must also be able to retaliate quickly and effectively against direct
attacks on the United States. The United States will need surveillance and interdiction capabilities that permit the harassment of
global terrorist networks, interference with any illegal trade in nuclear technology, and overwatch of the legal trade in nuclear
technology. I have outlined the air, naval, and space capabilities that the United States needs to accomplish these missions. The navy
looms particularly large in the Restraint Strategy: costly aircraft carriers, their associated aircraft, and nuclear attack submarines are
central elements. Over time the aircraft carrier may recede in importance, to be replaced or supplemented by another ship design,
probably a submarine-based system analogous to the present Ohio class SSGN. The air force will need to focus on fewer aircraft,
with longer range.

I have argued in this chapter that U.S.

military capabilities should be sized for the military actions that

could be necessary to protect these interests and respond to imminent threats. Large U.S.
ground forces play a diminished role in the Restraint Grand Strategy and would be cut substantially.
Restraint eschews intervention into the internal politics of other states, and thus the ground
forces that support large counterinsurgency campaigns are unnecessary. Restraint aims to energize
other advanced industrial states into improving their own capabilities to defend themselves, so the
garrisons of ground forces, whose peacetime purpose seems to be mainly diplomatic, and whose wartime missions seem easily
carried by the nations where they have been based, can return home and furl their colors.
A maritime strategy helps to avoid the problems of recent years. A maritime strategy is
responsive to the volatility of identity politics in an era of rapid social, economic, and political change. It reduces
U.S. military presence abroad in a way that lowers the U.S. political profile, and thus diminishes inchoate but
still dangerous local political antipathies to the United States. At the same time, reductions of forces abroad
should energize some U.S. allies to do more to defend themselves and cautions others to do
fewer of the things that they do that are inimical to U.S. interests.
Restraint will save a great deal of money. Personnel levels fall by roughly 20 percent, and force structure measured as
an average of reductions in army brigades, fighter squadrons, carrier task groups, and marine division/wings falls by roughly 30
percent. Recent history suggests that with such large force

structure reductions, the total Department of Defense

Budget could fall in rough proportion, which means that spending could decrease by perhaps 20 percent in real terms
from present levels. 85 If the cuts were accomplished over five years, this could soon take the DODs share of GDP down to 2.5
percent. Presuming that the economy continues to grow, defense

managers could then seek modest real

increases in defense spending to sustain the new force structure without increasing the
burden on the economy. The money saved by Restraint can either assist in long-term deficit
reduction or be diverted to other national needs.

No risks of rearmtheir current low level of capabilities proves

Fettweis 11 [Christopher, Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, Free Riding or Restraint? Examining European
Grand Strategy, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 30 No. 4, pg. 316-32]

Kagan appears to fundamentally misunderstand the genesis of grand strategy, reversing the
causal direction of the process he is describing. Though he would have us believe that capability
drives threat perception, history suggests that is exactly backwards. The first lesson of IR 101 is
that states in an anarchic, self-help system must address their security first and foremost. Only an insane or
deluded strategist would allow low capability to render dangers ignorable, or hope to make them go away entirely. If the Europeans
detected threats in the system, these rich states would certainly build large military forces to defend themselves. In other words,

U.S. allies do not deny threats because of their low capability. Instead allied capability is low
because they do not appear to feel that serious threats exist. By far the greatest determinant of
any grand strategy is the intensity of threats that the state perceives in its neighborhood, as well as
in the system as a whole. Generally speaking, there is a direct correlation between the level of danger
perceived in the security environment and support for internationalist grand strategies. In other words, the more
threat the analyst perceives, the more deeply he or she feels a necessity to be involved in political
affairs abroad. It is no coincidence that those with the highest perceptions of threat to the United
Statesthe neoconservativesalso espouse the most muscular, activist grand strategy .13 Kagans assumption
about the subconscious motivations of effete Europeans is understandable, since he and his fellow neoconservatives see the world as
a dangerous place where good men must wage constant combat against evil. He begins with his conclusionthat the Europeans are
underestimating the threatand searches for reasons, rather than assessing the possibility that they may in fact be correct in their
assessment of the security environment. While

Kagan will probably continue to believe that European

strategists address their security by wishing threats away, it seems a bit more logical to conclude
that they simply do not perceive the same level of threat as do many of their counterparts in the

United States. Restraint is a rational response to a low-threat international security environment.

Thus the root cause of allied demilitarization is not a mystery : The great powers of Europe do not
perceive much threat in the international system. The first line of the 2003 European Security Strategy reads that
Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free.14 The opening sentence of the U.S. National Security Strategy that
was released three years later struck a quite different tone: America is at war.15 It goes on to describe a tumultuous, dangerous
world, where the United States has to lead an effort to end tyranny since the survival of liberty at home increasingly depends on
the success of liberty abroad. Pg. 319

Iraq proves democracy promotion fails and forces greater intervention turns the
benefits to heg
Cant access kzad specifically about debt the aff does ZERO internal reform to
solve that
Competitiveness not key to heg your authors
Brooks and Wohlforth 08 [Stephen G. Brooks is Assistant Professor and William C. Wohlforth is Professor in the
Department of Government at Dartmouth College, World out of Balance, International Relations and the Challenge of American
Primacy, p. 32-35]
American primacy is also rooted in the county's position as the world's leading technological power. The United States remains
dominant globally in overall R&D investments, high-technology production, commercial innovation, and higher education (table
2.3). Despite the weight of this evidence, elite perceptions of U.S. power had shifted toward pessimism by the middle of the first
decade of this century. As we noted in chapter 1, this was partly the result of an Iraq-induced doubt about the utility of material
predominance, a doubt redolent of the post-Vietnam mood. In retrospect, many

assessments of U.S. economic and

technological prowess from the 1990s were overly optimistic; by the next decade important potential
vulnerabilities were evident. In particular, chronically imbalanced domestic finances and
accelerating public debt convinced some analysts that the United States once again confronted a
competitiveness crisis.23 If concerns continue to mount, this will count as the fourth such crisis since
1945; the first three occurred during the 1950s (Sputnik), the 1970s (Vietnam and stagflation), and the 1980s (the Soviet threat and
Japan's challenge). None of these crises, however, shifted the international system's structure:
multipolarity did not return in the 1960s, 1970s, or early 1990s, and each scare over competitiveness
ended with the American position of primacy retained or strengthened.24
Our review of the evidence of U.S. predominance is not meant to suggest that the United States lacks vulnerabilities or causes for
concern. In fact, it confronts a number of significant vulnerabilities; of course, this is also true of the other major powers.25 The
point is that adverse

trends for the United States will not cause a polarity shift in the near future. If
we take a long view of U.S. competitiveness and the prospects for relative declines in economic
and technological dominance, one takeaway stands out: relative power shifts slowly. The United
States has accounted for a quarter to a third of global output for over a century. No other economy will match its
combination of wealth, size, technological capacity, and productivity in the foreseeable future
(tables 2.2 and 2.3).

1NCNuclear Leadership
Nuclear leadership cant solve doesnt do anything to ensure compliance
Nuclear energy cred failscountries say no to US tech if it constrains them
Cleary 12 Richard Cleary, American Enterprise Institute Research Assistant, 8/13/12, Richard Cleary: Persuading Countries to
Forgo Nuclear Fuel-Making, npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1192&tid=30
The examples above show the limitations of both demand and supply side efforts. Supply side diplomatic
interventions, made before the transfer of technology, have been at times effective, particularly in precluding nuclear fuel-making in

supply side
interventions are no substitute for demand side solutions: Countries face political choices
regarding nuclear fuel-making. A nation set upon an independent fuel-making
capacity, such as Pakistan or Brazil, is unlikely to give up efforts because of supply side controls.
Multilateral fuel-making arrangements, as proposed repeatedly by the United States, have not
materialized and therefore seem to have had little tangible influence.
the short term and buying time for more lasting solutions. However, as the Pakistan and Brazil cases illustrated,

No widespread prolif and its slow preventative measures fail and turn the
impact
Hymans 14 [Jacques, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, February 5, No
Cause for Panic: Key Lessons from the Political Science Literature on Nuclear Proliferation, International Journal, Vol. 69 No. 1,
pg. 90-2/AKG]
Lessons for policymakers
What insights does the political science literature offer for policymakers facing the prospect of proliferation today? I would highlight
three key lessons.
First, even

when a state appears to be heading in the direction of the bomb, do not assume that
it is hell-bent on achieving that goal. For instance, consider the case of Argentina in the 1970s and
1980s. At that time, Argentina was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship and was involved in significant
territorial disputes with three countries: Brazil, Chile, and nuclear-armed Great Britain. Moreover, Argentina refused to join
the NPT regime. And in 1978, it started building a secret uranium enrichment plant, eventually enriching
its first batch in 1983. All of this seems very suspicious. But we now know that the military junta in
Argentina did not launch a nuclear weapons project.19 In fact, it did not even have a significant
nuclear bomb lobby, and the idea of an Argentine bomb was viewed by most of the state leadership as a
strategic absurdity.20 Argentina built the enrichment plant to provide fuel for its research
reactors, which it was designing in-house and also starting to export. Argentina also likely intended to use the plant to produce
fuel for a projected nuclear submarine fleet, which could be a potential asset in a future campaign to retake the Falklands/Malvinas
islands from the British. But it had no intention to build bombs, as indicated by archival records and by the plants technical
configuration. The

idea to build the plant in secret was sparked by the sudden decision of the USA to
refuse to supply enriched uranium fuel to Argentina out of suspicion about the military juntas nuclear
intentions. By suspecting the worst about Argentine intentions, the USA nearly created a selffulfilling prophecy. The USA and its allies need to keep in mind the potential for such unintended
consequences when determining their policy toward contemporary countries of proliferation
concern, such as Iran.
Second, even if you are sure that a state is trying for the bomb, do not assume that it is necessarily
going to get there quickly. Statistics compiled by political scientists demonstrate that nuclear weapons projects
went into slow motion after around 1970. Since the start of the nuclear age, there have been 17
dedicated nuclear weapons projectsmeaning determined efforts to build a bomb, not just tentative exploratory forays.21 Of

those 17 cases, all seven of the projects that were launched in earnest before 1970 succeeded.22 Their
average time to the first nuclear test (or in the case of Israel, the direct induction of operational weapons without a test) was about 7
years. By contrast, only

three of the ten dedicated nuclear weapons projects that were launched since 1970 have
succeeded.23 And even those ultimately successful cases needed about 17 years on average to do so.
That is, they needed a full decade longer than the earlier group. Perhaps the most important reason for this
slowdown has been the poor management of the more recent projects.
A good example of the contemporary reality of dysfunctional nuclear weapons projects is North Korea.
Claims that North Korea is motivated to build the bomb because of its parlous security and economic conditions since the demise of
the Soviet Union may have some validity. But, thanks to the opening of the archives of Pyongyangs erstwhile East European allies,
we now know that its pursuit of nuclear weapons actually dates all the way back to the 1960s and ramped up
greatly in the early 1980s, while the Cold War was still going strong.24 Therefore, the end of the Cold War can at most be said to
have reinforced the already strong nuclear determination of the Kim family regime.25 The

fact that North Korea has

been trying for the bomb for such a long time, and yet to the best of our knowledge still lacks an operational
nuclear arsenal, is striking evidence of the inefficiency of its nuclear program. 26 Indeed, the more
North Korea has tried to show off its nuclear and missile capabilities in recent years, the less impressive
those capabilities have appeared, and therefore the less successful Pyongyangs attempts at nuclear
blackmail have become.27
Third, keep clearly in mind the crucial difference between a so-called nuclear breakout capacity and an
actual nuclear weapons arsenal. The former may be a worry, but only the latter is a threat and, for
political and technical reasons, it is very hard for most states to jump suddenly from a notional
breakout capacity to an actual breakout. This point is particularly relevant to the current debate over what to do
about Irans problematic nuclear program.28 There is a crucial difference between setting a red line of no Iranian nuclear weapon,
which has been done by US president Barack Obama, and setting a red line of no Iranian nuclear

weapons capability,
assumes that the
acquisition of a certain number of kilograms of highly enriched uranium is essentially equivalent to a bomb,
which has been done by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Netanyahu stance

since the engineers tell us that an explosive nuclear test is not strictly technically necessary in order to obtain a workable nuclear
weapon. Netanyahu is therefore worried that Iran could break out of the NPT and build a bomb without anyone knowing. The
Netanyahu point of view is supported by the historical case of Israel itself, which built an operational nuclear arsenal in secret
without conducting a nuclear test.29 But a political science analysis

supports Obamas position over Netanyahus in the case

of Iran. Not only is the typical global historical pattern to test first and induct second , but also Iran and
Israel are very dissimilar cases, with different external and internal political challenges. The key factors that led Israel to produce its
unique arsenal of untested but fully operational nuclear bombs are not present in the case of Iran. In addition, Irans empirical
record of ballistic missile testing behaviour provides yet more evidence against the idea that Iran may be gravitating toward the
Israeli model.30 Since the present Iranian nuclear capability cannot be legitimately seen as equivalent to an Iranian nuclear threat,

the USA and its allies should reject calls for pre-emptive strikes in this case. The world still
has substantial time to work out a diplomatic solution to the long-running Iranian nuclear crisis.
In conclusion, nuclear

proliferation is a serious issue for the international community, but there is no cause
for panic. Moreover, unjustified and exaggerated fears of the proliferation threat lead to bad
policy, as demonstrated by the unnecessary and tragic Iraq war.31 If we can right-size our
perception of the threat, we will have much more success in achieving the non-proliferation
results we want, at a price we can afford.

Hegemony causes prolif nations perceive the need to deter the US

Posen 14 [Barry, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT's Security Studies Program,
June 24, Restraint : A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Cornell University Press, pg. 31-3/AKG]
Internal balancing aims to strengthen a state militarily or deliberately to improve a states economic position to mobilize military
power at a later date. Efforts

to dull the U.S. military advantage are widespread. Nuclear proliferation

in some cases is motivated primarily by fear of the United States. North Korea seems to want nuclear

weapons in part because it has no other answer to U.S. military superiority. Iran pursues near
nuclear weapons status to improve its power in the Persian Gulf, a region the United States has
strategically dominated since the end of the Cold War. China has taken Irans part in its dispute with the
United States over its efforts to master the technology that would permit it to build atomic weapons. Both Russia and
China have sold advanced weaponry to Iran.
China is working very hard to improve the quality of its military forces, technologically and professionally.
Aside from its imports from Russia, its domestic arms industry strives to produce more internationally competitive weapons, and
judging from appearances it is having some success. China

is also developing strategic materials and energy

stockpiles, presumably to allow it to ride out a U.S. blockade, enabled by U.S. command of the sea. 23 On a smaller
scale, Iran too has tried to develop a capable independent arms industry. Though its products
are much less advanced than those of the top producers, they seem to have made important progress, especially in
their ability to produce unguided and guided rockets and missiles. There is also some evidence that they are
producing night vision devices, portable surface to air missiles, and signals intelligence gear. 24 The performance of their clients,
especially Hizbollah in its 2006 war with Israel, and the so-called special groups in Iraq, both suggest some impressive skills in
Irans military. The trade in expertise is likely two way; Iran teaches others some techniques but itself profits from the combat
experience of its friends. 25
Thus far the combination of soft and hard, external and internal balancing encountered by the United States has been inconvenient,
but not deadly. The

diplomatic resistance to the United States over Iraq cast a shadow over the U.S.
effort, making it harder for some allies to sign up and easier for them to leave. It also helped shape
the backdrop of politics across the Arab world, legitimating assistance to Iraqi insurgents
opposed to the United States. We cannot measure this, however, and the actual impact may be slight, given the expected patriotic
opposition of at least some Arab Iraqis to the United States, and the particular opposition of Sunni Arab Iraqis, whose hold on power
the United States broke. In the world of hard balancing, Chinas internal improvements are the most decisive . Its
overall economic progress, however, cannot be attributed to a desire to balance the United States per se, but rather to a larger desire
to build Chinas wealth and prosperity. As many have observed, Chinas

export-led growth strategy depends in

part on the liberal international economy that U.S. hegemony aims to sustain and protect. At the same
time, however, China is working steadily to improve its military power. And it is hard to see
any immediate object of this buildup other than the United States. United States strategic planners have taken
note. China is making it very difficult for the U.S. military to reach the Asian littorals. The debate
on anti-access area denial capabilities in the U.S. defense community, and the emergence of the air-sea
battle concept, with its concomitant requirement for significant expenditures on the most advanced offensive capabilities ,
testifies to the military progress China has already made and is expected to make. 26 As China
improves its littoral warfare capabilities, U.S. projection assets may simply be pushed
away. I expect this to occur, but only after the United States spends a great deal of money trying to prevent it.

Nuclear leadership fails Sanders assumes new proliferators are part of the NPT
CX proves states wouldnt join in the first place
SMRs are low-grade uranium leadership cant stop enrichment programs in
other nations and attempts would force those programs into secrecy turns the
advantage
Glennon is awful scholarship
A. Overlooks deterrence-based bargaining shifts that incentivized cooperation

B. Any-risk logic is absurd in this context deterrence works on a perceived 1%

risk of war that negates the actual chance of war
C. Assumes either vague, nonexistent irrational actors that would pre-emptively
use nukes or terrorists stealing a weapon CX proves its impossible
D. Even if it happens states have an incentive to help the US and not get blown up
stops adventurism and escalation
No impact to deterrence breakdown
Sechser 09 (Todd S. - assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, Controversies in
Globalization, Peter M. Haas, John A. Hird, and Beth McBratney, eds., p. 167-168)
The Intensity of Military Conflict What about conflicts which, despite the shadow of nuclear weapons, nevertheless occur?
Proliferation optimists argue that even if nuclear-armed states fight one another, their wars will not

be
intense: leaders will prevent such conflicts from escalating to avoid the risk that nuclear weapons
might be used. As Waltz writes, Everyone knows that if force gets out of hand all the parties to a
conflict face catastrophe. With conventional weapons, the crystal ball is clouded. With nuclear weapons, it is
perfectly clear (Sagan and Waltz 2003, 114). This reasoning was borne out clearly by the 1999 Kargil
War between India and Pakistanthe only war ever to occur between two nuclear states. The
episode is instructive because the war entailed far fewer causalities than any of the prior wars between
India and Pakistan (see table 1), owing in part to the restraint of the Indian military in expelling
Pakistani insurgents from the Kargil region. The Indian military could have reduced its own losses and ended the war more quickly
by attacking critical communication and supply lines in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, yet because crossing into

Pakistani territory might have widened the war and risked provoking a Pakistani nuclear threat,
Indian leaders instead opted for caution. It is not hard to find other military crises in which the risk of nuclear
escalation induced restraint. In March 1969, Chinese forces ambushed Russian troops along the Ussuri River in
northwest China, prompting a Soviet counter- attack. But one important reason we do not read about the catastrophic Sino- Soviet
War of 1969 is that a Soviet threat to launch preventive strikes against Chinese nuclear targets

induced Chinese leaders to de-escalate the crisis. Despite having initiated the challenge,
China backed down rather than risk let- ting events get out of hand. The Soviet Union, of course, had itself recently backed
down from a crisis it precipitated when Nikita Khrushchev agreed in 1962 to remove Soviet missile bases from Cuba rather than risk
a potentially nuclear conflict with the United States. These examples make clear that nuclear weapons cannot prevent all conflicts:
indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Ussuri River crisis, and the Kargil War all came about because one
nuclear power was bold enough to challenge another. But in

a world without nuclear weapons, these clashes

might have escalated to large-scale conventional wars. Instead, in each case the shadow of
nuclear weapons helped to cool tempers and contain the crisis: retaliation remained
limited, escalatory options were rejected , and eventually the challenger backed
down.

1NCSolvency
No solvency NRC regulation and accidents
Wellock 13 (Thomas Wellock, NRC Historian, Waves of Uncertainty: The Demise of the Floating Reactor Concept (Part II),
http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2013/09/26/waves-of-uncertainty-the-demise-of-the-floating-reactor-concept-part-ii/,
September 26, 2013)
Offshore Power Systems, apparently, did not appreciate that putting land-based reactors out to sea was bound to raise new safety,
environmental and regulatory questions. Concerns

about ship collisions, off-shore fishing grounds, barge sinking

and the challenge of creating a new regulatory process for floating reactors were just some of the unique
issues facing regulators. Even the trade press raised concerns. Nuclear News worried about the incredibly
tangled mass of overlapping jurisdictions, state, national, and international law,
inter-agency authority that included new players such as the U.S. Coast Guard. Drawing from a 1978 GAO report.
Drawing from a 1978 GAO report. Events conspired to worsen OPSs prospects. The oil crisis that began in 1973 made construction
financing expensive and slowed electricity consumption. Facing slack demand, PSEG postponed delivery of the first floating plant
from 1981 to 1985 and later to 1988. Tenneco backed out of the OPS partnership in 1975. With the entire enterprise threatened,
Westinghouse and the Florida Congressional delegation asked the federal government to purchase four plants. But, the prospect of
bailing out OPS did not appeal to officials in the Ford Administration. The purchase proposal died. Floating

reactors
did not solve regulatory or political problems. The production facility in Jacksonville needed an
NRC manufacturing license. There were so many technical and regulatory uncertainties that the
licensing review ran three years behind schedule. A 1978 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office criticized
the NRC for what it believed was an incomplete safety review, particularly for not accounting for impacts on the ocean ecosystem
during an accident where a melting reactor core broke through the bottom of the barge. Local

and state opposition to the

plant was intense. Nearby counties voted in non-binding referendums 2 to 1 against the Atlantic Generating Station, and the
New Jersey legislature refused to introduce a bill to turn the offshore site over to PSEG. Westinghouse held out hope for a brighter
future; PSEG didnt. In late 1978, the utility announced it canceled its orders for all four of its floating plants. Slack demand, it noted,
was the only reason for the cancellations. We simply will not need these units in the foreseeable future, a utility official admitted.

Others blamed excessive regulation. In March 1979, John OLeary, a Department of Energy deputy secretary,
provided to the White House a grimeven alarming report, as one staffer said, that the NRC delays
with the OPS license were symptomatic of a larger problem. It has become impossible to
build energy plants in America OLeary said, due to excessive environmental regulations and
an indecisive bureaucracy. Environmental laws, OLeary complained, had created a chain of hurdles
which effectively kill energy projects and damage to the nations economy. He wanted presidential action.
Drawing from a 1978 GAO report. Drawing from a 1978 GAO report. Events rendered OLearys plea for action moot. Two and a half
weeks later the Three Mile Island accident occurred, ending any hope of an imminent industry rebound. The accident raised anew
questions about a core melt accident and further delayed the manufacturing license. The NRC did not issue a license until 1982. In
1984, Westinghouse formally abandoned the OPS enterprise, dismantled the Jacksonville facility, and sold its huge crane to China.

Going to sea, OPS discovered, did not allow it to escape the problems that beset nuclear
power. A novel technological solution could not overcome public distrust and economic, technical and regulatory uncertainty.
We shall see how Russia handles the challenges.

No market for nuclear energy due to natural gas and other factors mean no
adoption cant solve
Lordan 12 (Rebecca Lordan, Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Bite-Size Nuclear Reactors: More Than We Can Chew?
http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/16/bite-size-nuclear-reactors-more-than-we-can-chew/, April 16, 2012)
In their recent white paper Small Modular ReactorsKey to Future Nuclear Power in the US, Robert Rosner of the Energy Policy
Institute at Chicago and Steven Goldberg of Argonne National Laboratory argue that Americas history with Small Modular Light
Water Nuclear Reactors (SMRs), the growing demand for carbon-free energy sources, and a potential cost advantage make SMRs
ready for prime time: the U.S. nuclear energy market. While each module generates only 300 megawatts or less of power a typical
nuclear reactor generates approximately one gigawatt (1000 megawatts) deploying a system of SMRs could have a dramatic effect
on the domestic energy portfolio. Light water SMRs are governed by the same physical principles as the aging fleet of traditional
reactors. Atomic reactions generate heat that boils water into steam, which in turn drives electricity-generating steam turbines.
However, the smaller size of SMRs allows these power plants to be placed underground, situated in more diverse geographical
locations, and, potentially, manufactured in a standard, cost-effective way. There are two major design advantages of a smaller size.

First, SMRs are less susceptible to potential attack. When they are placed underground, SMRs have an additional layer of protection
that intruders must penetrate before gaining access to the site. Underground modules are also more difficult to target from the air.
Second, because SMRs are submerged underwater, they are better protected from natural disasters especially earthquakes
because the water can absorb seismic forces and shaking. The authors argue that SMRs would not suffer the catastrophic safety
failures that occurred at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Plant in March of 2011. But can

these SMRs compete economically

with alternative green technologies and with low natural gas prices? Rosner and Goldberg assert that they
can, but only under particular economic and regulatory conditions. SMR plants have two major cost
advantages over alternative energies: they can be built one module at a time, thereby reducing up-front capital costs, and they can
take advantage of existing nuclear infrastructure such as component and equipment facilities. Large-scale reactors are constructed
on-site from scratch. As a result, each site requires expensive capital investments and is staffed by a novice local workforce that must
learn by doing; costly delays are common due to small errors. In contrast, production of SMRs in a manufacturing facility would
benefit from an experienced workforce and machine-controlled precision and could create economies of scale. Under these
conditions, SMRs would not only be competitive with carbon-based energy, but would have lower unit-energy prices than other
alternative energy options, such as wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and geothermal, which are less efficient and less reliable
and suffer from high capital costs. However, alternative

energies do not face the same regulatory challenges

as nuclear power. In order to further decrease the costs of SMRs to a competitive level, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) would have to rule in favor of changing license
requirements. One such change would be a reduction in the number of onsite staff required at
nuclear facilities, which would decrease operating and infrastructure costs. Rosner and Goldberg also
outline a variety of ways that the government should support the nascent SMR industry, including cost incentives and market
transition strategies to help limit the uncertainty and risk that often deter private investors. The authors map out a five-step business
plan beginning with a first-of-a-kind pilot plant and ending with fully developed facilities that have achieved economies of scale. But

there is much to do before their plan is realized . While the paper mainly examines SMRs based
on economic and manufacturing factors, the regulatory challenges that small reactors face are
significant. Despite the countrys history with SMRs, this difficult regulatory environment
and anti-nuclear sentiment after the events at Fukushima Daiichi will make deploying
small modular reactors on the scale the authors imagine a challenge.

PPA fails
Jeffrey Marqusee 12, Executive Director of the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and
the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) at the Department of Defense, March 2012, Military
Installations and Energy Technology Innovation, in Energy Innovation at the Department of Defense: Assessing the Opportunities,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Energy%20Innovation%20at%20DoD.pdf
There is an extensive literature on the impediments to commercialization of these emerging energy technologies for the building
infrastructure market. 82 A key impediment (and one found not just in the building market) is that energy

is a cost of doing

business, and thus rarely the prime mission of the enterprise or a priority for decision makers. In contrast to
sectors such as information technology and biotechnology, where advanced technologies often provide the end customer with a new
capability or the ability to create a new business, improvements

in energy technology typically just lower the

cost of an already relatively low-cost commodity (electricity). As a result, the market for
new technology is highly price sensitive, and life-cycle costs are sensitive to the operational
efficiency of the technology, to issues of maintenance, and to the estimated lifetime of the component. Thus, a first
user of a new energy technology bears significantly more risk while getting the
same return as subsequent users. A second impediment is the slow pace of technological change in the U.S. building sector:
it takes years, if not decades, for new products to achieve widespread use. One reason for this is that many
firms in the industry are small; they lack the manpower to do research on new products, and they have limited ability to absorb the
financial risks that innovation entails. A third impediment to the widespread deployment of new technologies arises from the
fragmented or distributed nature of the market; decisions are usually made at the individual building level, based on the perceived
return on investment for a specific project. The

structural nature of decision making and ownership can be a

significant obstacle to technological innovation in the commercial market : n The entity that bears
the up-front capital costs is often not the same as the one that reaps the operation and management
savings (this is known as the split incentives or principal agent problem). n Key decision makers (e.g., architecture
and engineering firms) face the liabilities associated with operational failure but do not share in

the potential savings, creating an incentive to prefer reliability over innovation . n

Financing mechanisms for both energy efficiency (by energy service companies using an ESPC) and distributed and
renewable energy generation (through PPA and the associated financing entities) require high confidence in the
long-term (decade-plus) performance of the technology, and thus investors are unwilling to put
capital at risk on new technologies. Other significant barriers to innovation include a lack of information, which
results in high transactional costs, and an inability to properly project future savings. As the National Academy of Sciences has
pointed out, the lack of evidence-based data inhibits making an appropriate business case for deployment. 83 The return on the
capital investment is often in terms of avoided future costs. Given the limited visibility of those costs when design decisions are
being made, it is often hard to properly account for them or see the return. This is further exacerbated by real and perceived discount
rates that can lead to suboptimal investment decisions. Finally, the lack of significant operational testing until products are deployed
severely limits the rapid and complete development of new energy technologies. The impact of real-world conditions such as
building operations, variable loads, human interactions, and so forth makes it very difficult to optimize technologies, and specifically
inhibits any radical departure from standard practice. These

barriers are particularly problematic for new energy

efficiency technologies in the building retrofit market, which is where DoD has the greatest interest. In addition to these barriers,
which are common across DoD and the commercial market, DoD has some unique operational requirements
(security and information assurance issues) that create other barriers.