1NC

T subs
Interpretation – substantially means at least 50%.
Selya, US Circuit Court Judge, 2005
(Bruce M., “ANTILLES CEMENT CORPORATION, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. ANIBAL ACEVEDO
VILA, GOVERNOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO, * ET AL., Defendants,
Appellants. PUERTO RICAN CEMENT CORPORATION, INC., Intervenor, Appellant.,” US
Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, May 25, 2005, Lexis Nexis, Date Accessed: 8/17/18,
JCP-AA)
Notwithstanding these similarities, there are some salient differences between Law 109 and the BAA. 4 For instance, the BAA permits the use of
foreign goods if it is in the "public interest," 41 U.S.C. § 10d, and Law 109 does not contain such an exception. There are also disparities
between the BAA and Law 109 as the former has been interpreted in federal regulations. One such disparity is that the preference for domestic
construction materials in procurement by federal agencies is 6%, see 48 C.F.R. § 25.204(b), whereas the Preference Board currently sets the
preference for purposes of Law 109 at 15%. Furthermore, the BAA requires contracts for construction of public buildings to favor items
manufactured in the United States that are "substantially all" composed from American raw materials. 41 U.S.C. § 10b. The applicable
federal regulation defines "substantially [**22] all" as meaning at least 50%. See 48 C.F.R. § 25.101(a)(2). In
contradistinction, Law 109 seems to require that cement be manufactured 100% from indigenous (Puerto Rican) raw materials, save for those
indigenous materials that are unavailable in commercial quantities. See 3 P.R. Laws Ann. § 927(d).

Violation –– they are a miniscule reduction

Voter for limits and ground – there are infinite tiny changes to grounds of
inadmissibility that spike out of disads
 T Tassoff
Restrictions on legal immigration include raising quotas and changing terms of
admissibility for the five paths to LPR
Tasoff, 16 - Certified Specialist in Immigration Law (State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization)
since 1985 and has exclusively practiced immigration law for over 40 years. He was a past chair of the S.
Calif. Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and is a partner in the Law Firm
of Tasoff and Tasoff (“Immigration Law After Trump” https://www.tasoff.com/Immigration-
Information/Immigration-Law-After-Trump.pdf

. Quantitative and Qualitative Restrictions on Legal Immigration There are two barriers stopping the masses
from legally immigrating to the U.S. First there are quantitative
restrictions, quotas, which limit the number of
people who can come to the U.S. in any one category of eligibility or from a specific country5 .

[Footnote 5 Starts]

5 The quota for total Family Based immigration is set at 226,000 not including “immediate relatives” of U.S. citizens for which there is no numerical
limitation. Employment Based is set at 150,000 . These visa numbers are allocated in unequal proportions set by law to the various subcategories (see chart). No single country can be
issue more than 26,366 7% of total) which has resulted in large backlogs for Mexico, Philippines, India and China.

[Footnote 5 Ends]

Second, there are qualitative restrictions – people that Congress has determined should not be allowed to
live here due to a myriad of reasons ranging from criminal convictions and health issues to membership in terrorist organizations6 .

[Footnote 6 Starts]

See section 212 of the Act for the grounds of inadmissibility – the rules that prevent noncitizens from
receiving visas and/or entering the U.S. Similar but different in significant ways, is Section 237 of the Act, the grounds of removal,
which allow DHS to remove people who are already in the U.S.

[Footnote 6 Ends]

Although there are waivers for some grounds, most require a showing of extreme hardship to a close U.S. citizen or LPR relative. The
various categories of noncitizens that Congress has given a path to LPR status can be basically broken
down into five groups: family based immigration, employment based immigration, refugees/asylees,
investors and successful applicants to a “diversity” lottery selection process . See the accompanying Chart for
more details regarding the family and employment based categories. There is a multitude of ways that a noncitizen, including a LPR, can
become subject to removal or barred from reentering the U.S. after a trip abroad. The most common reason is a criminal conviction. However,
some of the grounds of removal found in section 237 of the Act apply to activities that are not so serious, especially for crimes involving
controlled substances (including marijuana), firearms and domestic violence. For instance, the violation of a civil protective order is considered
a removable offense. Even the act of remaining abroad for over one year continuously may result in “abandonment” of LPR status and
confiscation of a noncitizen’s green card. For LPR’s, the discovery of a removable offense might occur when the person is arrested and booked
for any offense and a fingerprint check reveals a criminal record. Others, after traveling abroad without incident for many years, find out upon
being routinely inspected at an airport that CBP official have access to new data bases. And others are caught upon applying for naturalization
or renewal of their green cards which like passports expire every 10 years.

Violation – the plan doesn’t eliminate any specific restriction of quota, just creates an
exception or internally changes an EB visa
Voting issue for limits and ground – there are hundreds of internal categories for each
EB visa whose small size can spike out of any disad
 Parole
The United States federal government should
-        grant indefinite parole to former afghan translators and interpreters and
their immediate families
-        announce and enforce that the parole will be continual, won’t be revoked,
and parolees won’t be deported, regardless of administration change, and
-        grant them employment authorization, public benefits, and full legal
protection
- Reverse Executive Order 11935
- Permit agencies to hire non citizens by defaulting to agency claims that there
are no qualified citizens available

The counterplan solves using creative unilateralism

Cox and Rodriguez 15 Adam b. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez 2015 -- -- Adam B. Cox is the Robert
A. Kindler Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. Cristina M. Rodríguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck
Professor of Law, Yale Law School. (“The President and Immigration Law Redux”
https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/presidentandimmigrationlawredux.pdf) mba-
alb

*edited for gendered language*

In our 2009 work, we identified three models of executive authority that emerged over the course of the twentieth century: inherent presidential authority, 19 express delegation, 20 and de facto delegation.21 Each model arose through institutional practice and amidst confusion in the
courts about the constitutional role each branch was supposed to play in the exercise of the federal government’s immigration power. By the late twentieth century, consonant with the dramatic expansion of the delegated administrative state, the first tradition of inherent authority had

presidents looking to mold immigration law to advance their own objectives have rarely needed to
receded.22 But

resort to claims of inherent constitutional authority. , they have used authorities expressly delegated Instead

to them by Congress, or taken advantage of their role in enforcing congressional schemes (the source of de facto delegation)

to advance their own agendas the President has used powers expressly delegated
. Throughout the twentieth century, and up to the present,

to him by Congress to advance his their own immigration agenda these uses have often been . Importantly,

innovative, accomplishing objectives Congress almost certainly did not intend and expanding or
repurposing Congress’s original design . Congress has at different moments resisted and accommodated these efforts, in some moments moving to limit the originally delegated power in an effort to rein in executive

. Perhaps the best twentieth-century example of this

branch efforts, while at others creating new statutory frameworks to accomplish some of the Executive’s objectives

phenomenon is the President’s use of the parole power Contained within the INA the . original Immigration and Nationality Act ( ) of 1952,

parole power permits the President to exercise discretion and allow otherwise inadmissible noncitizens
into the United States As we explained in 2009 beginning with
. 23 Eisenhower’s admission of 15,000 , President

Hungarians fleeing the communist crackdown in their country, the power served as “the central tool of
American refugee policy,” enabling the President to control refugee admissions for over twenty years .24

Though Congress attempted to curtail the power presidents continued to President’s use of the by enacting a refugee preference regime in 1965,

wield the discretionary power that Congress intended only for “emergent, individual, and isolated
situations” in order to admit large groups of noncitizens, including during refugee crises from Cuba,
Haiti, and Vietnam A combination of settled expectations and political pressures eventually led
.25

Congress to make those temporary admissions permanent, underlining the President’s agenda-setting
power .26 With the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress directly responded to the executive-driven agenda in two ways. First, it added language to the parole provision requiring that the discretionary act serve compelling reasons in the public interest—an addition many in Congress
(perhaps mistakenly) regarded as a means of “bring[ing] the admission of refugees under greater Congressional and statutory control.” 27 Second, and more importantly, it created a scheme for overseas refugee selection that expressly delegated power to the President to set the number
of annual refugee admissions and to select the countries from which they would be accepted.28 In 1990, Congress further systematized the process of admitting noncitizens fleeing disaster by creating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, which authorizes the President to

The combination of these

permit categories of noncitizens to remain in the United States on a temporary basis, provided they meet statutory criteria defining the types of calamities Congress deemed worthy of response through protection.29

new provisions suggests that Congress sought to replace the nontransparent use of parole and other
discretionary mechanisms with semi-supervised and controlled schemes of delegation that required the President to submit his recommendations to

, it is important
congressional committees and to consult with various agency heads in the process.30 As we will explain later, the substitution of delegated and visible authority for discretionary and opaque authority generally should be welcomed. But here

to see how the President made these supposed new constraints on his authority his own. A common critique of the
President’s implementation of the refugee selection system in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, was that admissions during that period skewed toward nationals of then-Communist regimes, suggesting that the President used the system in order to advance his particularistic foreign
policy goals rather than the more universal humanitarian objectives of the 1980 Act.31 This critique simultaneously assumes that the two goals are mutually exclusive and that Congress had a clear purpose it thought should drive refugee selection. Whether either of these claims has

what matters is that the President utilized his delegated authority to serve a
merit is beside the point for our purposes. Instead,

decidedly executive agenda. The creation of the refugee selection process may have in 1980 and TPS authority in 1990

diminished the need for sweeping parole power But these

and categorical use of the , as well as the political and legal flexibility of the President to rely on parole as he had in the past.

effects have been more modest than one might suppose, and parole remains an important alternative
route of admission for those who may not qualify for refugee status The authority also continues to .32

serve as a basis for innovation Most recently, the Obama Administration has invoked parole in place
. —

itself an innovation on the parole power to provide relief for a large group of unauthorized immigrants 33—

already in the United States Though the application for and granting of parole continues
—relatives of members of the military.

to be framed as case-by-case, the memorandum announcing parole in place for military families
clearly reflects an intent to provide relief to a favored category of unauthorized immigrants. This sort 34

of creative unilateralism, which we identified has arisen in many other instances in our 2009 article, . A vivid example is the once obscure but
now frequently invoked “family fairness” policies adopted by Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush after Congress enacted a large-scale legalization program in 1986. The legalization program, part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), provided a path to legal status for
millions of unauthorized migrants, but it did not extend to many of the spouses and children of those immigrants. Despite this, President Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1987 elected to defer the removal of many of these family members 35—a deferral President
Bush continued, and then expanded in 1990 when legislation to legalize their status stalled in Congress.36 Later that year, Congress enacted a statutory legalization for the group.37 These deferrals of removal can be cast in two very different lights. First, we might see them as nothing

legalization framework, but in the course of

more than a form of transitional relief. On this account, Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush operated within a statutorily created

implementation identified inequities (and perhaps oversights) in the design of IRCA’s original program.
They used their discretion to ameliorate those inequities—to prevent the removal of family members
who eventually would be eligible for immigration status through their newly legalized spouses or
parents. Once debate began in Congress over new legalization legislation that would reach family
members left out of the initial legislation, thus obviating the need for those family members to petition
through the ordinary immigration process, the actions of the Presidents truly became transitional
amelioration pending congressional action. 38 If the statutory legalization scheme would soon
encompass those family members it would make little sense—as a matter of resource allocation or
,

justice—to deport large numbers of them during the period of legal transition.3 Far from being 9

oppositional, the President’s actions could be seen to exemplify cooperation between the Executive and
Congress in the implementation of a large new initiative.
 Courts
The United States federal judiciary should rule that restrictions on Afghan Special
Immigrant Visas are unconstitutional by establishing that the Courts have equitable
powers in immigration.

The United States executive branch should follow and enforce any Supreme Court
ruling on immigration.

Solves and avoids politics --- courts have the authority to rule on immigration and
provide citizenship.
Ludwin 99 (DEREK LUDWIN, Partner for Covington & Burling LLP, Instructor for University of Virginia School of Law, Law Clerk at United
States District Court for The Southern District of New York, 2000-2001 “ CAN COURTS CONFER CITIZENSHIP? PLENARY POWER AND
EQUAL PROTECTION”, November 1999, NYU Law, http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-74-5-Ludwin.pdf)

In order for the Court to provide a remedy in naturalization based equal protection cases, it would need
to find a jurisprudential foundation to counter the plenary power doctrine and sanction such a remedy. For citizenship
applicants stymied by unconstitutional naturalization provisions, meaningful relief ultimately must come in the form of a grant of citizenship, so the doctrinal foundation would need to support

This Note considers two possible doctrinal solutions: indirect or direct conferral of
judicial conferral of citizenship.

citizenship-the former a byproduct of the Court's striking down an unconstitutional statute and the latter stemming directly from the Court's
equitable powers. In the end, only equity can provide a strong enough foundation to support judicial conferral. B. Indirect Conferral of Citizenship If
the Court finds that a statute violates the Equal Protection Clause, it may strike down the statute or
sever the offending clauses;10 3 this ensures that everyone is judged under a constitutional law.1'4 Indirect conferral of citizenship could
mean nothing more than striking down offending clauses of naturalization statutes and allowing
petitioners who meet the remaining, valid requirements to naturalize through those channels . At first glance, this
means of conferral seems unexceptionable, as courts regularly sever offending clauses from federal acts.105 In many cases, these courts use the statute's own severability clause as a guide.

Such clauses include instructions on severing, providing, for example, that if any portion of the Act is struck down, the rest of the statute
shall remain in effect. Given that the INA includes such a clause, and thus contemplates severance, effecting such severance cannot inherently be seen as judicial overreach.10
6 From one perspective, merely severing the unconstitutional provisions of the statute would not implicate the conferral issue: "[ Once the two unconstitutional

clauses are excised from the statute, that statute [would] operate[ ] automatically to confer
citizenship . ..'at birth.'" 07 On the other hand, severance could be seen as effecting a conferral of citizenship, albeit indirect, contrary to Pangilinan's strictures; the practical import of
such severance would be the indirect conferral of citizenship to those included in the statute by virtue of the severance. The Ninth Circuit panel in Ahumada-Aguilar followed this path in
declaring petitioner a citizen: "The evidence in the record sufficiently demonstrates that Ahumada-Aguilar is the child of a U.S. citizen father, satisfying the requirements of § 1409(a)(1) and (a)
(2).' ' 1 o8
 Base
Immigration is key to trump’s base and he knows it – collapse causes impeachment
Prokop ’17 --- Andrew Prokop, Politics Reporter at Vox.com “Why Trump keeps doing unpopular
things to please his base” September 5, 2017 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/9/5/16233568/trump-approval-unpopular)

Donald Trump has responded to his dismal approval ratings by throwing more and more red meat to his
base. With his controversial comments on the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, his pardon of former Maricopa County
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and now potentially his sunsetting of a popular program that gave young unauthorized
immigrants work permits, the president seems increasingly focused on pleasing the 37 percent or so of
the public that approves of him, rather than reaching out to any of the 57 percent who disapprove . It’s an
odd way of responding to his unpopularity . The conventional political advice for what he should do to improve such poor numbers would be
to try to change his image and win over voters who’ve turned against him. Furthermore, Trump’s base already loves him — the vast
majority of Republican voters continue to say they approve of the job he’s doing. If he already has his base, why,
then, does he need to keep doing new things that please them but repel the majority of the public ? Of
course, as with anything involving Trump, it’s a mistake to assume there’s a strategic master plan here. Instinct, emotion, and his own personal preferences all likely
play a role in his choices. But it
is possible to come up with a strategic justification — or at least some potential
strategic benefits — to Trump’s recent behavior . Here’s the best case for what may seem like a puzzling political strategy. 1) He may
think reaching out to Democrats is futile at this point: Back in November 2016, it may have been possible
for Trump to change his image and govern as a bipartisan consensus-builder. But after months of
controversy, it would make sense if he thinks that opportunity no longer exists. “My reaction is that he
has closed off all the other avenues for political success or consensus-building,” says Patrick Ruffini, a
Republican political consultant. “In an era of increasingly polarized politics, if he is so loathed by
Democrats — I think the base is all he has.” 2) It’s about branding: While Trump doesn’t often seem to have a sophisticated
understanding of political strategy or vote counting, one broader concept he’s long been obsessed with is branding . It’s a concept he
brought from the worlds of business and celebrity to politics — think the towers with his name on it in
big letters, his portrayal of a master businessman on reality TV, and his “Make America Great Again”
slogan. Over the past few years, Trump has deliberately constructed a political brand for himself that
he wants to protect. So with moves like the sheriff Joe Arpaio pardon, he could be partly trying to signal
to his core supporters that the swamp hasn’t changed him, and that he’s still willing to defy political
elites with controversial moves. On immigration in particular — the issue that resonated from his first
campaign speech on — Trump seems particularly sensitive to the danger that any softening could pose
to his brand. “His instincts are to wade in on these culture war issues, especially immigration,” Ruffini
says. “I think he understands that’s the bedrock issue that got him an audience in the first place.” 3)
He’s doing what he feels worked during the campaign: We’ve already seen the political world get egg on
their collective faces by second-guessing Trump’s instincts many times. And in 2016, Trump’s strategy of
resentment-stoking against minority groups, angrily tweeting, and overall negativity was enough to let him eke out a close victory. Now, there were
of course other factors that helped Trump win, like Hillary Clinton’s scandals and his status as the “change” candidate. But from Trump’s perspective,
ignoring the whining of media and political elites and focusing on his core supporters worked for him
before, so it makes sense that he’s trying it again. 4) He thinks racializing politics works to his benefit: A somewhat darker framing of some of the above points is
that Trump may feel that the more politics is framed as a conflict between white Americans and various
“others,” the more he’ll benefit politically. He’s long seemed to have an instinctual feel for this dynamic ,
perhaps stemming from the politics of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s. Just before his firing from the White House, Steve Bannon made a case to this effect in
an interview with the American Prospect. “The
Democrats — the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I
want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with
economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats ,” he said. 5) It’s a strategy for surviving his scandals:
Finally, the remaining potential motive here is self-preservation as the Russia investigation looms. That is: So long
as Trump keeps his core supporters on his side, it will be very difficult for Congress to find the votes to
impeach him or oust him from office. Many House Republicans in conservative districts will fear taking
any action against a president who is so popular among their constituents. This dynamic was at play
during the Watergate investigations into Richard Nixon. “ The President has lately been at some pains
not to give further displeasure to conservatives,” Elizabeth Drew wrote in an early 1974 entry in her book Washington Journal. She
explained: “In a vote in the House to impeach or in the Senate to convict, it is the conservatives who could
save him or do him in.” So Trump’s constant attention to his base at the expense of building broader
support may seem puzzling as a strategy for political success. But as a strategy for survival, it doesn’t
seem half-bad.

Credible threat of impeachment causes lashout against North Korea

Micah Zenko 17, senior fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign
Relations, 6/6/17, “Trump’s Russia Scandal Is Already Swallowing His Foreign Policy,”
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/06/trumps-russia-scandal-is-already-swallowing-his-foreign-policy/
Which brings us to Donald Trump. America, and much of the world, is understandably fascinated with the circus of leaks, self-sabotage, and
scandal currently emanating from the White House. The past 24 hours has brought a number of explosive revelations about the Russian
interference in the election, and Washington is eagerly awaiting former FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday testimony. But Trump is
likely to remain in the Oval Office at least until the various investigations into allegations of his presidential campaign’s
cooperation with Russia are completed; if history is any indication, together these should take two or three years to finish. That’s long
enough for important foreign policies to be devised and implemented (or not) and unforeseen crises to
force Trump to respond (or not). If you follow international relations and are interested in America’s role in the world, you’d be wise
to divert your gaze from the daily headlines and reckon more seriously with Trump’s foreign-policy agenda. But you should also note
that agenda won’t be static relative to the scandals that are engulfing his administration . In 1973, Anthony Lake
and Leslie H. Gelb wrote a fascinating essay for this magazine titled “Watergate and Foreign Policy,” which outlined all the ways that scandal
would influence Nixon’s foreign policy. Much of what they warned about happened, and all of it applies today. Because Trump will have less
time to focus on pursuing his foreign-policy agenda, the foreign-policy bureaucracy will have incentive to be more resistant than usual to
dictates from Trump-appointed leaders, while bureaucratic entrepreneurs will have an invitation to expand their power and influence (as Henry
Kissinger did under Nixon). Meanwhile, congressional
Republicans, sensing the White House’s weakness, will be
less likely to approve funding for Trump’s pet foreign-policy projects , like a 350-ship Navy or a border wall
with Mexico. And foreign allies and partners, if they believe Trump is unlikely to serve out his entire term,
will be less willing to support Trump’s specific diplomatic goals Consider an issue at the center of
Trump’s present diplomatic agenda: North Korea . The most alarming and potentially consequential foreign-policy change
since Jan. 20 has been the Trump administration’s rhetorical approach to North Korea. After promising that the administration would “have no
further comment,” senior officials made a series of escalatory demands on Kim Jong Un’s nuclear and missile programs and imposed a timeline
for action on the United States by declaring “the clock has now run out” and “this problem is coming to a head.” While telegraphing its desire to
instigate a crisis with North Korea, the
Trump administration has publicly articulated no plan or theory of success
for how the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula actually happens . And in conversations with White House,
Pentagon, and State Department officials and staffers about North Korea, I have heard nothing that indicates such a plan exists. The default
course of action — tried unsuccessfully by the last two presidents — is to further lean on Beijing to further lean on
Pyongyang. This will not work. Two weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend a workshop in Beijing, where a well-connected Chinese foreign-
policy scholar stated bluntly: “You have to understand, China is more afraid of the United States than it is of North Korea.” He further indicated
that China’s leaders prefer the status quo of a nuclear-armed North Korea over working with the United States to further destabilize, or even
topple, the Kim regime. When China inevitably refuses to coerce North Korea as strongly, or on the timeline, that the Trump administration
demands, then what? If
the White House believes that North Korea has even a 10 or 20 percent probability of
being able to successfully launch an intercontinental ballistic missile mated with a nuclear warhead onto
the United States, I believe that Trump would authorize a preemptive attack against the missile-launch site
(assuming it is an easily observable, liquid-fueled missile) and perhaps against known nuclear weapons-
related facilities. Military officials, including Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, have
acknowledged that Kim would not simply absorb such an attack but would immediately retaliate against
South Korea. This would trigger America’s mutual defense treaty commitments to defend South Korea
and spark a series of classified, pre-planned U.S.-South Korean military operations . When the Pentagon reviewed
some version of this scenario in 1994 (before North Korea had a nuclear arsenal of at least a dozen bombs), it was estimated that such a
retaliation could “cause hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of casualties.” But a
President Trump facing ever-expanding
scandals, continually low polling numbers, and even potential impeachment proceedings may decide that a
preemptive attack on North Korea is worth the costs and consequences. The academic findings are
mixed on whether heads of government facing domestic vulnerability engage in such diversionary wars — uses of force to
divert public attention and rally support for their leadership. Some analysts and scholars have examined
whether George H.W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama or Bill Clinton’s attacks on al Qaeda targets and
Iraq in 1998 were examples of such diversionary tactics. What seems clear, however, is that presidents are
more likely to engage in such diversions when they are inherently distrustful and perceive the world in
simplistic black-and-white terms — a perfect characterization of Trump.
 Security K
Securitized knowledge production that valorizes American Exceptionalism risks
extinction – a fundamental epistemological shift is necessary to prevent endless cycles
of destruction.
Willson, Humanities PhD New College San Francisco, 13
(S. Brain, JD, American University, “Developing Nonviolent Bioregional Revolutionary Strategies,”
http://www.brianwillson.com/developing-nonviolent-bioregional-revolutionary-strategies/)

II. The United States of America is irredeemable and unreformable, a Pretend Society. The USA as a
nation state, as a recent culture, is irredeemable, unreformable, an anti-democratic, vertical, over-sized
imperial unmanageable monster, sustained by the obedience and cooperation, even if reluctant, of the
vast majority of its non-autonomous population. Virtually all of us are complicit in this imperial plunder
even as many of us are increasingly repulsed by it and speak out against it. Lofty rhetoric has
conditioned us to believe in our national exceptionalism, despite it being dramatically at odds with the
empirically revealed pattern of our plundering cultural behavior totally dependent upon outsourcing the
pain and suffering elsewhere. We cling to living a life based on the social myth of US America being
committed to justice for all, even as we increasingly know this has always served as a cover for the social
secret that the US is committed to prosperity for a minority thru expansion at ANY cost. Our Eurocentric
origins have been built on an extraordinary and forceful but rationalized dispossession of hundreds of
Indigenous nations (a genocide) assuring acquisition of free land, murdering millions with total
impunity. This still unaddressed crime against humanity assured that our eyes themselves are the wool.
Our addiction to the comfort and convenience brought to us by centuries of forceful theft of land, labor,
and resources is very difficult to break, as with any addiction. However, our survival, and healing,
requires a commitment to recovery of our humanity, ceasing our obedience to the national state. This is
the (r)evolution begging us. Original wool is in our eyes: Eurocentric values were established with the
invasion by Columbus: Cruelty never before seen, nor heard of, nor read of – Bartolome de las Casas
describing the behavior of the Spaniards inflicted on the Indigenous of the West Indies in the 1500s. In
fact the Indigenous had no vocabulary words to describe the behavior inflicted on them (A Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552). Eurocentric racism (hatred driven by fear) and arrogant
religious ethnocentrism (self-righteous superiority) have never been honestly addressed or overcome.
Thus, our foundational values and behaviors, if not radically transformed from arrogance to caring, will
prove fatal to our modern species. Wool has remained uncleansed from our eyes: I personally
discovered the continued vigorous U.S. application of the “Columbus Enterprise” in Viet Nam,
discovering that Viet Nam was no aberration after learning of more than 500 previous US military
interventions beginning in the late 1790s. Our business is killing, and business is good was a slogan
painted on the front of a 9th Infantry Division helicopter in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta in 1969. We, not
the Indigenous, were and remain the savages. The US has been built on three genocides: violent and
arrogant dispossession of hundreds of Indigenous nations in North America (Genocide #1), and in Africa
(Genocide #2), stealing land and labor, respectively, with total impunity, murdering and maiming
millions, amounting to genocide. It is morally unsustainable, now ecologically, politically, economically,
and socially unsustainable as well. Further, in the 20th Century, the Republic of the US intervened
several hundred times in well over a hundred nations stealing resources and labor, while imposing US-
friendly markets, killing millions, impoverishing perhaps billions (Genocide #3). Since 1798, the US
military forces have militarily intervened over 560 times in dozens of nations, nearly 400 of which have
occurred since World War II. And since WWII, the US has bombed 28 countries, while covertly
intervening thousands of times in the majority of nations on the earth. It is not helpful to continue
believing in the social myth that the USA is a society committed to justice for all , in fact a convenient
mask (since our origins) of our social secret being a society committed to prosperity for a few through
expansion at ANY cost. (See William Appleman Williams). Always possessing oligarchic tendencies, it is
now an outright corrupt corporatocracy owned lock stock and barrel by big money made obscenely rich
from war making with our consent, even if reluctant. The Cold War and its nuclear and conventional
arms race with the exaggerated “red menace”, was an insidious cover for a war preserving the Haves
from the Have-Nots, in effect, ironically preserving a western, consumptive way of life that itself is killing
us. Pretty amazing! Our way of life has produced so much carbon in the water, soil, and atmosphere,
that it may in the end be equivalent to having caused nuclear winter. The war OF wholesale terror on
retail terror has replaced the “red menace” as the rhetorical justification for the continued imperial
plunder of the earth and the riches it brings to the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional-
executive-information complex. Our cooperation with and addiction to the American Way Of Life
provides the political energy that guarantees continuation of U.S. polices of imperial plunder. III. The
American Way Of Life (AWOL), and the Western Way of Life in general, is the most dangerous force that
exists on the earth. Our insatiable consumption patterns on a finite earth, enabled by but a one-century
blip in burning energy efficient liquid fossil fuels, have made virtually all of us addicted to our way of life
as we have been conditioned to be in denial about the egregious consequences outsourced outside our
view or feeling fields. Of course, this trend began 2 centuries earlier with the advent of the industrial
revolution. With 4.6% of the world’s population, we consume anywhere from 25% to nearly half the
world’s resources. This kind of theft can only occur by force or its threat, justifying it with noble
sounding rhetoric, over and over and over. Our insatiable individual and collective human demands for
energy inputs originating from outside our bioregions, furnish the political-economic profit motives for
the energy extractors, which in turn own the political process obsessed with preserving “national
(in)security”, e.g., maintaining a very class-based life of affluence and comfort for a minority of the
world’s people. This, in turn, requires a huge military to assure control of resources for our use,
protecting corporate plunder, and to eliminate perceived threats from competing political agendas. The
U.S. War department’s policy of “full spectrum dominance” is intended to control the world’s seas,
airspaces, land bases, outer spaces, our “inner” mental spaces, and cyberspaces. Resources everywhere
are constantly needed to supply our delusional modern life demands on a finite planet as the system
seeks to dumb us down ever more. Thus, we are terribly complicit in the current severe dilemmas
coming to a head due to (1) climate instability largely caused by mindless human activities; (2) from our
dependence upon national currencies; and (3) dependence upon rapidly depleting finite resources. We
have become addicts in a classical sense. Recovery requires a deep psychological, spiritual, and physical
commitment to break our addiction to materialism, as we embark on a radical healing journey,
individually and collectively, where less and local becomes a mantra, as does sharing and caring, I call it
the Neolithic or Indigenous model. Sharing and caring replace individualism and competition. Therefore,
A Radical Prescription Understanding these facts requires a radical paradigmatic shift in our thinking
and behavior, equivalent to an evolutionary shift in our epistemology where our knowledge/thinking
framework shifts: arrogant separateness from and domination over nature (ending a post-Ice Age
10,000 year cycle of thought structure among moderns) morphs to integration with nature, i.e., an eco-
consciousness felt deeply in the viscera, more powerful than a cognitive idea. Thus, we re-discover
ancient, archetypal Indigenous thought patterns. It requires creative disobedience to and strategic
noncooperation with the prevailing political economy, while re-constructing locally reliant communities
patterned on instructive models of historic Indigenous and Neolithic villages.

American empire is perpetuated on a paranoid politics of fear of terrorism– to sustain

narratives of omnipotence, the militarized state must provide itself with external
justifications, undefinable threats, figures of terrifying primitive others.
McClintock 9 Anne, Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton, (Paranoid Empire:
Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe, Issue 28, March 2009)//jh

By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on
terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US
government has committed itself after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people
imprisoned, killed, and tortured—unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and
disturbing doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global
omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil ) coinciding with nightmares of
impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and
catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of
absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the
“war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to
encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror”
is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls
elsewhere “a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US government can fling its military might against
ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion
and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the
better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the
war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial
violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes —the modern “slave-
ships on the middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-
carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily
covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the
terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend
beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how
can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship
with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of
ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render
itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For
imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily
ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the
nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary
people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do
we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that
violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted
no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US
claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the
uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of
originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to
theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the
authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official
history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. —Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of
imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the pervasive
presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our
time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I
conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power : a double-sided phantasm that oscillates
precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous
doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as
after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its
peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence.

Linguistic domination is the root cause of imperialism

Rafael, University of Washington history professor, 2007

[Vicente L., Ph.D. Cornell University, “Translation in Wartime,” Public Culture, 19:2, ebsco, accessed 2-1-
11, mss]

Learning to translate thus entails two distinct but related movements. On the one hand, one is required to recognize the singularity of each idiom, for example,
Texan or Arabic, that makes one distinct from and irreducible to the other. It is for this very reason that speaking the other’s language necessarily means deferring
to it, giving it primacy, and thereby keeping one’s own out of mind. On the other hand, by
promising the transportability and
substitutability of one language for another, translation raises the possibility of mastering the language
of the other, hearing in it some things that the other him- or herself did not mean or did not intend to be heard. We see,
then, how translation looks two ways. It opens up a passage to the other in all its otherness, drawing near what at the same time will always remain far. Faithful to
the original, it thus allows for the appreciation of and care for the foreigner whose very foreignness becomes an element of oneself. Translating the other’s
language, one is transformed, becoming other than oneself. However, translation is also a medium for hearing as well as overhearing what
others say even if they did not mean to say it. It is in this sense a kind of instrument of surveillance with which
to track and magnify the alienness of alien speech, decoding dangers, containing threats, and planning
for interventions. Rather than dwell in the hospitality of the other , translation in this latter sense is unfaithful
to the original, seeking to put the other in its putative place, apart from the self. Bush’s view on the learning of foreign
languages, however crudely phrased, reflects a certain idea about translation that has a long history. Since the Spanish conquest and

religious conversion of the native peoples of the New World and the Pacific, various projects of translation
have always accompanied, enabled, and at certain moments disabled the spread of empire.2 As with the Spanish empire,
so with the United States: in both, translation has played the key role of what we might think of as an essential
supplement. How so? Demarcating as it seeks to the draw the other near, translation has always had at least a double aspect.
First, translation historically has served as an instrument of domination under colonial rule . Speaking the other’s

language means replacing one’s first with a second idiom, investing the second with the primacy that outstrips the first . In a colonial context, the

second language, that of the foreign occupier, is usually instituted as the official one, subsuming all other

vernaculars. To speak authoritatively and to address state authorities, one must be able to speak up, using this
second language in place of one’s native speech . Indeed, knowledge of the colonizer’s language has often
endowed speakers with considerable privileges. By insisting on the inequality of languages, translation
tends to promote linguistic hierarchy. Within the context of Western imperialisms and their associated
orientalisms, we see how this linguistic hierarchy also generates social hierarchies between those — usually
missionaries, colonial officials, and educated elites — who are able to move back and forth between an official and a vernacular, and those — peasants, workers,
women, children, the insane, and so on — whose knowledge is restricted to their own. Idealizing
the colonizer’s speech, empire employs
translation as a means for appropriating and reorganizing native languages and their speakers in view of
an overarching official language. Translation bound to empire thus imbues a second, foreign language with a social power surpassing any of the
local idioms.

Reject colonial knowledge-production – their epistemology contributes to a matrix of

imperialism that marginalizes local experience and prioritizes reason over emotion
which fuels global and interpersonal racism – vote NEG as an act of epistemic
disobedience
Mignolo, Prof @ Duke University, 13
(Walter, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture &
Society 26(7): 1-24, http://waltermignolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/epistemicdisobedience-
2.pdf)

Knowledge-making in the modern/colonial world is at once knowledge in which the very concept of ‘modernity’
rests and the judge and warrantor of legitimate and sustainable knowledge . Vandana Shiva (1993) suggested
‘monocultures of the mind’ to describe Western imperial knowledge, its totalitarian and epistemically
non-democratic implementation.11 Knowledge-making presupposes a semiotic code (languages, images, sounds, colors, etc.)
shared between users in semiotic exchanges. It is a common human endeavor (I would say of any living organism, since without ‘knowing’ life
cannot be sustained). Taking a short cut from general conditions of knowledge-making among human beings sensu largo (that is, without racist
and gender/sexual normativity) to knowledge-making in the organization of society, institutions are created that accomplish two functions:
training of new (epistemic obedient) members and control of who enters and what knowledge-making is allowed, disavowed, devalued or
celebrated. Knowledge-makingentrenched with imperial/colonial purposes , from the European
Renaissance to the US neoliberalism (that is, political economy as advanced by F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman) that guided the
last stage of globalization (from Ronald Reagan to the Wall Street collapse), was grounded – as mentioned before – in specific languages,
institutions and geo-historical locations. Thelanguages of Western imperial/knowledgemaking (and the self-definition of
the West – the West of Jerusalem – by social actors that saw themselves as Western Christians) were practiced (speaking and writing) by
social actors (human beings) dwelling in a specific geo-historical space, with specific memories that said
actors constructed and reconstructed in the process of creating their own Christian, Western and
European identity. Briefly, the formal apparatus of enunciation is the basic apparatus for engaging in institutional and purposive
knowledge-making geo-politically oriented. Originally theology was the overarching conceptual and cosmo - logical frame of knowledge-making
in which social actors engaged and institutions (monasteries, churches, universities, states, etc.) were created. Secularization, in the 18th
century, displaced Christian theology and secular philosophy and science took its place. Both frames, theological and secular, bracketed their
geo-historical foundation and, instead, made of theology and philosophy/science a frame of knowledge beyond geo-historical and body
location. The subject of theological knowledge depended on the dictates of God while the subject of secular philosophy/science depended on
Reason, on the Cartesian ego/mind and Kant’s transcendental reason. Thus, Western imperial knowledge was cast in Western imperial
languages and was theopolitically and ego-politically founded. Such foundation legitimizes the assumptions and claims that knowledge was
beyond bodies and places and that Christian theology and secular philosophy and science were the limits of knowledge-making beyond and
besides which all knowledge was lacking: folklore, myth, traditional knowledge, were invented to legitimize imperial epistemology. Theo- and
ego-politics of knowledge also bracketed the body in knowledge-making (Mignolo, 2007a). By
locating knowledge in the mind
only, and bracketing ‘secondary qualities’ (affects, emotions, desires, anger, humiliation, etc.), social actors who
happened to be white, inhabiting Europe/ Western Christendom and speaking specific languages assumed that
what was right for them in that place and which fulfilled their affects , emotions, fears and angers was
indeed valid for the rest of the planet and , consequently, that they were the depositor, warrantor, creator
and distributor of universal knowledge. In the process of globally enacting the European system of belief and structure of
knowledge, human beings who were not Christian did not inhabit the memories of Europe, from Greece through Rome, were not familiar with
the six modern imperial European languages and, frankly, did not care much about all of that until they realized that they were expected and
requested to submit to the European (and in the 20th century to the United States also), knowledge, belief, life style and world view. Responses
to the contrary came, since the 16th century, from all over the globe, but imperial theo- and ego-politics of knowledge managed to prevail
through economically sustained institutions (universities, museums, delegations, state officers, armies, etc.). Now, the type of responses I am
referring to were responses provoked by the making and remaking of the colonial matrix of power: a complex conceptual structure that guided
actions in the domain of economy (exploitation of labor and appropriation of land/ natural resources), authority (government, military forces),
gender/sexuality and knowledge/subjectivity. Since the responses I am referring to were responses to the colonial matrix of power, I would
describe such responses as de-colonial (Mignolo, 2007b). The cases/examples I offered in Section III also show that in such responses de-
colonial geo-politics of knowledge confronted imperial theo- and ego-politically based assumptions on the universality of Western knowledge-
making and institutional grounding. But there is still another dimension in de-colonial politics of knowledge relevant for my argument: the
claim that knowledge-making for well being rather than for controlling and managing populations for
imperial interest shall come from local experiences and needs, rather than from local imperial
experiences and needs projected to the globe, invokes also the body-politics of knowledge. Why? Because not only
regions and locales in which imperial languages were not ancestrally spoken and that were alien to the history of Greek
and Latin were disqualified and the disqualification filled with knowledge-product and knowledge-making in bodies and institutions where
the conceptual warranty of Greek and Latin legitimized the belief of their dwelling in the universal, but bodies too. Racism, as we sense
it today, was the result of two conceptual inventions of imperial knowledge: that certain bodies were inferior to others, and that
inferior bodies carried inferior intelligence. The emergence of a body-politics of knowledge is a second strand of de-colonial thinking and the
de-colonial option. You can still argue that there are ‘bodies’ and ‘regions’ in need of guidance from developed ‘bodies’ and ‘regions’ that got
there first and know how to do it. As
an honest liberal, you would recognize that you do not want to ‘impose’ your
knowledge and experience but to ‘work with the locals’. The problem is, what agenda will be
implemented, yours or theirs? Back then to Chatterjee and Smith. De-colonial thinking presupposes de-linking
(epistemically and politically) from the web of imperial knowledge (theo- and ego-politically grounded) from
disciplinary management. A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to save capitalism’. A de-
colonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why
save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?’ In the same vein, geo- and body-politics of knowledge,
de-colonial thinking and the de-colonial option place human lives and life in general first rather than making claims for the ‘transformation of
the disciplines’. But, still, claiming life and human lives first , de-colonial thinking is not joining forces with ‘the
politics of life in itself’ as Nicholas Rose (2007) has it. Rose’s ‘politics of life in itself’ is the last development in the
‘mercantilization of life’ and of ‘bio-power’ (as Foucault has it). In the ‘politics of life in itself’ political and economic strategies for
controlling life at the same time as creating more consumers join forces. Bio-politics, in Foucault’s conception, was one of the
practical consequences of an ego-politics of knowledge implemented in the sphere of the state. Politics of
life in itself extends it to the market. Thus, politics of life in itself describes the enormous potential of bio-technology to generate consumers
who invest their earnings in buying health-promoting products in order to maintain the reproduction of technology that will ‘improve’ the
control of human beings at the same time as creating more wealth through the money invested by consumers who buy health-promoting
technology. This is the point where de-colonial
options, grounded in geo- and body-politics of knowledge, engage in both
decolonizing knowledge and decolonial knowledge-making, delinking from the web of
imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power.
 Infrastructure DA
Infrastructure bill is a priority and has bipartisan support – DeFazio will assure the bill
is structurally sound and funded
David Schaper 11/12 is a NPR National Desk reporter based in Chicago.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666971627/bridging-the-partisan-divide-can-infrastructure-unite-
democrats-and-republicans Bridging The Partisan Divide: Can Infrastructure Unite Democrats And
Republicans? Heard on All Things Considered

The I-word is popping up again in Washington D.C.: infrastructure. It's one

of the few issues on which President Trump and
Democrats in Congress might be able to agree. Both sides say they're willing to work together on a plan to rebuild the nation's
roads, bridges, transit and water systems. "It really could be a beautiful bipartisan type of situation," Trump said in his news conference last
Wednesday. While he was combative on a lot of issues, this wasn't one of them: "We have a lot of things in common on infrastructure," he
added. "Look,this guy's a builder. He gets it," says Rep. Peter DeFazio, the Oregon Democrat who is likely to be the
incoming chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "It sounds like the
president is sincere and wants to deliver." Trump To Unveil Long-Awaited $1.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Back in February,
Trump outlined what his administration billed as a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, but it included only $200 billion in federal funding over 10
years, funded by unspecified cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, and it went nowhere with the Republican Congress. DeFazio has offered a
$500 billion plan to repair, rebuild and expand the nation's highways, bridges and transit systems, funded by a 30-year bonding program paid
off by increasing motor fuel taxes and indexing the gas tax to inflation. Other House Democrats, including leader Nancy Pelosi, have talked
about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. DeFaziosays whatever the number ends up being, he is willing to work with
the president on coming up with a variety of different funding sources. But, he says, "my bottom line is
it has to be real. We can't pretend . There has to real money, real investment and it needs to be done
soon." It will be more challenging than they realize, because it costs money, and we don't have a lot of money to spend these days. Beth
Osborne, Transportation for America And there's the rub. "This is the buzz saw we tend to run into," says Beth Osborne, who served as a
transportation official in the Obama administration and now heads the group Transportation for America. "It will be more challenging than they
realize [to reach agreement on an infrastructure plan], because it costs money, and we don't have a lot of money to spend these days," says
Osborne. She says she is "hearing some very positive things" on infrastructure from both Democrats and the White House, but she doesn't see
a clear vision for what the federal program will be. "They want to build, build, build," Osborne says, "And my question is, 'what do you want to
build?' And until I know the answer to that question, I don't know how excited I am about what they're building." The American Society of Civil
Engineers gives the nation's infrastructure a D-plus grade and says it would take at least $2 trillion more than is currently budgeted to bring our
roads, rails, seaports, airports, levees, dams and water and sewer systems up to par. ASCE's Brian Pallasch says
addressing such
infrastructure problems has historically been done when government has been been divided, with
Republicans and Democrats coming together to pay for it. "The last time we raised the motor fuels tax,
way back in 1993, that was done in a bipartisan fashion. When Ronald Reagan raised the gas tax in the
'80s, it was done in a bipartisan fashion with a Democratic Congress," he says. In its first two years, the Trump
administration has favored rural areas with infrastructure funding and has held back and delayed funding to urban transit projects, even though
Congress allocated those funds. But Pallasch says a new, comprehensive infrastructure spending plan could actually help bridge the nation's
urban-rural divide. "The reality is there are significant infrastructure needs both in urban areas and in rural areas. And any infrastructure plan
that's put together needs to be able to address both," he says. Other
Washington insiders agree it may be easier now to
come to an infrastructure funding and spending agreement next year than it would have been with one
party in full control. "When you have a different party governing one chamber of Congress, it does give
[both sides] a little more cover to come up with a deal," says Michael Friedberg, a former top Republican
staffer on the House transportation committee , now an infrastructure policy adviser and lobbyist at Holland & Knight. "We
have a unique opportunity with a president who has campaigned on this, is willing to buck
conservative traditions, and now a Democratic Congress," Friedberg adds. "This change of power might give
the necessary kick to both the administration and Congress to make this the No. 1 priority." But the gas tax
is, after all, a tax, and Democrats may not want to endanger their new House majority by raising taxes. And some
Democrats might
not want to give Trump a legislative victory to campaign on. Add to that the president's vow to adopt "a
warlike posture" and bring government to a halt if Democrats use their new House majority to further
scrutinize and investigate his administration, and any promised cooperation on infrastructure might never
get on the road.

Fight proves that the program has been contaminated by broader immigration
controversy
Stein 6/19/18 - politics editor at The Daily Beast (Sam, “Senate Could Screw Over the Military’s Afghan
Interpreters”, https://www.thedailybeast.com/senate-could-screw-over-the-militarys-afghan-
interpreters, EM)
A special visa program for Afghans who worked alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan is likely to lapse
over objections from a key Republican senator. Known as The Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program, the program grants
protected status to Afghans who were escaping the country precisely because of their association with, and work for, American armed forces.
It is authorized until 2021. But advocates have warned that without new legislative directive, the
number of visas that can be granted through it will be exhausted well before then. Those advocates had
pushed for 4,000 additional visas to be made available in a must-pass defense spending bill. But when
that bill came to the Senate floor on Monday night, there was nothing in the final language to bolster
the program due to objections from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) over what he
perceived to be the program’s lax standards . Because the House version of the defense spending bill did not include the
provision either, aides working on the matter have grown highly pessimistic that visa program will survive in the long
term. “It’s in trouble,” said one Senate Democratic aide working directly on the visa program. The aide noted that when House and
Senate negotiators reconcile their respective bills together, lawmakers could try and reintroduce the visa program into
the final legislation. But that would be a procedural long shot. That Congress even got to this point
serves as an illustration that the political paralysis over immigration policy has extended beyond the
current debate over families crossing the border and into various elements of U.S. foreign policy. Only, in
this case, President Donald Trump isn’t the nexus of that paralysis. The Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program started as a means of getting a
yearly allotment of visas for both Afghans and Iraqis who proved they were under threat, held a job that helped with U.S. national security, and
were recommended for protection (so as to filter out potential imposters). The Iraqi component ended as the war there drew down. But the
Afghan component has persisted, and so have the visas.

Weak infrastructure undermines cybersecurity. Attacks collapse the grid.

Mueller et al 17, Andreas S. Mueller is Chief of Federal Policy for the California Military Department,
where he handles national security policy in the Governor’s Washington D.C. office, and serves as
Executive Director of the Governor’s Military Council, California’s statutory advisory body to the
Governor and State Legislature on national security and defense policy. Peter Liebert was appointed as
Chief Information Security Officer and Director of the Office of Information Security at the California
Department of Technology in 2016. Austin Heyworth is Public Affairs Manager for Uber Technologies in
California, where he represents the ridesharing giant on state government issues. April 2017. “Keeping
the Lights On; The Critical Role of U.S. States in Electrical Sector Cybersecurity,” Truman Center,
http://trumancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cyber-paper-v10-and-final.pdf
II. CURRENT THREAT LANDSCAPE IN THE NON-BULK ELECTRIC SYSTEM The U.S. electrical power system is split between two broad categories:
namely the Bulk Electric System (BES) and the non-Bulk Electric System (non-BES) (see figure 2). The BES includes electrical
generation and transmission elements of 100 kV or higher, with few exceptions, and does not include local distribution of electricity (NERC
2015). The BES is overseen by federal entities, while the non-BES is primarily under the purview of states but can also be
governed by municipalities (Campbell 2015). Once electricity is in the non-BES for distribution to the
consumer, “no federal regulations apply” (Koppel 2015, 32). The non-BES system is actually the larger of the
two, representing approximately 80 percent (Campbell 2015, 13) of the electrical grid (Peter Behr and Blake Sobczak
2015), as it consists primarily of elements involved in the distribution of electricity to the consumer
rather than generation or high-voltage transmission (Bogorad and Nurani 2012). The BES, under the regulation
and purview of NERC, must adhere to baseline cybersecurity standards . While these standards have been continually
improved over the last half decade, there is still some controversy on how effective this approach has been. However, non-BES
stakeholders operate outside of federal regulations and lack even minimum mandatory cybersecurity
standards because the non-BES is legally outside of 12 federal jurisdiction (NERC 2015). The crux of this
entire issue is that electricity delivered to consumers is not covered by federal security regulations , as per
the preference of industry (Koppel 2015). Yet the failure of non-BES could be significant, particularly for systems
supporting critical sectors of the economy. These systems distribute electricity directly to all other
critical infrastructure industrial sectors, including water and oil pipelines, telecommunications, and
government operations. While the definition of BES was made to be more inclusive in 2014, the non-BES
still remains a critical aspect of the power grid and is simultaneously the least regulated. IMPORTANCE OF
NON-BES SECURITY A cyberattack on the non-BES distribution system could have serious national
consequences. Past distribution system failures have cascaded, proliferating to the electrical grid’s BES
backbone (Campbell 2015). Subsequently, this effect could be multiplied in the face of several distribution
system failures. For example, federal regulators found that one of the causes of the 2011 Southwest Blackout—in which cascading
outages caused 2.7 million customers to lose power at an estimated cost of $100 million to consumers (National University System Institute for
Policy Research)— was the failure of the Imperial Irrigation District’s non-BES distribution system (FERC and NERC 2012; Bogorad and Nurani
2012). 1 This risk only increases as new technology is introduced to the non-BES. To illustrate this further, U.S.
military facilities are
almost wholly reliant on the public electrical grid and utilities, and are therefore served by the non-BES
(GAO 2015). The security implications of cutting off electricity to a military base should be apparent since it
may be easier to affect base operations this way than via direct cyberattack on military networks, a
reality echoed by the Department of Defense (DOD) in 2014. In a GAO report, DOD asserted that cyberattacks
on installation electrical systems could have serious effects, including the destruction of critical
infrastructure, which could degrade or compromise DOD’s ability to conduct its missions (GAO 2015,
20,36,44). This was further reinforced by a former top-ranking National Security Agency (NSA) technology
professional, who remarked that while the agency itself is protected, “the electric power coming into the
agency is not” (Koppel 2015, 32). Non-BES distribution systems are incorporating more and more smart
infrastructure aimed at optimizing the real-time, automated physical operation of electrical appliances, many of which are vulnerable to
cyberattack (Michael Hayden, Curt Hébert, and Susan Tierney 2014). These include: off-the-shelf software, advanced
metering, advanced customer management systems, distribution automation, two-way electrical flow
technologies (including the ability for utilities to communicate with and control major electrical devices such as heating and air
conditioning), and other smart grid infrastructure (Campbell 2015). Moreover, some of these technologies currently communicate over
vulnerable media, such as Wi-Fi and unencrypted radio waves, compounding the negligence of companies who do not bother to update or
change default passwords on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems (ICS-CERT 2016;
Longstaff 2015). Further, renewable energy and two-way electrical flows within the non-BES will blur its
technical definition, making differentiating between it and the BES systems more difficult. This may
create jurisdictional issues between states and federal regulators, thereby increasing the risk the non-BES poses
to the BES (Michael Hayden, Curt Hébert, and Susan Tierney 2014). The future growth of a smart grid is a central focus of electrical sector
cybersecurity concerns; however, unlike the BES, much of the non-BES has not yet been made smart. It is estimated that utility companies will
spend $7 billion on cybersecurity upgrades by 2020, but it has not been made clear what fraction of that will go to protect non-BES systems
(Michael Hayden, Curt Hébert, and Susan Tierney 2014). Ultimately, as this new technology propagates to the non-BES, its risk to the BES will
increase (NERC 2015). ELECTRICAL GRID VULNERABILITIES Efforts to address this critical vulnerability exist, but the
computer backbones that critical infrastructure utilizes to operate, known as industrial control systems
(ICS), are still susceptible. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, responded to 295
known cyber incidents that impacted critical infrastructure, 46 of which were in the energy sector , the
second most targeted category (ICS-CERT 12-15). The actual unreported numbers are likely an order of magnitude higher. 2 This is
particularly concerning as cyber intrusions into ICSs can allow a malicious actor to manipulate this
weakness and cause catastrophic failure (ICS-CERT 2015). There is little data inside an ICS that could be easily
leveraged for monetary gain, such as credit card data or personal information, so there is little reason for threat actors
to target these systems unless they have a larger nefarious goal in mind or a desire to hold the asset at risk for
ransom (a risky endeavor). In other words, these actors are not likely to steal anything; rather, they are there to
find out how to undermine the system itself (ICSCERT 12-15). The defense and intelligence communities call
this “intelligence preparation of the battlespace,” (ICS-CERT 12-15) and it is often a harbinger of a
potentially devastating attack. With evidence pointing to vast vulnerabilities in the U.S. electrical power
ICS, state governments must take the threat of cyberattack seriously and ensure that all available measures to protect
these critical systems are taken. In December 2015, a cyberattack on the Ukrainian power grid disrupted power to hundreds of thousands of
people (Goure 2016). The network (IP) addresses linked to critical infrastructure are actually available online, increasing their vulnerability
(Shodan 2017). And in California, a data breach report by the attorney general detailed the security failures of government agencies and
businesses in exposing 50 million personal records, from 2012 to 2015. To achieve this goal, states must address the problem of electrical grid
vulnerabilities using the same methodology that computer security incident responders use and broadly address the issue before, during, and
after an incident (see figure 1). Whereas electrical companies’ response methodology focuses on their individual needs, states
must take
a strategic approach and act in a manner that can positively influence the plans that companies are
developing. III. STATE LED OPPORTUNITIES IN NON-BES SECURITY As varied as the stakeholders are in the non-BES space, there are
common issues that states are in a leading position to affect. However, government oversight of the electrical sector is spread across a
scattered regulatory structure, presenting a challenge for decision makers seeking to deliver effective cybersecurity across the entire system.
The following section provides recommendations and showcases best practices across six areas in an effort to improve cybersecurity across
state government: State government cybersecurity, private sector and state cooperation, information sharing, standards, education and
workforce, and incident response. It is important to note that many of these recommendations apply to not only the
electrical sector but to state cybersecurity in general. STATE GOVERNMENT CYBERSECURITY Electrical sector
stakeholders (utilities and other entities operating in the non-bulk electrical system, hereafter referred to as non-BES stakeholders) at
the state government level face the same challenge as the federal government in providing
cybersecurity protection for vital infrastructure . This is a problematic gap in electrical grid security as
state governments could potentially have a larger effect on electrical sector cybersecurity as they
regulate the larger non-BES where cybersecurity regulation is virtually absent, can enact policies faster
than the federal government and Congress, can better customize resources to the area, and are closer
in proximity if onsite assistance is imperative. Unfortunately, states have invested little in critical
infrastructure protection, including in the electrical sector . Indeed, state Chief Information Officers often indicate that
the lack of adequate funding is a major barrier to effective cybersecurity (NASCIO & Deloitte 2012) and that
state and local governments typically spend less than five percent of their IT budget on cybersecurity
(Lipman 2015). This is troubling, especially considering the high-profile, successful attacks on federal
government networks, such as the June 2015 breach at the Office for Personnel Management, which invested heavily in cybersecurity.
As one prominent cyber expert put it, “if the federal government is considered the class valedictorian of security,
states are barely graduating” (Kevin Mandia 2015). FUNDING According to a 2014 Deloitte report for the National Association of
State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), roughly half of states spend between 1-2 percent of overall IT budgets on security—a number
significantly below private sector averages. Further, 45 percent of states lack an approved strategy for long-term security budgeting. While
state budgets for cybersecurity are increasing slightly, current funding levels are not adequate to
support information sharing infrastructure and qualified personnel necessary to provide ongoing security benefits.
State budgets for cybersecurity are inadequate and lag behind the private sector considerably. Current funding needs to be
increased and substantiated by a process that matches funding to identified risks or weaknesses in
cybersecurity operations. Most states have not separated out cybersecurity as a distinct category of an overall IT budget, resulting in
inadequate funding and operational attention. This is an unsustainable approach. Most networks overseen by state
regulators, to include the electrical sector, may be highly vulnerable.

Collapse causes extinction

Alice Friedemann 16, transportation expert, founder of EnergySkeptic.com and author of “When Trucks
Stop Running, Energy and the Future of Transportation,” worked at American Presidential Lines for 22
years, where she developed computer systems to coordinate the transit of cargo between ships, rail,
trucks, and consumers, citing Dr. Peter Vincent Pry. Pry is executive director of the Task Force on
National and Homeland Security, a Congressional advisory board dedicated to achieving protection of
the United States from electromagnetic pulse and other threats. Dr. Pry is also the director of the United
States Nuclear Strategy Forum, an advisory body to Congress on policies to counter weapons of mass
destruction. Dr. Pry has served on the staffs of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of
the United States, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from an EMP Attack, the House
Armed Services Committee, as an intelligence officer with the CIA, and as a verification analyst at the
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. 1-24-16, “Electromagnetic pulse threat to infrastructure
(U.S. House hearings)” http://energyskeptic.com/2016/the-scariest-u-s-house-session-ever-
electromagnetic-pulse-and-the-fall-of-civilization/

Modern civilization cannot exist for a protracted period without electricity. Within days of a blackout across the
U.S., a blackout that could encompass the entire planet, emergency generators would run out of fuel,
telecommunications would cease as would transportation due to gridlock, and eventually no fuel. Cities
would have no running water and soon, within a few days, exhaust their food supplies. Police, Fire, Emergency Services and
hospitals cannot long operate in a blackout. Government and Industry also need electricity in order to operate.
The EMP Commission warns that a natural or nuclear EMP event, given current unpreparedness, would likely result in societal

collapse. Terrorists, criminals, and even lone individuals can build a non-nuclear EMP weapon without great trouble or expense, working from Unclassified designs publicly available on the internet, and using parts
available at any electronics store. In 2000, the Terrorism Panel of the House Armed Services Committee sponsored an experiment, recruiting a small team of amateur electronics enthusiasts to attempt constructing a
radiofrequency weapon, relying only on unclassified design information and parts purchased from Radio Shack. The team, in 1 year, built two radiofrequency weapons of radically different designs. One was designed to fit inside
the shipping crate for a Xerox machine, so it could be delivered to the Pentagon mail room where (in those more unguarded days before 9/11) it could slowly fry the Pentagon’s computers. The other radiofrequency weapon was
designed to fit inside a small Volkswagon bus, so it could be driven down Wall Street and disrupt computers— and perhaps the National economy. Both designs were demonstrated and tested successfully during a special
Congressional hearing for this purpose at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground. Radiofrequency weapons are not merely a hypothetical threat. Terrorists, criminals, and disgruntled individuals have used home-made
radiofrequency weapons. The U.S. military and foreign militaries have a wide variety of such weaponry. Moreover, non-nuclear EMP devices that could be used as radiofrequency weapons are publicly marketed for sale to anyone,
usually advertised as ‘‘EMP simulators.’’ For example, one such simulator is advertised for public sale as an ‘‘EMP Suitcase.’’ This EMP simulator is designed to look like a suitcase, can be carried and operated by one person, and is
purpose-built with a high energy radiofrequency output to destroy electronics. However, it has only a short radius of effect. Nonetheless, a terrorist or deranged individual who knows what he is doing, who has studied the electric
grid for a major metropolitan area, could—armed with the ‘‘EMP Suitcase’’— black out a major city. A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. An EMP weapon can be used by state actors who wish to level the battlefield by neutralizing the
great technological advantage enjoyed by U.S. military forces. EMP is also the ideal means, the only means, whereby rogue states or terrorists could use a single nuclear weapon to destroy the United States and prevail in the War
on Terrorism or some other conflict with a single blow. The EMP Commission also warned that states or terrorists could exploit U.S. vulnerability to EMP attack for coercion or blackmail: ‘‘Therefore, terrorists or state actors that
possess relatively unsophisticated missiles armed with nuclear weapons may well calculate that, instead of destroying a city or military base, they may obtain the greatest political-military utility from one or a few such weapons by
using them—or threatening their use—in an EMP attack.’’ The EMP Commission found that states such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have incorporated EMP attack into their military doctrines, and openly describe making
EMP attacks against the United States. Indeed, the EMP Commission was established by Congress partly in response to a Russian nuclear EMP threat made to an official Congressional Delegation on May 2, 1999, in the midst of the
Balkans crisis. Vladimir Lukin, head of the Russian delegation and a former Ambassador to the United States, warned: ‘‘Hypothetically, if Russia really wanted to hurt the United States in retaliation for NATO’s bombing of
Yugoslavia, Russia could fire an SLBM and detonate a single nuclear warhead at high altitude over the United States. The resulting EMP would massively disrupt U.S. communications and computer systems, shutting down
everything.’’ China’s military doctrine also openly describes EMP attack as the ultimate asymmetric weapon, as it strikes at the very technology that is the basis of U.S. power. Where EMP is concerned, ‘‘The United States is more
vulnerable to attacks than any other country in the world’’: ‘‘Some people might think that things similar to the ‘Pearl Harbor Incident’ are unlikely to take place during the information age. Yet it could be regarded as the ‘Pearl
Harbor Incident’ of the 21st Century if a surprise attack is conducted against the enemy’s crucial information systems of command, control, and communications by such means as… electromagnetic pulse weapons… Even a
superpower like the United States, which possesses nuclear missiles and powerful armed forces, cannot guarantee its immunity…In their own words, a highly computerized open society like the United States is extremely
vulnerable to electronic attacks from all sides. This is because the U.S. economy, from banks to telephone systems and from power plants to iron and steel works, relies entirely on computer networks… When a country grows
increasingly powerful economically and technologically…it will become increasingly dependent on modern information systems… The United States is more vulnerable to attacks than any other country in the world.’’ Iran—the
world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism—in military writings openly describes EMP as a terrorist weapon, and as the ultimate weapon for prevailing over the West: ‘‘If the world’s industrial countries fail to devise
effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years… American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.’’ The
threats are not merely words. The EMP Commission assesses that Russia has, as it openly declares in military writings, probably developed what Russia describes as a ‘‘Super-EMP’’ nuclear weapon—specifically designed to
generate extraordinarily high EMP fields in order to paralyze even the best protected U.S. strategic and military forces. China probably also has Super-EMP weapons. North Korea too may possess or be developing a Super-EMP
nuclear weapon, as alleged by credible Russian sources to the EMP Commission, and by open-source reporting from South Korean military intelligence. But any nuclear weapon, even a low-yield first generation device, could suffice
to make a catastrophic EMP attack on the United States. Iran, although it is assessed as not yet having the bomb, is actively testing missile delivery systems and has practiced launches of its best missile, the Shahab–III, fuzing for
high- altitude detonations, in exercises that look suspiciously like training for making EMP attacks. As noted earlier, Iran has also practiced launching from a ship a Scud, the world’s most common missile—possessed by over 60
nations, terrorist groups, and private collectors. A Scud might be the ideal choice for a ship-launched EMP attack against the United States intended to be executed anonymously, to escape any last-gasp U.S. retaliation. Unlike a
nuclear weapon detonated in a city, a high-altitude EMP attack leaves no bomb debris for forensic analysis, no perpetrator ‘‘fingerprints.’’ Under present levels of preparedness, communications would be severely limited,
restricted mainly to those few military communications networks that are hardened against EMP. Today’s microelectronics are the foundation of our modern civilization, but are over 1 million times more vulnerable to EMP than
the far more primitive and robust electronics of the 1960s, that proved vulnerable during nuclear EMP tests of that era. Tests conducted by the EMP Commission confirmed empirically the theory that, as modern microelectronics
become ever smaller and more efficient, and operate ever faster on lower voltages, they also become ever more vulnerable, and can be destroyed or disrupted by much lower EMP field strengths. Microelectronics and electronic
systems are everywhere, and run virtually everything in the modern world. All of the civilian critical infrastructures that sustain the economy of the United States, and the lives of 310 million Americans, depend, directly or
indirectly, upon electricity and electronic systems. Of special concern is the vulnerability to EMP of the Extra-High-Voltage (EHV) transformers, that are indispensable to the operation of the electric grid. EHV transformers drive
electric current over long distances, from the point of generation to consumers (from the Niagara Falls hydroelectric facility to New York City, for example). The electric grid cannot operate without EHV transformers—which could
be destroyed by an EMP event. The United States no longer manufactures EHV transformers. They must be manufactured and imported from overseas, from Germany or South Korea, the only two nations in the world that
manufacture such transformers for export. Each EHV transformer must be custom-made for its unique role in the grid. A single EHV transformer typically requires 18 months to manufacture. The loss of large numbers of EHV
transformers to an EMP event would plunge the United States into a protracted blackout lasting years, with perhaps no hope of eventual recovery, as the society and population probably could not survive for even 1 year without
electricity. Another key vulnerability to EMP are Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition systems (SCADAs). SCADAs essentially are small computers, numbering in the millions and ubiquitous everywhere in the critical
infrastructures, that perform jobs previously performed by hundreds of thousands of human technicians during the 1960s and before, in the era prior to the microelectronics revolution. SCADAs do things like regulating the flow of
electricity into a transformer, controlling the flow of gas through a pipeline, or running traffic control lights. SCADAs enable a few dozen people to run the critical infrastructures for an entire city, whereas previously hundreds or
even thousands of technicians were necessary. Unfortunately, SCADAs are especially vulnerable to EMP. EHV transformers and SCADAs are the most important vulnerabilities to EMP, but are by no means the only vulnerabilities.
Each of the critical infrastructures has their own unique vulnerabilities to EMP: The National electric grid, with its transformers and generators and electronic controls and thousands of miles of power lines, is a vast electronic

the electric grid is the most important of all critical infrastructures,

machine—more vulnerable to EMP than any other critical infrastructure. Yet

and is in fact the keystone supporting modern civilization, as it powers all the other critical
infrastructures. As of now it is our technological Achilles Heel. The EMP Commission found that, if the electric grid
collapses, so too will collapse all the other critical infrastructures. But, if the electric grid can be protected and recovered, so
too all the other critical infrastructures can also be restored. Transportation is a critical infrastructure because modern civilization cannot exist

without the goods and services moved by road, rail, ship, and air . Cars, trucks, locomotives, ships, and aircraft all have
electronic components, motors, and controls that are potentially vulnerable to EMP. Gas stations, fuel pipelines, and refineries that make petroleum products
depend upon electronic components and cannot operate without electricity. Given our current state of unpreparedness, in the aftermath of a natural or nuclear
EMP event, transportation systems would be paralyzed. Traffic control systems that avert traffic jams and collisions for road, rail, and air depend upon
electronic systems, that the EMP Commission discovered are especially vulnerable to EMP. Communications is a critical infrastructure because modern

economies and the cohesion and operation of modern societies depend to a degree unprecedented in history

on the rapid movement of information—accomplished today mostly by electronic means. Telephones, cell phones, personal computers,
television, and radio are all directly vulnerable to EMP, and cannot operate without electricity. Satellites that operate at Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) for communications,
weather, scientific, and military purposes are vulnerable to EMP and to collateral effects from an EMP attack. Within weeks of an EMP event, the LEO satellites,
which comprise most satellites, would probably be inoperable. Banking and finance are the critical infrastructure that sustain
modern economies. Whether it is the stock market, the financial records of a multinational corporation, or the ATM card of an individual—financial
transactions and record keeping all depend now at the macro- and micro-level upon computers and electronic automated systems. Many of these are directly
vulnerable to EMP, and none can operate without
electricity. The EMP Commission found that an EMP event could transform the
modern electronic economy into a feudal economy based on barter. Food has always been vital to every
person and every civilization. The critical infrastructure for producing, delivering, and storing food depends

upon a complex web of technology, including machines for planting and harvesting and packaging,
refrigerated vehicles for long-haul transportation, and temperature-controlled warehouses. Modern
technology enables over 98 percent of the U.S. National population to be fed by less than 2 percent of the population. Huge
regional warehouses that resupply supermarkets constitute the National food reserves, enough food to feed the Nation for 30–60 days at normal consumption
rates, the warehoused food preserved by refrigeration and temperature control systems that typically have enough emergency electrical power (diesel or gas
generators) to last only about an average of 3 days. Experience
with storm-induced blackouts proves that when these big
regional food warehouses lose electrical power, most of the food supply will rapidly spoil. Farmers, less
than 2 percent of the population as noted above, cannot feed 310 million Americans if deprived of the means that

currently makes possible this technological miracle. Water too has always been a basic necessity to every person and civilization, even
more crucial than food. The critical infrastructure for purifying and delivering potable water, and for disposing of and treating waste water, is a vast networked
machine powered by electricity that uses electrical pumps, screens, filters, paddles, and sprayers to purify and deliver drinkable water, and to remove and treat
waste water. Much of the machinery in the water infrastructure is directly vulnerable to EMP. The system cannot operate without vast amounts of electricity
supplied by the power grid. A natural or nuclear EMP event would immediately deprive most of the U.S. National population of running water. Many natural sources
of water—lakes, streams, and rivers—would be dangerously polluted by toxic wastes from sewage, industry, and hospitals that would backflow from or bypass
wastewater treatment plants, that could no longer intake and treat pollutants without electric power. Many natural water sources that would normally be safe to
drink, after an EMP event, would be polluted with human wastes including feces, industrial wastes including arsenic and heavy metals, and hospital wastes including
pathogens. Emergency services such as police, fire, and hospitals are the critical infrastructure that upholds the most basic functions of government and society—
preserving law and order, protecting property and life. Experience from protracted storm-induced blackouts has shown, for example in the aftermath of Hurricanes
Andrew and Katrina, that when the lights go out and communications systems fail and there is no gas for squad cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, the
worst
elements of society and the worst human instincts rapidly takeover. The EMP Commission found that, given our
current state of unpreparedness, a natural or nuclear EMP event could create anarchic conditions that would
profoundly challenge the existence of social order.
1NC
 1NC – Circumvention
It’s not a question of numerical limits—bureaucratic inefficiencies overwhelm
whatever the aff does
Creedon 14
Mariam Creedon 14. Associate Corporate Counsel @ Conduent. 07/10/2014. Immigration Policy: Special
Immigrant Visas. SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 2521993, Social Science Research Network. papers.ssrn.com,
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2521993.
3. TIMELINE Applying for an SIV is a lengthy and arduous process. For Iraqis, total average processing time between the initial application and departure can take

one to two years. Afghans face similar wait times, though tremendous backlogs exist for both groups of applicant.46 Afghans and Iraqis
interested in applying for an SIV must provide the following pieces of information to begin the process: 1. Form DS-157: contains all employment,

academic, and military history; 2. Documentation demonstrating 12 months employment with the U.S.

Government in Iraq (continuous or non-continuous); 3. A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s “direct, American citizen

supervisor;” 4. Passport or ID card (evidence of nationality); 5. Family and biographic data; 6. Employee

badges; 7. Statement of harm or threats resulting from a direct consequence of

the applicant’s employment by the U.S. government; and, 8. Previous or current SIV or other
refugee applications.47 Once the Chief of Mission (“COM”) within the National Visa Center (“NVC”) approves the initial submission in the
United States, applicants must file a petition with United States Citizen and Immigration Services, a division with the Department of Homeland Security. Obtaining
COM approval may take up to a year. Throughout the application proceedings, different NVC employees will be tasked with answering questions via e-mail,

arbitrarily imposing standards not clearly outlined in the State

receiving documents, and, at time,

Department instructions.48 Without clear methods of communication, applicants

may find themselves lost in a system designed to help but inadvertently hurting their prospects in obtaining a visa. After
conditional approval and review of the applicant’s materials, the NVC will ask the applicant to prepare for a visa interview at the Kabul or Baghdad embassy,

depending on the contractor’s national origin.49 Interviewed applicants must pay for all costs associated with the interview (such
as medical exams and hotel reservations), risk further public association with the United States by entering an American embassy, and might not receive an answer
about their visa for several months.50 No alternatives exist for applicants who fear traveling to and into the U.S. embassies, and all applicants must complete this
step to continue their path to an SIV. a. An Imminent Fear of Death A significant reality of SIVs is that many Iraqi and Afghan contractors who would be eligible often

do not make it through the SIV process. Many will die as a result from their work with the U.S. government before
they can apply for an SIV. Others will apply for an SIV, but, while waiting for the immense bureaucratic structure to proceed on the
application, will be assassinated.51 The contractors affected by the bureaucratic logjam are helpless

against the long waits, and defenseless against the forces hunting them down in
their home countries. While many flee their homes to avoid attacks, it is necessary for contractors to stay within a certain distance of the
Baghdad and Kabul embassies in order to be available when and if they are invited for an interview as part of the SIV process. The following examples aim to provide
a general sense of the futility many applicants face during the SIV application process, and the tragedy involved in an overly burdensome system filled with
redundancies that result in hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.52 One report provided by a non-profit designed to raise awareness for Iraqi SIV applicants
describes an Iraqi contractor who contacts the U.S. State Department for an SIV. In his very first e-mail to the State Department, he notes that “he’s afraid for his life
because he worked with the U.S. Army as a forklift operator. He’s asked many times [by the Department of State and National Visa Center] for information that he
believes he’s already provided. Within a year, he’s dead.”53 The contractor submitted his application on June 28, 2011; NVC does not contact him again until
October 4, 2011 to request a valid e-mail address for a supervisor. On December 31, 2011, the contractor requests a status update on his application; NVC responds
January 4, 2012 and informs him that his application is still being processed, and that “[y]our patience does assist us in accelerating the process.” By February, the
contractor requested to move his family to Turkey in order to avoid further death threats; NVC counsels him to remain in Iraq or move to Jordan, but will not
provide any assistance or continue the SIV process if he relocates. On June 17, 2012, the contractor’s brother e-mails NVC to inform the agency that, “[b]ecause of
the numerous and continuing threats against him, [the contractor] asked you to expedite or transfer his case to Amman or Turkey. Because of your delays, my
brother was murdered a week ago at the hands of an unknown group,” leaving behind a wife and family in Iraq.54 This is just one of countless accounts that follow
the same storyline and ending. Others are killed as they travel to weddings and attend to day-to-day tasks.55 As more eligible contractors die while waiting for visas
or while trying to understand the SIV requirements, it is increasingly clear these individuals and their families need protection and a more considerate and speedy
review process tailored to their situations.56 b. Political Process Congress has the power to initiate and authorize legislation dealing with all three areas converging
on SIVs: immigration, employment law, and defense spending. All three, and especially immigration law and enforcement and defense spending, are critically
influenced by Congress at this time. One of the main [disadvantages impacting the issue rate of SIVs] is the bureaucratic labyrinth in charge of reviewing and
deciding on the outcomes of thousands of applications. With over sixty percent (60%) of the DOD’s $360 million budget obligated for contracts performed in
Afghanistan and Iraq in fiscal year 2012, greater attention should be paid to the rights, duties, and obligations of Afghan and Iraqi contractors.57 In light of the
defense spending overhauls and effects of issues like sequestration, it would be in Congress’ best interest in the long-term to review the SIV application process and
program in order to issue visas more effectively and efficiently. In the short term, it might make sense for Congress to ignore the immigration tragedy occurring in
Afghanistan and Iraq. From this perspective, the United States would reap the reward of foreign intervention and native (Afghan and Iraqi) contribution without any
moral qualms by merely upholding its contractual obligation and nothing else. This might save the United States money, time, productivity, and other resources.
However, in the long run, this practice could not be sustained. From the author’s perspective, it is unlikely the United States will stop intervening in other countries
and foreign governments for the foreseeable future. As long as this is the case, the United States and the U.S. military has an interest in protecting people from
whom it needs help. The best way to demonstrate the U.S. will uphold its side of the bargain, implicit or explicit, is to have a track record consistent with a concern
for the wellbeing of the people whom it engages. If Congress enforced the new streamlined application procedures written into NDAA 2014, it would help protect
the contractors’ rights as employees and potential human rights victims, and also allow more qualified applicants to enter the United States who have potential to
become positive members of American society. Looking down the road, a revamped policy with concrete results will shape interactions in future interventions, and
help the United States win the trust and work of the native population.
 1NC – Translators Fail
Translators fail
Ron Synovitz 8, senior correspondent for RFE/RL, “Mistakes By Afghan Translators Endanger Lives,
Hamper Antiterrorism Effort”,
https://www.rferl.org/a/Mistakes_By_Translators_Hamper_Afghan_Antiterrorism_Campaign/1195783.
html

When U.S. or NATO soldiers need to communicate with Afghan villagers, they rely on translators provided by private contractors.
But for various reasons -- regional dialects, cultural misunderstandings, or even ethnic animosities --
translators in Afghanistan often don't relate everything they hear. And what is lost in translation can hurt
efforts by NATO and the U.S.-led coalition to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. In the worst cases, innocent civilians
can be arrested or wrongly targeted as Taliban fighters. Zalmai Zurmutai, a Pashto translator for NATO troops in Afghanistan, is
angry about what he has seen happen when unqualified translators serve as a liaison between foreign troops and Afghan
villagers. For example, Zurmutai says, when a Dari speaker from northern Afghanistan is sent out with NATO troops to Pashtun parts of
southern Afghanistan, it is not unusual for the translator to have difficulties understanding the local Pashto dialect. Other
times, Zurmutai says, a young Afghan translator who has grown up in Europe or the United States does not understand the traditional tribal
culture of Pashtun villagers. 'Unable To Convey The Meaning' Local animosities also can come into play. When a translator is
from a tribe or ethnic group that suffered under the rule of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime, Zurmutai says some treat Pashtun
village elders with contempt -- the kind of behavior that can turn an entire village against the foreign troops . "If you
go to [the provinces of] Kandahar or Oruzgun or Zabol or Paktia, most people can't understand Dari," Zurmutai says. "And if you go to
Badakhshan or Takhar, they don't speak Pashto and they can't understand it. Imagine when a [native Dari speaker] becomes a translator and
goes into a Pashtun village where the people cannot speak Dari -- and the translator cannot understand [their local dialect of] Pashto.
"Unfortunately, there are so many translators like this who are unable to convey the meaning of Pashto speakers to the coalition forces. And he
can't convoy the message of foreign troops to these local people," Zurmutai continues. "There also are some Afghan translators who are
coming from other countries who are less familiar with the Afghan culture. They don't know about the tribal value system. Or there are some
emotional young Afghans who don't care about the local values. They have very rude behavior -- very [undiplomatic and] cruel -- without
respect for people. They are creating misunderstandings between local people and the coalition forces. They are destroying mutual trust. There
are some translators who are working for their own political, personal and tribal interests. These translators are treating people in a very bad
way." John McHugh is an independent filmmaker whose documentary "Lost In Translation -- Afghanistan" was released on the Internet this
summer by The Guardian newspaper group. Filmed while McHugh was embedded with U.S. troops near the Afghan-Pakistan border, the eight-
minute documentary shows how tensions rise between U.S. soldiers and Pashtun villagers when a Dari-speaking translator is unable to
understand a village elder's Waziri dialect. 'Is It Any Wonder?' The elder gives lengthy answers to the U.S. soldiers' questions about the lack of
security in their village and the threats against them by Taliban fighters who regularly cross the nearby border with Pakistan. The translator
fails to convey the elder's concerns. "The soldiers ask to speak to the village elders, but everything gets lost in translation," McHugh
says. "Everything here hinges on the translation -- the subtleties of Pashto and English. The translators have become unexpected power brokers
in all this. And sometimes, they just don't translate everything they hear. Is it any wonder that the Americans feel baffled in these situations and
that ordinary Afghans feel ignored?" Zurmutai says there are many
misunderstandings during NATO military operations
in Afghanistan that are caused by bad translations . Zurmutai described one case in which a translator wrongly told NATO
troops that an encampment of Pashtun nomads -- a Kochi tribe -- were Taliban fighters. He says it was only the last-minute intervention of
another translator that stopped NATO from calling in an air strike on the tents of the innocent nomads. "Unfortunately, we can't deny that
there are tribal and regional differences between Afghans today. And translators are involved in this stuff," Zurmutai says. "Many translators
have been sacked because of creating these kinds of conflicts. Recently, so many people have been killed in mistaken bombardments that were
later found to be the result of bad translations. "Nowadays, coalition forces understand that the real source of the problem is with the
translators. And they are paying more attention to this issue," he continues. "If this problem would be solved, it would be a major step forward
for reconstruction and for bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan." Security Criteria U.S. and NATO military officials in Afghanistan have
admitted to RFE/RL privately that inaccurate translations cause problems for their soldiers , whether in a battle situation or
simply communicating with members of a rural Afghan community. One problem has been for the U.S. military to get qualified Dari
and Pashto translators who also meet the Pentagon's security criteria. For years, the Pentagon required that its translators
be American citizens and also have top secret military security clearance.
 1NC – Shortages
Double bind – either no shortage that’s significant OR
structural reasons the aff can’t solve
Abdulrahim 10 (Raja Abdulrahim, 11-26-2010, "Army translators tough to find", Los Angeles Times,
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/26/local/la-me-afghan-linguist-20101126, accessed 7-24-2018) ml

As the United States continues its military shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, the recruitment of Army
translators and interpreters has followed, and Zamani, a contractor who recruits for the Army, is among those who have fanned
out to Afghan and Persian communities and shopping districts looking for potential linguists to help fight the war. The recruitment trail

can be challenging. The pool of candidates who speak Dari, Pashto or Farsi is far thinner than the Arabic
speakers the military sought out during the Iraq war. And many in the communities have
reservations about the war. The Army has been able to sign up only nine Los Angeles-area
recruits for the language program in the last year, far short of the goal of 48 local enlistees and just a
fraction of the 250 signed nationwide. "It's a much smaller population.... We're involved in a lot of community liaison
activities and I expect this year to do more than in years past," said Lt. Col. Frank Demith, assistant deputy for foreign
language and culture for the Army. "It's much harder to recruit." The Army's projected shortage of translators comes at a
time when the need is most crucial -- as the U.S. ramps up preparing an Afghan police, army and justice system and meeting with local councils
in preparation for an eventual U.S. withdrawal. Last weekend, NATO leaders set a goal of 2014 to transfer security responsibilities to the Afghan
government -- a longer timeline than initially thought -- as alliance forces increasingly focus on training, advising and logistics, areas in which
specialized linguists are critical. "You're
not simply looking for language, you're looking for expertise, you're
looking for people who can operate in combat zones, you're looking for people who can work with local
officials," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Once enlisted, recruits go through basic training,
though when deployed their names are not stitched onto their uniforms for security reasons. Some are quickly shipped to Afghanistan; others --
especially women -- remain stateside to train soldiers preparing to deploy. On the front lines, translators often accompany commanders and
high-level officials to meetings with Afghan governors and leaders. Sometimes their value goes beyond simple translations. One soldier, who
asked not to be identified because of security risks, recounted interceding when he saw U.S. soldiers shooting toward a mountain pass in
Afghanistan during target practice. The soldier, who had grown up in the area, knew there was a village on the other side of the mountains and
believes he probably prevented casualties. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz authorized the recruitment of soldiers with
special language and cultural skills in 2003 after the U.S. invaded Iraq. At the time, the main focus was on Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish. "Our
mission mirrored our presence overseas," Demith said. Although military action began first in Afghanistan, Iraq was viewed as the longer
commitment and Arabic remained the military's main focus until troop deployment to Afghanistan began to spike. The Arab population in the
U.S. is three times larger than the Afghan and Persian population, and winning recruits in those communities is complicated
because military contractors compete for the same pool of applicants, offering better pa y. Zamani, born
in Kabul and a U.S. resident since 1981, began with the Los Angeles Army battalion in April but recently quit the assignment because of the
long drive from his home in south Orange County. He now works for private firms that recruit for the Army .
 1NC – A/C – Other Regions

Al Qaida is prevalent across the world—the AFF can’t solve—we will insert this
map.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/images/map-al-qaeda-2015.gif

Glavin 18 – MALD candidate (Nicholas, “Sustaining U.S Counterterrorism Pressure in

Afghanistan”,  http://nationalinterest.org/feature/sustaining-us-counterterrorism-pressure-afghanistan-
24999, EM)

Pakistan “creates the largest concentration of terrorist and extremist organizations in the world,” 
 1NC – No Nuke !
Other terrorists groups means crude bomb inevitable
NoKo will sell to anyone including Syria – evidence cites Pakistan also
The risk of nuclear terror is one in 3 billion
Mueller 10 (John, professor of political science at Ohio State, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters, Issues in Science and Technology, Winter,
http://www.issues.org/26.2/mueller.html)

Politicians of all stripes preach to an anxious, appreciative, and very numerous choir when they, like President Obama,
proclaim atomic terrorism to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It is the problem that, according to Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, currently keeps every senior leader awake at night. This is hardly a new anxiety. In 1946, atomic bomb maker J. Robert
Oppenheimer ominously warned that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could blow up New
York. This was an early expression of a pattern of dramatic risk inflation that has persisted throughout the nuclear age. In
fact, although expanding fires and fallout might increase the effective destructive radius, the blast of a Hiroshima-size device would “blow
up” about 1% of the city’s area—a tragedy, of course, but not the same as one 100 times greater. In the early 1970s, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor
proclaimed the atomic terrorist problem to be “immediate,” explaining at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it
into a bomb.” At the time he thought it was already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then,” or “in another ten or fifteen years,
it will be too late.” Three decades after Taylor, we
continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their “easy” task . In contrast to
these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going
atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous
effort required is scarcely likely to be successful . The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to
manufacture an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a
daunting one, requiring that a considerable series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed theft of fissile material is
exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of guards, but because chase would be immediate.
A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a
host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or, either out of
guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is useless . Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist was accomplished,
the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it, “have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates.” If
terrorists were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would then probably have
to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and probably while being pursued by security forces.
Crossing international borders would be facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they appear
and are often under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators . If border personnel became suspicious of the
commodity being smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that would probably be
offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had been discovered. Once outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists
would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb and then to
populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, machinists, and administrators. The group
would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were
generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bomb-
building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and
certainly their careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an intense worldwide
dragnet operation. Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material. But Christoph
Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland‘s Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the
task “could
hardly be accomplished by a subnational group.” They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches
and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign. They
also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting , and that the technical requirements in several
fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument,
pointing out that uranium is “exceptionally difficult to machine ” whereas “plutonium is one of the most complex
metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed.“ Stressing the “daunting problems associated with
material purity, machining, and a host of other issues,” Younger concludes, “to think that a terrorist group, working in isolation with
an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies” could fabricate a bomb “is
farfetched at best.” Under the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a
year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrecy. In addition, people in the area, including
criminals, may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to be locals. If the effort to build a
bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to be transported to and
smuggled into the relevant target country where it would have to be received by collaborators who are at
once totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives.
The financial costs of this extensive and extended operation could easily become monumental. There would be expensive
equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay off . Some operatives might work for free out of utter dedication
to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable array of criminals and opportunists, each of
whom has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible . Any criminals competent and capable
enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and psychologically equipped by their profession to be
willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle
and that doing so in each case is “not impossible.” But although
it may not be impossible to surmount each individual step,
the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small . Table 1 attempts
to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them, would-be
atomic terrorists would effectively be required to go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly
conclude that their prospects are daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is possible to calculate the
chances for success. Adopting probability estimates that purposely and heavily bias the case in the terrorists’ favor—for
example, assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of overcoming each of the 20 obstacles—the chances that a concerted effort would be successful comes out to be
less than one in a million. If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that their chances at each barrier are one in three, the
cumulative odds that
they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over three billion. Other routes would-be terrorists
might take to acquire a bomb are even more problematic. They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a
generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery abroad because the risk would be high, even for a country led by extremists, that the bomb
(and its source) would be discovered even before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would not approve,
including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the terrorist group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The
terrorist group might also seek to steal or illicitly purchase a “loose nuke“ somewhere. However, it seems probable that none
exist. All governments have an intense interest in controlling any weapons on their territory because of fears that
they might become the primary target. Moreover, as technology has developed, finished bombs have been out-fitted with devices that
trigger a non-nuclear explosion that destroys the bomb if it is tampered with. And there are other security techniques :
Bombs can be kept disassembled with the component parts stored in separate high-security vaults, and a process can be set up in which two people and multiple
codes are required not only to use the bomb but to store, maintain, and deploy it . As Younger points out, “only a few
people in the world have the knowledge to cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon.” There could be dangers in the chaos that would emerge if a
nuclear state were to utterly collapse; Pakistan is frequently cited in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under such
conditions, nuclear weapons would probably remain under heavy guard by people who know that a purloined bomb might be used in
their own territory. They would still have locks and, in the case of Pakistan, the weapons would be disassembled . The al
Qaeda factor The degree to which al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that seems to want to target the United States, has pursued or even
has much interest in a nuclear weapon may have been exaggerated . The 9/11 Commission stated that “al Qaeda has tried to
acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least ten years,” but the only substantial evidence it supplies comes from an episode that is supposed to have taken place about
1993 in Sudan, when al Qaeda members may have sought to purchase some uranium that turned out to be bogus. Information about this supposed venture apparently
comes entirely from Jamal al Fadl, who defected from al Qaeda in 1996 after being caught stealing $110,000 from the organization. Others, including the man who
allegedly purchased the uranium, assert that although there were various other scams taking place at the time that may have served as grist for Fadl, the uranium
episode never happened. As a key indication of al Qaeda’s desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of conversations in Afghanistan
in August 2001 that two Pakistani nuclear scientists reportedly had with Osama bin Laden and three other al Qaeda officials. Pakistani intelligence officers
characterize the discussions as “academic” in nature. It seems that the discussion was wide-ranging and rudimentary and that the scientists provided no material or
specific plans. Moreover, the scientists probably were
incapable of providing truly helpful information because their
expertise was not in bomb design but in the processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities
of a nonstate group. Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent planner of the 9/11 attacks, reportedly says that al Qaeda’s bomb efforts never
went beyond searching the Internet. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department of Energy examined
documents and other information that were uncovered by intelligence agencies and the media in Afghanistan. They uncovered no credible information that al Qaeda
had obtained fissile material or acquired a nuclear weapon. Moreover, they found no evidence of any radioactive material suitable for weapons. They did uncover,
however, a “nuclear-related” document discussing “openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some weapons-related issues.” Just a day or two before
al Qaeda was to flee from Afghanistan in 2001, bin Laden supposedly told a Pakistani journalist, “If the United States uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us,
we might respond with chemical and nuclear weapons. We possess these weapons as a deterrent.” Given the military pressure that they were then under and taking
into account the evidence of the primitive or more probably nonexistent nature of al Qaeda’s nuclear program, the reported assertions, although
unsettling, appear at best to be a desperate bluff . Bin Laden has made statements about nuclear weapons a few other times. Some of these
pronouncements can be seen to be threatening, but they are rather coy and indirect, indicating perhaps something of an interest, but not acknowledging a capability.
And as terrorism specialist Louise Richardson observes, “Statements
claiming a right to possess nuclear weapons have been
misinterpreted as expressing a determination to use them. This in turn has fed the exaggeration of the threat we face .” Norwegian
researcher Anne Stenersen concluded after an exhaustive study of available materials that, although “it is likely that al Qaeda central has considered the option of
using non-conventional weapons,” there is “little evidence that such ideas ever developed into actual plans , or that they were
given any kind of priority at the expense of more traditional types of terrorist attacks.” She also notes that information on an al Qaeda computer left behind in
Afghanistan in 2001 indicates that only $2,000 to $4,000
was earmarked for weapons of mass destruction research and that the
money was mainly for very crude work on chemical weapons. Today, the key portions of al Qaeda central may well total only a few hundred
people, apparently assisting the Taliban’s distinctly separate, far larger, and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan. Beyond this tiny band, there are thousands of
sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe. They mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare
each other to actually do something. Any “threat,” particularly to the West, appears, then, principally to derive from self-selected
people, often isolated from each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds. From time to time some of these people, or ones closer
to al Qaeda central, actually manage to do some harm. And occasionally, they may even be able to pull off something large, such as 9/11. But in most cases, their
capacities and schemes, or alleged schemes, seem to be far less dangerous than initial press reports vividly, even
hysterically, suggest. Most important for present purposes, however, is that any notion that al Qaeda has the capacity to
acquire nuclear weapons, even if it wanted to, looks farfetched in the extreme . It is also noteworthy that, although there
have been plenty of terrorist attacks in the world since 2001, all have relied on conventional destructive methods. For the most part, terrorists seem to be heeding the
advice found in a memo on an al Qaeda laptop seized in Pakistan in 2004: “Make use of that which is available … rather than waste valuable time becoming
despondent over that which is not within your reach.” In fact, history consistently demonstrates that terrorists prefer weapons
that they know and understand, not new, exotic ones. Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran and once its deputy intelligence officer for
transnational threats, warns, “We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have exaggerated . In fact, we must see
jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed, and miserable opponents that they are .” al Qaeda, he says, has only a handful of
individuals capable of planning, organizing, and leading a terrorist organization, and although the group has threatened attacks with nuclear weapons, “ its
capabilities are far inferior to its desires .” Policy alternatives The purpose here has not been to argue that policies designed to inconvenience the
atomic terrorist are necessarily unneeded or unwise. Rather, in contrast with the many who insist that atomic terrorism under current conditions is rather
likely— indeed, exceedingly likely—to come about, I have contended that it is hugely unlikely. However, it is important to consider not only the likelihood
that an event will take place, but also its consequences. Therefore, one must be concerned about catastrophic events even if their probability is small, and efforts to
reduce that likelihood even further may well be justified. At some point, however, probabilities become so low that, even for catastrophic
events, it may make sense to ignore them or at least put them on the back burner; in short, the risk becomes acceptable . For
example, the British could at any time attack the United States with their submarine-launched missiles and kill millions of Americans, far more than even the most
monumentally gifted and lucky terrorist group. Yet the risk that this potential calamity might take place evokes little concern; essentially it is an acceptable risk.
Meanwhile, Russia, with whom the United States has a rather strained relationship, could at any time do vastly more damage with its nuclear weapons, a fully
imaginable calamity that is substantially ignored. In constructing what he calls “a case for fear,” Cass Sunstein, a scholar and current Obama administration official,
has pointed out that if there is a yearly probability of 1 in 100,000 that terrorists could launch a nuclear or massive biological attack, the risk would cumulate to 1 in
10,000 over 10 years and to 1 in 5,000 over 20. These odds, he suggests, are “not the most comforting.” Comfort, of course, lies in the viscera of those to be
comforted, and, as he suggests, many would probably have difficulty settling down with odds like that. But there
must be some point at which
the concerns even of these people would ease. Just perhaps it is at one of the levels suggested above: one in a million or one in three
billion per attempt.
 1nc – Bioterror !D
Al Qaeda bioterror threat was found in a 2008 raid – already prepared
Biological weapon attacks are too complex – even with large-scale funding, access to
information, and gene-editing tools – terrorists will choose not to pursue or will likely
fail.
Revill ’17 [Dr. James Revill, Research Fellow with the Harvard Sussex Program at SPRU, Past as
Prologue? The Risk of Adoption of Chemical and Biological Weapons by Non-State Actors in the EU,
European Journal of Risk Regulation, 8 (2017), pp. 626–642,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/6B824CDE0E25FD86AC3D0BD07822A743/S1867299X17000356a.pdf/div-class-title-
past-as-prologue-the-risk-of-adoption-of-chemical-and-biological-weapons-by-non-state-actors-in-the-
eu-div.pdf]

[t]he complexity of an
The second factor is “the perceived complexity of the innovation in terms of adoption and use”.40 This is important in the innovation literature, as Rogers remarked, “

innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is negatively related to its rate of adoption ”.41 Several scholars of terrorist
innovation have also highlighted the issue of complexity ;42 or, as Cragin et al have stated, “[h]ow simple or complex a technology appears affects perceptions of
how risky it will be to adopt.”43 In most cases terrorist groups appear to have largely opted for the simplest pathway

towards the achievement of their goals and the weapons used tend to be vernacular, functional devices
drawing on local and readily-available materials, rather than sophisticated, “baroque” technologies. This
is certainly the case with IEDs, the history of which is characterised largely by incremental innovations – although nevertheless frequently effective ones – with many means of delivery recycled from the past.44 Complexity can
therefore be seen as important in the adoption of technology by terrorists generally, but is perhaps particularly acute in the case of CBW technology. Some CBW can be relatively simple: “chlorine-augmented, vehicle-borne IEDs,”
as employed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) from 2006 to 2007 are not sophisticated weapons.45 Attacks on chemical production facilities, an apparent tactic of Serbian forces in the early to mid-1990s,46 employed relatively simple
technologies – specifically explosives – with toxicity a secondary by-product. Direct contamination of food,47 drink48 or healthcare products49 does not require particularly sophisticated technology for the purposes of delivery –
although may require some considerable skill to culture and scale-up a biological agent – and has been a common approach in European CBW incidents.50 Similarly, the contamination of water systems, something familiar to
Europe,51 can also be relatively easily attempted. However, in most cases such methods of dissemination have generated results that are far short of the “mass destruction” that CBW are associated with, although this does not

mass casualty attacks still

mean such a possibility can be ignored by those working on public health preparedness. Although some relatively simple approaches could cause significant harm,

require considerable expertise, something particularly acute in the context of biological weapons .52 The
most effective route to weaponising biology is arguably through the process of aerosolising agents, something recognised mid-way through
the last century as opening up the theoretical possibility of using biological weapons on a gigantic scale.53 However, realising such theoretical potential is difficult and

it took states decades to develop more predictable biological weapon s,54 and even then such weapons
were acutely vulnerable to environmental factors.

55 For non-state groups such complexity has proven a significant barrier to CBW development. By means of an example,
one of the best-resourced biological weapons programs, that of Aum Shinrikyo, failed variously because the
group acquired the wrong strain, contaminated fermenters and were faced with insurmountable
production and dissemination difficulties .56 There are of course exceptions, such as the 2001 anthrax
Letter Attacks in the US. However, if one accepts the conclusions of the FBI that this sophisticated attack with aerosolised anthrax
in the US postal system was perpetrated by a US biodefence researcher, Dr Bruce Ivins,57 it is an exception that proves

the rule. To circumvent the difficulties with aerosolisation, arguably one could use human-to-human transmissible
biological agents as part of a suicide bioterror operation. There are good reasons for concern over how crude suicide bioterrorists could employ such a tactic. However, the use of highly

contagious agents is also poorly predictable and would have to deal with social factors, such as the
“spatial contact process among individuals” , which can spell “out the difference between large-scale epidemics and abortive ones”.58 The counter to this
argument is the growing access to data and the changing human geography of the life sciences . Some 83% of
European households reportedly are online, effectively allowing access to what is a growing body of available data on

CBW, including so-called bioterrorist “recipes” and “blueprints ” that are available in both mainstream scientific as well as more subversive literatures
online. It is also clear that there is a changing human geography in European life sciences (for peaceful purposes), with the emergence of 30 DIY-bio groups located in Europe59 and some 80 European teams in the international

Genetically Engineered Machines (IGEM) competition in 2016.60 This is compounded by reports that groups such as Daesh have
deliberately sought to recruit foreign fighters “including some with degrees in physics, chemistry, and
computer science, who experts believe have the ability to manufacture lethal weapons from raw substances”.61 Whilst it would be unwise to ignore such developments, there is a need
for caution in looking at the extent to which new technologies and geographies will facilitate the
adoption of chemical and biological weapons by groups seeking to target European countries. First, data is not information, and
information is not knowledge, let alone the tacit knowledge required for CBW.62 In many cases a degree of
determination and dedication will be required merely to separate online fantasy from fact and identify
operationally useful information (of relevance to the European context) from nonsense (or information pertinent to contexts other than Europe). Second, with new technologies there is the
potential for such tools to enable some, but certainly not all, actors, and even then new technologies bring new challenges. CRISPR, gene editing

technology is currently seen as a particular source of promise and peril, which purportedly enables “even largely untrained people to
manipulate the very essence of life”.63 As much may be technically true, yet “untrained people” would nonetheless require
some guidance in identifying suitable areas of genetic structures to manipulate. Moreover, CRISPR would only
get aspiring weaponeers so far, with the process of culturing, scaling-up and weaponisation still
requiring considerable attention and interdisciplinary skills, typically generated through “large
interdisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, and technicians”,64 in order to be effective. Indeed, for all the
progress in science and technology, biological weapons are still not used, in part, because of the
complexity of such weapons; and the chemical weapons that are used today are largely the same as the chemical weapons of 100 years ago. As Robinson noted “It remains the case today that, in
the design of CBW, increasingly severe technological constraint sets in as the mass-destruction end of the spectrum is approached: the greater and more assured the area-

effectiveness sought for the weapon, the greater the practical difficulties of achieving it”.65
 1NC – Cyber ! D
Sleep on AQE - Liu has no warrant how AQE can hack nukes –
AQE is underground and online – not connected to the ground
No impact to cyber-terror --- countermeasures, system patches, deterrence, and
deferral.
Chuipka 17—Junior Policy Officer at Transport Canada (the Canadian equivalent of an Assistant
Secretary at the US Dept. of Transportation) and a MA in Public and International Affairs from the
University of Ottawa [Adam, “The Strategies of Cyberterrorism: Is Cyberterrorism an effective means to
Achieving the Goals of Terrorists?” 11 Jan, https://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/35695]

These cases illustrate that the threat from cyberterrorism is real but can be vastly overstated. Most of
the damage or disruption caused by the cyber-attack was quickly undone, therefore the potential threat
could be considerable but the actual threat is significantly lower. While attrition has proven to be the
only likely strategy that cyberterrorists could pursue, its overall effectiveness is unconvincing and
counterterrorism measures could make it even less effective. First, cyberterrorism attacks are unlikely
to be repeated as the vulnerabilities from that specific attack are patched up, making future threats of
cyberterrorism less credible. Second, if a terrorist attempts to threaten cyberterrorism, governments
can immediately search for vulnerabilities and patch them, essentially making the attack fail – this may
be easier said than done in most cases though warning always provides the chance to gain an
advantage. In some cases you can simply go offline since an established connection is required for
cyberterrorism to ultimately work. Third, Cyberterrorism is only possible because of vulnerabilities, by
hardening systems and patching vulnerabilities – the chances of cyberterrorism occurring is decreased.
This is one of the ongoing efforts by governments around the world. Fourth, it is also critical that
governments are constantly removing zero day vulnerabilities from the market to prevent terrorists
from obtaining them – they are key in a successful surprise cyber-attack. Fifth, if worst comes to worst
and a cyber-attack has proven successful, one of the most effective strategies against cyber-terrorism is
simply denying that the event was caused by terrorism. Regardless of a terrorist organizations claim, if
the cyber-attack is downplayed by governments as just a “glitch” in the system, it can take away the
desired impact of terrorists and deter future attempts at cyberterrorism .

Even if a terrorist successfully conducted a cyber-attack and claimed to be the perpetrators,

cyberattacks have yet to demonstrate they can actually cause terror – an essential element for a
terrorist attack to be considered a success. Given that high-level cyber-attacks capable of being violent
requires vast resources, intelligence, skill, and time – ultimately too much can go wrong in conducting
a cyber-attack and the costs-benefit analysis weighs heavily towards terrorist use of kinetic weapons for
the time being.
 1nc – Lashout !D
Trump cant unilaterally go to war – even when provoking other countries, wont
escalate
Peter Feaver, 11-17-2017, (professor of political science and public policy and Bass Fellow at Duke
University, and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Duke Program in American
Grand Strategy. "President Trump and the Risks of Nuclear War," Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/17/president-trump-and-the-risks-of-nuclear-war//)MBA HBJ

It is a different matter in the other context: when it is the president who wakes up the military and tries
to get them to go from peacetime to war , i.e. to launch a preventive nuclear attack. In the preventive case, it is
not reasonable to believe that the streamlined procedures of an emergency response would operate
without anyone raising objections. The steps the president would have to take in order to pass a nuclear
order to someone who could physically launch the missiles would simultaneously alert the rest of his
national security team. Efforts to bypass the senior leadership would themselves further alarm
subordinates, increasing the likelihood that they would draw in the rest of the national security team,
even if ordered not to. The military is trained to reject illegal orders and the president trying to order the

military to go from peacetime to nuclear war without consulting with his national security advisors
would set off alarms up and down the system about whether the orders were legal. The president does not need
anyone else to help him fire off a tweet, but he does need many others to help him fire off a nuclear
intercontinental ballistic missile. If he were trying to do so it would take an enormous effort of persuasion that would involve many more people than are
involved in the streamlined, launch-under-attack scenario. What would happen in this second scenario? That question led to the second major topic of concern in
the Q&A period: how robust is the military training to resist illegal orders and how confident could we be that the Pentagon would view an order to “launch a
preventive nuclear war without notifying my national security team” to be illegal? In testimony, General Kehler
repeatedly emphasized that
the military does not follow orders blindly [sic] and the ubiquity of lawyers at multiple layers of
command gives us high confidence the legal questions would be asked (and need to be answered) before a
nuclear strike actually happened. This is true, though it is also true that the military are trained that authenticated orders from the national
command authority have a presumption of legality. (Note: the presumption is even stronger in launch-under-attack scenarios, because the United States has long
embraced the legal concept of anticipatory self-defense, which could result in a decision to strike under circumstances where the United States has not yet suffered
an attack, but one is deemed to be imminent or even underway.) Nevertheless, I am inclined to share General Kehler’s confidence that a rogue president
would find it exceedingly hard to persuade the military to act in preventive war scenarios as rapidly as they are trained to act in
launch-under-attack scenarios. Part of this comes from my understanding of the civil-military context of national

security. Presidents already find it challenging to persuade the military to embrace policies that the
military object to — and which are far less consequential than preventive nuclear war . Another of my books, Armed
Servants, explores in some detail the push and shove of civil-military relations. And still a third (co-authored with Chris Gelpi), Choosing Your Battles, shows that
the military are hardly chomping at the bit to initiate the use of force . To be sure, I also found, in Guarding the Guardians,
that the military did favor a system inclined to the always rather than the never side of the always/never dilemma. This is in part why U.S. political leaders insisted
that there be civilian control of the arsenal. Yet all of these policies were the result of a lengthy bureaucratic struggle that involved many more people than just the
president and the few nuclear operators required to launch a missile.
 1NC – No ME War

Middle East war won’t escalate—regional militaries are too weak

Rovner 14 -- *John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair of International Politics and National Security,
Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies
@ Southern Methodist University, **Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at
the George Washington University

(*Joshua, **Caitlin Talmadge, Less is More: The Future of the U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf, The
George Washington University, http://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/less-more-future-us-military-persian-gulf)

Happily, however, the situation for the United States today is more like the 1950s than the 1970s. The major regional powers all
suffer from serious shortcomings in conventional military power, meaning that none of them will be able
to seriously threaten the balance for the foreseeable future. Iran’s military has suffered greatly from
decades of war and sanctions. Iraq’s fledgling security services are almost exclusively focused on internal
problems. And Saudi Arabia, the richest country in the region, seems content to rely on a dense network of
defenses and proxies rather than pursue any real power projection capabilities. While there are reasons to worry
about internal stability, especially given the ongoing fight against ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), there is very little chance
of a major interstate war. Moreover, threats to oil shipping in the Gulf are real but not overwhelming . All of
this points to a simple and optimistic conclusion: the United States can protect its core interest in the free flow of oil without having to commit
to a large and enduring naval or ground presence to the Gulf.
 2NC
Invisible wars come first – they cause net more suffering and are the controlling
internal link to their impacts
Szentes, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest, 8
(Tamás, and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, “Globalisation and prospects of the world
society” http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)
[]=gender corrected

It’s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace . Without peace countries cannot develop.
Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in the
most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated
and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, -- many “invisible

wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression,
racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the
democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human

environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural
resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment , is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind

global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted

development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the
way for unrest and “visible” wars . It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a
lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic
and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and
institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires
a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and
opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global
level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-
violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating
globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or

before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible
wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development.
“Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for
preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However,
no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society
inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain
at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses.
Therefore, the actual question
is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability
of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive
Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not
any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development
problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about
natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make
“survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world society, which
is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded,
election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political
leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe . One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive
historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of
political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new
forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of
human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries
concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a point of
bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common solution. Under
the circumstances
provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive
unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated.
Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged , wellfed,

well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived , starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games'
(which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global
interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on
the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation
and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next
generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in
natural environment.

1. Power is enforced through truth and dominant discourse – only the alt’s and
our framework change can open debaters up to ideological freedom
Anthony Burke 2, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, 2002
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27.1 page InfoTrac OneFile

It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as

countless struggles for freedom, justice, and social transformation have
proved, a sense of seriousness can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already
available--and where they are not, the effort to create a productive new critical sensibility is well
advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it
assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed as truth , consented to and desired--which
creates an important space for refusal. As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing was conditional on it
being credible to the governed as well as the governing. (60) This throws weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of subjectivity. It is to take
up Foucault's challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel, not to discover who or what we are so much as to
refuse what we are. (61 ) Just as security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene.
We can critique the machinic frameworks of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation,
and diplomacy, while challenging the way these institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects
into their consensual web. This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in
challenging available possibilities for being and their larger socioeconomic implications . Roland Bleiker formulates
an idea of agency that shifts away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act
of rebellion to one that understands both the thickness of social power and its "fissures,"
"fragmentation," and "thinness." We must, he says, "observe how an individual may be able to escape the discursive
order and influence its shifting boundaries.... By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden
appear where forces of domination previously seemed invincible ." (62) Pushing beyond security requires tactics that can
work at many levels--that empower individuals to recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications

of the everyday forms of desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite
them, and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger structures of being,
exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms . As Derrida suggests, this is to open
up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the
international that security seeks to imagine and police. The second seeks new ethical principles based on a critique of the rigid and repressive forms of
identity that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William Conolly, and Moira Gatens have sought to imagine a new ethical

relationship that thinks difference not on the basis of the same but on the basis of a dialogue with the other that might
allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar , for a "debate and engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics"--an encounter that
involves a transformation of the self rather than the other. (63) Thus while the sweep and power of security must be acknowledged, it must also be

refused: at the simultaneous levels of individual identity, social order, and macroeconomic possibility, it
would entail another kind of work on "ourselves"--a political refusal of the One, the imagination of an other that never
returns to the same. It would be to ask if there is a world after security, and what its shimmering possibilities might be.

No it’s not sustainable

Rebecca Thorpe 18, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, “US
Empire in the Age of Trump”, https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1114&context=classracecorporatepower

The 2016 American presidential election has fueled ongoing speculation about the viability of liberal democracy and the post-World War II global order.
For more than a half century, Washington has held the moral high ground in its discourse about democratic norms, transparency and human rights. Meanwhile, American statecraft has been governed by a prevailing rationality to
maintain economic and political hegemony and shape the global order by exercising hard and soft power throughout the world.1 However, the US faces increasing challenges making other states comply with its agenda, and it has

US exit from the Paris accords on climate change,

declined precipitously in its international standing. NATO members are shaken by the US president’s reluctance to affirm a pledge of reciprocal defense.

rejection of a nuclear pact with Iran, and the president’s refusal to condemn (or admit) Russian interference in the 2016 election have ruptured the
international system and eroded faith in global stability, democracy and elections throughout the world. Meanwhile, pundits, scholars and others have expressed alarm about the weakening
of traditional international alliances, the abuse of ethics in government, lack of fidelity to the rule of law and celebration of authoritarian behavior. The trends provoke fears that the waning US hegemon is

destroying the international system that has kept the world more stable since 1945, while catapulting the plight of racial, ethnic and religious minorities
into particularly sharp focus. Yet, while the US has withdrawn from multilateral institutions and endorsed isolationist (“America first”) rhetoric, the Pentagon’s

military footprint remains outstretched in every corner of the globe. The US is still engaged in decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, in 2016, the president ordered a cruise missile attack on Syrian government forces without congressional approval or legal justification;

continued support for the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen that has fueled one of the world’s worst
humanitarian crises; and issued threats of “fire and fury” against North Korea raising the alarming prospect of nuclear
war. Cold War-era arrangements empowering presidents to identify and eliminate threats by deploying the nation’s vast military arsenals, its invasive intelligence apparatus and even its nuclear stockpiles have faced little
meaningful or sustained challenge from either political party.2 While the 2016 election has hastened and highlighted the erosion of liberal democratic norms, this slippage is not simply the result of a particular election,

administration, policy or program. Rather, USpresidents since World War II have promoted democracy, open markets and free trade by wielding gargantuan military arsenals
and undertaking widespread surveillance of ordinary citizens. Many historians and legal scholars argue that the Cold War era gave rise to a permanent “state of executive exception” to the

normal constitutional order—thus signifying the nation’s sustained deviation from the rule of law, civil liberties and human rights in national security realms.3

What is unprecedented today, then, is not so much the betrayal of liberal norms, but rather the degree to which liberal discourse has yielded to tacit and explicit support for authoritarian

tactics and the extent to which liberal democratic principles, institutions and values are simultaneously being abandoned by large parts of the American population.4 To reflect on the decline of
American influence in the geopolitical sphere, its internal fracturing and polarization, atrophying commitment to liberal democratic values and persistent tendency
to confront global conflicts with military solutions raises crucial questions about whether American empire is sustainable ,
and whether it is in fact worth sustaining.5 First, how is it that a nation founded on liberal principles such as checks and balances, limited powers and individual rights has come to embrace its opposite—that is, virtually unbounded

executive authority to stamp out security threats without regard for legal and ethical limitations? Second, what does an executive monopoly on a militarized national
security state portend for liberal democratic institutions in an increasingly polarized, fragmented and unstable political climate? In The American Warfare State, I argue that the nation’s unprecedented military
mobilization during World War II created new political and economic interests in military spending and war that constitutional framers did not anticipate.6 I found that, in subsequent decades, large defense budgets were not only a

response to heightened national security concerns, but also an integral component of many local and regional economies—particularly in geographically remote areas that lack diverse economies. Meanwhile, the public
burdens historically associated with large military establishments and warfare shifted onto a small minority of military volunteers, future
generations of taxpayers who will inherit the nation’s war debts and foreign populations where US wars take place. These new arrangements encourage legislators to support large defense
budgets, while freeing presidents to launch military actions without congressional authorization or democratic deliberation—an outcome that the constitutional framers feared and tried to prevent. In this essay I build on the

argument advanced in The American Warfare State: I suggest that a constitutional framework built on liberal principles like separation of powers and democratic accountability has failed to
reliably limit power or uphold the rule of law—and that evidence of the tilt toward a more authoritarian alternative has been apparent for many decades. Although previous administrations upheld verbal affirmations of liberal
democratic norms, neither discourse nor institutional procedures alone guarantee fidelity to human rights and legal imperatives—at least not without a more robust commitment to these ideals and a political environment where

“law is valued as principle rather than tactic.”7 To make this case, I document patterns of executive lawlessness in the conduct of national security policy, with a particular emphasis on
military interrogations and targeted killings in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Though I emphasize twenty-first century practices, these precedents are
not new. Rather, since Congress authorized a national security apparatus in 1947 and provided new financial incentives to maintain a permanent military-industrial base, both real and perceived security threats have rationalized
the use of force and relaxed moral and legal standards that may otherwise constrain executive conduct. Moreover, the rise of a national security state equipped to kill suspects anywhere in the world and cipher intelligence through
extra-legal channels developed democratically and with little coherent resistance. Far from “ambition... counteracting ambition,” the different branches and levels of government have come to perceive mutually overlapping

interests in expanding the national security state, swelling executive prerogative, and pursuing foreign policy through martial means.8 As a result, an executive monopoly over a heavily militarized,
clandestine national security establishment is routinely deployed without regard for human rights, civil liberties or nation-state sovereignty. The consequences today, in an especially fraught and fragile political climate, are two-

allows presidents—however volatile, intemperate, or characteristically unfit — to pursue their

fold: First, this arrangement

military and intelligence policies as they please, while the most violent and degrading consequences are borne by ethnic or religious minorities and foreign populations

in countries where US security operations take place. Second, these practices also systematically weaken America’s democratic institutions , norms and values,
rendering the regime more vulnerable to authoritarian challenges.

Pursuit of hegemony causes mass industrial killing of millions of innocents

Kelly 13 (Kieran Kelly, Master's candidate studying history through Aotearoa/New Zealand's Massey
University as of 2012, “The United States of Genocide: Putting the US on Trial for Genocide Against the
Peoples of Korea, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Elsewhere,” Global Research, September 30,
2013, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-united-states-of-genocide-putting-the-us-on-trial-for-
genocide-against-the-peoples-of-korea-laos-viet-nam-cambodia-iraq-and-elsewhere/5352227)//glen

The United States of America was built on a foundation of genocide against the Indigenous peoples of North
America. In fact, all successful settler colonial societies are founded in genocide. The process is one of dispossession – the
erasure of one group identity and the imposition of another on the people and/or on the land. But genocide is not merely the foundation of the US nation state, it is
also the foundation of the US empire. The
US habit of genocide has not died, but has transformed. The US has
become a serial perpetrator of genocide with the blood of many millions of innocents spilled in
pursuit of imperial hegemony. There is a fight going on for the very meaning of the term “genocide”. Western powers assert their right to accuse
enemies of committing genocide using the broadest possible definitions whilst also touting a twisted undefined sense of “genocide” which can never, ever be
applied to their own actions. Aotearoa (New Zealand) Prime Minister John Key, apparently taking his cue from the US, is currently pushing for reform of the UN
Security Council such that the veto power would be unavailable. The UNSC is a political body and “genocide” will simply become a political term cited by powerful
states to rationalise aggression against the weak. Key notoriously said that his country was “missing in action” because it did not invade Iraq in 2003, reminding
Kiwis that “blood is thicker than water”. If his desired reforms existed now, the US would probably have a UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force
against Syria on the grounds of “genocide”. All of those who oppose Western aggression justified as humanitarian intervention under the “responsibility to protect”
must stop burying their heads in the sand over this matter. This is a very real fight for the future of humanity. We can either learn and propagate the understanding
that US imperial interventions are, by nature, genocidal. Or we can just pretend the word has no meaning; indulge our childish moral impulses and the lazy
fatuousness of our scholars and pundits and let Western mass-murderers use this Orwellian buzzword (for that is what “genocide” currently is) to commit heinous
acts of horrific violence which ensure the continued domination of the world’s masses by a tiny imperialist elite. (An aside: apparently people like a pragmatic focus
to accompany a call to action. So, am I making the most obvious appeal – that US officials be tried for committing genocide? No I am not. They can be tried for war
crimes if people really think that “holding people accountable” is more important than preventing suffering and protecting the vulnerable. But it has been a terrible
mistake to construct genocide as being an aggravated crime against humanity, as if it were simply a vicious felony writ large. This has played completely into the
hands of those propagandists for whom every new enemy of the West is the new Hitler. The means by which genocides are perpetrated are the crimes of
individuals – war crimes, for example – but genocide itself is the crime of a state or para-state regime. That is the proper target of inquisition and censure. Though
the attempt was tragically abortive, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal recently began hearing charges of genocide against Israel. We need this sort of process
to hear charges of genocide against the US. I fully support such efforts, but my real call to action is a call for thought, for clarity, and for self-discipline. People are
drawn to using woolly thinking over genocide, wishing to use it as the ultimate condemnation of mass violence without reference to any actual meaning of the term.
We must not tolerate it in ourselves or others. We are a hair’s breadth away from the point where “genocide prevention” will be used by major Western powers to
justify genocidal mass violence.) US
“Wars” are Actually Genocides Every major military action by the US since
World War II has first and foremost been an act of genocide . I do not state this as a moral condemnation. If I were seeking to
condemn I would try to convey the enormous scale of suffering , death, loss and misery caused by US mass

violence. My purpose instead is to correct a terrible misconception of US actions – their nature, their meaning and their strategic utility. This understanding
which I am trying to convey is a very dangerous notion with an inescapable moral dimension because the US has

always maintained that the suffering, death and destruction it causes are incidental to military purposes
– they are instances of “collateral damage”. But, with all due respect to the fact that US personnel may face real dangers, these are
not real wars. These are genocides and it is the military aspect that is incidental. In fact, it is straining credulity to
continue believing in a string of military defeats being sustained by the most powerful military in the history of the world at the hands of impoverished Third World
combatants. TheUS hasn’t really been defeated in any real sense. They committed genocide in Indochina, increasing the level
of killing as much as possible right through to the clearly foreseen inevitable conclusion which was a cessation of direct mass violence, not a
defeat. The US signed a peace agreement which they completely ignored. The Vietnamese did not occupy US territory and
force the US to disarm and pay crippling reparations. There is no question that the US has committed actions which fit the description of genocide. Genocide does
not mean the successful extermination of a defined group (there is no such thing as “attempted genocide”). It was never conceived that way, but rather as any
systematic attack on “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Those who deny US genocides usually only deny that there is any intent to commit
genocide. The UN definition of genocide (recognised by 142 states) is: … any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The
US has committed these acts many times and
in many different countries. Some people object that this is some watered down version of genocide that risks diluting the significance of this
“ultimate crime”. However, bear in mind that the victims of US armed violence are not usually combatants and are not

engaged in some sort of contested combat that gives them some ability to defend themselves or to kill
or be killed. They are helpless as they die of incineration, asphyxiation , dismemberment, cancer,
starvation, disease. People of all ages die in terror unable to protect themselves from the machinery
of death. Make no mistake, that is what it is: a large complex co-ordinated machinery of mass killing.
There is nothing watered down about the horrors of the genocides committed by the US, and their
victims number many millions. The violence is mostly impersonal, implacable, arbitrary and industrial.
There are at least three specific times at which US mass violence has taken lives in the millions through
direct killing: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars and sanctions against Iraq in combination with the occupation of Iraq. I refer to them as the
Korea Genocide (which was against both South and North Koreans), the Indochina Genocide (against
Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese), and the Iraq Genocide (which took place over at least a 20 year
period). There are many ways to show that the US committed genocides in these cases. On one level the case is straightforward. For example, if the US
commits acts of “strategic bombing” which systematically kills civilians by the hundreds of thousands ,
and it turns out that not only is there no rational proportionate military reason, but that US military
and intelligence analysis is clear that these are in fact militarily counter-productive acts of gratuitous
mass-murder, then by any reasonable definition these must be acts of genocide. The logic is simple and inescapable. I have written lengthy pieces showing
in detail that these were large scale systematic and intentional genocides which you can read.1

This is a NEG argument – data proves world peace is possible – but their approach
obscures the role that US militarism plays in contributing to global violence – only
rejecting their representations can prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy
Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings @ Stevens Institute of Technology,
15
(John, “Would Global Violence Decline Faster If U.S. Was Less Militaristic?,”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/would-global-violence-decline-faster-if-u-s-was-less-
militaristic/)

Pinker and Mack urge journalists, and all of us, to "consult the analyses of quantitative datasets on violence
that are now just a few clicks away. An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our
national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us." I'm all for an "evidence-based mind-set," especially

if it counteracts the widespread fatalism of our era about the prospects for peace, which can become
self-fulfilling. That's why I discuss the recent decline of war in my book The End of War and in posts on this site—for example, in my recent rebuttal of the
fears of some environmentalists that global warming might provoke more war. But my mindset diverges in a crucial way from that of Pinker and Mack. While noting
that many
conflicts around the world involve "radical Islamist groups," Pinker and Mack fail to recognize
the enormous contributions of the U.S., especially since September 11, 2001, to global violence. Pinker's
2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, an exhaustive documentation of the decline of violence, suffers from this same oversight. The Costs of War Project,
based at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, has compiled data on wars that the U.S. has been waging since 2001 in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Pakistan. (Explaining the inclusion of Pakistan, Costs of War notes: "The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the US helps the Pakistani military fight by funding,
the
equipping and training them, is in many ways more intense than in Afghanistan although it receives less coverage in the US news.") As the graph above shows,

three wars have claimed more than 350,000 lives so far, including "armed forces on all sides,
contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers" and at least 220,000 civilians. Hundreds of thousands
more civilians have died of disease, exposure, malnutrition and "indirect" consequences of the conflicts ,
and more than 6 million have been forced from their homes. More than 6,800 U.S. soldiers have died in the conflicts—and an
almost equal number of military contractors--and more than 970,000 troops have filed disability claims. Costs of War does not estimate the number of civilians
killed directly by U.S. forces. But according to the reputable group Iraq Body Count, between 2003 and 2001, U.S.-led coalition forces were directly responsible for
15,060 civilian deaths in Iraq. Rather than eliminating violent extremism ,
U.S. military actions have arguably exacerbated it. According
to The New York Times, one of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre was allegedly radicalized by "fury

over the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, particularly the mistreatment of Muslims held at Abu
Ghraib prison." The U.S. contributes to violence—and the threat thereof--in other less direct ways. The U.S. is the
dominant innovator, manufacturer and exporter of arms in the world. Aggressive U.S. development and
deployment of drones and cyber-weapons have inspired other nations to pursue these technologies. That
brings me to another valuable but flawed essay, "The Tragedy of the American Military," by journalist James Fallows. Writing in The Atlantic, Fallows argues that the
post-9/11 U.S. military has become virtually immune to criticism either from within or from civilians; as a result, it has become dysfunctional, dedicated less to
maintaining security than to maintaining its bloated budgets. Fallows does an excellent job analyzing how the Pentagon wastes its resources on such colossal
boondoggles as the F-35 fighter jet, which has been plagued with "delays, cost overruns and mechanical problems" and may end up costing taxpayers $1.5 trillion.
He notes that, in spite of recent dips in Defense Department budget, the U.S. is now spending more than $1 trillion annually on national security, not even counting
the interest paid on the military-related debt. "After adjustments for inflation," he elaborates, "the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military
this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War. It
will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined —
three to five times as much as China, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as
Russia. The world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the United
States, about 4 percent." Recent U.S. wars could end up costing as much as $6 trillion, Fallows says. "Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing
of the human costs, most of those dollars might as well have been burned." Our actions "brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of
the world." Fallow's essay, like that of Pinker and Mack, suffers from a flawed conclusion. The major problem with our military, he suggests, is that it is ineffective,
especially relative to its cost. He recommends reforms in the structure of the military and its civilian oversight to make the armed forces more competent and cost-
efficient. Our ultimate goal, he says, should be to "choose our wars more wisely, and win them." I disagree. Rather
than worrying about how to
win wars, we should seek to prevent them from breaking out in the first place. Our ultimate goal should
be for the U.S. armed forces—and all armed forces--to become obsolete. Impossible? Not at all. As the
data presented by Pinker and Mack show, humanity is already headed in the right direction . If the U.S.
can transform itself from a warmonger into the leader of an international peace movement, war could
end soon.

us led world order increase violence

Gregory, Geography Prof @ University of British Columbia, 10
(Derek, “War and peace,” Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 154–186 2010,
http://roundtable.kein.org/sites/newtable.kein.org/files/GREGORY%20War%20and%20Peace.pdf, ava)
Ferguson is not alone in his silence. Many of those who regarded those continuing conflicts as ‘remote’– which excludes the
millions to whom those ‘theatres’ were their homes – elected to repress or to re-script the role of the global
North in provoking violence in the global South. Hence Mueller’s (2009) claim that, asymptotically, ‘war has almost
ceased to exist’, at least between ‘advanced states’ or ‘civilised nations’. Within those states, amnesia has now become so
common that Judt (2008) describes the 20th century as the forgotten century. ‘We have become stridently insistent that the past
has little of interest to teach us’, he writes: ‘Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.’ He suggests that ‘in our haste

to put the twentieth century behind us’ , to lock horror and misery in the attic-rooms of our memories
and museums, we – particularly the ‘we’ that is US, so to speak –‘have forgotten the meaning of war’. The parenthetical
qualification is necessary because in Europe the remains of two world wars are etched deep into the cultural landscape. There, some have seen salvation in Europe’s
construction of ‘civilian states’ out of the wreckage –‘the
obsolescence of war is not a global phenomenon’, Sheehan (2007, xvii)
argues, ‘but a European one, the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the twentieth century’– while others have sought

redemption in the constitutively (‘core’) European pursuit of Kant’s perpetual peace (Habermas 2006). But the meaning of modern war is not
confined to those terrible global conflicts, and their exorbitation of war as ‘total war’ was not a bolt from the blue. Its arc can be traced back to the Napoleonic wars.
Bell locates the origins of a recognisably modern culture of war in those ferocious campaigns and their ‘extraordinary transformation in the scope and intensity of
warfare’ (2007, 7). It was then, too, that the ill-fated French occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the savage expeditions through the Levant inaugurated what Said
(1978, 87) saw as a modern, profoundly martial Orientalism that was to be reactivated time and time again throughout the 20th and on in to our own century. We
should remember, too, that Napoleon also had to contend with insurgencies in Egypt and in Europe; 19th-century war cannot be reduced to a succession of battles
between the armies of contending states, any more than it can in subsequent centuries when, as Judt (2008, 6) reminds, war has ‘frequently meant civil war, often
under the cover of occupation or “liberation”‘. If these observations qualify the usual European genealogy of modern war, then its supersession cannot be a
European conceit either. Across the Atlantic a number of critics worry that, in the wake of 9/11, t he United States
continues to prepare its ‘serial warriors’ for perpetual war (Young 2005; Bromwich 2009). The Pentagon has divided
the globe into six Areas of Responsibility assigned to unified combatant commands – like US Central Command, or CENTCOM (Morrissey 2009)
– and relies on a veritable ‘empire of bases’ to project its global military power (Figure 1).2 And yet Englehardt reckons that it’s hard for Americans to

grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state , that it garrisons much of the
planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. (2009) Writing barely a year after the presidential election, he
ruefully observed that the Bush administration, ‘the most militarily obsessed administration in our history, which year after year submitted ever more bloated
Pentagon budgets to Congress’, was succeeded by the Obama administration that had already submitted an even larger one. There are of course differences in
foreign and military policy between the two, but re-scripting
the war in Afghanistan as ‘the good war’, a war of necessity, even a Just
War – the comparison is with Bush’s Iraq war – continues
to license the re-scripting of a succession of other wars from Korea or even
the Philippines to Afghanistan (and beyond) as the imaginative scene for a heroic interventionism by the United States
and its allies – Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’ now waged by a stern but kindly Uncle Sam (Boot 2003a) – that endorses a hypermasculinised military humanism
(Barkawi 2004; Douzinas 2003). The shifting fortunes of inter-state wars and ‘small wars’ since the Second World War have been charted by two major projects:

the Correlates of War project (COW) at the University of Michigan, devoted to ‘the systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge about war’, and the joint

attempt to establish an Armed Conflict Dataset by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden ( UCDP), the International Peace Research Institute in Norway

(PRIO) and the Human Security Report Project in Canada (HSRP). Any quantitative assessment is a battlefield of its own,
involving disputes over definitions and data and, for that matter, over the reduction of military violence to
abstract metrics and body counts. This holds for individual wars – think, for example, of the debates that have raged over
estimates of casualties in Iraq – but it applies a fortiori to any global audit. The sources for such studies are inevitably uneven and,

as Østerud (2008a 2008b) reminds us, ‘deaths from decentralized and fragmented violence are probably underreported
relative to deaths from more centralized and concentrated violence’ (2008a, 226). The screening and sorting devices that have to be used in these
approaches only compound the difficulty. Most quantitative studies count as a ‘war’ only armed conflicts that produce at least 1000 deaths each year,
which is a necessarily arbitrary threshold, and the common restriction to ‘battle-field’ or ‘battle-related deaths’ excludes many other deaths attributable to military
or paramilitary violence. Although these tallies include civilians caught in the crossfire, they exclude
deaths from warinduced disease or
starvation and, crucially, ‘the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians’. These are serious limitations. To
erase the deliberate killing of civilians makes a mockery not only of the ‘new wars’ I describe below, which are widely
supposed to focus on civilians as targets, but also of old ones. What are we then to make of the bombing offensives of the Second World War? For these reasons, I
also rely on a third, more recent project, the Consolidated List of Wars developed by the Event Data Project on Conflict and Security (EDACS) at the Free University
of Berlin. This provides a database that reworks the thresholds used in other projects and, in distinguishing inter-state wars from other kinds of war, operates with a
threshold of 1000 military or civilian deaths (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008). These body counts (and the temporal limits their exclusions assign to war) are defective in
another sense, however, because casualties do not end with the end of war. Nixon (2007, 163) writes about the ‘slow violence’ of
landmines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance. It costs roughly 100 more to remove a landmine than to lay it, and in consequence: One
hundred million unexploded mines lie inches beneath our planet’s skin. Each year they kill 24,000 civilians and maim many times that number. They kill and maim
on behalf of wars that ended long ago… In neither space nor time can mine-terrorized communities draw a clear line separating war from peace. (Nixon 2007, 163)
But, as Nixon emphasises, other lines can be drawn. Unexploded ordnance is heavily concentrated in some of the most
impoverished places on the planet, often on the front lines of the Cold War in the South, including
Afghanistan (the most intensively mined state in the world), Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Landmines
not only kill directly; they also have a dramatic effect on local political ecologies, since they are typically used to interdict land-based resources and hence food
supplies. In Mozambique, for example, large areas of prime agricultural land were sown with mines and have remained unworkable for years, which has forced
Other slow killers
farmers to bring marginal lands into cultivation with serious consequences for land degradation and food security (Unruh et al. 2003).

that disproportionately ravage populations in the South also reach back to attack those in the North . Thus
Blackmore (2005, 164–99) writes of ‘war after war’ – the long-term effects of exposure to agents like dioxins or depleted uranium3 – and there are countless killings
‘out of place’ by veterans returning to the North from war-zones in the South suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. These remarks are not intended to
disparage the importance of quantitative studies. While I despair of those who reduce war to a mortuary balancesheet – what Arundhati Roy (2002, 111) called the
algebra of infinite justice: ‘How many dead Afghans for every dead American?’ – the raw numbers do mean something. But there
is a world of
meaning hidden behind the tallies and tabulations, which can never summon up the terror, grief and
suffering that constitute the common currency of war (cf. Hyndman 2007). With these qualifications in place, the most relevant
findings from these projects for my purposes are these. First, casting a long shadow over everything that follows, more than two million battle deaths have occurred
worldwide in nearly every decade since the end of the Second World War. It bears repeating that this figure underestimates the carnage because the toll is limited
to ‘battle deaths’.4 Second, the number of inter-state wars has remained low since the end of the Second World War; they declined and even
briefly disappeared in the last decade of the 20th century, but reappeared at the start of the present century. T hird, while intra-state
wars were more frequent than inter-state wars throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (with the exception of the 1930s), by the end of the 20th century their
numbers were increasing dramatically, with a corresponding increase in intra-state wars that drew in other states. The
considerable rise in the
number of armed conflicts between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War was
almost entirely accounted for by the increase in conflicts within states in the global South (Sarkees et al. 2003,
61–4). The number of intra-state wars declined steeply after 1992, though they continued to account for the vast majority of armed conflicts around the world;
some have seen this trend continuing into the 21st century – in 2005 the Human Security Report trumpeted ‘a less violent world’ – but others have detected a
marked increase since the last fin de sie`cle (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008; Harbom and Wallensteen 2009). Whatever one makes of the small print, it is clear that it is

‘small wars’ (wars that are not fought between sovereign states) that dominate the databases. Today’s intra-state wars have overlapping
geographies: they are staged disproportionately in the global South , they involve a complex and shifting reticulation of territorial

allegiances, and they are the selective sites of military intervention by the global North. But as Orford (2003, 85–7) notes, it is often the nexus of

South–North relations that provokes violence there in the first place. She calls into question the ‘imaginative
geography of intervention’ that creates a convenient distance between ‘the space of the international
community and the space of violence or terror’ , in order to represent the North as ‘absent from the
scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic saviour’. On her contrary reading, international institutions (not least
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) are often structurally implicated in these situations long before political violence erupts. This is an
indispensable qualification; small wars are rarely purely local affairs. Chojnacki (2006) describes them as ‘the dominant war phenomenon on the global scale’ and
distinguishes ‘ordinary’ intra-state wars between a state and non-state actors (a war of secession, for example, or a military coup) from ‘sub-state wars’ between
(mostly) non-state actors. In his view, it is the latter that have increased most significantly over the last two decades (Figure 2), and he argues that they have
involved a substantial change in the ‘structures and dynamics of conflict’: The state has lost its monopoly of the legitimate use of
force … or is unwilling to enforce it effectively against combating local groups (e.g. in Nigeria or parts of Pakistan). In other sub-state wars the
monopoly of violence has at least temporarily collapsed (Somalia, Lebanon) or is geographically restricted to the capital or confined regions (Chad,
Afghanistan). In exchange, non-state actors (warlords, local or ethnic militia) are able to establish alternative, territorially restricted

forms of centralized violence. In these instances, actor constellations can no longer be reduced to the state on the one hand and more or less
organized rebel groups, which direct their political and military strategy in accordance with the principle of statehood on the other. Rather, multiple zones of
military and political control emerge, giving rise to partially overlapping loyalties and identities. (Chojnacki 2006, 39–40) Chojnacki (2006, 42) concedes that the
mutation and hybridisation of war makes these typological distinctions increasingly problematic – or at any rate
turns their black and white categories into so many shades of grey – and draws particular attention to the transnationalisation of conflict and the emergence of
complex conflict systems involving proxies and privatisations. Østrud (2008a, 230) goes further, insisting that ‘ the
seamless web of
contemporary violence’ makes the categorisations of the databases actively misleading. In many contemporary
conflicts, ‘there are deadly no peace – no war situations in which the prevailing types of violence are

missed by the categorizations and coding rules of the most prominent databases on war’ . In fact, the
blurring of categories and the indeterminacy of parameters have become the watchwords of war. War ,
observes Joenniemi (2008), has become unfixed, its concepts un-moored. This is not a scholastic affair; the new slipperiness has the most acutely
material consequences. The terms used to describe war (or to claim that it is something else altogether) shape its public response, its military conduct and its legal
regulation. For this reason, some have sought to reinstate the conventional categories – fighting to fix the old concepts – while others have sought to elaborate new
ones. It is to this that I now turn.

Heg and detterence fail

Fettweis 17 –Christopher J. Fettweis is an American political scientist and the Associate Professor of
Political Science at Tulane University. “Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace, Security Studies”
26:3, 423-451; EG)
Conflict and US Military Spending How does one measure polarity? Power is traditionally considered to be some combination of military and economic strength, but
despite scores of efforts, no widely accepted formula exists. Perhaps
overall military spending might be thought of as a proxy
for hard power capabilities; perhaps too the amount of money the United States devotes to hard power
is a reflection of the strength of the unipole. When compared to conflict levels, however, there is no
obvious correlation, and certainly not the kind of negative relationship between US spending and
conflict that many hegemonic stability theorists would expect to see. During the 1990s, the United States cut back on
defense by about 25 percent, spending $100 billion less in real terms in 1998 that it did in 1990.68 To those believers in the neoconservative version of hegemonic
stability, this irresponsible “peace dividend” endangered both national and global security. “No serious analyst of American military capabilities doubts that the
defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s responsibilities to itself and to world peace,” argued Kristol and Kagan at the time.69 The world
grew dramatically more peaceful while the United States cut its forces, however, and stayed just as
peaceful while spending rebounded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The incidence and magnitude of
global conflict declined while the military budget was cut under President Clinton, in other words, and
kept declining (though more slowly, since levels were already low) as the Bush administration ramped it
back up. Overall US military spending has varied during the period of the New Peace from a low in constant dollars of less than $400 billion to a high of more
than $700 billion, but war does not seem to have noticed. The same nonrelationship exists between other potential proxy

measurements for hegemony and conflict: there does not seem to be much connection between
warfare and fluctuations in US GDP, alliance commitments, and forward military presence. There was
very little fighting in Europe when there were 300,000 US troops stationed there, for example, and that
has not changed as the number of Americans dwindled by 90 percent. Overall, there does not seem to
be much correlation between US actions and systemic stability . Nothing the United States actually does
seems to matter to the New Peace.

Intellectual critique of security rhetoric and justifications isn’t abstract – it’s a

material process that empirically spills up, leads to movements, and changing
dominant discourse
Jones 99 (Richard, IR, Aberystwyth “6. Emancipation: Reconceptualizing Practice,” Security, Strategy
and Critical Theory, Available Online at http://www.ciaonet.org/book/wynjones/wynjones06.html
Accessed 7/5/18) // NW

The central political task of intellectuals is to construct a counterhegemony and undermine

the aid in the ion of thus the

prevailing discourse
patterns of that make up the hegemony This is accomplished through
and interaction currently dominant . task

educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It [the

theory affirms the need for contact between

] does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it

intellectuals and “simple” in order to construct an intellectual–

it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely moral

bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332–333)
According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual–moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party—a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolò Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign
barbarians, and create a virtù–ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern prince could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125–205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists
playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom
that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the
Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains
a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination—for example, in the case of gender—to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step
toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict. 1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and
problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led
to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has
obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such

parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of
progressive developments that have been influenced by positively organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a

party structure
particular (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate

ideas are important

that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material
or, more correctly, that

reality. the peace movement of the 1980s

One clear security–related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of . At that time the

defense intellectuals
ideas of dissident encouraged peace activism. they had an effect not
(the “alternative defense” school) and drew strength from Together

only on short–term policy but on the dominant discourses of security, a far more important result strategy and

in the long run. The synergy between intellectuals and social movements critical security critical and the potential influence of both working in tandem

can be witnessed in the fate of common security.

particularly clearly As Thomas Risse–Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the

Initially defense
German security debate of the 1970s (Risse–Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). , mainstream

intellectuals dismissed the concept as idealistic However, notions of hopelessly ; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world.

common security were taken up by different intellectual communities a number of , including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western
European peace researchers, security specialists in the center–left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks”—members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52–54; Risse–Kappen

These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure

1994: 196–200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995).

exerted through social movements in order to gain acceptance for common security broader . In Germany, for example, “in response to

pressures even had an effect on

social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse–Kappen 1994: 207). Similar

the Reagan administration. the American

As Risse–Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard–liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was

peace movement revived the arms control process

and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse–Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright

intellectuals
1993: 90–110) Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least

have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior . The most dramatic impact of and certainly the most unexpected

alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union . Through various East–West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct
personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse–Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995
concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin, and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz
Unterseher (Risse–Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East–

West relations in order to facilitate much–needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led
to significant changes in force sizes and postures . These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control
over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common
defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security

The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can

before it (Claude 1984: 223–260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased.

survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the
adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for
(immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonstrates in relation to NATO
expansion). The example of common security indicates that critical intellectuals can be is highly instructive. First, it

politically engaged and play a role—a significant one in making the world better at that— a and safer place. Second, it points to potential future

it underlines the role of ideas in the evolution of society.

addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, also Although most
proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The

critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic
example of the peace movement suggests that

relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of
social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for
emancipation critical intellectuals “are always tied and remain a
(Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that to ought to n

part of an ongoing experience in society

organic : of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the po

In the
werless” (Said 1994: 84). specific case of critical security studies this means placing the experience of those men ,

and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security
at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’état the prism
through which problems are viewed. If “all theory is for someone and Here the project stands full–square within the critical theory tradition.

for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the
powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation . The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a
fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the

alternative types of theorizing

question remains at the conceptual level of how these —even if they are self–consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the

can become “a force for the direction of action.”

struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures— Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks,

dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political

Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how and economic

orders Consent is
, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323–377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, half man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. produced and

reproduced by a hegemony through which dominant ideas become widely

ruling that holds sway through civil society and ruling or

dispersed ideology becomes subconsciously accepted

. 2 In particular, Gramsci describes how becomes sedimented in society and takes on the status of common sense; it

and even regarded as beyond question Obviously there is nothing immutable about the . , for Gramsci,

values that permeate society; they can and do change ideas and institutions once . In the social realm, that were

seen as natural and beyond question such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen (i.e., commonsensical) in the West,

as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable . In Marx’s well–worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves

any successful
in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229–239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies,

attempt at social change requires a , incremental, molecular, struggle to break down the
progressive slow even

prevailing hegemony intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this

and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic

process by helping to undermine the “natural,” nature of the status quo This “commonsense,” internalized . in turn helps

create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic
blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. The Tasks of Critical Security Studies If the project of critical security

the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the
studies is conceived in terms of a war of position, then

enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse This may be .

accomplished by critique of the prevailing security regimes that is,

utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent ,

comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes When this is attempted . in the

the
security field, regimes are found to fail
prevailing structures andon their own terms Such an approach also grievously .

involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals whose views serve to , traditional or organic,

legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out
the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments
while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream
thinking about security behind its positivist facade. specific In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “

intellectuals” use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth
who ” (Foucault 1980: 132).
However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course,
traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is

whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without

that,

questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a critique of all that traditional thoroughgoing

security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition

The aim of security studies in attempting to undermine the

of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). critical orthodoxy is prevailing

ultimately educational by
. As Gramsci notes, “Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116–121). Thus,

criticizing hegemonic discourse

the the approach is and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities,

simultaneously playing a part in eroding the ruling bloc and contributing to a legitimacy of the historic the development of

counterhegemonic position. specialists pursuing this educational strategy

There are a number of avenues open to critical security in .

As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other

As teachers, we try to foster

possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant punditry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “

an emergent pedagogical counterculture .... As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11).

In the history of civilization there have been

Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues:

not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final
analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at
the root of the delusion The conceptual and the
. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes.

practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. through Rather, their

educational activities proponents of security studies should aim to provide support for those
, critical

social movements that promote social change By providing a critique of the prevailing
emancipatory .

order critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of
and legitimating alternative views,

social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean

peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their
efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers . For example, in his account of New
Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh
1989: 108; see also Cortright 1993: 5–13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious
difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the
movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the
Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of
emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naive to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural
constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49–62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability
that they are extremely risk–averse. It pays—in all senses—to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the
study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the

opportunities for critical thinking do

pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless,

exist, and become a “force for the direction of action the 1980s,
this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and .” The experience of

when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order

to challenge received wisdom playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race
, thus arguably ,
should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
1NR
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 Case
The risk of nuclear terror is one in 3 billion
Mueller 10 (John, professor of political science at Ohio State, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters, Issues in Science and Technology, Winter,
http://www.issues.org/26.2/mueller.html)

Politicians of all stripes preach to an anxious, appreciative, and very numerous choir when they, like President Obama,
proclaim atomic terrorism to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It is the problem that, according to Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, currently keeps every senior leader awake at night. This is hardly a new anxiety. In 1946, atomic bomb maker J. Robert
Oppenheimer ominously warned that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could blow up New
York. This was an early expression of a pattern of dramatic risk inflation that has persisted throughout the nuclear age. In
fact, although expanding fires and fallout might increase the effective destructive radius, the blast of a Hiroshima-size device would “blow
up” about 1% of the city’s area—a tragedy, of course, but not the same as one 100 times greater. In the early 1970s, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor
proclaimed the atomic terrorist problem to be “immediate,” explaining at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it
into a bomb.” At the time he thought it was already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then,” or “in another ten or fifteen years,
it will be too late.” Three decades after Taylor, we
continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their “easy” task . In contrast to
these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going
atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous
effort required is scarcely likely to be successful . The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to
manufacture an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a
daunting one, requiring that a considerable series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed theft of fissile material is
exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of guards, but because chase would be immediate.
A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a
host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or, either out of
guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is useless . Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist was accomplished,
the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it, “have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates.” If
terrorists were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would then probably have
to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and probably while being pursued by security forces.
Crossing international borders would be facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they appear
and are often under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators . If border personnel became suspicious of the
commodity being smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that would probably be
offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had been discovered. Once outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists
would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb and then to
populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, machinists, and administrators. The group
would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were
generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bomb-
building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and
certainly their careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an intense worldwide
dragnet operation. Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material. But Christoph
Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland‘s Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the
task “could
hardly be accomplished by a subnational group.” They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches
and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign. They
also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting , and that the technical requirements in several
fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument,
pointing out that uranium is “exceptionally difficult to machine ” whereas “plutonium is one of the most complex
metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed.“ Stressing the “daunting problems associated with
material purity, machining, and a host of other issues,” Younger concludes, “to think that a terrorist group, working in isolation with
an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies” could fabricate a bomb “is
farfetched at best.” Under the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a
year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrec

y. In addition, people in the area, including criminals, may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to
be locals. If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then
have to be transported to and smuggled into the relevant target country where it would have to be
received by collaborators who are at once totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, detonating,
and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives. The financial costs of this extensive and extended operation could easily become
monumental. There would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay
off. Some operatives might work for free out of utter dedication to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a
considerable array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to push the price for
cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals competent and capable enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see
boundless opportunities for extortion and psychologically equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a
terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is “not impossible.” But
although it may not be impossible to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could
surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small . Table 1 attempts to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome
under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them, would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be required to
go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly conclude that their prospects are daunting and
accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is possible to calculate the chances for success. Adopting probability estimates
that purposely and heavily bias the case in the terrorists’ favor—for example, assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of overcoming each of
the 20 obstacles—the chances that a concerted effort would be successful comes out to be less than one in a million. If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that
their chances at each barrier are one in three, thecumulative odds that they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in
well over three billion. Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even more
problematic. They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery abroad because
the risk would be high, even for a country led by extremists, that the bomb (and its source) would be discovered even before
delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would not approve, including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the
terrorist group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The terrorist group might also seek to steal or
illicitly purchase a “loose nuke“ somewhere. However, it seems probable that none exist. All governments have an intense
interest in controlling any weapons on their territory because of fears that they might become the primary target. Moreover, as
technology has developed, finished bombs have been out-fitted with devices that trigger a non-nuclear explosion that destroys
the bomb if it is tampered with. And there are other security techniques: Bombs can be kept disassembled with the
component parts stored in separate high-security vaults, and a process can be set up in which two people and multiple codes are required not
only to use the bomb but to store, maintain, and deploy it. As Younger points out, “only a few people in the world have the
knowledge to cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon.” There could be dangers in the chaos that would emerge if a nuclear state were to
utterly collapse; Pakistan is frequently cited in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under such conditions, nuclear
weapons would probably remain under heavy guard by people who know that a purloined bomb might be used in their own territory.
They would still have locks and, in the case of Pakistan, the weapons would be disassembled. The al Qaeda factor The
degree to which al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that seems to want to target the United States, has pursued or even has much
interest in a nuclear weapon may have been exaggerated . The 9/11 Commission stated that “al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make
nuclear weapons for at least ten years,” but the only substantial evidence it supplies comes from an episode that is supposed to have taken place about 1993 in Sudan,
when al Qaeda members may have sought to purchase some uranium that turned out to be bogus. Information about this supposed venture apparently comes entirely
from Jamal al Fadl, who defected from al Qaeda in 1996 after being caught stealing $110,000 from the organization. Others, including the man who allegedly
purchased the uranium, assert that although there were various other scams taking place at the time that may have served as grist for Fadl, the
uranium
episode never happened. As a key indication of al Qaeda’s desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of conversations in Afghanistan
in August 2001 that two Pakistani nuclear scientists reportedly had with Osama bin Laden and three other al Qaeda officials. Pakistani intelligence officers
characterize the discussions as “academic” in nature. It seems that the discussion was wide-ranging and rudimentary and that the scientists provided no material or
specific plans. Moreover, the scientists probably were
incapable of providing truly helpful information because their
expertise was not in bomb design but in the processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities
of a nonstate group. Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent planner of the 9/11 attacks, reportedly says that al Qaeda’s bomb efforts never
went beyond searching the Internet. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department of Energy examined
documents and other information that were uncovered by intelligence agencies and the media in Afghanistan. They uncovered no credible information that al Qaeda
had obtained fissile material or acquired a nuclear weapon. Moreover, they found no evidence of any radioactive material suitable for weapons. They did uncover,
however, a “nuclear-related” document discussing “openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some weapons-related issues.” Just a day or two before
al Qaeda was to flee from Afghanistan in 2001, bin Laden supposedly told a Pakistani journalist, “If the United States uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us,
we might respond with chemical and nuclear weapons. We possess these weapons as a deterrent.” Given the military pressure that they were then under and taking
into account the evidence of the primitive or more probably nonexistent nature of al Qaeda’s nuclear program, the reported assertions, although
unsettling, appear at best to be a desperate bluff . Bin Laden has made statements about nuclear weapons a few other times. Some of these
pronouncements can be seen to be threatening, but they are rather coy and indirect, indicating perhaps something of an interest, but not acknowledging a capability.
And as terrorism specialist Louise Richardson observes, “Statements
claiming a right to possess nuclear weapons have been
misinterpreted as expressing a determination to use them. This in turn has fed the exaggeration of the threat we face .” Norwegian
researcher Anne Stenersen concluded after an exhaustive study of available materials that, although “it is likely that al Qaeda central has considered the option of
using non-conventional weapons,” there is “little evidence that such ideas ever developed into actual plans , or that they were
given any kind of priority at the expense of more traditional types of terrorist attacks.” She also notes that information on an al Qaeda computer left behind in
Afghanistan in 2001 indicates that only $2,000 to $4,000
was earmarked for weapons of mass destruction research and that the
money was mainly for very crude work on chemical weapons. Today, the key portions of al Qaeda central may well total only a few hundred
people, apparently assisting the Taliban’s distinctly separate, far larger, and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan. Beyond this tiny band, there are thousands of
sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe. They mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare
each other to actually do something. Any “threat,” particularly to the West, appears, then, principally to derive from self-selected
people, often isolated from each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds. From time to time some of these people, or ones closer
to al Qaeda central, actually manage to do some harm. And occasionally, they may even be able to pull off something large, such as 9/11. But in most cases, their
capacities and schemes, or alleged schemes, seem to be far less dangerous than initial press reports vividly, even
hysterically, suggest. Most important for present purposes, however, is that any notion that al Qaeda has the capacity to
acquire nuclear weapons, even if it wanted to, looks farfetched in the extreme . It is also noteworthy that, although there
have been plenty of terrorist attacks in the world since 2001, all have relied on conventional destructive methods. For the most part, terrorists seem to be heeding the
advice found in a memo on an al Qaeda laptop seized in Pakistan in 2004: “Make use of that which is available … rather than waste valuable time becoming
despondent over that which is not within your reach.” In fact, history consistently demonstrates that terrorists prefer weapons
that they know and understand, not new, exotic ones. Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran and once its deputy intelligence officer for
transnational threats, warns, “We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have exaggerated . In fact, we must see
jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed, and miserable opponents that they are .” al Qaeda, he says, has only a handful of
individuals capable of planning, organizing, and leading a terrorist organization, and although the group has threatened attacks with nuclear weapons, “ its
capabilities are far inferior to its desires .” Policy alternatives The purpose here has not been to argue that policies designed to inconvenience the
atomic terrorist are necessarily unneeded or unwise. Rather, in contrast with the many who insist that atomic terrorism under current conditions is rather
likely— indeed, exceedingly likely—to come about, I have contended that it is hugely unlikely. However, it is important to consider not only the likelihood
that an event will take place, but also its consequences. Therefore, one must be concerned about catastrophic events even if their probability is small, and efforts to
reduce that likelihood even further may well be justified. At
some point, however, probabilities become so low that, even for catastrophic
events, it may make sense to ignore them or at least put them on the back burner; in short, the risk becomes acceptable . For
example, the British could at any time attack the United States with their submarine-launched missiles and kill millions of Americans, far more than even the most
monumentally gifted and lucky terrorist group. Yet the risk that this potential calamity might take place evokes little concern; essentially it is an acceptable risk.
Meanwhile, Russia, with whom the United States has a rather strained relationship, could at any time do vastly more damage with its nuclear weapons, a fully
imaginable calamity that is substantially ignored. In constructing what he calls “a case for fear,” Cass Sunstein, a scholar and current Obama administration official,
has pointed out that if there is a yearly probability of 1 in 100,000 that terrorists could launch a nuclear or massive biological attack, the risk would cumulate to 1 in
10,000 over 10 years and to 1 in 5,000 over 20. These odds, he suggests, are “not the most comforting.” Comfort, of course, lies in the viscera of those to be
comforted, and, as he suggests, many would probably have difficulty settling down with odds like that. But there
must be some point at which
the concerns even of these people would ease. Just perhaps it is at one of the levels suggested above: one in a million or one in three
billion per attempt.
Biological weapon attacks are too complex – even with large-scale funding, access to
information, and gene-editing tools – terrorists will choose not to pursue or will likely
fail.
Revill ’17 [Dr. James Revill, Research Fellow with the Harvard Sussex Program at SPRU, Past as
Prologue? The Risk of Adoption of Chemical and Biological Weapons by Non-State Actors in the EU,
European Journal of Risk Regulation, 8 (2017), pp. 626–642,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/6B824CDE0E25FD86AC3D0BD07822A743/S1867299X17000356a.pdf/div-class-title-
past-as-prologue-the-risk-of-adoption-of-chemical-and-biological-weapons-by-non-state-actors-in-the-
eu-div.pdf]

[t]he complexity of an
The second factor is “the perceived complexity of the innovation in terms of adoption and use”.40 This is important in the innovation literature, as Rogers remarked, “

innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is negatively related to its rate of adoption ”.41 Several scholars of terrorist
innovation have also highlighted the issue of complexity ;42 or, as Cragin et al have stated, “[h]ow simple or complex a technology appears affects perceptions of
how risky it will be to adopt.”43 In most cases terrorist groups appear to have largely opted for the simplest pathway

towards the achievement of their goals and the weapons used tend to be vernacular, functional devices
drawing on local and readily-available materials, rather than sophisticated, “baroque” technologies. This
is certainly the case with IEDs, the history of which is characterised largely by incremental innovations – although nevertheless frequently effective ones – with many means of delivery recycled from the past.44 Complexity can
therefore be seen as important in the adoption of technology by terrorists generally, but is perhaps particularly acute in the case of CBW technology. Some CBW can be relatively simple: “chlorine-augmented, vehicle-borne IEDs,”
as employed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) from 2006 to 2007 are not sophisticated weapons.45 Attacks on chemical production facilities, an apparent tactic of Serbian forces in the early to mid-1990s,46 employed relatively simple
technologies – specifically explosives – with toxicity a secondary by-product. Direct contamination of food,47 drink48 or healthcare products49 does not require particularly sophisticated technology for the purposes of delivery –
although may require some considerable skill to culture and scale-up a biological agent – and has been a common approach in European CBW incidents.50 Similarly, the contamination of water systems, something familiar to
Europe,51 can also be relatively easily attempted. However, in most cases such methods of dissemination have generated results that are far short of the “mass destruction” that CBW are associated with, although this does not

mass casualty attacks still

mean such a possibility can be ignored by those working on public health preparedness. Although some relatively simple approaches could cause significant harm,

require considerable expertise, something particularly acute in the context of biological weapons .52 The
most effective route to weaponising biology is arguably through the process of aerosolising agents, something recognised mid-way through
the last century as opening up the theoretical possibility of using biological weapons on a gigantic scale.53 However, realising such theoretical potential is difficult and

it took states decades to develop more predictable biological weapon s,54 and even then such weapons
were acutely vulnerable to environmental factors.

55 For non-state groups such complexity has proven a significant barrier to CBW development. By means of an example,
one of the best-resourced biological weapons programs, that of Aum Shinrikyo, failed variously because the
group acquired the wrong strain, contaminated fermenters and were faced with insurmountable
production and dissemination difficulties .56 There are of course exceptions, such as the 2001 anthrax
Letter Attacks in the US. However, if one accepts the conclusions of the FBI that this sophisticated attack with aerosolised anthrax
in the US postal system was perpetrated by a US biodefence researcher, Dr Bruce Ivins,57 it is an exception that proves

the rule. To circumvent the difficulties with aerosolisation, arguably one could use human-to-human transmissible
biological agents as part of a suicide bioterror operation. There are good reasons for concern over how crude suicide bioterrorists could employ such a tactic. However, the use of highly

contagious agents is also poorly predictable and would have to deal with social factors, such as the
“spatial contact process among individuals” , which can spell “out the difference between large-scale epidemics and abortive ones”.58 The counter to this
argument is the growing access to data and the changing human geography of the life sciences . Some 83% of
European households reportedly are online, effectively allowing access to what is a growing body of available data on

CBW, including so-called bioterrorist “recipes” and “blueprints ” that are available in both mainstream scientific as well as more subversive literatures
online. It is also clear that there is a changing human geography in European life sciences (for peaceful purposes), with the emergence of 30 DIY-bio groups located in Europe59 and some 80 European teams in the international

This is compounded by reports that groups such as Daesh have

Genetically Engineered Machines (IGEM) competition in 2016.60

deliberately sought to recruit foreign fighters “including some with degrees in physics, chemistry, and
computer science, who experts believe have the ability to manufacture lethal weapons from raw substances”.61 Whilst it would be unwise to ignore such developments, there is a need
for caution in looking at the extent to which new technologies and geographies will facilitate the
adoption of chemical and biological weapons by groups seeking to target European countries. First, data is not information, and
information is not knowledge, let alone the tacit knowledge required for CBW.62 In many cases a degree of
determination and dedication will be required merely to separate online fantasy from fact and identify
operationally useful information (of relevance to the European context) from nonsense (or information pertinent to contexts other than Europe). Second, with new technologies there is the
potential for such tools to enable some, but certainly not all, actors, and even then new technologies bring new challenges. CRISPR, gene editing

technology is currently seen as a particular source of promise and peril, which purportedly enables “even largely untrained people to
manipulate the very essence of life”.63 As much may be technically true, yet “untrained people” would nonetheless require
some guidance in identifying suitable areas of genetic structures to manipulate. Moreover, CRISPR would only
get aspiring weaponeers so far, with the process of culturing, scaling-up and weaponisation still
requiring considerable attention and interdisciplinary skills, typically generated through “large
interdisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, and technicians”,64 in order to be effective. Indeed, for all the
progress in science and technology, biological weapons are still not used, in part, because of the
complexity of such weapons; and the chemical weapons that are used today are largely the same as the chemical weapons of 100 years ago. As Robinson noted “It remains the case today that, in
the design of CBW, increasingly severe technological constraint sets in as the mass-destruction end of the spectrum is approached: the greater and more assured the area-

effectiveness sought for the weapon, the greater the practical difficulties of achieving it”.65