Impacts Toolbox

Impacts – SDI 2008 Accidental Launch................................................................1 Acid Rain..............................................................................1 Africa....................................................................................1 AIDS.....................................................................................1 Air Pollution.........................................................................1 Air Power..............................................................................1 Allied Prolif..........................................................................1 Asia.......................................................................................1 Balkans.................................................................................1 Biodiversity..........................................................................1 Biopower..............................................................................1 Bioweapons..........................................................................1 Bird Flu.................................................................................1 Central Asia/Caspian............................................................1 China-Taiwan........................................................................1 China Economy....................................................................1 Competitiveness...................................................................1 Counterbalancing..................................................................1 Culture..................................................................................1 Dehumanization....................................................................1 Democracy............................................................................1 Disease..................................................................................1 Economy...............................................................................1 Egypt.....................................................................................1 Endocrine Disruption............................................................1 Europe...................................................................................1 EU Economy........................................................................1 Food Prices...........................................................................1 Freedom Of Speech..............................................................1 Genocide...............................................................................1 Greece-Turkey......................................................................1 Hegemony.............................................................................1 Hunger..................................................................................1 India-Pakistan.......................................................................1 Indian Economy....................................................................1 Indonesian Economy............................................................1 Iran Strikes............................................................................1 Iraq........................................................................................1 Iraq Withdrawal....................................................................1 Israeli Disclosure..................................................................1 Japan Economy.....................................................................1 Japan Rearm.........................................................................1 Lebanon................................................................................1 Middle East...........................................................................1 Monoculture.........................................................................1 NATO....................................................................................1

North Korea..........................................................................2 Nuclear Meltdowns..............................................................2 Oceans..................................................................................2 Oil Peak................................................................................2 Overpopulation.....................................................................2 Ozone....................................................................................2 Pakistan Coup.......................................................................2 Patriarchy..............................................................................2 Pesticides..............................................................................2 Poverty..................................................................................2 Prolif Bad..............................................................................2 Prolif Good...........................................................................2 Protectionism........................................................................2 Racism..................................................................................2 Russia-China.........................................................................2 Russian Collapse..................................................................2 Russian Economy.................................................................2 Russian Resurgence..............................................................2 Secession..............................................................................2 Soft Power............................................................................2 Separation Of Powers...........................................................2 Space.....................................................................................2 Space Militarization..............................................................2 Terrorism..............................................................................2 Terrorism – Lashout..............................................................2 Trade.....................................................................................2 Tyranny.................................................................................2 UN Credibility......................................................................2 US-China..............................................................................2 US-Russia.............................................................................2 Warming...............................................................................2 Water Wars............................................................................2 WTO Credibility...................................................................2

Accidental Launch ( ) Accidental launch causes global escalation and nuclear war PR Newswire, 4-29-98 An 'accidental' nuclear attack would create a public health disaster of an unprecedented scale, according to more than 70 articles and speeches on the subject, cited by the authors and written by leading nuclear war experts, public health officials, international peace organizations, and legislators. Furthermore, retired General Lee Butler, Commander from 1991-1994 of all U.S. Strategic Forces under former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, has warned that from his experience in many "war games" it is plausible that such an attack could provoke a nuclear counterattack that could trigger full-scale nuclear war with billions of casualties worldwide. The authors describe the immediate effects of an " accidental" launch from a single Russian submarine that would kill at least six to eight million people in firestorms in eight major U.S. cities. With hospitals destroyed and medical personnel killed, and with major communications and transportation networks disrupted, the delivery of emergency care would be all but impossible, according to Forrow and his colleagues.

( ) An accidental launch would trigger early warning systems, causing retaliatory strikes and extinction within half an hour The American Prospect, 2/26/01 The bitter disputes over national missile defense (NMD) have obscured a related but dramatically more urgent issue of national security: the 4,800 nuclear warheads -- weapons with a combined destructive power nearly 100,000 times greater than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima -- currently on "hairtrigger" alert. Hair-trigger alert means this: The missiles carrying those warheads are armed and fueled at all times. Two thousand or so of these warheads are on the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) targeted by Russia at the United States; 1,800 are on the ICBMs targeted by the United States at Russia; and approximately 1,000 are on the submarine-based missiles targeted by the two nations at each other. These missiles would launch on receipt of three computer-delivered messages. Launch crews -on duty every second of every day -- are under orders to send the messages on receipt of a single computerdelivered command. In no more than two minutes, if all went according to plan, Russia or the United States could launch missiles at predetermined targets: Washington or New York; Moscow or St. Petersburg. The early-warning systems on which the launch crews rely would detect the other side's missiles within tens of seconds, causing the intended -- or accidental -- enemy to mount retaliatory strikes. "Within a half-hour, there could be a nuclear war that would extinguish all of us," explains Bruce Blair. "It would be, basically, a nuclear war by checklist, by rote."

Acid Rain Acid rain leads to forest ecosystem collapse Green Education.Com, No Date, “Impacts of Acid Rain”, JaretLK, http://www.greeneducation.org.hk/English/focus/acid_rain_eng.htm#ways Acid rain can affect every ecosystem, for example : Woodland ecology When acid precipitation falls on woodland, the soil within the woodland will become more acidic, its pH value may be as low as 3 to 4. Acidic soil will have a direct impaction soil organisms such as plants, animals and even bacteria. The growth of vegetation relies on soil nutrients and pH, plant growth may be inhibited when the soil pH is too high or too low, if the acidity of the soil is too high, death of vegetation may be the results. Although different vegetation has different toleration to soil pH, most of them can only survive within a narrow pH value. Therefore, if the acidity in the soil has changed, the diversity of vegetation will change relatively. Acid rain will also change the level of nutrients in the soil, as acidic water can dissolve or react with the minerals/nutrients. The dissolved minerals/nutrients will be lost through the runoff of water, leading to the lack of nutrients for plant growth, eventually this nutrient-deficient land will lead to desertification. Acid rain can have adverse impacts of plant tissues. The acid water will corrode and damage plant structure and as a result the malfunction of plant physiology, photosynthesis process cannot be carried out and the whole woodland ecology may eventually collapse. When the plants die, the soil cannot be consolidated and lead to soil erosion. Most of the landslide occurred was due to the loss of vegetation. The damage caused by acid rain is not only a single aspects, but many aspects.

Acid rain kills water ecosystems – we wont have any fish left Geen Education.Com, No Date, “Impacts of Acid Rain”, JaretLK, http://www.greeneducation.org.hk/English/focus/acid_rain_eng.htm#ways Ecology of Rivers and Lakes Water is a precious resource on Earth. Life would not be existed without water. 2/3 of Earth surface is covered by water, present mainly in oceans, lakes and rivers, and of two types: marine and freshwater. The impact of acid rain is not as significant in seawater than in freshwater. The volume of seawater is enormous and the top part of ocean water moves (due to tidal and wind). Therefore, when acid rain falls into seawater, it would be diluted. In addition, seawater contains vast quantities of alkaline substances (e.g. calcium carbonate from shells), which can react with acid rain to decrease its acidity. On the other hand when acid rain falls into the freshwater resources such as rivers and lakes, because these resources usually do not store huge volume of water, the impacts of acid rain are more significant, especially in lakes with still water. Acid water will store in lakes and accumulate every time of acid precipitation, eventually the acidity will be too high to kill most of the organisms in lake water. Although each aquatic specie can tolerate acid rain to an extent, lack of calcium carbonate shells and the small volume of water account for the high acidity in some highland lakes and cause death. Generally, when the pH of lake water is below 5.0, most of the organisms in lakes and rivers would be killed, severely damage the ecosystem. Associated impacts include: 1. The loss of nutrient-making bacteria due to high acidity will lead to the reduction of nutrients that are important in sustaining planktons. The decrease of food (planktons) will also lead to population decline of fishes, crustaceans and other organisms, thus lower the aquatic ecological value. 2. The acidity of water (hydrogen ions) will have a direct impact on the physiology of fish. Frys (young fish) become pre-mature which cause lower fertility. Besides, the tendency towards single sex within the population is believed to be caused by the alteration of hormones caused by acidic water. If fish population towards one sex, the reproduction rate will decrease and population will decline. 3. Functioning of fish bodies may be affected by acidic water. The interruption of ions exchange between internal and external bodies will lead to the imbalance of salts inside the fish bodies, adversely affecting fish and deaths as a result. For example, massacre occurred in Norway was caused by acid rain.

Africa ( ) African conflict goes nuclear Dr. Jeffrey Deutsch, founder of the Rabid Tiger Project, a political risk consulting and related research firm,

11-18-02, http://www.rabidtigers.com/rtn/newsletterv2n9.html The Rabid Tiger Project believes that a nuclear war is most likely to start in Africa. Civil wars in the Congo (the country formerly known as Zaire), Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and domestic instability in Zimbabwe, Sudan and other countries, as well as occasional brushfire and other wars (thanks in part to "national" borders that cut across tribal ones) turn into a really nasty stew. We've got all too many rabid tigers and potential rabid tigers, who are willing to push the button rather than risk being seen as wishy-washy in the face of a mortal threat and overthrown. Geopolitically speaking, Africa is open range. Very few countries in Africa are beholden to any particular power. South Africa is a major exception in this respect - not to mention in that she also probably already has the Bomb. Thus, outside powers can more easily find client states there than, say, in Europe where the political lines have long since been drawn, or Asia where many of the countries (China, India, Japan) are powers unto themselves and don't need any "help," thank you. Thus, an African war can attract outside involvement very quickly. Of course, a proxy war alone may not induce the Great Powers to fight each other. But an African nuclear strike can ignite a much broader conflagration, if the other powers are interested in a fight. Certainly, such a strike would in the first place have been facilitated by outside help - financial, scientific, engineering, etc. Africa is an ocean of troubled waters, and some people love to go fishing.

AIDS ( ) Unchecked AIDS results in extinction Robert Ornstein, University of California Medical Center, Paul Ehrlich, Center for Conservation Biology, New World New Mind, 1989, p.129 AIDS clearly has the potential for decimating the human population. In addition to its extreme virulence, the AIDS virus can be carried for many years without producing symptoms. For part or all of that period the carrier is infectious, and that makes the situation much worse. People carrying the virus can infect person after person, and no one need be the wiser. A prostitute infected with AIDS could stay in business for five years or more, killing thousands of people (her clients and their other contacts) without being aware she was doing it. Under present public health policies in many nations there is no way of ending the sequence. More frightening is the extreme mutability (the ability to change form) of the virus. Many different strains exist already, which, along with other properties of AIDS, may make the development of cheap, permanent immunization procedures quite difficult. Furthermore few drugs so far exist to combat viruses, and there is little reason to believe that a biochemical cure for AIDS will be found readily, even though substantial progress has been made in understanding how to design antiviral drugs. Among other things, the virus may be able to evolve resistance to drugs that are initially effective. Last, as more and more people are infected, strains

of the virus may evolve that are more readily transmittible than those already circulating in the population. That is a very real possibility that terrifies biologists who understand the evolutionary potential of viruses. It is even therefore conceivable that humanity will sooner or later have to deal with strains of AIDS that can be transmitted by the bites of arthropods (perhaps by the bites of mosquitos that were interrupted while feeding on someone carrying the virus). Worse yet, a variety of AIDS virus might evolve that can be transmitted by relatively casual, nonsexual physical contact or even by inhaling droplets sneezed into the air. The odds of it happening seem very small, but the consequences if it did occur would be, to say the least, daunting. With millions virtually certain to die in Africa, the possibility that the virus, if uncontrolled, could result in extremely high death rates in the developed countries should not be overlooked.

( ) AIDS causes extinction Mutuma Mathiu, Africa News, July 15, 2000, Every age has its killer. But Aids is without precedent. It is comparable only to the Black Death of the Middle Ages in the terror it evokes and the graves it fills. But unlike the plague, Aids does not come at a time of scientific innocence: It flies in the face of space exploration, the manipulation of genes and the mapping of the human genome. The Black Death - the plague, today easily cured by antibiotics and prevented by vaccines - killed a full 40 million Europeans, a quarter of the population of Europe, between 1347 and 1352. But it was a death that could be avoided by the simple expedient of changing addresses and whose vector could be seen and exterminated. With Aids, the vector is humanity itself, the nice person in the next seat in the bus. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Every human being who expresses the innate desire to preserve the human genetic pool through the natural mechanism of reproduction is potentially at risk. And whereas death by plague was a merciful five days of agony, HIV is not satisfied until years of stigma and excruciating torture have been wrought on its victim. The plague toll of tens of millions in

two decades was a veritable holocaust, but it will be nothing compared to the viral holocaust: So far, 18.8 million people are already dead; 43.3 million infected worldwide (24.5 million of them Africans) carry the seeds of their inevitable demise - unwilling participants in a March of the Damned. Last year alone, 2.8 million lives went down the drain, 85 per cent of them African; as a matter of fact, 6,000 Africans will die today. The daily toll in Kenya is 500. There has never been fought a war on these shores that was so wanton in its thirst for human blood. During the First World War, more than a million lives were lost at the Battle of the Somme alone, setting a trend that was to become fairly common, in which generals would use soldiers as cannon fodder; the lives of 10 million young men were sacrificed for a cause that was judged to be more worthwhile than the dreams - even the mere living out of a lifetime - of a generation. But there was proffered an explanation: It was the honour of bathing a battlefield with young blood, patriotism or simply racial pride. Aids, on the other hand, is a holocaust without even a lame or bigoted justification. It is simply a waste. It is death contracted not in the battlefield but in bedrooms and other venues of furtive intimacy. It is difficult to remember any time in history when the survival of the human race was so hopelessly in jeopardy.

Air Pollution ( ) Air pollution causes extinction David Driesen, Law Prof @ Syracuse, Fall/Spring 2003, Buffalo Environmental Law Journal, p ln Air pollution can make life unsustainable by harming the ecosystem upon which all life depends and harming the health of both future and present generations. The Rio Declaration articulates six key principles that are relevant to air pollution. These principles can also be understood as goals, because they describe a state of affairs [*27] that is worth achieving. Agenda 21, in turn, states a program of action for realizing those goals. Between them, they aid understanding of sustainable development's meaning for air quality. The first principle is that "human beings. . . are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature", because they are "at the center of concerns for sustainable development." n3 While the Rio Declaration refers to human health, its reference to life "in harmony with nature" also reflects a concern about the natural environment. n4 Since air pollution damages both human health and the environment, air quality implicates both of these concerns. n5

( ) Pollution threatens billions of people Roberts, Earth Policy Insitute, September 17, 2002(http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update17.htm) The World Health Organization reports that 3 million people now die each year from the effects of air pollution. This is three times the 1 million who die each year in automobile accidents. A study published in The Lancet in 2000 concluded that air pollution in France, Austria, and Switzerland is responsible for more than 40,000 deaths annually in those three countries. About half of these deaths can be traced to air pollution from vehicle emissions. In the United States, traffic fatalities total just over 40,000 per year, while air pollution claims 70,000 lives annually. U.S. air pollution deaths are equal to deaths from breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. This scourge of cities in industrial and developing countries alike threatens the health of billions of people.

Air Power ( ) Airpower is key to deterring multiple nuclear conflicts in Asia Ashley J. Tellis et al, Chung Min Lee, James Mulvenon, Courtney Purrington, and Michael D. Swaine, sources of conflict in the 21st century, availible via the rand website @ rand.org. chapter 3, 1998 The first key implication derived from the analysis of trends in Asia suggests that American air and space power will continue to remain critical for conventional and unconventional deterrence in Asia. This argument is justified by the fact that several sub-regions of the continent still harbor the potential for full-scale conventional war. This potential is most conspicuously on the Korean peninsula and to a lesser degree, in South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea. In some of these areas such as Korea and the Persian Gulf, the United States has clear treaty obligations and therefore has pre-planned the use of air power should contingencies arise. U.S. Air Force assets could also be called upon for operations in some of these other areas. In almost all these cases, US airpower would be at the forefront of an American politico-military response because (a) of the vast distances on the Asian continent; (b) the diverse range of operational platforms available to the U.S. Air Force, a capability unmatched by any other country or service, (c) the possible unavailability of naval assets in close proximity, particularly in the context of surprise contingencies; and (d) the heavy payload that can be carried by U.S. Air Force platforms. These platforms can exploit speed, reach, and high operating tempos to sustain continual operations until the political objectives are secured. The entire range of warfighting capability—fighters, bombers, electronic warfare (EW), suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), combat support platforms such as AWACS and J-STARS and tankers—are relevant in the Asia-Pacific region, because many of the regional contingencies will involve large, fairly modern, conventional forces, most of which are built around large land armies, as is the case in Korea, China-Taiwan, India-Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. In addition to conventional combat, the demands of unconventional deterrence will increasingly confront the U.S. Air Force in Asia. The Korean peninsula, China, and the Indian subcontinent are already arenas of WMD proliferation. While emergent nuclear capabilities continue to receive the most public attention, chemical and biological warfare threats will progressively become future problems. The delivery systems in the region are increasing in range and diversity. China already targets the continental United States with ballistic missiles. North Korea can threaten northeast Asia with existing Scud-class theater ballistic missiles. India will acquire the capability to produce ICBM-class delivery vehicles, and both China and India will acquire long-range cruise missiles during the time frames examined in this report. The second key implication derived from the analysis of trends in Asia suggests that air and space power will function as a vital rapid reaction force in a breaking crisis. Current guidance tasks the Air Force to prepare for two major regional conflicts that could break out in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean peninsula. In other areas of Asia, however, such as the Indian subcontinent, the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, and Myanmar, the United States has no treaty obligations requiring it to commit the use of its military forces. But as past experience has shown, American policymakers have regularly displayed the disconcerting habit of discovering strategic interests in parts of the world previously neglected after conflicts have already broken out. Mindful of this trend, it would behoove U.S. Air Force planners to prudently plan for regional contingencies in nontraditional areas of interest, because naval and air power will of necessity be the primary instruments constituting the American response. Such responses would be necessitated by three general classes of contingencies. The first involves the politico-military collapse of a key regional actor, as might occur in the case of North Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia, or Pakistan. The second involves acute politicalmilitary crises that have a potential for rapid escalation, as may occur in the Taiwan Strait, the Spratlys, the Indian subcontinent, or on the Korean peninsula. The third involves cases of prolonged domestic instability that may have either spillover or contagion effects, as in China, Indonesia, Myanmar, or North Korea.

Allied Prolif ( ) Allied proliferation causes nuclear conflict Marc Dean Millot, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation, The Washington Quarterly, Summer, 1994 The outcome of this refusal to face the emerging reality of regional nuclear adversaries is that the United States is not preparing seriously for the possibility of having to fight in a regional nuclear war. If it continues down this path, it will be unable to cope with the potential threat of nuclear aggression against its allies. If it cannot assure the security of its allies against this threat, the result is likely to be further proliferation among these allies, highly unstable regional military situations, a severe reduction of the United States' international influence, and a growing probability of regional nuclear wars involving U.S. forces. Proliferation by regional allies of the United States is not inevitable. If it first recognizes that the threat of regional nuclear war threatens its own survival in ways no less meaningful than the threat presented to its allies by the Soviets and then convinces its allies that it understands this fact, the United States can dissuade them from deciding to follow their regional adversaries down the nuclear path. If the United States takes these steps, it has some hope of steering its way safely through the uncertain times ahead. U.S. policy should embrace Aspin's analysis of the proliferation problem. It should proceed from the assumption that the United States will face several regional nuclear adversaries in the next decade, emphasize the need to reassure regional allies that the best counter to this threat lies in collective defense arrangements with the United States, and give regional nuclear conflict high priority in U.S. military planning. This approach would reduce the prospect of proliferation by regional allies of the United States, improve regional military stability, maintain U.S. influence, and reduce the chances of U.S. military forces being dragged into a regional nuclear conflict.

Asia ( ) Asian instability leads to nuclear war and destruction of the world. Michael May, Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford, Washington Quarterly, Summer 97 The unpalatable facts, to Europeans and North Americans, are that Asia has about half of the world's people, that it is growing faster than other parts of the world, and that, by mid-century, it will probably have more than half the population of the developed world and more than half of its money. Energy consumption, economic influence, and military power will be distributed in proportion. That is the rosy scenario. The dark scenario is that of a war that would, in all likelihood -- because nuclear weapons can be procured and deployed by any of these countries at a fraction of the cost of peaceful development --leave most of the civilized world devastated.

Balkans ( ) Balkan war goes nuclear Chicago Daily Herald, May 9, 1999 We hear the grim rationale for sending in ground troops "to salvage the credibility of the NATO Alliance." I don't want any American servicemen/women to die for the idea that once you have embarked on a disastrous course of action, you can only continue on ... that's nonsense. On a recent news program the Italian and German foreign ministers stated troop deployment is not acceptable as part of their national defense - the French representative waffled. Both France and Germany have large Muslim populations. The German official said the NATO Alliance weapons, planes, missiles are primarily American with minimum involvement of NATO allies. Let's not

forget that Russia has warned NATO countries that this action could culminate in a third world war. The war in the Balkans could easily become the flash point of world conflict resulting in nuclear war and incalculable self-destruction.

Instability risks conflict and escalation. Stratfor Online, Online Geopolitical Forecasting Group, 11/16/07, “Kosovo: The Fuse on the Balkan Powder Keg,” http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/kosovo_fuse_balkan_powder_keg MH Contagion effects of Balkan violence are well known; they were seen both in the early 20th century and in the 1990s, and the recent outbursts are following the same pattern. Since EU and NATO forces are present, there have been no large wars declared by the states themselves. But if the region does ignite, Western forces could face many problems. First, those forces are a mere shadow of what they were during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s — during which it took four years to get the region generally under control. European and U.S. forces are deployed only in the non-Serbian section of Bosnia-Herzegovina and within Kosovo, not throughout the region. Furthermore, NATO and the United States are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and trying to juggle threats larger than the Balkans — namely Iran and Russia. To put it plainly, the West is not paying much attention to the Balkans other than as a bargaining chip with other global players such as Russia. But with or without the world watching, the actors in the Balkans are ready to move.

Biodiversity ( ) Loss of biodiversity will lead to extinction – global ecosystems are reliant on each other Bruce E. Tonn, Urban Planning Prof @ Tennessee, November 2007, Futures v. 39, no. 9, “Futures Sustainability”, ln The first principle is the most important because earth-life is needed to support earth-life. Ecosystems are composed of countless species that are mutually dependent upon each other for nutrients directly as food or as by-products of earth-life (e.g., as carbon dioxide and oxygen). If the biodiversity of an ecosystem is substantially compromised, then the entire system could collapse due to destructive negative nutrient cycle feedback effects. If enough ecosystems collapse worldwide, then the cascading impact on global nutrient cycles could lead to catastrophic species extinction. Thus, to ensure the survival of earthlife into the distant future the earth's biodiversity must be protected.

( ) Loss of biodiversity will lead to extinction – it is the foundation of all life on earth Anthony Costello, Lancet, 7-12-2008, “Apocalypse now?” ln This is a good time for catastrophists. Will the credit crunch cause the collapse of the world's financial system? Will climate change from greenhouse gas emissions threaten human survival in the next century? Or, as this book suggests, is the real apocalypse happening now with a massive new extinction phase brought about by industrial damage to the world's ecosystem? Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth, while ecosystems provide materials, conditions, and processes that sustain all life on this planet. The collapse of biodiversity, thus, has immediate implications for our health and survival. Was Thomas Malthus right, but for the wrong reason? A 21st-century human population of 6-9 billion is exceeding not its food supply but its maximum eco-footprint. The links between biodiversity and human health are manifold and complex. First the good news. There is no serious threat to biodiversity in the microbial world. Microbes are found everywhere; the number of individual microbes on earth is thought to be as high as 4-6×1030, about one billion times more than the total number of stars in the universe. But the news for bigger beasts is not so good. Estimates of the number of species presently living on earth cluster around 10 million. So what is the current rate of extinction? From the marine fossil record the background rate was about one extinction for every million species each year. Recent extinctions of birds run at about one or a few per year, about 100 times the background rate. Extinction rates for amphibians, primates, and some gymnosperms are even higher. Many biologists believe we have already entered the sixth great extinction phase of life on earth, with a current extinction rate 10 000 times greater than prehuman levels. Why is this happening? Certainly early human beings were responsible for species losses on a large scale by hunting predator-naive land animals. But the past century has moved things up a gear, with habitat degradation and destruction, overharvesting, pollution, and global climate change causing extinctions in all types of organisms in habitats worldwide. And for every species that goes extinct, many others will follow.

Environmental destruction causes extinction Paul Warner, American University, Dept of International Politics and Foreign Policy, August, Politics and Life Sciences, 1994, p 177 Massive extinction of species is dangerous, then, because one cannot predict which species are expendable to the system as a whole. As Philip Hoose remarks, "Plants and animals cannot tell us what they mean to each other." One can never be sure which

species holds up fundamental biological relationships in the planetary ecosystem. And, because removing species is an irreversible act, it may be too late to save the system after the extinction of key plants or animals. According to the U.S. National Research Council, "The ramifications of an ecological change of this magnitude [vast extinction of species] are so far reaching that no one on earth will escape them." Trifling with the "lives" of species is

playing Russian roulette, with our collective future as the stakes.

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Biopower Biopower causes extinction Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, 2004, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, p. 41 Power is commonly associated with regimes of government and governance that regularly claim universal, metaphysical status for the rights and competences that comprise them; regimes whose very raison d’etre, in the form of state sovereignty and raison d’etat, for example, seek to limit and confine if not altogether rid us of politics. Sovereign power, a form of rule gone global, has also come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination and use it finds increasingly impossible to control because these have become integral to its propagation and survival; modes of destruction that put in question the very issue of planetary survival for the human as well as many other species. Despite the fashion of speaking about the demise of sovereignty, political thought and practice have to still struggle with terrains of power throughout which the legitimating narratives, iconography and capabilities of sovereign power remain amongst the most persistent, and powerful and threatening globally. As it has come to dominate our understanding of rule, so sovereign power has come to limit our imagination in relation to the possibility and to the promise of politics.

Bioweapons Bioweapons cause extinction John Steinbruner, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chair of the committee on international security and arms control of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Policy, December 22, 1997 That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents,

the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.

Bioweapons represent the single greatest risk of extinction Richard Ochs, BS in Natural Resource Management from Rutgers University, with honors, 2002 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS MUST BE IMMEDIATELY ABOLISHED, http://www.freefromterror.net/other_articles/abolish.html Of all the weapons of mass destruction, the genetically engineered biological weapons, many without a known cure or vaccine, are an extreme danger to the continued survival of life on earth. Any perceived military value or deterrence pales in comparison to the great risk these weapons pose just sitting in vials in laboratories. While a "nuclear winter," resulting from a massive exchange of nuclear weapons, could also kill off most of life on earth and severely compromise the health of future generations, they are easier to control. Biological weapons, on the other hand, can get out of control very easily, as the recent anthrax attacks has demonstrated. There is no way to guarantee the security of these doomsday weapons because very tiny amounts can be stolen or accidentally released and then grow or be grown to horrendous proportions. The Black Death of the Middle Ages would be small in comparison to the potential damage bioweapons could cause. Abolition of chemical weapons is less of a priority because, while they can also kill millions of people outright, their persistence in the environment would be less than nuclear or biological agents or more localized. Hence, chemical weapons would have a lesser effect on future generations of innocent people and the natural environment. Like the Holocaust, once a localized chemical extermination is over, it is over. With nuclear and biological weapons, the killing will probably never end. Radioactive elements last tens of thousands of years and will keep causing cancers virtually forever. Potentially worse than that, bio-engineered agents by the hundreds with no known cure could wreck even greater calamity on the human race than could persistent radiation. AIDS and ebola viruses are just a small example of recently emerging plagues with no known cure or vaccine. Can we imagine hundreds of such plagues? HUMAN EXTINCTION IS NOW POSSIBLE.

Bird Flu Bird flu outbreak kills billions Satish Chandra, the Deputy National Security Advisor of India – Center for Strategic Decision Research – Global Security: A broader Concept for the 21st Century -- May 7th 2004 http://www.csdr.org/2004book/chandra.htm This scenario, as frightening as it is, pales in comparison with what could overtake us by 2007 if the highly pathogenic form of bird flu “H5N1” becomes transmittable human to human; all it would take for this to happen is a simple gene shift in the bird flu virus, which could happen any day. In a globalized world linked by rapid air travel, the disease would spread like a raging forest fire. If it did, it would overwhelm our public health system, cripple our economies, and wipe out a billion people within the space of a few months—a 60 percent mortality rate is estimated.

An avian flu pandemic would destroy the global economy Kansas City Star, “Avian flu outbreak would threaten economic vitality of U.S.,” Thu, Mar. 22, 2007, by David Goldstein. http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/politics/16956294.htm WASHINGTON - In addition to sickening 90 million Americans - 2 million mortally - a pandemic flu outbreak could lay the economy flat as well, a new study says. The Kansas economy would take a $6 billion hit, Missouri's twice that much. "Everywhere will be ground zero," said Merideth Parrish, a public health outreach coordinator for the Kansas City Health Department, which is trying to get local businesses to look ahead to the possibilities. "Everybody will be experiencing shortages, absenteeism, supply and demand disruptions universally at one time. The effects will trickle down. I don't think business had a big enough grasp of the severity of the impact." The Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit health advocacy group, foresees in its report Thursday a nearly $700 billion economic blow if businesses were closed or forced to operate with minimal staff. The study said the U.S. gross domestic product valued at $12.4 trillion in 2005 - could drop by 4 percent to 6 percent. "A pandemic poses a serious threat to our global economy," said Jeffrey Levi, the group's executive director. Concerns continue to simmer about avian flu, which has resulted in 169 deaths in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and wiped out millions of birds. So far, scientists have not found evidence that the H5N1 virus has mutated to allow human-to-human transmission, although some cases may have occurred. So far, no avian flu vaccine is widely available. The study was based on several public and private analyses and used the 1918 influenza outbreak as a model. The study said the pandemic could extend over 18 months, with several waves lasting from six to eight weeks. Richard Morrissey of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said large corporations, such as Sprint Nextel and Raytheon Aircraft, are fairly far along in their preparedness. "The real difficult impact is on the smallest businesses, where you've got a few employees," he said. "When you have a couple out, how do you continue to operate? We don't have a good answer for those kinds of problems." The study ranked potential losses to 20 top industries. Hotel and food services would suffer most - $68 million followed by transportation and warehousing, $61 million. The Congressional Budget Office said in its own analysis that entertainment and tourism industries could see business plummet by 80 percent over three months in a pandemic. States like California, Hawaii, Florida, and Nevada, could be in for an especially rough ride.

Nothing will mitigate the impact; millions will die in the case of a bird flu impact. ABC International, News Service, 6-22-2008, “The world said to be unprepared for bird flu pandemic,” SS. http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200806/s2281951.htm?tab=asia America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that the world is unprepared for a bird flu pandemic. Director, Julie Gerberding says there's no vaccine that will provide universal protection, there are big gaps in surveillance in some countries and there's no control over the virus in wild animals. Speaking in Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur during a conference on diseases, she says it's imperative every nation shares information because the world can't afford to have the virus move into humans, undetected and unreported. Experts says the H5-N1 bird flu virus could trigger the next pandemic and kill millions of people if it becomes easily transmissible among humans. Indonesia has the highest human casualties from the disease, it's infected 135 people and killed 110.

Central Asia/Caspian Central Asian war escalates Stephen Blank, MacArthur Professor of Research at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, Jane’s Intelligence Review, 5-1-98 Many of the conditions for conventional war or protracted ethnic conflict in which third parties intervene are present in the Transcaucasus. For example, many Third World conflicts generated by local structural factors have a great potential for unintended escalation. Big powers often feel obliged to rescue their lesser proteges and proxies. One or another big power may fail to grasp the other side's stakes, since interests here are not as clear as in Europe. Hence commitments involving the use of nuclear weapons to prevent a client's defeat are not well established or clear as in Europe. Clarity about the nature of the threat could prevent the kind of rapid and almost uncontrolled escalation we saw in 1993 when Turkish noises about intervening on behalf of Azerbaijan led Russian leaders to threaten a nuclear war in that case. Precisely because Turkey is a NATO ally but probably could not prevail in a long war against Russia or if it could, would trigger a potential nuclear blow (not a small possibility given the erratic nature of Russia's declared nuclear strategies) - the danger of major war is higher here than almost everywhere else.

China-Taiwan A war over Taiwan would involve the use of nuclear weapons Rex Li, Senior Lecturer @ Liverpool John Moores University. Editor: Suisheng Zhao, Professor of US-China studies @ University of Denver. 2004. Chinese Foreign Policy. Pragmatism and Strategic Behavior. Pg. 40-41 Not surprisingly, America’s continued support for Taipei is seen as a means of obstructing the PRC from achieving reunification with Taiwan. Beijing’s suspicion of U.S. intentions heightened when China was depicted as America’s “strategic competitor” by some foreign policy advisors of the George W. Bush administration.161 In April 2001, President Bush said in public that the United States would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend itself ?‘ In the meantime, he approved the sale of a massive arms package to Taipei that would enhance Taiwan’s capability to break potential Chinese blockades. Despite the need to secure Beijing’s support for its international campaign against terrorism,

Washington has not abandoned its commitments to Taiwan. If anything, it has developed closer defense ties with the Taiwanese military and allowed senior Taiwanese leaders and officials to visit the United States. A leaked Pentagon report has allegedly suggested that nuclear weapons could be used against China in the event of a conflict across the Taiwan Strait.162 It is clear that on a variety of strategic, political, and economic issues, the perceptions of Chinese and American policy-makers differ profoundly.’63 While the events of September 11 and the “war on terror” may have provided a new opportunity for U.S.China cooperation, the expansion of America’s antiterrorist networks in Central, South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia has exacerbated Chinese fear of a strategic encirclement of China. Chinese leaders and elites are convinced that the Bush administration is seeking to maintain America’s unipolar position in the global system through the development of a National Missile Defense system and a Theater Missile Defense system in Asia as well as other unilateral actions.

Cross-strait war causes extinction Straits Times, 6-25-2000, p ln THE DOOMSDAY SCENARIO THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -- horror of horrors -- raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end

there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -- truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear

there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability,

A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. MajorGeneral Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that

we would see the destruction of civilisation. There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear Armaggedon over Taiwan might seem inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else. should that come to pass,

China invasion of Taiwan leads to nuclear war between China and the US Alexandra Harney and Demetri Sevastopulo and Edward Alden, July 14 2005, “Top Chinese general warns US over attack”, JaretLK, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/28cfe55a-f4a7-11d9-9dd1-00000e2511c8.html China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the US if it is attacked by Washington during a confrontation over Taiwan, a Chinese general said on Thursday. “If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” said General Zhu Chenghu. “If the Americans are determined to interfere [then] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University. “We . . . will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds . . . of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.” Gen Zhu is a self-acknowledged “hawk” who has warned that China could strike the US with long-range missiles. But his threat to use nuclear weapons in a conflict over Taiwan is the most specific by a senior Chinese official in nearly a decade.

China Economy Chinese economic decline causes war with the US Dr. Thomas M. Kane teaches security studies at the University of Hull, UK and Dr. Lawrence W. Serewicz recently received his Ph.D. in politics from the University of Hull, UK, Fall 2001, Parameters Despite China's problems with its food supply, the Chinese do not appear to be in danger of widespread starvation. Nevertheless, one cannot rule out the prospect entirely, especially if the earth's climate actually is getting warmer. The consequences of general famine in a country with over a billion people clearly would be catastrophic. The effects of oil shortages and industrial stagnation would be less lurid, but economic collapse would endanger China's political stability whether that collapse came with a bang or a whimper. PRC society has become dangerously fractured. As the coastal cities grow richer and more cosmopolitan while the rural inland provinces grow poorer, the political interests of the two regions become ever less compatible. Increasing the prospects for division yet further, Deng Xiaoping's administrative reforms have strengthened regional potentates at the expense of central authority. As Kent Calder observes, In part, this change [erosion of power at the center] is a conscious devolution, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1991 to outflank conservative opponents of economic reforms in Beijing nomenclature. But devolution has fed on itself, spurred by the natural desire of local authorities in the affluent and increasingly powerful coastal provinces to appropriate more and more of the fruits of growth to themselves alone. [49] Other social and economic developments deepen the rifts in Chinese society. The one-child policy, for instance, is disrupting traditional family life, with unknowable consequences for Chinese mores and social cohesion. [50] As families resort to abortion or infanticide to ensure that their one child is a son, the population may come to include an unprecedented preponderance of young, single men. If common gender prejudices have any basis in fact, these males are unlikely to be a source of social stability. Under these circumstances, China is vulnerable to unrest of many kinds. Unemployment or severe hardship, not to mention actual starvation, could easily trigger popular uprisings. Provincial leaders might be tempted to secede, perhaps openly or perhaps by quietly ceasing to obey Beijing's directives. China's leaders, in turn, might adopt drastic measures to forestall such developments. If faced with internal strife, supporters of China's existing regime may return to a more overt form of communist dictatorship. The PRC has, after all, oscillated between experimentation and orthodoxy continually throughout its existence. Spectacular examples include Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign and the return to conventional MarxismLeninism after the leftist experiments of the Cultural Revolution, but the process continued throughout the 1980s, when the Chinese referred to it as the "fang-shou cycle." (Fang means to loosen one's grip; shou means to tighten it.) [51] If order broke down, the Chinese would not be the only people to suffer. Civil unrest in the PRC would disrupt trade relationships, send refugees

flowing across borders, and force outside powers to consider intervention. If different countries chose to intervene on different sides, China's struggle could lead to major war. In a less apocalyptic but still grim scenario, China's government might try to ward off its demise by attacking adjacent countries.

Competitiveness US competitiveness is key to hegemony Adam Segal, Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Practical Engagement: Drawing a Fine Line for U.S.-China Trade,” The Washington Quarterly 2004 Summer The brevity of the list of technologies the United States should try and control is the product of two processes that have occurred over the last 10 years: the increasing importance of commercial producers in R&D and the globalization of technological innovation. Unlike during the Cold War, government spending and procurement no longer play a dominant role in commercial R&D, especially in IT sectors. In the 1970s, the major semiconductor manufacturers were essentially government defense contractors; the Pentagon was the source of almost 50 percent of the funding for semiconductor R&D from the 1950s to the 1970s. n29 In 2002, according to David Rose, director of export, import, and information security affairs at Intel Corporation, all government procurement (including Defense Department contracts) accounted for less than 1 percent of U.S. semiconductor sales, and that number is declining. n30 With the diminishing importance of

government funding, private firms play a greater role in maintaining the United States' national security. Military capabilities are closely tied to the innovative capabilities of commercial producers. According to a 1999 Defense Science Board Task Force on Globalization and Security, the Defense Department relies "increasingly on the U.S. commercial advanced technology sector to push the technological envelope and enable the [department] to 'run faster' than its competitors." n31

Continued innovation and technological dominance is key to heg Zalmay Khalilzad, RAND, “Losing the Moment?” The Washington Quarterly 1995 U.S. superiority in new weapons and their use would be critical. U.S. planners should therefore give higher priority to research on new technologies, new concepts of operation, and changes in organization, with the aim of U.S. dominance in the military technical revolution that may be emerging. They should also focus on how to project U.S. systems and interests against weapons based on new technologies. The Persian Gulf War gave a glimpse of the likely future. The character of warfare will change because of advances in military technology, where the United States has the lead, and in corresponding concepts of operation and organizational structure. The challenge is to sustain this lead in the face of the complacency that the current U.S. lead in military power is likely to engender. Those who are seeking to be rivals to the United States are likely to be very motivated to explore new technologies and how to use them against it. A determined nation making the right choices, even though it possessed a much smaller economy, could pose an enormous challenge by exploiting breakthroughs that made more traditional U.S. military methods less effective by comparison. For example, Germany, by making the right technical choices and adopting innovative concepts for their use in the 1920s and 1930s, was able to make a serious bid for world domination. At the same time, Japan, with a relatively small GNP compared to the other major powers, especially the United States, was at the forefront of the development of naval aviation and aircraft carriers. These examples indicate that a major innovation in warfare provides ambitious powers an opportunity to become dominant or near-dominant powers. U.S. domination of the emerging military-technical revolution, combined with the maintenance of a force of adequate size, can help to discourage the rise of a rival power by making potential rivals believe that catching up with the United States is a hopeless proposition and that if they try they will suffer the same fate as the former Soviet Union.

Counterbalancing Rapid changes in the balance of power will cause extinction Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Gov’t at Harvard, Bound to Lead 1990, p.17 Perceptions of change in the relative power of nations are of critical importance to understanding the relationship between decline and war. One of the oldest generalizations about international politics attributes the onset of major wars to shifts in power among the leading nations. Thus Thucydides accounted for the onset of the Peloponnesian War which destroyed the power of ancient Athens. The history of the interstate system since 1500 is punctuated by severe wars in which one country struggled to surpass another as the leading state. If as Robert Gilpin argues, international politics has not changed fundamentally over the millennia,” the implications for the future are bleak. And if fears about shifting power precipitate a major war in a world with 50,000 nuclear weapons, history as we know it may end.

Culture Cultural survival is key to human survival Maivan Clech Lam, Visiting Associate Professor at American University Washington College of Law, 2000, At The Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination, p. 205-206 Nevertheless, as anthropologists know, ethnicity is both an enabling and an inescapable condition of human existence. It is a collective system of meaning that generates social energy which can be put to constructive and destructive uses equally. Stavenhagen writes: Cultures are complex patterns of social relationships, material objects, and spiritual values that give meaning and identity to community life and are a resource for solving the problems of everyday life. That some very ugly campaigns in modern history, usually unleashed by the destructive economic and military policies of the world’s powerful states, have tapped, frighteningly successfully, into ethnic energy is undeniable. But it is just as undeniable that knowledge—of the universe, of a specific part of it, of workable social relationships, of human nature—that is crucial to the project of human survival remains separately encoded in the distinctive cultures of ethnic groups. No human community or ethnic group can construct an informed and meaningful future if it is cut off from its cultural past. And alienation from meaning, as much as exploited meaning, can lead to violence.

Dehumanization ( ) Dehumanization makes all impacts of nuclear war, genocide, and environmental destruction inevitable David Berube, professor of speech communication, June/July 1997, Nanotechnology Magazine, http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/berube/prolong.htm Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.

Democracy Democracy solves war and extinction Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, October 1995, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990’s,” http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/dia95_01.html, accessed on 12/11/99 OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.

Disease Unchecked disease causes human extinction South China Morning Post, 1-4-1996 (Dr. Ben Abraham= “called "one of the 100 greatest minds in history" by super-IQ society Mensa” and owner of “Toronto-based biotechnology company, Structured Biologicals Inc” according to same article) Despite the importance of the discovery of the "facilitating" cell, it is not what Dr Ben-Abraham wants to talk about. There is a much more pressing medical crisis at hand - one he believes the world must be alerted to: the possibility of a virus deadlier than HIV. If this makes Dr Ben-Abraham sound like a prophet of doom, then he makes no apology for it. AIDS, the Ebola outbreak which killed more than 100 people in Africa last year, the flu epidemic that has now affected 200,000 in the former Soviet Union - they are all, according to Dr Ben-Abraham, the "tip of the iceberg". Two decades of intensive study and research in the field of virology have convinced him of one thing: in place of natural and man-made

humanity could face extinction because of a single virus, deadlier than HIV. "An airborne virus is a lively, complex and dangerous organism," he said. "It can come from a rare animal or from anywhere and can mutate constantly. If there is no cure, it affects one person and then there is a chain reaction and it is unstoppable. It is a tragedy waiting to happen." That may sound like a far-fetched plot for a Hollywood film, but Dr Ben -Abraham said history has already proven his theory. Fifteen years ago, few could have predicted the impact of AIDS on the world. Ebola has had sporadic outbreaks disasters or nuclear warfare,

over the past 20 years and the only way the deadly virus - which turns internal organs into liquid - could be contained was because it was killed before it had a chance to spread. Imagine, he says, if it was closer to home: an outbreak of that scale in London, New York or Hong Kong. It could happen anytime in the next 20 years - theoretically, it could happen tomorrow. The shock of the AIDS epidemic has prompted virus experts to admit "that something new is indeed happening and that the threat of a deadly viral outbreak is imminent", said Joshua Lederberg of the Rockefeller University in New York, at a recent conference. He added that the problem was "very serious and is getting worse". Dr Ben-Abraham said:

Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn how to mutate and evade the immune system." He cites the 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreak as an example of "Nature isn't benign. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary programme.

how viruses have outsmarted human intelligence. And as new "mega-cities" are being developed in the Third World and rainforests are destroyed, disease-carrying animals and insects are forced into areas of human habitation. "This raises the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious viruses would, for the first time, infect humanity at a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race," he said.

Diseases cause human extinction Frank Ryan, M.D., 1997, virus X, p. 366 How might the human race appear to such an aggressively emerging virus? That teeming, globally intrusive species, with its transcontinental air travel, massively congested cities, sexual promiscuity, and in the less affluent regions — where the virus is most likely to first emerge — a vulnerable lack of hygiene with regard to food and water supplies and hospitality to biting insects' The virus is best seen, in John Hollands excellent analogy, as a swarm of competing mutations, with each individual strain subjected to furious forces of natural selection for the strain, or strains, most likely to amplify and evolve in the new ecological habitat.3 With such a promising new opportunity in the invaded species, natural selection must eventually come to dominate viral behavior. In time the dynamics of infection will select for a more resistant human population. Such a coevolution takes rather longer in "human" time — too long, given the ease of spread within the global village. A rapidly lethal and quickly spreading virus simply would not have time to switch from

aggression to coevolution. And there lies the danger. Joshua Lederbergs prediction can now be seen to be an altogether logical one. Pandemics are inevitable. Our incredibly rapid human evolution, our overwhelming global needs, the advances of our complex industrial society, all have moved the natural goalposts. The advance of society, the very science of change, has greatly augmented the potential for the emergence of a pandemic strain. It is hardly surprising that Avrion Mitchison, scientific director of Deutsches Rheuma Forschungszentrum in Berlin, asks the question: "Will we survive!” We have invaded every biome on earth and we continue to destroy other species so very rapidly that one eminent scientist foresees the day when no life exists on earth apart from the human monoculture and the small volume of species useful to it. An increasing multitude of disturbed viral-host symbiotic cycles are provoked into self-protective counterattacks. This is a dangerous situation. And

begs the most frightening question of all: could such a pandemic virus cause the extinction of the human species? we have seen in the previous chapter how ill-prepared the world is to cope with it. It

Disease causes human extinction – mishandling proves John Crown, consultant oncologist, 4-20-2008, “We’re the clear losers in the latest round of germ warfare”, NM, Lexis Viral diseases range from trivial colds to potential causes of human extinction. Unlike bacteria, it is harder to develop drugs which target viruses. There have been advances, spectacular in the case of HIV/Aids, a disease once uniformly fatal within a few years which is now compatible with long life. The inappropriate treatment of common benign viral illnesses (e.g. colds) with antibiotics is a major cause of the emergence of MRSA and other resistant bacteria. Doctors who allow themselves to be browbeaten into the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics are hastening the day when they will have to tell their infected patients "there is nothing I can do for you". Our hospital infections are contributed to by bureaucratic and administrative neglect. Old, dirty, overcrowded and understaffed wards are a leading cause.

Economy Economic decline causes extinction Lt. Col, Tom Bearden, PhD Nuclear Engineering, April 25, 2000, http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/042500%20-%20modified.htm Just prior to the terrible collapse of the World economy, with the crumbling well underway and rising, it is inevitable that some of the [wmd] weapons of mass destruction will be used by one or more nations on others. An interesting result then---as all the old strategic studies used to show---is that everyone will fire everything as fast as possible against their perceived enemies. The reason is simple: When the mass destruction weapons are unleashed at all, the only chance a nation has to survive is to desperately try to destroy its perceived enemies before they destroy it. So there will erupt a spasmodic unleashing of the long range missiles,

nuclear arsenals, and biological warfare arsenals of the nations as they feel the economic collapse, poverty, death, misery, etc. a bit earlier. The ensuing holocaust is certain to immediately draw in the major nations also, and literally a hell on earth will result. In short, we will get the great Armageddon we have been fearing since the advent of the nuclear genie. Right now, my personal estimate is that we have about a 99% chance of that scenario or some modified version of it, resulting.

Decline in the economy causes war Walter Russell Mead, contributing editor to Opinion and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1998, p. M1 Even with stock markets tottering around the world, the president and the Congress seem determined to spend the next six months arguing about dress stains. Too bad. The United States and the world are facing what could grow into the greatest threat to world peace in 60 years. Forget suicide car bombers and Afghan fanatics. It's the financial markets, not the

Think about the mother of all global meltdowns: the Great Depression that started in 1929. U.S. stocks began to collapse in October, staged a rally, then the market headed south big time. At the bottom, the Dow terrorist training camps that pose the biggest immediate threat to world peace. How can this be?

Jones industrial average had lost 90% of its value. Wages plummeted, thousands of banks and brokerages went bankrupt, millions of people lost their jobs. There were similar horror

the biggest impact of the Depression on the United States--and on world history--wasn't money. It was blood: World War II, to be exact. The Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, undermined the ability of moderates to oppose stories worldwide. But

Joseph Stalin's power in Russia, and convinced the Japanese military that the country had no choice but to build an Asian empire, even if that meant war with the United States and

Let the world economy crash far enough, and the rules change. We stop playing "The Price is Right" and start up a new round of "Saving Private Ryan." Britain. That's the thing about depressions. They aren't just bad for your 401(k).

Recession would cause wars worldwide Bernardo V. Lopez, BusinessWorld, September 10, 1998 What would it be like if global recession becomes full bloom? The results will be catastrophic. Certainly, global recession will spawn wars of all kinds. Ethnic wars can easily escalate in the grapple for dwindling food stocks as in India-Pakistan-Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Indonesia. Regional conflicts in key flashpoints can easily erupt such as in the Middle East, Korea, and Taiwan. In the Philippines, as in some Latin American countries, splintered insurgency forces may take advantage of the economic drought to regroup and reemerge in the countryside.

. Famine can be triggered in key Third World nations with India, North Korea, Ethiopia and other African countries as first candidates. Food riots and the breakdown of law and order are possibilities. Unemployment worldwide will be in the billions

Lopez continues Unemployment in the US will be the hardest to cope with since it may have very little capability for subsistence economy and its agrarian base is automated and controlled by a few. The riots and looting of stores in New York City in the late '70s because of a state-wide brownout hint of the type of anarchy in the cities. Such looting in this most affluent nation is not impossible. The weapons industry may also grow rapidly because of the ensuing wars. Arms escalation will have primacy over food production if wars escalate. The US will depend increasingly on weapons exports to nurse its economy back to health. This will further induce wars and conflicts which will aggravate US recession rather than solve it. The

US may depend more and more on the use of force and its superiority to get its ways internationally. The public will rebel against local monopolies. Anarchy and boycotts will be their primary weapons against cartels especially on agricultural products such as rice and vegetables, which

. Global recession will test the limits of human cooperation and sharing in the name of survival. Grants and aids will decrease. Rescues and international funding for advocacy NGOs will disappear rapidly. Coupled with disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climatic aberrations are presently in the hands of a few in most Third World nations

like the El Nino, global recession will degrade a step further.

Economic collapse leads to war (this evidence is gender paraphrased) Norman Bailey, Senior director of International Economic Affairs, The World and I, 1990, p. 33-34 The thirties, after all, began three months after the inception of the Great Depression arid ended four months after the start of World War II. This was not a coincidence.

Tens of millions were killed and maimed in the Second World War. If another historical credit liquidation cycle is allowed to take place in the usual chaotic fashion the chances of another global armed conflict will be greatly increased—this time not only would hundreds of millions (rather than tens of millions) be killed or wounded, but the very hopes and the future of [hu]mankind.

Egypt Egypt coup causes nuclear war St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 19, 1992, Pg. 2C Were its government to fall in a coup and the National Democratic Party deposed after 40 years of oneparty rule, the Middle East would tremble in a way not felt since the fall of the shah of Iran. Egypt's treaty with Israel would be swept aside, and a brutal, possibly nuclear war could be the outcome. The Middle East would be thrown into great upheaval, as states, rulers and people absorb the shocks and react accordingly. Fundamentalists in moderate Arab countries such as Jordan would be inspired to revolt too. The impact would be devastating for stability in the short and long run.

Egyptian coup would cause a Brotherhood takeover and war Shai D. Bronshtein, March 11, 2008, a Crimson editorial editor, A Stable Egypt, Harvard Crimson Egypt, with a population of roughly 76 million individuals, is the most populous nation in the Arab world and a major player in Middle Eastern politics. It has significant clout in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and last year also attempted to serve as an intermediary between Israel and Hezbollah. While it is certainly not a liberal, democratic state, Egypt largely embraces secularism, pragmatism, and the West. Now that Iraq is not a major power player, a secular and friendly nation such as Egypt is necessary for maintaining the balance of power and checking Iran. If Egypt were to be led by radicals, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who espouse violence and want to implement their radical version of Islamic law—even against civilians—this balance would be disrupted and the United States and the rest of the world would face a very different, far more hostile Middle

East. Such a transformation would likely destablize and endanger Israel and other American allies. The possibility of such a radical transformation is very real. Egypt will soon reach an important crossroads regarding fundamentalism. Current president Hosni Mubarak turns 80 this year, and there is speculation that he will soon step down. In 2005, the Egyptian government passed a referendum that allowed for the popular election of a new leader after this happens. His son, Gamal Mubarak, seems a likely candidate for the popular election, but he is strongly opposed by many fundamentalists for his secularism. The Mubaraks have also been harshly criticized for attempting to install a dynasty in Egypt, passing on power as a familial inheritance. Despite this criticism, Gamal Mubarak should take the reigns once his father leaves in order to ensure that Egypt remains a secular and stable country, if not a true democracy, that is peaceful and friendly to the west. Gamal Mubarak is by no means perfect. He has been accused of receiving the power and authority he wields in Egypt from his father, rather than winning them by his own merit and leadership. As a leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP), the younger Mubarak is also a major political player within his own party. Although this politico claims to not want the presidency, he recently met with President Bush in what many see as a “seal of approval from Washington.” Whether or not Gamal Mubarak deserves the presidency, he has both familial, political, and foreign backing, and is thus well-positioned to transition into power. Although President Hosni Mubarak does enjoy general support, the strong, outlawed Muslim Brotherhood poses a serious threat if an open election were to be held. Members of the Brotherhood have run as independents on the platform that “Islam is the Solution.” While such an assertion is not troubling in itself, as Islam does indeed offer many positive moral lessons, many of the tools of the organization are troubling. The Brotherhood claims to have divorced itself from violence, but reporting by journalists for Newsweek and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) shows that despite their “peaceful coexistence” rhetoric, the Brotherhood “supports suicide bombings in Israel and offers inspiration for many violent jihadi groups.” Dennis Ross, former President Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy, has offered additional criticism stating that despite the Brotherhood’s “assertion that it wants to engage in the political process in Egypt, the movement supports the use of violence in other areas.” The clear consensus seems to be that the reality of the Brotherhood’s interests are not necessarily peace and stability as they claim, but rather implementation of strict Islamic law and opposition to the West. Additionally, a truly open election would be bad for Egypt as a nation. If Gamal Mubarak is not brought into office by the forces of political nepotism, the Muslim Brotherhood may gain enough support to win the election, as citizens might be driven to vote for the Brotherhood as a simple reaction to the Mubaraks’ perceived dynasty. In reality, however, a reactionary vote, much like the Palestinian’s vote for Hamas last year, would be supporting a radical Islamic regime—a decision they may later regret. In this case, voting for the alternative—the Muslim Brotherhood—in order to send a message to the Mubaraks would do far more harm than good. The result would likely be internal fighting as the entrenched political and military power is overturned. Rather than a sudden transition to democracy with an open election, Egypt needs to slowly undergo reform. The best way to do this while maintaining stability is through the continuation of the current power dynamic. To aid Mubarak’s ascension, the United States and other western countries should ease pressure on Egypt to implement democratic reforms. It is in the best interest of Egypt, the United States, and the entire region for the elections to be guided by an interest in stability rather than the ideology of democratic reform. The current system is completely untenable, and democratic reform must happen in Egypt, but it must be measured so as to maintain the peace in an

increasingly volatile region.

Endocrine Disruption ( ) Endocrine disruption causes extinction – prevents reproduction Californians For Alternatives To Toxics, 2004, “Toxic Pesticides”, http://www.alternatives2toxics.org/toxicpesticides.htm, accessed 9-12 Pesticides, such as oryzalin, metam sodium, simazine or oxyfluorfen, which laboratory studies show affect blood and blood-forming tissues, may be especially dangerous for persons with inherited blood abnormalities or acquired blood diseases. Even sulfur, which is considered relatively low in toxicity, can be threatening to an asthmatic. * chemical interactions such as synergism and other effects that are created as a result of mixing chemicals together. Research on chemical blends like those in pesticide formulations is limited to lethal effects and acute eye and skin effects. * endocrine disruption, or alteration to the system that regulates hormones. Although there is evidence in nature and even in humans, damage to the endocrine system by pesticides and other chemicals is only now beginning to be considered by the EPA for future studies and regulatory action. Endocrine disrupting chemicals often affect reproductive organs and reproduction and they are especially dangerous to fetuses or young children. This is of particular concern to scientists because of the threat to future survival of humans and other species. * immune system depression. Hundreds of scientific studies of humans in agricultural areas in Canada and the former Soviet Union found adverse alterations to immune systems and higher rates of infectious disease than unexposed populations (WRI 1996). Studies in experimental animals prove that many pesticides have the ability to disrupt immune system flinctions following acute and even low-level exposures.

( ) Endocrine disruption causes extinction NRDC, 2003, Natural Resources Defense Council, “Toxic Chemicals And Health”, http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/bendrep.asp, accessed 9-12 Experiments in lab animals indicate that while high doses of PCBs can be toxic, lower doses can cause hypoor hyper-activity, impaired performance on tests of learning, balance, reaction time, and impaired hearing. The doses of exposure that result in behavioral abnormalities, sex hormone abnormalities, and enzyme abnormalities are close to the current exposure levels in humans. We are concerned about endocrine disruption because this is a means by which subtle effects from human actions can have species- and population-extinction outcomes. Small, but critical, changes in the chemical makeup of an environment are enough to trigger outcomes that could lead to population decline and loss of biodiversity.

Europe European War goes nuclear Charles Glaser, professor of public policy studies, summer 1993, International Security, p. 8-9 However, although the lack of an imminent Soviet threat eliminates the most obvious danger, U.S. security has not been entirely separated from the future of Western Europe. The ending of the Cold War has brought many benefits, but has not eliminated the possibility of a major power war, especially since such a war could grow out of a smaller conflict in the East. And, although nuclear weapons have greatly reduced the threat that a European hegemon would pose to U.S. security, a sound case nevertheless remains that a major European war could threaten U.S. security. The United States could be drawn into such a war, even if strict security considerations suggested it should stay out. A major power war could escalate into a nuclear war that, especially if the United States joins, could include attacks against the American homeland. Thus, the United States should not be unconcerned about Europe’s future.

EU Economy And the European Economy is key to the Global Economy World Net Daily, byline Jerome R. Corsi, 3/18/2008, “U.S. Loses No.1 ranking as dollar drops,” http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59256 MH The European Union has overtaken the U.S. as the world's No. 1 economy due to the continued dramatic fall of the dollar, according to a Reuters report. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, for 2007 is officially estimated at $13,843,800 billion. The 2007 GDP for the 15 EU countries is estimated at 8,847,889 billion euros, the report said. That means when the euro yesterday topped $1.56, the EU officially became the largest economy in the world. In a Financial Times commentary published Monday, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan declared the current financial crisis in the U.S. "is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching" since the end of World War II.

Collapse of the EU economy could increase oil, food, and commodity prices. EIU ViewsWire, The Economic Intelligence Unit, 6/18/08, “EU Economy: Inflation Fears,” Proquest MH The Economist Intelligence Unit has recently revised up its inflation forecasts for the euro area to 3.3% this year and 2.3% in 2009. Although we believe that the recent rise in inflation is a blip and that the outlook for prices in Europe is one of broad stability--inflation in May is likely to have been close to its peak, with a modest easing expected in the second half of 2008 and a more substantial slowdown in 2009--there are three significant upside risks to this benign forecast. One is that international oil prices could spike further upwards, perhaps as a result of geopolitical tension in large oil-producing regions such as the Middle East. Another is the effects of sharp rises in most non-energy commodities, including food. Although any pass-through to the wider price level has been limited thus far, should commodity prices continue to rise, this may change. A third risk, which is related to the first two, is the danger that wage claims could pick up. As unemployment falls further this year and the labour market continues to tighten (the labour market tends to react with a lag to a slowdown in economic activity), trade unions will have increased bargaining power to seek sufficiently high pay settlements to mitigate the effects on incomes of rising prices.

Food Prices Hikes in food prices kill billions Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96 On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s, world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food," he said. "Rising prices can also quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.

Food shortages lead to World War III William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64 The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The betterorganized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.

Freedom Of Speech Lack of freedom of speech enables genocide and the death of democracy Frances D'Souza, Executive Director of Article 19, the International Centre Against Censorship. Public Hearing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence Policy Subcommittee on Human Rights Brussels, 25 April 1996. “Freedom of Expression: The First Freedom?” Article 19, International Centre Against Censorship. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. In a totalitarian state where the expression of political views, let alone the possibility of political organis-ation, is strenuously suppressed, one has to ask what other options are open to a genuine political movement intent on introducing justice. All too often the only perceived option is terrorist attack and violence because it is, quite literally, the only method available to communicate the need for change.

Genocide Genocide is the ultimate evil – failure to act is acceptance and complicity – Gender Paraphrased Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, July 2000, Journal of Peace Research, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” p. 520-522 Most often, in cases of genocide, for every person directly victimized and killed there will be hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions, who are neither directly targeted as victims nor directly participating as perpetrators. The moral issues raised by genocide, taken as the illegal act par excellance, are not confined to the nexus of agent and victim. Those directly involved in a given instance of genocide will always form a minority, so to speak. The majority to the event will be formed by the contemporary bystanders. Such bystanders are individuals; in their private and professional lives, they will belong to a vast score of groups and collectives, some informal and closely knit, others formal and detached as far as personal and emotional involvement are concerned. In the loose sense intended here,

every contemporary citizen cognizant of a specific ongoing instance of genocide, regardless of where in the world, counts as a bystander. Bystanders in this loose sense are cognizant, through TV, radio, newspapers, and other publicly available sources of information, of ongoing genocide somewhere in the world, but they are not - by profession or formal appointment — involved in it. Theirs is a passive role, that of onlookers, although what starts out as a passive stance may, upon decision, convert into active engagement in the events at hand. I shall label this category passive bystanders. This group should be distinguished from bystanders by formal appointment: the latter bystanders have been professionally Engaged as a ‘third party’ to the interaction between the two parties directly involved in acts of genocide. The stance of this third party to an ongoing conflict, even one with genocidal implications, is in principle often seen as one of impartiality and neutrality, typically highlighted by a determined refusal to ‘take sides.’ This manner of principled non-involvement is frequently viewed as highly meritorious (Vetlesen, 1998). A case in point would be UN personnel deployed to monitor a ceasefire between warring parties, or (as was their task in Bosnia) to see to it that the civilians within a UN declared ‘safe area’ are effectively guaranteed ‘peace and security’, as set down in the mandate to establish such areas. By virtue of their assigned physical presence on the scene and the specific tasks given to them, such (groups of) bystanders may be referred to as bystanders by assignment. What does it mean to be a contemporary bystander? To begin with, let us consider this question not from the expected

From the viewpoint of an agent of genocide, bystanders are persons possessing a potential (one needing to be estimated in every concrete case) to halt his ongoing actions. The perpetrator will fear the bystander to the extent that he [or she] has reason to believe that the bystander will intervene to halt the action already under view- point — that of the bystander - but from the two viewpoints provided by the parties directly involved in the event. To put it as simply as possible:

way, and thereby frustrate the perpetrators goal of eliminating the targeted group, that said, we immediately need to differentiate among the different categories of bystanders introduced above. It is obvious that the more knowledgeable and other wise resourceful the bystander, the more the perpetrator will have reason to fear that the potential for such resistance will translate into action, meaning a more or less direct intervention by military or other means. Deemed efficient to reach the objectives of halting the incipient genocide. Of course, one should distinguish between bystanders who remain inactive and

even the most initially passive and remote bystander possesses a potential to cease being a mere onlooker to the events unfolding. Outrage at what comes to pass may prompt the judgement that ‘this simply must be stopped’ and translate into action promoting that aim. But is not halting genocide first and foremost a task, indeed a duty, for the victims themselves? The answer is simple: The sheer fact that genocide is happening shows that the targeted group has not proved itself able to prevent it. This being so, responsibility for halting what is now unfolding cannot rest with the victims alone, it must also be seen to rest with the party not itself affected but which is knowledgeable about -which is more or less literally witnessing — the genocide that is taking place. So whereas for the agent, bystanders represent the potential of resistance, for the victims they may represent the only source of hope left. In ethical terms, this is borne out in the notion of responsibility of Immanuel Levinas (1991), according to which responsibility grows bigger the weaker its addressee. Of course, agents of genocide may be caught more or less in delicto flagrante. But in the those who become actively engaged. Nonetheless, the point to be stressed is that, in principle,

age of television - with CNN being able to film and even interview doers as well as victims on the spot, and broadcast live to the entire television-watching world (such as was the case in the concentration camp Omarska in Bosnia in August 1992) (see Gutman, 1993) — physical co-presence to the event at hand is almost rendered superfluous. One need not have been there in order to have known what happened, The same holds for the impact of the day-to-day reporting From the ground by newspaper journalists of indisputable reputation. In order to be knowledgeable about ongoing genocide, it suffices to watch the television news or read the front pages of a daily newspaper. But, to be more precise, what exactly does it mean to act? What is to count as an action? We need to look briefly at the philosophical literature on the notion of action — as well as the notion of agent responsibility following from it - in order to gel a better grasp of the moral issues involved in being a bystander to genocide, whether passive or active. ‘I never forget', says Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, 'to speak of humans as acting and suffering, The moral problem', he continues, ‘is grafted onto the recognition of this essential dissymmetry between the one who acts and the one who undergoes, culminating in the violence of the powerful agent.' To be the 'sufferer' of a given action in Ricoeur's sense need not be negative; either 'the sufferer appears as the beneficiary of esteem or as the victim of disesteem, depending on whether the agent proves to be someone who distributes rewards or punishments'. Since there is to every action an agent and a sufferer (in the sense given), action is interaction, its structure is interpersonal (Ricoeur. 1992:145). But this is not the whole picture. Actions are also omitted, endured,

not acting is still acting: neglecting, forgetting to do something, is also letting things be done by someone else, sometimes to neglected, and the like; and Ricoeur takes these phenomena to remind us that ‘on the level of interaction, just as on that of subjective understanding,

the point of criminality. (Ricoeur, 1992:157) Ricoeur's systematic objective is to extend the theory of action from acting to suffering beings; again and again he emphasizes that 'every action has its agents and its patients' (1992; 157). Ricoeur's proposed extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight articulated, albeit not developed, in the passages quoted is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the case

the inaction making a difference is the inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when confronted with such action, as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure which carries a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed. Knowing, yet still not acting, means-granting acceptance to the action. Such inaction entails letting things be of genocide as a reported, on going affair,

done by someone else - clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, 'to the point of criminality', to invoke one of the quotes from Ricoeur. In short, inaction here means complicity; accordingly, it raises the question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive bystander, by which I mean the bystander who decides to remain inactive. In the view I am advancing, the theory of action is satisfactorily extended only when it is recognized that the structure of action is triadic, not dyadic. It takes two to act, we are tempted to say — no more and no less. But is an action really the exclusive possession — a private affair — between the two parties immediately affected as agent and sufferer? For one thing, the repercussions of a particular piece of action are bound to reach far beyond the immediate dyadic setting. As Hannah Arendt (1958) famously observed, to act is to initiate, to make a new beginning in the world, to set in motion - and open-endedly so. Only the start of a specific action allows precise localization in space and time, besides our attributing it to a particular agent, as her property and no one else’s. But, as for the repercussions, they evade being traced in any definite manner, to any final and definitive endpoint.

Greece-Turkey A Greek/Turkish conflict would explode into an apocalyptic war with multiple scenarios for WMD use Khairi Janbek, Institute for Diplomacy in Amman, Jordan, June 1998, “Heat Wave in Cyprus,” On the Turkish side of the island thirty thousand Turkish troops are unlikely to be deterred by the missiles in the event of conflict. The range of the missiles, however threatens nearby Turkish cities and towns on the mainland, which could lead to total war in the instance of conflict. In an apocalyptic scenario, Greece would most likely get involved, again unsettling peace in the Balkans, and the Mediterranean would become a heavily militarized zone in an age of demilitarization. Obviously, such a situation would have implications for the Arab world. Although relations between Greek-Cyprus and the neighboring Arab states are normal, any perceived threat could put both Lebanese and Syrian ports and cities at the mercy of the Russian missiles. This, in turn, could lead to a new arms race in the region, at a time when resources should be targeted for development, and cooperation among the nations of the region is paramount to solving the fundamental problems of their collective existence. Pushing a policy of brinkmanship at a time when the whole area is nervous it is clearly not a wise thing for the Greek-Cypriot's to do. The stalled Middle East peace process does not need this Meditteranean island to further induce the prevailing pyschology of encirclement. Neither does Turkey-with its conventionally cool relations with all its neighbors- need the emerging tension on the island. Greece, on the other hand, as a member of the EU and NATO, has fully integrated itself into the EU ethos and can only act accordingly.

Hegemony Leadership is essential to prevent global nuclear exchange Zalmay Khalilzad, RAND, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1995 Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous

advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

Decline in US hegemony leads to an apolar world of plagues, economic stagnation and nuclear wars Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of history at New York University's Stern School of Business and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “A world without power,” Foreign Policy July 1, 2004 So what is left? Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century. For the world is much more populous--roughly 20 times more--so friction between the world's disparate "tribes" is bound to be more frequent. Technology has transformed production; now human societies depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on supplies of fossil fuels that are known to be finite. Technology has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it. For more than two decades, globalization--the integration of world markets for commodities, labor, and capital--has raised living standards throughout the world, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. The reversal of globalization--which a new Dark Age would produce--would certainly lead to economic stagnation and even depression. As the United States sought to protect itself after a second September 11 devastates, say, Houston or Chicago, it would inevitably become a less open society, less hospitable for foreigners seeking to work, visit, or do business. Meanwhile, as Europe's Muslim enclaves grew, Islamist extremists' infiltration of the EU would become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions over the Middle East to the breaking point. An economic meltdown in China would plunge the Communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that undermined previous Chinese empires. Western investors would lose out and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad. The worst effects of the new Dark Age would be felt on the edges of the waning great powers. The wealthiest ports of the global economy--from New York to Rotterdam to Shanghai--would become the targets of plunderers and pirates. With ease, terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers, aircraft carriers, and cruise liners, while Western nations frantically concentrated on making their airports secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in the Korean peninsula and Kashmir, perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East. In Latin America, wretchedly poor citizens would seek solace in Evangelical Christianity imported by U.S. religious orders. In Africa, the great plagues of AIDS and malaria would continue their deadly work. The few remaining solvent airlines would simply suspend services to many cities in these continents; who would wish to leave their privately guarded safe havens to go there? For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the United States retreats from global hegemony--its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier--its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power. Be careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity--a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a not-so-new world disorder.

Hunger Hunger tanks the economy and causes war Don Melvin, writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2002, “U.N panel decries failed war on hunger”, NM, Lexis An accelerated campaign would require a public investment of $24 billion a year. But the report estimates that the benefits of cutting hunger in half would be $120 billion per year, because several hundred million people would live longer, more productive lives. The report argues that hunger is cyclical. Not only does poverty cause hunger, but hunger --- by reducing the ability of adults to work and children to learn --- in turn causes poverty. Hunger causes entire nations to perform less well economically, which leads again to more hunger. War causes hunger, and hunger causes war. The world produces enough food for all its inhabitants, according to the report. But people in rural agricultural areas often fail to share in that bounty.

We have a moral obligation to prevent famine Mylan Engel, Jr., P.H.D. from Arizona University, 2001, Associate Professor for Psychology at Northern Illinois University, “Take Hunger Seriously”, NM, www.rhbass.googlepages.com/engelhunger.pdf In his seminal article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Peter Singer (1972) offers a utilitarian argument to the effect that we ought to send famine relief organizations “as much money as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would be begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one’s dependents—perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility.”14 Singer begins his argument with the following much-discussed example: The Pond: Suppose that on my way to give a lecture I notice that a small child has fallen in [a pond] and is in danger of drowning. Would anyone deny that I ought to wade in and pull the child out? This will mean getting my clothes muddy and either canceling my lecture or delaying it until I can find something dry to change into; but compared with the avoidable death of the child this is insignificant.15 The Pond example is supposed to motivate the following principle: 5 (P2) If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it.16 Singer takes (P2) to be uncontroversial and thinks it explains why we ought to pull the child from the pond. Given (P2), Singer reasons as follows: Since absolute poverty is very bad, we ought to prevent as much absolute poverty as we can, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Since most of the material possessions with which we surround ourselves pale in significance compared to an innocent child’s life, we ought to forego such luxuries and save children instead. These arguments taken together present us with a certain sort of puzzle. First, each of these arguments is initially quite compelling, at least if one accepts the normative framework within which the argument is couched. For example, it seems that any hedonistic or preference act-utilitarian is committed to Singer’s principle (P2), regardless whether The Pond justifies (P2). Since the other premises in Singer’s argument are uncontroversial, it looks like any hedonistic or preference act-utilitarian must accept Singer’s robust conclusion. In short, these arguments provide strong utilitarian, Kantian, rights-based, and contractarian reasons for thinking that we have a moral duty to assist those in absolute poverty. Second, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, human rights-based ethics, and contractarianism are among the most widely accepted theories in normative ethics.

India-Pakistan India Pakistan conflict ensures extinction Ghulam Nabi Fai, Kashmiri American Council, July 8, 2001, Washington Times The foreign policy of the United States in South Asia should move from the lackadaisical and distant (with India crowned with a unilateral veto power) to aggressive involvement at the vortex. The

most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary. This apocalyptic vision is no idiosyncratic view. The director of central intelligence, the Defense Department, and world experts generally place Kashmir at the peak of their nuclear worries. Both India and Pakistan are racing like thoroughbreds to bolster their nuclear arsenals and advanced delivery vehicles. Their defense illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It

budgets are climbing despite widespread misery amongst their populations. Neither country has initialed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or indicated an inclination to ratify an impending Fissile Material/Cut-off Convention.

An Indo-Pak war would cause global starvation, conflict, disease spread and nuclear fallout that would threaten the whole planet Hidustan Times, 10-4-2007, “Indo-Pak nuclear war,” ln A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would not only have catastrophic affects in these two countries or their neighbours, but it could cause one billion people to starve to death across the world. Hundreds of millions of more would die from disease and conflicts over food in the aftermath of any such war. US medical expert Ira Helfand will on Thursday present this horrifying scenario in London during a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine. "A limited nuclear war taking place far away poses a threat that should concern everyone on the planet," the New Scientist magazine quoted Helfand as saying. "It is appropriate, given the data, to be frightened," said Helfand, who is an emergency-room doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, US, and a co-founder of the US anti-nuclear group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Helfand has tried to map

the global consequences of India and Pakistan exploding 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear warheads. Referring to earlier studies that have suggested that in such a conflict, the annual growing season in the world's most important grain-producing areas would shrink by between 10 and 20 days, he said that the world is ill-prepared to cope with such a disaster. "Global grain stocks stand at 49 days, lower than at any point in the past five decades," he said, adding: "These stocks would not provide any significant reserve in the event of a sharp decline in production. We would see hoarding on a global scale." Countries, which import more out

than half of their grain, such as Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan, would be particularly vulnerable, along with 150 million people in north Africa, which imports 45 percent of its

the global death toll from a nuclear war in Asia "could exceed one billion from starvation alone." Food shortages could also trigger epidemics of cholera, typhus and other diseases, as well as armed conflicts, which together could kill "hundreds of millions". Helfand further told the magazine that the smoke would warm the stratosphere by up to 50°C, accelerating the natural reactions that attack ozone. "No-one has ever thought about this before...I think there is a potential for mass starvation," he cautioned. Endorsing Helfand’s views, John Pike, director of the US think tank, globalsecurity.org, said the fallout from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan "would be far more devastating for other countries than generally appreciated." "Local events can have global consequences," he added. food, Helfand said. Many of the 800 million around the world who are already officially malnourished would also suffer, he added. He went on to say that

( ) Indo-Pak war kills hundreds of millions – jacks the ozone and kills crops Alexis Madrigal, Energy Science Tech and Journalist, 4-7-2008, Wired, “Regional Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction,” http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/regional-nuclea.html Imagine that the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan broke out into a war in which each side deployed 50 nuclear weapons against the other country's megacities. Karachi, Bombay, and dozens of other South Asian cities catch fire like Hiroshima and Nagasaki did at the end of World War II. Beyond the local human tragedy of such a situation, a new study looking at the atmospheric chemistry of regional nuclear war finds that the hot smoke from burning cities would tear holes in the ozone layer of the Earth. The increased UV radiation resulting from the ozone loss could more than double DNA damage, and increase cancer rates across North America and Eurasia. "Our research supports that there would be worldwide destruction," said Michael Mills, co-author of the study and a research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It demonstrates that a small-scale regional conflict is capable of triggering larger ozone losses globally than the ones that were previously predicted for a full-scale nuclear war." Combined with the climatic impact of a regional nuclear war -which could reduce crop yields and starve hundreds of millions -- Mills' modeling shows that the entire globe would feel the repercussions of a hundred nuclear detonations, a small fraction of just the U.S. stockpile. After decades of Cold War research into the impacts that a full-blown war between the

, recent work has focused on regional nuclear wars, which are seen as more likely than all-out nuclear Armageddon. Incorporating the latest atmospheric modeling, the scientists are finding that even a small Soviet Union and the United States would have had on the globe

nuclear conflict would wreak havoc on the global environment (.pdf) -- cooling it twice as much as it's heated over the last century -- and on the structure of the atmosphere itself.

Indian Economy Collapse of the Indian Economy jacks world stability Garten 1995 (Jeffrey, Under Sec. Trade, “Moving beyond”, March 7, FDCH, p ln) Paramount among those interests are the commercial opportunities that are increasingly at the heart of the Clinton Administration's foreign policy. But it is impossible to separate those commercial interests from our broader interests. Economic reforms enable our companies to take advantage of the opportunities within the Indian market and enable Indian companies to better enter the global marketplace. Economic growth in India is a powerful stabilizing force in a region of the world where stability is of supreme.importance. Stability and growth in India are of enormous importance through southern Asia, from the Middle East to Indochina. Peace and prosperity in that part of the world are essential to the peace and prosperity of the world. The survival of Indian democracy is an important message to those who doubt the value of democracy, particularly in large, complex, emerging societies. India is a regional powerhouse. Home of the world's fourth largest navy. Home of a burgeoning space program. It would be hard to describe a nation that could be more central to our interests in the century ahead -- or one with whom the promise of cooperation and friendship is greater.

A strong Indian Economy is crucial to lifting millions of people out of poverty. Dr. Y V Reddy, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore, 5/20/08, “Indian Economy – Prospects for Growth with Stability,” http://www.bis.org/review/r080522b.pdf MH There are certain “not easily quantifiable strengths” which the Indian economy possesses. A vast pool of science and technology graduates and the millions of people who are familiar with the English language are sources of strength. The familiarity with multiple languages in India prepares the people to adapt better to multi-cultural situations, making it easier for them to fit into international systems smoothly. The political climate is characterised by, what may be termed as, political system stability, despite the coalition cabinets and periodic elections both at the Centre and in several States. India will remain one of the youngest countries in the world in the next few decades. This “demographic dividend” is seen as an inevitable advantage provided pre-requisites such as skill-upgradation and sound governance to realize it are put in place. In terms of business environment, the impressive growth coupled with market orientation of the economy has been a bottom-up exercise with a very broad-based and growing entrepreneurial class. These tendencies are perhaps reflective of a penchant for innovation among already large and growing entrepreneurial class in India, imbued with professionalism and seeking to be globally competitive. In brief, the medium term challenges are many, but all indications point to a sense of overall optimism for some acceleration in the already high rate of growth, with reasonable stability. Perhaps we should track not only the addition to the number of billionaires in India but also the depletion in the number of millions of poor and unemployed. For some, Indian economic progress signifies the beginnings of a major economic powerhouse in the world. But for many of us, the optimism over the medium-term is only the beginning of an arduous journey to ensure basic nutrition, clean water, safer sanitation, minimal housing, personal security and individual dignity for millions in India. The prospects for growth and stability in India are great, but greater are the challenges in fulfilling the very basic objectives of public policy.

Indonesian Economy Indonesian growth is key preventing global economic collapse Rajan Menon, Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University, The National Interest, Fall 2001 Indonesia is staggering like a heavyweight boxer who has absorbed too many blows in too many places. A faltering economy, a fractious and feeble central government, communal war and secessionism could culminate in the state's collapse and the country's fragmentation. The result would be more than a local disturbance, for Indonesia is no ordinary place. With 224 million people Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous state, a sprawling archipelago of 13,600 islands (3,000 of them inhabited) nearly three times the size of Texas. While 87 percent of its citizens are Islamic (no country has more Muslims), Indonesia is a kaleidoscope of nationalities, tribes, languages and dialects. The sea lanes that cut through this island constellation-the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok-connect the Asia-Pacific to Europe and the Persian Gulf, bringing the lifeblood of energy and raw materials and providing an outlet for its manufactured exports. Now that globalization has diminished the distinction between "there" and "here", the disruptions that East Asia's largest economies would suffer if shipments are blocked or delayed will reverberate worldwide. Indonesia is also a fragile democracy in trouble and a humanitarian disaster-in-waiting that threatens to upend the strategic circumstances of Southeast Asia. Obviously, then, the U.S. stake in Indonesia's future is enormous. The Political Economy of Chaos The 1997 East Asian economic crisis illustrated globalization's power as both opportunity and vulnerability-this everyone by now understands. What remains unclear is why Indonesia alone has been rocked to its foundations when every other Asian country hurt by the 1997-98 crisis has recovered its balance to one degree or another. The basics of its economy were sound, and for nearly three decades Indonesia experienced an economic and social transformation that bettered the lives of most of its people. Between 1970 and 1997 the percentage of those in poverty fell from 60 percent to 15 percent, life expectancy and literacy increased significantly, and an urban middle class arose. Revenue from oil exports enabled the expansion of infrastructure and social services, and the share of GDP accounted for by the production of natural resources then shrank as industrialization advanced. Non-Javanese peoples in outlying areas and students, workers, and democrats chafed, the disparities in wealth and power among classes and regions were wide, and cronyism, nepotism, and corruption were rife. But the "New Order" (the authoritarian edifice Suharto built after taking power in 1965) promoted growth and kept order. The 1997 economic crisis was its death knell. Indonesia's GDP plummeted from $250 billion to below $100 billion at the end of 1998, and inflation rocketed to 60 percent. Capital fled abroad, millions were pushed deeper into poverty, and the dreams of others whose lives had improved during the decades of rapid growth were dashed. The absence of democratic institutions led simmering dissatisfaction to boil over onto the streets. Political consequences soon followed. Suharto was forced out in May 1998, and his successor, B.J. Habibie-ineffectual and compromised by his long association with Suharto-proved a political hiccup. In October 1999, following parliamentary elections, Indonesia's highest legislative body, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR, the Mejelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, comprising the 500-member parliament plus representatives from the military, the provinces, and civic organizations) elected Abdurrahman Wahid president, and, after Wahid nominated her, chose Megawati Sukarnoputri as vice president. Something like a democracy emerged. But the change accelerated instability. Indonesia's non-Javanese minority peoples saw an opening to assert their rights. East Timor broke free, but not before being brutalized by the Indonesian armed forces and its paramilitary acolytes. Long-established separatist movements in Aceh and West Papua (Irian Jaya) have gained confidence and new converts. Maluku and Sulawesi are now venues for horrific violence between Muslims and Christians. Kalimantan's Dayaks and Malays have set upon settlers from Java and Bali, forcing survivors to flee. Lombok and Riau have also experienced unrest. These upheavals have saddled Indonesia with a million internal refugees that local governments struggle to house and feed as the hospitality of permanent residents gives way to resentment. Indonesia's descent into communal violence included anti-Chinese riots (pogroms would not be too strong a term to describe them), which

Indonesia's odds for survival would be increased by a broad economic recovery that attracts capital back into the country and that gives people in rebellious regions a stake in national unity. There are some encouraging signs. The accelerated the flight of capital, for ethnic Chinese, while only three percent of the population, control almost three-quarters of Indonesia's wealth.

economy, which contracted by 15 percent in 1998, stabilized in 1999 and grew by five percent in 2000. Inflation, which stood at 60 percent in 1998, dropped to just below seven percent in 2000. The flight of capital fell sharply, foreign exchange reserves amounted to $22 billion in 2001, domestic investment has picked up, and exports have grown. And the International Monetary Fund is on hand with advice and $5 billion in loans, though not a few Indonesians are leery of its standard cures-and who can blame them? But this sliver of a silver lining frames a large dark cloud. Indonesia's banks and companies bear an external debt of $65 billion, but corporate restructuring and reform proceed at a snail's pace. The tepidity of reform explains why Indonesia ranks second worst in the Asia-Pacific in the quality of corporate governance and third worst in transparency. These dubious honors have hardly increased business confidence: ING Barings has warned investors away from Indonesia (as well as Malaysia and Thailand); Standard and Poor's revised Indonesia's creditworthiness downward sharply. Meanwhile, the steps that the Wahid government took to devolve power to the provinces, essential to keep Indonesia whole, may heighten investors' concerns. As of January 2001, provinces and districts keep 80 percent of mining, forestry and fishing revenues and 15 percent and 30 percent respectively of natural gas and oil income and also have rights to borrow independently. Western mining and energy companies, already facing demands from provincial authorities for a share of equity, worry about a profusion of power and corruption unmatched by competence, conflicting lines of authority, increased taxation by local authorities, and additional twists in an already labyrinthine legal system. Mining companies are particularly loath to make new investments, and their mood could influence other corporations. For their part, the IMF and the World Bank fret that provinces will be profligate with their newfound freedom to borrow. Nor is Indonesia's outlook positive when gauged by the standard economic indicators. The projected GDP growth rate for 2001 has been revised down to 3.5 percent from 5 percent. Actual growth could be even lower if political ferment continues. The national debt is about as large as the size of the economy. The budget deficit is 6.5 percent of GDP, and the IMF wants it cut to 3.5 percent. The government announced deep cuts in subsidies for electricity and oil in 2001 to achieve the goal, but the frailty of the central government may make further stringency infeasible. Without a smaller budget deficit, inflation, 6.8 percent in 2000, is expected to reach 8.5 percent or worse by the end of 2001. The rupiah, which stood at 6,800 to the dollar in 1999 (about a third of its value in 1996), fell to 11,000 in early 2001 and reached 12,000 in May, the lowest level in almost three years. Its descent makes deficit reduction harder still and could also stoke inflation. Indonesia's reserves of $22 billion look impressive, but that sum is insufficient to defend the faltering currency. Interest rates could be raised to support the rupiah, but that would increase the government's interest payment on the debt. These discouraging signs have not escaped investors. Capital outflows, while far smaller than in 1998, were still $4 billion in 2000. New foreign direct investment, $10 billion in 1996, has essentially ceased, as has portfolio investment. Nor do global economic conditions augur well for Indonesia's recovery. Economic growth in America, a major market for Indonesia's exports, is slowing. Japan, another important customer and the key source of direct and portfolio investment, is in far deeper trouble; its corporations have canceled new investments in Southeast Asia and laid off workers in Indonesian subsidiaries. Europe cannot take up the slack, while China is a major competitor to Southeast Asia for foreign investment and exports. If the global economic slowdown reduces oil prices, Indonesia's treasury will lose $50 million for every one-dollar drop; deficit reduction will then be harder

Indonesia's convulsions cannot be reduced to economic causes, but they will prove impossible to manage, let alone cure, if the economy deteriorates further-and despite the brave front of Indonesian officials, the economic outlook is bad. still and inflation could rise.

Iran Strikes Iran Strike causes nuclear escalation – ends the world Jorge Hirsch, Professor of physics at the University of California San Diego, 2-20-2006, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8577 The U.S. has just declared that it will defend Israel militarily against Iran if needed. Presumably this includes a scenario where Israel would initiate hostilities by unprovoked bombing of Iranian facilities, as it did with Iraq's Osirak, and Iran would respond with missiles targeting Israel. The U.S. intervention is likely to be further bombing of Iran's facilities, including underground installations that can only be destroyed with low-yield nuclear bunker-busters. Such nuclear weapons may cause low casualties, perhaps only in the hundreds [.pdf], but the nuclear threshold will have been crossed. Iran's reaction to a U.S. attack with nuclear weapons, no matter how small, cannot be predicted with certainty. U.S. planners may hope that it will deter Iran from responding, thus saving lives. However, just as the U.S. forces in Iraq were not greeted with flowers, it is likely that such an attack would provoke a violent reaction from Iran and lead to the severe escalation of hostilities, which in turn would

lead to the use of larger nuclear weapons by the U.S. and potential casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Witness the current uproar over cartoons and try to imagine the resulting upheaval in the Muslim world after the U.S. nukes Iran. - The Military's Moral Dilemma - Men and women in the military forces, including civilian employees, may be facing a difficult moral choice at this very moment and in the coming weeks, akin to the moral choices faced by Colin Powell and Dan Ellsberg. The paths these two men followed were radically different. Colin Powell was an American hero, widely respected and admired at the time he was appointed secretary of state in 2001. In February 2003, he chose to follow orders despite his own serious misgivings, and delivered the pivotal UN address that paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following month. Today, most Americans believe the Iraq invasion was wrong, and Colin Powell is disgraced, his future destroyed, and his great past achievements forgotten. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, played a significant role in ending the Vietnam War by leaking the Pentagon Papers. He knew that he would face prosecution for breaking the law, but was convinced it was the correct moral choice. His courageous and principled action earned him respect and gratitude. The Navy has just reminded [.pdf] its members and civilian employees what the consequences are of violating provisions concerning the release of information about the nuclear capabilities of U.S. forces. Why right now, for the first time in 12 years? Because it is well aware of moral choices that its members may face, and it hopes to deter certain actions. But courageous men and women are not easily deterred. To disobey orders and laws and to leak information are difficult actions that entail risks. Still, many principled individuals have done it in the past and will continue to do it in the future ( see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].) Conscientious objection to the threat and use of nuclear weapons is a moral choice. Once the American public becomes fully aware that military action against Iran will include the planned use of nuclear weapons, public support for military action will quickly disappear. Anything could get the ball rolling. A great catastrophe will have been averted. Even U.S. military law recognizes that there is no requirement to obey orders that are unlawful. The use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country can be argued to be in violation of international law, the principle of just war, the principle of proportionality, common standards of morality ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), and customs that make up the law of armed conflict. Even if the nuclear weapons used are small, because they are likely to cause escalation of the conflict they violate the principle of proportionality and will cause unnecessary suffering. The Nuremberg Tribunal, which the United States helped to create, established that "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." To follow orders or to disobey orders, to keep information secret or to leak it, are choices for each individual to make – extremely difficult choices that have consequences. But not choosing is not an option. - America's Collective Responsibility - Blaming the administration or the military for crossing the nuclear threshold is easy, but responsibility will be shared by all Americans. All Americans knew, or should have known, that using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country like Iran was a possibility given the Bush administration's new policies. All Americans could have voiced their opposition to these policies and demand that they be reversed. The media will carry a heavy burden of responsibility. The mainstream media could have effectively raised public awareness of the possibility that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons against Iran. So far, they have chosen to almost completely hide the issue, which is being increasingly addressed in non-mainstream media. Members of Congress could have raised the question forcefully, calling for public hearings, demanding public discussion of the administration's plans, and passing new laws or resolutions. So far they have failed to do so and are derelict in their responsibility to their constituents. Letters to the president from some in Congress [1], [2] are a start, but are not likely to elicit a meaningful response or a change in plans and are a far cry from forceful action. Scientific organizations and organizations dealing with arms control and nuclear weapons could have warned of the dangers associated with the Iran situation. So far, they have not done so ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]). Scientists and engineers responsible for the development of nuclear weapons could have voiced concern [.pdf] when the new U.S. nuclear weapons policies became known, policies that directly involve the fruits of their labor. Their voices have not been heard. Those who contribute their labor to the scientific and technical infrastructure that makes nuclear weapons and their means of delivery possible bear a particularly heavy burden of moral responsibility. Their voices have barely been heard. - The Nuclear Abyss - The United States is preparing to enter a new era: an

era in which it will enforce nuclear nonproliferation by the threat and use of nuclear weapons. The use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran will usher in a new world order. The ultimate goal is that no nation other than the U.S. should have a nuclear weapons arsenal. A telltale sign that this is the plan is the recent change in the stated mission of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are developed. The mission of LANL used to be described officially as "Los Alamos National Laboratory's central mission is to reduce the global nuclear danger" [1] [.pdf], [2] [.pdf], [3] [.pdf]. That will sound ridiculous once the U.S. starts throwing mini-nukes around. In anticipation of it, the Los Alamos mission statement has been recently changed to "prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to protect our homeland from terrorist attack." That is the present and future role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, to be achieved through threat (deterrence) and use of nuclear weapons. References to the old mission are nowhere to be found in the current Los Alamos documents, indicating that the change was deliberate and thorough. It is not impossible that the U.S. will succeed in its goal. But it is utterly improbable. This is a big world. Once the U.S. crosses the nuclear threshold against a non-nuclear country, many more countries will strive to acquire nuclear weapons, and many will succeed. The nuclear abyss may turn out to be a steep precipice or a gentle slope. Either way, it will be a one-way downhill slide toward a bottomless pit. We will have entered a path of no return, leading in a few months or a few decades to global nuclear war and unimaginable destruction. But there are still choices to be made. Up to the moment the first U.S. nuclear bomb explodes, the fall into the abyss can be averted by choices made by each and every one of us.

Iraq Iraqi disintegration causes regional war and global economic collapse Kenneth Pollack, Director of Research for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, July-August, 2003, http://www.brookings.org/views/papers/pollack/20040107.htm After the experience of the last thirty years we now know quite a bit about failed states—enough to know that allowing Iraq to become one would be disastrous. The chaos bred by a failed state can never be successfully contained. Iraqi refugees would flow out of the country and into neighboring states. Chaos in Iraq would breed extremists and terrorists who would not limit their targets only to those within Iraq’s nominal borders. Groups within Iraq would call on co-religionists, co-ethnicists, tribesmen, and fellow political travelers across the borders for aid. Petty warlords would seek help from neighboring powers, and the neighbors themselves would inevitably begin to intervene in Iraq’s civil strife if only in the vain hope of preventing it from spilling over into their territory. The same would likely hold true for Iraq and its impact on the countries of the Persian Gulf. They would be inundated by refugees and armed groups seeking sanctuary and assistance. They would be sucked in by tribal rivalries, ethnic and religious ties, and fear that a failure to act would cause the chaos to spread across their borders. They would likely become battlegrounds for rival Iraqi militias and breeding grounds for Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists. And these are countries that the United States cares about deeply. Saudi Arabia is frail enough as it is. Many analysts fear that even on its own, the Saudi state might not last another ten years. Add to that the tremendously destabilizing influence of civil war in Iraq next door, and no one should be sanguine about Saudi prospects. Kuwait is another major oil producer, and if chaos consumed Iraq and Saudi Arabia, it would be hard for tiny Kuwait to remain inviolate. The loss of oil production as a result of chaos or revolution in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would cripple the international oil market with unimaginable consequences for the global economy. Beyond them, much as two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves, and its oil is absurdly economical to produce. Saudi Arabia has a majority of the world's excess production capacity, and it increases or decreases production to stabilize and control prices. The sudden loss of the Saudi oil network would send the price of oil through the ceiling, probably causing a global downturn at least as devastating as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Most Middle East experts think that a revolution or civil war in any of the GCC states within the next few years is unlikely, but few say so now as confidently as they once did. Indeed, fears of mounting internal turmoil have prompted each of the GCC regimes to announce democratic Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and Syria are all also economically and politically fragile and all would suffer from the political, military, and economic spillover of a failed state in Iraq. Nor are these simply abstract warnings. They are being played out on the ground even today. Already the Iranians, Syrians, Turks, and Saudis have begun to stake out their turf and potential proxies in the event that Iraq falls apart.

Iraq Withdrawal Withdrawing from Iraq would cause Ethnic Violence, Terrorism, and Global Conflicts CNN World News, 5/3/2007, “No safe way to leave Iraq, experts warn,” http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/05/02/iraq.scenarios/index.html MH Pulling U.S. forces from Iraq could trigger catastrophe, CNN analysts and other observers warn, affecting not just Iraq but its neighbors in the Middle East, with far-reaching global implications. Sectarian violence could erupt on a scale never seen before in Iraq if coalition troops leave before Iraq's security forces are ready. Supporters of al Qaeda could develop an international hub of terror from which to threaten the West. And the likely civil war could draw countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran into a broader conflict. President Bush vetoed a war spending bill Tuesday precisely because the Democrat-led Congress required the first U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn by October 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later. Bush said such a deadline would be irresponsible and both

A rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops would hurt America's image and hand al Qaeda and other terror groups a propaganda victory that the United States is only a "paper tiger," CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said. (Send us your reaction) "It would also play into their strategy, which sides are now working on new proposals -- which may have no pullout dates.

is to create a mini-state somewhere in the Middle East where they can reorganize along the lines of what they did in Afghanistan in the late '90s," Bergen told CNN.com. It was in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda allied with the Taliban, and were allowed to run terror bases and plan the

we must prevent is central/western Iraq [from] becoming a Sunni militant state that threatens our interests directly as an international terror hub," he said. Don Shepperd, a retired Air Force major-general and military analyst for CNN, agreed September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. Bergen says it is imperative that the United States not let that happen in Iraq. "What

that Sunni Muslim fighters who support al Qaeda would seek an enclave inside a lawless Iraq likely riven along sectarian lines into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions. There would be "increasing attempts by terrorists to establish a training sanctuary in Iraq," Shepperd said. That's one of the reasons why a fast withdrawal will not happen, whatever the politicians say, the analysts predict. (Watch why a radical Shiite cleric wants U.S. troops out Video)

"Everyone wants the troops home -- the Iraqis, the U.S., the world -- but no one wants a precipitous withdrawal that produces a civil war, a bloodbath, nor a wider war in an unstable Mideast," Shepperd said, adding that the image of the United States was important too. "And we do not want a U.S that is perceived as having been badly defeated in the global war on terror or as an unreliable future ally or coalition partner.”

And Iraq withdrawal threatens major conflict and terrorism – Lebanon proves. David Silverberg, Homeland Security Analyst, 4/7/2008, Homeland Security Today, “The consequences of withdrawal,” http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/2785/151/ MH The Israeli experience in Lebanon has disturbing parallels to Iraq: A strong, conventional power won an easy victory against a conventional foe; the invader failed to plan for the post-war aftermath and was unable to establish a friendly, stable regime that could maintain order; it pinned its hopes on surrounding countries, which while hostile, it still thought might find it in their interests to cooperate and these hopes proved fruitless; it became bogged down and its public became weary of the conflict; it ultimately withdrew unilaterally; where it departed, its terrorist foes followed. Ultimately, the conflict simply exchanged one threat for another—one potentially more dangerous. This is the definition of a quagmire: A seemingly endless conflict that shows no promise of clear victory but where abrupt withdrawal is equally unacceptable. This was also the experience of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and there too, Islamist terrorism followed the troops back to the Russian homeland. It is also the historical experience from the Middle East that religiously-motivated terrorists are not deterred by shows of force, by repeated punishment, or by overwhelming odds. The religiously-driven impulse to conduct jihadist terrorism is multigenerational and almost impossible to snuff out. It is these near-inevitable consequences that the current crop of American presidential candidates must address. McCain has raised the prospect of a century of American involvement in Iraq—an honest if politically damaging assessment. The other two candidates must also address the consequences of an abrupt American withdrawal from Iraq. One person with personal experience of Lebanon who has pointed out the potential results of a hasty Iraqi withdrawal is author Walid Phares, who wrote in an April 1 online policy briefing: “An

abrupt abandonment of the Iraqi battlefield would bring about a catastrophe—not only in Iraq, but also throughout the region and even to the United States. President Bush's description of the ramifications of a ‘retreat’ is accurate. Indeed, at first the Iraqi democratic forces would be decimated. Second, the Iraqi armed forces would collapse and divide. Third, whatever was achieved in terms of national consensus would crumble, sectarian divisions would deepen, and Al Qaeda would expand its influence in the Sunni Triangle and Iran would expand its rule in the Shia areas. The Al Qaeda bases would become a launching pad for operations in the region and overseas, including against the United States mainland. Iranian advances in Iraq would create dangerous shifts in power in the region and beyond.”

Israeli Disclosure Israeli disclosure sparks a Middle East arms race and turns the case Yair Evron, Professor of Political Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel’s Strategic Dilemma, 1994, p. 272-73 Another of the propositions discussed in this book is the effect of ambiguity on deterrence and on Arab state’s assessments whether to “go nuclear.” Although the ambiguity surrounding the Israeli posture has considerably diminished over the years, nevertheless some of its dimensions had been maintained. And it should be borne in mind that an ambiguous posture does have advantages in a nonproliferation posture. An explicit doctrine would actually force Arab states to choose a nuclear path. It would also place the United States in a very difficult situation. The United States is committed to nonproliferation, both by policy as well as by law. A disclosure of proliferation might force the United States to act against Israel or, short of this, to undermine her overall antiproliferation policy. Then again, a disclosure by Israel would be an irreversible act. It is difficult to imagine that any Israeli government would be willing to forgo the capability or means of production Israel might have. Once things become explicit, attitudes and interests tend to coalesce around them and create a powerful lobby which would most probably preempt any move toward denuclearization. Then again, as a result of the above, a feedback process would probably be set in motion. Israeli disclosure would force some Arab governments to invest greater resources in nuclear developments. This, in turn, would tend to convince Israel of the necessity to increase rather than limit, her nuclear effort. As mentioned, recent ideas presented by Egyptian scholars, which probably reflect official views, refer to a graduated approach which would begin with an Israeli disclosure coupled with a freeze on activity, followed by a gradual reduction of Israeli capabilities tied to progress in the peace process. But this brings us back to the point that disclosure would be an irreversible act. A breakdown in the peace process following disclosures would create a political stalemate and would increase pressure on Arab states to develop their own capabilities. Moreover, the Israeli disclosure would make it

virtually impossible for the United States to apply pressure on Arab states – even those friendly to America – to desist from producing their own capabilities. Similarly, nuclear weapons states and in general, the nuclear suppliers, would feel free to transfer know-how and components of nuclear technology, and possibly even the complete weapons, to Arab states. There is, therefore, a whole serius of arguments on why the abandonment of the ambiguous posture would backfire in terms of nuclear arms control. Indeed, apparently both the UN document, as well as the American position, probably for the reasons mentioned above, have not called for a disclosure by Israel of her capability (whatever it may be.)

Arab/Israeli arms racing leads to use and escalation. Sharad Joshi, Student, International Relations, March 2000, Strategic Analysis, http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/sa/sa_00jos01.html The introduction of nuclear weapons in an already hostile region could increase the possibility of actual use of nuclear weapons in a tense situation. The continuous hostility of varying levels over the past five decades, might lead to the inclusion of nuclear and other WMD in existing “war-fighting” doctrines. 18 If the states in the region see WMD simply as weapons to be used in a conflict, the probability of these weapons being used increases drastically. The Arabs have tried to counter Israel’s nuclear superiority, by developing a sizeable chemical and biological weapons arsenal. The greater the number of powers in a region possessing WMD, the greater the risk of escalation. Wars in history have more often than not been limited; but the main reason for this has been constraints due to resources and technological know-how. Instances are very rare of a war being limited due to considerations of the consequences of existing capabilities. 19 The indiscriminate effect of Weapons of Mass Destruction makes it very difficult to keep a war involving such weapons, limited.

Japan Economy ( ) Japenese economy is key to check global economic collapse and nuclear war with China The Guardian 2-11-2002, p ln Even so, the west cannot afford to be complacent about what is happening in Japan, unless it intends to use the country as a test case to explore whether a full-scale depression is less painful now than it was 70 years ago. Action is needed, and quickly because this is an economy that could soak up some of the world's excess capacity if functioning properly. A strong Japan is not only essential for the long-term health of the global economy, it is also needed as a counter-weight to the growing power of China. A collapse in the Japanese economy, which looks ever more likely, would have profound ramifications; some experts believe it could even unleash a wave of extreme nationalism that would push the country into conflict with its bigger (and nuclear) neighbour.

Japan Rearm Japanese rearm will lead to global war Guoli Liu, Professor of Political Science @ The College of Charleston. 2004. Chinese Foreign Policy in Transition. Pg. 15 Unless this nuclear crisis is resolved, peace on the Korean Peninsula will remain fragile. Both Beijing and Washington are deeply concerned about the frightening consequences of North Korea arming itself with nuclear weapons. If the worst case scenario becomes a reality, the Japanese leaders might decide to put an end to Japan’s constitutional restraint and build nuclear weapons. Right-wing Japanese politicians already boasted that Japan could build a lot of nuclear weapons in a short period of time. In terms of technological and economic resources, Japan’s nuclear option is certainly viable. The real issue is political and strategic. Owing to Japan’s militaristic history and its past brutal invasion of its neighbors, a Japan with nuclear weapons will become a serious threat to peace. A nuclear arms race in East Asia will certainly disrupt the balance of power in the region and threaten global peace and security.

Even the slightest move toward rearmament would cause tension and conflict in Asia Anthony DiFilippo, Prof. Sociology at Lincoln University, 2002, The Challenges of the U.S.-Japan Military Arrangement: Competing Security Transitions in a Changing International Environment, pg. 108-109 Because of its militaristic and imperialist past, Japan has to worry about Much more than just verbal criticism from its East Asian neighbors. Japan's past still raises too many unpleasant memories throughout the region. Just the appearance of Japan's independent rearmament would send shock waves throughout parts of Asia. Indeed, if either Beijing or Pyongyang believed that Japan was fully pursing independent military capability, existing regional tensions and problems would escalate very quickly. Right now, any movement by Japan to increase the sophistication of its military sends shock waves through East Asia and precipitates tension. When the Japanese government approved the ¥25 trillion ($220 billion plus) five year defense plan in December 2000, Beijing and Pyongyang quickly became alarmed, as ¥90 billion of this had been earmarked for four inflight refueling planes. These planes will extend Japanese military capabilities and, as a researcher at the Defense Agency's National Institute for Defense Studies put it, moves Japan to a "more offensive defense [which] creates tension with the Chinese and Koreans."49

Lebanon Lebanese instability causes global war James Stuart, Strategist, Negotiator and Futurist: minimising future risk at Alt3.co.uk , 2006, “Lebanon – the struggle continues” www.alt3.co.uk/discussion_files/lebanon.htm Why is this important? Why is Lebanon, which is a small country, so important to the rest of the world? Why should the world pay attention to the undeniable plight of Lebanon? The world should pay attention because Lebanon is so crucially placed. It is also a democracy in a region infamous for its extremist inspired instability. The murderous extremists who inspire such instability are doing everything in their considerable power to maintain and spread this instability in the sure knowledge that stability will create growth – and they themselves will not be required. The extremists live to destroy. To sustain themselves they must spread their destruction. If the brave souls of Lebanon fall … who will be next? The eyes of the extremists will then turn to those rich states on the periphery of the region – and they will strip those states bare to feed their addiction and leave such a trail of destruction that will be truly unbearable, that will be truly shameful. Lebanon is crucial to the stability of the entire Middle East region. It is crucial to the stability of the world. This is where a stand must be taken lest the extremists, and the madmen from external states who inspire the extremists, gain too much strength, too much momentum. Lebanon may be a small country yet here is where the heart of the world will either beat strongly or will cease to beat at all. If there is a wider instability there will only be a wider destruction – and will be too much to stop.

Middle East Even without escalation, Middle East nuclear war guarantees extinction Ian Hoffman, Staff Writer, December 12, 2006, “Nuclear Winter Looms, experts say”, MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers SAN FRANCISCO -- With superpower nuclear arsenals plummeting to a third of 1980s levels and slated to drop by another third, the nightmarish visions of nuclear winter offered by scientists during the Cold War have receded. But they haven't gone away. Researchers at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting warned Monday that even a small regional nuclear war could burn enough cities to shroud the globe in black smoky shadow and usher in the manmade equivalent of the Little Ice Age. "Nuclear weapons represent the greatest single human threat to the planet, much more so than global warming," said Rutgers University atmospheric scientist Alan Robock. By dropping imaginary Hiroshima-sized bombs into some of the world's biggest cities, now swelled to tens of millions in population, University of Colorado researcher O. Brian Toon and colleagues found they could generate 100 times the fatalities and 100 times the climate-chilling smoke per kiloton of explosive power as all-out nuclear war between the United States and former Soviet Union. For most modern nuclear-war scenarios, the global impact isn't nuclear winter, the notion of smoke from incinerated cities blotting out the sun for years and starving most of the Earth's people. It's not even nuclear autumn, but rather an instant nuclear chill over most of the planet, accompanied by massive ozone loss and warming at the poles. That's what scientists' computer simulations suggest would happen if nuclear war broke out in a hot spot such as the Middle East, the North Korean peninsula or, the most modeled case, in Southeast Asia. Unlike in the Cold War, when the United States and Russia mostly targeted each other's nuclear, military and strategic industrial sites, young nuclear-armed nations have fewer weapons and might go for maximum effect by using them on cities, as the United States did in 1945. "We're at a perilous crossroads," Toon said. The spread of nuclear weapons worldwide combined with global migration into dense megacities form what he called "perhaps the greatest danger to the stability of society since the dawn of humanity." More than 20 years ago, researchers imagined a U.S.-Soviet nuclear holocaust would wreak havoc on the planet's climate. They showed the problem was potentially worse than feared: Massive urban fires would flush hundreds of millions of tons of black soot skyward, where -- heated by sunlight -- it would soar higher into the stratosphere and begin cooking off the protective ozone layer around the Earth. Huge losses of ozone would open the planet and its inhabitants to damaging radiation, while the warm soot would spread a pall sufficient to plunge the Earth into freezing year-round. The hundreds of millions who would starve exceeded those who would die in the initial blasts and radiation. Popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan and Nobel prize winners, the idea of nuclear winter captured the public imagination, though nuclear-weapons scientists found nuclear winter was virtually impossible to achieve in their own computer models without dropping H-bombs on nearly every major city. Scientists on Monday say nuclear winter still is possible, by detonating every nation's entire nuclear arsenals. The effects are striking and last five times or longer than the cooling effects of the biggest volcanic eruptions in recent history, according to Rutgers' Robock.

Mideast war escalates and goes nuclear John Steinbach, Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee, March 2002, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/02.03/0331steinbachisraeli.htm Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability."(41) and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum (and the) next war will not be conventional."(42) Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major (if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (43) (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon - for whatever reason - the deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration." (44).

Monoculture Loss of genetic diversity causes extinction Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the

biggest single environmental catastrophe in human history is unfolding in the garden. While all are rightly concerned about the possibility of nuclear war, an equally devastating time bomb is ticking away in the fields of farmers all over the world. Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture—silent, rapid, inexorable—is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction —to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious. It is life at the end of the limb. That is the subject of this book. Agronomists in the Philippines warned of what became known as southern corn leaf blight in 1061.' The disease was reported in Mexico not long after. In the summer of 1968, the first faint hint that the blight was in the United States came from seed growers in the Midwest. The danger was ignored. By the spring of 19701 the disease had taken hold in the Florida corn crop. But it was not until corn prices leapt thirty cents a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade that the world took notice; by then it was August—and too late. By the close of the year, Americans had lost fifteen percent of their most important crop—more than a billion bushels. Some southern states lost half their harvest and many of their farmers. While consumers suffered in the grocery stores, producers were out a billion dollars in lost yield. And the disaster was not solely domestic. U.S. seed exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Monocultures lead to a laundry list of impacts; deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and exploitation of resources. Khadija Sharife, Phoenix Environmental Institute, 7-6-2008, “Behind closed doors: Food inflation, GMOs and the agri-cartel,” SS. http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/khadijasharife/2008/07/06/behind-closed-doors-food-inflation-gmo%E2%80%99sand-the-agri-cartel/ Biofuels are usually derived from high-density monocultures, often GM cash crops, that quickly render land barren, causing mass desertification and deforestation, rapid depletion of freshwater sources, toxic run-offs, habitat loss, critically endangered/extinct species, contamination of air, soil and water, soil erosion, displaced and disenfranchised people, unsustainable exploitation of resources and unchecked use of ecologically disruptive chemicals such as pesticides. GM crops penetrate markets and food supplies through fisted bilateral trade agreements formulated by countries such as Brazil and the US; four crops (canola, soy, maize and corn) account for more than 95% of the world’s GM harvests, previously concentrated in Argentina, Canada and the US (the former heavily influenced by the World Bank). Dr Henry Miller, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official in charge of the “nods” to the agri-biotech industry, stated that “government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do”.

NATO NATO is key to prevent nuclear war John Duffield, asst prof of govt and foreign affairs at Univ. of Virginia, Winter 1994, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 109, issue 5, pg. 766-7 Initial analyses of NATO's future prospects overlooked at least three important factors that have helped to ensure the alliance's enduring relevance. First, they underestimated the extent to which external threats sufficient to help justify the preservation of the alliance would continue to exist. In fact, NATO still serves to secure its members against a number of actual or potential dangers emanating from outside their territory. These include not only the residual threat posed by Russian military power, but also the relatively new concerns raised by conflicts in neighboring regions. Second, the pessimists failed to consider NATO's capacity for institutional adaptation. Since the end of the cold war, the alliance has begun to develop two important new functions. NATO is increasingly seen as having a significant role to play in containing and controlling militarized conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe. And, at a deeper level, it works to prevent such conflicts from arising at all by actively promoting stability within the former Soviet bloc. Above all, NATO pessimists overlooked the valuable intra-alliance functions that the alliance has always performed and that remain relevant after the cold war. Most importantly, NATO has helped stabilize Western Europe, whose states had often been bitter rivals in the past. By damping the security dilemma and providing an institutional mechanism for the development of common security policies, NATO has contributed to making the use of force in relations among the countries of the region virtually inconceivable. In all these ways, NATO clearly serves the interests of its European members. But even the United States has a significant stake in preserving a peaceful and prosperous Europe. In addition to strong transatlantic historical and cultural ties, American economic interests in Europe--as a leading market for U.S. products, as a source of valuable imports, and as the host for considerable direct foreign investment by American companies-remain substantial. If history is any guide, moreover, the United States could easily be drawn into a future major war in Europe, the consequences of which would likely be even more devastating than those of the past, given the existence of nuclear weapons.(11)

NATO is key to solve multiple scenarios for war John O'Sullivan, editor-at-large of National Review and founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative, American Spectator, June, 1998 These opposing possibilities emerge in the extraordinary flux of post_Cold War politics in which NATO has lost its traditional role as the main defense against Communism. We sometimes understate the revolutionary character of that change. In theory, NATO last month could have dissolved, expanded, or embarked on some other course entirely--and there are numerous ideas for "a new role for NATO" buzzing around in alliance bonnets and (covertly) in some anti-alliance bonnets. Some of those ideas--notably, dissolution and "standing pat"--were never likely to be implemented. Quite apart from the sociological law that says organizations never go out of business even if their main aim has been achieved (the only exception being a slightly ominous one, the Committee for the Free World, which Midge Decter closed down after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact), NATO's essential aim has not been permanently achieved. True, the Soviet threat is gone; but a

nuclear-armed and potentially unstable Russia is still in the game; a major conflict has just been fought in the very Balkans which sparked the First World War; and there are a number of potential wars and civil wars lurking in such regions as the Tyrol, the Basque country, Northern Ireland (not yet finally settled), Corsica, Belgium, Kosovo, and Eastern Europe and the Balkans generally where, it is said, " every England has its Ireland, and every Ireland its Ulster." If none of these seems to threaten the European peace very urgently at present, that is in part because the existence of NATO makes any such threat futile and even counter-productive. No nation or would-be nation wants to take NATO on. And if not NATO, what? There are international bodies which could mediate some of the lesser conflicts: the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe is explicitly given that responsibility, and the European Union is always itching to show it can play a Big Power role. But neither body has the military heft or the prestige to deter or repress serious strife. The OSCE is a collective security organization, and as Henry Kissinger said of a similar body: "When all participants agree, there is no need for it; when they split, it is useless." And the EU only made itself look ridiculous when it attempted to halt the Bosnian conflict in its relatively early stages when a decisive intervention might have succeeded. As for dealing with a revived

Russian threat, there is no military alliance in sight other than NATO that could do the job. In a sense, NATO today is Europe's defense. Except for the American forces, Western armies can no longer play an independent military role. They are wedded to NATO structures and dependent on NATO, especially American, technology. (As a French general admitted in the Gulf War: "The Americans are our eyes and ears.") If NATO were to dissolve--even if it were to be replaced by some European collective defense organization such as a beefed-up Western European Union--it would invite chaos as every irridentist faction sought to profit from the sudden absence of the main guarantor of European stability.

North Korea North Korea war causes extinction Pat Fungamwango, Times of Zambia, Africa News, October 25, 1999 Lusaka - If there is one place today where the much-dreaded Third World War could easily erupt and probably reduce earth to a huge smouldering cinder it is the Korean Peninsula in Far East Asia. Ever since the end of the savage three-year Korean war in the early 1950s, military tension between the hard-line communist north and the American backed South Korea has remained dangerously high. In fact the Koreas are technically still at war. A foreign visitor to either Pyongyong in the North or Seoul in South Korea will quickly notice that the divided country is always on maximum alert for any eventuality. North Korea or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has never forgiven the US for coming to the aid of South Korea during the Korean war. She still regards the US as an occupation force in South Korea and wholly to blame for the non-reunification of the country. North Korean media constantly churns out a tirade of attacks on "imperialist" America and its "running dog" South Korea. The DPRK is one of the most secretive countries in the world where a visitor is given the impression that the people's hatred for the US is absolute while the love for their government is total. Whether this is really so, it is extremely difficult to conclude. In the DPRK, a visitor is never given a chance to speak to ordinary Koreans about the politics of their country. No visitor moves around alone without government escort. The American government argues that its presence in South Korea was because of the constant danger of an invasion from the north. America has vast economic interests in South Korea. She points out that the north has dug numerous tunnels along the demilitarised zone as part of the invasion plans. She also accuses the north of violating South Korean territorial waters. Early this year, a small North Korean submarine was caught in South Korean waters after getting entangled in fishing nets. Both the Americans and South Koreans claim the submarine was on a military spying mission. However, the intension of the alleged intrusion will probably never be known because the craft's crew were all found with fatal gunshot wounds to their heads in what has been described as suicide pact to hide the truth of the mission. The US mistrust of the north's intentions is so deep that it is no secret that today Washington has the largest concentration of soldiers and weaponry of all descriptions in south Korea than anywhere else in the World, apart from America itself. Some of the armada that was deployed in the recent bombing of Iraq and in Operation Desert Storm against the same country following its invasion of Kuwait was from the fleet permanently stationed on the Korean Peninsula. It is true too that at the moment the North/South Korean border is the most fortified in the world. The border line is littered with anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles and is constantly patrolled by warplanes from both sides. It is common knowledge that America also keeps an eye on any military movement or build-up in the north through spy satellites. The DPRK is said to have an estimated one million soldiers and a huge arsenal of various weapons. Although the DPRK regards herself as a developing country, she can however be classified as a super-power in terms of military might. The DPRK is capable of producing medium and long-range missiles. Last year, for example, she test-fired a medium range missile over Japan, an action that greatly shook and alarmed the US, Japan and South Korea. The DPRK says the projectile was a satellite. There have also been fears that she was planning to test another ballistic missile capable of reaching North America.

War ensures global nuclear destruction Lee Wha Rang, Korea Web Weekly, September 13, 1999, http://www.kimsoft.com/1997/lee0913.htm, accessed 3/17/03 Meanwhile, Kim Dae Jung should tell his Japanese friends to keep their mouth shut and tone down their anti-North Korea rhetoric. Kim should hire specialists on American legal terms - fight fire with fire - lawyers against lawyers. As long as Kim is represented by amateurs, he will be clobbered by America's Harvard lawyers - the most bright, cunning and vicious negotiators on Earth, the consummate masters of forked-tongues. The Korean peninsula sits on an atomic powder keg and any misstep

will ignite it into a global NBC war and tens of millions of people - Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and Americans - will die horrible death. The Earth day after will not be suitable for human habitation.

War in North Korea would spread to global nuclear conflict Kim Myong Chol, November 24, 1998, www.nautilus.org/for a/security/23C_Kim.html The long-sealed Pandora's box would be unlocked, loosing genies onto the world. The North Koreans would follow up through with their threat by announcing that they have succeeded in fabricating not only atomic bombs but hydrogen bombs small enough to be delivered by their small fleet of ICBMS. The Japanese and the Germans would decide to join the nuclear club. The East Asian tensions would be ratcheted up. The European front is quiet except for the Balkan situation, which has little possibility of flaring up into a nuclear exchange. The Mideast situation will remain still tense, but a nuclear shoot-out is a remote possibility. However, the Northeast Asian situation is quite alarming, because two million-strong armies, both armed with nuclear weapons, confront each other along the 38th Parallel in Korea in a near-war tension in the absence of a peace treaty. The first casualties in a nuclear conflagration in Korea would be South Korea and Japan, which have the world's heaviest concentration of operating nuclear power stations to serve the most booming economies on earth. The second would include the USA, Russia, and China. ICBMs fired from the USA and North Korea would cross their paths over Japan and the Pacific, joined by those launched from Russia and China.

Nuclear Meltdowns Meltdowns obliterate all life on earth Harvery Wasserman, Sen. Advisor Nuclear Info and Res. Service, MA History U. Chicago, 2004, “Nuclear Power and Terrorism,” Spring, v. 17, no. 1, www.earthisland.org/eijournal/new_articles.cfm?articleID=457&journalID=63

Infants and small children would quickly die en masse. Pregnant women would spontaneously abort or give birth to horribly deformed offspring. Ghastly sores, rashes, ulcerations and burns would afflict the skin of millions. Heart attacks, stroke and multiple organ failure would kill thousands on the spot. Emphysema, hair loss, nausea, inability to eat or drink or swallow, diarrhea and incontinence, sterility and impotence, asthma and blindness would afflict hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Then comes the wave of cancers, leukemias, lymphomas, tumors and hellish diseases for which new names will have to be invented. Evacuation would be impossible, but thousands would die trying. Attempts to quench the fires would be futile. More than 800,000 Soviet draftees forced through Chernobyl's seething remains in a futile attempt to clean it up are still dying from their exposure. At Indian Point, the molten cores would burn uncontrolled for days, weeks and years. Who would volunteer for such an American task force? The immediate damage from an Indian Point attack (or a domestic accident) would render all five boroughs of New York City an apocalyptic wasteland. As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, natural ecosystems would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed. Spiritually, psychologically, financially and ecologically, our nation would never recover. This is what we missed by a mere 40 miles on September 11. Now that we are at war, this is what could be happening as you read this. There are 103 of these potential Bombs of the Apocalypse operating in the US. They generate a mere 8 percent of our

total energy. Since its deregulation crisis, California cut its electric consumption by some 15 percent. Within a year, the US could cheaply replace virtually all the reactors with increased efficiency. Yet, as the terror escalates, Congress is fast-tracking the extension of the Price-Anderson Act, a form of legal immunity that protects reactor operators from liability in case of a meltdown or terrorist attack. Do we take this war seriously? Are we committed to the survival of our nation? If so, the ticking reactor bombs that could obliterate the very core of our life and of all future generations must be shut down.

Nuclear meltdowns cause extinction – millions die quickly Helen Caldicott, Physician and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, 1996, Satya, September, http://www.montelis.com/satya1backissues/sept96/nasa.html "As a physician," writes Dr. Helen Caldicott in Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do, "I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced." It matters little whether you listen to Bob Grant or WBAI, radiation knows no boundaries. And with an ever increasing number of nations acquiring the technology needed to produce a major disaster, the problem is growing exponentially. To bring the matter home, so to speak, let me remind you that that Indian Point nuclear reactor (one of over 100 such reactors in the U.S.) is only 35 miles from the center of Manhattan and, as Caldicott describes, "A meltdown would . . . [trap] millions of people in a radioactive hell, unable to escape, dying within forty-eight hours of acute radiation illness. Such an event is not unlikely according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, because this reactor is plagued with safety problems."

Oceans ( ) Oceans are key to extinction Oceans At Risk, 2005, “Empty Oceans, Empty Nets,” http://www.oceansatrisk.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=page&pageID=443 Oceans provide 95 percent of the living space for the earth's animals and plants, and are the largest source of protein in the world, feeding billions of people around the globe. Healthy oceans are essential to the survival of our planet. Our oceans are at risk, and with them our food supplies, our coastal economies, and even ourselves. We must act now to preserve the earth’s web of life for future generations.

( ) Ocean health is key to prevent extinction Robin Kundis Craig, Law Prof @ Indiana, Winter 2003, “Taking Steps,” 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155, ln The world's oceans contain many resources and provide many services that humans consider valuable. "Occupy[ing] more than [seventy percent] of the earth's surface and [ninety-five percent] of the biosphere," n17 oceans provide food; marketable goods such as shells, aquarium fish, and pharmaceuticals; life support processes, including carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, and weather mechanics; and quality of life, both aesthetic and economic, for millions of people worldwide. n18 Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the ocean to humanity's well-being: "The ocean is the cradle of life on our planet, and it remains the axis of existence, the locus of planetary biodiversity, and the engine of the chemical and hydrological cycles that create and maintain our atmosphere and climate." n19 Ocean and coastal ecosystem services have been calculated to be worth over twenty billion dollars per year, worldwide. n20 In addition, many people assign heritage and existence value to the ocean and its creatures, viewing the world's seas as a common legacy to be passed on relatively intact to future generations. n21

Oil Peak Oil peak will cause global economic depression, and war Paul Roberts, energy expert and writer for Harpers,2004, The End of Oil, pg.12-13 Suppose, for example, that worldwide oil production hits a kind of peak and that, as at Ghawar, the amount of oil that oil companies and oil states can pull out of the ground plateaus or even begins to decline — a not altogether inconceivable scenario. Oil is finite, and although vast oceans of it remain underground, waiting to be pumped out and refined into gasoline for your Winnebago, this is old oil, in fields that have been known about for years or even decades. By contrast, the amount of new oil that is being discovered each year is declining; the peak year was 1960, and it has been downhill ever since. Given that oil cannot be produced without first being discovered, it is inevitable that, at some point, worldwide oil production must peak and begin declining as well — less than ideal circumstances for a global economy that depends on cheap oil for about 40 percent of its energy needs (not to mention 90 percent of its transportation fuel) and is nowhere even close to having alternative energy sources. The last three times oil production dropped off a cliff — the Arab oil embargo of 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War — the resulting price spikes pushed the world into recession. And these disruptions were temporary. Presumably, the effects of a long-term permanent disruption would be far more gruesome. As prices rose, consumers would quickly shift to other fuels, such as natural gas or coal, but soon enough, those supplies would also tighten and their prices would rise. An inflationary ripple effect would set in. As energy became more expensive, so would such energy-dependent activities as manufacturing and transportation. Commercial activity would slow, and segments of the global economy especially dependent on rapid growth — which is to say, pretty much everything these days — would tip into recession. The cost of goods and services would rise, ultimately depressing economic demand and throwing the entire economy into an enduring depression that would make 1929 look like a dress rehearsal and could touch off a desperate and probably violent contest for whatever oil supplies remained.

Overpopulation Overpopulation causes nuclear war – text modified Paul Ehrlich & Anne Ehrlich, Stanford Biologists, The Population Explosion, 1990 p 174-5 The population explosion contributes to international tensions and therefore makes a nuclear [war] holocaust more likely. Most people in our society can visualize the horrors of a large-scale nuclear war followed by a nuclear winter.' We call that possible end to our civilization "the Bang." Hundreds of millions of people would be killed outright, and billions more would follow from the disruption of agricultural systems and other indirect effects largely caused by the disruption of ecosystem services. it would be the ultimate "death-rate solution" to the population problem-a stunning contrast to the humane solution of lowering the global birthrate to slightly below the death rate for a few centuries. As this is written (mid-1989), it fortunately seems that the chances of the Bang have lessened. New-minded leadership in the Soviet Union is for the moment in the ascendancy. President Mikhail Gorbachev, along with a few other world leaders, seems to be aware that environmental security is at least as important as military strength in providing security to nations, and appears to be doing everything possible to damp down the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. An apparently more pragmatic government also is in place in the United States, although it is still too soon to tell whether the superpowers are on the road toward massive nuclear-arms reduction and true reconciliation. What is certain is that the structure of military forces around the world still provides plenty of chances for local conflicts to escalate into Armageddon even in the face of growing East-West rapprochement. There remains the problem that, as the world gets further and further out of control, crazies on both the left and the right may exert increasingly xenophobic pressures on national governments. The rise of fundamentalism in both East and West is a completely understandable but not at all encouraging sample of what the future may hold in terms of conflict. Those

struggling to achieve a permanently peaceful world still have much work to do, especially as growing and already overpopulated nations struggle to divide up dwindling resources in a deteriorating global environment.

Overpopulation causes biodiversity loss and human extinction Edward Otten, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, 2000-2001, http://www.ecology.org/biod/population/human_pop1.html The exponential growth of the human population, making humans the dominant species on the planet, is having a grave impact on biodiversity. This destruction of species by humans will eventually lead to a destruction of the human species through natural selection. While human beings have had an effect for the last 50,000 years, it has only been since the industrial revolution that the impact has been global rather than regional. This global impact is taking place through five primary processes: over harvesting, alien species introduction, pollution, habitat fragmentation, and outright habit destruction.

Ozone Ozone depletion causes complete extinction – scientific consensus is on our side Greenpeace, 1995, Full of Holes: Montreal Protocol and the Continuing Destruction of the Ozone Layer, http://archive.greenpeace.org/ozone/holes/holebg.html When chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina first postulated a link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone layer depletion in 1974, the news was greeted with scepticism, but taken seriously nonetheless. The vast majority of credible scientists have since confirmed this hypothesis. The ozone layer around the Earth shields us all from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without the ozone layer, life on earth would not exist. Exposure to increased levels of ultraviolet radiation can cause cataracts, skin cancer, and immune system suppression in humans as well as innumerable effects on other living systems. This is why Rowland's and Molina's theory was taken so seriously, so quickly - the stakes are literally the continuation of life on earth.

Pakistan Coup Pakistani coup leads to India-Pakistan nuclear war The Washington Post, 10/21/2001 The prospect of Pakistan being taken over by Islamic extremists is especially worrisome because it possesses nuclear weapons. The betting among military strategists is that India, another nuclear power, would not stand idly by, if it appeared that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal were about to fall into the hands of extremists. A preemptive action by India to destroy Pakistan's nuclear stockpile could provoke a new war on the subcontinent. The U.S. military has conducted more than 25 war games involving a confrontation between a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and each has resulted in nuclear war, said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert on strategic games. Having both the United States and India fighting Muslims would play into the hands of bin Laden, warned Mackubin Owens, a strategist at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "He could point out once again that this is the new crusade," Owens said. The next step that worries experts is the regional effect of turmoil in Pakistan. If its government fell, the experts fear, other Muslim governments friendly to the United States, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, might follow suit. "The ultimate nightmare is a pan-Islamic regime that possesses both oil and nuclear weapons," said Harlan Ullman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ullman argued that the arrival of U.S. troops in Pakistan to fight the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan could inadvertently help bin Laden achieve his goal of sparking an anti-American revolt in the country. Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, said it is possible "that we are sliding toward a summer-of-1914 sequence of events" -- when a cascading series of international incidents spun out of control and led to World War I.

Patriarchy Patriarchy is the root cause of war Betty Reardon, coordinator of the Peace Education Program at Columbia University, 1985, SEXISM AND THE WAR SYSTEM, p. 7. The profoundly sexist history of the human species indicates that the socially induced and prescribed separations and differences between sexes are a very significant component of the inner psychic constructs. They may well be the psychic origins of war, sexism, and all structures of violence and oppression. Various feminists have pointed to the oppression of women by men as the first and most fundamental form of structural oppression (see Reardon 1975 for citations from unpublished papers by feminist anthropologists). It is clear that for both boys and girls the first socially encountered other, a person they perceive as being different from themselves, is usually of the other sex; and our experience indicates that it is others, those different from us, who threaten us and instigate the fear that gives rise to the notion of enemy and, ultimately, the practice of war. Society reinforces and exacerbates this perception of otherness.

Civil war in Pakistan leads to loose nukes David Albright, Kevin O'Neill and Corey Hinderstein, October 4, 2001, ISIS Issue Brief, “Securing Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal: Principles for Assistance”, JaretLK, http://www.isisonline.org/publications/terrorism/pakassist.html A troubling question in the current situation is that a nuclear weapon or fissile material could fall into the wrong hands. Available information suggests that, despite official statements to the contrary, the Pakistani government may not have full confidence in the security of its nuclear arsenal. According to a former Clinton administration Energy Department official, even before the crisis, Pakistan had requested some kind of assistance to improve its physical security capabilities.3 The security threats to Pakistan's nuclear weapons arsenal include the following: Outsider Threat -- The possibility that armed individuals or groups from outside a facility gain access and steal weapons, weapons components or fissile material. The outsiders' objective is to gain control of these items for their own use or to transfer them to another state or to other non-state actors. Insider Threat -- The possibility that individuals who work at a facility will remove weapons or weapons components without proper authorization. The insiders' objectives may be to control these items for their own use, transfer control of the items to a previously identified outsider, or to sell these items to a previously unidentified outsider. In the case of transfer, the insider may be motivated either by profit or ideological affinity with an outside group. Insider/Outsider Threat -- The possibility that insiders and outsiders conspire together to obtain weapons or weapon components. Again, the motivation for the theft may be either profit or ideology. Leakage of Sensitive Information -- Insiders provide key information about Pakistan's nuclear weapons to outsiders. The information could include classified nuclear weapons data, exact storage locations, security and access control arrangements, or operational details about the weapons. Loss of Central Control of Storage Facilities -- In the event of a civil war in Pakistan, clear lines of communication and control over weapons, weapons components, and information may be broken or lost entirely.

Pesticides Pesticides cause endocrine disruption, culminating in extinction – can’t reproduce NJ Environment, accessed 9-12-2003, “Pesticides,” http://www.njenvironment.org/pesticides.htm Not only are current gardening practices harmful to local ecosystems, but also expanding pesticide use appears to threaten the fertility and viability of human life. Theo Coburn's extensive research in Our Stolen Future suggests that the declining sperm count worldwide and the aberrations in animal sexuality may be the result of endocrine disrupting chemicals in our environment. Many pesticides mimic human hormones thereby sending inaccurate signals to our endocrine systems. "They bind to intracellular receptor proteins for steroid hormones and evoke hormonal effects in animals and humans." These hormonemimicking chemicals trick the estrogen receptors disrupting normal endocrine response. This disruption has been linked to the alarming increase in the U.S. of reproductive organ cancers. Information about endocrine system disrupters was not available to EPA when these pesticides were registered (not approved). The chemical industry is resisting testing for EDs (endocrine system disrupters). However, it is interesting to note that Gerber' baby foods tolerate 0% pesticide residues in baby food and have banned the use of genetically altered seed in their foods.

Poverty Poverty is on-par with an ongoing nuclear war – it kills millions a year Mumia Abu-Jamal, 9-19-1998, “A Quiet and Deadly Violence,” www1.minn.net/~meis/quietdv.htm We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural" violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; "By `structural violence' I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting `structural' with `behavioral violence' by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on." -- (Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it -- really? Gilligan notes: "[E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world." [Gilligan, p. 196]

War is inevitable without poverty alleviation Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, Ambassador to the United States, The Republic of Rwanda Spring 1999, Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce Fourth, Rwanda must face the problem of poverty and underdevelopment. Rwanda is a landlocked country that has for most of the last 100 years remained an impoverished enclave in the heart of Africa. Over 95 percent of the population live off a subsistence economy that cannot cater for their housing, clothing, health, education and nutritional needs. Irrespective of the usual claims that governments have made in the past, the Rwandese people of all ethnic backgrounds live in conditions of extreme poverty. Coffee and tea, introduced by colonial authorities, is still grown and exported without adding much value, but hardly benefiting those who grow it. The population of Rwanda will double in the next twenty years to a figure of about sixteen million people by the year 2020. Poverty, in addition to limiting the choices of the Rwandese people, creates a fertile ground for conflict as the local elite scramble for limited resources by recruiting ordinary people to factional interests. The strategy for undoing this legacy must necessarily begin with investment in people through their health and education. The struggle to acquire scientific, technological and managerial skills is very crucial, especially in an era where most economies are increasingly becoming knowledge- based. The other aspects of this strategy include agricultural transformation; infrastructure development; and creating an enabling legal and regulatory environment that will promote trade and investment. But this will be very difficult to achieve if the problem of Rwanda's external debt remains unresolved, constituting an unbearable burden to ordinary Rwandese in a post-genocide era.

Prolif Bad ( ) Proliferation causes extinction. Guardian, 3-31-2008, Project Syndicate, “The Nuclear Risk,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/31/newnuclearrisk Vital pillars of the old arms-control and anti-proliferation regime have either been destroyed - as was the case with the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty - or substantially weakened, as with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT). Responsibility for this lies largely with the Bush administration, which, by terminating the ABM treaty, not only weakened the international control systems for nuclear weapons, but also sat on its hands when confronted with the NPT's imminent collapse. At the beginning of the 21st century, proliferation of military nuclear technology is one of the major threats to humanity, particularly if this technology falls into terrorists' hands. The use of nuclear weapons by terrorists would not only result in a major humanitarian tragedy, but also would most likely move the world beyond the threshold for actually waging a nuclear war. The consequences would be horrific.

Proliferation causes nuclear war Victor Utgoff, Summer 2002, Survival, vol 44, no. 2, ProQuest In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed to a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear ‘sixshooters’ on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

Proliferation causes war: 6 scenarios Graham Gerard Ong, officer with the Ministry of Information and the Arts (Singapore), 2000, http://www.mindef.gov.sg/safti/pointer/Vol27_2/Denying%20Armageddon.htm Military analyst Roger Hilsman in his recent book, From Nuclear Military Strategy to a World Without War5, draws up six possible scenarios of "Armageddon" or nuclear war of a global scale that mankind can face in the near future: · Scenario 1: Group sponsored nuclear terrorism. A terrorist organisation might smuggle a small suitcase type nuclear bomb in a city of a major power and set it off to dramatise its demands. · Scenario 2: State sponsored nuclear terrorism. An "outlaw" state that acquires or manufactures nuclear weapons may try to provoke a war between the US and Russia or the US and China by sending agents to set off nuclear devices in the capitols of these countries. · Scenario 3: Nuclear war between third and fourth countries. A good possibility is India and Pakistan. Both have tested nuclear weapons, and in the case of war are very likely to use them. · Scenario 4: A war between Israel and a Muslim state in the Middle East. Israel is known to have built a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Countries such as Iraq and Iran have engaged in nuclear weapons activities before. If any of these or other Muslim states acquire such weapons, a war with Israel could easily escalate into nuclear warfare. · Scenario 5: Nuclear war between nuclear powers purely by accident. Hilsman predicts that the number of states possessing nuclear weapons will rise such that in a decade or two, several dozen countries will have such weapons. The chances for miscalculation will be proportionately higher in launching such weapons. · Scenario 6: The "bolt from the blue" scenario. This is a war that starts when one nuclear state attacks an adversary without warning during a period of low international tension and succeeds in achieving surprise. Countries that have autocratic governments allow an irrational leader to carry out such attacks based on hatred and anger without much opposition.

Prolif Good Proliferation deters large-scale regional war David Karl, Ph.D. International Relations at the University of Southern California, “Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers,” International Security, Winter, 1996/1997, p. 90-91 Although this school bases its claims upon the U.S-Soviet Cold War nuclear relationship, it admits of no basic exception to the imperatives of nuclear deterrence. Nothing within the school’s thesis is intrinsic solely to the superpower experience. The nuclear “balance of terror” is seen as far from fragile. Nuclear-armed adversaries, regardless of context, should behave toward each other like the superpowers during the Cold War’s “nuclear peace.” The reason for this near-absolute claim is the supposedly immutable quality of nuclear weapons: their presence is the key variable in any deterrent situation, because fear of their devastating consequences simply overwhelms the operation of all other factors.’Martin van Creveld alleges that “the leaders of medium and small powers alike tend to be extremely cautious with regard to the nuclear weapons they possess or with which they are faced—the proof being that, to date, in every region where these weapons have been introduced, large-scale interstate warfare has disappeared.” Shai Feldman submits that “it is no longer disputed that the undeclared nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan have helped stabilize their relations in recent years. It is difficult to see how escalation of the conflict over Kashmir could have been avoided were it not for the two countries’ fear of nuclear escalation.” The spread of nuclear weapons technology is thus viewed by optimists as a positive development, so much so that some even advocate its selective abettance by current nuclear powers.’

Proliferation prevents miscalculations of damage which empirically causes the bloodiest wars Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, 1995, p. 6-7 Certainty about the relative strength of adversaries also makes war less likely. From the late nineteenth century onward, the speed of technological innovation increased the difficulty of estimating relative strengths and predicting the course of campaigns. Since World War II, technological advance has been even faster, but short of a ballistic missile defense breakthrough, this has not mattered. It did not disturb the American-Soviet military equilibrium, because one side’s missiles were not made obsolete by improvements in the other side’s missiles. In 1906, the British Dreadnought, with the greater range and firepower of its guns, made older battleships obsolete. This does not happen to missiles. As Bernard Brodie put it, “Weapons that do not have to fight their like do not become useless because of the advent of newer and superior types.” They may have to survive their like, but that is a much simpler problem to solve. Many wars might have been avoided had their outcomes been foreseen. “To be sure,” George Simmel wrote, “the most effective presupposition for preventing struggle, the exact knowledge of the comparative strength of the two parties, is very often only to be obtained by the actual fighting out of the conflict.” Miscalculation causes wars. One side expects victory at an affordable price, while the other side hopes to avoid defeat. Here the differences between conventional and nuclear worlds are fundamental. In the former, states are too often tempted to act on advantages that are wishfully discerned and narrowly calculated. In 1914, neither Germany nor France tried very hard to avoid a general war. Both hoped for victory even though they believed the opposing coalitions to be quite evenly matched.

Proliferation makes states too afraid of escalation to risk tension Peter Lavoy, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Security Studies, Summer, 1995, p. 707 Also in 1963, Richard Rosecrance claimed that fears about the strategic consequences of nuclear proliferation were exaggerated: “The nth country ‘problem’ may not turn out to be a major ‘problem’.” At the close of the decade, Rosecrance identified what be considered might become another salutary feature of nuclear proliferation: “If each threat of minor war makes the two greatest states redouble their efforts in tandem to prevent major war, it is even conceivable that nuclear dispersion could have a net beneficial impact. Several years later Robert Sandoval advanced what he called a “porcupine theory” of nuclear proliferation. According to this view, states with even modest nuclear capabilities would “walk like a porcupine through the forests of international affairs: no threat to its neighbors, too prickly for predators to swallow.”

Protectionism Protectionism causes nuclear war Michael Spicer, economist; member of the British Parliament, The Challenge from the East and the Rebirth of the West, 1996, p. 121 The choice facing the West today is much the same as that which faced the Soviet bloc after World War II: between meeting head-on the challenge of world trade with the adjustments and the benefits that it will bring, or of attempting to shut out markets that are growing and where a dynamic new pace is being set for innovative production. The problem about the second approach is not simply that it won't hold: satellite technology alone will ensure that he consumers will begin to demand those goods that the East is able to provide most cheaply. More fundamentally, it will guarantee the emergence of a fragmented world in which natural fears will be fanned and inflamed. A world divided into rigid trade blocs will be a deeply troubled and unstable place in which suspicion and ultimately envy will possibly erupt into a major war. I do not say that the converse will necessarily be true, that in a free trading world there will be an absence of all strife. Such a proposition would manifestly be absurd. But to trade is to become interdependent, and that is a good step in the direction of world stability. With nuclear weapons at two a penny, stability will be at a premium in the years ahead.

( ) Protectionism is the greatest threat to the global economy Daniel Ben-Ami, Fund Strategy, 6-19-2006, “Protection Racket”, ln Protectionism poses one of the greatest threats to the global economy, with potentially damaging repercussions for everyone who has a stake in it. But how likely is future protectionist conflict? Daniel Ben-Ami reports. Protectionism is one of the greatest threats to the prosperity of the global economy. Although the markets are currently preoccupied with inflation and risk aversion, in the longer term it could be rows over trade that pose a greater danger. Overall global GDP growth is strong and volatility is low. But an outbreak of protectionism would probably do more than anything else to damage growth and undermine markets. Of course, hardly anyone would say that they favour protectionism. Almost everyone would claim to support free trade as long as other countries behave fairly. The complaint is always that the other guy is not playing by the rules. He is responsible for dumping, rigging the rules or cheating in some other way.

Racism Racism outweighs all other impacts Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America, 1991, p. 155-56 To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and colonization, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching the point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of global population derives its power and privilege from sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.

Racial justice is a moral imperative. Human dignity demands that we treat people as ends in themselves, never as a means Paul Gordon Lauren, Regents Professor, University of Montana, Power and Prejudice, 1996, p. 321. Yet despite these many problems and centuries of wrestling to find solutions, normative questions about the ought rather than simply the is of global politics and diplomacy remain before us. Indeed, such questions are particularly pressing and acute in the area of racial discrimination. Race was the subject that placed the whole issue of human rights upon the international agenda in the first place, and for a vast majority in the world race remains the most critical and universal test of how people deal with other people on the basis of an ethical standard. The principle of racial equality itself flows from a basic ethical concept, that of human dignity which implies in its simples terms that every human being is an end in himself or herself, not a mere means to an end, and should be treated as such. Thus, it is only natural for people to ask whether the conduct of politics and diplomacy supports or opposes racial discrimination, which is the very negation of the principle of equality. This should not be at all surprising, for as scholar Stanley Hoffman writes in his penetrating book Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics, :“We must remember that states are led by human beings whose actions affect human beings with and outside: considerations of good and evil, right or wrong, are therefore both inevitable and legitimate.”

Russia-China ( ) Russia-China war goes nuclear Alexander Sharavin, 10-3-2001, Defense and Security Chinese propaganda has constantly been showing us skyscrapers in free trade zones in southeastern China. It should not be forgotten, however, that some 250 to 300 million people live there, i.e. at most a quarter of China’s population. A billion Chinese people are still living in misery. For them, even the living standards of a backwater Russian town remain inaccessibly high. They have absolutely nothing to lose. There is every prerequisite for “the final throw to the north.” The strength of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (CPLA) has been growing quicker than the Chinese economy. A decade ago the CPLA was equipped with inferior copies of Russian arms from later 1950s to the early 1960s. However, through its own efforts Russia has nearly managed to liquidate its most significant technological advantage. Thanks to our zeal, from antique MiG-21 fighters of the earliest modifications and S-75 air defense missile systems the Chinese antiaircraft defense forces have adopted Su-27 fighters and S-300 air defense missile systems. China’s air defense forces have received Tor systems instead of anti-aircraft guns which could have been used during World War II. The shock air force of our “eastern brethren” will in the near future replace antique Tu-16 and Il-28 airplanes with Su-30 fighters, which are not yet available to the Russian Armed Forces! Russia may face the “wonderful” prospect of combating the Chinese army, which, if full mobilization is called, is comparable in size with Russia’s entire population, which also has nuclear weapons (even tactical weapons become strategic if states have common borders) and would be absolutely insensitive to losses (even a loss of a few million of the servicemen would be acceptable to China). Such a war would be more horrible than the World War II. It would require from our state maximal tension, universal mobilization and complete accumulation of the army military hardware, up to the last tank or a plane, in a single direction (we would have to forget such “trifles” like Talebs and Basaev, but this does not guarantee success either). Massive nuclear strikes on basic military forces and cities of China would finally be the only way out, what would exhaust Russia’s armament completely. We have not got another set of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-based missiles, whereas the general forces would be extremely exhausted in the border combats. In the long run, even if the aggression would be stopped after the majority of the Chinese are killed, our country would be absolutely unprotected against the “Chechen” and the “Balkan” variants both, and even against the first frost of a possible nuclear winter.

Russian Collapse Russian civil war leads to nuclear war and nuclear terrorism against the US Steven R. David, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Foreign Affairs Jan 1999 Should Russia succumb to internal war, the consequences for the United States and Europe will be severe. A major power like Russia -- even though in decline -- does not suffer civil war quietly or alone. An embattled Russian Federation might provoke opportunistic attacks from enemies such as China. Massive flows of refugees would pour into central and western Europe. Armed struggles in Russia could easily spill into its neighbors. Damage from the fighting, particularly attacks on nuclear plants, would poison the environment of much of Europe and Asia. Within Russia, the consequences would be even worse. Just as the sheer brutality of the last Russian civil war laid the basis for the privations of Soviet communism, a second civil war might produce another horrific regime. Most alarming is the real possibility that the violent disintegration of Russia could lead to loss of control over its nuclear arsenal. No nuclear state has ever fallen victim to civil war, but even without a clear precedent the grim consequences can be foreseen. Russia retains some 20,000 nuclear weapons and the raw material for tens of thousands more, in scores of sites scattered throughout the country. So far, the government has managed to prevent the loss of any weapons or much material. If war erupts, however, Moscow's already weak grip on nuclear sites will slacken, making weapons and supplies available to a wide range of anti-American groups and states. Such dispersal of nuclear weapons represents the greatest physical threat America now faces. And it is hard to think of anything that would increase this threat more than the chaos that would follow a Russian civil war.

Civil war in Russia would go nuclear Steven R. David, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Foreign Affairs Jan 1999 Only three countries, in fact, meet both criteria: Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Civil conflict in Mexico would produce waves of disorder that would spill into the United States, endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, destroying a valuable export market, and sending a torrent of refugees northward. A rebellion in Saudi Arabia could destroy its ability to export oil, the oil on which the industrialized world depends. And internal war in Russia could devastate Europe and trigger the use of nuclear weapons. Of course, civil war in a cluster of other states could seriously harm American interests. These countries include Indonesia, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, and China. In none, however, are the stakes as high or the threat of war as imminent.

( ) Russian breakup causes nuclear war – comparative evidence you prefer magnitude over probability in this instance Henry E. Hale, Poly Sci Prof @ Indiana, and Rein Taagepera, Political Scientist and politician, 2002, “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?”, Europe-Asia Studies, v. 54, no. 7, JSTOR A fragmenting Russia could pose extreme security concerns for the West, of which the nuclear danger is the most obvious. While the former Soviet republics were willing to cede their arms to Russia, a collapsed Russia would be likely to have no clear single 'successor' to which the weapons would best be transferred. This could make it nearly impossible to consolidate Russia's nuclear arsenal, which would in turn seriously complicate international diplomacy. Indeed, given the tendency of some Russian regional leaders to spout anti-Semitic slogans or otherwise thumb their noses at norms of human rights, their hold on nuclear weapons could radically increase the likelihood that these weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists or other groups that would like to use them for more than just defensive deterrence. Even if this likelihood is small, the possible outcome is sufficiently grave to merit significant effort to prevent it from occurring.

Russian Economy Russian economic collapse causes nuclear conflict Steven David, Prof. of political science at Johns Hopkins, 1999, Foreign Affairs If internal war does strike Russia, economic deterioration will be a prime cause. From 1989 to the present, the GDP has fallen by 50 percent. In a society where, ten years ago, unemployment scarcely existed, it reached 9.5 percent in 1997 with many economists declaring the true figure to be much higher. Twenty-two percent of Russians live below the official poverty line (earning less than $ 70 a month). Modern Russia can neither collect taxes (it gathers only half the revenue it is due) nor significantly cut spending. Reformers tout privatization as the country's cure-all, but in a land without well-defined property rights or contract law and where subsidies remain a way of life, the prospects for transition to an American-style capitalist economy look remote at best. As the massive devaluation of the ruble and the current political crisis show, Russia's condition is even worse than most analysts feared. If conditions get worse, even the stoic Russian people will soon run out of patience. A future conflict would quickly draw in Russia's military. In the Soviet days civilian rule kept the powerful armed forces in check. But with the Communist Party out of office, what little civilian control remains relies on an exceedingly fragile foundation -- personal friendships between government leaders and military commanders. Meanwhile, the morale of Russian soldiers has fallen to a dangerous low. Drastic cuts in spending mean inadequate pay, housing, and medical care. A new emphasis on domestic missions has created an ideological split between the old and new guard in the military leadership, increasing the risk that disgruntled generals may enter the political fray and feeding the resentment of soldiers who dislike being used as a national police force. Newly enhanced ties between military units and local authorities pose another danger. Soldiers grow ever more dependent on local governments for housing, food, and wages. Draftees serve closer to home, and new laws have increased local control over the armed forces. Were a conflict to emerge between a regional power and Moscow, it is not at all clear which side the military would support. Divining the military's allegiance is crucial, however, since the structure of the Russian Federation makes it virtually certain that regional conflicts will continue to erupt. Russia's 89 republics, krais, and oblasts grow ever more independent in a system that does little to keep them together. As the central government finds itself unable to force its will beyond Moscow (if even that far), power devolves to the periphery. With the economy collapsing, republics feel less and less incentive to pay taxes to Moscow when they receive so little in return. Three-quarters of them already have their own constitutions, nearly all of which make some claim to sovereignty. Strong ethnic bonds promoted by shortsighted Soviet policies may motivate non-Russians to secede from the Federation. Chechnya's successful revolt against Russian control inspired similar movements for autonomy and independence throughout the country. If these rebellions spread and Moscow responds with force, civil war is likely. Should Russia succumb

to internal war, the consequences for the United States and Europe will be severe. A major power like Russia -- even though in decline -- does not suffer civil war quietly or alone. An embattled Russian Federation might provoke opportunistic attacks from enemies such as China. Massive flows of refugees would pour into central and western Europe. Armed struggles in Russia could easily spill into its neighbors. Damage from the fighting, particularly attacks on nuclear plants, would poison the environment of much of Europe and Asia. Within Russia, the consequences would be even worse. Just as the sheer brutality of the last Russian civil war laid the basis for the privations of Soviet communism, a second civil war might produce another horrific regime. Most alarming is the real possibility that the violent disintegration of Russia could lead to loss of control over its nuclear arsenal. No nuclear state has ever fallen victim to civil war, but even without a clear precedent the grim consequences can be foreseen. Russia retains some 20,000 nuclear weapons and the raw material for tens of thousands more, in scores of sites scattered throughout the country. So far, the government has managed to prevent the loss of any weapons or much material. If war erupts, however, Moscow's already weak grip on nuclear sites will slacken, making weapons and supplies available to a wide range of anti-American groups and states. Such dispersal of nuclear weapons represents the greatest physical threat America now faces. And it is hard to think of anything that would increase this threat more than the chaos that would follow a Russian civil war.

( ) Collapse of the Russian economy causes Rusisan breakup and secessionism Henry E. Hale, Poly Sci Prof @ Indiana, and Rein Taagepera, Political Scientist and politician, 2002, “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?”, Europe-Asia Studies, v. 54, no. 7, JSTOR From the perspective of Russia's own history, then, Russia's survival looks to be overdetermined in light of comparisons with the USSR. But ethnic politics in the USSR once looked quite stable too, before conditions arose that put separatist dynamics into play. What kinds of conditions might turn the seemingly impossible into reality? In the Soviet case the immediate precipitating factor was a virtual collapse of central state institutions when the August 1991 coup failed and split the military at the same time that it confirmed fears in many republics that Russia could never fully be trusted. While a full analysis of such 'triggering' events is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to lay out some scenarios that could conceivably (though not probably) beset Russia in the foreseeable future. * Economic collapse. For one thing, one could conceive of a total economic collapse, far worse than the August 1998 crisis, perhaps involving sustained hyperinflation. If such a severe depression were to render the federal government virtually useless (or even harmful) to its citizens, this could trigger a combination of secession and state

collapse as regions decide that they are better off trying to go it alone.

Russian Resurgence Russian resurgence causes global instability and WMD use Ariel Cohen, Ph.D, Senior Policy Analyst, Heritage Foundation Reports, 1-25-97 Much is at stake in Eurasia for the U.S. and its allies. Attempts to restore its empire will doom Russia's transition to a democracy and free-market economy. The ongoing war in Chechnya alone has cost Russia $ 6 billion to date (equal to Russia's IMF and World Bank loans for 1995). Moreover, it has extracted a tremendous price from Russian society. The wars which would be required to restore the Russian empire would prove much more costly not just for Russia and the region, but for peace, world stability, and security. As the former Soviet arsenals are spread throughout the NIS, these conflicts may escalate to include the use of weapons of mass destruction. Scenarios including unauthorized missile launches are especially threatening. Moreover, if successful, a reconstituted Russian empire would become a major destabilizing influence both in Eurasia and throughout the world. It would endanger not only Russia's neighbors, but also the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East. And, of course, a neo-imperialist Russia could imperil the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf. n15 Vladimir Zhirinovsky, mouthpiece for the most irredentist elements in the Russian security and military services, constantly articulates this threat. Domination of the Caucasus would bring Russia closer to the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East. Russian imperialists, such as radical nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have resurrected the old dream of obtaining a warm port on the Indian Ocean. If Russia succeeds in establishing its domination in the south, the threat to Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, and Afganistan will increase. The independence of pro-Western Georgia and Azerbaijan already has been undermined by pressures from the Russian armed forces and covert actions by the intelligence and security services, in addition to which Russian hegemony would make Western political and economic efforts to stave off Islamic militancy more difficult. Eurasian oil resources are pivotal to economic development in the early 21st century. The supply of Middle Eastern oil would become precarious if Saudi Arabia became unstable, or if Iran or Iraq provoked another military conflict in the area. Eurasian oil is also key to the economic development of the southern NIS. Only with oil revenues can these countries sever their dependence on Moscow and develop modem market economies and free societies. Moreover, if these vast oil reserves were tapped and developed, tens of thousands of U.S. and Western jobs would be created. The U.S. should ensure free access to these reserves for the benefit of both Western and local economies.

Secession Unbridled secession leads to global war and WMD use Gidon Gottlieb, Leo Spitz Professor of International Law and Diplomacy University of Chicago Law School, 1993, Nation Against State, p. 26-27 Self-determination unleashed and unchecked by balancing principles constitutes a menace to the society of states. There is simply no way in which all the hundreds of peoples who aspire to sovereign independence can be granted a state of their own without loosening fearful anarchy and disorder on a planetary scale. The proliferation of territorial entities poses exponentially greater problems for the control of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and multiplies situations in which external intervention could threaten the peace. It increases problems for the management of all global issues, including terrorism, AIDS, the environment, and population growth. It creates conditions in which domestic strife in remote territories can drag powerful neighbors into local hostilities, creating ever widening circles of conflict. Events in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union drove this point home. Like Russian dolls, ever smaller ethnic groups dwelling in larger units emerged to secede and to demand independence. Georgia, for example, has to contend with the claims of South Ossetians and Abkhazians for independence, just as the Russian Federation is confronted with the separatism of Tartaristan. An international system made up of several hundred independent territorial states cannot be the basis for global security and prosperity.

Soft Power 30 regional conflicts will go global in a world without U.S. soft power Joseph Nye, badass and frmr assis. Sec defense, Winter 1996, W. Q., p ln While generally less threatening to U.S. interests than global or regional balance of power conflicts, communal conflicts are the most likely kind of post-cold war conflict and have thus far proved the most frequent. Less than 10 percent of the 170 states in today's world are ethnically homogenous. Only half have one ethnic group that accounts for as much as 75 percent of their population. Africa, in particular, is a continent of a thousand ethnic and linguistic groups squeezed into some 50-odd states, many of them with borders determined by colonial powers in the last century with little regard to traditional ethnic boundaries. The former Yugoslavia was a country with five nationalities, four languages, three religions, and two

. As a result of such disjunctions between borders and peoples, there have been some 30 communal conflicts since the end of the Cold War, many of them still ongoing. Communal conflicts, particularly those involving wars of secession, are very difficult to manage through the UN and other institutions alphabets

built to address interstate conflicts. The UN, regional organizations, alliances, and individual states cannot provide a universal answer to the dilemma of self-determination versus the inviolability of established borders, particularly when so many states face potential communal conflicts of their own. In a world of identity crises on many levels of analysis, it is not clear which selves deserve sovereignty: nationalities, ethnic groups, linguistic groups, or religious groups. Similarly, uses of force for deterrence, compellence, and reassurance are much harder to carry out when both those using force and those on the receiving end are disparate coalitions of international organizations, states, and subnational groups. Moreover,

communal conflicts by themselves threaten security beyond their regions, some impose risks of "horizontal" escalation, or the spread to other states within their respective regions. This can happen through the involvement of affiliated ethnic groups that spread across borders, the sudden flood of refugees into neighboring states, or the use of neighboring territories to ship weapons to combatants. The use of ethnic propaganda also raises the risk of "vertical" escalation to more intense violence, more sophisticated and destructive weapons, and harsher attacks on civilian populations as well as military personnel. There is also the danger that communal although few

conflicts could become more numerous if the UN and regional security organizations lose the credibility, willingness, and capabilities necessary to deal with such conflicts.

Leadership by the United States, as the world's leading economy, its most powerful military force,, and a leading democracy, is a key factor in limiting the frequency and destructiveness of great power, regional, and communal conflicts. The paradox of the post-cold war role of the United States is that it is the most powerful state in terms of both "hard" power resources (its economy and military forces) and "soft" ones (the appeal of its political system and culture), yet it is not so powerful that it can achieve all its international goals by acting alone. The United States lacks both the international and domestic Preventing and Addressing Conflicts: The Pivotal U.S. Role

prerequisites to resolve every conflict, and in each case its role must be proportionate to its interests at stake and the costs of pursuing them. Yet the United States can continue to

The U.S. role will thus not be that of a lone global policeman; rather, the United States can frequently serve as the sheriff of the posse, leading shifting coalitions of friends and allies to address shared security concerns within the legitimizing framework of international organizations. This requires sustained attention to the infrastructure and institutional mechanisms that make U.S. leadership effective and joint action possible: forward enable and mobilize international coalitions to pursue shared security interests, whether or not the United States itself supplies large military forces.

stationing and preventive deployments of U.S. and allied forces, prepositioning of U.S. and allied equipment, advance planning and joint training to ensure interoperability with allied forces, and steady improvement in the conflict resolution abilities of an interlocking set of bilateral alliances, regional security organizations and alliances, and global institutions.

Soft power is key to solve a laundry list of harms Lex Rieffel, Former U.S. Treasury official and a graduate professor at George Washington University, 2005, “Reaching Out: Americans Serving Overseas”, NM, http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/20051207rieffel.pdf Accordingly, one of the great challenges for the USA today is to build a broad coalition of like-minded nations and a set of international institutions capable of maintaining order and addressing global problems such as nuclear proliferation, epidemics like HIV/AIDS and avian flu, failed states like Somalia and Myanmar, and environmental degradation. The costs of acting alone or in small coalitions are now more clearly seen to be unsustainable. The limitations of “hard” instruments of foreign policy have been amply demonstrated in Iraq. Military power can dislodge a tyrant with great efficiency but cannot build stable and prosperous nations. Appropriately, the appointment of Karen Hughes as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs suggests that the Bush Administration is gearing up to rely more on “soft” instruments

Separation Of Powers Lack of SOP causes nuclear war – gender paraphrased Ray Forrester Professor, Hastings College of the Law, University of California August 1989 The George Washington Law Review 57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1636 “Presidential Wars in the Nuclear Age: An Unresolved Problem.” Abramson, Wherever President Goes, the Nuclear War 'Football' is Beside Him, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1981, at 10, col. 1 (copyright, 1981, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission). On the basis of this report, the startling fact is that one man [person] alone has the ability to start a nuclear war. A basic theory--if not the basic theory of our Constitution--is that concentration of power in any one person, or one group, is dangerous to [humankind]mankind. The Constitution, therefore, contains a strong system of checks and balances, starting with the separation of powers between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The message is that no one of them is safe with unchecked power. Yet, in what is probably the most dangerous governmental power ever possessed, we find the potential for world destruction lodged in the discretion of one person. As a result of public indignation aroused by the Vietnam disaster, in which tens of thousands lost their lives in military actions initiated by a succession of Presidents, Congress in 1973 adopted, despite presidential veto, the War Powers Resolution. Congress finally asserted its checking and balancing duties in relation to the making of presidential wars. Congress declared in section 2(a) that its purpose was to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations. The law also stated in section 3 that [t]he President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated. . . . Other limitations not essential to this discussion are also provided. The intent of the law is clear. Congress undertook to check the President, at least by prior consultation, in any executive action that might lead to hostilities and war. [*1638] President Nixon, who initially vetoed the resolution, claimed that it was an unconstitutional restriction on his powers as Executive and Commander in Chief of the military. His successors have taken a similar view. Even so, some of them have at times complied with the law by prior consultation with representatives of Congress, but obedience to the law has been uncertain and a subject of continuing controversy between Congress and the President. Ordinarily, the issue of the constitutionality of a law would be decided by the Supreme Court. But, despite a series of cases in which such a decision has been sought, the Supreme Court has refused to settle the controversy. The usual ground for such a refusal is that a "political question" is involved. The rule is well established that the federal judiciary will decide only "justiciable" controversies. "Political questions" are not "justiciable." However, the standards established by the Supreme Court in 1962 in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, to determine the distinction between "justiciable controversies" and "political questions" are far from clear. One writer observed that the term "political question" [a]pplies to all those matters of which the court, at a given time, will be of the opinion that it is impolitic or inexpedient to take jurisdiction. Sometimes this idea of inexpediency will result from the fear of the vastness of the consequences that a decision on the merits might entail. Finkelstein, Judicial Self-Limitation, 37 HARV. L. REV. 338, 344 (1924)(footnote omitted). It is difficult to defend the Court's refusal to assume the responsibility of decisionmaking on this most critical issue. The Court has been fearless in deciding other issues of "vast consequences" in many historic disputes, some involving executive war power. It is to be hoped that the Justices will finally do their duty here. But in the meantime the spectre of singleminded power persists, fraught with all of the frailties of human nature that each human possesses, including the President. World history is filled with tragic examples. Even if the Court assumed its responsibility to tell us whether the Constitution gives Congress the necessary power to check the President, the War Powers Resolution itself is unclear. Does the Resolution require the President to consult with Congress before launching a nuclear attack? It has been asserted that "introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities" refers only to military personnel and does not include the launching of nuclear missiles alone. In support of this interpretation, it has been argued that Congress was concerned about the human losses in Vietnam and in other presidential wars, rather than about the weaponry. Congress, of course, can amend the Resolution to state explicitly that "the introduction of Armed Forces" includes missiles as well as personnel. However, the President could continue to act without prior consultation by renewing the claim first made by President [*1639] Nixon that the Resolution is an unconstitutional invasion of the executive power. Therefore, the real solution, in the absence of a Supreme Court decision, would appear to be a constitutional amendment. All must obey a clear rule in the Constitution. The adoption of an amendment is very difficult. Wisely, Article V requires that an amendment may be proposed only by the vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress or by the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, and the proposal must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions of three-fourths of the states. Despite the difficulty, the Constitution has been amended twenty-six times. Amendment can be done when a problem is so important that it arouses the attention and concern of a preponderant majority of the American people. But the people must be made aware of the problem. It is hardly necessary to belabor the relative importance of the control of nuclear warfare. A constitutional amendment may be, indeed, the appropriate method. But the most difficult issue remains. What should the amendment provide? How can the problem be solved specifically? The Constitution in section 8 of Article I stipulates that "[t]he Congress shall have power . . . To declare War. . . ." The idea seems to be that only these many representatives of the people, reflecting the public will, should possess the power to commit the lives and the fortunes of the nation to warfare. This approach makes much more sense in a democratic republic than entrusting the decision to one person, even though he may be designated the "Commander in Chief" of the military forces. His power is to command the war after the people, through their representatives, have made the basic choice to submit themselves and their children to war. There is a recurring relevation of a paranoia of power throughout human history that has impelled one leader after another to draw their people into wars which, in hindsight, were foolish, unnecessary, and, in some instances, downright insane. Whatever may be the psychological influences that drive the single decisionmaker to these irrational commitments of the lives and fortunes of others, the fact remains that the behavior is a predictable one in any government that does not provide an effective check and balance against uncontrolled power in the hands of one human. We, naturally, like to think that our leaders are above such irrational behavior. Eventually, however, human nature, with all its weakness, asserts itself whatever the setting. At least that is the evidence that experience and history give us, even in our own relatively benign society, where the Executive is subject to the rule of law. [*1640] Vietnam and other more recent engagements show that it can happen and has happened here. But the "nuclear football"--the ominous "black bag" --remains in the sole possession of the President. And, most

important, his decision to launch a nuclear missile would be, in fact if not in law, a declaration of nuclear war, one which the nation and, indeed, humanity in general, probably would be unable to survive.

Space Space prevents inevitable extinction James Oberg, space writer and a former space flight engineer based in Houston, 1999, Space Power Theory, http://www.jamesoberg.com/books/spt/new-CHAPTERSw_figs.pdf We have the great gift of yet another period when our nation is not threatened; and our world is free from opposing coalitions with great global capabilities. We can use this period to take our nation and our fellow men into the greatest adventure that our species has ever embarked upon. The United States can lead, protect, and help the rest of [hu]mankind to move into space. It is particularly fitting that a country comprised of people from all over the globe assumes that role. This is a manifest destiny worthy of dreamers and poets, warriors and conquerors. In his last book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan presents an emotional argument that our species must venture into the vast realm of space to establish a spacefaring civilization. While acknowledging the very high costs that are involved in manned spaceflight, Sagan states that our very survival as a species depends on colonizing outer space. Astronomers have already identified dozens of asteroids that might someday smash into Earth. Undoubtedly, many more remain undetected. In Sagan’s opinion, the only way to avert inevitable catastrophe is for mankind to establish a permanent human presence in space. He compares humans to the planets that roam the night sky, as he says that humans will too wander through space. We will wander space because we possess a compulsion to explore, and space provides a truly infinite prospect of new directions to explore. Sagan’s vision is part science and part emotion. He hoped that the exploration of space would unify humankind. We propose that mankind follow the United States and our allies into this new sea, set with jeweled stars. If we lead, we can be both strong and caring. If we step back, it may be to the detriment of more than our country.

Space colonization harmoniously unites humanity The Columbus Dispatch, 5/23/2001 There may come a time when humans will consider space colonization. Initiatives such as the space station and a manned Mars landing could be steppingstones toward pitching a tent on another world. In one unexpected consequence, an international push into space could be the great uniter. The heavens, so immense and enigmatic, could make ethnic and religious groups look beyond their problems with each other. Everyone has a stake in this trip.

Space Militarization Space militarization will inevitably lead to conflict James Oberg, space writer and a former space flight engineer based in Houston, 1999, Space Power Theory, http://www.jamesoberg.com/books/spt/new-CHAPTERSw_figs.pdf Once in place, the use of space-based weapons, unlike nuclear weapons, will likely be unreserved, at least in their initial incarnation. This is in view of several factors. The first lies with their probable targets, low-earth-orbiting satellites, which are a relatively vulnerable prey whose remoteness and lack of human presence make them excellent candidates for preemptive strike. Lacking the stigma of the loss of life resulting from most other types of attack, the destruction of a satellite carries far less risk of earthbound retaliation. Popular sentiment—at least throughout the industrialized world—does not equate the loss of life against the loss of machinery, no matter how vital. The second factor lies in the disproportionate loss of war-making capability such a strike could inflict upon an adversary. Due to their vantage point, global reach, and station-keeping qualities, space systems enable system characteristics that would be expensive, if not impossible, to replicate by terrestrial systems if lost. Even if only LEO systems were lost, the combination of terrestrial and GEO systems required to replace LEO systems would be nearly as expensive. Thus, the side suffering a preemptive strike is faced with a very narrow set of options. A counter-attack in space could be launched, provided the attacker has not greatly limited his ability to do so. This would deprive the attacker of his vital space systems and provide a more level playing field for the conduct of an earthbound war. Or, a proportionate earthbound attack could be carried out that would deprive the attacker of enough non-space capability to compensate for his space advantage. Either option would likely prove difficult to effect in the wake of a no-notice opening engagement. The employment of space weapons for counterattack, provided they survive an opening salvo, will likely be limited by the destruction of supporting space-based communications, surveillance, and targeting systems. Unless there is a marked increase in system redundancy and replenishment capability, this equates to an initial and continued deficit of space support. Alternately, the conduct of massive earthbound operations is equally problematic due to its perceived escalation of the conflict. A possible third solution might take its cue from the nuclear strategy of assured mutual destruction. By pre-targeting an adversary’s critical space systems, a nation could deter a first strike through an implied mutual destruction of each side’s space assets. The problem with this strategy lies in the guaranteed operation of a nation’s space-based weaponry. To make this strategy a viable threat, the delivery of a crippling counterattack must appear to be certain. Unlike the nuclear scenario of the Cold War, the warning time of an attack in space would be greatly reduced and the redundancy of space-based counterattack systems would be limited. Augmenting space-based weapons, however, with ground-to-space and air-to-space weapons would function as a type of antisatellite triad in much the same way that a nuclear triad continues to serve as the cornerstone of US nuclear strategy. But this analogy to nuclear deterrence also suffers from the inability of space warfare to provide the ultimate trump card that a nuclear threat does. Absent the force-wide destruction that nuclear weapons promise, an adversary might willingly choose to eliminate space assets from the battlefield, perceiving himself to be disadvantaged in that arena.

Space militarization causes nuclear war, EU prolif, and blows up the world Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July-August 2001 International Socialist Review Issue 19. http://isreview.org/issues/19/NoamChomsky.shtml accessed 11/9/02 That’s a long pattern. So, it’s quite correct to think of militarization of space as serving the kinds of functions that navies, and to some extent armies, served a century ago: for protecting commercial interests and investment, for serving as a cover for socialization of the next phase of technological development, and for providing the means for a first strike if necessary or the use of force without concern for deterrence. Europe has been critical of the national missile defense, which everybody understands to be just a piece of the militarization of space. On the other hand, it’s beginning to shift. Chancellor Schröder of Germany recently pointed out that the European Union had better get involved in these programs. If not, they’ll be left behind in technological development for the next phase of economic progress. They want to make sure they won’t be left out of this aspect of it. They’re concerned about the dangers, which are quite real. Militarization of space could lead to blowing up the world. But it’s not all that important. Other things are far more significant to them.

Terrorism Unchecked terrorism will result in extinction Yonah Alexander, professor and director of the Inter-University for Terrorism Studies in Israel and the United States. “Terrorism myths and realities,” The Washington Times, August 28, 2003 Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns. Two myths in particular must be debunked immediately if an effective counterterrorism "best practices" strategy can be developed [e.g., strengthening international cooperation]. The first illusion is that terrorism can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated completely, provided the root causes of conflicts - political, social and economic - are addressed. The conventional illusion is that terrorism must be justified by oppressed people seeking to achieve their goals and consequently the argument advanced by "freedom fighters" anywhere, "give me liberty and I will give you death," should be tolerated if not glorified. This traditional rationalization of "sacred" violence often conceals that the real purpose of terrorist groups is to gain political power through the barrel of the gun, in violation of fundamental human rights of the noncombatant segment of societies. For instance, Palestinians religious movements [e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad] and secular entities [such as Fatah's Tanzim and Aqsa Martyr Brigades]] wish not only to resolve national grievances [such as Jewish settlements, right of return, Jerusalem] but primarily to destroy the Jewish state. Similarly, Osama bin Laden's international network not only opposes the presence of American military in the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, but its stated objective is to "unite all Muslims and establish a government that follows the rule of the Caliphs." The second myth is that strong action against terrorist infrastructure [leaders, recruitment, funding, propaganda, training, weapons, operational command and control] will only increase terrorism. The argument here is that law-enforcement efforts and military retaliation inevitably will fuel more brutal acts of violent revenge. Clearly, if this perception continues to prevail, particularly in democratic societies, there is the danger it will paralyze governments and thereby encourage further terrorist attacks. In sum, past experience provides useful lessons for a realistic future strategy. The prudent application of force has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for short- and long-term deterrence of terrorism. For example, Israel's targeted killing of Mohammed Sider, the Hebron commander of the Islamic Jihad, defused a "ticking bomb." The assassination of Ismail Abu Shanab - a top Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip who was directly responsible for several suicide bombings including the latest bus attack in Jerusalem - disrupted potential terrorist operations. Similarly, the U.S. military operation in Iraq eliminated Saddam Hussein's regime as a state sponsor of terror. Thus, it behooves those countries victimized by terrorism to understand a cardinal message communicated by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be: For

without victory,

there is no survival."

Terrorism causes a nuclear attack and extinction Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2002 Even the experts among us, Foggy Bottom wonks and think-tank philosophers, had dared to dream of a world free of the damoclean sword of mutual assured destruction. "The simple truth is that people simply forgot about nuclear danger for about a decade, and there were some pretty good reasons for doing so. I had a feeling like that myself," says Jonathan Schell, whose hair-raising tome, "The Fate of the Earth" (Knopf, 1982 ), helped fuel the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s. But in the bleak months since Sept. 11, the phantom menace of nuclear

with a vengeance--stalking our imaginations, confounding our leaders, confronting

catastrophe has come back us with a host of atomic terrors hitherto

barely imagined: hijacked airliners rammed down the throats of nuclear power plants; "dirty bombs" spraying lethal radiation and rendering huge swaths of cities uninhabitable for years to come. Looming over these lesser catastrophes is the threat of an actual nuclear weapons attack. After the lull of the '90s, we're learning to start worrying and fear The Bomb all over again. Only now America must face the possibility of dealing with

we're conjuring up visions of a suitcase bomb detonated at Times Square, a 10-kiloton dose of megadeath delivered in a truck to downtown Los more than just one or two mega-adversaries capable of sending our entire country up in a mushroom cloud. Now

Angeles or Chicago. Or a regional conflict, like the present one pitting India against nuclear rival Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir territory, escalating into global Armageddon. On the one hand, we're being confronted anew with the sublime terror

of extinction; on the other, with the banality and ridiculousness of a threat to our lives and our civilization from something that may be lurking in a briefcase, a pair of Hush Puppies or, as in the new Hollywood blockbuster "The Sum of All Fears," a cigarette-vending machine.

Terrorism causes global war and the destruction of civilization Walter Laqueur, Historian, Kirkus Reviews, 6-1-1999, ln Terrorism is nothing new. Fanatical groups have been wreaking havoc from time immemorial. Today two things have changed that together transform terrorism from a ''nuisance'' to ''one of the gravest dangers facing mankind.'' First terrorists be they Islamic extremists in the Middle East, ultranationalists in the US, or any number of other possible permutations seem to have changed from organized groups with clear ideological motives to small

There are no longer any moral limitations on what terrorists are willing to do, who and how many they are willing to kill. Second, these unhinged collectivities now have ready access to weapons of mass destruction. The technological skills are not that complex and the resources needed not too rare for terrorists to employ nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons where and when they wish. The consequences of such weapons in the hands of ruthless, rootless fanatics are not difficult to imagine. In addition to the destruction of countless lives, panic can grip any targeted society, unleashing retaliatory action which in turn can lead to conflagrations perhaps on a world scale. To combat such terrorist activities, states may come to rely more and more on dictatorial and authoritarian measures. In short, terrorism in the future may threaten the very foundations of modern civilizations. On all of this, Laqueur is quite convincing. Useful, too, is his clusters of the paranoid and hateful bent on vengeance and destruction for their own sake.

elaboration on the nature of the various terrorist threats we face. Yet he too often falls back on questionable, if not offensive, opinion. He asserts, for instance, that in non-Western countries ''human lives count for less,'' and so the danger of terrorism in these countries is

greater. This is simply unacceptable doggerel.

Terrorism – Lashout Terrorism causes the U.S. to lash out, precipitating global war Nicole Schwartz-Morgan, Assistant Professor of Politics and Economics at Royal Military College of Canada, 10/10/2001, “Wild Globalization and Terrorism,” http://www.wfs.org/mmmorgan.htm The terrorist act can reactivate atavistic defense mechanisms which drive us to gather around clan chieftans. Nationalistic sentiment re-awakens, setting up an implacable frontier which divides "us" from "them," each group solidifying its cohesion in a rising hate/fear of the other group. (Remember Yugoslavia?) To be sure, the allies are trying for the moment to avoid the language of polarization, insisting that "this is not a war," that it is "not against Islam," "civilians will not be targeted." But the word "war" was pronounced, a word heavy with significance which forces the issue of partisanship. And it must be understood that the sentiment of partisanship, of belonging to the group, is one of the strongest of human emotions. Because the enemy has been named in the media (Islam), the situation has become emotionally volatile. Another spectacular attack, coming on top of an economic recession could easily radicalize the latent attitudes of the United States, and also of Europe, where racial prejudices are especially close to the surface and ask no more than a pretext to burst out. This is the Sarajevo syndrome: an isolated act of madness becomes the pretext for a war that is just as mad, made of ancestral rancor, measureless ambitions, and armies in search of a war. We should not be fooled by our expressions of good will and charity toward the innocent victims of this or other distant wars. It is our own comfortable circumstances which permit us these benevolent sentiments. If conditions change so that poverty and famine put the fear of starvation in our guts, the human beast will reappear. And if epidemic becomes a clear and present danger, fear will unleash hatred in the land of the free, flinging missiles indiscriminately toward any supposed havens of the unseen enemy. And on the other side, no matter how profoundly complex and differentiated Islamic nations and tribes may be, they will be forced to behave as one clan by those who see advantage in radicalizing the conflict, whether they be themselves merchants or terrorists.

Terrorism leads to nuclear war Gregg Easterbrook, visiting fellow @ Brookings, 11-2-2001, CNN, p ln Terrorists may not be held by this, especially suicidal terrorists, of the kind that al Qaeda is attempting to cultivate. But I think, if I could leave you with one message, it would be this: that the search for terrorist atomic weapons would be of great benefit to the Muslim peoples of the world in addition to members, to people of the United States and Western Europe, because if an atomic warhead goes off in Washington, say, in the current environment or anything like it, in the 24 hours that followed, a hundred million Muslims would die as U.S. nuclear bombs rained down on every conceivable military target in a dozen Muslim countries.

Trade Free trade solves war Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute “Make Trade, Not War” http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html Different people have different solutions to war; none are as logical as free trade. The war hawks have pursued a policy of mutual assured destruction, arguing that bigger weapons make better deterrents. Others have argued for disarmament. While the causes of war are undoubtedly varied, protectionism clearly invites conflict. To this, free trade is a remedy. While diplomacy is important, there can be no better diplomacy than that which exists between common citizens of the world every day in a thousand spheres of life. The more free trade we have, the more the invisible hand of the market helps us to, while working for our own advancement, create a world of peace. The wellbeing of others becomes our own. There is no reason why, in a world of perfect free trade, people worldwide shouldn't get along as well as the citizens of the happiest, most prosperous democracies. For in a world of free trade it matters little where borders are drawn. "Make love, not war," was a slogan once bandied about as an answer to war. It was a catchy phrase -and an appealing message given the two options. But it wasn't too practical. The real solution to war, if condensed to the size of a placard, would instead read, "Make trade, not war."

Trade wars escalate to hot wars – empirically proven Miller and Elwood 1988 (Vincent H., pres. ISIL and James R., VP, ISIL, “Free Trade”, p. http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/free-trade-protectionism.html) History is not lacking in examples of cold trade wars escalating into hot shooting wars: Europe suffered from almost non-stop wars during the 17th and 18th centuries, when restrictive trade policy (mercantilism) was the rule; rival governments fought each other to expand their empires and to exploit captive markets. British tariffs provoked the American colonists to revolution, and later the Northerndominated US government imposed restrictions on Southern cotton exports - a major factor leading to the American Civil War. In the late 19th Century, after a half century of general free trade (which brought a half-century of peace), short-sighted politicians throughout Europe again began erecting trade barriers. Hostilities built up until they eventually exploded into World War I. In 1930, facing only a mild recession, US President Hoover ignored warning pleas in a petition by 1028 prominent economists and signed the notorious Smoot-Hawley Act, which raised some tariffs to 100% levels. Within a year, over 25 other governments had retaliated by passing similar laws. The result? World trade came to a grinding halt, and the entire world was plunged into the "Great Depression" for the rest of the decade. The depression in turn led to World War II.

Tyranny Tyranny outweighs full scale nuclear war R.J Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science @ U of Hawaii, 1994 Death by Government http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war1 and this book on genocide and government mass murder--what I call democide--in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power2, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers. [HE CONTINUES] Consider also that library stacks have been written on the possible nature and consequences of nuclear war and how it might be avoided. Yet, in the life of some still living we have experienced in the toll from democide (and related destruction and misery among the survivors) the equivalent of a nuclear war, especially at the high near 360,000,000 end of the estimates. It is as though one had already occurred! Yet to my knowledge, there is only one book dealing with the overall human cost of this "nuclear war"--Gil Elliot's Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.

UN Credibility UN credibility solves extinction Helena Cobban, September 8, 2005, CSM, The Bolton backfire: Weaken UN, imperil Americans During the cold war, the UN helped mediate what would otherwise have been an even more precarious situation of hair-trigger nuclear destruction. After the Soviet empire collapsed, the UN helped ease transitions on several continents - as it did earlier in helping manage instabilities that arose when the West European nations' empires splintered. The UN-related economic bodies - the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization have meanwhile buttressed a global market system that has generally been very good to Americans. So why - at a time when it is increasingly evident that in Iraq, as in the fight against violent extremism elsewhere, the US needs international cooperation more than ever - should the Bush administration and its man in New York be threatening to cause serious disruption to Washington's relations with the world body? Mr. Bolton - named by Mr. Bush as a "recess appointment" ambassador to the UN last month, bypassing the wait for a Senate confirmation - startled the representatives of most other nations in New York with his list of amendments to the summit declaration. On one issue he wants amended - the list of "Millennium Development Goals" that the UN adopted back in 2000 - a key Bolton spokesman got downright ornery, accusing UN officials of "manipulating the truth" when they claimed the US had previously endorsed these goals and now seemed to be backtracking from that earlier commitment. (The UN officials look right on that one.) The tiff over this key issue in international development efforts epitomizes the deeper discord over whether the US really judges that responsibilities within the world system should be reciprocal and based on the principles of human equality and human solidarity or not. The UN majority today thinks they should be. Bolton and his boss, the president, apparently disagree with that majority. Yes, it's true that the UN itself is far from perfect. But at the end of the day, the United Nations is just that: a confederation of the world's largely independent nation-states. It has very little independent existence of its own, and can only ever be as strong as the commitment it gets from its members. Under Bush - especially since he made the near-unilateral decision to initiate a war against Iraq in 2003 - the commitment of the world's most powerful nation to the UN and its principles has eroded drastically. To reduce American support for the foundations of this vital institution any further would be crazy. A UN that is any further weakened means the increased insecurity of everyone in the world. And, yes, that includes Americans.

US-China US-Sino conflict causes global nuclear war—text modified Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 5/14/2001, The Nation, Pg. 20 China is another matter. No sane figure in the Pentagon wants a war with China, and all serious US militarists know that China’s minuscule nuclear capacity is not offensive but a deterrent against the overwhelming US power arrayed against it (twenty archaic Chinese warheads versus more than 7,000 US warheads). Taiwan, whose status constitutes the still incomplete last act of the Chinese civil war, remains the most dangerous place on earth. Much as the 1914 assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo led to a war that no wanted, a misstep in Taiwan by any side could bring the United States and China into a conflict that neither wants. Such a war would bankrupt the United States, deeply divide Japan and probably end in a Chinese victory, given that China is the world’s most populous country and would be defending itself against a foreign aggressor. More seriously, it could easily escalate into a nuclear [war] holocaust. However, given the nationalistic challenge to China’s sovereignty of any Taiwanese attempt to declare its independence formally, forward-deployed US forces on China’s borders have virtually no deterrent effect.

US-Russia US-Russia nuclear war causes extinction The American Prospect, 2/26/01 The bitter disputes

over national missile defense (NMD) have obscured a related but dramatically more urgent issue of national security: the 4,800 nuclear warheads -- weapons with a combined destructive power nearly 100,000 times greater than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima -- currently on "hair-trigger" alert. Hair-trigger alert means this: The missiles carrying those warheads are armed and fueled at all times. Two thousand or so of these warheads are on the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) targeted by Russia at the United States; 1,800 are on the ICBMs targeted by the United States at Russia; and approximately 1,000 are on the submarine-based missiles targeted by the two nations at each other. These missiles would launch on receipt of three computer-delivered messages. Launch crews -- on duty every second of every day -- are under orders to send the messages on receipt of a single computer-delivered command. In no more than two minutes, if all went according to plan, Russia or the United States could launch missiles at predetermined targets: Washington or New York; Moscow or St. Petersburg. The early-warning systems on which the launch crews rely would detect the other side's missiles within tens of seconds, causing the intended -- or accidental -- enemy to mount retaliatory strikes. "Within a half-hour, there could be a nuclear war that would extinguish all of us," explains Bruce Blair. "It would be, basically, a nuclear war by checklist, by rote."

Warming Warming causes extinction Bill Henderson, 8-19-2006, Counter Currents, http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-henderson190806.htm The scientific debate about human induced global warming is over but policy makers - let alone the happily shopping general public - still seem to not understand the scope of the impending tragedy. Global warming isn't just warmer temperatures, heat waves, melting ice and threatened polar bears. Scientific understanding increasingly points to runaway global warming leading to human extinction. If impossibly Draconian security measures are not immediately put in place to keep further emissions of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere we are looking at the death of billions, the end of civilization as we know it and in all probability the end of man's several million year old existence, along with the extinction of most flora and fauna beloved to man in the world we share.

Warming threatens the destruction of humanity John J. Berger, independent energy and environmental consultant with a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis, Beating the Heat, 2000, p. 10-11 Although unable to make exact predictions, scientists believe that our atmosphere’s carbon dioxide level is likely to double over the next hundred years. With that doubling, the world’s average temperature is likely to increase 2-6 degrees F. Then again, without corrective action, carbon dioxide levels might even triple by the year 2100. That could raise the world’s temperature by 8 or 90F. While that may not sound like much— after all, temperature can easily swing 300F in a day—an average world temperature change of 90F is all that separates today’s benign climate from an Ice Age, when the place you now live may have been buried under two miles of ice. Even if our production of airborne carbon is significantly reduced between now and 2100, global warming will not halt on January 1, 2101. Once disrupted, climate processes remain disturbed for hundreds of years. The oceans, for example, take centuries to release accumulated heat, and carbon we put in the air today remains there for up to 200 years, continuing to warm the planet. As the Earth’s temperature rises, its living systems will inevitably be disrupted. If you are not sure why we should care if a few more species go extinct, remember that nature is an interconnected fabric. Poke enough holes in it, tear it, yank on it hard enough, and it will rip. Once in ruins, it is very difficult and costly to mend, and the services it was unobtrusively providing are suddenly in jeopardy or gone. These include services like purifying our air, cleaning our water, maintaining our soil, keeping pests in check, pollinating our crops, and providing us with the biodiversity from which medicines come. Of course, nature also offers us knowledge and insights about ourselves as an integral part of creation. If we destroy nature, we eventually destroy ourselves.

Water Wars Water wars go nuclear Weiner, Prof. At Princeton, The Next 100 Years p.270 1990 If we do not destroy ourselves with the A-bomb and the H-bomb, then we may destroy ourselves with the Cbomb, the Change Bomb. And in a world as interlinked as ours, one explosion may lead to the other. Already in the Middle East, tram North Africa to the Persian Gulf and from the Nile to the Euphrates, tensions over dwindling water supplies and rising populations are reaching what many experts describe as a flashpoint A climate shift in that single battle-scarred nexus might trigger international tensions that will unleash some at the 60.000 nuclear warheads the world has stockpiled since Trinity.

Water shortages cause war Arizona Water Resource, publication by Water Resources Research Center at Univ. of Arizona, NovemberDecember 1999, http://ag.arizona.edu/AZWATER/awr/dec99/Feature2.htm But shift from a local to a global water perspective, and the terms dramatically change. The World Bank reports that 80 countries now have water shortages that threaten health and economies while 40 percent of the world — more than 2 billion people — have no access to clean water or sanitation. In this context, we cannot expect water conflicts to always be amenably resolved. Consider: More than a dozen nations receive most of their water from rivers that cross borders of neighboring countries viewed as hostile. These include Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Congo, Gambia, the Sudan, and Syria, all of whom receive 75 percent or more of their fresh water from the river flow of often hostile upstream neighbors. In the Middle East, a region marked by hostility between nations, obtaining adequate water supplies is a high political priority. For example, water has been a contentious issue in recent negotiations between Israel and Syria. In recent years, Iraq, Syria and Turkey have exchanged verbal threats over their use of shared rivers. (It should come as no surprise to learn that the words "river" and "rival" share the same Latin root; a rival is "someone who shares the same stream.") More frequently water is being likened to another resource that quickened global tensions when its supplies were threatened. A story in The Financial Times of London began: "Water, like energy in the late 1970s, will probably become the most critical natural resource issue facing most parts of the world by the start of the next century." This analogy is also reflected in the oft-repeated observation that water will likely replace oil as a future cause of war between nations.

Water will be the source of the next major war In These Times November 11, 2002 The crisis is so great, the three authors agree, that the worlds next great wars will be over water. The Middle East. Parts of Africa. China. Russia, Parts of the United States and several other areas are already struggling to equitably share water resources. Many conflicts over water are not even recognized as such: Shiva blames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in part on the severe scarcity of water in settlement areas. As available fresh water on the planet decreases, today’s low-level conflicts can only increase in intensity.

WTO Credibility WTO credibility is key to averting nuclear war Copley News Service December 1, 1999, Wednesday For decades, many children in America and other countries went to bed fearing annihilation by nuclear war. The specter of nuclear winter freezing the life out of planet Earth seemed very real. Activists protesting the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle apparently have forgotten that threat. The truth is that nations join together in groups like the WTO not just to further their own prosperity, but also to forestall conflict with other nations. In a way, our planet has traded in the threat of a worldwide nuclear war for the benefit of cooperative global economics. Some Seattle protesters clearly fancy themselves to be in the mold of nuclear disarmament or anti-Vietnam War protesters of decades past. But they're not. They're specialinterest activists, whether the cause is environmental, labor or paranoia about global government. Actually, most of the demonstrators in Seattle are very much unlike yesterday's peace activists, such as Beatle John Lennon or philosopher Bertrand Russell, the father of the nuclear disarmament movement, both of whom urged people and nations to work together rather than strive against each other. These and other war protesters would probably approve of 135 WTO nations sitting down peacefully to discuss economic issues that in the past might have been settled by bullets and bombs. As long as nations are trading peacefully, and their economies are built on exports to other countries, they have a major disincentive to wage war. That's why bringing China, a budding superpower, into the WTO is so important. As exports to the United States and the rest of the world feed Chinese prosperity, and that prosperity increases demand for the goods we produce, the threat of hostility diminishes. Many anti-trade protesters in Seattle claim that only multinational corporations benefit from global trade, and that it's the everyday wage earners who get hurt. That's just plain wrong. First of all, it's not the military-industrial complex benefiting. It's U.S. companies that make high-tech goods. And those companies provide a growing number of jobs for Americans. In San Diego, many people have good jobs at Qualcomm, Solar Turbines and other companies for whom overseas markets are essential. In Seattle, many of the 100,000 people who work at Boeing would lose their livelihoods without world trade. Foreign trade today accounts for 30 percent of our gross domestic product. That's a lot of jobs for everyday workers. Growing global prosperity has helped counter the specter of nuclear winter. Nations of the world are learning to live and work together, like the singers of anti-war songs once imagined. Those who care about world peace shouldn't be protesting world trade. They should be celebrating it.