Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

No Impact – Doesn’t Turn Case – Prolif

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While nations will justify their nuclear weapon programmes for external security reasons, there are often internal domestic pressures driving the procurement. The main drive in Britain immediately after World War 2 came from the military establishment. It was bureaucratic momentum that kept the French programme in being before de Gaulle came to power. Pakistan officials made it clear that they would have to respond quickly to India’s test as much for domestic political reasons as anything else. Today it is more difficult to envisage the decision to embark on a nuclear weapon programme as being taken as routinely as it was by Britain. The international community ensures that any state has to weigh up all the factors before taking on the restrictions which will inevitably follow. Internal pressures may accelerate (or inhibit) a programme which is already in being. They will also have an effect on the decision to remain a nuclear weapon state. Thus South Africa was able to stop its programme as part of its new internal structure. Britain has reduced its capability to just four submarines with missiles, and has no tactical weapons left. Yet internal political issues make it very difficult for it to go to the final step of nuclear disarmament. Just in Case An important consideration in nuclear doctrine is an inability to predict the future. China has never had a particularly consistent or logical nuclear doctrine. I appears that it wished to ensure that it had nuclear capability in case it became crucially important at some time in the future. Britain and France both used the arguments that they reinforced deterrence by being second centres of decision. If the Soviet Union were to think that the United States would not risk nuclear retaliation in order to defend Europe, then the French and British nuclear weapons entered the deterrence equation. They increase Soviet uncertainty and strengthened deterrence. Today the British nuclear force is entirely justified as an insurance policy against an uncertain future. While such arguments are used to retain nuclear weapons, they are insufficiently strong to be the primary drivers in the acquisition of such capabilities today, given the international difficulties that a potential proliferator faces.

AT: Nuclear Reps Bad – AT: Nuclear Apartheid

Nuclear apartheid arguments are wrong – the K replicates racial hierarchies through effacing difference with broad generalizations of nuclear haves and have-nots

Biswas 1 (Shampa, Whitman College Politics Professor, Alternatives 26.4, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_4_26/ai_n28886584/, AD: 7/1/10) jl

Where does that leave us with the question of "nuclear apartheid"? As persuasive as the nuclear-apartheid argument may be at pointing to one set of global exclusions, its complicity in the production of boundaries that help sustain a whole other set of exclusions also makes it suspect. It is precisely the resonances of the concept of apartheid, and the strong visceral response it generates, that gives it the ability to bound and erase much more effectively. In one bold move, the nuclear-apartheid argument announces the place of nuclear weaponry as the arbiter of global power and status, and how its inaccessibility or unavailability to a racialized Third World relegates it forever to the dustheap of history. It thus makes it possible for "Indians" to imagine themselves as a "community of resistance." However, with that same stroke, the nuclear-apartheid position creates and sustains yet another racialized hierarchy, bringing into being an India that is exclusionary and oppressive. And it is precisely the boldness of this racial signifier that carries with it the ability to erase, mask, and exclude much more effectively. In the hands of the BJP, the "nuclear apartheid" position becomes dangerous--because the very boldness of this racial signifier makes it possible for the BJP to effect closure on its hegemonic vision of the Hindu/Indian nation. Hence, this article has argued, in taking seriously the racialized exclusions revealed by the use of the "nuclear apartheid" position at the international level, one must simultaneously reveal another set of racialized exclusions effected by the BJP in consolidating its hold on state power. I have argued that comprehending the force and effect of the invocation of "race" through the nuclear-apartheid position means to understand this mutually constitutive co-construction of racialized domestic and international hierarchical orders.

AT: Nuclear Apartheid – Turns Racism

The concept of the Nuclear Apartheid replicates the colonial logic of oppression their K criticizes

Biswas 1 (Shampa, Whitman College Politics Professor, Alternatives 26.4, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_4_26/ai_n28886584/, AD: 7/1/10) jl

It is clear that the concept of apartheid draws its enunciative force from the category of race, and I will argue that the deployment of the nuclear-apartheid position by the Indian government points to a racially institutionalized global hierarchy. In other words, scrutinizing the nuclear-apartheid position means at the very least taking seriously the manner in which the deployment of such a racial signifier by the Indian government is able to unsettle a certain taken-for-granted terrain in the conduct of international relations and in the writing of the discipline. What happens if we take seriously the opposition of the Indian government to some of the most prominent international arms-control treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), as well as its decision in 1998 to declare itself as a nuclear-weapons state (NWS) despite the emerging global norms against nuclearization and the threat of economic sanctions, in the name of nuclear apartheid-- using perhaps one of the most potent racial signifiers of our contemporary times to register its frustrations with, and resistance to, the unequal distribution of global warfare resources? Rather than simply dismissing this position because of the level of abhorrence that has come to be attached to weapons of mass destruction, I argue that there is an epistemic gain from seeing the Indian decision to test as a statement against a racialized inequitable global order.

However, despite the critical leverage that the category of apartheid as used by the Indian government carries, the category itself is analytically problematic, and its deployment is politically disturbing in other ways. On the one hand, as the article will show, there are a whole host of ways in which the concept of apartheid that lays implicit claim to certain inalienable democratic entitlements is simply untenable, given the fundamentally undemocratic character of nuclear weapons. At the same time, the political implications of India's nuclearization under the aggressive, exclusivist regime of the Hindu nationalist party (the BJP), does not bode well either for regional security or for the global disarmament agenda. But much more importantly, this article argues that the use of race through the nuclear-apartheid position can also simultaneously mask a series of exclusions--domestically and internationally--and indeed in its use by the BJP government comes to play a "racialized, boundary-producing" role tha t maintains that division at the expense of marginalized sections of the Indian population. In addition to exploring the usefulness of "race" as a category of analysis in examining the BJP's imagination of the Hindu/Indian nation, I also look at how the BJP draws on a racist global discourse on Islam and Muslims. Recently, critical-security scholars within JR have raised and problematized quite compellingly the questions of "whose security?" and "what kind of security?" does nuclear/military security provide. (2) Taking seriously the global racialized exclusions that the nuclear-apartheid position points to, I want to problematize the implicit referent (i.e., the Hindu/Indian nation) in whose name this position is being deployed by the BJP and raise questions about the political interests that are served by this deployment.

The nuclear apartheid argument simply generates new forms of racialization

Biswas 1 (Shampa, Whitman College Politics Professor, Alternatives 26.4, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_4_26/ai_n28886584/, AD: 7/1/10) jl

The ultimate purpose of this article, then, is to interrogate, critically, the category of nuclear apartheid as deployed by the Indian government in order to think through how the silence on race within the field of international relations enables and constrains its deployment as a postcolonial resource, and what implications that offers for peace and justice. The article begins with discussing the security environment and the domestic political context within which the decision to test was made. This first section of the article looks at the rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary Indian politics, finding the immediate trigger to the tests in this domestic political environment, and scrutinizes the realist "external threats" argument from within this context. The next section of the article presents and analyzes the nuclear-apartheid position as articulated with respect to the two prominent arms-control treaties--the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--and points to the global structural and racial hierarchies that make possible the effective deployment of such a position by the Indian government. Finally, the article turns to a deconstruction of the nuclear-apartheid position to demonstrate both its analytical paucities as well as the political function it serves in the contemporary Indian context in effecting "new kinds of racializations." I conclude with some reflections on conceptualizing race within global politics and the implications of taking race seriously for issues of peace and justice.