Case NEG—Indo Pak

1nc
1
Interp: The AFF may not specify states in the plan text
Zero + Plural nouns such as “states” are the most common kinds of
generalizations.
Byrd [(Pat, Department of AppliedLinguistics & ESL Georgia State University) “Generic Meaning” Transcript of lecture] TDI
Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, two of the authors of the Longman Grammar, have written about what they call "seemingly
synonymous words." They have shown how the adjectives big, great, and large are used differently in academic writing from in
fiction. Their point is that when a language has forms that seem to be synonyms--the forms are likely to be used in different ways in
different settings. One can't just be substituted for another without a change in meaning or a violation of style. A big toe isn't the
same as a large toe. And I don't think I know what a great toe might be. Or, for another example, a political scientist would call
Georgia a large state but not necessarily a great state. But a politician from Georgia is likely to talk about the great State of Georgia.
A similar process is at work with the use of these generic forms in context. We have a set of sentences that seem to have very much
the same meaning. It is probable that the uses of these forms do not entirely overlap. However, we do not yet have a complete
picture of how generic forms are used. But the use of computers for linguistic research is a new field, and we get more information
all the time. Here are some things that we do know about these generic noun phrase types when they are used in context: 1. The +
singular: The computer has changed modern life. This form is considered more formal than the others--and is not as likely to be used
in conversation as the plural noun: Computers have changed modern life. Master (1987) found in the sample that he analyzed that
this form with the was often used to introduce at topic--and came at the beginning of a paragraph and in introductions and
conclusions. 2.
Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers have changed modern life. Probably the
most common form for a generalization . It can be used in all contexts--including both
conversation (Basketball players make too much money) and academic writing (Organisms as
diverse as humans and squid share many biological processes). Perhaps used more in the hard sciences and
social sciences than in the humanities. 3. A + singular: A computer is a machine. This generic structure is used to refer to individual
instances of a whole group and is used to classify whatever is being discussed. The form is often used for definitions of terms. It is
also often used to explain occupations. My sister is a newspaper reporter. I am a teacher. Use is limited to these "classifying"
contexts. Notice that this form can't always be subtituted for the other: *Life has been changed by a computer. *A computer has
changed modern life. 4. Zero + noncount: Life has been changed by the computer. The most basic meaning and use of noncount
nouns is generic--they are fundamentally about a very abstract level of meaning. Thus, the most common use of noncount nouns is
this use with no article for generic meaning. Zero Article and Generic Meaning Most
nouns without articles have
generic meaning. Two types are involved. 1. Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers
have changed modern life.
Violation: They spec
Standards
limits-- can specify any combination or amount of countries w/nuclear arsenals
—that’s 511 affs
1] Precision – Pragmatics can only be used when comparing two semantic interps
of the topic – semantics first.
2] Limits are best for education:
A. Iterative content mastery- Repeatedly engaging in debates about the
same core issues challenges students to innovate their arguments based
on feedback from opponents and judges.
B. Prep: Depth over breadth A large caselist results in shallow debates.
undermines the most valuable part of debate – rigorous testing – that’s
inaccessible in any other educational space.
3] Ground:
The aff can claim any advantage to a virtual infinite combination of affs and the
lack of predictability for negatives means virtually no DAs are applicable
because Affirmatives can de-link out of them.
4] TVA solves – whole res allows for their advantages.
D. Voters:
-- Fairness – debate is a game so any unfair advantage means they should lose,
and controls the internal link to education
-- Education—is the reason schools fund debate, carries on to the real world
Drop the debater
Competing interps –
a. Reasonability leads to a race to the bottom
b. Arbitrary and infinitely regressive
Reject 1ar theory— A] the 2NR must cover substance and over-cover theory,
since they get the collapse and 2AR B] their responses to my counter interp will
be new, 1AR theory necessitates intervention so drop the arg at best if we win
defence on the shell. Also justifies reasonability since judge intervention is
inevitable and they get new 2ar args. C] Allows infinite uplayering in the 1ar
that skews my strat and decentivizes clash for tricks. D] It has conditional value
which splits the 2n and forces me to heg against multiple 2ar collapses
No RVIs
A) The aff shouldn’t win for being Topical – they have the burden for doing
so
B) Chills Topicality –discourages debaters from running theory good T
debaters will run abusive positions to bait T and win the round.
2
The standard is maximizing expected well-being.
a1 – All moral valuations collapse to pleasure and pain.
Moen 15
Ole Martin Moen, a Norwegian philosopher who tries to think straight about thorny issues in applied ethics. Such issues include
drugs, violence, sexuality, animals, and biotechnology. Research Fellow at University of Oslo and an Associate Professor (tenured) at
University of South-Eastern Norway, “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 12 September 2015, accessed:
28 July 2018, doi:10.1007/s10790-015-9506-9, R.S.
*bracketed because of gendered language
The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these
experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the
convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience
store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further
that you deem to be valuable. You
might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is
a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I
might further inquire, however: “What is buying the
soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You
might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But
what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an
awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to
the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle observes: ‘‘We never ask a̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶ 
[someone] what h̶i̶s̶ [their] end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice
worthy in itself.’’ Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says ‘‘This is painful!’’ we never
respond by asking: ‘‘And why is that a problem?’’ We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation
of why it is bad.

2 – Degrees of wrongness – Breaking a promise to take a dying person to the

hospital is worse than breaking a promise to show up to a birthday party – the
consequence of the first one explains why it’s worse than the second. Intuitions
outweigh because they’re the foundational basis for every argument.

3 – Indicts to normative ethics are a reason to vote neg on presumption – they

guide action so indicts freeze action and means the plan
A – Doesn’t do anything and
B – Doesn’t have a reason it’s good.

4- Actor specificity- governments always have to account some sort of tradeoffs

so the aff is only possible through util
4 – Risk of extinction outweighs – inflate our links because you’re
psychologically predetermined to underestimate them.
GPP 17
Global Priorities Project, Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland,
“Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance”, Global Priorities Project, 2017, accessed: 24 February 2020,
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf, R.S.
In his book Reasons and Persons, Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit advanced an influential argument about the importance of
avoiding extinction: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people
think. Compare three outcomes:
(1) Peace.
(2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population.
(3) A nuclear war that kills 100%.
(2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most
people
believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference
between (2) and (3) is very much greater. ... The Earth will remain habitable for at least
another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few
thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and
(3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If
we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.65 In this argument, it seems
that Parfit is assuming that the survivors of a nuclear war that kills 99% of the population would eventually be able to recover
civilisation without long-term effect. As we have seen, this may not be a safe assumption – but for the purposes of this thought
experiment, the point stands. What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is that they would
“destroy the future,” as another Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, puts it.66 This future could potentially be
extremely long and full of flourishing, and would therefore have extremely large value. In standard risk analysis, when
working out how to respond to risk, we work out the expected value of risk reduction, by
weighing the probability that an action will prevent an adverse event against the severity of the event.
Because the value of preventing existential catastrophe is so vast, even a tiny probability of
prevention has huge expected value.67 Of course, there is persisting reasonable disagreement about ethics and
there are a number of ways one might resist this conclusion.68 Therefore, it would be unjustified to be overconfident in Parfit
and Bostrom’s argument. In some areas, government
policy does give significant weight to future
generations. For example, in assessing the risks of nuclear waste storage, governments have
considered timeframes of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million years. 69
Justifications for this policy usually appeal to principles of intergenerational equity according to which future generations
ought to get as much protection as current generations.70 Similarly, widely
accepted norms of sustainable
development require development that meets the needs of the current generation without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.71 However, when it comes to
existential risk, it would seem that we fail to live up to principles of intergenerational equity.
Existential catastrophe would not only give future generations less than the current generations; it would give them nothing.
Indeed, reducing existential risk plausibly has a quite low cost for us in comparison with the huge expected value it has for
future generations. In spite of this, relatively little is done to reduce existential risk. Unless we give up on norms of
intergenerational equity, they give us a strong case for significantly increasing our efforts to reduce existential risks. 1.3. WHY
EXISTENTIAL RISKS MAY BE SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERINVESTED IN, AND THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
In spite of the importance of existential risk reduction, it probably receives less attention than is warranted. As a result,
concerted international cooperation is required if we are to receive adequate protection from existential risks. 1.3.1. Why
existential risks are likely to be underinvested in There are several reasons why existential risk reduction is likely to be
underinvested in. Firstly, it is a global public good. Economic theory predicts that such goods tend to be underprovided. The
benefits of existential risk reduction are widely and indivisibly dispersed around the globe from the countries responsible for
taking action. Consequently, a country which reduces existential risk gains only a small portion of the benefits but bears the
full brunt of the costs. Countries thus have strong incentives to free ride, receiving the benefits of risk reduction without
contributing. As a result, too few do what is in the common interest. Secondly, as already suggested above, existential risk
reduction is an intergenerational public good: most of the benefits are enjoyed by future generations who have no say in the
political process. For these goods, the problem is temporal free riding: the current generation enjoys the benefits of inaction
while future generations bear the costs. Thirdly, many existential risks, such as machine superintelligence, engineered
pandemics, and solar geoengineering, pose an unprecedented and uncertain future threat. Consequently, it is hard to develop a
satisfactory governance regime for them: there are few existing governance instruments which can be applied to these risks,
and it is unclear what shape new instruments should take. In this way, our position with regard to these emerging risks is
comparable to the one we faced when nuclear weapons first became available. Cognitive
biases also lead people to
underestimate existential risks. Since there have not been any catastrophes of this
magnitude, these risks are not salient to politicians and the public.72 This is an example of the
misapplication of the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut which assumes that something is important
only if it can be readily recalled. Another cognitive bias affecting perceptions of existential risk is scope
neglect. In a seminal 1992 study, three groups were asked how much they would be willing
to pay to save 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The
groups answered $80, $78, and $88, respectively.73 In this case, the size of the benefits had
little effect on the scale of the preferred response. People become numbed to the effect of
saving lives when the numbers get too large. 74 Scope neglect is a particularly acute problem
for existential risk because the numbers at stake are so large. Due to scope neglect, decision-makers are
prone to treat existential risks in a similar way to problems which are less severe by many orders of magnitude. A wide range
of other cognitive biases are likely to affect the evaluation of existential risks.
3
Both India and Pakistan have a latent bioweapon capability- nukes prevent
their development
Yamin, 13 -- National Defence University Islamabad strategic and nuclear studies professor
[Tughral, "disaster like floods and earthquakes. Future disaster management policies should
cover issues like CBW attacks. This should include inter alia training of first responders, including
decon staff and medics, arranging for decontamination facilities, stocking hospitals with chem-
bio vaccines, earmarking shelters, early warning sirens and public awareness through print and
electronic media.," Policy Perspectives, 10.1, 2013, jstor, accessed 12-21-19]

CBWs in South Asia

Both India and Pakistan have the requisite human resource capital and well developed
pharmaceutical industry to produce CW's. However, both these South Asian countries chose to become part of the
international treaties proscribing these weapons. The motivation to do so could have been different for India and
Pakistan. India had made a long term investment in its nuclear programme . It actually began before the partition, when Homi Bhabha
established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in 1945. In 1974 India conducted its first nuclear test. In 1998 it carried out nuclear weapon tests. Pakistan followed suit. Pakistan has traditionally
linked its security threats to India. It did not join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because India chose to remain out of it. It is therefore understandable that Pakistan followed suit, when India opted for
treaties banning BCW. India is an original signatory of the CWC and has also ratified the BWC. In 1992, Pakistan and India signed a Joint Declaration on the Complete Prohibition of CWs undertaking not to develop,
produce, acquire or use these weapons. Both countries signed the CWC in 1993. Pakistan signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972, and ratified it in 1974. According to a US State
Department report "Available information did not suggest that any agent and toxin research activities by Pakistani entities were inconsistent with Pakistan's BWC obligations."25 After signing and ratifying the CWC
in 1993, Pakistan has been regarded as a member in good standing of the OPCW.26 A number of inspections of pharmaceutical factories has revealed no violations.27 Pakistan remains firm in its commitment NOT
to possess CBWs.

It came as a nasty surprise to Pakistan, when in June 1997, India acknowledged that it had a dedicated CW production programme. Pakistan decried India's declaration as a breach of the 1992 Joint Declaration, but
nonetheless ratified the treaty later that year. It did not declare any chemical agent production facilities or stockpiles.28 Formal commitments notwithstanding, it is well known that India has the capability to
produce a wide variety of chemical agent precursors at short notice should the government change its policy. According to Chinese researchers at one time India possessed upto 1,000 tons of CW agents, mostly
mustard gas. These were stockpiled at five different locations. Under the terms of the CWC India was to destroy upto 45 per cent of its CW stocks by 2004 and the remaining by 2007.30 In 2009, India declared that
it had destroyed its verifiable CW arsenal.31

Pakistan has never claimed possession of CBWs.32 Pakistani officials have time and again reiterated their country's commitments under CWC.33 This notwithstanding, there has been some propaganda against
Pakistan with regards CW's in the past. Most of it has been conflicting, fragmentary and spread with malicious intent. Over the years Pakistan and India have accused each other of using CW's e.g. in May 1999
Pakistan blamed the Indians for using CW's in Siachin, and vice versa.34 In April 2003 Pakistan complained to the US about Indian forces using CW against the Kashmiri fighters.35 Indian military forces countered
that the Kashmiris 'ultras' were in possession of CW's.36

In the wake of May 1998 nuclear tests, the US Department of Commerce imposed sanctions on a large number of entities related to nuclear and missile proliferation in India as well as Pakistan.37 The ban was
lifted after the 9/11 attacks.38 No sanctions apply now. In 1999, the Pakistani government mandated all domestic chemical producers to "furnish details of the chemicals" imported or used in Pakistan.39 In
October 2000, Islamabad promulgated the CWC Implementation Ordinance to prohibit the development, production, and use of CW in accordance with its obligations under the CWC. The law also prohibits the
transport or transfer of chemical weapons or toxic dual-use chemicals and chemical agent precursors, as detailed in reports pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1540. The OPCW has conducted a number of
inspections of industrial facilities in Pakistan engaged in the production of CWC-scheduled chemicals, and none of these have resulted in publicly known irregularities.40 Pakistan has played an active and
consistent role in the OPCW, supporting provisions to increase trade and assistance in the peaceful uses of the chemical industry as consistent with the positions of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).41 Although
the country's domestic chemical industry has continued to grow, Pakistan still relies on imports for many raw materials and intermediate chemicals. In 2010, Islamabad released the CWC (Implementation) Rules,
which established requirements for all companies dealing with CWC-scheduled chemicals to make declarations, obtain permits, and receive inspections.42

Defensive Measures

Main problem with chemical agents is that there is no easy protection against these. On the battlefield, soldiers wear gas masks and complete skin coverings when a BCW attack is suspected. All Pakistan army
combat troops are equipped with NBC protection suits and gas masks. Most formations have gas chambers to train soldiers to react to a gas attack. The medical units are well equipped to render emergency
remedial aid to gas victim. The military also has limited decontamination capability. The civilian population is, however largely unprepared to respond to a chemical-biological attack. They need a supply of gas
masks and water and airtight suits. This equipment is unfortunately not readily available to civilians. Some ways of protection against CBW attacks are by:

• Installing sensors in cities nationwide.43

• Stockpiling vaccines, including enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person.

• Developing new drugs and vaccines.

• Writing emergency protocols for cities and hospitals

• Running drills of various attacks

It is indeed worth noting that India has constructed a number of nuclear shelters for its Prime Minister, the President, top army commanders and other select officials. Most bunkers are located in Delhi, Kashmir,
Punjab, and Rajasthan. These include individual units of 30 sleeping bunks, their own power and water supplies, waste disposal, fire-fighting systems and decontamination modules. The shelters will provide safety
in the event of a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.44 Since 2004 India has established training programmes for their paramilitary forces such as the Indo-Tibetan border police and the Central Industrial
Security Force to deal with nuclear, chemical, and biological disasters. The first course was for trainers and involved US experts.45 There is little worthwhile activities in this regard in Pakistan.

Conclusion

Chem- bio attacks in the future cannot be ruled out . Pakistanis prepared on two counts to handle such a situation. Firstly, the military is prepared to handle NBC
fallouts on the battlefield and secondly, domestic authorities and diplomats posted in international arms control forums remain vigilant that Pakistan is not brought to account for suspected violations of existing
treaties. The area, where the country needs to work is to prepare unsuspecting civilians to manage a situation arising from chemical or bio-warfare. The National Disaster Managemen Authority
(NDMA) needs to craft an elaborate policy covering such a possibility. Their present policies mainly cover natural disaster like floods and earthquakes. Future disaster management policies should cover issues like
CBW attacks. This should include inter alia training of first responders, including decon staff and medics, arranging for decontamination facilities, stocking hospitals with chem-bio vaccines, earmarking shelters,
early warning sirens and public awareness through print and electronic media.

Only nukes fulfill this role – disarmament launches arms race for CBW’s and
conventional weapons can’t check.
Peter D. Zimmerman 9-16-2017 [Peter D. Zimmerman, 9-16-2017, "Nuclear weapons deter
conventional wars," No Publication, https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/nuclear-weapons-
deter-conventional-wars-1.2091053, accessed 12-1-2019 azhang] Peter D. Zimmerman is a
nuclear physicist. He was a former chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a
former chief scientist of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and science adviser for
arms control in the Department of State. He is a professor emeritus at King’s College London
and is based in Northern Virginia.

This month, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will open for signature at the
United Nations. Signatories will promise never to “develop, test, produce, manufacture ...
possess or stockpile nuclear weapons”; never to transfer weapons to other parties nor to
receive them; and never to “use or threaten to use nuclear weapons”. The treaty’s aims, if they
could be universally effected, are noble. After all, the prospect of nations — including an
international pariah like North Korea — facing off with their respective nuclear arsenals is
horrific. Their renewed use in war would be catastrophic. But there is a risk in aiming for total
nuclear disarmament, because deterring nuclear war isn’t their only legitimate use. Nuclear
weapons also deter conventional war. In recent decades, great powers have fought proxy wars,
but since 1945, they have not come into direct armed conflict. Through the Cold War, nuclear
weapons kept the peace in Western Europe. Only once, during the Cuban missile crisis, did
deterrence come close to breaking, but the then United States president, John F. Kennedy, and
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the rest of the world learned well. India and Pakistan have
skirmished in recent decades, but the realisation that a conflict could escalate to nuclea r
catastrophe has contributed to the rival nations eventually standing down. The probability that
Israel has nuclear weapons is the ultimate guarantor of its existence. Since the Soviet Union’s
first atomic test in 1949, the existence of nuclear weapons in many hands has not only deterred
the use of nuclear weapons, but also made nuclear possessors and their adversaries think
carefully about the desirability of going to war at all. When conflict has broken out, the nuclear
deterrent has limited war aims to those short of total destruction of adversary nations or regime
change. That’s why North Korea has sought nuclear capability so fervently. This is the
“porcupine theory”, advanced by, among others, the late strategist Kenneth Waltz: After
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many states wanted nuclear weapons, not for offensive purposes, but
as a hedge against attack by other nations. If peace is desirable, and it is, this seems, at first,
philosophically unappealing; non-proliferation and nuclear elimination sound so much safer. But
with obvious limits, this hedge has served as a practical solution to an intractable problem. It’s a
good thing, then, that the United Nations nuclear treaty is probably going nowhere. For starters,
the nuclear powers aren’t on board: When negotiations concluded on July 7, 122 nations voted
for the treaty. But the Netherlands, the only Nato country to participate in negotiations, voted
against it. As CBS News notes, none of the countries “known or believed to possess nuclear
weapons” — the US, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel —
supports the treaty. Sweden was the only country with long-standing, close ties to Nato that
voted for it. Most states voting for the treaty lack the capability, or significant interest, in
acquiring nuclear weapons. If the proverbial mice decide to bell the cat, success will depend
upon the cat’s consent to wear a bell. And the agreement was rushed: Other international arms-
control agreements, such as the prohibitions on chemical and biological weapons, on nuclear
testing, and on strategic arms reduction have taken years and even decades to negotiate. The
nuclear ban was completed after only a few days of negotiation in March and a few weeks in
June and July. The treaty’s language is unhelpful. The preamble includes references to an
assortment of humanitarian causes, bearing only the most tangential relationship to the topic at
hand: “Disproportionate impact of nuclear-weapon activities on indigenous peoples”,
“disproportionate impact on women and girls”, and the role of the “Red Cross and Red Crescent
Movement”. Though “trust but verify”, as former US president Ronald Reagan often put it,
remains the core of any international arms-control agreement, the UN treaty presents a
nebulous mention that weapons states shall cooperate with a “competent international
authority or authorities to negotiate and verify the irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons
programmes”. A “State Party that owns, possesses or controls nuclear weapons ... shall
immediately remove them from operational status” and later “submit to the secretary-general
of the United Nations a declaration that it has fulfilled its obligations”. The mechanics by which
nuclear possessor states rid themselves of their weapons are undefined. For now, the
agreement relies on the honour system, rather than enforceable penalties for noncompliance —
critical details kicked down the road to a document that doesn’t yet exist. Even if the document
had been perfectly drafted, and had the leaders of the effort gained a measure of buy-in from
nuclear states about their interests, total nuclear abolition remains a bad idea. As former British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher had said, 30 years ago, in a speech delivered in Russia:
“Conventional weapons have never been enough to deter war . Two world wars showed us that.
They also showed us how terrible a war fought even with conventional weapons can be. Yet,
nuclear weapons have deterred not only nuclear war but conventional war in Europe as well. A
world without nuclear weapons may be a dream, but you cannot base a sure defence on
dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present ,
a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.” The
planet would be safer with far fewer nuclear weapons, but more dangerous with none; and
would be a way to prove all such weapons have been eliminated. Some hydrogen bombs are
small enough to hide in a coat closet — verification of their destruction, in the absence of a yet-
to-be-determined mechanism, and in the absence of a strong international consensus, is
impossible. And the loss of the barrier to conventional escalation would be ruinous. Nuclear
weapons cannot be un-invented. If the treaty’s proponents had their way, the world would
eventually regret it.

CW attacks, lab accidents, and artificial smallpox are coming now – spurs inter-
state wars AND non-state actors which ensure escalation – taboo eroded,
empirics prove, tech and motive are here
--bio-hacking, gene-editting (cas-9 crispr)

--intra-state wars between Russia, NATO, EU, US

--VX, neuroweapons, and Novichek agents

Henry de Quetteville et. al 18. Special Correspondent @Telegraph, Technology. Former

foreign correspondent in France, the Balkans and the Middle East., citing James Giordano,
professor of neurology, chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program, and co-director of the
O’Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy at
Georgetown University Medical Center. He is an member of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency’s panel on neuroethics, legal, and social issues, and serves as a senior
science advisory fellow to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. His latest book is Neurotechnology
in National Security and Defense: Practical Considerations, Neuroethical Concerns (CRC
Press), citing Gavin Williamson, UK Secretary of Defense, citing Aimen Dean, also known as
Ramzi is a Bahrainian man who was a founding member of al-Qaeda. In 1998, he joined the
Secret Intelligence Service and became an MI6 spy, citing Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a
chemical weapons expert and chief operating officer of SecureBio Limited. He was formerly
a British Army officer for 23 years and commanding officer of the UK's CBRN Regiment and
NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, August 3, 2018, “The rise of biological and chemical
weapons After Salisbury, how ready is the UK?”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/rise-
of-biological-chemical-weapons/. Rez
[SUB TITLE] With nerve agents having been deployed in Syria, Malaysia and Salisbury, the 100
year taboo on the use of chemical weapons is in danger of collapse. The stakes could not be higher as gene-
editing technologies put a new generation of bio-weapons within reach of almost anyone.
[ARTICLE BEGINS] The small town of Melksham, in rural Wiltshire, is an unlikely location for one of the world’s largest producers of gas masks. Yet
there, next to Farmers’ Roundabout, is a warehouse containing a production line that can turn out a quarter of a million masks a year. Models include the FM54, a
sinister-looking bit of kit used by the SAS. This is Avon Protection, originally founded in the late 19th century as a tyre factory but which, come the First World War,
spotted a new market for its rubber presses. Today, business is booming. Orders are flooding in from the US military and the MoD. A contract is up for grabs from
Canada’s army. India is keen. ‘All this CW has been good for us,’ says an executive. By CW he means chemical warfare. And it’s true. On Avon’s factory floor, permeated by
the distinctive smell of its essential raw material, blue and yellow presses relentlessly inject molten rubber into dense matt-metal moulds. Every four minutes a new
mask emerges, ready to be trimmed and equipped with tubes, visors and filters. Amid the beauty of Melksham’s peaceful surroundings, these blank-eyed robo-humanoid
visors, worthy of Darth Vader, are the starkest possible reminder that 100 years after we thought we had said goodbye to all that, a new age of poison weapons is upon

[PHOTO OMITTED] Sales are booming at the UK firm Avon Protection, purveyors of gas masks since the First World War CREDIT: BENEDICT
us.

REDGROVE It is an era in which a series of unprecedented plots and attacks – from England to
Australia – has projected this darkest of the arts of war far from the traditional battlefield .
They have seen an airport departure lounge and a medieval cathedral city in the West Country laced with the deadliest toxic
chemicals, upsetting a diplomatic and military status quo established in the wreckage
of the First World War, and blowing away one of armed conflict’s weightiest taboos
like a breeze dispersing clouds of mustard gas over the trenches of the Western Front. Worse,
some fear that with emerging threats from DIY bioweapons, this may just be the beginning. The new age of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been decades in the making. As Aimen Dean , MI6’s mole in al-
Qaeda, recounts in his new book Nine Lives, Osama bin Laden’s terror group plotted to smear deadly chemicals on the
door handles of luxury cars in Britain in the late 1990s. After 9/11, Dean delivered intelligence that Abu
Khabab, an al-Qaeda weapons engineer, had managed to develop a viable poison-gas device destined for
New York’s subway system. The plot never came to fruition. Terrorists continue to fantasise about
striking fear into civilian populations with chemical and biological weapons. Last August, intelligence
agencies in Australia intercepted an Isil plot that allegedly would have involved the release of
toxic hydrogen sulphide gas. And just last month, German authorities arrested Seif Allah Hammami, a 29-
year-old Tunisian who had apparently managed to manufacture significant quantities of ricin , a bioweapon first
developed by the US during the First World War. But it is in Syria that the century-old toxic taboo has truly
been blown away. Since 2012, chlorine and sarin gas have repeatedly been dropped from the
jets and helicopters of the Assad regime, as well as fired in warheads attached to artillery
rockets. Isil too has deployed gas in Syria – both in contravention of the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War
of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare – known in short as the Geneva Protocol – which was first
signed in 1925. The Protocol was an attempt to ensure that the horrors of the Great War were never repeated, yet in Syria today, just as on the
Western Front then, chemical munitions have targeted networks of trenches housing enemy
fighters. Bashar al-Assad spent four year besieging Aleppo with conventional weapons. When, in December 2016, he started
using chemicals instead, the city fell in just over two weeks . Little matter that all too often they hit civilians too,
as shown by heartbreaking images of choking, gagging, foaming men, women and children broadcast around the world. Ghouta in 2013
remains the deadliest single attack, almost unimaginable in scale . The final death toll has never been pinned
down, but the US administration estimates almost 1,500 were killed. Hundreds more have died in over three dozen subsequent attacks in Syria
that the world knows of. [PHOTO OMITTED] A Syrian boy holds an oxygen mask over the face of an infant at a make-shift hospital following a
reported gas attack on the rebel-held besieged town of Douma in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on January 22, 2018. A Syrian boy
holds an oxygen mask over the face of an infant following a reported gas attack in Ghouta, Syria 2018. CREDIT: AFP/GETTY IMAGES Having been unleashed anew in
Syria in 2012, it was only five years before these weapons were deployed – in February 2017 – in an exclusively civilian arena. The scene was the budget-airline terminal
at Kuala Lumpur airport. Just as sarin is many times more toxic than chlorine, so VX is many times more toxic than sarin. And it was VX that was used to assassinate Kim
Jong-nam, exiled half-brother of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, when two women smeared the agent on his body in what they claim to have thought was a

unfolded in
prank. Currently on trial, they could face the death penalty if their story is not believed. But even that brazen attack was as nothing to what

Salisbury on 4 March this year, when the Russian military officer turned British spy Sergei
Skripal and his daugher Yulia were found unconscious on a bench . Skripal was a victim of
Novichok, a nerve agent that is perhaps 1,000 times more toxic than sarin. Invisible and
deadly, it brought a menace to Britain’s streets that most of us never imagined we would have to
consider – let alone experience. And that shock only deepened when, earlier this month, and out of the blue, Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess (who died
last weekend), 44, also fell victim to Novichok in Amesbury, just down the road from Salisbury. [PHOTO OMITTED] Kim Jong's brother looking to the right and wearing

glasses Kim Jong Nam, half brother of the North Korean leader killed by VX nerve agent in 2017CREDIT: AP/SHIZUO KAMBAYASHI [PHOTO OMITTED]
The two alleged assassins. Three heads in a row, guard at end. Head covered on person nearest. Middle person auburn hair and crying Doan Thi Huong (centre), one of
two suspects charged with the killingCREDIT: AP/DANIEL CHAN On top of the attacks in Syria and the killing of Kim Jong-nam, the targeting of the
Skripals and its protracted consequences made a devastating conclusion inescapable: a century after Wilfred Owen wrote of ‘Gas, gas’ and of the
victim ‘yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime’, the use of chemical weapons had become
normal again. It is easy to see why. Toxic chemicals are the perfect weapon for our fake news
world, where everything is disputable, objective truth malleable or elusive, blame
and attribution hard to pin down. Take the Skripal attack: afterwards Russia’s propaganda machine
went into overdrive, peddling countless claims and counterclaims of its own : that the British state
was itself responsible; that Yulia and her father were sedated and poisoned. Spinning this web of ambiguity was all the
easier because of the absence of any international body empowered to attribute
responsibility for attacks. The independent Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) identified the Novichok
in Salisbury, but pointing to its source was not within its remit. Moscow’s media trumpeted its failure to do so as exculpation anyway. For a
former superpower like Russia, chemical weapons offer an alluring asymmetry too ,
helping to level the playing field against the better-financed, better-equipped militaries of
Nato. ‘We’re in a position now where we’re going into a new Cold War,’ says Hamish de
Bretton-Gordon, former commander of the British Army’s Joint Chemical, Biological,
Radiological and Nuclear Regiment (CBRN), which, ironically, was disbanded in 2011, a year before WMD were first
deployed in Syria. ‘While we overmatch Russia in most areas, in chemical weapons their offensive
capability more than overmatches us. If Russia did decide broadly to hit us with this stuff,
we’d be found wanting.’ [PHOTO OMITTED] Biohazard suits on the streets of SalisburyCREDIT: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY
IMAGES [PHOTO OMITTED] Investigators at the Zizzi restaurant, Salisbury CREDIT: GEOFF PUGH FOR THE TELEGRAPH [PHOTO

OMITTED] Military personnel on the Skripal case CREDIT: CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES Novichok, which de Bretton-Gordon describes as
‘the world’s blue riband nerve agent’, was developed in Shikhany, a town on the Volga that houses a military
research establishment. Experts estimate that Russia has perhaps a few tons of it, enough ‘to carry out
assassinations but not to wage war’. Still, only tiny doses are needed to block a crucial
enzyme – acetylcholinesterase – which breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When that happens,
large branches of the nervous system become overexcited and ultimately shut down. ‘The first
thing that happens is bowel and bladder incontinence,’ says Stefano Costanzi, associate professor in the department of chemistry at American
University in Washington, DC, and an expert in the effects of chemical weapons. ‘Eventually that is followed by the collapse of the nervous
system, with death typically resulting from respiratory failure and seizures.’ How long that takes depends on
exposure and dose. It can be minutes. Dr Stephen Jukes, intensive care consultant at Salisbury District Hospital, where the Skripals
were treated (and where Rowley and Sturgess were taken), has described trying ‘all our therapies’ to keep Sergei and Yulia alive. Due to an astonishing coincidence, two
doctors on duty had just returned from a course at Porton Down, Britain’s world-leading equivalent to Shikhany, when the pair were brought in. Recognising what
looked like symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning, they made sure to include diazepam and atropine in their battery of treatments – the drugs compensate for some of the
effects of acetylcholinesterase blockage – and plunged the Skripals into an artificial coma to prevent brain damage. Then it was a question of waiting. ‘It is key to
keep the victims alive long enough for their bodies naturally to restore their ability to break down acetylcholine,’ says Costanzi. Dr Jukes says
that hospital staff did indeed wait, but more in hope than expectation. ‘ When
we first realised this was a nerve agent,
we were expecting them not to survive,’ he told the BBC. His colleague Dr Duncan Murray attributed the fact that the
Skripals did pull through to ‘very good, generic, basic critical care’. But simple good fortune, like the fact that Porton Down is just down the road
from Salisbury, played a big part too. ‘There are only 10 or so countries in the world that could have possibly responded to the Skripal attack,’
one British official told me. ‘And even then we were very lucky.’ Soldiers march across Kim Il Sung Square, North Korea. The country is
known to hold stocks of VX nerve agent as well as long range nuclear missiles [PHOTO
OMITTED] Soldiers march across Kim Il Sung Square, North Korea. The country is known to hold stocks of VX nerve agent as well as long range nuclear missiles
CREDIT: AP/WONG MAYE-E Lucky, and stretched to the absolute limit. Lorna Wilkinson, nursing director at the hospital, has said that when

policeman Nick Bailey was also admitted with symptoms

of poisoning similar to the Skripals’ ‘there was a
real concern as to how big this could get’. She and fellow medical staff worried that it could become ‘all-
consuming and involve many casualties’. According to de Bretton-Gordon, even containing the attack as it was
required the deployment of ‘every bit of this country’s military establishment’. So could Britain cope with a bigger attack? Responsibility for
responding to major disasters in Britain lies with the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) in the Cabinet Office, which liaises with intelligence agencies and the Office for
Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) at the Home Office to draw up the National Risk Register Of Civil Emergencies (NRR) – a list of 80 or so critical threats to the
country, from flooding to a collapse of the national grid to cyber attacks. The NRR distinguishes between natural hazards or accidents, and malicious attacks, and even
produces a table ranking these threats by their impact severity and likelihood, both on a scale of 1 to 5. The table makes it easy to see, for example, that the natural
disaster the CCS is most worried about is a pandemic flu outbreak, which is given a 5 impact rating, and a 4 for its relative likelihood of occurring in the next five years.

When it comes to malicious acts, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) attacks are deemed the most
severe threat to this country. ‘Larger-scale incidents could include… much greater
numbers of casualties and widespread, long-term impacts of a magnitude above all others,’
the cheery document suggests. As one British diplomatic source puts it, ‘We assumed that the use of
chemical weapons by states had drawn to an end. But their repeated use in Syria ate away
at that. Then the sheer recklessness of the Skripal attack shocked not just us but a lot of our allies around the world.’ And it’s not
just states. Aimen Dean has called Salisbury a ‘big neon advertisement’ to jihadists
about the potency of chemical attacks. British efforts to reverse this normalisation of WMD have included participating with the US and France in air
strikes in Syria in April, aimed at redrawing some Obama-era ‘red lines’ that were blurred by six years of unpunished chemical attacks by the Assad regime. At the same time Gavin Williamson, the
Defence Secretary, has pledged £48 million to build a new chemical weapons defence centre at Porton Down, and elements of de Bretton-Gordon’s disbanded CBRN regiment are being reconstituted.
Quietly, this summer, the British Government has also pursued a high-stakes diplomatic gambit to ensure chemical attacks are no longer easy to get away with, by granting the OPCW powers to attribute
blame for chemical attacks. Russia has repeatedly blocked such moves, but last month a special session of OPCW member states was convened and despite Russian pressure, 106 members turned up and
82 voted in favour of granting the OPCW powers ‘to identify the perpetrators of the use of chemical weapons’ – initially in Syria alone but then, so Britain hopes, around the world. ‘The taboo against the
use of these weapons is breaking down and today the OPCW has not just the power to say the chemical weapons have been used, but can also point the finger at whoever did it,’ the then Foreign Secretary
Boris Johnson said afterwards. If the worst came to the worst, however, and a major attack did unfold, Britain would fall back on the Reserve National Stock, a chain of warehouses filled with antidotes
and drugs for use in the event of a catastrophic WMD event. It was established in the 1970s after the eradication of smallpox, when dumps of the smallpox vaccine were maintained just in case the disease
re-emerged. In 1995, after sarin terror attacks on the Tokyo subway launched by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, nerve-gas antidotes were added. Following 9/11, countermeasures for anthrax were also
included; then, in 2003, the nerve agent response was upgraded with better drugs and personal-protection gear. Critical chemical- and biological- weapon treatments are strategically positioned around
the country, with the aim of getting essential supplies to almost any affected location within five hours. The kind of items in the stock is made clear in an NHS England document, identified with the bland
‘Gateway Reference Number 03088’. ‘1. Nerve agent antidote pod to treat 90 people. 2. Obidoxime further treatment for nerve agent poisoning. 3. Dicobalt edetate pod for treatment of cyanide poisoning
in 90 people. 4. Botulinum antitoxin... Antibiotic pods (oral ciprofloxacin) to treat 250 adults for 10 days… with post-exposure prophylaxis for anthrax, plague or tularaemia…’ You get the picture. The
Reserve National Stock is kept under review, to ensure it contains the right kit and drugs to meet current threats. But that also begs a question: will it be able to respond to threats in the future? For no

for example, biological pathogens can be modified to

sooner have WMD resurfaced than the nature of the threat they pose is changing. Today,

‘improve’ their lethality using gene-editing techniques such as Crispr-Cas9. Because of their
ease of use, these techniques – more usually lauded for their medical applications – have been described by James Clapper, America’s national
intelligence director until last year, as weapons of mass destruction, as they
do not require a vastly sophisticated
lab. ‘It makes it easy for individuals to operate outside a formal institutional setting,’ says James
Giordano, professor of neurology and biochemistry at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics of Georgetown University Medical Center in
Washington, DC. ‘Crispr lends itself to biohacking.’ Biohacking
sounds subversive, but in fact is merely the
name given to the growing trend for DIY bioengineering , carried out by amateurs with
no malicious intent, usually on entirely benign organisms, such as yeast. Take a turn off the stalls of
Shepherds Bush Market in west London, for example, and you will come across 45 purple and pink shipping containers. This is Open Cell, where biotech innovators can
rent access to lab equipment like a thermal cycler (to reproduce DNA) for a few hundred pounds a month. Open Cell has the relaxed campus feel common to many
collaborative working spaces of which entrepreneurs are fond. Except here, budding young companies are working on encouraging flies to do the pollinating work of
bees, say, or exploiting potato waste to make chipboard-like material. It is a sign of London’s thriving biotech start-up scene. But it is also a sign of how biotech is
breaking out of the state- or university-run lab. ‘That is exactly our passion,’ says Open Cell’s co-founder, biotechnologist Thomas Meany. He makes plain that security is
a top concern, pointing to CCTV on site and constant threat assessments, as well as vetting of potential tenants. ‘We work with organisms you might find in your tummy
or on your skin,’ he says. ‘We don’t use anything that could be potentially hazardous.’ Nevertheless,
Open Cell is part of what Giordano calls ‘an
increasingly global independent DIY movement’ in biotech. ‘It is not a Wild West of biohacking cowboys,’ he says. ‘But the
ubiquity of these techniques now means people may drift outside the norm of a community through a “let’s see what happens”
spirit. They may not be operating with controls to see something bad coming then mitigate it if it happens. Then of course
other groups may simply not care – they want to see if they can do something a bit disruptive. They might say, “Let
see if we can build something that will make people sick.”’ [PHOTO OMITTED] pile of gas masks
CREDIT: BENEDICT REDGROVE Such people, Giordano says, could find themselves the tools of
states looking to sow chaos but not take any blame. ‘They could create bio-agents that are not even
categorised by the biological weapons convention because they are new. You could take something common like E.coli and make it more
pathogenic.’ He points to the case last year of two
academics at the University of Alberta in Canada who
ordered segments of horsepox DNA – related to smallpox – off the internet, and put them
together so they became infectious. What particularly shocked peers was that the pair then published their work –
effectively unveiling a deadly recipe. ‘You shake your head and wonder how it happened,’ says Giordano. ‘Before gene
editing, of course, that’s not such a problem. But now putting out these types of recipes creates real problems because they will be read outside
institutions where regulations are very stringent. I am very concerned about the external community. This is new territory. It needs to be
surveillable and enforceable.’ Or as Clapper put it in his Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community: ‘Given
the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this [gene-editing]
technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and
national security implications.’ What people like Clapper fear is a genetically modified pox
outpacing efforts to contain it, creating a pandemic which could kill not thousands
but, in the doomsday scenario, millions. Last year Bill Gates said a bioweapon strike represented a
bigger threat than nuclear attack, and put the potential death toll at 30 million. The economic fallout would also
be catastrophic. This is hard to calculate, but in a paper some 20 years ago the Center for Disease Control in America tried to estimate
the cost of containing an anthrax-based bioterror attack. The total? $26.2 billion per 100,000 persons exposed. Between renewed state use of chemical
weapons, and amateurs potentially cooking up bioweapons, an entirely new landscape of WMDs is being drawn. It is a landscape that many prefer not to look upon,
wishing to believe it is a picture of the past. Not so. ‘This is such a very dark world,’ says de Bretton-Gordon. ‘People are uncomfortable even speaking about it. Bombs

And this modern age of chemical and biological weapons is only likely to
and bullets are easy. This isn’t.’

become more disturbing – particularly if, as experts like Giordano believe, they unleash an
entirely novel kind of warfare. Medical researchers may be increasingly excited about ‘personalised medicine’ – which
tailors treatments to individuals’ unique genetic make-up – but there’s no reason why bioweapons couldn’t be equally specific. ‘Personalised
pathogens…’ says Giordano. ‘You don’t get collateral damage. That’s on the horizon in future warfare – and we’re
talking near future.’ For a bioethicist like Giordano, such developments raise difficult questions. Are personalised biological weapons – which kill only
their intended targets – ‘better’ than conventional weapons? And if so, will that require a reassessment of our current attempts to reimpose a taboo on such arms?

What if the logical consequence of our growing control of these techniques is

‘neuroweapons’, non-lethal toxins that act through the central nervous system and the brain
to alter emotion and cognition, changing a target’s thoughts and feelings? Such weapons
might present a mechanism to control and defeat potential enemies without killing
them. This might end up saving, not taking lives – but only by effectively enslaving an unwilling adversary.
‘That’s where we’re heading,’ says Giordano. ‘It opens up a whole new ethical vista. A whole new vista of
what international engagement looks like. The very face of warfare as we know it is
changing.’
4 – CP – Pak TNW
Resolved: The Republic of India ought to eliminate its nuclear arsenals, and the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan ought to eliminate its nuclear arsenals with the
exception of its nuclear-tipped battlefield short range ballistic missiles.

India is capable and willing to invade now, but Pakistani TNWs block invasion
and war – our ev postdates theirs. Turns the aff b/c invasion wrecks tensions.
Hagerty 20
Devin Hagerty, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, “Deterrence Stability in South Asia Today”
chp 4 of Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Stability in South Asia published by Springer Nature 2020 Pg. 78-85, R.S.

The public and political pressure on Prime Minister Modi to respond forcefully to the Pulwama
tragedy was intense; in the event of a spectacular terrorist attack killing scores or hundreds of
citizens in Delhi or Mumbai, it would be even greater. Multiplying the inherent dangers of such a scenario is
that the initial provocation, call it “Step One,” would not be the move of a unitary, rational actor. Pakistan is the world’s only nuclear
weapon state for which this can be said. In every crisis from 1998 to 2019, Islamabad denied, dissembled, and obfuscated its way
through the ensuing highly charged interaction with New Delhi. Its established practice is to deny any role in the initial aggression or
to argue that it cannot control (and cannot be expected to control) every group of jihadis that bears a grudge against India. This
issue has been most insightfully analyzed by Perkovich, who anticipated the exact dynamic that played out after the Pulwama attack:
“If a state is not functioning as a unitary actor, or claims not to be when it is convenient, or is not perceived to be by those who seek
to deter it, the implications for deterrence stability are profound.” Indian decision-makers facing such a fragmentary adversary are
confronted with a “highly unstable dilemma. They could act as if the initial violence reflects the intentions of Pakistan’s chain of
command and send countervailing signals of retaliatory action according to normal models of deterrence, in which greater credibility
and righteousness tend to reside with the defender.” But “if Pakistani leaders believe or claim that the perpetrators were not
carrying out state policies, and India does escalate, Pakistani leaders will feel that India is the aggressor, significantly changing the
dynamics of crisis and deterrence stability.”53 In February 2019, both sides portrayed themselves as victims, which created severe
pressures on political leaders to respond aggressively. The “ugliness” stems from the existence and resolve of subconventional
actors and the ambiguity surrounding the precise authorship of their attacks, which renders clear state-to-state communication and
signaling extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. For Perkovich, “the most immediate risk is that a major terrorist attack on India
could instigate war that would then escalate to nuclear use. Deterrence stability requires control over the nuclear arsenal and
prevention of conflict that can escalate— perhaps unintentionally—to major war between India and Pakistan.”54 Step Two in this
ugly scenario would be India’s.55 We can productively assume the Indian state to be a unitary, rational actor in which there is strong
civilian control of the military and little evidence that elements of the national security apparatus sponsor, support, and/or carry out
deadly subconventional operations against Pakistan. However, the Indian Army has been planning and
exercising for limited, Cold Start–style conventional military options. Indian military planners
envision relatively shallow armored penetrations that would conquer a limited area of
Pakistani territory, which would then be used as leverage to negotiate a favorable political
settlement with Islamabad.56 The reasoning behind such limited-war options is that they could, in theory,
be launched so quickly, perhaps within a handful of days, that the United States and other external actors would
not have a chance to intervene before India could respond forcefully to Pakistan-abetted aggression. Planning for and
publicizing these options has created a quandary for the Indian Army: The Indian political leadership, skeptical of
the possibilities for escalation control, has never officially endorsed a “proactive” conventional military doctrine, but the army’s
concept has drawn sufficient attention over the years to have become a major source of concern for the Pakistan Army, which has
naturally responded with a number of countervailing moves, both conventional and nuclear. Although the champions of limited
Indian conventional responses to Step-One attacks emanating from Pakistan claim that they can carve out “space” for retaliation
under Islamabad’s nuclear threshold,57 their confidence that they can do so without transgressing
Pakistan’s nuclear “red lines” is in all probability unwarranted.58 They have not been able to convincingly
answer Indian political leaders’ questions about what would happen next. Would Pakistani commanders on the
ground and the Army leadership in Rawalpindi interpret the invasion across the international
border—the first Indian ground operation on Pakistani soil since 1971— as a limited attack?
How would they respond to battlefield defeats and the loss of substantial amounts of
territory? What if the Pakistani forces, well-prepared by now for the prospect of Indian incursions, and
enjoying shorter logistical lines to the front, begin
to outfight the Indian intruders? Would Indian forces
accept a humiliating defeat, or would they redouble their efforts to take Pakistani territory by
throwing more armor and air power into the fight? If the latter, how would Pakistan respond in turn? Given
the inherent friction59 of major conventional land warfare and the inevitable uncertainties it
generates, could escalation from the conventional to the nuclear level certainly be avoided?
How to be sure? Indian military planners’ seeming overconfidence regarding the conduct of conventional military
options “under the nuclear threshold” could well have disastrous consequences . Step Three in this “ugly” scenario
would be Pakistan’s. Predictably, Pakistani military strategists have responded to Indian planning for
limited conventional war options by developing tactical nuclear weapons, deliverable via the short-range Nasr
missile. The Pakistan Army describes this capability as a low-yield option for destroying large tank formations with relatively little
explosive damage or spread of radiation beyond the battlefield. Pakistani military planners envision the Indian limited-war threat as
a “pre-programmed, predetermined, shooting from the hip posture within 48 to 96 hours,” involving “eight or nine” “independent
integrated battle groups of about armored brigade size,”60 totaling some 32,000–36,000 soldiers. Although analysts describe the
Nasr as a “fielded” system,61 public sources do not disclose whether Pakistan has yet been able to successfully miniaturize a nuclear
warhead to mate with the missile. It is possible that even Indian military planners do not know whether the Nasr system is fully
operational, but it would be wise for them to assume that it is. Pakistan’s actual or anticipated deployment of an operational short-
range nuclear missile system raises a number of potential instabilities in this evolving scenario. As noted above, in order for the Nasr
to be available for use on short notice during an Indo-Pakistani crisis, authorization to launch the missile(s) against advancing Indian
armor would likely have to be predelegated to commanders on the ground, perhaps in the midst of major military hostilities and the
resultant fog of war. Under these circumstances, Pakistan’s command and control system would come under enormous stresses,
quite possibly including the severing of communications links, which would leave battlefield commanders cut off from their superiors
and forced to make decisions of the greatest magnitude on their own. Looming over all of this would be Pakistani decision-makers’
understanding that their failure to back up their nuclear-deterrent posture in response to an Indian invasion would forevermore
render their nuclear capabilities—Pakistan’s crown jewels—suspect in Indian eyes. Given that knowledge, Pakistani commanders
might well choose not to exercise nuclear restraint.62

A war between India and Pakistan draws in China and the US – goes nuclear
and outweighs.
Mitter 19
Rana Mitter [professor of the history and politics of modern China at St Cross College, Oxford University], 19 - ("How future wars
between India and Pakistan could draw in the US and China," New Statesman, 3-3-2019,
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2019/03/how-future-wars-between-india-and-pakistan-could-draw-us-and-china)//ML

Yet with China’s relentless rise, regional alliances – and rivalries – may be changing . For Pakistan, China
provides a new source of comfort as its other partners, most notably the US, feel uneasy about Islamabad’s commitment to areas
such as anti-terror co-operation. A Chinese diplomat recently described Pakistan and China’s relationship as being like “steel”.
There is plenty of that, along with concrete and glass, in the $62bn being pumped into the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor under the Belt and Road Initiative – Beijing’s aspiration to bring up to $8trn of investment to
a region stretching from Eurasia to East Africa. ¶ Aspects of that development have proved increasingly worrying for India.
Gwadar, the hitherto sleepy Pakistani town where Chinese funds are paying for a new container port, will become a
major hub for Chinese merchant shipping . In addition, there are numerous rumours that a port nearby might
become a Chinese overseas naval base, to accompany the base in Djibouti, which China opened in 2017 – a prospect
that alarms politicians in New Delhi. The planned supply route for Gwadar is through Pakistani-administered
Kashmir and into Xinjiang in western China. Since India also claims the parts of Kashmir under Pakistani control (just as Pakistan
claims the Indian parts), this would mean a scenario in which a key Chinese economic pathway runs
substantially through disputed territory , with all the diplomatic and security implications of such a decision.¶ It’s
not implausible to envisage a situation, perhaps just a few years away, when an attack on
Pakistan would seem to impinge directly on China’s interests. For now, China has declared that it does not
intend to internationalise the Kashmir issue, although it also controls a disputed area of the region known as Aksai Chin and has
confronted India over it within the past year. The
country’s relative restraint may not last when economic
investments are at stake. And events such as the terrorist attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi on 23 November last
year show that, despite China’s protestations of neutrality, it is regarded as a player in Pakistan’s politics and is vulnerable to sudden
violence from non-state actors. ¶ Meanwhile, the rise of China will certainly add urgency to US attempts to
make the Quad more effective. The Indus Valley Treaty, of course, is a reminder that disputes between South Asia’s
fractious neighbours don’t have to descend into confrontation.¶ Is a future dispute between India and Pakistan
that draws in the US and China unlikely? Overall, yes. But politics in all those countries is volatile. And the effect of a
miscalculation could be more devastating than we can imagine.
5 – K – Berlant
The 1AC forges a relationship of cruel optimism with the ballot — a
hopeful attachment to the logic of a problematic system of economic
exchange that kills the potential for successful change.
Berlant 06
Lauren Berlant, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism”, Duke University Press, 1 December
2006, accessed: 29 November 2019, https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-abstract/17/3/20/97656/Cruel-
Optimism?redirectedFrom=fulltext, R.S.

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we
want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could
be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase
“the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is
incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation
for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the
object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic.
That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the
slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object
hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent). “Cruel
optimism” names a
relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these
attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their
lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence
threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity
of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on
living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of
melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she
has identified her ego continuity. Cruel
optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a
problematic object in advance of its loss. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic,
in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about the cluster of desires and affects we
manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of
the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad. But some scenes of optimism are crueler than
others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an
object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed
to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a
scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, patriotism, a career, all kinds of things. One makes affective
bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which
keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. To understand cruel optimism as an aesthetic of
attachment requires embarking on an analysis of the modes of rhetorical indirection that manage the strange activity of
projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson’s work on
apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a
writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of phantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains
superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because
the dynamics of this scene are something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I will describe the shape of
my transference with her thought.
This relationship stages a moment of rupture from our material
conditions and dooms us to abstraction – the exchange value of the
ballot creates a politics of exchange that re-inforces the brutal logic of
the economy and turns case.
Berlant 2’
Lauren Berlant, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism”, Duke University Press, 1 December
2006, accessed: 29 November 2019, https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-abstract/17/3/20/97656/Cruel-
Optimism?redirectedFrom=fulltext, R.S.

It is striking that these moments of optimism, which mark a possibility that the habits of a history might not be
reproduced, release an overwhelmingly negative force: one predicts such effects in traumatic scenes, but it is
not usual to think about an optimistic event as having the same potential consequences. The conventional fantasy
that a revolutionary lifting of being might happen in proximity to a new object/scene would
predict otherwise than that a person or a group might prefer, after all, to surf from episode
to episode while leaning toward a cluster of vaguely phrased prospects. And yet: at a certain
degree of abstraction both from trauma and optimism, the experience of self-dissolution,
radically reshaped consciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar; the
emotional flooding in proximity to a new object can also produce a similar grasping
toward stabilizing form, a reanchoring in the symptom’s predictability .¶ I have suggested that the particular
ways in which identity and desire are articulated and lived sensually within capitalist culture
produce such counterintuitive overlaps. But it would be reductive to read the preceding as a claim that anyone’s
subjective transaction with the optimistic structure of value in capital produces the knotty entailments of cruel optimism as
such. This essay focuses on artworks that explicitly remediate singularities into cases of nonuniversal but general abstraction,
providing narrative scenarios of how people learn to identify, manage, and maintain the hazy luminosity of their attachment to
being x and having x, given that their attachments were promises and not possessions after all. Geoff Ryman’s historical novel
Was provides a different kind of limit case of cruel optimism. Linking agrarian labor, the culture industries, and therapy
culture through four encounters with The Wizard of Oz, its pursuit of the affective continuity of trauma and optimism in self-
unfold- ing excitement is neither comic, tragic, nor melodramatic, but metaformal: it absorbs all of these into a literary mode
that validates fantasy (from absorption in pretty things to crazy delusion) as a life-affirming defense against the attritions of
ordinary history.¶ Was constructs a post-traumatic drama that is held together by the governing consciousness of Bill Davison,
a mental health worker, a white heterosexual Midwesterner whose only intimate personal brush with trauma has been
ambivalence toward his fiancé e but whose profes- sional capacity to enter into the impasse with his patients, and to let their
impasses into him, makes him the novel’s optimistic remainder, a rich witness. The first traumatic story told is about the real
Dorothy Gale, spelled Gael, partly, I imagine, to link up the girl who’s transported to Oz on a strong breeze to someone in
prison, and also to link her to the Gaelic part of Scotland, home of the historical novel, the genre whose affective and political
conventions shape explicitly Ryman’s quasi-documentary inclusion of experiences and memories whose traces are in archives,
land- scapes, and bodies scattered throughout Kansas, Canada, and the United States. Like Cooter, this Dorothy Gael uses
whatever fantasy she can scrap together to survive her scene of hopeless historical embeddedness. But her process is not to
drift vaguely, but intensely, by way of multigeneric inven- tion: dreams, fantasies, private plays, psychotic projection,
aggressive quiet, lying, being a loud bully and a frank truth teller. Dorothy’s creativity makes a wall of post-traumatic noise, as
she has been abandoned by her parents, raped and shamed by her Uncle Henry Gulch, and shunned by other children for being
big, fat, and ineloquent.¶ Part 2 of Was tells the story of Judy Garland as the child Frances Gumm. On the Wizard of Oz set she
plays Dorothy Gale as desexualized sweetheart, her breasts tightly bound so that she can remain a child and therefore have her
childhood stolen from her. It is not stolen through rape, but by parents bound up in their own fantasies of living through
children in terms of money and fame (Gumm’s mother) or sex (Gumm’s father, whose object choice was young boys). The third
story in Was is about a fictional gay man, a minor Hollywood actor named Jonathan, whose fame comes from being the
monster in serial killer movies titled The Child Minder and who, as the book begins, is offered a part in a touring Wizard of Oz
company while he is entering aids dementia. All of these stories are about the cruelty of optimism for people without control
over the material condi- tions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by
other people and the nation. I cannot do justice here to the singularities of what optimism makes possible and impossible in
this entire book but want to focus on a scene that makes the whole book possible. In this scene, Dorothy Gael encounters a
substitute teacher, Frank Baum, in her rural Kansas elementary school. ¶ “The children,” writes Ryman, “knew the Substitute
was not a real teacher because he was so soft” (168). “Substitute” derives from the word “succeed,” and the sense of possibility
around the changeover is deeply embedded in the word. A substitute brings optimism if he hasn’t yet been defeated—by life or
by the students. He enters their lives as a new site for attachment, a dedramatized possibility. He is by definition a placeholder,
a space of abeyance, an aleatory event. His coming is not personal—he is not there for anyone in particular. The amount of
affect released around him says something about the intensity of the children’s available drive to be less dead, numb,
neutralized, or crazy with habit; but it says nothing about what it would feel like to be in transit between the stale life and all
its others, or whether that feeling would lead to something good. ¶ Of course, often students are cruel to substitutes, out of
excite- ment at the unpredictable and out of not having fear or transference to make them docile or even desiring of a
recognition that has no time to be built. But this substitute is special to Dorothy: he is an actor, like her parents; he teaches
them Turkish, and tells them about alternative histo- ries lived right now and in the past (171). Dorothy fantasizes about
Frank Baum not in a narrative way, but with a mixture of sheer pleasure and defense: “Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his hands
on her” (169); then she berates herself for her “own unworthiness” (169) because she knows “how beautiful you are and I
know how ugly I am and how you could never have anything to do with me” (174). She says his name, Frank, over and over: it
“seemed to sum up everything that was missing from her life” (169). Yet, face to face she cannot bear the feeling of relief from
her life that the substitute’s being near provides for her. She alternately bristles and melts at his deference, his undemanding
kindness. She mocks him and disrupts class to drown out her tenderness, but obeys him when he asks her to leave the room to
just write something, anything.¶ What she comes back with is a lie, a wish. Her dog, Toto, had been murdered by her aunt and
uncle, who hated him and who had no food to spare for him. But the story she hands in to the substitute is a substitute: it is
about how happy she and Toto are. It includes sentences about how they play together and how exuberant he is, running
around yelping “like he is saying hello to everything” (174). Imaginary Toto sits on her lap, licks her hand, has a cold nose,
sleeps on her lap, and eats food that Auntie Em gives her to give him. The essay suggests a successful life, a life where love
circulates and extends its sympathies, rather than the life she actually lives, where “[i]t was as if they had all stood back-to-
back, shouting ‘love’ at the tops of their lungs, but in the wrong direction, away from each other” (221). It carries traces of all of
the good experience Dorothy has ever had. The essay closes this way: “I did not call him Toto. That is the name my mother
gave him when she was alive. It is the same as mine” (175).¶ Toto, Dodo, Dorothy: the teacher sees that the child has opened
up something in herself, let down a defense, and he is moved by the brav- ery of her admission of identification and
attachment. But he makes the mistake of being mimetic in response, acting soft toward her in a way he might imagine that she
seeks to be: “I’m very glad,” he murmured, “that you have something to love as much as that little animal.” Dorothy goes
ballistic at this response and insults Baum, but goes on to blurt out all of the truths of her life, in public, in front of the other
students. She talks nonstop about being raped and hungry all the time, about the murder of her dog, and about her
ineloquence: “I can’t say anything,” she closes (176). That phrase means she can’t do anything to change anything. From here
she regresses to yelping and tries to dig a hole in the ground, to become the size she feels, and also to become, in a sense, an
embodiment of the last thing she loved. After that, Dorothy goes crazy, lives in a fantasy world of her own, wandering
homeless and free, especially, of the capacity to reflect on loss in the modalities of realism, tragedy, or melodrama. To protect
her last iota of optimism, she goes crazy. ¶ In Was, Baum goes on to write The Wizard of Oz as a gift of alternativity to the
person who can’t say or do anything to change her life materially and who has taken in so much that one moment of relief from
herself produces a permanent crack in the available genres of her survival. In “What Is a Minor Literature?”
Deleuze and Guattari exhort people to become minor in exactly that way, to deterritorialize
from the normal by digging a hole in sense, like a dog or a mole. Creating an impasse, a
space of internal displacement, in this view, shatters the normal hierar- chies, clarities,
tyrannies, and confusions of compliance with autonomous individuality. This strategy looks
promising in the Ashbery poem. But in “Exchange Value,” a moment of relief produces a psychotic
defense against the risk of loss in optimism. For Dorothy Gael, in Was, the optimism of attachment
to another living being is itself the cruelest slap of all.¶ From this cluster we can understand a bit more of
the magnetic attraction to cruel optimism, with its suppression of the risks of attach- ment. A change of heart, a sensorial shift,
intersubjectivity, or transference with a promising object cannot generate on its own the better good life: nor can the
collaboration of a couple, brothers, or pedagogy. The
vague futurities of normative optimism produce
small self-interruptions as the utopias of structural inequality. The texts we have looked at here
stage moments when it could become otherwise, but shifts in affective atmosphere are
not equal to changing the world. They are, here, only pieces of an argument about the centrality of optimistic
fantasy to reproducing and surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness. And that is one way to take the measure of the
impasse of living in the overwhelmingly present moment.
Case
cTop Level
The role of the judge is to evaluate the winner of the round based on who was
the better debater. Any other role of the ballot is self serving and arbitrary.

Framework – Vote neg if we win that the plan would be bad.

1 – Fairness – Any other ROTB is arbitrary and self-serving, which precludes
nuanced testing and refinement of their politics.
2 – Purity Politics – saying “we solve” politics lets them shift out of necessary
legal engagement which is necessary to understand and dissolve systems of
power – turns their offense.

Vote neg on presumption – they don’t solve their impacts.

1 – Systems – The 1AC argues that material institutions create social realities
that replicate violence but ceding the state refuses to alter these conditions.
2 – Spillover – They’re missing a robust internal link as to 1) Why they need the
ballot or 2) Why the reading of the aff forwards change inside or outside of
round.

no prefiat offense- prefer for predictability its not in the rez. either we contest
the performance and it’s messed up or we don’t and lose
vitalistic jurisprudence
1 – VTL exists even with biopower – I can still find enjoyment in life from
something like eating ice cream.

2 – It’s impact justified – Even if biopower is net bad, util determines that,
which means you should use util because it determines the violence something
produces in its context.
Proper
We’ll do the LBL here:

1 – They have no delineated offense to storytelling – don’t give it to them in the

1AR or it’s functionally an add-on.

2 – Group Hashimi and Batalvi

A – It’s about the initial partition when there was a mass immigration that
caused violence – which they can’t solve now.
B – India didn’t have nukes back then.

4 – They moot the affective value of the aff with nuclear discussion, nuanced
politics, and spreading.

5 – On Dalton and Kalwani

A – Modi has ZERO political incentive to escalate tensions – his approval
rating is high and he’s far ahead of any other candidates.
India Today 19
India Today, Indian newspaper and broadcast network, “NaMo, uninterrupted: India stands firmly behind Narendra Modi, finds
Mood of the Nation,” India Today, 14 August 2019, accessed: 19 January 2019, https://www.indiatoday.in/mood-of-the-
nation/story/narendra-modi-popularity-bjp-congress-kashmir-economy-mood-of-the-nation-august-1580907-2019-08-14, R.S.

The country is firmly behind Narendra Modi whose popularity as a leader stands unrivaled in recent
times. In fact, Narendra Modi's 'strong leader' image was the primary driving force behind the
Bharatiya Janata Party's staggering victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. And, if elections were to be held again today, the
BJP would not only win but would improve on the tally it registered in the Lok Sabha polls, the results of which were declared in
May. All this, according to the August edition of the Mood of the Nation poll. The bi-annual survey was
conducted across 97 parliamentary constituencies and 194 assembly constituencies in 19 states. A total of 12,126 interviews were
conducted between July 22, 2019 and July 30, 2019 to gauge the nation's mood. And the Mood of the Nation is pretty clear:
Narendra Modi is miles ahead of his contemporaries and stands on the cusp of going down in
history as one of India's strongest political leaders . PM Modi's approval ratings currently stand at 71
per cent, a sharp rise compared to the 54 per cent approval he enjoyed in the January 2019 edition of the Mood of the Nation.
If elections were held today, Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party would once again emerge victorious. The findings of the
Mood of the Nation poll show that the BJP would win 308 seats -- five more than what the party won in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls
-- while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would win 357. Meanwhile for the Congress, it is all doom and gloom
with a majority of the respondents saying that the Grand Old Party is in terminal decline and that the party risks losing two of the
only four states where it is currently in power -- Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Here are the top takeaways from the August
2019 Mood of the Nation poll: MODI MOST POPULAR: PM Narendra Modi remains the most popular leader
in the country, according to the Mood of the Nation poll. 30 per cent of the respondents rated his performance as
outstanding while 41 per cent rated it as good. His approval ratings as prime minister are at 71 per cent. He is also rated as
the best prime minister India has had.
B – Ambiguity ensures M.A.D. – It leads to increased hesitance with
conventional attacks because any conflict has a chance of escalation.
C – All of their evidence is old and thumped by the Balakot conflicts earlier this
year.
D – Cold Start has been around since 1947 and they’ve had nukes since the 90’s
– 20+ years of history thumps.
E – Their ev is a “what if” scenario – there’s no descriptive claim about the
squo.
1AC Dalton and Kalwani 19
Toby Dalton and Gaurav Kalwani, Toby Dalton is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program and senior fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Gaurav Kalwani is a James C. Gaither junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, “Might
India Start the Next South Asian Crisis”, War on the Rocks, 1 November 2019, accessed: 24 February 2020,
https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/might-india-start-the-next-south-asia-crisis/, R.S.

What if India Takes the Initiative?

Instead of waiting for the next terror attack to start yet another crisis, might Modi decide to take the
initiative and launch an operation to capture territory in Pakistani Kashmir?

Indian counterforce would wipe out Pakistan’s nukes

Clary and Narang 19 – Christopher, assistant professor of political science at the University
at Albany, State University of New York, and Vipin, associate professor of political science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “India’s Counterforce Temptations”, International
Security, Vol. 43, No. 3

Is India shifting to a nuclear counterforce strategy? The conventional wisdom is that India only
reluctantly acquired nuclear weapons and has been a restrained nuclear weapons power that adheres to a no-first-use (NFU) policy and
rejects the possibility of nuclear warfighting . Although the empirical record largely bears out its reluctance to acquire nuclear weapons,1
India’s continued nuclear restraint is less certain . Specifically, India is developing a suite of capabilities
and increasingly making statements about preemption and counterforce that appear inconsistent with its professed
strategy of assured retaliation or minimum deterrence. This article identifies, and attempts to explain, why India has devoted considerable

resources since 2003 to develop and acquire capabilities that exceed what is required for a
strictly retaliatory nuclear arsenal. Specifically, why has India sought to build a diverse and growing
number of accurate and responsive nuclear delivery systems at higher states of readiness, an
increasing array of surveillance platforms, and both indigenous and imported air and ballistic
missile defenses? Moreover, these capability developments have emerged alongside an
increasing number of public statements by serving and retired Indian national security officials
arguing that preemptive counterforce options against Pakistan are permissible doctrinally and
advantageous strategically.2 We argue that these apparently discrepant capability developments are most likely the result of India’s conscious pursuit of
more flexible options beyond countervalue targeting—namely, counterforce options against Pakistan’s longer-range nuclear systems—and are largely not the product of either

these developments are an early indication of India’s

technological drift or strategic confusion. If our assessment is correct, then

exploration and development of options to target Pakistan’s strategic nuclear systems in a

conflict. Unlike India’s nuclear strategy toward China, which appears to remain countervalue assured retaliation, available evidence suggests
that India may be developing options toward Pakistan that would permit it to engage in hard
nuclear counterforce targeting, providing India a limited ability to disarm Pakistan of strategic
nuclear weapons.3 Such a development would entail a decoupling of India’s nuclear strategies toward its two neighbors. A shift to
incorporating nuclear counterforce options may be an attempt to escape India’s strategic
paralysis following Pakistan’s development of tactical nuclear weapons, which Pakistan
threatens to use against Indian conventional forces should they cross certain red lines . What can
India do if Pakistan uses one or several tactical nuclear weapons against Indian forces? India’s official
nuclear doctrine explicitly threatens massive retaliation against any such use, which outside observers have widely interpreted as implying a major countervalue strike against
Pakistani cities. Nevertheless, many have questioned the credibility of massive retaliation—whether any Indian leader would in fact order the killing of millions of innocent
Pakistani civilians in response to nuclear use on Indian forces operating on Pakistani soil.4 If India chose not to retaliate with massive force, it could attempt a proportional tit-
for-tat response. Such a response, however, would cede the nuclear initiative back to Pakistan, which, retaining its long-range strategic nuclear weapons, could respond by
destroying one or several Indian cities. Further, pursuing such graduated options would place enormous pressure on India’s command and control system.5 Thus, some

Indian policymakers appear to be attracted to a third option: a hard counterforce strike against
Pakistan’s relatively small number—perhaps several dozen—strategic nuclear assets on land (and eventually at sea) to
eliminate its ability to destroy Indian strategic targets and cities . Such a strategy would be
consistent with India’s doctrine of massive retaliation —massive retaliation strategies need not
be countervalue—while avoiding the credibility issues associated with a countervalue targeting
strategy following Pakistan’s use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. One problem with a counterforce option,
however, is that, seized with the fear of a disarming strike, Pakistan would have an incentive to unleash its entire arsenal

first before losing it, which in turn would encourage India to attempt a counterforce strike
preemptively—a problem given India’s NFU commitment, which most commentators have assumed would oblige India or its forces to suffer a nuclear detonation
before retaliating. We argue that these preemptive pressures associated with counterforce targeting may explain

why a number of influential Indian officials have made a persistent and otherwise puzzling
argument either that India should revise its NFU policy to permit preemption or that preemptive use upon
warning of imminent Pakistani launch is consistent with its existing NFU policy. India’s adoption of potentially preemptive counterforce options—even as a choice on a menu
that otherwise consists of countervalue retaliation options— would mark a seismic shift in Indian nuclear strategy and the death knell of so-called credible minimum deterrence.

Furthermore, if India construes preemption as consistent with its NFU policy and therefore preemptive counterforce as a form of massive retaliation, it may decide
that no overt changes to its declaratory doctrine are necessary. As India’s former National
Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon recently stated , “India’s nuclear doctrine has far greater
flexibility than it gets credit for.”6 In short, India’s national security officials may have already quietly
concluded that preemptive counterforce options—and associated increases in strategic force capabilities—are consistent
with India’s existing nuclear doctrine. Therefore, there may be no explicit acknowledgment or indicators of this shift, which may force Pakistan to
adjust its nuclear posture and strategy on the fear that it has already occurred. Eliminating Pakistan’s strategic nuclear weapons

would be tempting for India. Rather than current military plans that aim to punish Pakistan for
future provocations while avoiding Pakistan’s nuclear red lines , plans for a counterforce-capable
India would be able to wage whatever conventional war it prefers by eliminating the nuclear
threat altogether. India might be able to reestablish deterrence against Pakistani terrorist
attacks on Indian territory in ways that aborted adjustments to its conventional doctrine have
failed to do.

The Toon ev
A – Assumes an invasion link.
B – Terrorists can’t acquire because they’d have to steal it from a heavily
guarded base, get chased by international intervention, and somehow launch it.
C – No warrant for ambiguity.
D – This cites US Russia so it doesn’t apply
Case – Solvency
The Hensman ev just says India’s a cool country with lots of activists and nukes
are scary
A – There’s fewer deterrent threats now than 1999
B – it says literally nothing about joining borders.
C – No ev that people believe the other country will use nukes.
D – Flight times, BMD, and psychological violence assume that they’lsl use
which we answered – the political leaders stuff assumes a different prime
minister from the 90s

The other Hensman ev is garb – States don’t threaten to nuke their populations,
and grassroots activism wouldn’t trigger response from another state. If they
solve it it’s extra T because it defends denuclearization as a “strengthening of
international working class solidarity”

No risk of Indo-Pak war because of deterrence

Sehgal and Rajaraman ’18 Rashme Sehgal and Ramamurti Rajaraman 18, he’s being interviewed, Emeritus
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, "'India-Pakistan nuke war not a realistic possibilty', says leading
nuclear expert Ramamurti Rajaraman", Firstpost, https://www.firstpost.com/india/india-pakistan-nuke-war-not-a-realistic-
possibilty-says-leading-nuclear-expert-ramamurti-rajaraman-3880145.html

is there a likelihood that India could

Q: The conflict between India and Pakistan has intensified in the last three years. If the situation worsens,

launch a pre-emptive first strike against Pakistan if it feared an imminent nuclear strike? Of course, this
could mean a marked reversal of our no-first use (NFU) policy. On the other hand, if India goes in for more surgical strikes, can Pakistan use a conventional attack as a pretext to
attack India? A: The conflict between India and Pakistan during the past three years has been limited to Jammu and Kashmir. These conflicts may continue and may also

I don’t think there is any realistic possibility of

occasionally intensify. There may also be a lot of heated rhetoric from both sides. But

those conflicts developing into a full-scale war, let alone one with any serious chances of a
nuclear strike by Pakistan. Notice that there has been no mainland attack by Pakistan based terrorists
since the 2008 Mumbai attacks. I feel that this is because Pakistan military and its Inter-Services
Intelligence do appreciate the fact that the next time there is an attack of that magnitude