Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Nuclear War Turns Economy

Nuclear war derails the economy – banking and social services
Katz and Osdoby 82 [Arthur M. Katz and Sima R. Osdoby, author of Life After Nuclear War and graduate student at Johns Hopkins respectively, Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa009.html]

Casualties, evacuation, and land denial would create severe national and local economic dislocations. Approximately one-third of the U.S.'s manufacturing capacity lies within the geographic areas most affected by fallout.[5] A major evacuation would leave the regional economy in a shambles. Because of economic interdependence, the problem of "bottlenecking" -- serious disruption of the national economy -- would be likely. Bottlenecking is the disruptive effect that losses in a key industry (e.g., steel) have on other dependent economic activities (automobiles and machine tool production). Even modest reductions in capacity of basic, pivotal industries can have severe, widespread effects on the economy. Despite the possibility of product substitution (e.g., plastics for steel) or high inventories of selected products, the short- and mid-term ramifications of a disruption of even 25 to 50% of the affected region's manufacturing activities (equivalent to 8 to 15% of national economic activities) would be a serious blow to the national economy. This disruption could easily last several months, and in a post-attack stalemate with the possibility of future attack requiring prolonged urban evacuation, it would become worse. There are other likely consequences that are less obvious. The banking system would face a particularly severe burden, for example -- potential bankruptcies; defaults on basic time payments, such as mortgages and major appliances; and major shifts of monies by individuals during evacuation. In contaminated areas individuals or businesses would be unable to gain access to money, especially in local banks, for long periods. In general, it would be virtually impossible for banks, either regionally or nationally, to pursue "normal" lending and borrowing policies. Payments such as rents and salaries to businesses or individuals would also have to be deferred. Business insurance would certainly not cover this type of catastrophe. On a scale unknown in U.S. experience, there would probably be a massive outcry for the federal government to provide regional disaster loans to prevent bankruptcy and help resettle workers and their families from severely contaminated areas. The injured and evacuated population would create enormous social service demands (medical care, welfare, emergency housing, etc.) requiring huge sums of money to be spent rapidly. Unprecedented government intervention would probably be demanded to save industries from bankruptcies, allocate goods, and determine industrial priorities. Since individual, industrial, and even regional economic stability would depend on which industries and plants were decontaminated and/or received needed financial support first, implementing these governmental policies would be politically explosive.

Nuclear War Turns Disease

Nuclear war increases disease spread and frequency
Katz 82[ Arthur M, PHD in Chemistry from University of Rochester and MS in Meteorology from MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts, PP 172)

In the initial post attack period, severe medical care problems will occur on a nationwide scale because of the massive increase in the number of people who will require medical care for burns, radiation sickness, blast effects, shock, and other injuries; and the absence of necessary medical services and supplies due to the wholesale destruction of hospital facilities, widespread deaths and injuries among medical personnel, and the almost total destruction of the drug industry. Other serious health problems are likely to appear later. For example, while epidemics are unlikely to occur during the early post attack period because the large reservoirs of disease carriers will be absent, nevertheless, prolonged contact in crowded conditions necessitated by extended shelter life or fuel and housing conservation measures would increase the long-term probability of epidemics.29 In addition, the appearance of diseases not normally seen in the United States, such as plague, typhus, cholera, and so forth, may generate fear (magnified by the post attack atmosphere) that will cause spontaneous or planned isolation of specific areas, and diminish the effectiveness of post attack recovery programs.

Nuclear War Turns Democracy

Nuclear war makes democracies vulnerable – perception of threats
Krebs 9, [Ronald R. professor of political science at the U of Minnesota Cambridge University Press, journals.cambridge.org]

The relationship between democracy and war has been much studied in international relations. Yet, while the democratic peace continues to be refined and revised, the reverse—the effects of war on democracy—has received less systematic attention. Students of international political economy have devoted substantial attention to the “second-image reversed,” but they have had fewer counterparts in international security. The most plausible explanation for this relative neglect is that international relations emerged in the shadow of mass industrialized war fare and the prospect of nuclear war, and the field’s overriding concern was how to prevent a catastrophe in which millions would perish. This understandable focus on the causes of war came at the expense of research into its consequences. Moreover, assumptions about both the nature of war (an event) and the purpose of social science (to explain regularities) combined to make the study of war ’s consequences seem fruitless. But war, this article has suggested, is a process, embedded in and potentially transforming social life. War is more than war fare: it entails the emergence and perception of threat as well as the mobilization of societal resources, and these are distinct political phenomena with distinct ramifications for democratic politics. International conflict, especially when unpacked in this fashion, is a recurring feature of global politics, not an outlier. Large-scale war fare may be obsolete among developed nations, but conflict, mobilization, and the use of force are not. Understanding war’s consequences for democratic politics is important for its own sake, but it will also lead to better-specified models of war initiation and termination. Further research may, by clarifying the costs of crisis and war time measures, help civilize an often-strident public debate. Hand observed that the “spirit of liberty” may determine the survival of democracy. But, during rough times, the fate of regimes may rest precisely on the margins. It is there that the difference may lie between a democracy that limps along, compromised yet intact, and one that abandons its heritage

Nuclear war erodes democracy – deterrence
Falk 82 [Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton Central and Eastern Europe Online Library, ceeol.com]

In this essay, my concern is with the structural relevance of nuclear weaponry and strategy to the future of democracy. The central contention is that the existence of nuclear weapons, even without any occurrence of nuclear war, interferes with democratic governance in fundamental ways. In other words, we don’t have to wait for Armageddon to begin paying the price, as measured by the quality of democracy, for a system of international security constructed around the central imagery of nuclear deterrence. To presume this relevance of nuclear armaments and doctrines to democracy is itself somewhat unusual. For instance, one searches in vain the pages of the Trilateral Commission’s notorious study, The Crisis of Democracy, for any reference to the erosion of democratic governance as a consequence of “the nuclear revolution”; the Trilateralists’ idea of “crisis” is based on the alleged erosion of authority and stability through the undisciplined tactics of social movements demanding reform that surfaced in the late 1960s, a phenomenon described elsewhere in positive terms as the beginnings of a participatory model of democratic revitalization. In the background, of course, is a concern about the preconditions for capitalist efficiency under contemporary conditions, including a fear that the work ethic, achievement syndrome, and greed impulse are being drained away by cultural developments, including a substantially alienated intelligentsia in so-called mature capitalist countries.4