Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Proliferation Turns Taiwan Stability

Taiwanese proliferation would lead to a shootout in a desperate attempt to draw in superpowers
Rosen 6 [Beton Michael Kaneb, Professor of National Security and Military Affairs and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University Foreign Affairs. Sep. CIAO]

What kind of state might attempt such a thing? If history is any guide, a state that openly rejects the existing international order, considers its opponents to be less than fully human, and seeks to intimidate others. Alternatively, internal conflicts could create hatreds so powerful that actors might resort to using nuclear weapons; consider, for example, how Moscow might respond if another Chechen attack killed hundreds of Russian children. Some states might also be tempted to use nuclear weapons in other ways. For example, before it started to abandon its nuclear weapons program, South Africa had planned to use its bombs if it was ever approaching military defeat, as a last-ditch effort to draw the superpowers into the conflict. If it were to cross the nuclear threshold, Taiwan might embrace a similar strategy.

Proliferation Turns Escalation

Prolif snowballs – as long as one country has weapons, the rest will follow
Sethi 1 [Manpreet. Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Strategic Analysis:A Monthly Journal of the IDSA. February 2001 Vol. XXVI No. 11. CIAO]

The most palpable danger that nuclear weapons pose arises from the insecurity that they generate in the minds of others so that the adversary too is compelled to acquire a similar capability in order to guard against nuclear blackmail, coercion, or annihilation. The dictate of putting a sort of deterrence in place then has the potential to trigger off a chain of proliferation.   Despite the best US efforts to withhold nuclear know how and expertise in the late 1940s, it could not prevent the USSR from going nuclear. Within one year of the use of the two nuclear weapons in Japan, Russia had realised the threat that the monopolist possession of the bomb posed. Stalin had then said on September 24, 1946 that the "monopolist possession of the bomb cannot last long". The USSR conducted its first nuclear tests in 1949. Thereafter, as and when a country has felt it imperative for its security, nuclear weapons have gone on proliferating. Nuclear proliferation is a real danger that exists as long as nuclear weapons exist with even one country. And this danger is only likely to grow in the future owing to the following factors:-  An increasing salience of nuclear weapons in the national security strategies of the nuclear weapons states (NWS). Disturbing indications are available in the way all the NWS are increasing their reliance on their nuclear arsenals. US and NATO have reaffirmed that nuclear weapons constitute the cornerstone of their national security policies; 1 Russia's new national security concept envisages the right to use "all available means and forces, including nuclear weapons, in case of the need to repel an armed aggression when all other means of settling the crisis situation have been exhausted", 2 China's modernisation of its nuclear and missile weaponry continues; an arms race spiral could be created by the US decision to deploy a national missile defence; 3 and NATO intervention in Kosovo without the approval of the United Nations and its implications on state intervention, are all issues that have a bearing on nuclear proliferation.  A corollary of the above is the growing perception among the non nuclear weapon states (NNWS) that there is a lack of seriousness and urgency on the part of the NWS to honour their commitment towards nuclear disarmament and as embodied in Article VI of the NPT. The NPT Preparatory Committee meetings in 1997, 1998 and 1999, as also the Review Conference earlier this year found the two categories of states polarised over the issue of nuclear disarmament. 4 The Conference on Disarmament, the multilateral grouping of 66 countries, that identifies and negotiates steps towards disarmament has also remained deadlocked over the past two years on two issues. One of these pertains to the insistence by the NNWS on the creation of an ad hoc committee within the CD to negotiate nuclear disarmament. 5  Easy accessibility to more and more sophisticated technology, fissile material, weapons components and even ready-made weapons after the collapse of centralised Soviet control. This aspect is dealt with in greater detail in the section on nuclear smuggling. Apart from this, there is the aspect of the international system going through a phase of technology push in which more and more sophisticated technology is available from an increasing number of suppliers. In such an emergent scenario, commercial considerations could outweigh security concerns even as import-export restrictions become less effective over the years.  Likelihood of an increase in Third World dependence on commercial nuclear power. A rise in scientific and technological sophistication of infrastructures would carry the seed of militarily exploiting the dual use technology. In fact, with improvements in technologies relating to commercial nuclear power, the size of key facilities is getting smaller, as is the number of technicians involved and the amount of electrical power consumed or the time taken for each step of development. Earlier, all these could be taken as tell tale signs of a country's nuclear weapons programme. But given the present trend, proliferation could not only increase for a variety of reasons, but also become less easy to detect.  

Proliferation Turns Hegemony

Proliferation leads to accidental shootout, collapse of hegemony and attack on the homeland
Gray 99 [Colin. strategic thinker and professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, The Second Nuclear Age. CIAO]

Unfortunately, balanced political and strategic judgment is apt to be the first victim of the retreat into technicity and a world of presumptive nuclear peril that often is the dense thicket of expert scholarship on proliferation. Proliferation experts have a way of being expert on almost everything except what the subject of their expertise means politically and strategically. To be fair, the whole realm of strategic and security studies is awash with such niche cases of genuine, but bounded, expertise. Theorists of seapower, airpower, spacepower, and now cyberpower vie for our respect. But are they offering a whole theory of sufficient strategic effect for success in statecraft? Or, is the plat du jour but one course in what needs to be approached as a balanced meal overall?  Lest I should be misunderstood, proliferation could matter to the point where vital or even survival levels of intensity of interest are engaged because of the following considerations:  Nuclear proliferation renders some regional neighborhoods far more dangerous than they were previously.   Nuclear-armed regional polities, or other actors similarly equipped, might inflict mass destruction upon U.S. and U.S.-allied forces forward deployed, upon local friends and allies, or even upon the homeland of the United States.   Successful use of WMD as a diplomatic counterdeterrent would undermine fundamentally the basis of the current regional/international order, which frequently amounts in practice to a (single) superpower protection system—in other words, a hegemonic system. 4   In some statistical perspective, the emergence of more (declared or undeclared) nuclear powers means a rise in the possibility of nuclear “events,” purposeful or accidental. The psychological, political, and hence probably strategic consequences of a, or some, “small” nuclear event(s) are not easily analyzed by mind-sets that resist nonlinear, chaotic possibilities. Again to quote Freedman, “The concept of a small nuclear war has yet to be developed. Any nuclear use still moves us into the area of unimaginable catastrophe.” 5 His hyperbole is appropriate.