Miami Debate ABJ

Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear Fusion Aff

Nuclear Fusion Aff...........................................................................................................................1
1AC Inherency.................................................................................................................................3
1AC Plan..........................................................................................................................................4
1AC Humanism Advantage.............................................................................................................5
1AC Hegemony Advantage.............................................................................................................9
***Aff***......................................................................................................................................15
Inherency – Cuts Permanent..........................................................................................................15
Inherency – Support for Fusion Low.............................................................................................16
Harm – Competitiveness................................................................................................................17
Harm – Basic Research..................................................................................................................19
Basic Research Low Now .............................................................................................................20
Harm – International Image...........................................................................................................21
Harm – Research Cooperation and Competitiveness.....................................................................22
R&D Key to US Leadership..........................................................................................................23
Technology Key to Hegemony......................................................................................................24
Scientific Leadership key to Democracy.......................................................................................25
US Funding Key to ITER..............................................................................................................26
Funding Key to Fusion Leadership................................................................................................27
Harm – Global Warming................................................................................................................28
Harm – Energy Crisis.....................................................................................................................30
ITERFusion Power.....................................................................................................................31
International Cooperation Good....................................................................................................33
ITER Good.....................................................................................................................................36
AT: Fusion Inevitably Fails............................................................................................................37
Fusion Feasible..............................................................................................................................38
AT: Fusion Unclean/Dangerous ....................................................................................................39
Time Frame for Fusion..................................................................................................................41
AT: Energy Bad..............................................................................................................................43
Topicality – Incentives ..................................................................................................................44
Topicality – Alternative Energy.....................................................................................................45
***Humanism***..........................................................................................................................46
FusionHumanism.......................................................................................................................46
Humanism Good............................................................................................................................47
Energy = Political..........................................................................................................................48
Humanism = Prerequisite to Politics.............................................................................................49
Progress Good................................................................................................................................50
Rationality Good............................................................................................................................51
Freedom Good...............................................................................................................................52
America Good................................................................................................................................53
Consequentialism Good.................................................................................................................54
Pessimism Bad...............................................................................................................................55
Pessimism Now..............................................................................................................................56
Humanist Ethics.............................................................................................................................57
Globalization..................................................................................................................................58
Consensus Good.............................................................................................................................59
Representations Matter..................................................................................................................60
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Postmodern K..........................................................................................................................62
AT: Heidegger................................................................................................................................64
AT: Spanos.....................................................................................................................................66
AT: Capitalism Bad........................................................................................................................68
AT: Nuclearism K..........................................................................................................................70
AT: Renewables Good...................................................................................................................71
Art and Politics .............................................................................................................................72
***Neg***.....................................................................................................................................73
Kritik Link.....................................................................................................................................73
Fusion Bad.....................................................................................................................................74
Fusion Fails....................................................................................................................................76
Heidegger – Humanism Link.........................................................................................................77
1NC Framework.............................................................................................................................78
AT: Representations First...............................................................................................................80
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Inherency

1AC Inherency (1/1)

Contention I is Inherency
The federal government has recently cut US support for ITER, an international research
program for nuclear fusion energy, in favor of research on renewable energies that could
provide short-term benefit. These cuts preclude R&D funding for US corporations; they
are likely to be permanent and derail international research efforts
Peter Fairly, Contributing editor, IEEE Spectrum, Author, “The Perfect Energy: From Earth,
Wind or Fire?” in Fueling the Future (Anansi Press, 2003) and Electricity & Magnetism
(Twenty-First Century Books, 2007), “Does Fusion Have a Future?” IEEE Spectrum,
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5980, 2/08
The 2004 report “Burning Plasma: Bringing a Star to Earth,” from the U.S. National Research Council, sold
Washington on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a massive R&D project that
proponents predict will be the breakthrough project for fusion energy. In its fiscal 2008 budget, however,
Congress drove the United States’ role in ITER right into the ground, slashing US $160 million promised
for this year to $10.7 million. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) officials are expected to provide an update on how the
United States plans to work around the budget shortfall at a meeting of the agency’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee
next Tuesday. But the United States’ paltry participation has some wondering if fusion research, considered since the 1960s one
of the great long shots for a sustainable and relatively clean energy supply, has run out of time. ITER, set to begin
construction in Cadarache, near Marseilles in southern France, aspires to produce the first self-sustaining
fusion reaction. Like most fusion experiments to date, ITER will use formidable electric currents and magnetic fields to
induce fusion in isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) and to contain the resulting burning plasma—akin to a tiny star and
exceeding 100 million ˚C. But where existing fusion reactors have produced heat equivalent to just a few megawatts of power for
fractions of a second, ITER should put out 500 megawatts—10 times as much as the external power delivered—for several
minutes. Getting there requires a scale of investment that only international consortia can support. The 27-
meter-high magnetic confinement chamber required will take a decade to build and cost an estimated $2.76 billion. Including design,
administration, and 20 years of operation, the project’s total expenses will be nearly $15 billion. The European Union has agreed to cover half
that cost, with the other half shared by the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia, and the Republic of Korea. U.S. support has waxed and
waned before. In 1998, Congress pulled the United States out of ITER, judging the design too pricey. ITER got Congress back on board in 2005
with a redesign that cut the cost in half, only to see the United States trim the cap on its contribution for ITER the next year from $1.4 billion to
This year’s budget cut will prevent the DOE from lining up contractors for the design and
$1.1 billion.
assembly of the hardware that it committed to supply, which includes conductors for the magnets,
a pellet injector to deliver solid deuterium fuel, and an exhaust system for tritium gas. The $10.7
million provided by Congress will cover only U.S. personnel posted to ITER in France and a skeleton staff in the
States. ITER supporters say the setback is temporary. They note that congressional committees fully funded ITER in
draft legislation last fall, only to see the funds shed in the course of a larger budget battle between President Bush and Congress.
At the last minute, Congress slashed $22 billion to avoid a threatened veto, and ITER was an obvious target as a new and
nondomestic project. “It’s just one of those things that happen because of this financial mess we’re in,” says Stephen Dean,
president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit research and educational outfit based in Gaithersburg, Md. Dean says that
slowdowns at ITER, as officials grapple with more than 200 proposed design changes, will blunt the effect of U.S. delays. “The
impact is going to be relatively small, provided that it doesn’t happen again next year,” says Dean. But some observers say
it could happen again if the “financial mess” endures, because ITER—the core of the U.S. fusion program
—appears to be low on Congress’s list of priorities. James Decker, a principal with Alexandria, Va., lobbying
firm Decker Garman Sullivan and former director of the DOE’s Office of Science, notes that Congress instead
provided extra funding for shorter-term energy solutions. For example, Congress gave a 23 percent raise to the
DOE’s energy R&D programs, covering such areas as carbon sequestration and solar energy. If the United States
does drop out of ITER, that could weaken support among other ITER players. Britain pulled its funding
for another international R&D megaproject, the $6.7 billion International Linear Collider, after Congress
effectively froze U.S. participation in the project. The International Linear Collider is the successor to the CERN
(European Organization for Nuclear Research) Large Hadron Collider, which is to begin operations this year.
Proponents of renewable energy would shed no tears if ITER came apart. Ed Lyman, a senior scientist at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, says governments today must determine if energy technologies—including fusion—are “going to
be realistic large-scale energy sources on a timeframe needed to mitigate global warming.” Lyman says fusion, which even
supporters agree is still several decades from fruition, flunks that test and has no place in tight budgets: “R&D resources just
aren’t there to support projects that are so expensive and have shown so little potential for promise in the
near term.”
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Plan

Plan
The United States federal government should restore its funding for ITER research and
development.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Humanism Advantage

1AC Humanism (1/3)

Current environmentalism and energy policy is oriented towards a return to primitivism,
attempting to re-attain the world prior to fossil fuels. An affirmation of fusion power
reverses these ideals, affirming humanism through belief in progress and potential
JJ Charlesworth, writes regularly on contemporary art for magazines such as Art Monthly, Art Review and Time
Out London,FUSION NOW! Art and the Politics of Energy, Manifesto Club, 12/20/2007,
http://www.manifestoclub.com/fusionnowessay
Whatever position we take on the science of global warming, or about the possible consequences of climate change,
the way in which contemporary society identifies carbon emissions as a problem touches on the founding
basis of every material social development of the last 150 years. Because, while human society had
developed and advanced for centuries before, it had always done so on the basis of what we today would
recognise as ‘renewable energy’ – wind in the sails of ships and of windmills, in the biological energy of animals,
or as fuels found in the burning of trees and of organic oils – all sources of energy closely tied to the immediate
environment that produced them. But with the advent of the development of fossil fuels as a source of
energy, many of the social advances we now take for granted were made possible. By contrast, the
approach to energy embedded in environmentalism’s reliance on renewable energy becomes an implicit
demand that we regress from a more advanced level of energy production to a more primitive one. If
seventeenth-century Europe was built on the windmill, the watermill and the sailing ship, the best that new
technology can hope for is to make the extraction of ‘renewable’ energy more efficient. Beyond direct
environmental sources, contemporary environmentalism makes a case for carbon-neutral biofuels, a turn
which also finds parallels in the energy base of society before the industrial revolution. But both
renewable energy and biofuels suffer from the same shortcomings. Compared to fossil fuels, they are
hopelessly low-intensity sources, requiring extensive inputs for proportionally little return. As Kaplinsky
and Woudhuysen argue, to expand renewable energy to match even current energy use would require a technical
transformation of the global environment on a scale the consequences of which would be unacceptable to today’s
environmentalists. But the green agenda refuses to think of big solutions to problems standing in the way of
human progress. Green repugnance to rolling out further conventional (carbon-neutral) fission nuclear
capacity, for example, exposes a pessimistic prejudice towards expansive solutions. Green antagonism to new
nuclear power is not so much an attempt to dismiss the particular shortcomings of any one technology, but is more
profoundly a moral rejection of expansive solutions to the challenges facing human society, based on the notion that
any form of human expansion is by definition a noxious incursion on the purity of an otherwise pristine planet. It
reflects a culture in which we are uncomfortable with using energy – uncomfortable with our own energy use and
uncomfortable with any idea of abundance. More fundamentally, it is an anxiety regarding our relationship to our
own energies, a view of human productive activity as a negative force for harm and destruction. James
Heartfield argues that, paradoxically, green antipathy to human expansion chimes with a wider political fear
about abundance within contemporary capitalism itself. Scarcity, Heartfield suggests, has always formed the
basis of social power. Yet capitalism has unwittingly replaced scarcity with abundance, undermining its
power over social relations, and the green message of restraint and reduction offers capitalism a new
moral justification for restraint and austerity. Renewable energy, however extensively deployed, can only ever
yield as much energy as the Sun inputs. The paradigmatic difference between pre- and post-industrial
revolution society, in terms of energy, is the difference between energy captured in the here-and-now
(wind and water), in contrast to the release of energy stored up over millions of years in the form of fossil
fuel; energy condensed, accreted, compressed and stored on a time-scale that stretches far beyond the timeframe of
human history. It is this input, a release of stored energy (which is not ‘contemporaneous’ to the inputs of the
present ecosphere) and the developing human ability to harness it through technology, which underpins the
productive and social advances of the last two centuries. If the earlier world of renewable energy has
been left far behind through the development of the last two centuries, it is one which many contemporary
environmentalists would wish us to return to. It means that we need to think through what might
transcend the current paradigm of energy, not regress to an earlier one. The greatest potential is in the
development of fusion power. As Professor Dunne argues, fusion technology is fast approaching the point
where a net energy-producing reaction will be realised. It is a matter of years, he says, not decades.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Humanism (2/3)
Humanism is key to prevent barbarism and genocide. The elimination of torture, slavery,
and slaughter of defeated enemies is empirical evidence of humanism’s impacts on the past.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, 97-98
When the inclination is to wallow in the dark side of humanity, it is worth emphasizing that the
legacy of the enlightenment has provided us with a high standard of moral and ethical
responsibility. The twentieth century has witnessed appalling atrocities and relapses into
barbarism and genocide. Yet though the scale of degradation experienced in modern society may
have been greater than in earlier times, it is only in our era that such events would have been
popularly regarded with moral opprobrium. Torture, slavery, the slaughter of defeated enemies –
before the modern era such activities were generally considered legitimate and went without
question. Autocracy, hierarchy, elitism were considered to be features of a natural order vested
with divine authority. It is only with the emergence of modern society, with its concepts of
democracy and equality, that the possibility of progress and the improvement of humanity in
both a material and moral sense arises.

Humanism is a prerequisite to politics – any political or philosophical inquiry relies on the

presupposition that individuals can make a difference
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 166
In our era of political exhaustion, the challenge that faces us is essentially pre-political. It makes
little sense of human subjectivity exists in a diminished form. Politics represents the negation of
Fate and its existence depends on the prevalence of the belief that what people do can make a
difference. That is why today the challenge facing those interested in the reconstitution of public
life is not the discovery of a Big Idea or the invention of a new political doctrine or
philosophy. In the absence of a more robust sense of human agency that can act on such ideas,
such doctrine would have a formal and platitudinous character. Does that not mean
abandoning any hope of re-engaging with political life? Not at all, for the most immediate task
facing those interested in the recovery of the Enlightenment sensibility towards the future is to
contribute to the promotion of the humanist version of personhood. Before politics can be
reconstituted we need to foster an intellectual climate that is hospitable to sentiments that directly
challenge the prevailing paradigm of vulnerability. Humanizing personhood is the most pressing
issue and practical question facing those concerned to challenge the prevailing culture of
fatalism.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Humanism (3/3)
Pessimistic views of people as inevitably involved in causing global atrocities are anti-
humanistic – they promote self-loathing, which precludes meaningful political or
philosophical inquiry
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 94-6
How we view the human species constitutes the point of departure for any philosophical or
political orientation towards the world. Previous debates about the nature and nurture and the
human potential still retain their relevance but are subordinate to the far more critical question of
whether or not we consider humans as special or unique. Those who do so share a common
ground in countering a growing tendency to denigrate the meaning of human. The downsizing of
the role of the subject has as its cultural reinforcement the tendency to denigrate humanity. The
construction of a past that continually highlights human selfishness and destruction helps the
current project of dispossessing people of any unique of positive qualities. Indeed, there is a
widespread conviction that it is the development of human civilization, particularly the advance
of science and technology, and the resulting subordination of the natural order to the debates of
human society, that is the source of today’s problems of environmental destruction and social
disintegration. The perception that it is civilization that bears responsibility for the perils we face
today assigns an undistinguished if not low status to the human species. At times this sentiment
expresses a sense of loathing for humankind. Such sentiments are expressed by members of
Earth First! when they chant ‘Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!’ Indeed people are regularly
portrayed as loathsome parasites who threaten the existence of the Earth. Human activity is
continually blamed for threatening the survival of the globe. Scare stories about the scale of
human destruction are regularly transmitted by the media and promoted by advocacy groups and
politicians. For example, it was claimed that human activity has reduced the number of surviving birds and fish
species by 35 percent during the past thirty years. This story, which was circulated by the environmentalist news
service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, drew a direct correlation between human action and
ecological destruction. The engagement of human beings with nature is frequently represented as ecocide, the
heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. Such a highly charged representation of humanity’s attempt
to domesticate nature attempts to turn this experience into a process akin to genocide of the Holocaust. The title of
Broswimmer’s polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing
towards the human. Ecocide is also the dominant theme of Jared Diamond’s recently published Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, ecocide represents the principal threat to global
survival. ‘Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the
threat to global civilizations,’ observes Diamond. The depiction of human activity as itself a threat to the
world tends to endow this species with an overwhelmingly negative status. Instead of positive
transformation and progress, civilization is portrayed as a history of environmental vandalism.
This misanthropic sentiment was clearly expressed by Micheal Meacher, the former New Labour
Minister for the Environment, when, in 2003, he spoke about how ‘we are the virus’ infecting the
Earth’s body. His colleague, Labour MP Tony Banks, echoed this sentiment in a proposed motion
to the House of Commons. It state that “This House … believes that humans represent the most
obscene, perverted, uncivilized and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to
the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the Earth and wipes them out thus giving Nature
the opportunity to start again. Of course such intense loathing for people represents but an
extreme variant of contemporary anti-humanism. But the denigration of humanity that is
associated with the downsizing of subjectivity enjoys a powerful resonance in contemporary
culture. This development is evident in the elevation of the natural world and of animals on to a
par with – if not into a relation of superiority to – human beings. The insistence on the special
qualities and superior attributes of humans is sometimes condemned as speciesist, and the term
‘human-centric’ used to convey a negative connotation.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony Advantag e

1AC Hegemony (1/6)

Budget cuts towards ITER hurt US international reputation and competitiveness - must act
now to rectify
Hamish Johnston, Editor of PhysicsWorld.com, “Nobel laureates petition Bush over funding
shortfall”, http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34137, 5/8/08
A group of 20 Nobel-prize-winning physicists have written to US President George Bush, asking him to
work with Congress to find at least $510m in “emergency supplemental funding” for the agencies that pay
for much of the nation’s physics research. The laureates sent the letter in response to a similarly-sized shortfall
in the amount of money granted by Congress for scientific research in this financial year compared with what Bush
had first proposed. "[The 2008 budget] sends a terrible message to the next generation of scientists," the
laureates complain in their letter. "Instead of providing incentives for budding scientists, the funding plan
provides discouragement". The letter's signatories include laser pioneer Charles Townes, particle theorist Frank
Wilczek and 2006 winners, the cosmologists George Smoot and John Mather. The funding situation in the US been
difficult this year because the budget for the 2008 fiscal year — which began in October 2007 — was only agreed
upon in December 2007, after 11 months of wrangling between the President and Congress. This delay was bad
news for those researchers and institutes that had already started spending their 2008 money, only to find that their
funding had been cut back or even curtailed. Two fields financed by the Department of Energy have been
particularly badly hit, with funding for high-energy physics falling to $688m — some 12% less than Bush had
requested — and support for fusion falling by a third. The cuts led to Fermilab, for example, announcing plans
earlier this year to lay-off 200 of the lab's 1900 staff. Permanent damage In the letter, the laureates complain that
"hundreds of scientists have been laid off; research grants have been slashed; and facilities operations
have been seriously curtailed at national laboratories", as a result of the shortfall. They also warn that the
damage done to American science in 2008 "will become permanent if it is not rectified within the next
few months". This damage, they say, could hamper the nation’s ability to respond to "increased global
competition from countries such as China, India, and South Korea". Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared the 2001
prize for his work on Bose-Einstein condensates, told physicsworld.com why he signed the letter: "I know from
my own experience that scientific progress needs continuity and predictability of funding, both for current research
efforts, and for attracting new talent". He added "the current budget situations does not reflect this". The budget
cuts have also caused US physicists to limit severely their participation this year in several international
projects — including the International Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER), which is being built in France, and the
International Linear Collider. "[The 2008 budget] is damaging our reputation as a reliable partner for
international projects," the laureates complain. Respite in 2009 Bush has already submitted a funding request
for 2009, which — if approved — would provide some respite for researchers as it includes significant increases in
science spending. In particular, the extra money could allow the US to resume full contributions to ITER and the
ILC. In their letter, the laureates "applaud" Bush’s commitment to science but warn that the 2008 funding problems
require immediate action. "We strongly urge you to work with Congress in the coming weeks to enact emergency
supplemental funding". The $510m comprises $310m for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, $170m for
the National Science Foundation and $30m for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Kei Koizumi, a
budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told physicsworld.com "There is a
chance, but a shrinking chance, that 2008 physics funding could be added by Congress this week". However he
cautioned "it's increasingly likely that everyone will have to wait until 2009 for more physical sciences
funding".
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony (2/6)
US involvement and funding towards ITER is crucial to the US’s short-term scientific
research and long-term technological prowess
David Pace, PhD Student in physics at UCLA. Current research involves experimental plasma
physics in the UCLA Tokamak Laboratory, “The United States Will Probably Desert ITER
Permanently,” http://www.davidpace.com/physics/graduate-school/us-leave-iter.htm, 1/05/08
The APS Division of Plasma Physics quickly released a statement detailing their displeasure with the nixing of ITER's funding.
Similar sentiments have been released by other institutions though it does not seem the physics researcher bloc exercises much
influence at present. The cut may kill our role in ITER, but it also seriously wounds Fermilab. High energy physicists share our
sadness over this budget news. The collection of circumstances now present do not bode well for ITER and
they encourage renewed concern over U.S. fusion and plasma research in general. It seems that history is
repeating itself with regard to our role in ITER. An unwilling Congress, the lack of powerful supporters,
and economic pressures are aligned against a U.S. presence in ITER. The Government Accountability Office has
highlighted both the need for more fusion Ph.D.'s in the workforce and the fact that as many of half of all plasma science and
engineering Ph.D.'s leave the field (plain text, pdf). As a member of the group of graduate students in this field I can positively
state that our discussions focus on events like this ITER cut and the uncertainty in funding for this type of research is
a major motivation for moving to other sectors and very different careers. Supporting ITER encourages a
new generation of plasma scientists as much as cutting it leads these same people to other fields. A broader
issue remains: what happens if ITER is a rousing success and we were not involved? For a comparison, imagine
that the methods of AC and DC electricity generation and transmission had not been developed in the United States. The
negative impact on our industrialization and technological prowess is unimaginable. A successful ITER
project with no U.S. assistance will be very similar. The rest of the industrialized world will have a wealth
of knowledge and ability in the field of fusion driven electricity production, along with the desire to feed
their own national corporate interests with the first commercial applications.

Technological collaborations have the ability to strengthen international relations.

Robert Baird, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives,
http://science.house.gov/publications/OpeningStatement.aspx?OSID=1885,
2/07/08
This year, the subcommittee is going to focus on the role that the federal government can
play in fostering international scientific cooperation and science diplomacy. I have spent
a great deal of time traveling around the world and have come to learn the
potential that science holds for building and strengthening our
relationship with other countries. I have come to believe very strongly that,
although the United States is not looked upon as highly as it once was in
many respects, countries throughout the world still respect and admire us
for science and technology. We should build on this; we should use our
standing in this area to develop relationships and build bridges with other
countries.
Much of this can be done by fostering collaborative research between our
scientists and foreign scientists. However, it can also be done by bringing foreign
scientists to our country to study. Many scientists and engineers entering the U.S. on
student and scholar visas return home and rise to prominent positions in their own countries
and can serve as important advocates for the United States.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony (3/6)
US must increase federal resources towards scientific R&D to maintain economic
leadership.
Nicholas Donofrio, EVP for Innovation and Technology, IBM Corporation, House Science Committee Hearing Summary, “US
COMPETITIVENESS: THE INNOVATION CHALLENGE, ”http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/reports/InnovationHearing0705.pdf, 7/21/05
A major factor in the accelerated growth of the American economy since 1995 has been increased productivity resulting from the application of
information technology to the improvement of business processes. The pace of economic change in the US and elsewhere in the
world is being driven by the convergence of three historic developments: the growth of the Internet as the planet’s operational
infrastructure; the adoption of open technical standards that facilitate the production, distribution and management of new and better products and
services; and the widespread application of these technologies to the solution of ubiquitous business problems. In an increasingly
networked world, the choice for most companies and governments is between innovation or commoditization.
Winners can be innovators those with the capacity to invent, manage and leverage intellectual capital or
commodity players who differentiate through low price, economies of scale and efficient distribution of
someone else’s intellectual capital. To maintain its economic leadership and living standards, the US
must raise innovation to a whole new level and make it the focal point and organizing principle for
public and private policies that nurture the nation’s technological talent, investment and
infrastructure. IBM Policy Recommendations · Establish an innovation focal point in the Executive Office of the President ·
Create new national innovation metrics to drive performance and assess results · Expand scholarships, reform immigration to attract and retain
best talent · Improve career options and workers adaptability using portable learning benefits · Devote more Federal R&D resources
to physical, engineering and service sciences, emphasizing basic, novel, highrisk and exploratory ventures
· Focus federal economic development programs on regional innovation hotspots · Establish a legal and regulatory environment that encourages
voluntary and more complete disclosure of business innovations · Improve US production capabilities in emerging technologies by establishing
world class Centers for Production Excellence; strengthen DoD’s historic role in advanced manufacturing research and use the Manufacturing
Extension Program to help small and midsized firms to improve product design, manufacturing, supply chain and customer relations management
capabilities · Capitalize on new and emerging opportunities involving hydrogen fuel cells, nanotechnology, new materials, micromachining,
semiconductors, broadband deployment, next generation wireless devices, digital medical records and networked computer modeling and
simulations · Encourage America’s ability to solve problems across diverse communities by institutionalizing
innovative approaches to learning, skill building and collaboration.

Continued technological leadership key to hegemony, which solves nuclear war

Khalilzad, Ambassador to Afghanistan and program director of RAND’s Project AIR FORCE, 95
Zalmay, Spring, Losing the Moment, The Washington Quarterly, v18, n2, p87
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to
multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end
in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment
would be more open and more receptive to American values - democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a
better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade
states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global
rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers,
including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a
multipolar balance of power system. <CONTINUES> The United States is unlikely to preserve its military and
technological dominance if the U.S. economy declines seriously. In such an environment, the domestic
economic and political base for global leadership would diminish and the United States would
probably incrementally withdraw from the world, become inward-looking, and abandon more and more of its external
interests. As the United States weakened, others would try to fill the vacuum. To sustain and improve its economic
strength, the United States must maintain its technological lead in the economic realm. Its success will depend on
the choices it makes. In the past, developments such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions produced
fundamental changes positively affecting the relative position of those who were able to take
advantage of them and negatively affecting those who did not. Some argue that the world may be at the
beginning of another such transformation, which will shift the sources of wealth and the relative
position of classes and nations. If the United States fails to recognize the change and adapt its
institutions, its relative position will necessarily worsen. To remain the preponderant world
power, U.S. economic strength must be enhanced by further improvements in productivity, thus increasing real per
capita income; by strengthening education and training; and by generating and using superior science and technology.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony (4/6)
Hegemony is key to prevent global violence – all scenarios for war are impossible in a world
of US hegemony
Bradley Thayer, Assc. Prof., Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, Missouri State Univ.,
In Defense of Primacy, The National Interest, November-December 2006, ln
A grand strategy based on American primacy means ensuring the United States stays the world's
number one power--the diplomatic, economic and military leader. Those arguing against primacy claim that the United States should
retrench, either because the United States lacks the power to maintain its primacy and should withdraw from its global commitments, or because
the maintenance of primacy will lead the United States into the trap of "imperial overstretch." In the previous issue of The National Interest,
Christopher Layne warned of these dangers of primacy and called for retrenchment.1 Those arguing for a grand strategy of retrenchment are a
diverse lot. They include isolationists, who want no foreign military commitments; selective engagers, who want U.S. military commitments to
centers of economic might; and offshore balancers, who want a modified form of selective engagement that would have the United States
abandon its landpower presence abroad in favor of relying on airpower and seapower to defend its interests. But retrenchment, in any of its
guises, must
be avoided. If the United States adopted such a strategy, it would be a profound
strategic mistake that would lead to far greater instability and war in the world, imperil American
security and deny the United States and its allies the benefits of primacy. There are two critical issues in any
discussion of America's grand strategy: Can America remain the dominant state? Should it strive to do this? America can remain dominant due to
its prodigious military, economic and soft power capabilities. The totality of that equation of power answers the first issue. The
United
States has overwhelming military capabilities and wealth in comparison to other states or likely
potential alliances. Barring some disaster or tremendous folly, that will remain the case for the
foreseeable future. With few exceptions, even those who advocate retrenchment acknowledge this. So the debate revolves around the
desirability of maintaining American primacy. Proponents of retrenchment focus a great deal on the costs of U.S. action--but they fail to realize
what is good about American primacy. The price and risks of primacy are reported in newspapers every day; the benefits that stem from it are not.
A GRAND strategy of ensuring American primacy takes as its starting point the protection of the
U.S. homeland and American global interests. These interests include ensuring that critical
resources like oil flow around the world, that the global trade and monetary regimes flourish and
that Washington's worldwide network of allies is reassured and protected. Allies are a great asset
to the United States, in part because they shoulder some of its burdens. Thus, it is no surprise to see NATO in
Afghanistan or the Australians in East Timor. In contrast, a strategy based on retrenchment will not be able to achieve these fundamental
objectives of the United States. Indeed, retrenchment will make the United States less secure than the present
grand strategy of primacy. This is because threats will exist no matter what role America chooses
to play in international politics. Washington cannot call a "time out", and it cannot hide from
threats. Whether they are terrorists, rogue states or rising powers, history shows that threats must
be confronted. Simply by declaring that the United States is "going home", thus abandoning its commitments or making unconvincing
half-pledges to defend its interests and allies, does not mean that others will respect American wishes to retreat. To make such a
declaration implies weakness and emboldens aggression. In the anarchic world of the animal kingdom, predators
prefer to eat the weak rather than confront the strong. The same is true of the anarchic world of international politics. If
there is no diplomatic solution to the threats that confront the United States, then the conventional and strategic military power of the United
States is what protects the country from such threats. And when enemies must be confronted, a strategy based on primacy focuses on engaging
enemies overseas, away from American soil. Indeed, a key tenet of the Bush Doctrine is to attack terrorists far from America's shores and not to
wait while they use bases in other countries to plan and train for attacks against the United States itself. This requires a physical, on-the-ground
presence that cannot be achieved by offshore balancing. Indeed, as Barry Posen has noted, U.S. primacy is secured because America, at present,
commands the "global commons"--the oceans, the world's airspace and outer space--allowing the United States to project its power far from its
borders, while denying those common avenues to its enemies. As a consequence, the costs of power projection for the United States and its allies
are reduced, and the robustness of the United States' conventional and strategic deterrent capabilities is increased.2 This is not an advantage that
should be relinquished lightly. A remarkable fact about international politics today--in a world where American primacy is clearly and
unambiguously on display--is that countries want to align themselves with the United States. Of course, this is not
out of any sense of altruism, in most cases, but because doing so allows them to use the power of the United
States for their own purposes--their own protection, or to gain greater influence. Of 192 countries, 84 are allied with America--their
security is tied to the United States through treaties and other informal arrangements--and they include almost all of the major economic and
military powers. That is a ratio of almost 17 to one (85 to five), and a big change from the Cold War when the ratio was about 1.8 to one of states
aligned with the United States versus the Soviet Union. Never before in its history has this country, or any country, had so many allies. U.S.
primacy--and the bandwagoning effect--has also given us extensive influence in international
politics, allowing the United States to shape the behavior of states and international institutions.
Such influence comes in many forms, one of which is America's ability to create coalitions of
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony (5/6)
like-minded states to free Kosovo, stabilize Afghanistan, invade Iraq or to stop proliferation through
the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Doing so allows the United States to operate with allies outside of the UN, where it can be stymied by
opponents. American-led wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq stand in contrast to the UN's inability to save the people of Darfur or even to
conduct any military campaign to realize the goals of its charter. The quiet effectiveness of the PSI in dismantling Libya's WMD programs and
unraveling the A. Q. Khan proliferation network are in sharp relief to the typically toothless attempts by the UN to halt proliferation. You can
count with one hand countries opposed to the United States. They are the "Gang of Five": China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. Of
course, countries like India, for example, do not agree with all policy choices made by the United States, such as toward Iran, but New Delhi is
friendly to Washington. Only the "Gang of Five" may be expected to consistently resist the agenda and actions of the United States. China is
clearly the most important of these states because it is a rising great power. But even Beijing is intimidated by the United
States and refrains from openly challenging U.S. power. China proclaims that it will, if necessary, resort to other
mechanisms of challenging the United States, including asymmetric strategies such as targeting communication and intelligence satellites upon
which the United States depends. But China may not be confident those strategies would work, and so it is
likely to refrain from
testing the United States directly for the foreseeable future because China's power benefits, as we
shall see, from the international order U.S. primacy creates. The other states are far weaker than China. For three of the
"Gang of Five" cases--Venezuela, Iran, Cuba--it is an anti-U.S. regime that is the source of the problem; the country itself is not intrinsically anti-
American. Indeed, a change of regime in Caracas, Tehran or Havana could very well reorient relations. THROUGHOUT HISTORY, peace
and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a dominant power--Rome, Britain or the
United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized the irenic effect of power on the anarchic world of international politics.
Everything we think of when we consider the current international order--free
trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing
respect for human rights, growing democratization--is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment
proponents seem to think that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead
wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international
orders collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established
at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as
assuredly. As country and western great Ral Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important
to note what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within
the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first
has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction among many states that were historical
antagonists, most notably France and West Germany. Today, American primacy helps keep a number of complicated
relationships aligned--between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan,
India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars
still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax Americana does reduce war's
likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second, American power gives the
United States the ability to spread democracy and other elements of its ideology of liberalism.
Doing so is a source of much good for the countries concerned as well as the United States because, as John Owen noted on these pages in the
Spring 2006 issue, liberal
democracies are more likely to align with the United States and be
sympathetic to the American worldview.3 So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition, once
states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of conflict is significantly reduced.
This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it is because they are more open, more
transparent and more likely to want to resolve things amicably in concurrence with U.S.
leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for advancing the interests of the United States. Critics
have faulted the Bush Administration for attempting to spread democracy in the Middle East, labeling such an effort a modern form of tilting at
windmills. It is the obligation of Bush's critics to explain why democracy is good enough for Western states but not for the rest, and, one gathers
from the argument, should not even be attempted. Of course, whether democracy in the Middle East will have a peaceful or stabilizing influence
on America's interests in the short run is open to question. Perhaps democratic Arab states would be more opposed to Israel, but nonetheless, their
people would be better off. The United States has brought democracy to Afghanistan, where 8.5 million Afghans, 40 percent of them women,
voted in a critical October 2004 election, even though remnant Taliban forces threatened them. The first free elections were held in Iraq in
January 2005. It was the military power of the United States that put Iraq on the path to democracy. Washington fostered democratic governments
in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Caucasus. Now even the Middle East is increasingly democratic. They may not yet look like Western-
style democracies, but democratic progress has been made in Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt. By
all accounts, the march of democracy has been impressive. Third, along
with the growth in the number of democratic
states around the world has been the growth of the global economy. With its allies, the United States
has labored to create an economically liberal worldwide network characterized by free trade and
commerce, respect for international property rights, and
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1AC Hegemony (6/6)
mobility of capital and labor markets. The economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order is a global
public good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World. The United States created this network not out of
altruism but for the benefit and the economic well-being of America. This economic order forces American industries to be competitive,
maximizes efficiencies and growth, and benefits defense as well because the size of the economy makes the defense burden manageable.
Economic spin-offs foster the development of military technology, helping to ensure military prowess. Perhaps the greatest testament to the
benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service diplomat and researcher at the World Bank, who
started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post-independence India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now recognizes that
the only way to bring relief to desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the
adoption of free market economic policies and globalization, which are facilitated through
American primacy.4 As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is one of the strongest academic proponents of
American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides. Fourth and finally, the United States, in seeking primacy, has
been willing to use its power not only to advance its interests but to promote the welfare of
people all over the globe. The United States is the earth's leading source of positive externalities for the world. The U.S. military has
participated in over fifty operations since the end of the Cold War--and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed, the U.S.
military is the earth's "911 force"--it serves, de facto, as the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire department. Whenever
there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or tsunami, the
United States assists the countries in need. On the day after Christmas in 2004, a tremendous earthquake and tsunami
occurred in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, killing some 300,000 people. The United States was the first to respond with aid. Washington
followed up with a large contribution of aid and deployed the U.S. military to South and Southeast Asia for many months to help with the
aftermath of the disaster. About 20,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines responded by providing water, food, medical aid, disease
treatment and prevention as well as forensic assistance to help identify the bodies of those killed. Only the U.S. military could have accomplished
this Herculean effort. No other force possesses the communications capabilities or global logistical reach of the U.S. military. In fact, UN
peacekeeping operations depend on the United States to supply UN forces. American
generosity has done more to help
the United States fight the War on Terror than almost any other measure. Before the tsunami, 80 percent of
Indonesian public opinion was opposed to the United States; after it, 80 percent had a favorable opinion of America. Two years after the disaster,
and in poll after poll, Indonesians still have overwhelmingly positive views of the United States. In October 2005, an enormous earthquake struck
Kashmir, killing about 74,000 people and leaving three million homeless. The U.S. military responded immediately, diverting helicopters fighting
the War on Terror in nearby Afghanistan to bring relief as soon as possible. To help those in need, the United States also provided financial aid to
Pakistan; and, as one might expect from those witnessing the munificence of the United States, it left a lasting impression about America. For the
first time since 9/11, polls of Pakistani opinion have found that more people are favorable toward the United States than unfavorable, while
support for Al-Qaeda dropped to its lowest level. Whether in Indonesia or Kashmir, the money was well-spent because it helped people in the
wake of disasters, but it also had a real impact on the War on Terror. When
people in the Muslim world witness the U.S.
military conducting a humanitarian mission, there is a clearly positive impact on Muslim opinion
of the United States. As the War on Terror is a war of ideas and opinion as much as military
action, for the United States humanitarian missions are the equivalent of a blitzkrieg.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
***Aff***

Inherency – Cuts Permanent

Cutting of ITER funds permanent
David Pace, PhD Student in physics at UCLA. Current research involves experimental plasma
physics in the UCLA Tokamak Laboratory, “The United States Will Probably Desert ITER
Permanently,” http://www.davidpace.com/physics/graduate-school/us-leave-iter.htm, 1/05/08
The recent passage and signing into law of H.R. 2764 zeros out the financial contribution of the U nited
States to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Members of the magnetically confined
fusion research community are rightfully concerned that the funding support will not be returned and our
(i.e., the U.S.'s) participation in ITER is effectively ended. Looking into this series of events it seems that
such is the harsh reality. What Happened? The American Institute of Physics provides a detailed review of the
budget's language. Finding and understanding the actual congressional material regarding this cut is difficult. It is
easy to find media coverage of the results but they will not say much about the ITER issue. A collection of the
House Amendments to the bill provides the best overview. With respect to ITER, the Joint Explanatory Statement
says (emphasis added), Funding under this heading in the amended bill includes $289,180,000 for Fusion Energy
Sciences. Within Fusion Energy Sciences, $162,910,000 is provided for Science, $93,504,000 for U.S. Facility
Operations, an increase of $6,000,000 to be used to increase facility operations at the three U.S. user facilities (i.e.,
the DIII-D, Alcator C-Mod, and National Spherical Torus Experiment) $22,042,000 for Enabling R&D, an increase
of $1,225,000 for materials research, $0 for the U.S. contribution to ITER, and $10,724,000 for Enabling R&D for
ITER. Funding under this heading in the amended bill includes $12,281,000 for High Energy Density Physics.
Funding may not be reprogrammed from other activities within Fusion Energy Sciences to restore the U.S.
contribution to ITER. The removal of funds for our ITER contribution might normally be considered a
temporary technicality if not for the final line stating that money may not be transferred from other
funds to pay the contribution. This suggests that the bill's intent is to completely reacquire the $160
million originally reserved for ITER. I have not determined what is included as “Enabling R&D” though I
suspect that this money will allow those already being paid through U.S. ITER support to continue receiving their
wage.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Inherency – Support for Fusion Low
NCSX funding terminated- project was crucial to US fusion development.
Adrian Cho, “Energy Department Pulls Plug on Overbudget Fusion Experiment,” Science, Vol.
320. no. 5880, pp. 1142 – 1143, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1142
,5/30/08
Fusion may someday yield cheap power, but a troubled experimental reactor has proved too pricey for the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This week, DOE terminated the National Compact Stellarator
Experiment (NCSX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey. The not-yet-
completed reactor would have been one of four large "magnetic confinement" reactors in the United States. Donald
Rej, a plasma physicist at PPPL and NCSX project manager since February, says he was disappointed
to hear the news. "My colleagues have put a good fraction of their careers into this," Rej says. "It's a
technological tour de force." Like a supernova, the stellarator's budget had exploded. In 2001, it was proposed
as a $58 million project to be completed in 5 years. It won approval in 2005 with a "baseline" budget of $102
million and a completion date of 2009. But in April, a DOE review showed that the cost had ballooned to $170
million and the machine could not be completed until 2013 at the earliest. The review suggested that even those
estimates might not hold. "We were unable at this point to rebaseline, to formally say that we knew what it would
take to finish," says Raymond Fonck, associate director for fusion energy sciences in DOE's Office of Science. Had
it been completed, the NCSX might have served as the prototype for the next great fusion
experiment to come after ITER, the $12 billion machine that will be built in Cadarache, France. In a magnetic
confinement reactor, scientists heat an ionized gas, or plasma, of light nuclei to 100 million degrees while trapping
and squeezing it with magnetic fields. ITER and the three remaining machines in the United States are tokamaks,
reactors built around a tubelike magnetic coil curled into a doughnut shape, or torus. The coil produces magnetic
fields that go straight around in the horizontal torus. But to confine the plasma, the field must be modified so that it
spirals around the doughnut like the stripes on a candy cane. To make that happen, the plasma must flow around the
tokamak to produce an electrical current. The flow is generated by applying pulses of magnetic field or by other,
more complicated means. A stellarator, by contrast, uses bizarrely shaped coils to generate a spiraling field from
scratch. Those coils are immensely complicated. NCSX researchers were able to fabricate them, but they needed
more time and money to assemble the parts into a whole machine. The problems were far trickier than sticking tab A
into slot B and required overcoming engineering challenges such as how to weld the massive asymmetrical pieces
without deforming them, Rej says. The cancellation of the NCSX strikes a body blow to the United
States's domestic fusion program, says Stewart Prager, a plasma physicist at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, and chair of DOE's Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. "The loss of important
scientific knowledge is very large," Prager says. "NCSX would have tested a fascinating physics
concept and advanced understanding of a very promising fusion configuration." The cut intensifies
the uncertainty already facing plasma physicists. Over the past decade, DOE's budget for fusion
research has stagnated at $300 million, and since the United States rejoined the ITER collaboration in 2003,
researchers have fretted that money for smaller experiments at home might be siphoned off to pay for the nation's
commitment overseas. (This year, however, the U.S. Congress zeroed out a scheduled $149 million contribution to
ITER and bumped up the budget for running domestic facilities to $93.5 million, $6 million more than DOE had
requested.) Fonck says he would prefer to keep the $19.6 million requested for NCSX next year within the domestic
fusion program. That money could be used simply to run the other U.S. fusion experiments longer. For example,
PPPL's tokamak, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), ran for only 13 of a possible 25 weeks in 2007
and will run for 15 weeks this year. "The plan for next year is down to 9 weeks," says A. J. Stewart Smith, dean of
research at Princeton University, which runs PPPL. "This was necessary to accommodate NCSX." It's too early to
know whether the cancellation of NCSX will lead to layoffs at PPPL, Fonck says. The lab has a staff of 420 and a
budget of $77 million this year. Some physicists argue that, in spite of the cost overruns, DOE should
have stuck with the NCSX. "Given the energy problem we have, it doesn't make any sense to shut
down projects like this," says Miklos Porkolab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He
notes that China and South Korea, both members of ITER, completed their own large fusion experiments in 2006
and 2007, respectively. The United States hasn't completed a new machine since PPPL finished the NSTX in 1999.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Competitiveness
Fusion- specifically ITER- key to U.S. Competitiveness.
Lamar Alexander, U.S. Sentate (R-TN), “A NEW MANHATTAN PROJECT FOR CLEAN ENERGY
INDEPENDENCE,”5/9/08
Provide energy from fusion. The idea of recreating on Earth the way the sun creates energy and using it for
commercial power is the third grand challenge suggested by the National Academy of Engineering. The promise of
sustaining a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power generation is so fantastic that the five-year
goal should be to do everything possible to reach the long-term goal. The failure of Congress to approve
the President’s budget request for U.S. participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
– the ITER Project – is embarrassing. Anything is possible This country of ours is a remarkable place.
Even during an economic slowdown, we will produce this year about 30 percent of all the wealth in the world for
the 5 percent of us who live in the United States. Despite “the gathering storm” of concern about American
competitiveness, no other country approaches our brainpower advantage – the collection of research
universities, national laboratories and private-sector companies we have. And this is still the only country
where people say with a straight face that anything is possible – and really believe it. These are precisely the
ingredients that America needs during the next five years to place ourselves firmly on a path to clean
energy independence within a generation – and in doing so, to make our jobs more secure, to help balance
the family budget, to make our air cleaner and our planet safer and healthier – and to lead the world to do
the same.

Cuts to ITER weakened US global competitiveness.

John Marburger, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the
President, “AAAS Policy Forum,”5/8/08
How are all these challenges to be overcome in a time of constrained budgets? In the
immediate future, the best thing that could happen for U.S. science is for Congress
actually to pass a budget for FY09 as part of its regular business this year. I would like to see
a bill that funds the President's request and finally launches a competitiveness initiative. The 2008
Omnibus bill seriously wounded U.S. interests in high energy physics and the international fusion energy
project, ITER, and it weakened our long term prospects for competing successfully in a globalized
technology intensive economy. That is the wrong signal to the American people, to the science and
engineering communities, and to the world. The sooner Congress can pass bills moving us forward from
this dreadful position, the better. As to the prospects for a supplemental budget that adjusts funding for FY08, the
issue is rapidly becoming moot because two thirds of the year have passed already. Timely passage of FY09 budgets
– which is after all what Congress is supposed to do – at this point would be the strongest bridge to the future.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm - Competitiveness
Scientific R&D funding cuts hurt U.S. Competiveness – specifically ITER.
Morton Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call, “Partisanship scuttling energy research
advantages,” The York Dispatch,
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/auth/checkbrowser.do?ipcounter
=1&cookieState=0&ran d=0.98477 98 661112431&bhcp=1, 6/26/08
John McCain and Barack Obama unveiled impressive plans last week on energy and competitiveness policy, but
they need to act now to save federal energy research from collapsing. Specifically, McCain should call the White
House and Obama should call Democratic congressional leaders to make sure that federal scientific research budgets
aren't flatlined for another year. Funding cuts are especially dire for science programs at the Department of
Energy, resulting in layoffs at national laboratories and cuts in university research in the physical
sciences. There's widespread bipartisan agreement -- in principle -- that the United States needs to increase
funding for basic research, science education and energy innovation. But, somehow, what everybody agrees
to in principle doesn't get done in practice -- either because of partisan rancor or competing priorities. In 2006, for
instance, President Bush called for an American Competitiveness Initiative, including a doubling of basic science
research over a 10-year period. And Congress, by wide margins in both the House and Senate, passed the
America Competes Act last year, authorizing the doubling in seven years and calling for increases in science
teaching. The impetus, of course, was a rising concern that the United States is in danger of falling behind
its foreign competitors in research and the training of scientists, threatening the nation's standard of living.
As Obama put it in his recent speech in Flint, Mich., "At a time when technology is shaping our future, we devote a
smaller and smaller share of our national resources to research and development. It's time for America to lead." He
promised to double federal funding for basic research and said, "We can ensure that the discoveries of the 21st
century happen in America -- in our labs and universities." And McCain, in his energy speech last week in Houston,
declared that he would lead "a great national campaign to achieve energy security for America" involving an
eventual "great turn" from carbon to alternative fuels -- for which, he said, "we will need all the inventive genius of
which America is capable." And yet, right now, the United States is being forced by Department of Energy
budget cuts to withdraw from ITER, the international project -- based in France -- to investigate whether nuclear
fusion is a potential source of energy. More than 2,700 workers at the DOE's national laboratories already have been
laid off, and 200 planned university research programs have been canceled, according to City College of New York
professor Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society. Also in danger is U.S.
participation in an international high-energy physics project based in Geneva, Switzerland, and development of
work in U.S. labs on high-intensity X-rays useful for biomedical research, nanotechnology and computer-chip
design -- all keys to competitiveness. The goals authorized in 2007 were never funded. Both the House and Senate
actually agreed to a 17 percent increase in funding for DOE science projects -- to make up for money diverted the
previous year for Hurricane Katrina cleanup -- as well as 12 percent for the National Science Foundation and 32
percent for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But after Democrats and the White House reached a
funding impasse in December, Congress passed an omnibus fiscal 2008 appropriation that contained barely any
increases for science. Lubell says some Democrats told him at the time that they were unwilling to let Bush claim
credit for passing competitiveness initiatives. Also, Democrats were furious with Bush for suddenly becoming a
budget hawk after years of failing to veto GOP spending bills. This year, Bush called for an 18 percent increase in
the DOE science budget and 14 percent for NSF, but Democrats have signaled that no domestic appropriations bills
are likely to pass while Bush is in office. In the meantime, the Senate has allocated $200 million increases for NSF
and $400 million for the National Institutes of Health, but only $100 million for DOE science, while allocating $300
million to nuclear-site environmental cleanup. Earlier this month, 74 CEOs of technology companies and university
presidents signed a letter to congressional leaders appealing for increases in the NSF and DOE levels in the
supplemental and declaring that past underfunding means that "cutting edge research has been halted or not
launched; scientists by the hundreds have lost their jobs; fewer teachers are being trained; bright students
are choosing alternative paths, and international partnerships have been severed." To advance the causes
of competitiveness and energy research, Obama and McCain should take a few minutes out from
campaigning and make some phone calls. If they succeed, they can claim credit for leadership.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Basic Research
Budget shortfalls for ITER jeopardize US basic research capability
Peter Gwynne, a science writer based in Boston, MA, and US correspondent for Physics World,
“Layoffs at Fermilab to be Reversed,”Physics World,
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34821, 8/1/08
Six months of lobbying brought some success for the American physics community yesterday when
President George W Bush signed a $186bn “supplemental” spending bill. The bill, which continues funding
for military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, also includes $338m for government agencies that support
science research. The extra funds become available immediately and will go part of the way to compensating for
severe cuts in funding for US physics that were announced last December. In particular, the new money could allow
the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago to reverse a decision to lay off 140 staff. However,
physicists think that serious problems with the US science budget remain. Lay-offs reversed The new
legislation provides $62.5m apiece for the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science of the Department of
Energy (DOE), and NASA. Although the DOE has yet to decide how it will spend the fresh funds, it is expected to
give the bulk to the Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) in California. Since the funds
apply to the current financial year, which ends on 30 September, they can permit the institutions to cancel or reverse
layoffs planned as a result of last December’s budget. Fermilab’s director Pier Oddone, who was in process of
sacking 140 employees, has called a meeting of all his staff for tomorrow. “I expect to announce an end of
involuntary layoffs at the laboratory,” he said. SLAC, which laid off 125 people in April, is less certain of its course.
“At this stage we don’t really know what will happen,” said spokesman Lee Lyon. “We’re not anticipating that we
would do a large rehiring at this point. But as critical positions open up going forward, we would anticipate that
people would be interested in reapplying.” Analysts expect that any funds remaining after those efforts will support
DOE’s fusion programmes. That should help the American contribution to the ITER project, support for which was
cut to zero in the 2008 budget signed last December. Physicists have reacted to the supplemental bill with less
than unalloyed glee, seeing it more as a bandage than a cure. “While it’s not as great as it could have been
for physics, the supplemental is a good sign that Congress has recognized the importance of physical science and
other science funding,” said Kei Koizumi, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS). Stanford University physicist Arthur Bienenstock, this year’s president of the American
Physical Society (APS), takes a more sceptical view. “I’m very pleased that we will be able to retain some of the
extreme capabilities in science and technology at Fermilab and SLAC,” he said. “But I’m disappointed that there
isn’t more funding for the basic energy science facilities at DOE.” Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City
College of New York and APS director of public affairs, also points out that three key issues that physicists
raised last December with budget makers remain “largely unaddressed”. These are cuts in funding for
particle physics, the lack of support for national facilities, and the damage to America’s credibility as an
international partner because of the decision to cut funds for ITER. “Unless these issues are addressed
some time in the next six months, the country will pay a heavy penalty,” said Lubell, who plans to continue
lobbying over the 2009 budget.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Basic Research Low Now
US leadership in innovation threatened- significant support for research needed.
William Brody, President, The Johns Hopkins University ,House Science Committee Hearing Summary, “US
COMPETITIVENESS: THE INNOVATION CHALLENGE,
”http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/reports/InnovationHearing0705.pdf, 7/21/05
America’s longstanding preeminence in discovery and innovation is threatened by recent developments
in the United States as well as by advances in other countries including China, India and Western Europe.
Europe currently produces twice as many scientists and engineers than the United States. Asia produces three times
as many. Federal financial support for basic research in the physical sciences and engineering is declining,
Science and technology articles published in Western Europe already exceed those published in the United States.
And by 2010, it is expected that emerging economies in Asia will produce more patents and spend more
on R&D than we do. With declining leadership in innovation will come declining living standards. Some
say such declines are already becoming apparent. The number of jobs requiring technical training is growing five
times as fast as other occupations at the same time that the average age of American scientists and engineers is
increasing; the numbers of new entrants into most SET fields is static or falling; and the public perception of these
fields as exciting, important and financially rewarding is declining. Enhanced financial incentives, including
more generous scholarships and fellowships, are needed to replenish America’s homegrown talent pool, especially in
view of steady increases in tuition and other higher educational expenses. Immigration reforms are needed to attract
and retain more of the best and the brightest students from other countries. At the same time, the nation should be
significantly increasing its financial support for basic research in information technology, mathematics
and the physical sciences– and doing so without sacrificing important allocations for research in the biological,
health and life sciences. For its part, the private sector must be encouraged to be more accepting of risks and to
eschew the shortterm, bottomline thinking that has become the hallmark of far too many American corporations.
Government agencies,including DoD and DARPA, should channel more of their available resources into
cutting edge research on the frontiers of science and technology instead of into applications and
development.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – International Image
Congress’ failure to fund ITER damages the US’s international image
David Pace, PhD Student in physics at UCLA. Current research involves experimental plasma
physics in the UCLA Tokamak Laboratory, “The United States Will Probably Desert ITER
Permanently,” http://www.davidpace.com/physics/graduate-school/us-leave-iter.htm, 1/05/08
The U.S. does not have a good track record in terms of support for ITER. In the late 1990's the U.S.
joined ITER only to have withdrawn before 2000. While there were public statements about support for
ITER, the Congress prevented any financial contributions when it came time to pay. When we left the
project back then it endangered the entire program. The NewScientist published an article noting the poor
economic state of the other member nations and predicted that the lack of U.S. funds would doom the project. The
project did not die, however, probably because most other nations have more expensive electricity than the U.S. and
are therefore more inclined to invest in fusion technology. In 2005, Japan's household electricity is reported to be
approximately twice as expensive as that in the United States. The U.S. rejoined the ITER project in 2003.
Initially, it seemed that we would be more careful in making a commitment. Congressperson Sherwood
Boehlert (R-NY) pushed an amendment through the House that called for the U.S. to delay the signing of any
specific agreement until a plan for successfully completing the financial contribution was determined. During his
speech to the House to argue his case, Representative Boehlert said, “But ITER is expensive. The U.S. contribution
is expected to exceed $1 billion. And I want to make sure that before we commit a dime to ITER that we have a
consensus on how we will find that money." “I am very, very tired of the U.S. signing on to international science
agreements that we later come to regret. We’re then left with the Hobson’s choice – the Chairman will excuse the
expression – the Hobson’s choice of either reneging on our international agreement or funneling money into a
project we don’t actually need." Unfortunately, this amendment only required a delay in the signing of an
agreement. The extra time appears not to have made any difference because we rejoined the project and once again
find ourselves withholding our contribution. Congress is behind our failure to meet our commitment. Strangely
enough, Boehlert predicted exactly what would happen with his quote above. He mentions the awful choice of either
"reneging" on our agreement or spending the money on something that is unnecessary. When President Bush signed
the bill that removed all money for ITER part of his statement included the following, "I am disappointed in the way
the Congress compiled this legislation, including abandoning the goal I set early this year to reduce the number and
cost of earmarks by half. Instead, the Congress dropped into the bill nearly 9,800 earmarks that total more than $10
billion." Instead of honoring our international promises we have decided, through congressional action, to
leave our partners millions of dollars short. If we truly leave ITER completely, then we will keep over one
billion dollars from the project. It should be noted that Boehlert was not talking about earmarks and pork-barrel
projects in his speech, he actually suggested that ITER might be the unnecessary project. Still, even though not all
earmarks have to be wasteful just a small percentage of the $10 billion set aside for these projects could have
fulfilled our role in something to which we have already agreed. In fact, in an era where the U.S. does not
always engender a favorable image in the international community we could have taken a slightly larger
portion of this pot and over-contributed to the project as a sign of our desire to participate in cooperative
endeavors. This is an election year, however, so no one should expect a politician to willingly divert funds away
from their local districts. The combined effects of a downward moving economy, incredible financial burden of
multiple military exercises, and the coming election leaves it incredibly unlikely that ITER will be funded. Congress
is ending our involvement in the project as they did previously.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Research Cooperation and Competitiveness
US funding to ITER critical to International relations and competitiveness.
Fusion Power Report,Senators urge support for ITER,http://www.accessmylibrary.com/com s2/summary_0286-
3450 7523_IT M, 5/1/08
U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Bob Corker (R-TN) were joined by a bipartisan group of senators
in sending a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting an additional $350 million in
Fiscal Year 2008 for critical science programs, including the ITER fusion experimental test reactor.
Administered by the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, the
requested funding would impact programs at ORNL for the International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor (ITER), a joint international research and development project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of
fusion power. Congress did not include the requested funding in the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal
Year 2008 that was signed into law in December. "Not including this funding to begin with is an embarrassing
mistake by Congress," Alexander said. "We're at a time when gasoline costs three dollars a gallon and climate
change is all the talk, and we don't fund our part of the effort to create unlimited energy with no environmental
consequences? Congress should fund these programs like it said it would and be a leader in encouraging such
endeavors rather than undermining them. Oak Ridge is the center of this activity, but it's not just important to Oak
Ridge and East Tennessee, it's important to the whole country and the rest of the world." "If additional funds are
included in the emergency spending bill, funding for the important work at Oak Ridge should be a priority," said
Corker. "It is critical, for example, that we provide appropriate funding for ITER so we can keep the
project on target and uphold the commitments we've made to our international partners." The
senators said that this funding would provide the funds to stay on track with the goals of the America COMPETES
Act of 2007, which was signed into law by President Bush on August 9, 2007. The America COMPETES Act
focuses on two primary areas of importance to maintaining and improving U.S. innovation in the 21st century:
increasing research investment; and strengthening educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics from elementary through graduate school. It puts research programs at the National Science Foundation
and the Department of Energy's Office of Science on a path to double their budgets during the next decade. Oak
Ridge National Laboratory is the lead national laboratory coordinating U.S. participation in the ITER Project,
which is an important effort to develop fusion as a possible new clean source of electricity, as well as
a long-term symbol of international science collaboration. The U.S. signed an ITER agreement with
its partners--the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia--committing to provide funding
for people and equipment for the project. In addition to endangering Oak Ridge's lead role on the project, failure
to contribute U.S. funds by the end of Fiscal Year 2008 could "call into question our commitment to
our other international obligations," according to a response from the U.S. State Department to a letter from
Senators Alexander and Corker to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In addition, it could trigger a default
clause in the ITER agreement, costing American taxpayers over $750 million. The letter states, in part,
"ITER is a multinational scientific project and has been one of the Office of Science's top priorities for the last
several years. The President's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2008 included $160 million for the project. It is
imperative that Congress appropriate supplemental funding for ITER as soon as possible to keep
our commitments to our interntional partners, keep this important project on track, and avoid
losses in scientific talent among U.S.-based employees working on ITER." In addition to Alexander and
Corker, the letter was also signed by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Richard Durbin (D-
IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The letter was sent to Sen.
Robert C. Byrd, Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriations and to Sen. Thad Cochran, Ranking Member of the
Appropriations Committee
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
R&D Key to US Leadership
US leadership slipping due to lack of funding to scientific R&D.
House Science Committee Hearing Summary, “US COMPETITIVENESS: THE INNOVATION
CHALLENGE,”http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/reports/InnovationHearing0705.pdf, 7/21/05
While the US continues to lead the world in terms of innovation capacity R& D spending, size of its
scientific and engineering workforce, etc there are disturbing signs that its lead over other countries may
be slipping. Overall federal spending on research and development as a percentage of gross domestic
product (GDP) has been declining since the 1960’s and the focus for much of this spending has been
shifting away from the physical sciences, math and engineering the areas of R&D that have
traditionally been most closely associated with innovation and economic growth.
At the same time, other nations most notably China and India have recognized the important links
between innovation and economic growth and are pouring resources into their scientific and engineering
enterprise, rapidly building their capacity to innovate and with it their ability to compete with the US and
Europe in an increasingly technology driven global economy. Advocates from nearly every industry sector
are calling on Congress to respond to the growing competitiveness challenge by increasing public
investments in science and engineering education and basic research and development.

R&D key to US Leadership.

Office of the Secutary, U.S. Department of Commerce, “Summary Report on Federal
Laboratory Technology Transfer,” December 2004
America’s economy and technology sectors lead the world, thanks in large measure to our well
developed capacity for innovation. Even so, the forces of economic globalization continue to gain
momentum and are changing trade, technology sourcing, capital flows, and the movement of technical
talent in significant ways. Our present leadership notwithstanding, we are likely in the years ahead to
face more significant challenges to our innovative capacity and long-term competitiveness than ever
before. In its May 2003 report, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)
emphasized the critical role that transfer of federally funded research and development results has played
in helping to move ideas from the realm of research into commerce and the marketplace. Indeed, the
effective transfer of federal technology -- that is, diffusing the new knowledge and inventions created by
federal research and development funds to American firms and entrepreneurs with the capabilities to translate these
advances into commercially significant products and processes -- will likely continue to be essential in
sustaining U.S. Competitiveness and leadership in the global economy in the years ahead. America’s
federal laboratory system, comprised by world-class scientists and research facilities, is a key
element of the Nation’s infrastructure for innovation. The federal labs offer a critical and fertile
resource for early-stage, high-risk research and development -- the kind of work on basic science and
basic technology that gives rise to revolutionary new know-how and technologies with the prospect of
important commercial impacts.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Technology Key to Hegemony
Innovation and technology key to US economy and global leadership.
Titus Galama, Physical Scientist, MBA, INSEAD; Ph.D. and M.Sc. in physics ,James Hosek,
Director, Forces and Resources Policy Center, RAND National Security Research Division;
Editor, RAND Journal of Economics; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School, “.S.
Competitiveness in Science and Technology,” RAND, National Defense Research Institute,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG674.pdf, 2008
Thus, capability to innovate and adopt new technologies, including those
invented elsewhere, is crucial to the employment, sales, and profitability of U.S.
firms and hence to the U.S. economy and standard of living. Science and
technology have historically contributed significantly not only to economic
growth but also to well-being (improved public health, longer life expectancy, better
diagnoses and treatments of many illnesses, etc.), standard of living (refrigerators, cars,
iPods, etc.), and national security (atomic bomb, radar, sonar, etc.). The strength of
the U.S. economy and military provide it with the foundation for its global
leadership. If claims of diminishing U.S. leadership in S&T are true and its future
ability to compete globally is in question, the prognosis is indeed serious. S&T is
directly linked not only to America’s economic strength but also to its
global strategic leadership.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Scientific Leadership key to Democracy
Fusion is key to spread democracy and US soft power throughout the globe.
Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID
Testimony Before the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Science Education
Washington, DC, April 2, 2008
Science and technology provide an immeasurable benefit to the U.S. by bringing scientists and
students here, especially from developing countries, where they see democracy in action, make
friends in the international scientific community, become familiar with American technology, and
contribute to the U.S. and global economy. For example, in 2005, over 50% of physical science
and engineering graduate students and postdoctoral researchers trained in the U.S. have been
foreign nationals. Moreover, many foreign-born scientists who were educated and have worked
in the U.S. eventually progress in their careers to hold influential positions in ministries and
institutions both in this country and in their home countries. They also contribute to U.S.
scientific and technologic development: According to the National Science Board’s 2008 Science
and Engineering Indicators, 47% of full-time doctoral science and engineering faculty in U.S.
research institutions were foreign-born. Finally, some types of science – particularly those that
address the grand challenges in science and technology – are inherently international in scope
and collaborative by necessity. The ITER Project, an international fusion research and
development collaboration, is a product of the thaw in superpower relations between Soviet
President Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan. This reactor will harness the
power of nuclear fusion as a possible new and viable energy source by bringing a star to earth.
ITER serves as a symbol of international scientific cooperation among key scientific leaders in
the developed and developing world – Japan, Korea, China, E.U., India, Russia, and United
States – representing 70% of the world’s current population..
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
US Funding Key to ITER
ITER requires more funding- US Key to project budget. Failure to fund by 2009 could doom the
project
Daniel Clery, “FUSION RESEARCH: Design Changes Will Increase ITER Reactor's Cost,”Science Vol. 320. no.
5882, p. 1405, June 2008
The €10 billion ITER fusion project hopes to demonstrate that a burning plasma can be controlled to produce useful energy. This
month, ITER's funders face their own daunting task of keeping the project's budget under control, as
scientists present a wish list of design changes. The changes are needed, say the researchers, because of
advances in fusion science since the baseline reactor design was published in 2001. Although the wish list won't be
publicly revealed until ITER's governing council meets in Japan on 17-18 June, insiders say the design tweaks
are going to require more money, a fact that will not go down well with governments funding the project.
"Where the pain level is for each [ITER] member is impossible to say," says David Campbell, assistant head of
ITER's department of fusion science and technology. The design review is not the council's only
headache. The prices for steel and copper have skyrocketed this decade, and at the end of last year, the U.S.
Congress zeroed out the country's ITER contribution from the 2008 budget. "The June council will
be a key meeting," says Campbell. ITER, or International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, has been on the
drawing board since the mid-1980s. In 2001, the "final" design was ready, and, after much wrangling over the site,
the governments of China, the European Union, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States agreed to build it
at Cadarache in southern France (Science, 1 July 2005, p. 28). (India joined the effort in 2006.) But before
construction starts this year, ITER managers decided to ask researchers to review whether the design could be
improved to give the project the best chance of meeting its goals (Science, 13 October 2006, p. 238). Led by Günter
Janeschitz of Germany's Karlsruhe research center and completed late last year, the redesign report is said to
recommend 80 modifications, including changes to the plasma's microwave heating system, the complex
arrangements of magnets to hold the plasma in place, and the diverter, a device around the bottom of the doughnut-
shaped vessel that extracts spent fuel. ITER staff and the Science and Technology Advisory Committee--a panel of
fusion experts appointed by ITER members--have been poring over the report, trying to separate out the essential
from the merely desirable, and estimating how much the changes will cost and their impact on the construction
schedule. "All of these things cost money, … [so] we must be careful not to make a list so long that the bill shocks
everyone," says a senior European fusion researcher who asked not to be named. One of the most contentious
recommendations concerns a system to control explosive releases of energy at the edges of the plasma called edge-
localized modes (ELMs). If they are too large, ELMs can erode the wall of the reactor vessel and damage the
diverter. The current ITER design already contains a system to control ELMs: rapidly firing a stream of frozen
deuterium pellets into the plasma, each of which causes a mini-ELM that does no damage. But researchers using the DIII-D
fusion reactor in San Diego, California, discovered another way: A weak magnetic field can make the edge of the plasma slightly
leaky and take the sting out of ELMs. Such a system would be simpler and more efficient than pellet injection, but to create the
magnetic field requires adding electromagnetic coils inside the reactor vessel--a major and expensive design change. Some think
it's too soon to decide on such a major modification. "It's clear the field has an effect. But we don't yet understand the physics.
It'll take 3 to 4 years to nail it down," says Hartmut Zohm of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany.
Zohm and others suggest that a redesign could make space for the coils with the decision to install them taken later. ITER
council members will also be eager to hear about the U.S. budget situation. The decision by Congress last
December to remove the $149 million ITER funding from the fiscal year 2008 budget was considered
unfortunate but not catastrophic by ITER insiders. "In 2009, we'll be ready to get running," says Ned
Sauthoff, head of the U.S. ITER effort, adding: "We're a family. We'll figure out how to get through this." Last
month, the U.S. Senate approved spending $55 million on ITER this year as part of a bill now before
Congress to fund the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill's fate is uncertain, however, as the Bush
Administration opposes any additional domestic spending. The talk in Washington is that, with a presidential
election looming, Congress will simply extend the current budget for another 6 months, leaving ITER out
in the cold until April 2009. This could prompt some ITER members to query the United States's
commitment to the project. Says ITER project construction leader Norbert Holtkamp: "If the U.S. doesn't
restore funding in 2009, then we have a very tricky problem. We have to ensure that 2009 is okay."
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Funding Key to Fusion Leadership
More US funding for ITER is needed to sustain US leadership in fusion.
Ian H. Hutchinson,head of MIT's Nuclear Science Department, “Fusion Research: What
About the U.S.?” Technology Review, MIT,
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=14755&channel=energy&
section=,9/05

Fusion is the kind of grand technological challenge that calls for

international cooperation. But the length of time its development will require can
breed skepticism and discourage policymakers. In the mid-1990s, cuts in the United
States' fusion research budget led it to pull out from the ITER consortium. Thankfully,
it rejoined in 2003, but in a more junior role, reflecting its relatively modest funding
of fusion projects: $290 million in 2006, less than half Europe's commitment. The United
States still has two world-renowned tokamaks -- one at MIT, the other at General
Atomics in San Diego -- whose research will be crucial in helping to resolve and
prepare for challenges that ITER faces. But U.S. leadership in fusion
plasma science cannot be sustained without a renewed commitment of
resources. The United States' present 10 percent share of ITER will call for peak
expenditures of perhaps $150 million per year -- mostly for industrial procurements, not for
research. If that money were taken from the existing federal fusion research budget, it would
decimate U.S. fusion research. That is why the U.S. fusion community's
overwhelming enthusiasm for ITER is predicated on strong domestic
support for fusion and plasma physics research, plus additional funds for
ITER construction. Even if the U.S. increased its funding for fusion research to $500
million per year, that would still be substantially less than it spends separately on high-
energy physics, fossil energy research, and basic energy sciences, not to mention the recent
budgets of the Missile Defense Agency ($9 billion) and NASA ($16 billion). Ultimately,
fusion could prove to be one of the most environmentally attractive
energy options. The United States should seize the opportunity to play a
strong role in ITER's success and demonstrate its commitment and long-
term vision as a scientific collaborator by revitalizing its overall fusion
program.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Global Warming
Nuclear fusion will give humankind unlimited energy and completely solve for global
warming.
James Reynolds and Ian Johnston, Sat 2 Apr 2005
The government’s chief scientific adviser yesterday urged more investment in the holy grail of
nuclear fusion to help tackle global warming. Sir David King, who last night gave the opening
speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, said he believed fusion power would
become a reality. The phenomenon, which could provide almost limitless energy, has been
researched by scientists worldwide for decades and Sir David urged more work to be done so it
could be achieved sooner. Unlike existing power stations, which run on nuclear fission, fusion
reactors produce little radioactive waste and do not create carbon dioxide, one of the main
greenhouse gases. The reactors could also provide power for centuries to come as they can be
fuelled using sea water. Most of Britain’s power stations are due to shut down in the next 15
years and the government has said it will make an announcement on whether any more will be
built after the election, expected next month. Speaking at the Royal Museum of Scotland, Sir
David repeated his warning that global warming was a real problem and action had to be taken to
reduce emissions. And in an exclusive interview before his speech, Sir David put forward nuclear
power - particularly fusion - and power from hydrogen as ways to save the planet from an
environmental catastrophe. He said modern fission reactors were far cleaner than Britain’s
ageing nuclear plants and this meant governments had the "option" of building them. "We need
energy sources that are inherently carbon-free. In the longer term I believe that fusion power
stations are a reality. It is just a question of what timescale we are talking about," he said. "We
need to be investing today in the development of fusion power so we have that additional power
supply to come. Science and technology can provide the mechanisms for taking this forward. We
also need populations and governments to understand the nature of the problem."

Fusion eliminates the emissions of noxious gases that cause global warming
<Toby Murcott, science journalist-the Times and BBC radio, Fusion project sparks new hopes of
cheap, clean power, BBC News, May 7, 1999>
At present virtually all electricity generation consumes limited resources of coal, oil, gas and
uranium, and produces noxious effluent such as smoke, carbon dioxide and radioactive waste.
The emission of such gases may be causing global warming and will be on the agenda at the
Kyoto summit to discuss ways of tackling climate change. Meanwhile, hopes of unlimited,
pollution-free energy rest at the moment with nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and
all stars. But this has proved extremely difficult to harness. Current nuclear fusion reactors
depend on the fusion of hydrogen isotopes, including radioactive tritium, but controlling the
extreme conditions for this reaction to proceed is technologically very difficult. A commercial
nuclear fusion reactor is still many years away.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Global Warming
Fusion can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, which most say is the root cause of global
warming.
<Sunaina Gulati, Journalist, The Insider’s Guide to Nuclear Fusion, CNN.com, November 23,
2006>
As you already know, fossil fuels are a backbone of industrialized nations. Oil, coal, natural gas
or similar carbon-based sources of energy fall into this category and they are currently the
primary source of relatively-cheap energy. But, they also are a major source of environmental
pollution. Combustion of these fuels is considered to be the largest contributing factor to the
release of greenhouse gases, which many scientists believe are largely responsible for global
warming and climate change. Thus, this pact is a huge step towards combating climate change.
Nuclear fusion involves the bringing together of atomic nuclei. An atom's nucleus consists of
protons (positive charge) and neutrons (no charge.) The reaction, which takes place at extremely
high temperatures, joins two light atomic nuclei to form heavier ones and in this process releases
large amounts of energy. Scientists say nuclear fusion could provide a sustainable answer to
concerns of pollution caused by fossil fuels. It is claimed to be. And it does have some key
features that make it such an attractive option for future energy supply. Fusion plants don't
generate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide -- blamed by many scientists for causing
global warming -- or other gases that have harmful effects on the environment. Experts also say
that the process in itself is inherently safe because equipment failure will simply result in a
system shutdown. They also say no chain reaction is involved and the reaction is thermally self-
limiting. Due to its experimental nature, it is possible for the plant to sometimes operate at higher
power levels than planned, but it is said that this can be easily brought under control in a matter
of seconds.

Nuclear fusion would end climate change, the energy crisis, and oil dependence.
Nigel Praities, 23 Mar 2007, http://www.firstscience.com/home/articles/big-theories/nuclear-
fusion-energy-for-the-future_17006.html
Although using nuclear fusion is controversial, it could also be the most significant scientific
breakthrough of the century. If it is a success, the energy crisis would be a distant memory,
climate change could be halted and we may all be driving around guilt-free in electric cars. It still
sounds like science fiction, but we may only have decades to wait before it becomes a reality.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Harm – Energy Crisis
Fusion is the only solution to the worsening energy crisis.
Nigel Praities, 23 Mar 2007
http://www.firstscience.com/home/articles/big-theories/nuclear-fusion-energy-for-the-
future_17006.html
The energy crisis has rocketed from a textbook concept into the most pressing political issue of
our time. Future energy supplies are increasingly vulnerable and global consumption is expected
to escalate dramatically, increasing by 71% in 2030 and continuing to rise. Energy shortages
would have a dramatic impact on every area of modern life: business, transport, food, health and
communications. This looming crisis has drawn scientific minds and encouraged radical research
into arcane technologies, such as the once neglected area of nuclear fusion.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
ITER Fusion Power
The best option to combat the energy crisis is to develop fusion via a Manhattan project
program like ITER
Peter Graneau,Center for Electromagnetics Research, Northeastern University, “Manhattan or Kyoto,” Infinite
Energy, Issue 77, January/February 2008
In the July 2007 issue of the journal Physics World, Chi-Jen Yang, a prominent member of the International Affairs
Department of Princeton University, wrote about tackling global climate change under the headline “ Manhattan
versus Kyoto .” (Physics World is the membership journal of the British Institute of Physics.) The first paragraph of
Yang’s article reads: In advance of the G8 summit held in Germany last month, U.S. President George Bush
reiterated his view that to tackle global climate change is through technology, rather than by regulating
emissions of green house gases. . .He is not alone in this view. Indeed political leaders of all persuasions,
including U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, as well as many scientists, are arguing that global
warming can only be solved through a crash research and development programme similar to the
Manhattan or Apollo projects. The Bush administration is unlikely to launch a Manhattan project, addressing energy,
during its last year in office. For the time being we will have to live with the Kyoto protocol, a political approach which does not
preclude major advances in new energy research. In the long run, however, a Manhattan-type of R&D program
deserves serious consideration. The words Energy Crisis assumed their threatening connotation when the Arab nations imposed an oil
embargo in 1973. Gas lines formed overnight in the United States and other countries of the western hemisphere. Petroleum prices rocketed and
the news media suddenly realized how dependent human society had become on the ready availability of fossil fuels in particular and energy in
general. There was much talk about alternative fuels and renewable energy sources. The U.S. government formed the Department of Energy with
the cabinet position of a Secretary of Energy to marshal the scientific and economic resources of the world’s leading industrialized nation and
make America independent of foreign oil. The bureaucracy has been in place for some time, but its performance has been disappointing. Man
went to the moon, proudly demonstrating his technological skills, while most electric power plants are stuck with coal, oil, and natural gas
combustion. It seems to have been the co-coordinated and intense Apollo program which made the difference in succeeding with a new
technology. In recent years the energy crisis assumed a new dimension in the form of global warming. A majority of scientists now believe that
environmental temperatures all over the globe increase at an alarming rate which ultimately will endanger the existence of the human race. The
cause of global warming, and associated climate changes, is said to be an accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere. They may be responsible for retaining more of the energy that arrives from the sun than the amount of energy that is radiated back
into space. It is argued that the annual production of carbon dioxide on earth has to be reduced by 40% to stabilize global temperatures. This is
about the amount of carbon dioxide exhausted by all the fossil fuel burning electric power plants worldwide. Our civilization without
electricity is unthinkable. The best answer to the energy crisis is to drive the electricity generators of the world
with water. It would be wrong to call water a fuel because it does not burn carbon, but there is plenty of usable
2
energy stored in the hydrogen bonds between water molecules. The success of the Manhattan project was, in
no small measure, due to the well-defined objective of producing an atomic weapon based on the
experimental discovery of nuclear energy. Today—in the energy field—we have to make a choice
between different scientific discoveries which have opened separate avenues to new sources of energy.
The best choice of a particular line of energy research to be pursued by a Manhattan-type organization is
by no means obvious. The Kyoto protocol has the great advantage that no choice has to be made. All reasonably economic
energy sources, not involving fossil fuels, are acceptable. Energy conservation measures are equally attractive. In fact it is not
necessary to develop new technology, but innovation must not be ruled out. A mix of renewable energy from wind turbines,
photo-voltaic cells, solar heating, geothermal power, and biomass fuels can certainly be used. The expansion of existing
technologies, without the imposition of taxes on the populations of the world, to pursue research is a great incentive of the Kyoto
treaty. It should be continued and strengthened even if one or more Manhattan enterprises to develop new sources of energy come
into existence. The problem with Kyoto is that after a few decades it may become clear that all the voluntary measures, nurtured
by public opinion and government encouragement, fell short of arresting global warming and did not lead to oil independence.
The worldwide enthusiasm which now upholds Kyoto may ultimately wane, because it requires too many small sacrifices. The
voluntary contributions to the Kyoto system by industrial nations may then appear to be an idle burden. In that case nobody may
be able to control the ever-growing energy crisis. If this should happen, the Manhattan approach becomes mandatory.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion received generous support from the U.S. government for at least 25
years. For all practical purposes the fusion reactors, known as tokomaks, represent a Manhattan project.
This effort has been bogged down by technological difficulties of confining deuterium and tritium plasmas in a
metallic vacuum chamber. It has not stopped a consortium from going ahead with the building of an
3
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) at Cardarache , France , at a cost of $10 billion.
Contributions to this project are made by China , the European Union, Japan , Russia , South Korea , and the United States .
Energy researchers at large around the globe are skeptical of the future of ITER. On the other hand, the project does
demonstrate that the lobbying power of a large body of scientists and engineers can mobilize national
governments to spend billions of dollars on a scientific venture.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
ITER Fusion Power
Nuclear fusion will be a major energy source- ITER important to development.
D. P. Stotler, R. E. Bell, K. W. Hill, D. W. Johnson and F. M. Levinton,Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory,
Princeton University, and Nova Photonics, “Atomic Physics in ITER - The Foundation for the Next Step to Fusion
Power,” ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR DATA AND THEIR APPLICATIONS: 5th International Conference on
Atomic and Molecular Data and Their Applications (ICAMDATA). AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 901, pp.
95-104, April '07.
Fusion energy is envisioned to contribute significantly to the world’s energy needs by the end of this
century. The associated reduction in carbon dioxide emission relative to fossil fuel power plants will be
important in mitigating global warming. The proposed “fast track” [1, 2] to fusion energy would put
power on the grid in about 50 years, just when new technologies will be required to replace fossil fuel
based energy [3]. Approximately the last half of this development period will be devoted to the operation of one or
more demonstration power plants. The objective of these devices would be to show that fusion reactors can not only
generate net electrical power, but do so economically with high levels of reliability and low activity waste products.
An aggressive, multi-component research plan will be required to establish the technical, physics, and
safety basis for a demonstration power plant. One component of this plan is a facility for testing candidate
fusion reactor structural materials for their ability to withstand bombardment by fusion neutrons and operate at
high temperatures without experiencing a significant degradation of materials properties. This is International
Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) [2]. But, the more important component is a device that will
demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power; this is the ITER experiment.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
International Cooperation Good
Collaboration with other countries key to better nuclear energy.
Sarnit K., Bhattacharyya Director, Technology Development Division, Argonne National Laboratory, “Argonne
National Laboratory: An Example of a United States Nuclear Research Center,” U.S. Department of
Energy,http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/750627-HqeV1m/webviewable/750627.pdf, Dec. 1999
International collaborations are also very desirable for large nuclear projects. There has been long-
term collaboration on the development of fusion energy, and this continues to this day, despite the
recent decision by the U.S. to withdraw from the ITER project. The use of fission systems for space
exploration and exploitation is an area that could provide exciting opportunities for collaboration in the21st Century.
The design of advanced nuclear power systems that incorporate features of inherent safety,
proliferation resistance, reduced waste, and ease of decommissioning could be another area in which
international collaborations could pay rich dividends.

International collaboration in science beneficial to US- numerous reasons.

Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National
Research Council, “INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE: WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE UNITED
STATES,”Committee on Science, US House of Representatives,
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s03
251998 ,3/25/98

Science and technology are already fundamental to driving economic development in

more sustainable ways and to improving the life of people everywhere. This is going to
become even more true in the next century, as the power of science and technology expands and makes possible more and more
amazing achievements. The United States is today the undisputed world leader in science and technology. Yet the ability of the
nation to remain at the forefront scientifically, and thereby reap benefits in economic growth, national security, environmental
quality, health, education, and other areas, requires that we place increased emphasis on pursuing science and technology in an
international context. The United States can benefit scientifically through increased
international cooperation because many scientific and technological advances are
made in other countries. A growing fraction, already over half, of all scientific articles have foreign authors. Some
research facilities are so expensive that international collaboration is necessary in
order to make them affordable. In order for the United States to be able to capitalize
on discoveries made elsewhere and facilities located elsewhere, we must have world-
class researchers who maintain constant communication and work frequently in
collaboration with the best scientists around the world. We benefit not only from the
contributions of scientists in other countries, but also from access to location-specific research that is
essential to making progress in certain fields. We must also maintain the ability to permit leading scientists
from other countries to work as researchers in the United States. We at the National Academy of Sciences believe that increasing
international cooperation and communication is so important that we are using our own funds to create a series of symposia,
"Frontiers of Science," which bring the best young scientists in the United States together every year with their colleagues in Japan,
International cooperation in science and technology also
China, Germany, and other countries.
serves the nation's vital economic interests. In a global economy, knowledge of and
experience with other countries are critical to developing markets, partnerships, and
learning about technological developments elsewhere. We should not be fearful that international
science and technology cooperation could become a foreign assistance "give away." The vast majority of intellectual property is in
the possession of the private sector, and U.S. companies are quite capable of deciding for themselves whether and under what
conditions to put their proprietary technologies on the table. Cooperation in the area of public-funded research is predominantly in
open areas where we benefit from the interaction, and where we are almost always agile in exploiting any economically useable
advance. International
science and technology cooperation is also necessary in order to
make progress on many common problems in environment, health, food, water,
energy and other global challenges. There are many urgent examples -- such as stopping new infectious
diseases, understanding volcanic hazards, cataloguing biological diversity, reversing soil degradation, and so forth. It is in our
interest that wise and informed decisions be made by other countries and international organizations in addressing these common
problems. We have a great opportunity to develop more rational decision-making in
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
foreign countries by working with the scientific organizations in those countries, to help
them become more respected and involved in advising their governments. At the National Academy of Sciences, we are using our
own funds to undertake studies with our foreign counterparts on important topics -- for example, with the Chinese Academy of
Sciences on energy options; jointly with the Chinese and Indian Academies of Sciences on population and land use issues; with
academies in the Middle East on water problems in arid regions; and with the Mexican Academies of Sciences and Engineering on
the Mexico City water supply.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
International Cooperation Good
International scientific collaborations crucial to US interests/relations.
Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National
Research Council, “INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE: WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE UNITED
STATES,”Committee on Science, US House of Representatives,
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s03251998,3/25/98

There is a growing awareness within the foreign policy community in the United
States that science and technology have become intimately intertwined with
vital U.S. interests. Yet the federal government has not mobilized its resources
to capitalize on this fact. I agree with Admiral Watkins and the Carnegie Commission that
"overall, U.S. international relations have suffered from the absence of a long-
term, balanced strategy for issues at the intersection of science and technology
with foreign affairs." I am pleased to relate that the State Department has recently asked the
Academy to undertake a study of the contributions that science, technology, and health can make
to foreign policy, and to recommend ways in which the department might better carry out its
responsibilities to that end. This is a task that we are eager to undertake.

International Collaboration required for large science projects

Kumju Hwang, “International Collaboration in Multilayered Center-Periphery in the
Globalization of Science and Technology,”Science Technology Human Values, 33,
101,http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/33/1/101 ,2008

Interdisciplinary content and the sharing of instruments are prototypes of the category of
scientific content. As some research problems cannot be solved by the existing
theoretical concepts or methods of a single discipline of science, they are
pursued within the scope of multiple disciplines. Bordons et al. (1999) point out that
interdisciplinarity is now considered to be essential for the advancement of science.
Multidisciplinary collaboration is a mode of producing integrated knowledge from different
areas. Sophistication of equipment and sharing rare and expensive
instruments, especially in big
science (Galison and Helvy 1992), such as high-energy physics and astronomy,
inevitably require collaboration. Thus, interdisciplinary application and
manipulating and building equipment are the main determinants of
collaboration in the category of the scientific content.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
ITER Good
ITER is awesome.
Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs,United States Global
Climate Change Policy,”US Department of State,
http://www.gcrio.org/OnLnDoc/pdf/climate_policy.pdf, 2/27/03
Multilateral partnerships. The President’s FY 2004 budget also supports significant funding
for Department of
Energy (DOE) multilateral climate change-related technology research and development
(R&D), including:
l $9.7 million for the Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems Initiative, which is developing
the nextgeneration
nuclear systems to produce electricity to drive our 21st century economy and to generate
vast
quantities of economical hydrogen for transportation use without emitting greenhouse
gases. In this effort,
the U.S. leads multi-national R&D projects through the Generation IV International Forum,
comprised of
Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa,
Switzerland,
the United Kingdom, and the U.S. This international approach seeks to develop technologies
that are widely
acceptable, enables DOE to access the best expertise in the world to develop complex new
technologies,
and helps leverage scarce nuclear R&D resources.
$62 million for carbon sequestration research and development, which is developing a
portfolio of
technologies that hold great promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel
plants through
carbon separation, capture, transport and storage. The U.S. is also inviting international
partners to
participate in a Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum that provides a way for the U.S. and
other
governments to take effective action in a number of ways -- by partnering with the private
sector on carbon
capture and storage activities already underway; by strengthening international multilateral
efforts in
research and development of carbon sequestration technologies; and by mobilizing
international resources.
$12 million to support U.S. preparations for negotiations with the United Kingdom, other
European Union
nations, Russia, China, Japan and Canada on the creation of the International Thermonuclear
Experimental
Reactor (ITER), an ambitious international research project to harness the promise of fusion
energy. In the
longer term, the results of ITER will advance the effort to produce clean,
safe, renewable, and commerciallyavailable fusion energy by the middle of
this century. Commercialization of fusion has the potential to dramatically
improve America’s energy security while significantly reducing air
pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Fusion Inevitably Fails
The scientific establishment is biased against new technologies – risk of failure prevents
research and advocacy of fusion
Brian O' Leary, former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton
University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California
Berkeley School of Law, AAAS Fellow, “Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest: Exploring the Myths of
New Energy,” http://www.brian-
oleary.com/Dumb,%20Dumber%20and%20Dumbest%20v2.html, 5/04,
Myth #1. New energy is not scientifically valid. This is perhaps the biggest obstacle. Throughout history,
mainstream scientists have opposed and ridiculed new ideas. They (we) are the guardians to the gates of
truth. The more important the idea, the greater the resistance. New energy research is no exception,
leading the renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke to conclude that the debunking of cold fusion research
is "one of the greatest scandals in the history of science." I have talked with fellow physicists still in the mainstream
who are open enough to discuss the matter with me. To them, it would be the professional kiss of death to
advocate new energy research because that implies the acceptance of revolutionary concepts frowned
upon by colleagues. "Any failure would be embarrassing and the funding would stop. It's not worth the
risk for me to stick my neck out until I'm 100 % convinced the experiments would work." This is a classic
chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. And so, the typical physicist awaits silently and skeptically until
somebody somewhere might produce a convincing (to them) experiment. Then change can begin, but not
one moment sooner. Meanwhile, one government-funded physicist sits in his laboratory awaiting the
arrival of research devices, one at a time, for testing. Is this any way to run a crash program for planetary
survival? Certainly not: the results so far have been (understandably) disappointing and slow when looked
at by physicists. Meanwhile several successful experiments in low energy nuclear reactions (aka. cold
fusion) have been reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, for example methods of producing energy
through acoustic cavitation or sonoluminescence, by multiple authors from prestigious institutions worldwide
reported in Science Magazine in March 2002. Many other approaches appear in the literature as well, in spite of the
denials of some mainstream physicists, and in spite of little or no funding available to do the work.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Fusion Feasible
Fusion is the best option
Raymond L. Orbach, UNDER SECRETARY FOR SCIENCE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
ENERGY TASK FORCE FOR AMERICAN INNOVATION,States News
Service,http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/search/newssubmitForm.do ,5/8/08
Fusion. Finally, one of the most promising future energy solutions lies in fusion. Fusion is the energy that
powers the sun and the stars. Fusion energy uses deuterium from water, and lithium to create tritium, fusing
deuterium and tritium into helium and a fast (14 MeV) neutron. Deuterium and lithium are abundant and cheap, the
helium will escape from the earth' gravity, and the energy of the neutron can be captured to generate electricity or
produce hydrogen. Fusion has the potential to provide clean, carbon-free energy for the world' growing
electricity needs, on an almost limitless scale. The key challenge is sustaining and containing the 100 million
degree-plus fusion reaction on earth. Scientists have made progress containing fusion reactions using
powerful magnetic fields for confinement. Imagine a future of truly unlimited, emissions-free energy for
humanity. Imagine a future where humanity ceases to struggle with the challenge of providing abundant
energy without damaging our earthly environment. The basic science needs to enable this technology include:
fundamental understanding of plasma science; materials for the extreme thermochemical environments and high
neutron flux conditions of a fusion reactor; and predictive capability of plasma confinement and stability for an
optimum experimental fusion power plant design. In November 2006, the United States signed an agreement with
six international partners to build and operate an experimental fusion reactor, ITER, which will demonstrate the
technical and scientific feasibility of sustained fusion burning plasma. Scientists supported by the DOE
Office of Science will be working side by side with counterparts from China, the European Union, India, Japan, the
Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Fusion Unclean/Dangerous
Fusion is clean, safe, efficient, and sustainable.
Matthew Hole, PhD,Research School of Physical Science and Engineering at the ANU, is the
Chair of the Australian ITER Forum, “Nuclear Fusion - Clean, sustainable
energy,”http://www.industrysearch.com.au/Features/Nuclear_Fusion_-
_Clean_sustainable_energy-700 8/29/06
As its name implies, fusion energy is released by joining light nuclei (typically
deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen) in a high pressure, extremely high temperature
“plasma” contained by strong magnetic fields. Like fission, the fusion process
produces effectively zero greenhouse gases. Unlike fission, where radioactive
waste is a by-product of the reaction, the fusion process is intrinsically clean, with
waste generated only indirectly through neutron activation of the shield of
the reactor. Based on existing technology, fusion power plants could be recycled in
about 100 years. Research into the use of advanced alloys and ceramics suggests that
this period could be made even shorter. Deuterium, a fusion fuel, is naturally
abundant in water. Countries with access to sea water automatically have access to
vast reserves of deuterium. Per kilogram of fuel, fusion releases 4 times more
energy than fission, and a staggering 10 million times more than coal.
World deposits of deuterium are sufficient to power civilization for millions
of years: access to fuel supply would therefore no longer be an issue,
economically or politically. More importantly, the fusion reaction is inherently
safe. Turn off the heating power and the reaction ceases. There can be no chain
reactions, no reactor meltdowns and no explosions. Reproducing star-like
conditions on Earth is a very significant technological and scientific challenge. Despite the
difficulties, progress towards the development of fusion power has been
spectacular. Indeed, the advance in the triple-product fusion performance parameter (a
product of density, temperature and confinement time) has outstripped Moores law, the
characteristic increase computer power. Present-day experiments have a power output of
tens of MW. ITER will be a 500MW fusion experiment. In continuous operation, ITER will
yield five times more power than is required to sustain the reaction, while
in pulsed mode, the power gain could be as high as 30.

Nuclear fusion is cleaner and safer than fission.

Clive Cookson, Science editor, “Nuclear fusion: Political imperative drives research
partners,”The Financial Times”, 11/09/07
In a tokamak, the fuel - a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen - is heated to temperatures
above 100m'C, forming an electrically charged "plasma" that is even hotter than the sun. Superconducting
magnets around the tokamak generate a strong magnetic field to stop the plasma touching the walls of the
reaction vessel, which would instantly stop the fusion reaction. The process can also be stopped within
seconds by turning off the external fuel supply, which means that a fusion power plant can be shut down
safely and quickly with no possibility of a runaway nuclear reaction. Advocates of fusion power say it is
far safer than today's fission-based nuclear plants - and far cleaner because it produces only minimal
amounts of radioactive by-products. In its linear dimensions, Iter will be more than twice the size of the largest
existing tokamaks, JET and JT-60, with a reactor vessel 10 metres high. Its volume will be 10 times greater. JET (at
Culham near Oxford) is the only reactor yet to have produced a significant amount of fusion energy: 16 megawatts
in short bursts up to a second. But this was less than the electrical energy input required to heat up the plasma. Iter
aims to generate a "burning plasma" in which the fusion reaction sustains itself for 10 minutes and produces 500
megawatts - as much as a small power station. But it will not generate electricity for a power grid. That will be a job
for its successor, Demo, which will be the first plant to demonstrate the large-scale production of electric power by
fusion. If all goes well, Demo could come into operation by about 2035, generating electricity continuously on a
large scale. It would lead fusion into the industrial era and open the way towards the first commercial fusion plants -
possibly around 2050. Although the world has put most of its fusion eggs into the Iter basket, tokamaks are not the
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
only potential route to fusion power. Some experts believe a spiral shaped reactor called a stellarator would be a
better vessel in which to contain the plasma with a magnetic field.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Time Frame for Fusion
International research and development scientists state that an experimental reactor will be
ready in 2010, followed by a demonstrational reactor in 2030, and an industrial reactor in
2050.
Tokimatsu et al 2002, Koji Tokimatsu, , a, Jun’ichi Fujinob, Satoshi Konishic, Yuichi Ogawad
and Kenji Yamajid, 2002, a Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE),
7th Floor, No 3 Toyokaiji Bldg 2-23-1 Nishi-shimbashi, 105-0003 Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan, b
National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba, Japan, c Japan Atomic Energy
Research Institute (JAERI), Naka, Japan, d The University of Tokyo (UT), Tokyo, Japan,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2W-46YXJKX-
3&_user=2518055&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000057738&_v
ersion=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=2518055&md5=43e7540bd54921738e0da834671bb1f2
The state of research and development (R&D) of nuclear fusion can be called embryonic. R&D
of the tokamak-type nuclear fusion, led by Japan, Europe, the United States, and Russia, is the
most advanced among several types of nuclear fusion. R&D of helical-type fusion, succeeding
the tokamak-type, is led by Japan and Germany. R&D of laser-type fusion is led by Japan, the
United States, and France. Progress in R&D of nuclear fusion is made primarily in plasma
physics. The following three conditions must be achieved simultaneously in order to realize
nuclear fusion as a power plant; i.e., (i) sufficiently larger power output produced (ii) by nuclear
fusion than input power to a nuclear fusion reactor should be maintained (iii) for a sufficient
duration. All three of these conditions have been attained—though not simultaneously—in the
current embryonic state of nuclear fusion R&D. The first condition has been achieved with the
tokamak-type experimental device, which puts out 20% more power than it consumes. For the
second condition, thermal power by nuclear fusion has been obtained in a nuclear experiment
using deuterium and tritium; the highest power is 16 MW at a duration of 2 s, and the longest
duration is 6 s at power of 5 MW. The third condition, of plasma discharge and sustained reaction
has been attained for 2 h using an experimental device equipped with superconductor coils. It
should be noticed that the first and third conditions are not attained by nuclear experiments. The
initial success has been achieved in the engineering aspects. One example is the superconductor
coil technologies: the required flux levels and current for an experimental reactor have been
attained on the same device scale as that of the experimental reactor. On the other hand, the
development of low-activation structural materials is essential for economically competitive,
environmentally compatible nuclear fusion reactors. This is considered the most difficult
challenge. The following R&D scenario illustrates how the fusion community could build an
experimental reactor in 2010, succeeded by a demonstration reactor in 2030, in order to begin
using a power reactor in 2050. The experimental reactor is planned as a tokamak type; in
parallel, R&D continues for other types of nuclear fusion that had not reached a level sufficient
for an experimental reactor to be built advances in the technologies of core plasmas and nuclear
engineering are made in both the tokamak type and other types. Among the various types of
reactors, one type is selected for construction of a demonstration reactor. Steady-state power
generation is planned to be demonstrated in this demonstration reactor (demo-reactor). The
reactor should attain economic competitiveness as well as reliability.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Time Frame for Fusion
The timeframe is 25-30 years for a reactor that can release 10 times the input energy.
John A. Glaser: National Risk Management Research Laboratory, US Environmental Protection
Agency, 26 W King Dr, Cincinnati, OH 45268, USA, Published online: 26 July 2007,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y725507574112k14/fulltext.html
Nuclear fusion reactor research has been pursued since World War II and the development of
thermonuclear weaponry. At its core this technology strives to harness the energy released
through the reaction of the hydrogen isotopes of tritium and deuterium to form a helium atom, a
high-speed neutron and massive quantities of energy. Current research is focused on differing versions of
the tokamak reactor and stellarators, which use superconducting magnets and plasma conditions to control the fusion
of the hydrogen isotopes. Gigawatts (GW) of energy could be generated from kilograms of fuels on a
daily basis. The current objective is to operate the reactor to release 10 times the input energy.
Initiation of the reaction has been difficult to sustain and energy consumption has overwhelmed energy production.
Lighting the nuclear match to start the fusion reaction and sustaining the reaction remain as hurdles to this
technology. A timeframe of 25–30 years for this technology to emerge seems credible.

Nuclear fusion will commercialize and industrialize within 3-4 years.

Kanellos and van Lierop 2008, Michael Kanellos and Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy
Venture Capital, February 7, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9866626-54.html
Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.
"Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van
Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech
Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that
show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said. If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with
an old stack of Omni magazines, you could dismiss him. Fusion--which extracts energy from nuclear reactions
without the dangers associated with nuclear fission--has been studied for decades, but has yet to go commercial. Van
Lierop, however, isn't a random individual. He is one of the earliest and more active investors in clean tech:
Chrysalix started investing in clean energy in 2001. The firm's limited partners include BASF, Shell, and Rabobank.
Chrysalix's optimism is pinned on an angel investment the company made in General Fusion, a Canadian company
that says it has found a way to hurdle many of the technical problems surrounding fusion. The company's
ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power.
The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity
at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventional electricity.

The time frame for successful fusion technology in industry is 100 years.
Fred Pearce, He writes for the New Scientist, Boston Globe, Independent, TES, Country Living and the Ecologist and has written reports for
WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank and the UK Environment Agency. He was voted BEMA
Environment Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 and has been short-listed for the same award in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He has been winner of
the Peter Kent Conservation Book Award and the TES Junior Information Book Award. Fred lives in London. July 2006, http://www.prospect-
magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7544
Publicly, the physicists say the science is all over bar the shouting. But one senior researcher at
ITER may have given the game away when he told a room full of journalists in May: "We think
it's going to work. We have to, or the politicians wouldn't give us the money." What are we to
make of this? One respected commentator has said that there may be a 20 per cent chance of the
world getting 20 per cent of its electricity from fusion by 2100. Llewellyn Smith, while thinking the
chances are rather better than that, says that even such long odds would represent a worthwhile gamble for the
world, notwithstanding the opportunity costs. The director of the science office at the US department of energy,
Raymond Orbach, says: "We think that fusion will, by the end of the century, be producing 40
per cent of the electricity produced in the world today," which would represent about 15 per cent
of the total electricity demand in 2100.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Energy Bad
High oil prices and rises in technology will inevitably solve the energy crisis.
David Benjamin, EE Times, 6/10/2008,
(06/10/2008 6:53 PM EDT)
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403236
The crisis, added Russell Lefevre, president of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers
(IEEE), can't be solved by Congress. "I don't think any one bill you can conjure can actually fix
it," he said, "There will be a really important energy bill next year, and I think what we will see is
something to encourage innovation." On the other hand, the panelists were broadly optimistic
about the power of innovation to guide America away from its dependence on foreign oil.
Among the measures certain to prod this wave of new ideas will be legislation forcing industries
to limit carbon emissions and to do so through a cap-and-trade system similar to many now
already in use in Europe. Vicki Hadfield, president of the Washington-based SEMI North
America, cited rapid growth in "clean energy" technologies in many U.S. industries, especially
40 percent growth last year in the solar energy sector. As oil prices rise, the "grid equity" gap
between oil and alternative sources shrinks, she said. Hadfield added that solar-cell efficiency,
aided by nanotechnology advances, will improve, further narrowing the gap.

The energy crisis will be inevitably solved by human logic. We will always find more energy
in different forms.
The Bottomless Well, Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Hills 2005,
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OVsccHaTpooC&oi=fnd&pg=PR17&dq=the+en
ergy+crisis+will+inevitably+be+solved&ots=nHGwSozVFh&sig=7LVk25_bAmWXulC_ynYJ-
PvN9rc#PPT1,M1
What lies at the bottom of the bottomless well isn’t oil, its logic. Fuels recede, demand grows,
efficiency makes things worse, but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic we attain the
impossible- infinite energy, perpetual motion, and the triumph of power. It will all run out but we
will always find more. Some say this is not good for the planet, but that’s how it works,
regardless. What we will forever seek, and forever find, is not energy, but the logic of power.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Topicality – Incentives
Funding for R&D is an incentive
Roger H. Bezdek, president of Management Information Services Inc. (MISI) and coauthor of
Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management, and Robert M.
Wendling,vice president of Management Information Services and served as senior economist
at the U.S. Department of Commerce, program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy and
director of the Department of Commerce's STAT-USA, “Solar Surprise,” ASPO-USA, Peak Oil
Weekly, EvWorld, http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1022, 5/1/06
The federal government has historically encouraged and supported the development of domestic
U.S. energy resources in many diverse ways. Federal incentives for energy production have taken the
form of direct subsidies, regulation, tax incentives, market support, demonstration programs, R&D
funding, procurement mandates, information generation and dissemination, technology transfer,
directed purchases, and other types of actions. Of the $644 billion (2003 dollars; all estimates
quoted here are in constant 2003 dollars, unless otherwise noted, and refer to actual expenditures
in the relevant year) in total federal energy-related incentives provided between 1950 and 2003,
R&D funding comprised about 19 percent— $121 billion. The R&D funds were not distributed
evenly among technologies. Three energy technologies—nuclear energy, coal, and solar and
renewable energy—have received 86 percent of all federal R&D support. These R&D programs
are the subject of this analysis. Federal involvement and intervention in energy markets has been
pervasive for most of the past century, especially with respect to regulatory, price, R&D, and tax
policies. Beginning in the 1950s, as a result of the Atomic Energy Act, the Federal government began to
expand its energy-related R&D, particularly as it related to commercialization of nuclear energy as a
source of electricity. While Federal support of energy research and development pro-grams began
during the 1950s, Federal support of energy R&D became a major national priority after the first
"energy crisis" of 1973/74.

Participation in ITER incentivizes fusion R&D in the US

EnergyWashington Week, 12/6/2006, “DOE Vying To Expand Role Under International Fusion
Program,” Lexis
ITER is meant to complement the president's initiative to increase U.S. competitiveness by
encouraging U.S. companies to develop novel technology to stay ahead of foreign competitors if
fusion becomes viable in the future. The administration sees U.S. participation as important to
the creation and marketing of U.S. hardware and expertise globally within an organization that
includes China, European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the Russian
Federation.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Topicality – Alternative Energy
Nuclear fusion development in ITER is an alternative energy
Douglas Kothe, director of science at the National Center for Computational Sciences, 9/1/2007,
“A look at the world's most powerful supercomputer: NCCS's Jaguar enables vital scientific
research; High Performance Computing,” Lexis
Nuclear fusion Over the next several decades, nuclear fusion should become increasingly
important as an alternative energy source. One of the most exciting developments on this front is
ITER, a multinational nuclear fusion reactorscale experiment, scheduled to come online in
Cadarache, France, in 2016. ITER will be the largest facility of its kind ever built and the most
ambitious attempt by scientists yet to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power production.

Nuclear fusion is an alternative energy – this evidence excludes alternative fossil fuels and
clean coal
Rowland Nethaway is senior editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald, 7/20/2007, “Washington talk
about upping fuel efficiency a familiar song, dance,” Lexis
Other changes were made to boost domestic oil and gas production and bring on line additional
energy sources. Lawmakers got behind government-supported efforts to convert this nation's
bountiful supply of bituminous shale into a distilled oil product to supply much of the nation's
energy needs. Another part of the package was a commitment to find ways to clean up coal-
burning plants. Coal is another energy product America has in abundance. Other efforts included
government-sponsored research and development of alternative energy sources such as
photovoltaic, solar, geothermal, advanced nuclear, fusion, wind and whatever science could
dream up. I liked it.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion

***Humanism***

Fusion Humanism
Our plan takes as its starting point an ethical stance in favor of progress
Nuno Rodrigues, a PhD candidate at the Middlesex Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Middlesex University, February 18, 2008, http://www.cluster.eu/2008/02/18/nuclear-
fusion-and-art%E2%80%99s-fission/
And art? Given that the argument over the cleanliness and limitlessness of fusion energy versus
the limitations and not-so-greenness of green energy is strictly a matter of technical dispute, here
we must see the role of art as particularly related to the general ethical position underlying the
advocacy of nuclear energy. ‘Energy is political’ writes Charlesworth. But, despite Heartfield’s
comment on capitalism and the management of scarcity, what emerges from these four texts is a
general ethical attitude towards technological progress and the respective promises of abundance.
Very little is said regarding the collective and socially transformative power that nuclear energy
might bring or how the embrace of technological progress is immanently political. Ultimately,
the advocacy of abundance, without a strong political revolutionary underpinning, becomes the
advocacy of ‘more of the same’, which is as political as it is conservative. With this in mind, it is
fair to say that the starting point of FUSION NOW! is a general ethical position towards
technological progress and material plenty and not the ‘politics of the present day’.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Humanism Good
Humanism propels society forward and leads to a better world with a more positive future.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 93
Societies estrangement from its past creates circumstances in which classical political
distinctions and divisions make little sense. The fundamental questions that have divided left and
right since the eighteenth century pale into insignificance compared to the issue of what it means
to be human. Previous political foes on the left and right- despite their differences - all drew
something positive from the experience of human history making. Scientific and progressive
thought have always recognized that preserving the achievements of the past is a precondition for
moving forward in a positive direction.’ If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants,' observed Sir Isaac Newton. For conservative thinkers the past is an important source
of enlightenment. They regard tradition as possessing the capacity to confer wisdom and insight
on human action in the present. Both perspectives view civilization in essentially positive terms
and use the word without a sense of embarrassment.

Humanism underpins progress and is necessary to deal with any social problem. The
Holocaust was an effect of lack of Humanism.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, 96-97
The reconstitution of the sense of agency and of historical thinking is the prerequisite for the re-
engagement of the public with political life. It requires that we uphold humanity’s past
achievements, including standards of excellence and civilized forms of behavior and values. Far
from representing a yearning of human achievement helps us deal with the issues thrown up by
change. It is through drawing on the achievement of the past that we can embrace change with
enthusiasm. Promoting a consistent belief in human potential underpins progressive thought. A
human-centered view of the world recognizes that people can be destructive and that conflicts of
interests can lead to devastating outcomes. However, the negative and sometimes horrific
experiences of the past two centuries, up to and including the Holocaust, are the price not of
progress, but of the lack of it. Contemporary problems are the result not of applying reason,
science, and knowledge, but of neglecting them and thwarting the human potential.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Energy = Political
Energy has become political, rather than scientific.
<JJ Charlesworth, Reviews Editor for Art Reviw, FUSION NOW! Art and the Politics of
Energy,www.manifestoclub.com/fusionnowessay, 12/20/2007>
There are many political issues that could be the subject for an art exhibition today; the war in
Iraq, or the global experience of mass migration, or the supposed clash of cultures between the
West and East, or the rise of China as a new global power. Or it could be the environment and
climate change. FUSION NOW! begins with the science of nuclear fusion to argue that energy
has become a political issue. It does so because the controversy over energy goes to the core of
how we understand the nature of modern society, of how we might understand what progress is,
and how abundance or scarcity are defining forces in our existence. And in different, often
contradictory ways, art has always related to these questions. Energy might seem a purely
scientific question, but the themes it touches on – the meaning of creativity and work, of
aesthetic experience and its relation to pleasure and abundance, and our relationship to human
history and to the future – forms the basis for art’s drive to make sense of things.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Humanism = Prerequisite to Politics
Humanism emphasizes reason and projects a future of human development.
<Dr. Joe Chuman, Leader of the Ethical Culture Society, Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson
University, Toward a Humanistic Politic, Toward a New Political Humanism, 2004>
Humanism is ineluctably political. On occasion one still hears the plea that humanists confine
their interests and activities to discussion centered primarily on reinforcing humanist identity, yet
efforts to exclude political activity are a logical contradiction that debases the humanist project.
All associations, organizations, and movements are unavoidably political, either by intent or
default, and there can be no stance of innocence. Opponents of political action within humanist
groups contend that by taking sides humanists risk fracturing their small and fragile
organizations. These putative risks frame the challenges; they of themselves do not exempt
humanist groups from the mandate to actively join the political struggle. The reluctance to assert
its small but distinctive voice in the political arena equates to a position of quietism, which in
any time, but especially in our time of conservative and ultraconservative triumphalism, lends
whatever political capital humanists possess to the maintenance of a perilous status quo. Moreover,
quietistic humanism resembles the characteristic nonengagement, especially the preoccupation with individual sal-
vation, that humanists frequently seeks to condemn, rightly or wrongly, in the traditional faiths.>Humanism is an
activistic world view and needs to express. itself as such lest it stagnate as a middle-class indulgence preoccupied
with refining metaphysical correctness. Naturalistic humanism philosophically covers a broad range of
values that characteristically resist doctrinal formulations. As a product of the Enlightenment,
humanism emphasizes the primacy of reason" in the process of problem-solving. underscores the
autonomy of the individual, (though some would argue not sufficiently) our dependence on and
interaction with the natural world, and eschews determinism of any sort as it projects a future
that is open to human development and cultural evolution. Humanism also posits a strong
emphasis on ethical values-the foundational commitment from which a humanist politics
emerges. As we confront the difficult challenges to humanism in the twenty-first century, we inevitably search for
theoretical handles by which to leverage our activism. The catastrophic consequences of applied determinisms and
ideologies In the century just past should incline us toward the reformist rather than revolutionary approach that has
historically characterized political initiatives within humanist movements. In this sense, there is wisdom in minding
the gold of theorists from within the humanist movement itself.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Progress Good
People are made human by overcoming obstacles to create a life better than mere existence.
Nuclear fusion is necessary to advance humans to another level.
James Heartfield, writes for The Times Higher Education Supplement, Spiked Online, and
Blueprint. Heartfield has had articles published in the Telegraph, The Times, the Architects'
Journal, Art Review, Review of Radical Political Economy, and Cultural Trends, 12/20/2007,
www.manifestoclub.com/files/Fusion%20Now!%20low.pdf
For thirty millennia mankind lived under the tyranny of scarcity. The struggle to survive
dominated human experience. Perched on the edge of existence men were at the mercy of the
elements. Droughts, famine, floods, and disease threatened extinction. We were slaves to the
relentless cycles of night and day, high and low tide, summer and winter. The Earth only gave up
the means by which we survived, food, shelter, warmth, very grudgingly. Backbreaking toil has
been the lot of the small farmer since men first settled the land. Hardship stunted the moral and
intellectual growth of men. Dominated by nature in fact, they were in thrall to phantoms in their
imaginations. Superstitious in beliefs, custom-bound in their social lives, ignorant intellectually –
there was nothing virtuous about poverty. Only by industry, by husbanding the soil, by honing
the tools, by storing the grain, by rerouting the waters, gathering the wood, digging the coal,
drilling the oil, smelting the iron and steel did [humans] ever succeed in wresting more from the
earth than they needed. The surplus, over and above bare existence, is what makes us human.
*Gender Modified

Efforts to improve the world are historically, for the most part, successful. Their argument
is based on a politics of fear
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 167-8
The politics of fear thrives on the terrain of misanthropy and cynicism concerning the endeavour
of people to alter and improve their circumstances. From this perspective, the instinctive
response to such efforts – be they an invention, a new product or an institutional reform – is an
expansive sense of suspicion that readily gives way to anxiety and fear. Such attitudes stand
ready to write off claims of human progress both in the present and in the past. Indeed, there is a
widespread conviction that it is the development of human civilization, particularly the advance
of science and technology, and the resulting subordination of the natural order to the demands of
human society, that is the source of many of today’s problems of environmental destruction and
social disintegration. Further developments in the sphere of science and technology tend to be
greeted with apprehension rather than celebration. So, for example, recent advances in genetics
or nanotechnology are regarded as creating more problems than benefits for society. Suspicion
concerning the possibility of progress means that significant advances in the human condition are
regularly reinterpreted as bad news. The very fact that Western society has become concerned
about its ageing population reflects the huge progress that has been made in recent years in
humanity’s struggle against disease. Since 1959 there has been a 17 percent increase in life
expectancy worldwide: this increase has been most spectacular in the poorer nations of Asia,
where it has reached 20 percent. Yet time and again we are told that the struggle to contain
disease has been a failure and that we now face new species of plagues and superbugs.
Increasingly, we are made to feel as it the risk to our health is greater than before.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Rationality Good
The seeking of knowledge and experimentation is what makes us human.
Frank Furedi, professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, “Politics of Fear,” 2005, pp 159-
160
People making choices do not need support from bureaucratic institutions. What they require is the freedom
to engage With new experiencc, nor just the formal right to choose but cultural support for
experimentation and individual choice making. Back in the eighteenth century, the German philosopher
Immanuel Kam recognized that it was the emergence of conditions whereby individuals could pursue such activities
unimpeded that consrtituted the point of departure for the Enlightenment. Experimentation and the pursuit
of knowledge are not simply good in and of themselves, they also give freedom and
democracy real content. Kant claimed that the 'enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed
immaturity'. By immaturity he meant "the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another'.
According [to Kant, this immaturity was self-imposed and its' cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of
resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another'. And confronting his readers with what he
characterized as the 'motto of the Enlightenment - Sapere Aude or Dare to Know he challenged them to “use their
understanding." Today, when the precautionary principle constantly communicates the prejudice that
science threatens to run ahead of society, and that most mounting experiments are 'playing God',
daring to know is often represented as an act of irresponsibility. Kane would have been perplexed by
contemporary society's uneasy relationship with science and knowledge. Of course, Our ambitious relationship
with knowledge and reason is not due to the failure of individual character but the outcome of a
more deep-seated process of cultural disorientation. Unfortunately, Kant's diagnosis of self-imposed
immaturity is more pertinent to contemporary times than to the circumstances he faced. At a time when the
claims of knowledge and science are regarded with mistrust and cynicism, the motto Sapere Aude
goes against the grain of contemporary cuItural sensibility. Yet fortunately, many of us sense that daring to know
is what makes us human.

Critical thinking and rationality are prerequisites to meaningful participation in public life
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 163-4
The version of personhood that is most consistent with the ideals of autonomy, the exercise of
choice and history making is that given by the legacy of the Enlightenment. Risk taking,
experimentation, the exercise of critical judgment and reason are some of the important attributes
of historical thinking and agency. The exercise of these attributes is the precondition for the
reconstitution of public life. Through such human activities, people develop an understanding of
how purposeful public activity may lead to positive results in the future. Without a sense of
agency, personhood lacks the imagination one associates with political engagement. Humanizing
personhood requires challenging the prevailing paradigm of vulnerability and gaining acceptance
for the humanist concept of personhood.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Freedom Good
Belief in a continuously absent individual autonomy is key to combating repression and
creating the possibility of politics
Frank Furedi, professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, “Politics of Fear,” 2005, pp 160-
161
The politic of behaviour represents the conscious negation of the ideal of individual autonomy.
To be sure, even at the best of times, individual autonomy is an ideal that can at best be realized
inconsistently. People live in a world not of their own making and in circumstances that often elude their
aspiration to determine their affairs. The exercise of autonomy has always come up against external
constraints - natural obstacles. Economic exigencies, wars and conflict, and social dislocation.
Today, It also faces a cultural climate that is deeply suspicious of the aspiration for
autonomous behaviour. Human action often results in unexpected outcomes, some of which
are uncomfortable to live with. For example, the genetics revolution provides us with
important new insights into our constitution, but it may also give us information about ourselves
that we would rather not know. Nevertheless, the pursuit of the ideal of autonomy offers people
the promise of choices and frequently results in progress. It is precisely because some
individuals have taken this ideal seriously that they successfully challenge repressive
institutions and the use of arbitrary powers that seek to thwart their ambition. We have also
learned that the aspiration for autonomy often goes hand in hand with the display of altruism and
social solidarity. An enlightened society needs to harness the ideal of individual autonomy to
create the optimum conditions for human development. Societies that fail to valorize this
ideal end up dominated by a culture of fatalism and risk , collapsing into a state of stasis.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
America Good
America key to future societal progress.
Lee Harris, “ The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing,” Policy Review, Hoover Institute,
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3458371.html, December 2002/January 2003
America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in
order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams. This is an
intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable
perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned — including Schumpeter and Thomas
Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be
incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that
state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend — a struggle that no one felt more keenly
than Marx himself. For the essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to acknowledge just how much
suffering and pain every upward step of man’s ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to dream that
there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and it is helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue
that the great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World can
be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral. The left, if it is
not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but
with its dialectical necessity — America is the sine qua non of any future progress that mankind can
make, no matter what direction that progress may take. The belief that mankind’s progress, by any
conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction
or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that
govern the historical process — whatever these laws may be — must dictate a proportionate respect for any
social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has
been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these
facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy,
but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral
principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself. It is not. It requires an entire social order
to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Consequentialism Good
Consequentialism is critical to humanism
<Gerry Dantone, founder & President of Long Island Secular Humanists, Putting the Humanist
Manifesto 2000 into Practice, Toward a New Political Humanism, 2004>
What goals embody enhancing human well-being for the purposes of a political movement?
Among the items that Humanist Mani[esUJ 2000 cites are ending poverty and hunger; providing
adequate shelter and health care for all; economic security and adequate income opportunities for
everyone: protection and security from various dangers; reproductive freedom; freedom to form
families of one's choosing; adequate educational opportunities; equality of opportunity and
equality under the law regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, caste, creed, gender, or
sexual orientation; and a wide range of personal freedoms and choices. These goals are difficult
to argue with in principle. Although some may claim that adequate health care, as an example, is
not a ' right,' natural or otherwise, it can be argued that it is humanistic to seek to ensure that
health care is available for all, particularly for children, and that societies and their governments
should agree by democratic consensus to make some standard of health care a legislated right to
which all are entitled. This consensus and a successful implementation of universal health care
would most likely increase the sum of human happiness, making this right authentically
humanistic. To be fair, however, if such universal health care plans, to continue the example,
were to end up increasing misery in the real world, they would prove to be antihumanistic in
practice and would require reversing. Such is the lot of an empirically based ethics. This
possibility should not discourage us from pursuing paths on which failure is a possibility-failure
is possible no matter what is chosen. The key is to make as objective and well-considered a
decision as possible and be prepared to change course if necessary. The absence of a 100 percent
guarantee, along with the willingness to accept new evidence, is actually an advantage of a
humanistic approach to political issues that typical political ideologies lack. In fact, a consistent
ideological approach to political issues no matter the results leads to tyranny and only reinforces
the need for the consequentialist humanistic approach.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Pessimism Bad
Politics of fear attempt to force humanity away from previous paths of development – must
embrace human qualities to avoid fatalism
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology University of Kent, 2005, Politics of Fear, p. 168-9
The politics of fear thrives in an atmosphere where the exercise of human agency is regarded
with suspicion if not dread. The anti-humanist turn continually blames progress and civilization
for every dreadful event from the Holocaust to global warming. It helps fuel the sensibility of the
conservatism of fear and its principal virtues of caution and low expectations. The misanthropic
worldview of the anti-humanist turn continually communicates the belief that human ambition is
a form of greed. The aspiration to greater individual autonomy is decried as selfishness and an
insensibility to the sufferings of the vulnerable. From this standpoint, the aspiration to improve
the conditions of life – the most basic motive of people throughout the ages and one that has
driven humanity from the Dark Ages to civilization – is vilified. In these conditions we have two
choices. We can renounce the distinct human qualities that have helped to transform and
humanize the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails today. Or we can
do the opposite. Instead of celebrating passivity and vulnerability we can set about humanizing
our existence. Instead of acting as the audience for yet another performance of the politics of fear
we can try to alter the conditions that give rise to it.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Pessimism Now
The mindset of unlimited potential and possibilities for the human species is diminishing.
The world is filled with people who doubt the future of humankind.
Andrey Kobilnyk, Editor of FirstScience, 12 Sep 2007, “Farewell to Utopia?”
http://www.firstscience.com/home/perspectives/editorials/farewell-to-utopia_36243.html
During the 19th century and continuing on into the 20th, visions of the future involved ideas
such as travelling faster, communicating with people at greater distances, exploring the planets
and the nature of the subatomic realm and generally providing a greater access to technology for
the common man. Flying cars, robot servants, vacations on the moon, underwater cities – it was
all going to happen, and soon. It seemed at the time, that we were living on the cusp of a golden
age which could be delivered to us through the combined might of science, technology and
industry. While from one perspective the future was envisaged as being one of nearly unlimited
human power and potential, increasingly as we approached the present day, warnings grew in
literature, film and non-fiction media of possible negative outcomes for human beings. Distopian
images of the future are now common. Most of us are aware of the almost standardized concepts
of industrial wastelands, diseased and starving populations, countries ravaged by high-tech wars
and so on. It seems as if we no longer believe as strongly in a shiny silver future. Today, what is
far more common is a toned down, muted prediction where people don’t wear red capes and
boots with lightning-bolts blazing on them. We appear to be more likely to stay at home, rather
than roaming the stars – content to be tending our vegetable gardens and more concerned for
spare parts for our windmills and solar panels rather than the price of nuclear fuel for our rocket
cars. A recent book by Daniel H. Wilson, in many ways, is about this very idea. It sports a
cheeky title ‘Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never
Arrived.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Humanist Ethics
Humanist ethics entail creating a better life for humans
<Paul Kurtz, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy @ SUNY Buffalo, Toward a New Political
Humanism, 2004>
Accordingly, secular humanists should speak out and act when they believe that their cherished
values and beliefs are at stake; they should seek to persuade their fellow citizens about the
principles that they consider important to endorse and defend. I submit that at the present
moment in American society, our cherished values and beliefs are indeed at stake. They are under
threat. This being the case, then declining to speak out would be an affront to our deepest
convictions. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (19061945) eloquently stated that he should
have protested earlier in the 1930s when the azis first began to implement their repressive
policies. Many Americans are today deeply disturbed about political developments. They are
frightened by what they view on the domestic front as a drastic threat to our cherished
democratic civil liberties, and internationally to the entire framework of international law and
order so painstakingly developed over past decades.They are concerned about the unilateral
preemptive war undertaken by the United States in Iraq, its abrogation of the test ban and Kyoto
treaties, its bypassing of the United Nations, and its refusal to endorse the International Court of
Justice. In the face of such dangers, how can we hold silent? Gelling our theories straight is
important, but it is praxis, the practical consequences of our actions, that is the best test o four
efficacy and influence. Purely theoretical humanism is a mere abstract concept, without content,
of no moment for the real life of humans as lived; thus, the relationship of humanism to praxis is
central. (I have called this in my writings "eupraxsophy,") If "God is dead," as Nietzsche
proclaimed at the beginning of the twentieth century, then at the dawn of the twenty-first century
we must affirm that "hum ansare alive." The power of the humanist message is that life itself is
intrinsically worthwhile, that we aspire to achieve the best of which we are capable, induding the
expression of our highest talents and creative excellences, that we cultivate the common moral
decencies, that our goal is exuberant happiness. To achieve all this we need to develop a just
social order for our own society, regionally and on the planetary scale. We humans are
responsible for our own destiny: "No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." The key
message of humanism is not that humanists are nonbelievers in theistic religion-atheists,
agnostics, or skeptics-but that we are believers, for we believe deeply in the potentialities of
human beings to achieve the good life. Indeed, we wish to apply the virtues and principles of
humanist ethics to enhance the human condition. If we indict the theological/messianic daims of
the ancient religions for providing false illusions of salvation, then we also need to state that we
are concerned with improving the conditions of human life, with improving the cultural, social,
economic, and political institutions in which human beings find themselves at various times in
history. The underlying premise here is our emphasis on humanist ethics: how we create a better
life for ourselves and our fellow human beings in the real world, here and now, and in the fore-
seeable future.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Globalization
An entity of global dimensions will occur – we need to ensure that it’s humanist
<Harvey Sarles, Prof. of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature @ Univ. of Minnesota,
Toward a New Political Humanism, 2004>
This urging. which each of us takes on within senses of conscience and responsibility, does not
simply disappear upon reaching maturity. I take this to be a major psychological etching toward
transcendence, making it at the least attractive to search for meaning within the larger sense of
political community/tradition that have collected and held vast numbers of followers." Those
transcendent or utopic notions of futurity most familiar to humanism offer a resolution within the
paradox of life and death, on the sideofdeathbeingtheultimate: thesoul'sreturntoheaven
ofChristianity and Islam, the deliverance of nirvana for the South Asians. The Jews and
Confucians find their utopias within life: The best is yet to be, and on the Wayto true knowledge,
a promise is made that exi tence/experience holds out the promise of... improvement. a good
lifegetting better. . The promise of humanism has itself been utopic, The noun of progress has
been the principal utopic fuel driving the engine of modernism and the reasoned understanding
of nature and human nature. And, it should be noted, an increasing loss of faith in the idea of
progress is presently weakening the gathering force of humanism on its home ground-a loss
requiring ongoing critique and study to rethink the grounds of humanism in all contexts,
especially as we are experiencing an attempt to reground reason and authority within narrativity
rather than nature in the name of postmodernisrn and fundamentalism" What I propose,
therefore, is less any particular solutions that might establish and perpetuate a global humanism
than modes of being, studying. and living with a major focus on our experiencing, rather than
modes than have been chosen historically to bolster our human senses of knowing and control.
Some thinking about transcendent/utopic models toward forming, establishing and maintaining a
global humanism: The openings of this global moment include the idea that the various
competing uaditions are actively receding in their demands upon their people(s),tendingto
placemany of the world's persons in a cosmopolitan setting and sensibility." This is to say that
establishing a global notion such as humanism has a fairer possibility of realization than in any
other era so far. Something of global dimension will happen in the near future. It is timely to
have this discussion at this moment in what is soon to be global history.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Consensus Good
The goal of debate is consensus
<Barry F. Seidman humanist/freethought community leader and events coordinator for the
Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, and Neil J. Murphy, 04>
Any foray of humanists into real politics must embrace the democratic processes for arriving at a
closure on hotly debated issues. These procedures facilitate political decision making in ways
that must, of necessity, reconstruct the humanist belief in diversity of opinion, including
differences among irs members into a vehicle capable of presenting a unifying vision that can
galvanize action. All opinions are entertained in discussions motivated by the need to arrive at a
conclusion in favor of one opinion or a conflation of numerous opinions as a means of moving
toward an acceptable focus for all discussants. Such a consensus should always be the ultimate
goal of any political debate embarked on to determine a particular policy or course of action
within a specific time frame. Conflicting views are useful for processing ideas and converting
them into definite principles for administering policies. Indecision and its corollaries of inaction
and instability are political time bombs that are assembled, planted, and detonated when debates
become ends in themselves.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Representations Matter
Discourse and the way society and policy is framed has substantial impact on
implementation and policy decision – empirically proven by images of Mogadishu
preventing deployment of ground forces to Kosovo. Rhetorical analysis has substantial
impact on determination of politics
Cori Dauber, Assc. Prof. of Communication Studies @ Univ. of North Carolina, 2001, The
Shots Seen 'Round the World: The Impact of the Images of Mogadishu on American Military
Operations, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, p. 653-687
The impact the Mogadishu images have had on American foreign policy is clear. But their
impact is not inescapable or inevitable. It is based on the incorrect assumption that people can
only read images unidirectionally. No matter how similar, no matter how powerfully one text
evokes another, every image is unique. Each comes from a different historical situation, is placed
within a different story, and offers an ambiguous text that can be exploited by astute
commentators. Images matter profoundly, but so do their contexts and the words that accompany
them. The implications of this shift in interpretation are potentially profound. Mogadishu, or the
mention of a potential parallel with Mogadishu, need not be a straightjacket or a deterrent to the
use of American power. Rhetoric, whether discursive or visual, has real power in the way events
play out. What this article makes clear is that rhetoric (and therefore rhetorical analysis) also has
power in the way policy is shaped and defined. In a recent book on the conflict in Kosovo, the
authors note that when the president spoke to the nation on the night the air war began, he
immediately ruled out the use of ground forces. This was done, they argue, due to fears that
leaving open the possibility of ground force participation would sacrifice domestic public and
congressional (and allied) support for the air war. But "publicly ruling out their use only helped
to reduce Milosevic's uncertainty regarding the likely scope of NATO's military actions," 109 and
possibly to lengthen the air war as a result. Yet, they report, National Security Advisor Sandy
Berger, "who authored the critical passage in the president's speech, maintains that 'we would not
have won the war without this sentence.'" 110 It would be difficult to find more direct evidence for
the profound impact and influence public rhetoric and debate have--and are understood to have--
on policy, policymaking, and policymakers at the highest level. That means that rhetorical
analysis can have a role to play and a voice at the table before policies are determined. Academic
rhetoricians, through their choice of projects and the formats in which they publish, can stake a
claim to having an important voice at the table--and they should do so.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Representations Matter
Representations determine us as subjects and their consideration shapes policy outcomes –
one cannot strictly separate discursive and nondiscursive practices
Roxanne Lynn Doty, Assc. Prof. of Political Science @ Arizona State Univ., 1996, Imperial
Encounters, Univ. of Minnesota Press, p. 4-5
The question of representation has historically been excluded from the academic study of
international relations. This exclusion has, to an important degree, shaped the horizons of the
discipline. This has been especially significant when it comes to Norht-South relations because
in an important sense this whole subfield revolves around the differences between these two
entities. Sometimes these differences are represented in primarily economic terms (e.g., levels of
development), and sometimes in terms of military power differentials. Representations of
economic and military power differences, however, take place within political and social
circumstances in which other kinds of differences are explicitly or implicitly presumed. Because
the question of representation has been excluded, the historical construction and consequences of
these differences have not bee considered legitimate realms of inquiry. This exclusion has in
many instances resulted in the complicity of international relations scholarship with particular
constructions of the South and of the “reality” of the South’s place in international relations. This
study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global
political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are
inextricably bound up with discursive practices that put into circulation representations that are
taken as “truth.” The goal of analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have
been obscured, but rather to examine how certain representations underlie the production of
knowledge and identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible.
As Said (1979:21) notes, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-
presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world,
but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. So,
for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly “real,” though the march of
troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially
irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when “American” is
attached to the troops and “Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created What the
physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it
as an “invasion.” A “show of force,” a “training exercise,” a “rescue,” and so on. What is “really”
going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To
attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the
former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of dichotomies—thought/reality,
appearance/essence, mind/matter, word/world, subjective/objective—that a critical genealogy
calls into questions. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and
performative character of discourse.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Postmodern K
Their critique uses the methods it disavows – disruption of political liberalism causes social
fragmentation and violence. Valid mechanisms exist within liberalism for the validation of
truth claims
Richard Wolin, Distinguished Prof. of History and Comparative Literature @ Graduate Center of
the City University of New York, 2004, The Seduction of Unreason, Princeton UP, p.
When communism collapsed in 1989, Central European politicians and intellectuals scrambled to obtain
copies of the U.S Constitution. They viewed the American founding—the Constitutional Convention, the
Bill of rights, the principle of judicial review—as an indispensable precedent on the road to political
freedom. That same year France celebrated the bicentennial of the Great Revolution. But the only
achievement deemed worthy of commemoration was the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of
August 20, 1789. Thus after a fitful two-hundred year struggle to determine the revolution’s ultimate
scope and meaning, French political theorists and public opinion leaders decided to highlight the phase
that approximated the ideals of political liberalism—that is, the aspect that bore the greatest affinities with
the principles of the American Revolution. The collapse of communism coincided with unprecedented
“Waves of democratization” in Central and South America as well as South Africa. What “lesson” might
be construed from this unexpected political blessing? As the Italian democratic socialist Norberto Bobbio
observed, not Marxism, but “political liberalism”—as a figure for the precepts of rule of law,
human rights, and popular sovereignty—has become the unsurpassable political horizon of our
time. That the American founding ushered in a set of fundamental and enduring political
principles is a truth that is easily lost sight of. In the background of these debates stands the
postmodernist disavowal of Enlightenment reason. Although the contours and content of these
disavowals vary, there is no mistaking their essence of crux: reason, instead of being a sine qua
non of political freedom, has led to our progressive enslavement. To criticize reason is one thing.
In truth, standards of rationality—scientific, political, and legal—could never “progress” (e.g., in
the direction of greater inclusiveness) were it not for the constant criticisms to which they are
exposed, on the part of experts as well as the reasoning public. Reasonable claims are ones that
are subject to institutionalized procedures of refutation and verification. When two centuries ago
the philosophes undertook an all-out assault against theological dogmatism and illegitimate
political privilege, they laid the foundations for our modern conceptions of public reason and
political fairness. In more ways than we realize or might conceivably enumerate, we are their
direct heirs and beneficiaries. But the counterrevolutionaries and postmodernists are uninterested
in mere criticisms of reason. As we have seen, both currents set their sights much higher. Instead,
they seek to banish or dismantle the enterprise of reason in its entirety. Whereas philosophes
such as Kant associated reason with the attributes of maturity and autonomy, their antagonists
consider it responsible for all manner of social injustice and catastrophe. Postmodernist
misology, or contempt for reason, is evidenced by Lyotard’s equation of “consensus” with
“terror.” Foucault’s portrayal of the semiotic coercion exercised by “discursive regimes”
(epistemic “prison houses,” as it were), and Derrida’s fashionable critique of “logocentrism.”
(Significantly, this term was originally coined in the 1920s by the German reactionary
philosopher Ludwig Klages. Here, too, the affinities between postmodernism and the
counterrevolutionary ideology speak volumes.) In all of the aforementioned cases, the operative
assumption is that there exist cogent parallels between the philosophical longing for “totality”
and political totalitarianism. Ironically, the attempt to account for totalitarianism via
philosophical deduction harks back to the methods and procedures of “first philosophy”—an a
priori and speculative approach to history and politics that postmodernists purportedly sought to
move beyond. The European counterrevolutionaries knew what they wanted as a replacement for
liberal democracy: the “contrary of revolution,” the restoration of the old regime. Their German
heirs—Nietzsche, Spengler, Schmitt, and Heidegger—disillusioned denizens of modern society,
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
knew that one could no longer turn back the clock. Instead, they decided to seize the bull by the
horns. They embraced industrial society but only under the proviso that it be governed by a
totalitarian dictatorship. Dictatorship was the most efficacious means with which to vanquish
the debilities of political liberalism and reestablish the sublimity of “Great Politics” (Nietzsche).
The postmodernists, on the other hand, are inconsistent and confused. They bask in the freedoms
of political liberalism—to whose institutions they are indebted for their brilliant academic
careers—while biting the hand that feeds them. As philosophers of “difference,” they present
themselves as advocates of the politically marginalized. Yet the antiliberal rhetorical thrust of
their arguments risks undermining the very norms of tolerance that, historically, have provided
such groups with the greatest measure of political and legal protection. Were the claims of
“difference” to become the “norm,” as postmodernists recommend, our inherited notions of
selfhood and community would likely all but collapse. What kind of world would it be in which
all forms of identity, both individual and collective, were anathematized to such an extent? In
this and other respects the radical claims of difference risk becoming a recipe for
epistemological, ethical, and political incoherence. As Michael Walzer observes succinctly, when
all is said and done, “isn’t the postmodern project…likely to produce increasingly shallow
individuals and a radically diminished cultural life?” Identities shorn of substantive ethical and
cultural attachments would conceivably set a new standard of immateriality. It is unlikely that
fragmented selves and Bataille-inspired ecstatic communities could mobilize the requisite social
cohesion to resist political evil. Here, too, the hazards and dangers of supplanting the
autonomous, moral self with an “aesthetic” self are readily apparent. In the standard
postmodernist demonology, the Enlightenment bears direct historical responsibility for the Gulag
and Auschwitz. In the eyes of these convinced miologists, modern totalitarianism is merely an
upshot of the universalizing impetus of Enlightenment reason. As Foucault proclaimed, “Raison,
c’est la torture.” According to the politics of “difference,” reason is little more than the
ideological window dressing for Eurocentrism and its attendant horrors. By making what is
different the same or identical, reason, so the argument goes, is implicitly totalitarian.
Conservatives hold postmodernists responsible for the latter-day “decline of the West,” accusing
them of promoting relativism by undermining the traditional concepts of reason and truth. But
they seriously overestimate postmodernism’s impact and influence, which has—happily—largely
been confined to the isolated and bloodless corridors of academe. Postmodernism’s debilities lie
elsewhere. In an era in which the values of tolerance have been forcefully challenged by the twin
demons of integral nationalism and religious fundamentalism, postmodernism’s neo-Nietzschean
embrace of political agon remains at odds with democracy’s normative core: the ever-delicate
balancing act between private and public autonomy, basic democratic liberties and popular
sovereignty. Postmodernists claim they seek to remedy the manifest failings of really existing
democracy. Yet, given their metatheoretical aversion to considerations of equity and fairness,
accepting such de facto assurances at face value seems unwise. Paradoxically, their celebration of
heterogeneity and radical difference risks abetting the neotribalist ethos that threatens to turn
the post-communist world order into a congeries of warring, fratricidal ethnicities. Differences
should be respected. But there are also occasions when they need to be bridged. The only
reasonable solution to this problem is to ensure that differences are bounded and subsumed by
universalistic principles of equal liberty. Ironically, then, the liberal doctrine of “justice as
fairness” (Rawls) provides the optimal ethical framework by virtue of which cultural differences
might be allowed to prosper and flourish. If consensus equals coercion and norms are inherently
oppressive, it would seem that dreams of political solidarity and common humanity are from the
outset nothing more than a lost cause.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Heidegger
Existence within the current technological nihilism is inevitable – attempts to challenge this
fact constitute a refusal to accept our fate, causing nihilism
Thomas Sheehan, Prof. of Philosophy @ Loyola Univ. in Chicago, 2002, Heidegger and
Practical Philosophy, Eds. Raffoul and Pettigrew, p. 286-7
Thus we would be doing “being” no favors if we just let entities “be” in the sense of leaving
them pristine and untouched, perhaps even unknown. The proper way to let entities be is to let
them be present, that is, to let them be endlessly engageable. And we do that be endlessly
engaging them, both scientifically and practically, and, yes, by letting them be submitted to the
domination of the worker in the inevitable humanization of nature and naturalization of the
human. If one follows Heidegger’s thinking consistently (not to mention the facts), there is no
escape from this humanization/naturalization, no nostalgia for a time “before” humanity
allegedly crossed the line into “too much,” and no hope for a new age when the balance might
shift back in favor of nature. Or better, if there is such nostalgia and hope, it has nothing to do
with Heidegger’s philosophy. At its worst, it is a matter of bad faith, an index of inauthenticity
and flight, a refusal to accept the historical fate of Greek-Western existence that is captured in
Paramenides’ word. In Heidegger’s view, the current age of technology follows from the fact that
the being of entities has always been experienced as Anwesen, their “presence-unto” human
being, all the way from archaic Greek through classical Greek, right down to Junger’s notion of
production. Hence, planetary technology is not only inevitable but also unsurpassable-for it is
empowered by the ontological nihil (the open), which cannot be overcome at all.

Withdraw of an open space for Being is a prerequisite for its eventual emergence, therefore
technology is a needed obstacle to Being that must be maintained. There is no necessary
connection between nihilism, humanism and technology
Thomas Sheehan, Prof. of Philosophy @ Loyola Univ. in Chicago, 2002, Heidegger and
Practical Philosophy, Eds. Raffoul and Pettigrew, p. 295
1. The hiddenness intrinsic to the opening of the open is what allows for the endless accessibility
of entities. Without the withdrawal intrinsic to Ereignis, entities would not be disclosed, and
human beings would not be human. But with this withdrawal, entities are endlessly available to
human engagement and manipulation. The technological domination of the globe is the gift of
the finite open. Far from having a philosophically negative valence, die Technik is the positive
outcome of Ereignis. 2. In Heidegger’s thought, “essential nihilism” in and of itself has nothing
to do with a given ratio between nature and technology. Self-preservation is the intrinsic
intelligibility of entities, not their exhibition of “natural.” Essential nihilism is a matter of the
hiddenness intrinsic to the open, and historical-cultural nihilism is a matter of overlooking that
hiddenness. But neither essential nihilism nor historical-cultural nihilism has any necessary
relation to the domination of nature by technology, nor does limiting the scope of technology and
restoring the powers of nature have any necessary relation to overcoming the oblivion of the
open. One can be a historical-cultural nihilist in rich and poor ancient Greece as much as in
today’s poor and rich North America—Antiphon is proof enough of that. 3. Historical-cultural
nihilism is not proportionate to the degree of human control over entities; it is not azero-sum
game in which the advances of humanization entail oblivion of the open. One can promote and
affirm a world that is, in principle, completely knowable and controllable by human beings. And
still remain resolutely true to the open. And one can embrace mystical worldviews (as the dying
Aquinas allegedly did) which, to the degree that they are oblivious of the open, are formally no
different from the materialist worldviews of Antiphon of Stalin.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Heidegger
Heidegger inevitably fails to solve nihilism due to lack of guidance after the rejection of
calculative thought. Misguided attempts to solve the K result in bad politics, collapsing into
Nazism
Thomas Sheehan, Prof. of Philosophy @ Loyola Univ. in Chicago, 2002, Heidegger and
Practical Philosophy, Eds. Raffoul and Pettigrew, p. 297
To return to Heidegger’s demand that he be read as a homo philosophicus rather than as a homo
politicus: the present reflections suggest that what Heidegger has to say about the essence of
nihilism—important though it might be—cannot realistically serve as a philosophical platform
for grounding political options. One would no more want to take Heidegger’s reflections on the
essence of nihilism as the basis for political decisions than one would want to take the
apocalyptic discourses attributed to Jesus of Nazareth as a blueprint for running a revolution.
You may not like technology and its products, the possibilities it opens up at the expense of the
ones it closes off. You may not like the current constellation of the management of technology or
the distribution of its effects. But Heidegger’s philosophy—for whatever light it may shed on the
question of essential nihilism—will not help one bit with changing the real powers that drive
today. Taken strictly, Heidegger’s discourse does not even encourage you to work to change the
direction of history. To motivate and to enact such a change require other strategies and other
tactics, and they do not come from Heidegger. This chapter has sought to be one thing only: a
philosophical propaideutic to understanding Heidegger’s political “error” of 1933—and the
continuing possibility of such errors today. If we bracket for now the other and more interesting
reasons that Heidegger had for joining the National Socialist German Workers Party, if we focus
only on the philosophical justifications that he gave ex eventu for his choice, it seems that he
joined the Nazis because he thought that they could help overcome nihilism. If we remain at the
superstructural level of philosophical discourse, we conclude that his error was not that he picked
the wrong party for overcoming nihilism but that he thought nihilism, could be overcome at all.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Spanos
Spanos takes the hypocritical stance of attacking those with relatively the same beliefs as
himself. His condemning of liberals actually hurts his own projects.
J. Russell Perkin, Department of English, Saint Mary's University Halifax, N.S., Canada, 1993,
“Theorizing the Culture Wars,” Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, PM
My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and
to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity
that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I will note in
conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual
seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about what goes
on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. Spanos
laments the "unwarranted neglect" (202) of the work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition
and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so
consistently cited. Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents
comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition
courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann's argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up
to date. For the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the
kind of oppositional practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more
diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely
that difference that neoconservatives want to erase.

Spanos uses a very abstruse dialect in his writing that is extremely hard to interpret.
Arguments can be misunderstood and aren’t reliable.
J. Russell Perkin, Department of English, Saint Mary's University Halifax, N.S., Canada, 1993,
“Theorizing the Culture Wars,” Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, PM
With The End of Education we enter a rather different world. Graff and Gates both write in an
elegant straightforward English, largely free of technical theoretical language; much of the
material in each book has its origin in material prepared originally for oral delivery or for
publication in literary reviews rather than academic journals. It is also clear that the publishers
are hoping that the books will appeal to an audience beyond the academy. Spanos, on the other
hand, writes in a dense discourse owing much to Heidegger and Foucault, and in a tone of
unqualified assertion, without any of the engaging personal voice of Graff or Gates. The words
"panoptic" and "hegemony," together or separately, occur with numbing insistency. To make
matters worse, the book is printed with small margins in a small typeface, and with forty-seven
pages of long footnotes. One of my colleagues, looking at the review copy lying on my desk,
commented that this seems like the kind of book that gives you a headache to read. It is likely to
be read only by committed postmodern theorists, which is unfortunate, because The End of
Education is an important book, and one which in many ways makes a challenging and necessary
critique not only of neoconservative humanism but of the structure and discourses of the
university which, Spanos asserts, support and are reinforced by such humanism.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Spanos
Spanos’s reliance on Heidegger means that his politics are implicated in Nazism.
J. Russell Perkin, Department of English, Saint Mary's University Halifax, N.S., Canada, 1993,
“Theorizing the Culture Wars,” Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, PM
Spanos's extensive reliance on Heidegger raises a political question that he doesn't adequately
face. The humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; Babbitt,
perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied "a totalitarian ideology" (84).
But the book is defensive and evasive on the topic of Heidegger's political commitments. Spanos
seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as enemies of
posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an article he
has published elsewhere. But the problem remains: Heidegger's ontological critique, when
translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse Nazi ideology. If Heidegger is to be
praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the
question of his politics should be faced directly in this book.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Capitalism Bad
Fusion energy breaks the paradigm of scarcity that underlies capitalism
<JJ Charlesworth, Reviews Editor for Art Reviw, FUSION NOW! Art and the Politics of
Energy,www.manifestoclub.com/fusionnowessay, 12/20/2007>
But the green agenda refuses to think of big solutions to problems standing in the way of human
progress. Green repugnance to rolling out further conventional (carbon-neutral) fission nuclear
capacity, for example, exposes a pessimistic prejudice towards expansive solutions. Green
antagonism to new nuclear power is not so much an attempt to dismiss the particular
shortcomings of any one technology, but is more profoundly a moral rejection of expansive
solutions to the challenges facing human society, based on the notion that any form of human
expansion is by definition a noxious incursion on the purity of an otherwise pristine planet. It
reflects a culture in which we are uncomfortable with using energy – uncomfortable with our
own energy use and uncomfortable with any idea of abundance. More fundamentally, it is an
anxiety regarding our relationship to our own energies, a view of human productive activity as a
negative force for harm and destruction. James Heartfield argues that, paradoxically, green
antipathy to human expansion chimes with a wider political fear about abundance within
contemporary capitalism itself. Scarcity, Heartfield suggests, has always formed the basis of
social power. Yet capitalism has unwittingly replaced scarcity with abundance, undermining its
power over social relations, and the green message of restraint and reduction offers capitalism a
new moral justification for restraint and austerity.

Capitalism exploits ideas of scarcity embedded in current environmentalism

James Heartfield, writes for The Times Higher Education Supplement, Spiked Online, and
Blueprint. Heartfield has had articles published in the Telegraph, The Times, the Architects'
Journal, Art Review, Review of Radical Political Economy, and Cultural Trends, 12/20/2007,
www.manifestoclub.com/files/Fusion%20Now!%20low.pdf
The old capitalist class rested on material scarcity, doling out the limited supplies to reward good
behaviour. But at least they invested some of their surplus into new means of production. Today
a new green capitalist class disdains to make its money out of industry. They prefer to see output
restricted. They deal in imaginary goods like carbon futures and ‘negawatts’. The carbon-offset
business is worth $34 billion and expected to double in size by 2010 – even though its products
are about as useful for the environment as cryogenic suspension is for longevity.3 In fact the
green capitalists have made restraint itself into a commodity. Green capitalism rests on the
economic theory of ‘externalities’; the hidden costs of pollution that are not represented in
ordinary market prices. In the name of meeting the costs of ‘externalities’, green capitalists
demand tribute from the productive economy. ‘Externalities’ are indeed external to the ordinary
operation of the market, being the basis of claims on future revenue arising out of government
regulation. Zac Goldsmith buried the millions that his father robbed from pension funds in an
organic farm. Peak-oil propagandist Jeremy Leggett sells people solar panels – the government
footing half the bill. Al Gore jets round the planet, while Paramount pictures offset his carbon
footprint making payments to a company that Al Gore owns, Generation Investment
Management. Far from exercising any personal restraint, these individuals are living high on the
hog. Their green lifestyles represent a greater spread of high value consumer goods. Their wealth
comes from artifi cially reinventing scarcity in an age of industrially-driven superabundance.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Capitalism Bad
Capitalism cannot exist without scarcity. The plan will cause capitalism to not exist.
James Heartfield, writes for The Times Higher Education Supplement, Spiked Online, and
Blueprint. Heartfield has had articles published in the Telegraph, The Times, the Architects'
Journal, Art Review, Review of Radical Political Economy, and Cultural Trends, 12/20/2007
www.manifestoclub.com/files/Fusion%20Now!%20low.pdf
Capitalism was from the outset a system of rationing. It rations scarce goods through the market
mechanism. It disperses the weekly ration to families as wages. It recovers its costs by limiting
access to goods. It reduces us to wage slaves by controlling access to the means of subsistence.
Capitalism cannot exist without scarcity. Scarcity is capitalism’s means of social control.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Nuclearism K
Our strategically uses traditionally violent technologies for peaceful ends
Prof. Mike Dunne, Director of the UK Central Laser Facility (Science and Technology Facilities
Council), visiting Professor of Physics, Imperial College London 12/20/2007,
www.manifestoclub.com/files/Fusion%20Now!%20low.pdf
Our challenge is a profound example of how swords can indeed be turned into ploughshares,
using the huge investment by the nuclear weapons industry to open up a solution to one of the
world’s most compelling problems – abundant clean energy. The approach requires a high level
of international cooperation over the next decade. The scientific community needs to build from
the existing defence programmes to a future civilian programme in which the broadest possible
assortment of international talent is assembled with common purpose.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Renewables Good
Pursuit of fusion is not mutually exclusive with renewables; they are still necessary to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the short term
Prof. Mike Dunne, Director of the UK Central Laser Facility (Science and Technology Facilities
Council), visiting Professor of Physics, Imperial College London 12/20/2007,
www.manifestoclub.com/files/Fusion%20Now!%20low.pdf
As scientists in this field we are only too aware that the pursuit of fusion energy has suffered
from some grossly optimistic claims in the early days. These turned out to underestimate the
scale of the challenge by a factor of at least a thousand. Finally, many years on, we are at the
point where the scientific demonstration of net energy production is now just around the corner
(likely to be less than five years away). This fact has captured the imagination of the fusion
community and instigated a level of international cooperation and integration that is wonderful to
see. Similarly, the attitude of students now entering this field is fascinating to watch – they quite
clearly ‘own’ this challenge and have the enthusiasm and commitment to drive it to completion.
Now, we must be aware that fusion is not a short term fix, nor will it address the immediate
requirement to manage greenhouse gas emissions. It is a long-term, sustainable solution that will
take a concentrated research and development effort across a range of options to realise its
potential. So, we must continue to develop renewable energy, reduce wastage and improve our
energy efficiency. But alongside this we must surely strive for the long-term. It is widely
accepted that renewable energy will only be able to meet a fraction of the world’s future energy
demand. Given the likelihood that this demand will not drop substantially, we need to provide
clean, abundant energy solutions that will last us for centuries.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Art and Politics
Art closely related to politics: current art is pushing for fusion.
JJ Charlesworth, writes regularly on contemporary art for magazines such as Art Monthly, Art Review
and Time Out London, FUSION NOW Art and the Politics of Energy, Manifesto Club, 12/20/2007,
http://www.manifestoclub.com/fusionnowessay
If fusion power can be seen as both scientific fact and a political and cultural metaphor for
abundance, art might also connect with this, even if it need not declare this explicitly. The artists in
FUSION NOW move in and out of the various points where energy touches on questions of science, history,
industry, aesthetics and subjectivity.Elsewhere, the legacies and potentials of Utopian Modernism are addressed:
Sam Basu’s sculpture delves into a paradoxical future-history where work and industry are returned to a sort of neo-
primitive collective ritual and Alasdair Duncan’s banner makes a graphic celebration of the combination of human
science and aspiration. Energy’s contemporary political dimensions – the way wealth, work and social division
operate – are addressed in Liam Gillick’s computer animation, which takes as its subject early experiments in the
democratization of industrial work in the 1970s. And in directly polemical vein, the artist’s group Freee makes a
declaration about the terms of a real ‘ecological politics’, while WITH and Laura Oldfield Ford present satirical and
poetic responses to how contemporary culture reproduces the orthodoxies and contradictions of green
pessimism.Art is inherently political regardless of whether it addresses any one particular event or
situation. Eventually, contemporary art often takes a position on the generally important questions
about human experience and society; the individual and social forms of desire, the potential of
human subjectivity, and how we choose to act in our present. If FUSION NOW asks a political question
then, it is whether art and artists cannot fail to take sides in a politics that is only now becoming clear: a politics
where lines are drawn between those who want austerity against those who want plenty, between
those who counsel restraint and those who would explore potentials; between those who wish for
less, and those who want more; More light, more power, more people. And more art.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion

***Neg***

Kritik Link
Nuclear fusion concentrates economic and military power in the West at the expense of
other people
Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s Environment & Health News, Sept. 2005, “Fusion illusion,”
The New Internationalist, Issue 382, http://www.newint.org/features/2005/09/01/fusion/
It is interesting to speculate why fusion might seem so attractive. For one thing its great
complexity and expense mean that only wealthy countries could afford it. Each machine would
create a highly centralized source of enormous power (electrical and political), controlled by a
few people. The technical teams needed to develop fusion might be called upon, if needed, to
lend a hand to military projects, perhaps extending to laser weapons deployed in space. In other
words, unlike photovoltaic electricity and wind power that are inherently small-scale and
difficult to bring under centralized control, nuclear fusion lends itself to tight control by powerful
élites, both corporate and governmental. To the people who fancy that they own and operate
Western civilization, such factors perhaps tip the balance in fusion’s favour.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Fusion Bad
Nuclear fusion technology facilitates nuclear proliferation
Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s Environment & Health News, Sept. 2005, “Fusion illusion,”
The New Internationalist, Issue 382, http://www.newint.org/features/2005/09/01/fusion/
As a final caveat about fusion, Lidsky pointed out that: ‘One of the best ways to produce material
for atomic weapons would be to put common uranium or thorium in the blanket of a D-T
[deuterium-tritium fusion] reactor, where the fusion neutrons would soon transform it to
weapons-grade material. And tritium, an unavoidable product of the reactor, is used in some
hydrogen bombs. In the early years, research on D-T fusion was classified precisely because it
would provide a ready source of material for weapons. Such a reactor would only abet the
proliferation of nuclear weapons and could hardly be considered a wise power source to export
to unstable governments.’ Despite these inherent problems, governments are relentlessly
pursuing this expensive and unproven technology.

Nuclear fusion causes lots of small accidents – causes economic collapse

Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s Environment & Health News, Sept. 2005, “Fusion illusion,”
The New Internationalist, Issue 382, http://www.newint.org/features/2005/09/01/fusion/
However, he pointed out: ‘Current analyses show that the probability of a minor mishap is
relatively high in both fission and fusion plants. But the probability of small accidents is
expected to be higher in fusion reactors. There are two reasons for this. First, fusion reactors will
be much more complex devices than fission reactors. In addition to heat-transfer and control
systems, they will utilize magnetic fields, high power heating systems, complex vacuum systems,
and other mechanisms that have no counterpart in fission reactors. Furthermore, they will be
subject to higher stresses than fission machines because of the greater neutron damage and
higher temperature gradients. Minor failures seem certain to occur more frequently,’ he warned.
Lidsky then pointed out that there would be too much radioactivity inside a fusion reactor to
allow maintenance workers inside the machine. When things break, repairs will not be possible
by normal procedures. This alone may make fusion plants unattractive to electric utilities, he
pointed out. Lidsky said no-one was hurt at Three Mile Island, yet the accident was a financial
disaster for the owner of the plant and ultimately for the nuclear power industry. An accident at a
fusion plant could have similar consequences, he said.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Fusion Bad
Nuclear fusion leads to development of nuclear weapons
<Tadahiro Katsuta, Researcher at the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, Possibilities of
Applying Nuclear Fusion Technologies to the Development of Nuclear Weapons in Japan,
www.inesap.org, no date given>
There is little doubt that the studies mentioned above investigate fusion for commercial uses, but
generally it is very difficult to distinguish between R&D studies for peaceful and those for
military uses. Therefore, these technologies need to be safeguarded well and the facilities need to
be supervised by a third party if we are to apply the “precautionary principle” to nuclear research
as is already state-of-the-art in the field of environmental studies. Although the energy released
by fast ignition systems is much smaller than needed for a nuclear bomb, the technology enables
laboratory-scale and reproducible experiments. Furthermore, because we talk about a large-scale
simulation study and with linear characteristics (i.e. the experiment keeps proportion even when
it is scaled up), it has some similarities with subcritical nuclear tests. The same applies to tritium
production and handling technology. Even though scientists not might have dual-use thoughts,
we need to keep an eye on R&D in this field. Energy policy is one example of the ambivalent
policy of the Japanese government. According to the long-term energy outlook released by the
Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, demand for electrical electricity will saturate in the
2020s. Furthermore, with the partial liberalization of the electrical power market soon to be
continuing, it is economically unwise to build additional nuclear plants, even when it comes to
light water reactors. In addition, fuel cell and renewable technologies have high potential in
Japan and citizens want these power types. In this situation, the Government cannot convince us
that there is need to promote nuclear fusion for power production. Those scientists and engineers
who are not concerned with the dualuse potential of a technology can easily be used as fig leaves
by politicians with dual-use intentions.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Fusion Fails
Fusion is not a realistic option at this time
<MSNBC.com, $13 million Nuclear Fission site gets Green light, MSNBC New Service, June
28, 2008>
Some scientists have warned that Cadarache could be prone to earth tremors, a view discounted
by France's government. And opponents note that the project, which will take 10 years to build,
is only experimental and that it would be at least 50 years before a commercially viable reactor is
built. Greenpeace, for one, stated that “at a time when it is universally recognized that we must
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources
and billions of euros on this project.” Some also contend that fusion fuel is neither clean nor
safe, although they acknowledge it would be a safer energy source than nuclear fission. The
project also faces challenges like trying to build a reactor that can sustain temperatures of about
180 million degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to generate power. “I give it a 50:50 chance of
success but the engineering is very difficult,” said Ian Fells of Britain’s Royal Academy of
Engineering. “If we can really make this work there will be enough electricity to last the world
for the next 1,000 to 2,000 years.”

Commercial Fusion will not work-Britain empirically proves

<New York Times, British Fusion Effort Fails, TheNewYorkTimes.com, May 9, 1989>
Britain's top atomic energy laboratory said today it had failed to generate large amounts of
energy by nuclear fusion at room temperature, despite the cooperation of a chemist who played a
major role in a claim last month that such fusion had been achieved. The announcement
dampened hopes of finding a cheap and limitless source of energy. A spokesman at the Atomic
Energy Authority laboratories at Harwell, near Oxford, said scientists there had become
convinced that ''cold fusion'' experiments would not produce energy on a large scale. ''We knew
within a few days that large-scale effects were not going to be seen and we transferred our
attention to looking for small-scale effects,'' said Nick Hance, a spokesman for the laboratories.
The research center said it has received cooperation in the experiments from Martin
Fleischmann, a British electrochemist who, with a colleague at the University of Utah,
announced last month that cold fusion had been achieved. Mr. Hance said scientists at Harwell
had not achieved such results but would continue their experiments until at least the end of May.
''We are doing a whole range of different experiments, looking for neutrons, nuclear effects and
heat,'' he said. The Harwell team had detected some neutrons but were checking to see whether
these came from fusion or background radioactivity.
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
Heidegger – Humanism Link
Humanism assumes a foundational essence of humanity, which precludes ontological
inquiry
Jean-Luc Nancy, teaches philosophy @ l’Université Marc Bloch de Strasbourg, 2002, Heidegger
and Practical Philosophy, Eds. Raffoul and Pettigrew, p. 69
Sense’s conduct—or the conduct of sense—makes Being as Being acted by and as Dasein.
Dasein is Being insofar as it is at stake as that being which man is. The conduct of sense is thus
indissociable from a “liberation of man for the dignity of his humanitas” (BW, 225). Dignity
(Wurde) is that which is to be found beyond any assignable value, that which measures up to an
action that is not regulated by any given. Humanitas needs to be measured against this
measurelessness of action, or rather, against action itself as absolute measure. Humanism is
inadequate, because it rests on an interpretation of beings that is already given (BW, 225f), in
other words, on an interpretation that has already fixed sense (e.g., according to a definition that
is Christian, or Marxist, etc.—cf. BW, 225). By fixing sense—the signification of sense—
humanism conceals or loses sight of the import of Kant’s fourth question, What is [hu]man?, as a
question that is concerned not with a determinable essence of man but with what is more
originally in man than man, namely, Dasein as finitude (KPM, 38041).
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1NC Framework
A. Interpretation – they can only defend the implementation of a topical plan and can’t
claim advantages off of their 1AC discourse

B. Violation – they claim advantages off their discourse

C. Standards
1. Ground – The aff will always win that the principles of their advocacy are good in the
abstract – we can only debate the merits of their framework if they defend the specific
consequences of political implementation
Michael Ignatieff, Carr professor of human rights at Harvard, 2004 Lesser Evils p. 20-1
As for moral perfectionism, this would be the doctrine that a liberal state should never have
struck with dubious moral means and should spare its officials the hazard of having to decide
between lesser and greater evils. A moral perfectionist position also holds that states can spare
their officials this hazard simply by adhering to the universal moral standards set out in human
rights conventions and the laws of war. There are two problems with a perfectionist stance,
leaving aside the question of whether it is realistic. The first is that articulating nonrevocable,
nonderogable moral standards is relatively easy. The problem is deciding how to apply them in
specific cases. What is the line between interrogation and torture, between targeted killing and
unlawful assassination, between preemption and aggression? Even when legal and moral
distinctions between these are clear in the abstract, abstractions are less than helpful when
political leaders have to choose between them in practice. Furthermore, the problem with
perfectionist standards is that they contradict each other. The same person who shudders, rightly,
at the prospect of torturing a suspect might be prepared to kill the same suspect in a preemptive
attack on a terrorist base. Equally, the perfectionist commitment to the right to life might
preclude such attacks altogether and restrict our response to judicial pursuit of offenders through
process of law. Judicial responses to the problem of terror have their place, but they are no
substitute for military operations when terrorists possess bases, training camps, and heavy
weapons. To stick to a perfectionist commitment to the right to life when under terrorist attack
might achieve moral consistency at the price of leaving us defenseless in the face of evildoers.
Security, moreover, is a human right, and thus respect for one right might lead us to betray
another.

2. Limits – there are limitless contexts or avenues through which they could purport to
advocate the plan. Our interpretation limits debate to promote politically relevant dialogue
and structured communication.
Donald S. Lutz, Professor of Polisci at Houston, 2000 Political Theory and Partisan Politics p.
39-40
Aristotle notes in the Politics that political theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels—discourse about the ideal,
about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems.4 Put another way, comprehensive
political theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to
understand the interlocking set of questions that political theory can ask, imagine a continuum stretching from left to
right. At the end, to the right, is an ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the
imagination. At the other end is the perfect dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination
can produce. Stretching between these two extremes is an infinite set of possibilities, merging into
one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the characteristics defining the end
points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly inegalitarian system described at
the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the extent to which they embodied equality.
An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the extremes. Of course, visions of the
ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is also true that in order to imagine an
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
1NC Framework
ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves
to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent indeterminate. t A non-ironic reading of Plato's
Republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes political philosophy. This is not the
case. Any person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political philosophy is to ask the question "Is this ideal worth
pursuing?" Before the question can be pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to
conceptual precision and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical analysis
raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis, and the careful comparison with
existing systems can proceed fruitfully. The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably because it works on clarifying ideas that
most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political philosophy.5 However, the
value of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical implications, nor in its
compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of actual political
systems. Among other things it allows him to show that anyone who wishes to pursue a state of affairs closer to that summed up
in the concept of the General Will must successfully develop a civil religion. To the extent politicians believe
theorists who tell them that pre-theoretical clarification of language describing an ideal is the
essence and sum total of political philosophy, to that extent they will properly conclude that
political philosophers have little to tell them, since politics is the realm of the possible not the
realm of logical clarity. However, once the ideal is clarified, the political philosopher will begin
to articulate and assess the reasons why we might want to pursue such an ideal. At this point,
analysis leaves the realm of pure logic and enters the realm of the logic of human longing, aspiration, and anxiety.
The analysis is now limited by the interior parameters of the human heart (more properly the human psyche) to
which the theorist must appeal. Unlike the clarification stage where anything that is logical is possible, there are now
definite limits on where logic can take us. Appeals to self-destruction, less happiness rather than more, psychic
isolation, enslavement, loss of identity, a preference for the lives of mollusks over that of humans, to name just a few
possibilities, are doomed to failure. The theorist cannot appeal to such values if she or he is to attract
an audience of politicians. Much political theory involves the careful, competitive analysis of
what a given ideal state of affairs entails, and as Plato shows in his dialogues the discussion between the
philosopher and the politician will quickly terminate if he or she cannot convincingly demonstrate the connection
between the political ideal being developed and natural human passions. In this way, the politician can be educated
by the possibilities that the political theorist can articulate, just as the political theorist can be educated by the
relative success the normative analysis has in "setting the hook" of interest among nonpolitical theorists. This
realm of discourse, dominated by the logic of humanly worthwhile goals, requires that the
theorist carefully observe the responses of others in order not to be seduced by what is merely
logical as opposed to what is humanly rational. Moral discourse conditioned by the ideal, if it is
to be successful, requires the political theorist to be fearless in pursuing normative logic, but it
also requires the theorist to have enough humility to remember that, if a non-theorist cannot be
led toward an ideal, the fault may well lie in the theory, not in the moral vision of the non-
theorist.

D. Voting issue for fairness, education, and jurisdiction

Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
AT: Representations First
Policy analysis should precede discourse – most effective way to
challenge power
Jill Taft-Kaufman, Speech prof @ CMU, 1995, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60,
Iss. 3, “Other Ways”, p pq
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by
substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The
political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of
power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite
their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-
referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist
politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts,
postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited
access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media
that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or
commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is
underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual
communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990)
echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little
radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about
Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for
actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial
minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the
postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even
stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern
Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and,
therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of
terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more
striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that
can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be
allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms.
It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its
projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the
discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world,
rather than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic
human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on
the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from
material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete
social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of
marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences
are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example,
argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571).
Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education
or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988)
asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to
realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual
radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of
socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about
how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience.
People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not
share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such
an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current
struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not
appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects.
Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and
homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to
Miami Debate ABJ
Nuclear Fusion
the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized
groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political agendas,
institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.