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GULC, Nicolas was a Global Law Scholar, president of the GULC Military Law Society, and student editor-in-chief of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. Prior to law school, she served as a U.S. Army military intelligence officer. Her assignments included a deployment to Afghanistan with 4-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team as an intelligence officer and female engagement team leader. After the Army, Nicolas taught secondary mathematics and computer science in San Jose, CA as a Teach for America corps member. She is an alumnus of the United States Military Academy, holding a BS in Sociology, and Loyola Marymount University, holding a M.Ed in Urban Education. Her work has been published in Foreign Policy’s Best Defense Blog, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Georgetown Law Journal Online. She is a 2016 Pat Tillman Foundation scholar and a 2018 Women in Defense HORIZONS scholar. “The President and Nuclear Weapons: Authorities, Limits, and Process,” 12-2019. https://media.nti.org/documents/The_President_and_Nuclear_Weapons_Authorities_Limits_and_Process.pdf] //schnit The U.S. Constitution’s division of war powers between the executive and legislative branches is notoriously murky. Few areas of law are more debated and less settled. The Constitution confers significant authority on each branch, but the exact scope of those authorities and the ways in which they interact remain controversial. Congressional authority might act in two principal ways to restrict a president’s decision to use nuclear weapons : (1) if the president is required to seek congressional authorization before use, and (2) if a statute prohibits or limits certain uses of those weapons . Nuclear forces consist of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems Congressional Budget Office 23 [Congressional Budget Office, Since 1975, CBO has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. Each year, the agency’s economists and budget analysts produce dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates for proposed legislation. “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2023 to 2032,” 6-2023. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365] //schnit U.S. nuclear forces consist of submarines that launch ballistic missiles (SSBNs), land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles ( ICBMs ), long-range bomber aircraft, shorter-range tactical aircraft carrying bombs , and the nuclear warheads that those delivery systems carry. Prefer it: Navigating complexity ---Abdicating the resolutional stasis sanctions picking any starting point for debate which incentivizes a retreat from controversy and eliminates the benefit of preround research . Only a common and stable point of engagement can ensure effective clash through critical thinking , reflexivity , and argument refinement , which is linear. Poscher 16 [Ralf Poscher, Diat the Institute for Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg “Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic Account of Legal Disagreement”, Metaphilosophy of Law, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki/Adam Dyrda/Pawel Banas (eds.), Hart Publishing. 2016.] Hegel’s dialectical thinking powerfully exploits the idea of negation . It is a central feature of spirit and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This […] is the magical power that converts it into being.”102 The tarrying with the negative is part of what Hegel calls the “labour of the negative ”103. In a loose reference to this Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits. We must go through the “labor of the negative” to have trust in our deliberative processes. 104 This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like ‐ minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations .105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for

such groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases .107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”. These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position . We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves . Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs , attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs , attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite expressions for a less aspirational idea. In hard cases we must – in some way – lay out the argument for ourselves to figure out what we believe to be the right answer. We might not know what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death penalty, torture, and stem cell research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions . In these cases it might be rational to discuss the issue with someone unlikely to share some of our more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we lean. This might even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view, because we know that our adversary is much more motivated to find a potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are in agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to make sure that we have not overlooked some counter ‐ argument to our case. It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard cases, in which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex practice in a more complex social framework. Argumentation with an adversary can have purposes beyond persuading him : to test one’s own convictions , to engage our opponent in inferential commitments and to persuade third parties are only some of these ; to rally our troops or express our convictions might be others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that “there must be a hope of coming to terms” with someone though not necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but maybe through inferential commitments in a different arena. f) The Advantage Over Non ‐ Argumentative Alternatives It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert and will typically hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some participants for whom our hope of coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason, the rationality of our disagreements is of a secondary nature. The rational does not lie in the discovery of a single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there are no single right answers . Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales which lie beyond the topic at hand, like the exploration of our communalities or of our inferential commitments. Since these reasons are of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary reasons in their favor – like swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require lengthy arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to come by some non ‐ argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic tradition it is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if

Ballot---1NC---OFF Presenting the 1AC’s value as dependent on the recognition of the critic reduces the revolutionary nature of the act—fails to produce meaningful change and draws them into the oppressive gaze of the academy. Vote negative to refuse the affirmative’s call for the ballot Phillips 99 – Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication at Central Missouri State University, PhD in Speech Communication from Pennsylvania State University, MA in Speech Communication from Central Missouri State University, BS in Psychology and Sociology from Southwest Baptist University, “Rhetoric, Resistance, and Criticism: A Response to Sloop and Ono”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 32, Number 1, p. 96-101 My concern with this movement centers around an issue that Sloop and Ono seem to take as a given, namely, the role of the critic . On one hand, calling for the systematic investigation of existing marginalized discourses is a natural extension both of critical rhetoric (see McKerrow 1989, 1991) and of the general ideological turn in criticism (see Wander 1983). On the other hand, the ease of transition from criticism in the service of resistance to criticism of resistance may obscure the need to address some fundamental issues regarding the general function of rhetorical criticism in an uncertain and contentious world . Beyond licensing the critic to engage in political struggle , Sloop and Ono advocate the pursuit of covert resistant discourses. Such a move not only stretches our understanding of rhetoric and criticism, but also alters significantly the relationship between critic and out- law. Critical interrogation of dominant discursive practices in the service of political/cultural reform is supplanted in favor of positioning covert out- law communities as objects of investigation . Invited to seek out subversive discourses, the critic is positioned as the active agent of change and the out-law discourse becomes merely instrumental . Rather than academic criticism acting in service of everyday acts of resistance, everyday acts of resistance are put into the service of academic criticism. Rhetorical resistance That we are "caught within conflicting logics of justice that are culturally struggled over" (Sloop and Ono 1997, 50) and that rhetoric is employed in these struggles seems an uncontroversial statement. Despite the theoretical miasma surrounding judgment, Sloop and Ono accurately note, the material process of rendering judgments (and of disputing the logics of litigation) continues in the world of actually practiced discourse. In the materially contested world, rhetoric is utilized both by those seeking to secure the grounds of dominant judgment and by those seeking to undermine or supplant dominant cultural logics with some out-law notion of justice. The distinction between these two cultural groups, "in-law" and out- law, however, deserves some consideration prior to any discussion of the role of the critic as implied in the out-law discourse project. The discourse of the dominant or those within the bounds of superordinate logics of litigation is reminiscent of Michel De Certeau's (1984) strategic discourse. For De Certeau, strategies are utilized by those who have authority by virtue of their proper position. Strategies exploit the institutionally guaranteed background consensus by which power relations (and litigations) are maintained and advanced. In contrast, tactics are utilized by those having no proper place of authority within the discursive economy who must seek opportunities whereby the discourse of the dominant might be undermined and contested. To extend Sloop and Ono's definition, out-law discourses are those that can (and, by their analysis, do) take advantage of situations (e.g., race riots) to disrupt the regularity of dominant cultural groups. The ongoing struggle between strategically instituted cultural dominants and the "out-law always lurk[ing] in the distance" (66) is acknowledged, even celebrated, by Sloop and Ono. What their acknowledgment fails to provide, however, is a clear need for critical intervention. Indeed, quite the reverse is presented: It is the critic (particularly the left-leaning critic) who needs out-law discourse. While the struggles over justice, equality, and freedom have gone on, the left-leaning critics are those who have theoretically excluded themselves from the disputes. The study of out-law dis- courses, then, provides a means to reinvigorate the intellectual and re-institute (academic) leftist thinking into popular political struggles (53-54). Thus, Sloop and Ono's project incorporates three types of rhetoric: the rhetoric of the in-law, presumably the traditional object of critical attention; the rhetoric of the out-law, the study of which may transform our understanding of judgment as well as reinvigorate leftist democratic critiques; and the rhetoric of the critics who, having lost their political po- tency, can exploit the discourse of the out-law to promote ideological struggles. It is to this critical rhetoric that I now turn. Resistance criticism Sloop and Ono (1997) clearly state the relationship they envision between the rhetorical critic and out-law discourse: "Ultimately, we will argue that the role of critical rhetoricians is to produce 'materialist conceptions of judgment,' using out-law judgments to disrupt dominant logics of judgment" (54; emphasis added). Here the critic seeks out vernacular discourse (60), focuses on the methods and values embodied in these communities (62), listens to and evaluates the out-law community (62-63), and chooses appropriate discourses for the purpose of disrupting dominant practices (63). Essentially, it is the critic who seeks out marginalized discourses and returns them to the center for the purpose of provoking dominant cultural groups (63). Despite acknowledging the efficacy of out-law discourses, Sloop and Ono assume that the critiques generated and presented by the out-law community have only minimal effect. The irony, and indeed arrogance, of this assumption is evident when they claim: "There are cases, however, when, without the prompting of academic critics, out-law discourses serve local purposes at times and at others resonate within dominant discourses, disrupting sedimented ways of thinking, transforming dominant forms of judgment" (60; emphasis added). Sloop and Ono seem to suggest that such locally generated critiques are the exception, whereas the political efficacy of the academic critic is the rule. This seems an odd claim, given that the justification for their out-law discourse project is the lack of politically viable academic critique and the perceived potency of out-law conceptions of judgment. Their suggestion that out-law

communities are in need of the academic critic contradicts not only the already disruptive nature of existing out-law discourses (the grounds for using out-law discourse), but also the impotence of contemporary critical discourse (the warrant for studying out-law discourse). By this I do not mean that the critiques and theories generated by academically instituted intellectuals have not been incorporated into subversive discourses. Just as out-law discourses inevitably mount critiques of dominant logics, so, too, the perspectives on rhetoric and criticism generated by academics are used in resistance movements. Feminist critiques of patriarchy, queer theories of homophobia, postcolonial interrogations of race have found their way into the service of resistant groups. The key distinction I wish to make is that the existence of criticism (academic or self-generated) in resistance does not necessitate Sloop and Ono's move to a criticism of resistance. What Sloop and Ono fail to offer is an adequate argument for " taking public speaking out of the streets and studying it in the classroom , for treating it less as an expression of protest " (Wander 1983, 3) and more as an object for analysis and reproduction within the political economy of the academy . Philip Wander made a similar charge against Herbert Wicheln's early critical project, and this concern should remain at the forefront of any discussion aimed at expanding the scope and function of criticism. Sloop and Ono offer numerous directives for the critic without addressing whether the critic should be examining out-law discourses in the first place . While it is too early to suggest any definitive answer to the question of criticism of resistance, some preliminary arguments as to why critics should not pursue out-law discourses can be offered: (1) Hidden out-law discourses may have good reasons to stay hidden . Sloop and Ono specifically instruct us that "the logic of the out-law must constantly be searched for, brought forth" (66) and used to disrupt dominant practices. But are we to believe that all out-law discourses are prepared to mount such a challenge to the dominant cultural logic? Or, indeed, that the members of out- law communities are prepared to be brought into the arena of public surveillance in the service of reconstituting logics of litigation? It seems highly unlikely that all divergent cultural groups have developed equally, or that all members of these groups share Sloop and Ono's "imperial impulse" (51) to promote their conceptions and practices of justice. (2) Academic critical discourse is not transparent. Here I allude to the overall problem of translation (see Foucault 1994; Lyotard 1988; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985; Zabus 1995) as an extension of the previous concern. Critical discourse cannot become the medium of commensurability for divergent language games. Are we to believe that the "use" of out-law dis- course by critics to disrupt dominant practices can fail to do violence to these diverse/divergent logics? Are out-law discourses merely tools to be exploited and discarded in the pursuit of returning leftist academic dis- course to the center? (3) Perhaps the academic translation of out-law discourse could be true to the internal logic of the out-law community. And, perhaps the re-presentation of out-law logic within the academic community will bestow a degree of legitimacy on the out-law community. Nonetheless , the effect of legitimizing out-law discourse is unknown and potentially destructive . In an effort to siphon the political energy of out-law discourse into academic practice, we may ultimately destroy the dissatisfaction that serves as a cathexis for these out-law discourses . It seems possible that academic recognition might take the place of struggle for material opportunities (see Fraser 1997). But, will academic legitimation create any material changes in the conditions of out-law communities? I mean to suggest, not that it is better to allow the out-law community to suffer for its cause, but rather that incorporating the struggle into an (admittedly) impotent academic critique does not offer a prima facie alternative. (4) Criticism of resistance denies the practical and theoretical importance of opportunity. Returning to De Certeau's notion of tactics, the crucial element of these discursive moves is their use of opportunity to disrupt the proper authority of the dominant. The kairos of intervention provides the key to undermining "in-law" discourses. But when is the "right moment in time" for the academic reproduction of out-law discourse? Mapping the points of resistance (ala Foucault and Biesecker) entails interrogating "in-law" discourses for their incongruities and contradictions, not turning the academic gaze upon those communities waiting for an opportunity. Out-laws do not lurk in the forefront (66), hoping to be exposed by academic critics; they wait for the right moment for their disruption. Rhetoricians can provide rhetorical instructions for seeking opportunities and for exploiting these opportunities (literally making the culturally weaker argument the stronger), but this does not justify interrogating (intervening in) the cultural logics of the marginalized. The concerns raised here are not designed to dismiss Sloop and Ono's provocative essay. The divergent critical logic they outline deserves careful consideration within the critical community, and it is my hope that the concerns I raise may help to further problematize the relationship between resistance and rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical criticism As I have suggested, my purpose is to use the provocative nature of Sloop and Ono's project to extend disputes regarding the ends of rhetorical criticism. Diverging perspectives on the ends of criticism have been categorized by Barbara Warnick (1992) as falling along four general lines: artist, analyst, audience, and advocate. Leah Ceccarelli (1997) discerns similar categories around the aesthetic, epistemic, and political ends of rhetorical criticism. The out-law discourse project presents clear ties to the notion of critic as advocate. For Sloop and Ono, the critic is an interested party , discerning (and at times disputing) the underlying values and forces contained within a discourse. Additionally, however, the out-law discourse critic is an analyst focusing on the hidden , aberrant texts of the out-law and "rendering] an incoherent or esoteric text comprehensible" (Warnick 1992, 233). Now, I am not suggesting that a critic must serve only one function or that the roles of advocate and analyst are mutually exclusive; rather, these entanglings of power (political ends) and knowledge (epistemic ends) are inevitable . My concern is that we not neglect the complexity of these entanglements. Turning covert out-law discourses into objects of our analyses runs the risk of subjecting them both to

Ishiro Honda---1NC---OFF We affirm the entirety of the aff except for their citation of ishiro honda He administrated comfort women camps. He is a WAR CRIMINAL Scherschel 20, [Brian Scherschel Brian is the creator, editor, director, and host at Kaijuvision Radio. He loves classic and foreign films. He’s also a violinist. He graduated with honors from Wabash College where he received my B.A. in Political Science, concentrating in International Relations. He then received his Master’s of Public Administration from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington, concentrating in Comparative Politics and International Affairs. Some of his favorite subjects in his studies include NATO, the European Union, European history, globalization, urban American history, non-democratic regimes, and national and international security concerns (high politics). “Episode 57: Ishiro Honda and Crimes Against Humanity” August 24, 2020, http://www.kaijuvision.com/2020/08/24/episode-57-ishiro-honda-and-crimes-against-humanity/] First I’ll give you some background. In episode 4 of the show, I covered the issue of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. I utilized a few sources plus what I already knew and thought about regarding the subject. I’ve never shied away from a subject because it was too difficult for me to read about and process. But I’ll preface what I say with this: It’s not my place to forgive Ishiro Honda for what he did under the command of the Imperial Japanese Army . It also isn’t your place to forgive him . The only ones who can forgive him are the women (and men ) who were put in the camps . And it isn’t Godzilla fandom experts’ place to downplay the significance of that chapter of his life . I can only give you my analysis of what I’ve learned and thought about. Honda was in a command position at a comfort women camp during World War II. He administered actions there . He would have participated in “acquiring” women for the camp , also known as abducting , or kidnapping, and forcing them into sexual slavery . Human trafficking is another way to put this . These actions classify him as a class C war criminal , for crimes against humanity. He was not arrested, charged, or punished after the war was over.

Image---1NC---OFF Affirm the entirety of the 1AC except their insertion of the images The AFF’s illustrations spectacularize the violence of imperialism which sanitizes violence and siphons ability to embrace it. Their evidence. 1AC Gatdula 23 , Assistant Professor @ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Anna Beatrice, “Spectacles of a Nuclear Empire: Opera and Film in the American Atomic Age, 1945-2018,” June 2023, University of Chicago, luna) Delivering an address at the celebratory unveiling, Professor Harold Haydon remarked: “As this bronze monument remembers an event and commemorates an achievement, it has something unique to say about the spiritual meaning of the achievement, for it is the special power of art to convey feeling and stir profound emotion, to touch us in ways that are beyond the reach of reason [emphasis mine].”27 The statue marked the very place where, several feet below ground, Fermi had successfully created the first nuclear chain reaction. Through the ritualistic acts of remembering and commemorating, the University staked its claim within US nuclear empire. Only five years beforehand (1962), US nuclear supremacy was at its most challenged, but its deterrence, with the U.S.S.R. during the Cuban Missile Crisis, reaffirmed its control over global order and geopolitical conflict. If spectacle is the superstructure, then nuclear empire is the base, this age’s “ mode of production .” I use the designation “nuclear empire” to name the period of US supremacy in the post-1945 world order. The nuclear empire spans the years (1946–1991), known as the years of the Cold War, but I extend the periodization to our present day. One could say “nuclear empire” names US supremacy in the Cold War’s long durée , which other historians have termed the “The Long Cold War.”28 It not only hearkens to US political history but also to the structural function of the nation-state during this time. In this I deviate from musicological studies of Cold War Music. The American Musicological Society’s Cold War Study Group, for example, “investigates the music composed during the decades after World War II, and specifically the relationship between new music and the continuing global opposition between the United States and the U.S.S.R..”29 Though the period of my project correlates with that of the disciplinary boundaries taken up by Cold War studies, I am not investigating historical changes in musical styles during this period. Indeed, the spectacle I have in mind exceeds generic confines. Hence my work means to describe how this spectacular excess is inherent to nuclear empire’s reification . Recent scholarship focusing on the literary tradition in the nuclear age centers the formal ways nuclear empire shapes cultural artefacts . Maria Anna Mariani’s monograph Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: The Poetics of the Bystander poses a serious question about the role of Italy and its citizens as passive accomplices.30 She claims that authors like Italo Calvino and Elsa Morante test the generic limits of science fiction, creating works that are both politically engaged in content and postmodern in form.31 She sees Calvino’s work as a formalist intervention dealing with the new space-time paradigm of the nuclear age. Her insights help enrich my own readings, especially with respect to opera where nuclear content began to take on a postmodern form now known as musical minimalism.32 Closer to the center of nuclear empire, Jessica Hurley’s work on the “ nuclear mundane ” articulates the ways that narratives of nuclear apocalypse obfuscate the everyday violence occurring at the environmental and infrastructural levels .33 I follow Hurley’s critical attention to the material ramifications of such narratives. In particular, her formulation of the “ nuclear mundane ” demands that we pay attention to the nuc lear problem as “ the slow violence of the atomic age.” “Like all slow violence,” Hurley writes, nuclear violence “ distributes its damage unevenly . Poor people, people of color, Indigenous people, queer people, and women receive the least benefit from the nuclear complex and are most exposed to its harm .”34 The study of empire calls attention to US geopolitical maneuvers post-1945.35 From its annexation of the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific to the Marshall Plan across the Atlantic, the United States used its military power for imperial occupation . Moreover, the US deployed imperial tactics within its own continental borders. The policies of eminent domain have been used to create sacrifice zones within the US for uranium mining and nuclear waste . Often these lands are under Native American sovereignty.36 Military power

It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.50 I claim that the spectacle constitutes the aesthetic strategy used to produce and circulate nuclear empire’s hegemonic ideology . The atomic bomb proved to be an epistemic shift , part of a culture in which empire was sublimated through various media . Cultural critic Rey Chow writes , “ It was probably no accident that the United States chose as its laboratory , its site of experimentation , a civilian rather than military space, since the former, with a much higher population density, was far more susceptible to demonstrating the upper ranges of the bomb’s spectacular potential .”51 It was not simply that hard science was replaced by a visual device, but that “the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot in the progress of science.”52 As an aesthetic strategy, the spectacle is one of many strategies in the arsenal of nuclear empire. The spectacle of the atomic bomb coheres a public , one that includes spectators, victims, and witnesses, all of whom can testify to the ongoing violence of nuclear technology . These violences are made a spectacle while at the same time paradoxically occurring on the level of the ordinary or mundane. A public made manifest by the nuclear problem is first built imaginatively. I propose spectacle as a cultural response to our nuclear age, and I follow in the methods of critical theorists in trying to understand how culture continues to shape and obfuscate political attachments . My work offers one perspective on the relation between spectacular mediation and historical meaning-making, exploring it through the media of opera and film. I make a distinction between aesthetic strategy and aesthetic category, particularly in relation to the sublime. Frances Ferguson’s essay on the nuclear sublime posits the atomic bomb as the most recent version of the sublime, quoting Edmund Burke, “We love the beautiful as what submits to us, we fear the sublime as what we must submit to.”53 According to Ferguson, the nuclear sublime becomes a useful lever in discussions of aesthetics because it helps “an individual identify himself, to attach himself to a consciousness of his own individuality.”54 The perception of the sublime adheres to the individual’s act of individual judgment: the sublime is enlisted in the search for a unique individual subjectivity, the sublime affirms individual identity at the expense of the notion of private ownership, and, finally, the virtue of the sublime is that it cannot be exchanged. You don’t want to witness another’s sublime; it encroaches on your individuality.55 I am not proposing here that the atomic bomb is inherently sublime. I want to make the distinction that the atomic bomb is spectacular, which, if it has anything to do with the sublime, is a bad form of it, what we might call a bad sublimation. The term “nuclear sublime” implies that the nuclear exceeds understanding, but my own historical impulse is to insist that the atomic bomb has historical actors and victims from whom we can learn. Moreover, the spectacle implies the presence of the spectator and can bring together a collective of spectators. With a certain amount of razzle dazzle, the spectacle vies for control over affect and affected bodies , creating a space and time for spectators to relate to or contest the narratives presented. I insist on the spectacle as an aesthetic strategy that narrativizes and reifies nuclear empire because I want to consider the ways that spectacle as a form and an experience can not only be used to mystify spectators but be deployed strategically to critique nuclear empire , as happens in the operas I take up in this dissertation. At its core, “nuclear empire” calls attention to the epoch-changing technology of nuclear weapons science. The field of Science and Technology Studies has been instrumental to my thinking about the dialectical relation between technology and culture. Cultural figurations of nuclear technology represent historically specific reactions and interpretations. Anthropologist Joseph Masco articulates a central question of nuclear empire: “What kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something ‘unthinkable’? How has the social regulation of the imagination —in this case, of nuclear war— been instrumental in American life since World War II?” 56 Masco makes a compelling inquiry into the intersections between nuclear technoscience, culture, and everyday life. Starting from the premise that “the invention of the atomic bomb transformed everyday life, catching individuals within a new articulation of the global and the local,” Masco proposes a new study of aesthetics that he formulates as technoaesthetics : “ the evaluative aesthetic categories embedded in the expert practices of weapons scientists. …are the non-classified everyday modes of interacting with nuclear technologies .”57 According to Masco, aestheticizing the bomb—literally the sensory experience of the bomb—was crucial to the development of the technology. Technoaesthetics were further imbricated in geopolitical matters , a history of the bomb he recounts in three parts: 1945–1962, above ground testing; 1963–1992, subterranean testing; and from 1995–2010, computer-generated model testing.58 Masco argues that the three different periods of testing offer three different technoaesthetic

modes of engagement. During above-ground testing, scientists could feel in their bodies the effects of ever-growing nuclear weapons technology and could thus apprehend the dangerous real-world consequences.59 The scientists aestheticized the bomb, apprehended the bomb through their bodily senses, and understood the bomb’s spectacular power through visual, sonic, and haptic senses as their bodies were shocked by the bomb’s light, sound, and heat . As bomb testing moved underground and then to the furthest removed technological mediation of computergenerated models, scientists could no longer feel the bomb, thus losing a sense of what the bomb might mean in the real world. Masco argues that their physical detachment from the bomb allowed scientists to fetishize the bomb : the further desensitized (or, de-aestheticized) the scientists became, the more they sublimated the bomb ultimately losing a sense of the real repercussions of their evermore powerful and dangerous weapon . As a formal principle, the aesthetic strategy of spectacle attempts to subsume its opposite— the “unspectacular.” The spectacular bomb is made through unspectacular infrastructures and experiments , like the giant graphite pile of CP-1. The dialectical impulse in play in this project follows the work of Masco and Hurley who study the everyday, “ordinary” violences of nuclear technology in US culture and literature. 60 I take up Jessica Schwartz’s proposal to examine the “ nuclear silences ” inherent in the structures of imperial domination . Schwartz’s ethnographic work and activism with and for the indigenous populations of the Marshallese Islands attest to an ongoing silencing — a tool to maintain nuclear empire’s hegemonic control .61 I want to take this critical intervention further by holding silence , or the “ unspectacular ,” in the same space as spectacle to claim that both are aesthetic characteristics of ideological authority . My analysis of ideology focuses not only on spectators, then, but institutions and (intimate) publics . Following Terry Eagleton, I think of ideology as “that which makes the subject feel the world is not an inhospitable place.”62 Ideology is the larger belief system that legitimates the power of a dominant social group or class, and can become dominant through six ways: promotion, naturalization, universalization, denigration, exclusion, and mystification.63 The ideology that interests me is that of nuclear empire, the ideology that maintains the necessity for nuclear supremacy—this belief makes the subject (spectator or ordinary citizen) feel the world is a more hospitable place with the presence and proliferation of nuclear technology. It is an ideology mired in imperial action—conquest of lands and peoples—but also of technological exceptionalism. The United States is hardly a stranger to the ideology of exceptionalism.64 Throughout its history, the nation-state’s ideology permeated myths of the frontier. US historian Greg Grandin defines the frontier myth: “The concept of the frontier served as both diagnosis (to explain the power and wealth of the United States) and prescription (to recommend what policy makers should do to maintain and extend that power and wealth).”65 In our nuclear age, the frontier manifests in the Bikini Atoll for testing of the hydrogen bomb, toward the moon in a race against the Soviet Union, and at the quantum reaches of the atom. At the core of this expansionist drive is the ideology that upholds nuclear empire. The spectacle specifies—moreover, actualizes and materializes—the relation between aesthetics and ideology . In order to represent, reproduce, and circulate the beliefs of nuclear empire, the spectacle must be deployed as an aesthetic strategy. Again, as exemplified by the Target Committee memo, the spectacular nature of the bomb was a deliberate (aesthetic) strategy toward geopolitical ends. My work covers the long durée of the nuclear age, from the hot and cold fluctuations of the Cold War to a post-9/11 United States. While geopolitical contexts change over time, the spectacle as a means of narrating our nuclear age adapts to these historical developments. I hope that the historical critique will be one among many that analyze American narratives of exceptionalism. Ultimately, I claim that the ideological and aesthetic are distinct but interdependent spheres of influence, both necessary to establish and maintain the nuclear empire. American Opera in the Nuclear Age My work brings opera into the larger conversation about media spectacle. I claim that opera is an aesthetic medium unlike film and television that begs for a different kind of intersubjective relation than they do—one among story tellers, performers, and audience (read: spectators). It differs from electronic media in that many of the laboring forces are right in front of you, breathing the very same air that you breathe in the opera house, at least in live performance.

practices of recycling – textual, visual, and even architectural; these have shaped accounts of subsequent separation walls and fences in other contexts. Such broadenings of the concept of the icon intersect with contemporary theorizations of ‘iconic power’ (Alexander et al., 2012) that connect aesthetic form and sociopolitical influence. Alexander (2010) defines icons as ‘symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shaping’ (p. 10). The materiality of icons converts abstract ideas into sensory experiences, enabling them to ‘concentrate and direct emotions’ and convey moral values in powerful ways (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 36). Alexander (2010) goes so far as to postulate an ‘iconic consciousness’ which ‘occurs when an aesthetically shaped materiality signifies social value’ (p. 11). Finally, the term ‘iconic’ suggests that iconic photographs are not only widely known and culturally resonant but also publicly sanctified. This idea, used conspicuously by Hariman and Lucaites, is greatly indebted to Christian traditions of venerating religious images, although it is also – as we elaborate below – connected to the institutional structures of modern journalism. The importance of sacredness finds a parallel in the idea that photography can be auratic, in Walter Benjamin’s (1980, 1992) sense, constituting a record of the unique spatiotemporal field of the depicted object. Iconic photographs are thus doubly sanctified, their public canonization anchored in and reinforcing the sanctification that photography bestows on the referent’s existential uniqueness. Brink (2000), in fact, identifies three analogies between religious icons and historic photographs: their ‘intense symbolic impact’, their authenticity or ‘special affinity to reality’, and their canonization, expressed through extensive reproduction and distribution in different media. Yet, while iconic photographs are canonized through repeated circulation , this may also corrode their intensity and uniqueness . Certain kinds of appropriation might lead not to canonization but to desacralization , until the images are devoid of the significance that made them iconic in the first place . The possibilities for such desacralization have been greatly magnified in the new media environment. Iconic photographs in the new media environment The sanctified historic and symbolic power of iconic photographs depended on distinctive practices of image production, dissemination, and alteration that characterized the mass ‘media regime’. These practices have been increasingly destabilized in the contemporary media environment, principally in two overlapping domains: institutions and technology. The key relevant institutional characteristic of the previous regime was the centrality of professional journalism. Key factors for iconic photographs include the role of the professional photojournalist as their primary source – informed by an occupational habitus based on norms of factual and moral ‘witnessing’ (Zelizer, 2007), the importance of editorial and publishing personnel as gatekeepers controlling publication and distribution, and the role of legal and contractual frameworks (e.g. copyright, commercial licensing) in governing, and limiting, processes of replication and alteration. As a consequence, possibilities for republication were mostly made available within journalism, but also within similarly centralized and demarcated institutions, such as book and magazine publishing, advertising and marketing, and the established art world. In most cases, the professional, contractual, and hierarchical structures in play contributed to the sanctification of iconic photographs since their use was sanctioned by legitimate institutions enjoying extensive cultural authority. While aspects of this regime have remained in force, certain important shifts have weakened it. These include the increasing dependence on non-professional user-generated images in the form of citizen journalism (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2011), the blurring boundaries and struggles for cultural authority between professional and nonprofessional practitioners and genres (Sjøvaag, 2011), and the spread of user- monitored and participatory editorial models (Deuze, 2003). All these reconfigure the institutional framework for the circulation of iconic photographs in favor of more decentralized, less authoritative, and potentially more democratic uses and appropriations. Technological changes are crucial to these institutional developments. Already existing iconic photographs – the focus of this article – become ‘ networked images’ (Rubinstein and Sluis, 2008) available for instant replication and mass distribution using social network services that bypass traditional gatekeepers , while ubiquitous image manipulation software enables ordinary individuals to disseminate radically altered versions to large audiences. Dependence on software processes for storage, replication, distribution, and display means that iconic photographs – like other fixed media ‘documents’ – have now become impermanent , real-time , dynamic ‘performances’ (Manovich, 2013: 33–34). Such ‘performances’ can raise issues beyond their original audiences and targets , allowing diverse publics to appropriate the iconic photo for new purposes . At the same time, however, these appropriations reveal a fundamental paradox: the more a photograph is recycled, the more it may influence the public – yet the more the original referential context may be lost in the process . For instance, Ibrahim (2016) argues that parodic versions of

the Tiananmen ‘Tank Man’ image express resistance to Chinese state censorship while also being ‘stripped from context, re-hashed and endlessly circulated as cultural artefacts bearing the burden of history yet being disenfranchised from it’ (p. 593). For iconic photographs, recycling is thus a definitional condition and a potential death threat . In a way, iconic photos are victims of their own success , as the diminution of their original reference is a condition for reaching iconic status: when a photograph becomes iconic, it is ‘ revised , circulated , and reissued in various venues until whatever reality its subject first possessed has been drained away’ (Rabinowitz, 1994: 87). The emblematic indexicality of iconic photographs The fit of iconic photographs for public salience and extensive replication hinges on a crucial semiotic duality: they are at once particular and universal, concrete and abstract. Frosh (2012) calls this duality ‘emblematic indexicality’. Peirce’s (1958) concept of indexicality designates signs that ‘point to’ their objects through a causal or physical connection. Photography is usually treated as indexical because the light reflected from the objects and scenes before the camera makes contact with the light-sensitive emulsion (or photoelectric sensors in digital cameras), thereby ‘producing’ the image (Barthes, 1981; Doane, 2007). Anchored spatially and temporally, this indexical character nevertheless runs parallel to ‘emblematic’ or symbolic processes, for two reasons: because the image is also interpreted according to contextual cultural knowledge and conventions of representation and because interpretive procedures generalize the meaning of the objects depicted beyond their specificity; they may ‘stand for’ (a classic definition of representation) absent others, including larger populations, broad historical periods, and abstract concepts. In the case of ‘Accidental Napalm’, the spatial indexical anchors are the human figures and the particular place in which they appear: these figures are identifiable as actual, nameable individuals who were before the camera at the time, including Kim Phuc, the naked girl. The temporal anchor is a precise moment, which can be specified through mechanical measures (date, time). However, these indexical anchors immediately lend themselves to extension and expansion: the spatial anchor is extended to ‘Vietnam’, ‘Vietnamese civilians’, and ‘soldiers’; the temporal anchor to the early 1970s; while contextual cultural knowledge at the moment of its first circulation connects it to the political and moral controversies and disintegrating consensus about the war among the American public. However, with iconic photos the process of symbolic generalization is exceptionally extensive: they connote death, injustice, courage, patriotism, and hope in ways that move beyond the particular political and cultural climates of their first appearance. This universal dimension is afforded by the photo’s particular signifiers, although it frequently also taps into pre-existing symbolic frameworks. For instance, the connection between the suffering of Kim Phuc and the suffering of innocents in general is not simply due to her status as a child (or her nudity, to be discussed below), but to her Christ-like pose. The recycling of iconic photos in different contexts , including with physical modifications, may facilitate and enhance the passage to a universal meaning , by detaching their primary signifiers from their indexical anchors or original contexts. Erasing pictorial elements that point to the Vietnam War, the United States or the 1970s would clarify and ‘unclutter’ the universal meaning of injustice. Yet , our study of the increasing range of appropriations of this photo suggests that the opposite trend may also be at work: not the universalization of the image’s meaning but its narrowing ; not the sacralization of the picture but its trivialization . Benjamin argued that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (quoted in Zelizer, 2000: 1). Today, however, the opposite may be true: an image of the past that is recognized by the present as one of its own concerns may be ‘ performed’ and manipulated so often and drastically that it merely becomes one of many existing templates for digital memes .

air defence and nuclear-tipped missile defence interceptors.6 Furthermore, Russia is building a new generation of nuclear weapons of terror never dreamed of during the Cold War, including a nuclear-armed drone sub marine, a nuclear- powered and nuclear- armed cruise missile and a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile. In short, Russia puts a nuke on almost any imaginable weapons system. Perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the USA is the rise of China. China has also become more aggressive in recent years. Under President Xi, China has thrown away the ‘hide-and-bide’ strategy of Deng Xiaoping and charted a more expansionist course . 7 It is taking contested territory through brute force in the S outh C hina S ea. It is building up its military power with the goal of weakening US alliances and pushing American military power out of Asia. It is also engaging in an ambitious global strategy, including its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to use infrastructure investment to increase its geopolitical influence in every major world region. Fortunately, China’s nuclear strategy and posture is more relaxed than Russia’s, but this might be changing. The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) states that, despite its formal NFU pledge, China might use nuclear weapons first in a conflict in Asia. 8 And the US government projects that China will greatly increase the size of its nuclear arsenal in the coming years. 9 No rth Ko rea is on the verge of becoming only the third potential US adversary to possess the ability to deliver nuclear weapons to the US homeland. It is estimated to have dozens of warheads . 10 It has the ability to deliver nuc lear weapon s in its region and could soon have a functioning intercontinental ballistic missile ( ICBM ) capability. Despite years of negotiations, there are few signs that North Korea will denuclearise anytime soon and the US A and its allies must strengthen deterrence now , even as it works towards its stated goal of disarmament. Iran currently poses a non-nuclear strategic threat to the USA and its regional security partners. Iran’s foreign policy and domestic political legitimacy are predicated on resistance to the US A and resistance to the West. It is operating proxy forces in Iraq , Syria , Lebanon and Yemen . Tehran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and has backed terror and proxy attacks against the US A and its allies for decades . It has the largest missile programme in the Middle East and is working on longer-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Tehran has a sophisticated, offensive cyber programme. It may also possess c hemical and b iological w eapon s . 11 Iran , therefore, has the ability to conduct a non-nuclear attack that could be nuclear-like in its strategic effects. Moreover, it has ceased compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and experts estimate that its dash time to a nuclear weapon might be as little as six to eight months.12 Nuclear terrorism also remains a concern. The threat has dissipated since the immediate post 9/11 era. The operational environment for terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has gotten more difficult. And the USA and its allies have made great strides in securing loose nuclear materials around the world. Still, if a terrorist group acquired nuclear weapons, deterrence would be more challenging (although not impossible).13 In short, the nuclear security environment for the USA and its allies has greatly deteriorated in the past decade. The risk of nuc lear war between the US A and its nuclear-armed rivals may be greater now than at any time since the most dangerous days of the Cold War . This means that the US A must once again prioritise nuclear deterrence in its foreign and defence policy.

Haiku---1NC---OFF king ghidora is an antihero which is worth affirming now Our redaction of their 1AC excludes their performance of the nuclear mundane and reveals the nuclear sublime through haiku and tanka---that’s key to understanding and resisting nuclear violence Miller & Atherton 17 [Alyson Miller and Cassandra Atherton 2017 (“Monster in the sky’: Hibakusha Poetry and the Nuclear Sublime”, Deakin University)] The nuclear sublime is a critical term , first used by Frances Ferguson in 1984. In her article in Diacritics, she begins by identifying a clause in a State Farm insurance policy, which states it will not cover loss ‘involving a nuclear incident’ (1984: 4). Ferguson uses this example to argue that while other disasters can be insured against, ‘nuclear peril’ cannot (4) due to its utter annihilation of the world and all life forms. Drawing on Jonathan Schell’s detailed description of this destruction, she argues that Schell ‘portrays himself as having determined to try and “think the unthinkable ”’ (5), while the insurance policy statement demonstrates the way that State Farm refuses to even attempt to do this. Despite their differing approaches , Ferguson makes the point that both of them are ultimately unsuccessful in discussing nuclear destruction, because of its ultimate sublimity : the nuclear as unthinkable [is] the most recent version of the notion of the sublime, that alternative and counterpoise to the beautiful that was revivified when Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (On Great Writing) was rediscovered in the seventeenth century and became especially influential in the eighteenth (5). This paper examines hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) poetry as a response to the nuclear sublime. It posits that hibakusha poetry – specifically tanka and haiku – best acknowledge the experience of the atomic bomb as ineffable . This is because of all atomic bomb literature, poetry turns on an economy of expression where fewer words are used to express ideas . In this way, we posit that haiku and tanka, specifically, with their focus on fewer words , lines and syllables than free verse poetry, are the vehicles that most successfully capture atomic experience and its sublimity . That is, we argue that these traditional Japanese poetic forms are uniquely able to express the anguish of the impossibility of describing the trauma of nuclear annihilation, via subtle use of allusion, fragmentation and minimalism . Hibakusha are positioned to be silent , rather than provide political commentary on atomic warfare. This is due to the discrimination they continue to face both at home and abroad , even seventy years after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Robert Jay Lifton has defined their discrimination in terms of the ‘death taint’ (1991: 170), which ‘caus[es] others to turn away and the hibakusha themselves to withdraw’ (170). There is a threefold prejudice: the hibakusha became symbolic of mortality, a reminder of Japan’s loss in war and, to extend these ideas, a symbol of the atomic sublime . The prejudice against hibakusha continues even into the second and third generation because people fear they may have inherited sickness and sterility, and the belief that they may give still give birth to deformed children because of the radiation poisoning. This encourages hibakusha and their progeny to remain silent . Hibakusha poets write into this silence . This is because as survivors they argue they have ‘a sense of duty toward humanity to bear witness in the face of the patent threat to life posed by nuclear weapons’ (Braw 1997: 171)