Resolved: The Possession and Use of Nuclear Weapons is Immoral

I will fulfill my aff burden by showing that both the use and possession of nuclear weapons are immoral. I agree to my opponent"s definitions and value. Consider three worlds. One is the neg world, where people have nukes, one is the dystopian world, where people use nukes, and one is the aff world, where nobody has nukes. If I show that the aff world is the most moral one, vote aff. Now to arguments: So consider the world where people use nukes. Source [1]: "In a large U.S.-Russian nuclear war, thousands of strategic nuclear weapons would be exploded over cities, (...) All these cities would be utterly destroyed. Within an hour, hundreds of thousands of square miles/kilometers of urban areas would be engulfed by nuclear firestorms. (") the smoke would quickly form a global stratospheric smoke layer, which would act to block sunlight from reaching the Earth. This would destroy the protective ozone layer and cause deadly climate change, (") combined with the massive release of radioactive and industrial toxins from the nuclear war, would collapse the Earth's already stressed terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Many if not most complex forms of life would not be able to withstand such an event. A mass extinction event would occur." This website elaborates even more, but you get the point. This would be detrimental to national security, so we must avoid it. This means that using nukes is clearly immoral. Now consider a world where people have possession of nukes. If nobody uses them, isn"t it just the same as a world without nukes? There are 4 reasons why not: a)Nukes are expensive. Source [5] : "The average annual per-unit cost is about $1.8 million(") One of the reasons for the exorbitant cost: A major factor driving increased costs for the US nuclear arsenal is an oversized nuclear weapons production infrastructure made up of a large number of contaminated excess facilities." In a world where every country needs nukes to be safe, we are wasting money " and my opponent gives no other functions of nukes besides national security, which I will debunk. Wasting exorbitant amounts of money and resources is immoral. b)False Alerts Source [6]: "Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake. What if it wasn't? What if the holocaust the world had feared ever since the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, was actually happening before his very eyes - and he was doing nothing about it? He would soon know. For the next ten minutes, Petrov sweated, counting down the missile time to Moscow. But there was no bright flash, no explosion 150 times greater than Hiroshima. Instead, the sirens stopped blaring and the warning lights went off. The alert on September 26th, 1983 had been a false one. Later, it was discovered that what the satellite's sensors had picked up and interpreted as missiles in flight was nothing more than high-altitude clouds. Petrov's cool head had saved the world." The world almost ended because of a computer glitch. A world without nukes completely sidesteps this, so you"re voting aff on this point. c)Possible Accidents Source [7]: "On 14 March 1961 an aircraft accident occurred near Yuba City, California. A United States Air Force B-52F-70-BW Stratofortress bomber, AF Serial No. 57-0166, c/n 464155, carrying two nuclear weapons departed from Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento. According to the official USAF report, the aircraft experienced an uncontrolled decompression that required it to descend to 10,000 feet (3,000 m) in order to lower the cabin altitude. Increased fuel consumption caused by having to fly at lower altitude, combined with the inability to rendezvous with a tanker in time caused the aircraft to run out of fuel." Once again, military disasters can happen. A world without nukes completely avoids this. d)Terrrorists Nukes Source [8] : "ISIS says it has already seized "tanks, rocket launchers, missile systems, anti-aircraft systems" " and is now setting its sights on the ultimate dirty bomb. (") "The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wil?yah [powerful friends] in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region. It"s the sum of all fears for Western intelligence agencies and it"s infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago. And if not a nuke, what about a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive? That"s easy enough to make."" MAD doesn"t apply to non countries. Source [9]: "Even then, nonstate entities such as terrorist groups may be able to purchase fissile material on the black market, and if they do there is nothing to deter them because many look forward to a martyr's death." So if ISIS gets a nuke, they can use it without fear, extinction happens. Yikes. Remember, a world without nukes avoids this. And for weighing, remember nuclear war will cause extinction. Avoiding extinction must be the first priority. Source [10]: "Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, ("), we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. (..) One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives." A world without nukes clearly avoids this. I have shown 4 reasons why a world with nukes, even if not used, is bad, and I will refute my opponent"s claims that nukes are good- but even then I"m outweighing. Now on to my opponent"s points. His contention 1 says nukes promote national security, but they don"t discourage war. For example, my opponent brings up India. But despite the fact that India and Pakistan both have nukes, they have still fought over their border multiple times since they acquire the nukes. So how is this happening? Nukes just discourage other countries from nuking you. They can still invade you if they have nukes since they know if you use the nuke, they will too. His contention is from 1939 " and if it were true, why did the Cold WAR happen? The US and Russia still fought in Vietnam and Korea despite both having nukes. Clearly, his contention is false. Contention 2 is ridiculous and morally repugnant. He actually attempts to claim that the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives. But the long term tolls of these bombs had insanely horrible repercussions. Source [2]: "More than forty percent of the city was destroyed. Major hospitals had been utterly flattened and care for the injured was impossible. Schools, churches, and homes had simply disappeared. Transportation was impossible. (")plants growing at ground zero presaged the frightening genetic aberrations in humans that were to come: (") For decades abnormally high amounts of cancer, birth defects, and tumors haunted victims." The long term repercussions were horrible for the area. And for his contention 3, Japan would have surrendered anyway. Source [3]: "According to Hasegawa, Stalin spent the summer of 1945 building up his forces for an attack on Japan while trying to figure a legal way out of the pact. Hasegawa never reveals why Stalin thought the legality of his actions against a country the allies loathed was so important. Meanwhile, the Japanese, who had already been told by the Soviets that they would let the pact naturally expire in 1946, viewed the Soviets first as a partner to help win the war and later as the agent to help them negotiate a peace treaty." So had the Allies just waited until 1946, Japan would have surrendered and asked Soviets to hep them in negotiations. The bombings were inherently immoral. Source [4]: "By the time the bomb was ready for use, Japan was ready to surrender. As General Dwight Eisenhower said, "Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing." (")t was also claimed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. Again, this just wasn"t true. Hiroshima was home to the Japanese Second Army HQ, but it was primarily a big city with a huge civilian population. About 10,000 of the total 200,000 deaths in Hiroshima were military personnel. Nagasaki had no military units and, of the total 140,000 deaths there, only about 150 were military. In total, over 95 per cent of the combined casualties of the two cities were civilian. " In this case, the United States government made the active choice to bomb Japanese cities rather than military bases. Specifically targeting civilians when other options are available is near very generally accepted as being an international taboo on moral grounds. The killing of civilians during wartime is morally unacceptable. So turn the argument. I"ve refuted all of my opponent"s arguments, even turning one, and all my points currently stand. Pro is winning. [1] http://www.nucleardarkness.org... [2] http://www.hiroshima-remembered.com... [3] http://www2.css.edu... [4] http://www.cnduk.org... [5] http://fpif.org... [6] http://www.dailymail.co.uk... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org... [8] http://www.express.co.uk... [9] http://www.scientificamerican.com... [10] http://www.existential-risk.org...