Global Nuclear War is Good

Before digging into many of Pro's arguments and sources, let's look at the statement that effectively lies at the crux of the entire debate. Pro claims that, assuming a nuclear war produces a society in the state that his sources say it will (which is debatable, at best), the new civilization that arises will be patently "better" than the current civilization. More specifically, Pro states, "This Shift in consciousness will "create a world beyond the dichotomy of war" meaning that this will indeed be the ear to end all wars," and " After a nuclear war mankind will simply "pick up the pieces" and start to all over again." Pro and I would likely be able to exchange countless rounds of sources making our respective cases. I would argue that an overwhelming amount of Pro's evidence comes from Caldwell and/or misleading/outdated research, though I feel it is important to put that aside for a moment. I could also note the clear differentiation in spelling and grammar between the two of our sets of arguments, but we can leave that for voters to decide in later rounds.Note: My argument in this round in no way is a concession that any of Pro's claims about the current state/capacity of our environment, the biological effects of nuclear war, the environmental implications of various fallout scenarios etc. are correct. Rather, I'd like to show that even if those were to be granted, there is nothing remotely resembling a guarantee that the consequent society would be superior to our current one. Since the Burden of Proof to show that the positive effects of "Global Nuclear War" outweigh the negative effects, I feel it should be incumbent upon them to show, irrefutably, that a world resulting from a nuclear holocaust would be better than the current state of affairs. Right off the bat, I would ask how we know who it is that is going to survive this nuclear holocaust. Are we going to corral the greatest thinkers, political scientists, and philosophers into the only safe bunker to ensure that those creating a new society are those best fit to not make the same mistakes as past civilizations? "Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it," as it is said. Pro claims that those who survive will have a new "mind set" but by what mechanism would this be achieved or even likely? I don't think any educated person would suppose that a majority of this world's citizens would be fit to effectively rebuild a "better" society (whatever that means) than we live in today. If the group of people that survives are proportionately representative of the current population, who is to say the same evolution won't take place? Pro states, "A minimal-regret strategy offers a way to do things differently." As I said, I am choosing to neither refute nor affirm their specious arguments in this round, but rather ask they fulfill the BoP in helping voters understand in what way it is certain that a surviving population make use of, let alone even be familiar with a minimal-regret strategy. Humans are the only species to hunt and kill just for fun rather than survival. What is to be made of that?Tangentially, "minimal-regret" isn't even the name of a leading forms of decision making in decision theory (see: minimax, maximax, and maximin (and sometimes Expected Value and Iterated Removal) - University of Oxford, Richland College). But that is neither here nor there.On to some scholars:Every civilization that’s ever existed has collapsed. This suggests that while humans have variable potential natures subject to ongoing biological and cultural evolutionary processes, the emergent dynamic of human behavior seems to always be the same, which is expansion until collapse. I have a basic hypothesis as to why that might be so. The point in stating the hypothesis is really to frame the problem as fundamentally as possible so that mitigating solutions can be properly focused. The basic idea is that exploiters will always emerge – somewhere – in the global population. As a thought experiment, imagine a world where systems were indefinitely sustainable, and the current global population was cooperative in maintaining this sustainability. Given inherent genetic and environmental variability, however, as well as the fact that the environment itself can undergo changes that are both locally and/or globally catastrophic (e.g. earthquakes and large volcanic eruptions), the emergence of people who are exploitive in nature will always naturally emerge. And such exploitation would beget ever-greater exploitation over time, until we reach the state of collapse once again. This is because exploitation involves the hoarding of surplus and the manipulation of exploited people to produce this surplus. And once such dynamics begin, they only give the exploiters more resources and technology with which to accelerate the exploitation process. Exploitation inevitably leads to growth in other words. This exploitation could develop from a sustainable cooperative state in a number of ways, from the generational erosion and conversion of sustainable mechanisms to selfish ones, to bands of raiders pillaging the countryside after losing their home to an environmental catastrophe. This dynamic seems impossible to keep from developing. The only possible solutions would be to somehow change Homo Sapiens themselves (impossible), or build sufficient immunization into what necessarily must be a global system on some level, otherwise the development of an exploitive culture in one area of the world entails the demise of sustainable cultures elsewhere. If we can’t reach sufficient technological sophistication to mitigate the more catastrophic existential risks, such as asteroid strikes, then our extinction is also eventually entailed. We had once chance with oil to make ourselves secure, but instead we’ve almost destroyed ourselves with a resource that could have preserved us long-term. Now what? ("Human Nature", Ehrlich, Eric Hiatt)I love nature. We all do. How could it be otherwise? For tens and even hundreds of thousands of years, we as a species came of age through daily and intimate connection with the natural world. That propensity and need to connect - deeply and intimately - with nature is with us still. It's part of our human nature. If that's true - and I'm sure it's true, though the research evidence is only beginning to catch up to it - then why are we degrading and destroying nature at such an astonishingly quick pace? The partial answer I'd like to discuss here focuses on a problem that drives me half crazy. It's the problem of what I've called "environmental generational amnesia. (Peter H Kahn Jr., Ph.D.)Within anthropological and historical studies, there are 5 components that often accompany societal collapses: destratification, despecialization, decentralization, destructuralization, and depopulation. Other theories regarding social collapse include:Linking social/environmental dynamics - Modern social critics commonly interpret things like sedentary social behavior as symptomatic of societal decay, and link what appears to be laziness with the depletion of important non-renewable resources. However, many primitive cultures also have high degrees of leisure, so if that is a cause in one place it may not be in another—leisure or apparent laziness is then not a sufficient cause. (Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)Population pressure and mineral resource exhaustion - see Joseph Tainter or Frederick Jackson TurnerToynbee’s theory of decay - all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.And, finally, per Wikipedia, a quick list of societies that have collapsed over time:By reversion or simplification Akkadian Empire Hittite Empire Mycenaean Greece The Neo-Assyrian Empire Indus Valley Civilization Angkor civilization of the Khmer Empire Han and Tang Dynasty of China Western Roman Empire Izapa Maya, Classic Maya collapse Munhumutapa Empire Olmec By absorption Sumer by the Akkadian Empire Ancient Egypt by the Libyans, Nubians, Assyria, Babylonia, Persian rule, Greece, Ptolemaic Dynasty, and the Roman Empire Babylonia by the Hittites Etruscans by the Roman Republic Ancient Levant Classical Greece by the Roman Empire Dacians by the Roman Empire Eastern Roman Empire (Medieval Greek) of the Byzantines by the Arabs and Turks Modern North East Asian civilizations Qin, Song, Mongol and Qing China Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, ending with the Meiji Restoration Aztecs by the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire Incas by the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire By extinction or evacuation Cahokia Lost cities Norse colony on Greenland Original Polynesian civilization on Pitcairn Island Malden Island Flinders Island Carthaginian Empire In summation, I used this round's argument not to counter Pro's specific claims, though I am happy to do so in future rounds. I feel that, as illogical as his/her viewpoint may be, there may also be someone who has written on the subject in such a way that Pro can construe evidence or proof. Pro likely thinks the same of me. Rather, I used this round to show a flaw in the logic underlying the entirety of the argument, namely that given any post-apocalyptic world, there is no guarantee that a civilization would arise in which positive externalities have outweighed negative and society would be any better off than today.