1AC---Fusion

1AC---Leadership
Advantage 1 is leadership.
The tech race is now – China has doubled-down on their fusion advancement – it’s the
single technology undergirding their tech race, but it’s close now.
Hiller and Hua 7/8/24 [Jennifer is a reporter covering renewable energy, the emerging
electric-vehicle charging industry and the energy transition in the The Wall Street
Journal’s bureau in Houston, Sha is a former reporter in The Wall Street Journal's
Singapore bureau, where she covered China's climate, energy and science policy as well
as China-Europe relations, “China Outspends the U.S. on Fusion in the Race for Energy’s
Holy Grail,” The Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-us-fusion-
race-4452d3be, FYI - the diagram on how fusion works was omitted from the body of
the card (can be accessed at hyperlink)]RVP
A high-tech race is under way between the U.S. and China as both countries chase an elusive energy
source: fusion .

China is outspending the U.S ., completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion
consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies.
Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has 10 times as many
Ph.D.s in fusion science and engineering as the U.S.

The result is an increasing worry among American officials and scientists that an early U.S. lead is slipping away.
JP Allain, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said China is spending around $1.5 billion a year on fusion,
nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget. What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that
hundreds of U.S. fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy.

“They’re building our long-range plan,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”
Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if the country continues its current pace of spending and development, it will surpass
the U.S. and Europe’s magnetic fusion capabilities in three or four years.

Fusion has long been a clean-energy dream. The process of combining atoms is the same process that powers the sun, and
scientists hope to harness it to deliver almost-limitless energy. The technology faces daunting scientific and engineering hurdles, and some
experts consider it a mirage that will remain out of reach.

Though a scientific breakthrough on fusion could benefit all of humanity, some

in the U.S. fear it would give China a leg up in
a growing competition over energy resources as the U.S. and others try to shift more production and
supply chains within domestic borders.
China already has a fast-growing nuclear-technology industry and is building more conventional nuclear power plants than any other country.
The country’s nuclear-plant development will give it an advantage when commercial fusion is reached, according to a report released last
month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank with backers that include big tech
companies.

Nuclear fusion occurs when two light atomic nuclei merge to form a single heavier one. That process releases huge amounts of energy, no
carbon emissions and limited radioactivity—if someone can get it to work.
Scientists around the world are trying to figure out how to sustain fusion reactions and engineer a way to turn that energy into net power. The
U.S. leads on a technology that uses lasers to create fusion reactions, though magnetic fusion—using
magnetic fields to confine plasma—is where many experts expect commercialization first.
China’s fusion push

China is putting vast resources into chasing the abundant-energy dream. Crews in China break only around Lunar
New Year, according to scientists familiar with the efforts.

“They’re going to put a lot of human capital and a lot of money and a lot of organization around it. And the question will be, can they figure out
the technology?” said Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the largest private fusion company in the U.S., with
investors that include Bill Gates.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plasma Physics in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei in 2018 broke ground on a nearly 100-acre
magnetic fusion research and technology campus. The facility is expected to be completed next year but is already largely operational and
focused on industrializing the technology.

Late last year, China said it would form a new national fusion company, and said the state-owned Chinese National Nuclear Corp. would lead a
consortium of state-owned industrial firms and universities pursuing fusion energy. Among the largest efforts by a private Chinese company are
those of ENN, an energy conglomerate, which created a fusion division from scratch in 2018.

Since then, ENN has built two tokamaks, the machines where fusion can happen, using powerful magnets to hold plasma. ENN’s fusion work
isn’t well-understood outside of China and its pace of development would be difficult to replicate in the U.S. or Europe.

Fusion has seen a burst of interest from governments and private investors since August 2021. Investments
in fusion technology surged in 2022 after scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved “ignition”—a fusion
reaction that produced more energy than it consumed. The federal research lab has achieved the key milestone four times since.

The Biden administration in 2022 set a goal of achieving commercial fusion energy within a decade and requested $1 billion for fusion in its
recent budget proposal. Organizing a U.S. public-private fusion consortium, similar to a 1980s and ’90s semiconductor program, was a
suggestion discussed at a recent White House event. Some recent DOE awards were structured similarly to the way NASA has boosted the
commercial space industry.

China, Russia and the U.S. are among the 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, in France.

China, Russia and the U.S. are among the 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, in France.
Photo: Olga Maltseva/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Tammy Ma, lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, said the U.S. fusion budget of $790
million for the 2024 fiscal year, a 4% increase from the year prior, hasn’t been enough to keep pace with inflation. The sluggish growth has
meant fewer research grants and grant-funded positions available in U.S. graduate schools, Ma said.

Not clear who will win

The fusion world is full of frenemies who believe their technology and approach is the best to meet the
world’s energy needs. Most are collegial competitors with partnerships that spiderweb the globe. But
cooperation has been complicated by the increasingly adversarial relationship between China and the
West, especially the U.S.
China for decades has invested in raw materials and technologies that are key to the low-carbon transition. Many of those are also used by
fusion firms and researchers, including powerful magnets to hold plasmas in place and lithium, which can be used as a blanket layer around a
fusion reactor to absorb neutrons produced in plasmas, among other technologies.

Fusion scientists have swapped and shared information since the late 1950s, when countries began declassifying fusion energy research. China,
Russia and the U.S. are among the 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, in France.

Chinese scientists participate in international fusion conferences and seem most comfortable sharing
information through direct conversations, other scientists say, though language is an obstacle.
U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat and co-chair of Congress’s Fusion Energy Caucus, said that much U.S. fusion spending goes to legacy
programs, “not the cutting-edge stuff.”
“In China, from what we can tell, most of their billion and a half is actually going to build stuff that would
compete with Helion or Commonwealth Fusion,” Beyer said, referring to two of the largest private fusion firms in the U.S.
For decades, China had “almost nothing” of a fusion program, said Dennis Whyte, a professor of engineering at MIT, who for several years sat
on Chinese fusion advisory committees. It took China about 10 years to build a world-class fusion science program and national labs.

“It was almost like a flash that they were able to get there,” Whyte said. “ Don’t underestimate their capabilities about
coming up to speed.”

The U.S. has advantages with an entrepreneurial approach but needs better coordination between
private companies, universities and the government , similar to what was used in the 1950s to develop the nuclear
submarine program, Whyte said.

“It’s not clear to me who will win,” he said.

Chinese fusion technology is surging now guided by strategic weaponization of US

Department of Energy (DOE) demands. Only strengthened IPR protections solves - it
establishes key private capital for commercial fusion development.
Peter Behr, 2/27/24, E&E News by Politico, “Intellectual property rights hobble DOE fusion program,”
https://www.eenews.net/articles/intellectual-property-fights-hobble-doe-fusion-program/, mm

The moonshot U.S. program to accelerate fusion energy has struggled to get started, held up by disputes
over the federal government’s control of scientific discoveries by startup companies, according to several
people familiar with negotiations. Intellectual property rights have been at the center of months of talks between the
Department of Energy and eight fusion technology companies vying for multimillion-dollar federal grants. DOE
selected the participants in its “milestone” program last May on the condition that a company meet engineering
and scientific benchmarks on the way to designing a pilot fusion reactor. But after nine months, no technology
investment agreements have been announced, and the Biden administration is approaching two years since it rolled out its vision
for developing fusion power. “We’re still in active negotiations with the DOE, and it isn’t all ironed out yet. I can’t comment on specifics, but
negotiations are progressing,” said Andy Freeberg, head of communications for Seattle-based Zap Energy, one of the milestone program
participants. Several other program participants declined to comment. Backedby rare bipartisan support in Congress, the
administration aims to accelerate progress toward building one or more pilot reactors in the 2030s. The goal
is to show that the technical challenges of delivering fusion power at a commercial scale can be
overcome. Fusion mimics nuclear reactions inside stars. Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association, said he and the
participating fusion companies are confident the program will move ahead. Sources close to the program said a delay of months isn’t significant
since commercial fusion power is likely decades away. But they said it’s notable that DOE
and fusion-tech companies are
struggling to find common ground on the government’s right to own or share rights to fusion
breakthroughs, and that could affect future development. A DOE spokesperson declined to discuss the agency’s position
on federal rights to fusion discoveries. But leaders in the nascent fusion industry say the ability to own intellectual
property and benefit from any commercial success is critical . “That’s the bread and butter of what they
have that appeals to their investors,” said Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit information resource
about the technology. “For any technology startup, whether it’s in fusion or otherwise, the preservation and ongoing
ability to commercialize intellectual property is a crucial part of the value proposition for investors ,” said
Chris Kelsall, a former fusion company chief executive. He said his comments in an interview with E&E News are solely his own and not
expressed on behalf of or in relation to any former employer. “To continue providing regular rounds of capital
investment, investors want to know that a technology company’s secret sauce — the IP — remains
intact and that the company’s ability to derive future revenue from its core IP is not unduly compromised,” Kelsall said. The China factor The
technology agreements DOE and the companies are negotiating are special contracts . They’re more flexible
than the standard federal contracts concerning federal access to government-supported intellectual property. However , companies must
accept substantial federal involvement in technical and management operations , Colleen Nehl, a program
manager in DOE’s Office of Science, said at the annual meeting of Fusion Power Associates in December. The technology investment
agreement contracts give DOE maximum flexibility in negotiating terms, “but they take time,” she noted in her
presentation. “We need to get the terms right so the milestone program doesn’t have unintended negative consequences.” Protecting U.S.-
funded fusion secrets is part of the challenge. Congress is putting pressure is on the department to lead the way in fusion development. Both
the Energy Act of 2020 and the CHIPS and Sciences Act of 2022 stressed the priority. Further, members
of Congress say they fear
that China could win the race to dominate the science and technology through its own well-funded push
to build a large-scale fusion prototype by 2035. Fusion reactor research initially was based on collaboration, not competition.
In 1985, the U.S. and other nations joined to develop the giant ITER project, which stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor, in southern France. The U.S. and China have shared scientific findings in building the $22 billion test reactor aimed at achieving an
extended fusion plasma reaction. The reactor is currently scheduled to be turned on in 2025. That cooperative spirit had shifted by 2020 as
U.S.-China competition for technological supremacy became a top priority for the Trump administration and leaders of both parties in Congress.
A report that year by a top-level DOE advisory panel, and another in 2021 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
urged Congress to channel federal support into development of a fusion pilot plant to keep the U.S. in the running. “It
is imperative that
the U.S. strengthen partnerships in the private sector to accelerate the development of fusion power in
the U.S. and maintain a leadership position in the emerging fusion energy industry,” the DOE-appointed Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory
Committee stated. “In a sense, the
U.K. and China are beating us to the punch on our own plan for fusion energy
development,” Troy Carter, director of the Plasma Science and Technology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, told a
House panel in 2021. More governments are lining up behind their fusion entrepreneurs and state-backed developers. Japan and Germany
announced new government programs last year. Britain, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Canada have “serious advanced
contenders” in the new fusion quest, according to the Fusion Industry Association. “[For] the first time, we are seeing significant new public-
private partnership programs in key nations. Eighteen companies reported they were involved (or would soon be) in a public-private
partnership with government,” said a 2023 report by the industrial association. “Around the world, these programs are diverse in their aims
and funding levels, but there is a clear trend toward government interest in fusion.” Government support for fusion developers falls far behind
the private sector’s contribution. The association counted 43 active fusion companies, 25 of them in the U.S., which have raised nearly $6 billion
in private funding from individuals, venture capital groups and state-backed funds. Governments’ backing totals just $271 million. Congress
gave DOE $46 million for the first 18-month segment of the milestone program.

But, recent DOE access is already detering crucial investors from entering the industry,
driving bankruptcies across the sector.
Powers 24 [6/27/24, Mary B. Powers has reported on engineering and construction
issues in the global energy and environmental sectors for more than 30 years from
Washington, D.C. and Birmingham, Ala. , “Nuclear Fusion Pushes to Reach Commercial
Power Plant Stage,” ENR, https://www.enr.com/articles/58879-nuclear-fusion-pushes-
to-reach-commercial-power-plant-stage] HongruiH
Intellectual Property

The issue of government access to startup firms’ patents, trade secrets and other intellectual property
has been a controversial part of Energy Dept. funding deal talks with developers, executives told ENR on
background. They considered government demand for such information in certain circumstances too
onerous since it is core to a firm’s market valuation and investor support.

One battery technology firm the agency supported financially declared bankruptcy in 2021 and was
bought by a Chinese firm that took its intellectual property to China, said a Congressional Research
Service report. Terms of Milestone funding program contracts were not disclosed, but developer unease
remains, one executive told ENR. Rules also mandate a ban on non-U.S. based investors in participating companies.
The patent issue becomes more pronounced as more private investors, particularly big tech firms, back
fusion startups to secure a directed power source as more and larger data centers and added artificial
intelligence use escalate energy demand.

Even now, fusion power supply deals with major players such as Microsoft, Google and ChatGPT-maker
OpenAI have propelled developers to expedite timelines for prototypes and even full-size plants. Paul
Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison nuclear engineering department chair, says he is not confident firms will meet such deadlines but
expects breakthroughs in the 2030s with full commercialization in the 2040s. Scientific hurdles remain, but “engineering challenges are the long
pole in the tent,” he says.

Fusion is the lynchpin of great power competition---whoever gains the first-mover

advantage is guaranteed global dominance.
Zou ’24 [Chris Qihan; June 11; DC-based researcher on climate policy, geopolitics, and China; The
Diplomat, “China and the Race for Nuclear Fusion,” https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/china-and-the-
race-for-nuclear-fusion/]

A flurry of nuclear fusion legislation has mushroomed globally in the past few years. Within the United States, the
Department of Energy set out a 10-year plan in 2022, which includes an initiative that coordinates all fusion-related work under a single
program to streamline fusion research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) activities. Data from the International Atomic Energy Agency
indicates that there are 96 nuclear fusion pilot projects worldwide, with an additional 11 under construction and 29 planned. Most of them
emerged in the last two years.

Controlled nuclear fusion emulates the process that powers the sun, merging two lighter atomic nuclei into a heavier one under extreme
pressure and heat, releasing immense energy. This process is the exact opposite of nuclear fission, which involves splitting a nucleus into two
lighter ones and is the basic mechanism for power generation in nuclear power plants. Like nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is emission-free, but it
surpasses fission in one crucial aspect: It produces no long-term radioactive waste.

Utilizing two heavier hydrogen isotopes, abundant in seawater, nuclear fusion could provide humanity with an almost
inexhaustible energy source . The energy yield from nuclear fusion is also incredibly high : according to the
IAEA, fusion could generate four times more energy per unit of the weight of fuel than nuclear fission and
nearly 4 million times more energy than oil or coal. These advantages make nuclear fusion the celebrated “ Holy
Grail ” of 21st-century tech nological advancement .
Climate Crisis and Geopolitics Driving the Hype of Nuclear Fusion

The surging enthusiasm for nuclear fusion is driven by two goals: the urgent need to identify substantial,
low-carbon energy solutions to mitigate the climate crisis, and the strategic imperative to gain a
competitive advantage amid escalating geopolitical tensions .
In recent years, many countries have rolled out decarbonization plans outlining a path to net-zero emissions, which involves significant
decarbonization of power generation. In the U.S., the Biden administration set a target of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 and net zero by
2050. However, reaching this target would require a significant overhaul of power generation infrastructure.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook 2023” projects that the United States will continue relying heavily on coal
and natural gas for power generation until 2050. These projections raise concerns about the feasibility of achieving net-zero emissions by mid-
century.

In light of these challenges, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences suggested that the country should start the operation of its large-scale fusion
power generator around 2035 to 2040 to achieve net-zero emissions in the power sector by 2050. By incorporating nuclear fusion into the
energy mix, the United States could potentially overcome the obstacles posed by its current reliance on fossil fuels and make significant
progress toward achieving net-zero emissions in the power sector by 2050.
China faces an even more dire need to abate emissions in its energy mix. The country’s pledge to reach net zero by 2060 means that it must
either eliminate or neutralize emissions from its coal power sector by then. In 2023, coal still accounted for over half of China’s power mix.
Although China has made substantial progress in installing renewable power capacity with unmatched speed and scale, the variable nature of
renewable power, like solar and wind, poses new challenges for its grids. Intermittent power output from solar and wind, which varies daily and
seasonally due to changes in weather and sunlight, requires greater market flexibility and more adequate long-distance transmission systems.

If realized, nuclear fusion would produce power much more steadily and efficiently than solar or wind
while remaining emission-free . As a breakthrough clean energy technology, nuclear fusion could bridge
the gap in the global effort to decarbonize the power sector and help countries like China meet their ambitious climate
goals while navigating the complexities of transition ing away from fossil fuels.

In addition to its potential role in addressing climate change, nuclear fusion is another aspect of geopolitical
competition with far-reaching implications for the fight for dominance in this century. Energy has
long shaped international politics, building alliances and stoking rivalries . The past few years have seen
escalating geopolitical tensions , such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine , the Israel-Hamas conflict,
and a potential military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait. These disruptions are vivid reminders that a lack of
energy self-sufficiency can leave countries vulnerable to the whims of others . As a result, countries are
increasingly seeking to strengthen their energy independence and gain a tech nological edge in the
development of next-gen eration energy sources, and nuclear fusion precisely affords such an
opportunity.

As a net energy importer, China has long sought to curb its reliance on oil and gas by increasing clean energy production.
The country has been successful in building out a competitive manufacturing sector across clean energy industries through strong R&D
capabilities, manufacturing prowess, and effective supply chain vertical integration. Declaring that nuclear fusion has “ strategic
importance to economic development and national defense ,” China sees the field as the next frontier
to solidify leadership in clean energy tech nologies and strengthen energy security.
Since 2011, China has filed more patents in nuclear fusion technology supply chains than any other country, according to Nikkei. In 2023,
China’s fusion testing facility set a world record for the longest run time for a magnetic confinement fusion device, a crucial step toward
operation maintenance. It plans to construct a nuclear fusion reactor independently as a demo project and aims to commercialize nuclear
fusion on a large scale by 2050. Meanwhile, the country is assembling a growing cadre of scientists and engineers, with a goal of training 1,000
new fusion physicists to support this program.

China’s increasingly prominent leadership in clean tech supply chains has heightened concerns among developed countries, as demonstrated by
the new rounds of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle exports. The push toward nuclear fusion is taking place amidst the latest wave of green
industrial policy rush, as these countries are learning from past policies that allowed China to become a front-runner in strategic clean tech
industries.

Nuclear fusion has the potential to revolutionize the entire energy industry , combat climate change , and
meet the growing energy demand worldwide . The country that can effectively control the nuclear
energy sector can dominate the market through a virtually unlimited , clean, and cheap energy source
and possess an enormous first-mover advantage . With the rapid transition in the energy sector toward clean energy
sources, countries would be wise to bolster investment in nuclear fusion at this critical juncture .

Chinese expansion enshrines a new world order---existential pandemics, inequality,

terrorism, territorial revisionism, and WMD wars.
Wang ’19 [Fei-Ling; October 24; Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Ph.D. from
the University of Pennsylvania; The Cipher Brief, “The China Order: A Challenge for the U.S. and the
World,” https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/the-china-order-a-challenge-for-the-u-s-and-
the-world]

It is no longer hard to see that the rising power and the mounting pugnaciousness of the P eople’s R epublic of C hina (PRC) have
become a comprehensive challenge for the U nited S tates. China’s Machiavellian policies and actions at home
and abroad have turned an otherwise naturally complementary Sino-American economic relationship into a near zero-
sum , if not already a zero-sum, competition for market, jobs, technology, and financial primacy . Beijing now openly flexes
its new muscles in its neighborhood and beyond to resist, reduce, and replace American leadership and presence
everywhere possible, seeking to undermine the U.S.-led international economic order and American-
anchored collective security arrangements. The PRC has been burning billions, for example, hoping to replace the U.S. dollar
with the over-printed Chinese Renminbi (RMB). Extraordinarily heavy extraction of its own economy, the world’s second largest, and its
enormous foreign currency reserve resulting from the gross imbalance in U.S.-China trade have enabled the PRC to massively expand its
military. That military is already the world’s second largest; its navy, for example, is projected to soon surpass the U.S. Navy in fleet tonnage. At
the same time, massive but opaque spending sprees has allowed the PRC to actively procure power and proxies even inside the United States,
positioning Beijing to reshape international opinions and norms more easily than ever.

What is less known, perhaps, is that the rising PRC state also seeks an overhaul of the very world order that has
enabled the greatest advances of human civilization over the past few centuries – the Westphalian system of
nation-states . This world order was codified in the 17th century, expanded to a global scale in the 20th century, and now is in its post-
World War II and post-Cold War iteration — the so-called America-led L iberal I nternational O rder (LIO). The rise of Chinese
power, under the autocracy of the C hinese C ommunist P arty (CCP), is not just contesting U.S. national security and
American global leadership but also the existing world order . Never since the heyday of the Cold War has
the world seen such a full challenge to the U nited S tates and to the Westphalian system.

The CCP is leading the PRC toward a Chinese Dream of a world order in its own image, which I call the China Order . The China
Order is a millennia-old political tradition and ideology that mandates a unitary, authoritarian (often totalitarian), omnipotent
and omnipresent government for the whole known world . This alternative world order has had a variety of euphemisms in
the long history of China: from tinaxia yitong (unification of all under heaven) and shijie datong (world’s grand harmony) in the imperial past, to
Mao Zedong’s world solidarity for Communist revolution only forty years ago, to now Xi Jinping’s community of common human destiny. The
China Order has powerfully revived to guide rising PRC power, under the banner of a Chinese version of globalization, ingeniously taking
advantage of the various calls in our time for global governance to address transnational issues such as climate
change , inequality , epidemics , and terrorism .
This China Order is normatively and practically at fundamental odds with the LIO version of the Westphalia system that
enshrines comparison and competition among nations coexisting with equal sovereignty. The China Order has been widely
addictive to the powerful and ambitious in history, whether they have been ethnically Han or not. It has been highly effective in practice, in
great part because it became deeply legitimized and internalized in elite Chinese culture over many centuries. The China Order is now the sole
acceptable model of the world under the authoritarianism known as the Qin-Han polity that the PRC now practices. But under this world order,
as documented by The China Order (#ad), human civilization is socio-economically very suboptimal and hopelessly
stagnant , inevitably shortchanging the lives of just about everyone, especially nonelites, as the tragic and often catastrophic history of
Eastern Eurasia under the China Order before the nineteenth century amply demonstrates.

Since 1949, when the PRC restored traditional Chinese autocracy under the guise of imported Marxism-Leninism, the
CCP has been
ceaselessly and callously fighting its own people internally and the U nited S tates and American allies externally
to preserve its monopoly over power . Only sheer exhaustion and near collapse could force the CCP to slow
down and retreat , at home and abroad. External powers have influenced and facilitated the rise of PRC power, but have so far failed to
transform the Qin-Han autocracy and its China Order ideal, thus remaining unable to change Beijing’s world views and global pursuits. Various,
often false, rationalizations have justified the continuation of American/Western engagement with the PRC, which
has greatly enriched and enabled the CCP to persist in its consolidation of power . Beijing’s push for power is

nothing personal; it is a brand of authoritarianism just happens to be anchored in the remarkably persistent belief that
failing to achieve control over the whole known world would spell the loss of the “mandate of heaven”
and political extinction . Thus, the CCP is driven (or doomed) to methodically and opportunistically seek ever greater influence.

The rise of China , or more precisely the ever-greater power of the PRC state, represents a shift of the distribution and
concentration of power in the international system (conceptually known as power transition) and an effort to reorder
the units in the system and change the system’s governing norms . Chinese leaders have already openly
claimed that they are now moving to the center of the world stage, leading a revolutionary change in the
world order, upending the Peace of Westphalia established “four hundred years ago,” in the words of PRC leaders This
points to a systemic change of world politics and a choice for all of us at the grandest possible scale: a scale that could
reshape nations and redirect the path of human civilization . The PRC’s challenge is therefore greater than the struggle
between the two European ideologies of Capitalism and Communism. The confrontation between the U.S.-led LIO and the
PRC-dreamed China Order transcends these often vaguely defined civilizational clashes.

If the PRC challenge, the rise of an unscrupulous, ever more resourceful and determined PRC state, is not managed well and promptly, the
U nited S tates will have to face a much worse choice in the not too distant future between tragic capitulation and a desperate
war for its national security and world leadership and for the way in which humankind is organized worldwide. In the
age of many kinds of w eapons of m ass d estruction, this will be a harrowing decision.
Of course, one may argue that the grandiose China Dream of a China Order may be just another pretentious way for the CCP to invoke
traditional, nationalist, and populist ideals to justify its autocratic governance of the Chinese people forever, similar to the splendid slogans and
missions fabricated by many other dictators. Perhaps the highly insecure CCP leadership is fighting for its survival, not world domination.
However, words have consequences. Propaganda and dilution often greatly mesmerize and mislead the pretenders themselves. More
importantly, the CCP has been steadily following up its words with action and money for years (basically nonstop since
1949); it has just pledged over 10 times the total sum of the Marshall Plan (in today’s dollars) for its Belt and Road Initiative alone, for instance.

As the logic of the China Order dictates, the rising Chinese power will not stop short of unseating the U nited S tates
and reordering the world , unless Beijing’s Qin-Han polity is transformed and/or the ever richer and more powerful PRC is
checked. The alternatives, American capitulation or world war , are horrific to contemplate, but not necessarily
impossible. Unlike in Hollywood, the “good” guys do not always win necessarily in the real world. A mighty autocracy that tightly controls
one-fifth of humankind, willfully spends a disproportionately larger portion of the fruits of the world’s second largest economy, and vows (even
if only hypocritically) to reform and reorder the world under its leadership, is and will always be a mortal challenge to the national security of
the United States. America’s global position and way of life, world peace , and the overall world order all rest on how
the PRC challenge is managed—soon.

Falling back risks multiple escalation vectors---World War III.

Latham ’23 [Andrew and David Goldman; December 4; Wax Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum,
Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research; Professor of International Relations at
Macalester College, former Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament Fellow at the Canadian
Department of Foreign Affairs; Westminster Institute, “Are We Heading Towards World War III?”
https://westminster-institute.org/events/are-we-heading-towards-world-war-iii/]
If I can just suggest one way of thinking about this subject matter, you have status quo powers, such as the U nited S tates today, which
finds itself as the guarantor of world peace , and you have anti-status quo powers. Obviously, at the beginning of World War I,
Germany was an anti-status quo power, and very clearly in World War II it was. That was also the case in Asia where Japan was very much an
anti-status quo power. How helpful is it to think about it in these terms?

Now, sometimes the anti-status quo position is animated by an ideology, such as was the case in Nazi Germany, such as was the case in the
Soviet Union with the many proxy wars it sponsored. That way it becomes easier to identify the sources of instability, such as North Korea, such
as Iran, Russia, and China, and you call that an Axis, or come up with other names that you might wish to assign it. Is that a helpful perspective?
I mean, it is just a very basic observation.

Andrew Latham:

If I can just [interject], because we have been talking about this in class this very morning, in fact, the idea of a hegemon that is committed to a
world order, the rules-based international order, which until five minutes ago was called the liberal International order, but we do not call it
that anymore, the United States and its closest friends, allies, and partners that want to uphold that system; again, the United States built it in
1945, the Soviets contested it, the Soviets went away, it got globalized, China bought into it, now it might be someplace different. The notion of
revisionism, which Hitler’s Germany was guilty of, and the Kaiser’s Germany, and Japan, of course, on the eve of the Second World War was
also a revisionist power, they wanted to revise this, the international order, the rules, norms, and institutions that govern the way different
societies interact with each other.

Russia is revisionist, but Russia cannot even defeat Ukraine. If I were living in Ukraine, I would be worried about [Russia], but I do not and I am
not [worried]. They are not the Soviet Union. They have got fingers in various pies, in Syria and a little bit in Africa, but they are not going to
upend and overturn the existing rules based international order. Iran is interested in dominating the Persian Gulf region, which would be about
dominating a regional rules-based international order, and we have seen some balancing that has taken place there that has been kind of
upended by this Hamas Israel war, but we saw the Abraham Accords, we saw Israel and Saudi Arabia engaged in a kind of rapprochement
dance, and that was about balance of power politics.

The big question is China, and the big question is to what extent is China interested in upending and overturning a
rules-based international order that it benefited from and continues to benefit from, or to what extent is it merely trying to maximize its
power within that rules-based international order? I do not have a definitive answer, but I think it might be a little bit of both. China does not
want to be a rule taker anymore, it wants to be a rule maker , and a lot of privileges and power come along with being able to make

rules, and define norms , and construct institutions . But I do not think it really wants to overturn the entire rules-based
international order that it has benefited from so much. I just think it wants more influence and power within that system.

Now, the question then becomes how does the U.S. respond? If the U.S. goes all Cold War on this, then we have got a problem. Now, I do not
want to be naive here. I am not a naive person. If the US engages in prudent and careful balancing, if China gets a bit too big for its boots on this
particular issue, then just push back a little bit, but that is very different from containment. President Xi Jinping is forever banging on about how
the U.S. is trying to encircle and contain China, and I think that is where mis-analogizing and looking to the Cold War as the model for how we
deal with China today is actually a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

We are not going to bring down the People’s Republic of China. I told my students this morning, if 35 years ago, you went to whatever the
equivalent of Walmart was and you looked on all the shelves, nothing would say made in the USSR, maybe vodka if you were in a liquor store.
You cannot go to Walmart today and find anything but stuff that is made [in China], and not just the low-tech stuff, right, this is David’s point,
the high value-added stuff [is there] as well. We are in such a structurally different world that mis-analogizing and bringing that Cold War stuff
to bare just misunderstands what Beijing is, to use a language I do not really like to use, but what Beijing is up to, which I do not think is trying
to take over the world.

David Goldman:

Andrew, I think your point is right, that it depends on what situation we are looking at. In the S outh C hina S ea, China has been
aggressive and expansionist . It has asserted territorial rights over territory whose historical relationship to China is dubious at best,
and it has a few thousand CBs, or construction battalions, expanding little islands into little military bases. The Chinese view the
South China Sea as the Mare Nostrum, as their private lake, and they have been quite aggressive with the Philippines, with
Vietnam, and others in asserting those privileges in a way that we found disruptive, particularly because some of those countries, like
the Philippines, are allies of ours.
In the Middle East, where China has no historical relationship, China is very much a conservative power for a very simple reason. China in 2022
imported 53% of its oil from the Persian Gulf and the last thing China would like to see is a war that disrupts oil supplies flowing out of the
Persian Gulf. Whatever the Communist Party does, the Mandate of Heaven starts and stops with the prosperity of the Chinese people, and if
China were to engage in a foreign adventure which led to widespread economic hardships, say through a disruption of energy
supplies, that would be very deleterious to the political health of the Communist Party and its current leadership.

So it is my understanding that the Chinese, for example, in the current Gaza crisis have told the Iranians to stay out of it. They do not want a
wider war. Israel, of course, if Iran were to get involved, could retaliate by destroying Iran’s capacity to export oil. There are two major oil
terminals. It would take an afternoon’s bombing by Israel to shut that down, and China would be a big loser, so China is very much a
conservative power when it comes to its energy supplies.

For years it was a free rider on American dominance of the region. Ten years ago, the Chinese will tell you, they were perfectly happy to be the
number two power, let the United States put the boots on the ground and put the vessels in blue water, and take care of these problems, and
guarantee our energy. We are getting a free ride, and we love it. Now they will say look, the Americans have lost their appetite for intervention
in the Middle East, they fled from Afghanistan, they made a mess in Iraq and Syria and Libya, so we need to have some kind of presence. We
are not quite sure what we are supposed to do, but we will be doing more there.

I do not see China as a rogue power with respect to Iran, though of course it has the option to do so. China certainly made Pakistan a nuclear
power. It did so in order to pin India down, and it did that successfully. If China decided to really make trouble for the West, it could assist the
Iranian nuclear program. There is no indication that they have chosen that rogue path yet, and I hope they will not because it would be very
difficult to control the situation.

The Chinese, unlike the Russians, are incurious about how we barbarians govern ourselves. Their view is we have a meritocracy. The 93 million
member Communist Party of China is the world’s biggest and most efficient HR department. We promote talented people, we judge people by
scores and standardized exams, and then by performance in office. It is the best system in the world. You barbarians allow your voters to vote
for stupid people. It is a terrible system, so you know, what would we want to do with that?

And whether we are Democrats or authoritarians, they really do not care because they think we are so inferior to them nothing we come up
with would really work and it would be pointless to try to teach us to use the Chinese system because we do not have the cultural superiority to
do that.

Andrew Latham:

You know, [I have] a couple of points in response to that, which I generally agree with. When I was talking about China as not being a revisionist
power, I was talking about global norms and rules and institutions. China clearly wants to revise the border with India , for
example. It wants to assert the nine-dash line over and against the Philippines and Indonesia and all of the South China Sea players. It wants to
increasingly revise the very profitable fiction of one China, two systems with respect to Taiwan.

As China has gotten stronger, it does what great powers do. It is flexing its muscle in its immediate s phere o f i nfluence, if we
can call it that. Also, though, at the global level, I am not sure that it wants to upend and overturn that American built system. I think it wants to
maximize its influence within that, and then that raises the question of how the U.S. should respond, and my view there is that we can be
hubristic.

I used to teach, and still do in fact teach, a little bit of Greek tragedy. We can be hubristic and think that we are ever so righteous and ever so
capable that we can overreach in terms of trying to contain and control China in the South China Sea, elsewhere, or we can be prudent. I just
wrote a piece about prudent balancing. You do not have to check China everywhere. You do not have to blunt everything that China does.

We are going to have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that China is not going away, not for 70 years, 30 years, 100 years, whatever. It is
not going away. It is not the Soviet Union. It is not vulnerable in that way, and we simply have to come to grips with the fact we, the United
States, that China is a player, a powerful player, and we have got to figure out how we are to play the game with China in ways
that keep us short of a Cuban Missile Crisis/Able Archer.

If you know anything about those two events, we came this close to nuclear Armageddon on both of those. It was one Soviet
submarine officer who refused to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo at the American Fleet, even though he was told to do so, and then the Able
Archer story David just shared with us a little bit earlier. That is where containment gets us as a grand strategy, as opposed to prudent
balancing, which is we will deal with China. If they get a bit too big for their boots, we will push back a little bit here and there.

Based on my studies I just do not see China as really wanting to Sino form the entire planet. Oh, and the other thing I would say very, very
quickly is you would be surprised how many of my Chinese international students who are very bright, they come out of very good high schools,
A., do not want to go back, and, B., I probably should not even say this, are unbelievably critical of the culture and the regime in China.
So yeah, I get that there is a cultural predisposition to think that China is the center of the universe and the apex of culture, but there are a
whole bunch of dissidents. I guess we could put it that way too, that I encounter every day in my teaching, and I am not sure what to make of
that. I do not think it is actually a criticism or a push back, David, but I just I do not know how to fit that into the picture, quite.

David Goldman:

Well, I have argued on many occasions that we should do our best to pick off China’s best and brightest, their most creative innovators, and get
them here working for us. To some extent we have already done that. Nvidia might be our best chip design company, and of course, Jensen
Wong is Taiwanese, ethnically Chinese. And it may be like the joke that Churchill’s military aide told about why we won World War II, because
our German scientists were better than their German scientists. So perhaps our Chinese engineers will be better than their Chinese engineers.

I agree about prudence. I am very much opposed to the way containment is presented, so I am very much in your camp on that. The Taiwan
issue deserves special mention as an existential issue for China. There are issues that, you know, you can take or leave as a great power. They
are things that you may want, and if you do not get them, it is not the end of the world.

Why is Taiwan such a potential trigger?

From China’s standpoint it is important for us to remember that China is not a nation state, it is an empire with six major language groups and
200 dialects. China’s method of expansion is the opposite of the United States where we have a melting pot. Immigrants come here, they learn
the culture, at least they used to be taught an American perspective on politics and the world. Their children typically do not learn the old
country language and we assimilate people, or at least we used to assimilate people when we believed in ourselves.

The Chinese do not assimilate in the same way. You learn to write the characters, but you speak whatever dialect you want, you worship
whatever God you want, you maintain your own festivals, your own culture. China has the remnants of hundreds of tribes and clans and
nations, preserved as it were in amber in the Chinese imperial system, but they are not dead.

The recurring tragedy of Chinese history has been a breakup of the empire with different nationalities within the Empire fighting each other,
often with a help of foreign intervention, so the emperor in Beijing, whoever he might be, whether he calls himself communist or Confucian,
lives in terror of a renegade province setting a precedent for other renegade provinces. It is not simply the matter of honor, the 24 million
ethnic Chinese sitting in Taiwan whom Xi Jinping wants to unite with the motherland.

The Chinese Communist Party, with some justification, views attempts to push Taiwan towards sovereignty as the beginning of an effort to
destabilize and break up China on the model that has plagued China so many times in the past, and that in my belief, in my view, is why China
will go to war over Taiwan.
As a footnote, at San Francisco, what Xi Jinping demanded from the Biden administration and got was an unambiguous statement that the
United States opposes Taiwanese independence. That was given by Kirby, the White House Press spokesman, in return for reestablishing the
hotline.

Andrew Latham:

I agree with that. I would layer on top of that that I think that ever since the Nationalist period, let alone the communist period, the imagined
China as a nation state has always been the maximum extent of the Chinese Empire, which as we know has contracted and expanded and
broken up, but it is imagined in ways that necessarily include Taiwan, which only became part of any Chinese Empire in the 1640s and was
conquered and colonized. Talk about settler colonialism.

But in the imagination of both the nationalists, and then the communist regime inherited these ideas, this is where China naturally begins and
ends, in the same way that Maine is part of the United States, that is just the way the U.S. is, Taiwan is part of this. And when you think that
part of the legitimating ideology of the post-Mao regimes, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, and all that gang, has been
nationalism, you can see how the legitimacy of the regime is tied into pursuing these nationalist ends, of recovering all of the historical Chinese
territory.

Now, as everybody knows, the Taiwan issue for most of that post-Cold War era was simply put on the back burner. There was a lot of cross
strait trade, everybody was making money, [and] everybody was happy. China was plugging into the World Trade Organization. They never
gave up the claim, but it was put on the back burner, and now it is on the front burner again since Xi Jinping has come to power, because of the
sort of intensification of, I think, this nationalist ideology, that this is simply part of China.

And they are looking at it, and they are seeing the Taiwanese population, increasingly as the old guys die, they do not think of themselves as
Chinese. Their identity is Taiwanese, and to the extent that that gets translated into an independence movement, you can see that the useful
fiction of One China, two systems is increasingly hard to maintain.

Now, do not get me wrong, I am not on Beijing’s side on this. I think the Taiwanese people can decide for themselves, but then to actually,
David, as you just pointed out, actually get the U.S. to do something which they have not done before, which is concede, which is to weigh in
and say Taiwan should never declare independence, that has kind of been implicit, but it has never been fully explicitly articulated. That was a
big concession that they made.

David Goldman:

It was indeed, and I think there is a concrete reason for it. The only other thing I would add to the long-term view that you mentioned, Andrew,
is that Taiwan has, next to South Korea, the lowest birth rate of any industrial country in the world, so over the course of the century its
working age population will drop by about 75% at current rates, so that situation will kind of fix itself. Well, that will be the end of Taiwan as an
important entity. And if we simply weigh it out, the problem will go away.

One key element of this picture, and one of the reasons that the asymmetry in our military position with regard to China is a risk, is that China
has spent massive amounts of effort developing a formidable coastal defense. Reading the last two Pentagon assessments of the Chinese
military, I think there is a consensus now in the U.S. military that China, with its thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and highly improved
satellite guidance systems, can basically destroy anything on the surface of the sea within a thousand miles or more of its coastline.

My old friend, Elbridge Colby, writes scenarios about how to stop a D-Day style invasion, presuming that China would send World War II style
landing crafts the 70 miles across the Taiwan strait to invade. I think that is the wrong way to look at it. What China would do in the event of
war is exactly what it demonstrated to us when Nancy Pelosi went there last year. They basically blockaded the island for 48 hours. Taiwan
produces none of its own energy, and its storage tanks can hold 11 days’ worth of natural gas, so the place would shut down in a blockade.

China also has close to a thousand fourth and fifth gen eration aircraft. How good they are we do not know because they
have never fought anything real, but you have to assume they are not entirely worthless. It has got about 50 diesel electric submarines and very
good electronic warfare capability, so I believe that the assessment of the U.S. military is that given
the current state of the U.S.
Navy and air and sea lift capability, we do not want to get into a scrap with China right now. We are simply not prepared for
it, and that strongly motivated the United States to ask the Chinese to reinstate the hotline and also motivated the Biden administration to
make what, as you point out, is an extraordinary concession.

It was prefigured by Governor Gavin Newsom of California going to Beijing on October 25th and making exactly the same statement. He said I
oppose Taiwanese independence. [That was a] remarkable thing for a U.S. governor to do. Why does he care? What does California think about
Taiwanese independence? But he did so, I believe he did that as a gesture to Xi Jinping prior to the San Francisco Summit in preparation for it. It
was followed up exactly as you said, by an extraordinary gesture, and that gesture, I think, as I said, is motivated by a really big change in the
military balance between America’s forward deployment in the western Pacific and China’s coastal defense.

Andrew Latham:

Yeah, I think you are absolutely right, that military balance piece is crucial, and it manifests in all kinds of ways. China now has more hulls, naval
vessels than the United States. They are not as good, but there is more of them, and as a brown water navy, it is very capable. They have anti-
ship ballistic missiles. They have got hypersonics that really cannot be shot down at this point. they lead the U.S. in that
hypersonic missile technology. I was just reading this morning about how there is an underwater network sensor that obviates the American
submarine advantage. The American sub marine s used to be invisible. You were talking about how surface combatants. They used
to be invisible. That is not the case anymore.

So when we look at that military balance , it is shifting in ways that do not favor the United States. Now, China has no power
projection capabilities. It does not have 11 carrier strike groups deployed across the whole planet , but in its backyard, with
respect to Taiwan and the South China Sea, there is no way in which [the U.S. could easily overcome a Chinese blockade
of Taiwan]. Any American administration would be loathed to engage.

But imagine what would happen if Beijing got serious about blockading Taiwan, not in a fit of anger and pique because Nancy Pelosi took a
delegation there, but as a serious way of changing the status quo. What would the U.S. do? Would it try to run the blockade? Would it try to
break the blockade? Would it escort ships? And you can imagine the scope for accidents to happen, right, as the Chinese
Maritime militia, the PLA, Navy, etc. are performing this crusade. What happens if the U.S. tries to run it?
David Goldman:

Yeah, I think what the Chinese would do in that case is to sink an oil tanker or a natural gas carrier. All they have to do is shoot one, let alone
sink it, and the insurance companies would make it impossible for anyone else to do that. And then our probable response would be to
blockade oil going to China from the Persian Gulf going through the Strait of Malacca, which you could easily do, the Chinese have no blue
water capability, and then we would have an immediate global economic crash . There would be no energy going to the Pacific.
China, in terms of BTUs, produces 80% of its energy mainly through coal, some through nuclear, and they have a substantial amount of oil, so
they would have a 20% decline in energy consumption immediately. Japan and Taiwan and South Korea would have a virtually 100% decline,
and the overall effect would be to crash the world economy and ruin us all, so it would be a standoff.

China under an authoritarian regime could hold out against a blockade. People would eat rice and pancakes. They would not eat a lot of pork
and chicken, but they can produce enough calories and enough BTUs to hold out, whereas our allies in Asia cannot, so as you spin this scenario,
it just would be a catastrophic mess that would hurt everybody, so I think everyone would think twice before doing it. And as people spun out
their scenarios, I think the Biden Administration and the Pentagon decided that the better part of valor was to give China the assurance against
Taiwanese independence.

Andrew Latham:

Yeah, a variation on mutually assured destruction from the Cold War, not nuclear but economic.

David Goldman:

Yes.

Robert R. Reilly:

If I could just mention one item regarding Taiwan, it is its geostrategic significance. It certainly was significant enough to Japan that they
occupied it for 50 years and the Nationalist government got Taiwan just in time to flee there when the Communists won the civil war. And as
you both know, communist China has never exercised power over Taiwan.

Now, it has not lost that significance to Japan, which is extremely worried if China breaks through that first island chain, that they would have a
very hard time protecting their eastern flank, and I think recently Japan sent some military forces to one of the Senkaku Islands to demonstrate
their claim to sovereignty over them and maybe to indicate to China that Japan would fight if China made aggressive moves to occupy those
islands.

Now, you mentioned that China keeps thinking that the United States is trying to contain it. It is not hard to imagine why they would think that
way, because we do not want them to break out of that first island chain, which of course makes the defense of the Philippines a huge problem,
and whereas President Biden made that concessionary remark against any Taiwanese independence, he also made very clear within days that
the United States would stand by its defense commitments to the Philippines.

And it seems to me, Andrew, that the chance of something very bad happening from the aggressive way in which the
Chinese have been behaving in the South China Sea is fairly large , as they continue to insist now that they are exercising sovereignty
and send ships and planes to challenge what they consider foreign powers impinging on their sovereign territory. That is very hard for me to
see how that is not going to lead to a conflict at some point, though certainly they probably know everything David has just pointed out. It
would be a disaster for them. It would be a global disaster.

If I could just quickly mention Russia, which appropriately enough David said, is an economy the size of Italy’s, though it is very well suited to
producing war material, so the worry is not so much Russia by itself but some cooperation between these powers, particularly between Russia
and China. For many, many years you know that the United States had a policy of fighting two wars at once and prevailing in both of them. That
policy is nowhere on the horizon now, and the greatest challenge to the United States would be a two-front war. How would we possibly win
that?

And then my last point is it is not simply a matter of counting the ships or the hypersonic missiles, it is the character of the people who would
be using them, as Hitler misjudged, as the Japanese themselves misjudged the character of the American people, as Hitler said because of silly
beauty pageants and other ephemera that he really did not worry about going to war with us. Japan calculated a little differently, particularly in
light of the issues David mentions in respect to China, President Roosevelt put an oil and steel embargo on Japan, which it needed. I forget –
they had maybe a year’s supply of oil and then everything would go dark.

I understand that these powers, first of all, want to assert regional hegemony, but are their mutual interests strong enough to create a two-
front challenge for the United States, for which it is not prepared, for which it does not even have the weapons to prevail, and which it may no
longer have the willpower to pursue. At least the Chinese have made that judgment that we do not [have the will].

Andrew Latham:

Well, I would say two things quickly in response, one of which is the U.S. cannot even sustain Ukraine and Israel at the moment, and those are
two half wars rather than full wars, from an American perspective. And then the other thing I would say is that when you get great powers
competing in various regions, there is going to be friction, and one element of that friction, often, if the stakes are high enough, is the game of
chicken, and the game of chicken is a very dangerous game to play when we are talking about not cars but we are talking about warships and
aircraft and whatnot.
I think if there is going to be a third world war , it is likely to start that way, it is likely to resemble the First World War
rather than the Second World War. I mean, who thought that a Serbian nationalist killing an Austrian Archduke was going to spiral out of
control the way it did? And I see some scope for that. What I do not see is the kind of deliberate, military attempt to overturn, really, a global
order, that Hitler was engaged in. I do not see that in the offing. I see escalation spiraling out of control, accidents , and that is
why I think reestablishing the military-to-military communication was really an important development, because it does not eliminate that
possibility, but it certainly dials it down substantially. You can actually try the hotline. You can try to talk it through.

And the last point, the final point I would make very, very quickly, is I just do not think, despite their protestations after the Olympics and
before the invasion of Ukraine, that this was an undying friendship, and they were totally committed, and their friendship knew no limits, Russia
and China. I do not see it playing out quite that way. I think China has been very measured and guarded with respect to its support for Russia in
its war. I do not think this is a friendship that knows no limits or bounds, however they characterized it.

David Goldman:

As in the case of Gaza, China was not particularly happy about the Ukraine war. Ukraine was the first country that signed up for the Belt and
Road initiative. China was the biggest foreign investor in Ukraine. China’s imperial model is everybody pays tribute to the emperor, takes
orders, and tries to make money for their family, and keeps their mouth shut. They have an inherent antipathy to nationalism, so they were not
at all pleased about the Ukraine war.

I think they sympathized to some extent with the Russian position, and they certainly exploited it to become Russia’s biggest trading partner.
You cannot buy a European car in Moscow. You can only buy Chinese cars. China’s official exports to Russia have tripled. This has been a
bonanza for them. But I agree with Andrew, they were not thrilled about it and they certainly were not the provocateurs in the Ukraine war.

Going back to Andrew’s point about the causes of World War I, I think that is a key contrast with the current situation. Ultimately, if China’s
main economic expansion is going to be what I call the Sino forming of the Global South, using their expertise in infrastructure, and lifting
people out of absolute poverty, and repeating that experiment in lots of developing countries, that is not necessarily bad for us. We do not
have a deep strategic interest in Indonesia or even in Brazil, despite the Monroe Doctrine, and if that is where China is going to concentrate its
efforts, that ultimately is not harmful for us. We do not have that kind of existential tension with China that, say, Germany and Russia had with
each other, or even Germany and England in 1914.

However, I think that the imbalance that has developed between China and the United States militarily is inherently destabilizing. It could lead
towards Chinese arrogance and aggressiveness and adventurism . I am very much a believer in balance of power, so what
I would like to see the U nited S tates do is to look at China’s breakout into major high-tech military power status and respond
by doing better.

Independently, the process of developing fusion breaks path dependency on nuclear

norms and creates momentum for global arms control, instilling a global peace and
revitalizing international diplomacy.
Carayannis ’22 [Elias, John Draper, Balwant Bhaneja; December; Professor of Science, Technology,
Innovation and Entrepreneurship at George Washington University, PhD in management of technology;
Nonkilling Economics and Business Research Committee, Center for Global Nonkilling and Visiting
Professor in Public Administration with the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute; Center for
Global Nonkilling; Peace and Conflict Studies, “Fusion Energy for Peacebuilding: A Trinity Test-Level
Critical Juncture,” Vol. 29, No. 1]

Given these developments, as with the original Baruch Plan, the

fusion burning plasma breakthrough creates the
opportunity for a new nuc lear normative order , a new Baruch Plan, this time based on fusion energy while likewise
being oriented towards perpetual peace . Path dependence indicates, as with the Baruch Plan and the Montreal Protocol, this
would be a hybridized approach, an innovative specialized policy framework relying upon the external legitimacy of the IAEA, followed by the
U.N., and supported by the IAEA. It would be tasked with accelerating the development of fusion energy; ensuring co-development by the
Global South in pursuit of a “Future Fusion Economy” that is both competitive with, and complementary to, renewables; and applying it to the
grand challenges of climate change, energy for all, and peace, via its accelerated commercialization (Carayannis et al., 2020a; Carayannis et al.,
2020b; Carayannis et al., 2022).
If such a framework can be designed and realized, developing fusion energy will mitigate against conflict . As with the
original Baruch Plan, incentivization is critical . Beginning with the Global South, G77 co-development of fusion energy
through funding around 6-10 competing public- and private-sector cost-sharing DEMO projects up to the sum of around 30
billion dollars over two decades via their sovereign wealth funds lessens the risk of fusion energy’s accelerated arrival
destabilizing their econ omies. It achieves this via the Global Commission to Accelerate Fusion Energy providing them with a stake in
the new fusion-based Future Fusion Economy through co-ownership of core fusion energy patents, insuring them against fusion competing with
fossil fuels (see Suggested ToR for Global Commission to Accelerate Fusion Energy and Technical Annexes, available at the OSF Storage data
repository: https://osf.io/hqzak).

For the West, several of their most advanced public- and private-sector fusion DEMOphase projects, like the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production project, or TAE Technologies’ project in the U.S., could be
effectively funded to continuously innovate and engineer fusion reactors. Moreover, co-development grows the market more rapidly as Global
South countries not only have a financial stake in sales but also have sufficient knowledge to build and operate their own fusion reactors. This
agreement would benefit both the Global South and the mainly Western global fusion innovation ecosystem, like the U.K.’s South West Nuclear
Hub. G77 co-ownership of patents would also benefit the global innovation ecosystem, as third-party countries would be less likely to reverse
engineer and sell technology to Global South countries that those same countries co-owned.

Finally, in that the global commission would establish ownership of fusion IP and implement a robust sanctions mechanism for breaches of
patents, a regime will be established whereby core patents held by Western companies could be securely licensed to China. SinoU.S. relations
should then improve as a new baseline for technological cooperation is developed and implemented, a return to the pathfinding element of
fusion as a clean energy technology and basis for science diplomacy (Claessens, 2020). Revisiting the example of the Spratly Islands, the
accelerated arrival and commercialization of fusion power in the 2030’s2040’s to contribute to transitioning from fossil fuels (National
Academies, 2021) would mean a railgun-powered military conflict over the islands would lack political utility. The most dangerous period
between the deployment of railgun weapon systems in the 2020s and the burning plasma in the 2030s-2040s, when military planners begin
contemplating a fusionpowered railgun arms race, would be governed by work towards the new nuclear order.

In situating NKGPS within the QHFIE framework, we have resurrected the U.S. goal, embodied in the U.N. and in the Baruch Plan, as well as in
the Atoms for Peace program and in the ITER project, of a demilitarized world with access to inexpensive energy (Carayannis & Draper, 2021).
The fusion energy critical juncture will introduce a genuine scientific paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970), a term
typically overused in the literature but appropriate here as conflict over fossil fuel resources could, within this century,
subside . Given so much U.S. fo reign po licy is geared towards a culture of war in large part due to the
securitization of fossil fuel energy (Marsella, 2011), much U.S. domestic and fo reign policy could then
shift from a killing-prone nature to a killing-avoiding one within the unfolding fan of nonkilling alternatives. This

could result in demilitarizing other societies. Demilitarizing would mean increased funding for public infrastructure and
services, enabling the U.S. to revisit welfare reforms abandoned during the rise of its military industrial complex (Hooks & McQueen, 2010).
Further, demilitarizing does not present an existential threat to the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) (LeLoup, 2008). The
MICC can re-purpose itself for a post-fusion world, towards domestic and foreign aid to coordinate a global Fusion for Peace program to
address energy for all and climate change, to ensure planetary defense (National Science and Technology Council, 2018), and to conduct space
exploration (Dawson, 2017).

In terms of Paige’s funnel of killing, preventing fusion-powered weaponry primarily requires action at the level of the structural reinforcement
zone, where socioeconomic arguments, institutions, and material means predispose and support a discourse of killing (Evans Pim, 2012, p. 116,
citing Paige, 2009, p. 76). Motlagh (2012, pp. 103–5) states that images of perpetual peace and weapon-free zones matter, as do actions like
removing economic support for lethality and protecting human rights. In the U.S., the basic Kantian concept of perpetual peace (Kant, 2003; see
Terminski, 2010) translated into President Roosevelt’s human security paradigm, as embodied in the 1941 State of the Union address (the Four
Freedoms Speech; see Kennedy, 1999) and then eventually into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. General
Assembly on December 10, 1948 as Resolution 217, in its 183rd session. Following Motlagh, we emphasize protecting the environment and the
ecological responsibility of humanity to manage the planet’s climate responsibly in the Anthropocene Era. Consequently, addressing
climate change via our hybridized specialist fusion governance instrument, the global commission, also serves as an
inspiration for peacebuilding .

A strategic North-South partnership on developing fusion energy that re-engages the U.S. and China in science and energy diplomacy should
also stimulate negotiations to use fusion energy for solely peaceful purposes. At the time of the original Baruch
Plan, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, divided by ideological differences, lacked a common language for negotiations. We suggest that negotiations via
the Global Commission for Urgent Action on Fusion Energy would start to create that common language . They would lead
to a new Baruch Plan via a technical report and business prospectus that employ the NKGPS peacebuilding , life-
affirming paradigm of nonkilling , as a science-based philosophy of survival through coop eration that
advocates pursuing mutually beneficial goals to overcome deadly antagonisms . This is possible because NKGPS
specifically emphasizes that “science provides knowledge for liberation from lethality” and advocates humanity adopting multiple peace-
bringing big science projects (Paige, 1996, p. 9).

innovation diplomacy required to rapidly develop and direct fusion energy for peaceful ends
In other regards, the North-South
would essentially revisit the same basic philosophical arguments regarding realizing perpetual peace that were triggered
by the Trinity Test critical juncture, provoking the U.N. normative global governance regime. Once again, a completely novel nuclear energy
source will emerge that could be militarized. Once again, there will be a momentous opportunity for peacebuilding,
involving the U.S. and the West , the Global South , and China . And once again, the U.S. will be challenged to provide
global leadership. Its incentive will be the possibility of revitalizing the flagging Washington consensus -based
approach to global development (Löfflman, 2019), fueled by a Fusion for Peace program through a Universal
Global Peace Treaty , a successor to the world’s first Global Ceasefire , called as a response to Covid-19 (Gifkins &
Docherty, 2020). A UGPT could rejuvenate the U.N. System in permitting humanity the opportunity to live
without fear, or at least with less fear, while utilizing fusion power to help address climate change and achieve the U.N.
Sustainable Development Goal of energy for all, whiling reaching for other goals , like the colonization of space,
facilitated by fusion drives (United States Department of Energy, 2021).

Otherwise, unraveling of international cooperation and arms control make the third
nuclear age inevitable.
Aylward ’24 [Mary Kate, Peter Engelke, Uri Friedman, and Paul Kielstra; Atlantic Council, publications
editor for the Atlantic Council’s editorial team; Senior Fellow, Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center; senior editorial director at the Atlantic Council;
Atlantic Council journalist; **Global Foresight survey citing survey data of 288 expert forecasters;
“Welcome to 2034: What the world could look like in 10 years, according to nearly 300 experts,”
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/welcome-to-
2034-what-the-world-could-look-like-in-ten-years-according-to-nearly-300-experts/#nuclear]

We appear to be entering a third nuc lear age following those that occurred during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
And a lack of international governance is likely to be one of the new nuclear age’s defining features, as
geopolitic al competition intensifies and nuc lear arms-control treaties unravel . What happens when the
guardrails for limiting the buildup, spread, and use of nuclear weapons are removed?

A huge majority of respondents foresees proliferation: Eighty-four percent say that at least one currently non-nuclear state will obtain these
weapons by 2034. The most likely country, cited by 73 percent of experts, is Iran , but considerable numbers also expect Saudi Arabia
(40 percent), So uth Ko rea (25 percent), and Japan (19 percent) to join the nuc lear club . These numbers are similar to the
results from last year’s survey, but one difference is worrying. In the survey conducted at the end of 2022, on average respondents thought that
1.4 new actors would have nuclear weapons within a decade. This has now risen to 1.7. Though this may seem like a small increase, it suggests
that compared with 2022, experts now believe nuc lear weapon s will spread more quickly —about 21 percent more
quickly, in fact.

<<FIGURE OMMITTED>>
When asked about which actors they expect to actually use a nuc lear weapon within the next ten years, 20 percent of our
experts said a terro rist group —up from just 3 percent last year. In this year’s survey we included terrorist groups explicitly among
our multiple-choice options whereas in last year’s we included a more general “other state or a non-state actor” option, which may account for
some of the year-over-year difference. But the fact that one in five respondents is forecasting such an alarming scenario is still noteworthy and
concerning. Around 14 percent of respondents expect Russia to use a nuclear weapon by 2024, while roughly 15 percent forecast that North
Korea will do so. But on a more positive note: More than 60 percent of respondents believe nuclear weapons won’t be used over the coming
decade.

International cooperation solves a laundry list of existential threats.

Burns ’20 [Nicholas; July/August; Goodman Family professor of the practice of diplomacy and
international relations, is chair of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Transatlantic Relations,
director of the Future of Diplomacy Project, and a co-leader of the American Secretaries of State Project;
Harvard Magazine, “The Indispensable Power,” https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/features-
forum-indispensable-power]

Diplomacy has never been so important as now, when we are confronting the most serious crises
since the Second World War: the global pandemic and econ omic collapse .
When we emerge finally from the grip of the coronavirus, Americans will need to account for a public-health disaster that has killed well over
100,000 people to date and shuttered nearly every institution in our society (including Harvard) for much of the spring and into the summer.

But we’ll also need to look beyond our borders to assess what went wrong globally. Why did the World Health Organization—its long and
continuing record of expertise in matters of global health notwithstanding—not press China more aggressively to tell the truth about the virus
in early January? How should nations be better prepared for a possible second wave? Can they agree to share a vaccine equitably among the
world’s 7.7 billion people? Will the major economies collaborate to prevent the current recession from turning into another Great Depression?
The answer to these questions will depend in large measure on our ability to work diplomatically across the world in this multi-front struggle.

As a former career Foreign Service officer, I have spent four decades of my professional life representing the United States overseas and
teaching about America’s role as the indispensable power in the international arena. For much of that time, the nation leaned heavily on its
unmatched military might—during the Cold War, after 9/11, and in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Now, with the spread of the coronavirus to every
inhabited continent, diplomacy ’s time has come in the re construction of a more stable and better world .
Unfortunately, restoring the role of U.S. diplomacy won’t be easy. One early casualty of the pandemic is our plummeting credibility as the
unmatched global power. For the first time since World War II, America has chosen not to lead in confronting a quintessentially global threat.
With American energy and confidence in short supply, President Donald Trump is a spectral figure on the world stage as nations struggle to
contain the virus. Instead of leading the G-20 major economies against the contagion, the world has watched an American president castigate
China for birthing the “Wuhan Virus,” pin the blame for the failed response on the World Health Organization, and—as one of my European
students lamented—fail even to offer a simple word of sympathy in all those endless news conferences to those dying in Italy and Spain and
other bedrock allies.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has long maintained that America should place its diplomats out in front (“on point” in the military
vernacular), with the armed forces in reserve, to be used only when diplomacy fails. Powell’s dictum is an important reminder of how the
United States should seek to lead in this time of pandemic, for the coronavirus is only one of many among a new type of threat that requires us
to lead as much through the power of diplomacy as through that of the military.

Many of the students I teach point to transnational threats that affect every nation and person on earth as our greatest
challenges: climate change, food and water shortages, narcotics and crime cartels , the lack of cyber security , and
pandemics top the list. We cannot succeed in contain ing them without forming diplomatic alliances among
governments, universities, foundations, businesses, and citizens.
 1AC---Futurity
Advantage 2 is futurity.
Scenario 1 is climate:
Fusion technology solves permanent energy independence, growth, and
sustainability---it is technologically feasible and economically viable.
GA ’24 [Company developing advanced technology solutions for government and commercial
applications; June 18; General Atomics, “General Atomics Scientists Achieve Key Requirement for
Economic Fusion Energy,” https://www.ga.com/ga-scientists-achieve-key-requirement-for-economic-
fusion-energy]

A team led by scientists from General Atomics ( GA ) has demonstrated, for the first time, an operational approach
that is key to many tokamak -based fusion power plant ( FPP ) designs aiming to generate economically
attractive electricity.
<<TEXT CONDENSED, NONE OMITTED>>
The experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility achieved a combination of high density and high confinement of the fuel that had never previously been achieved simultaneously. The results were published in an article in Nature in late April. “This is a landmark result,” said Dr. Siye Ding, the GA scientist who led the team. “For the first time, we’ve been able to demonstrate a model operational scenario that could be employed by fusion power plants seeking to achieve economically viable electricity generation.” Advancing the Tokamak Approach to Fusion Energy The
tokamak approach is considered by most experts to be the most mature and promising method of generating fusion energy. Tokamak-based FPPs will use powerful magnetic fields to confine a fuel gas composed of hydrogen isotopes in a high-temperature state known as a plasma. Delivering economically attractive fusion energy will require these tokamaks to maintain very high density and plasma confinement better than a current approach known as “high-confinement mode” (H-mode). The DIII-D National Fusion Facility is the largest research tokamak in the United
States. It is operated by GA on behalf of the DOE’s Office of Science as a user facility for the U.S. fusion research program. As a world-class laboratory, over 700 researchers from more than 100 domestic and international institutions use DIII-D to explore a wide range of topics from fundamental plasma science to FPP operations. Scientists have been able to create fusion in tokamaks for decades. However, to produce economically attractive electricity, FPPs will need to perform at substantially higher efficiencies than current tokamaks can manage. Two key elements of this
are the confinement quality and the density of the plasma that a tokamak is able to maintain during operation. Confinement quality is best understood as the ability of a tokamak to contain the energy of the fuel at specific conditions long enough to generate a sufficient level of fusion power. High confinement quality requires a low degree of turbulence in the plasma because turbulence allows heat to escape the magnetic fields. Confinement quality is a critical element in the cost-effectiveness of a FPP, because it has a direct impact on the necessary size of the tokamak
and other systems of the plant. H-mode plasmas are viewed as the most promising approach for tokamaks and have been achieved for many years. However, generating enough fusion power to be economically viable requires that the plasma be confined at densities above an empirically defined level, known as the Greenwald Limit. Breaking Through the “Greenwald Limit” Previous attempts to reach this point with H-mode plasmas have struggled with high turbulence in the plasma core and instabilities at the edge that disrupt confinement and can potentially damage the
tokamak, especially at FPP scale. The need to simultaneously maintain a stable edge and a high-density core – something fusion scientists refer to as “core-edge integration” – is one of the key challenges for fusion energy. For several years, work at DIII-D has explored methods to suppress turbulence and instabilities while achieving high density and confinement quality. During an experimental campaign in 2022, researchers developed an approach in which the plasma can stabilize itself into a magnetic configuration that achieves both conditions. This approach exploits a
configuration known as “high-poloidal beta” to create plasmas with densities that increase rapidly from the edge to the core. The steep density profile helps suppress core turbulence and enables the high density in the center of the plasma that is necessary for fusion power. The experiments on DIII-D achieved densities 20 percent above the Greenwald Limit and confinement quality 50 percent better than standard H-mode – the first time any fusion plasma at any facility has reached these heights simultaneously. They also exhibited a stable plasma edge, pointing to a
potential solution to the core-edge integration challenge. “This work supports critical requirements in fusion reactor designs all over the world,” Dr. Ding said. “The physics we’ve demonstrated with these experiments can be extrapolated to full-scale FPPs via integrated modeling, indicating a path toward economic fusion energy.” Accelerating Clean Fusion Energy

<<PARAGRAPH BREAKS RESUME>>

Fusion is the process that, powers the stars and it offers the potential for nearly limitless clean, safe, and
carbon-free electricity. As a sustainable , high-output , and dispatchable energy source , fusion would
put the U.S. on a path to energy independence and transform the global energy landscape .
As demand for energy grows , fusion is one of the best options for meeting the world’s clean energy
needs around the clock while reducing emissions and growing the economy . Developing commercially
scalable fusion would ensure energy security while meeting important environmental goals and
delivering trillions of dollars in economic benefits.

“These results are really exciting and demonstrate a real roadmap for operating a tokamak in a way that is consistent
with the needs of a fusion pilot plant,” added Dr. Wayne Solomon, Vice President of Magnetic Fusion Energy at General Atomics.
“The next step is to build on the successes of these experiments by continuing to close remaining

scientific gaps as we look ahead to bringing fusion energy to the grid.”

Warming causes extinction.

Ng ’19 [Yew-Kwang; May 2019; Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technology University, Fellow of
the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Member of the Advisory Board at the Global Priorities
Institute at Oxford University, Ph.D. in Economics from Sydney University; Global Policy, “Keynote:
Global Extinction and Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective Altruism,” vol. 10, no. 2, p. 258-266]

Catastrophic climate change

Though by no means certain, CCC causing global extinction is possible due to interrelated factors of non‐
linearity , cascading effects , positive feedbacks , multiplicative factors , critical thresholds and tipping
points (e.g. Barnosky and Hadly, 2016; Belaia et al., 2017; Buldyrev et al., 2010; Grainger, 2017; Hansen and Sato, 2012; IPCC 2014; Kareiva
and Carranza, 2018; Osmond and Klausmeier, 2017; Rothman, 2017; Schuur et al., 2015; Sims and Finnoff, 2016; Van Aalst, 2006).7

A possibly imminent tipping point could be in the form of ‘an abrupt ice sheet collapse [that] could cause a
rapid sea level rise’ (Baum et al., 2011, p. 399). There are many avenues for positive feedback in global warming,
including:

 the replacement of an ice sea by a liquid ocean surface from melting reduces the reflection and increases
the absorption of sunlight, leading to faster warming ;
 the drying of forests from warming increases forest fires and the release of more carbon ; and
 higher ocean temperatures may lead to the release of methane trapped under the ocean floor, producing
runaway global warming.
Though there are also avenues for negative feedback, the scientific consensus is for an overall net positive feedback (Roe and Baker, 2007).
Thus, the Global Challenges Foundation (2017, p. 25) concludes, ‘The world is currently completely unprepared to envisage,
and even less deal with, the consequences of CCC’.

The threat of sea‐level rising from global warming is well known, but there are also other likely and more
imminent threats to the survivability of mankind and other living things. For example, Sherwood and Huber (2010)
emphasize the adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress from high environmental wet‐bulb
temperature. They show that ‘even modest global warming could … expose large fractions of the [world]
population to unprecedented heat stress’ p. 9552 and that with substantial global warming, ‘the area of land
rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level’ p. 9555, making extinction much
more likely and the relatively moderate damages estimated by most integrated assessment models unreliably low .

Abundant energy ends wars over energy, food, and water, spurring global peace.
Sanderson ’24 [Cosmo; February 23; Digital Energy Journalist at Recharge, covering key energy
transition technologies, including storage; Interviewing Michl Binderbauer, an Austrian-American
physicist, CEO of TAE Technologies, and published author writing about plasma, physics, and fusion;
Recharge, “‘We'll need something else to fight over': nuclear fusion could end energy wars, says
pioneer,” https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/-well-need-something-else-to-fight-over-
nuclear-fusion-could-end-energy-wars-says-pioneer/2-1-1596764]

Limitless power from nuclear fusion could end wars over energy resources and make the world a
better place , says the chief of a leading developer of the technology, while warning that competition between countries to develop the
technology first could be about to heat up.

When it comes to “racing the Chinese” in developing nuclear fusion, “I think the entire Western world of course is nervous about that,” said
Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies.

“I want us to do this first,” he told Recharge, although by “us” the Austrian-born physicist, who moved to the US in the 1980s, said he doesn’t
mind if that is the US, the UK or the EU.

“But China would make me nervous personally.”

Working with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science, California-based TAE last year tested an innovative nuclear fusion
tech nology that uses no radioactive materials and is calculated capable of “ powering the planet for
more than 100,000 years”.
<<TEXT CONDENSED, NONE OMITTED>>
Fusion generates energy by fusing light elements like hydrogen or its variants in the same process that generates light and heat from stars. It has been described as the “holy grail” for clean energy. TAE is currently upgrading its fifth-generation fusion platform, Norman, to a sixth-generation machine: Copernicus. If all goes smoothly with Copernicus, Binderbauer believes TAE could build its first prototype power plant that could connect to the grid in the early 2030s. Scaling that up to develop “robust and reliable” commercial power would continue through the decade. 'Awe
of the challenge' The standing joke in nuclear fusion is that the technology is always 30 years away from being developed. Binderbauer said this mentality may have helped a spirit of international cooperation in developing fusion. “If you look back at the beginnings of fusion during the heyday of the Cold War,” Binderbauer said that scientists “were in awe of the challenge”. It was “rather bizarre” but he said the Soviets, the US and the British “had to share” research to make progress. The spirit of international cooperation continues today in the form of ITER, a fusion mega-
project being developed in the south of France in which 35 countries are working together and sharing information. “The Russians are sharing it with the US and the Chinese and the Koreans and the Japanese,” said Binderbauer. The dream of realising commercial power from nuclear fusion is now moving tantalisingly within reach. After seven decades of research into the field, US scientists in 2022 achieved the landmark feat of getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put in. A UK lab recently broke the world record for power output from a fusion reaction.
And China is developing an “artificial sun”, recently forming a fusion dream team to achieve this. Despite this, Binderbauer said he has not seen the “care and attention to export control” that one might expect from governments investing billions of dollars racing to develop such a transformative technology. Companies are “self-regulated,” he said. “I don’t want to give something away that somebody could copy and steal… so there’s a natural tendency to be a little careful,” but this is not due to “large scale regulation.” “Having said that, I would argue that probably it will
change,” he said, as states recognise the strategic significance of fusion and the speed of the race afoot. This relaxed mentality is really an “artefact of the mindset” that the development of fusion is “30 years away, so who cares.” Now he argues this mentality is out-of-touch – and falling out of favour quickly. Now he believes governments are starting to think more carefully about who will reach the finish line first. “They’re starting to think about, you know, the ‘what if?’” Binderbauer attended a White House summit in 2022 in which the government set out its “decadal
vision” for nuclear fusion and announced the “race is on” to develop it. “Clearly, if the White House convenes a debate about the decadal vision for fusion, there’s no question that there is a conversation brewing inside that is taking this much more seriously.” 'Power to change humanity' The development of fusion could cause some geopolitical tension in the short term, but Binderbauer believes that with an “optimistic outlook” the technology could ultimately “make us a much better society than we are today.” “Two things come together,” he said. One is that there is an
almost limitless reservoir of the light elements used in fusion. “There’s enough boron to allow for 100,000 years” of power, “that’s kind of like infinite on a human timescale.” The other point is that “there’s no Saudi Arabia of boron or hydrogen, this stuff is everywhere. “If you look at our entire structure as a culture, as an economy that we have as humans, it’s all put on a certain assumption of scarcity,” he said.

<<PARAGRAPH BREAKS RESUME>>

But fusion takes us into a “ paradigm of abundance .”

So if energy is no longer rare , or geographically isolated , “it almost forces us to rethink our value
system .”
“We’ll have to find other things to fight over.”

Energy intersects the availability of food , water , healthcare , said Binderbauer, “all the things that define
quality of life.”
“Why is the US sometimes going into areas that you would think, ‘why?,’” said Binderbauer. Competition for energy resources

has driven colonisation , he said, “I think if we take that out we’re truly in a different paradigm.

“I hope resource constraining decisions and wars derivative of such will be a thing that the next
gen eration will read in the textbooks and think, ‘Oh my god, that was a weird world .’”

Decarbonization’s impossible with current energy sources---it’s try-or-die for fusion.

Smil ’22 [Vaclav; Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, Ph.D. in geography
from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University, and the author of over
forty books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and
nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy; How the World Really Works: The
Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going, “Understanding Energy: Fuels and
Electricity,” Ch. 1]

Notice the key qualifying adjective: the target is not total decarbonization but “ net zero ” or carbon neutrality. This
definition allows for continued emissions to be compensated by (as yet non-existent !) large-scale removal of CO2
from the atmosphere and its permanent storage underground, or by such temporary measures as the mass-scale planting of trees. [71] By
2020, setting net-zero goals for years ending in five or zero has become a me-too game: more than 100 nations
have joined the lineup, ranging from Norway in 2030 and Finland in 2035 to the entire European Union, as well as Canada, Japan, and South
Africa, in 2050, and China (the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels) in 2060.[72] Given the fact that annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel
combustion surpassed 37 billion tons in 2019, the net-zero goal by 2050 will call for an energy transition unprecedented in both pace and scale.
A closer look at its key components reveals the magnitude of the challenges .
Decarbonization of electricity generation can make the fastest progress, because installation costs per unit of solar or wind capacity can now
compete with the least expensive fossil-fueled choices, and some countries have already transformed their generation to a considerable
degree. Among large economies, Germany is the most notable example: since the year 2000, it has boosted its wind and solar capacity 10-fold
and raised the share of renewables (wind, solar, and hydro) from 11 percent to 40 percent of total generation. Intermittency of wind and solar
electricity poses no problems as long as these new renewables supply relatively small shares of the total demand, or as long as any shortfalls
can be made up by imports.

As a result, many countries now produce up to 15 percent of all electricity from intermittent sources without any major adjustments, and
Denmark shows how a relatively small and well-interconnected market can go far higher. [73] In 2019, 45 percent of its electricity came from
wind generation, and this exceptionally high share can be sustained without any massive domestic reserve capacities, because any shortfalls
can be readily made up by imports from Sweden (hydro and nuclear electricity) and Germany (electricity coming from many sources). Germany
could not do the same: its demand is more than 20 times the Danish total, and the country must maintain a sufficient reserve capacity that
could be activated when new renewables are dormant. [74] In 2019, Germany generated 577 terawatt-hours of electricity, less than 5 percent
more than in 2000—but its installed generating capacity expanded by about 73 percent (from 121 to about 209 gigawatts). The reason for this
discrepancy is obvious.
In 2020, two decades after the beginning of Energiewende, its deliberately accelerated energy transition, Germany still had to keep most of its
fossilfired capacity (89 percent of it, actually) in order to meet demand on cloudy and calm days. After all, in gloomy Germany,
photovoltaic generation works on average only 11 –12 percent of time , and the combustion of fossil
fuels still produced nearly half (48 percent) of all electricity in 2020. Moreover, as its share of wind generation has
increased, its construction of new highvoltage lines to transmit this electricity from the windy north to the southern regions of high demand has
fallen behind. And in the US, where much larger transmission projects would be needed to move wind electricity from the Great Plains and
solar electricity from the Southwest to high-demand coastal areas, hardly any long-standing plans to build these links have been realized. [75]

As challenging as such arrangements are, they rely on technically mature (and still improving ) solutions —that is,
on more efficient PV cells, large onshore and offshore wind turbines , and high-voltage (including long-
distance direct current) transmission . If costs , permitting processes, and not - in -my- backyard sentiments
were no obstacles , these techniques could be deployed fairly rapidly and economically. Moreover, the problems of intermittency of solar
and wind generation could be resolved by renewed reliance on nuclear electricity generation. A nuclear renaissance would be particularly
helpful if we cannot develop better ways of large-scale electricity storage soon.

We need very large (multi-gigawatt-hour) storage for big cities and megacities, but so far the only viable option
to serve them is pumped hydro storage (PHS): it uses cheaper nighttime electricity to pump water from a low-lying reservoir to
high-lying storage, and its discharge provides instantly available generation. [76] With renewably generated electricity, the pumping could be
done whenever surplus solar or wind capacity is available, but obviously PHS can work only in places with suitable
elevation differences and the operation consumes about a quarter of generated electricity for the
uphill pumping of water. Other energy storages, such as batteries , compressed air , and
supercapacitors , still have capacities orders of magnitude lower than needed by large cities, even for a
single day’s worth of storage. [77]
In contrast, modern nuclear reactors, if properly built and carefully run, offer safe, long-lasting, and highly reliable ways of electricity
generation; as already noted, they are able to operate more than 90 percent of the time, and their lifespan can exceed 40 years. Still, the
future of nuclear generation remains uncertain. Only China, India, and South Korea are committed to further expansion of
their capacities. In the West, the combination of high capital costs , major construction delays , and the

availability of less expensive choices (natural gas in the US, wind and solar in Europe) has made new fission
capacities unattractive . Moreover, America’s new s mall, m odular, and inherently safe r eactors (first proposed during the
1980s) have yet to be commercialized , and Germany, with its decision to abandon all nuclear generation by 2022, is only the most
obvious example of Europe’s widely shared, deep anti-nuclear sentiment (for the assessment of real nuclear generation risks, see chapter 5).

But this may not last: even the European Union now recognizes that it could not come close to its extraordinarily ambitious decarbonization
target without nuclear reactors. Its 2050 net-zero emissions scenarios set aside the decades-long stagnation and neglect of the nuclear
industry, and envisage up to 20 percent of all energy consumption coming from nuclear fission. [78] Notice that this refers to total primary
energy consumption, not just to electricity. Electricity is only 18 percent of total final global energy consumption, and the
decarbonization of more than 80 percent of final energy uses —by industries, households, commerce,
and transportation—will be even more challenging than the decarbonization of electricity gen eration.
Expanded electricity generation can be used for space heating and by many industrial processes now relying on fossil fuels, but the course
of decarbonizing modern long-distance transportation remains unclear .

Scenario 2 is hybridization
Even if pure fusion is further off, hybrid reactors are coming now. They immediately
burn the waste produced by nuclear fission.
Mike Kotschenreuther 9, UT Austin internally quoting Mike Kotschenreuther, senior research
scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies and Department of Physics; Swadesh Mahajan, senior
research scientist at UT; Erich Schneider, Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT, “Nuclear Fusion-
fission Hybrid Could Contribute To Carbon-free Energy Future,” MRS Bulletin,
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127131654.htm

The invention could help combat global warming by making nuclear power cleaner and thus a more viable
replacement of carbon-heavy energy sources, such as coal.

"We have created a way to use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission ," says Mike
Kotschenreuther, senior research scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) and Department of Physics. "Our waste destruction system,
we believe, will allow nuclear power—a low carbon source of energy—to take its place in helping us combat global warming."

Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S. Debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage
site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which many maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is not expected
to open until 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. will exceed this amount by 2010.

The physicists' new invention could drastically decrease the need for any additional or expanded geological repositories.

"Most people cite nuclear waste as the main reason they oppose nuclear fission as a source of power," says Swadesh Mahajan, senior research
scientist.

The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor , the centerpiece of
which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) made possible by a crucial invention.

The CFNS would provide abundant neutrons through fusion to a surrounding fission blanket that uses transuranic
waste as nuclear fuel. The fusion-produced neutrons augment the fission reaction, imparting efficiency and
stability to the waste incineration process.

Kotschenreuther, Mahajan and Prashant Valanju, of the IFS, and Erich Schneider of the Department of Mechanical Engineering report their new
system for nuclear waste destruction in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design.

There are more than 100 fission reactors, called "light water reactors" (LWRs), producing power in the United States.The nuclear waste from
these reactors is stored and not reprocessed. (Some other countries, such as France and Japan, do reprocess the waste.)

The scientists' waste destruction system would work in two major steps.

First, 75 percent of the original reactor waste is destroyed in standard, relatively inexpensive LWRs. This step produces energy, but it does not
destroy highly radiotoxic, transuranic, long-lived waste, what the scientists call "sludge."

In the second step, the sludge

would be destroyed in a CFNS-based fusion-fission hybrid. The hybrid's potential
lies in its ability to burn this hazardous sludge, which cannot be stably burnt in conventional systems.
"To burn this really hard to burn sludge, you really need to hit it with a sledgehammer, and that's what we have invented here," says
Kotschenreuther.

One hybrid would be needed to destroy the waste produced by 10 to 15 LWRs.

The process would ultimately reduce the transuranic waste from the original fission reactors by up to 99 percent .
Burning that waste also produces energy.

The CFNS is designed to be no larger than a small room, and much fewer of the devices would be
needed compared to other schemes that are being investigated for similar processes. In combination with the substantial
decrease in the need for geological storage, the CFNS-enabled waste-destruction system would be much cheaper and faster than other routes,
say the scientists.

The CFNS
is based on a tokamak, which is a machine with a "magnetic bottle" that is highly successful in confining high
temperature (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) fusion plasmas for sufficiently long times.
The crucial invention that would pave the way for a CFNS is called the Super X Divertor. The Super X Divertor is designed to handle the
enormous heat and particle fluxes peculiar to compact devices; it would enable the CFNS to safely produce large amounts of neutrons without
destroying the system.

"The intense heat generated in a nuclear fusion device can literally destroy the walls of the machine," says research scientist Valanju, "and that
is the thing that has been holding back a highly compact source of nuclear fusion."

Valanju says a fusion-fission hybrid reactor has been an idea in the physics community for a long time.

"It's
always been known that fusion is good at producing neutrons and fission is good at making energy," he says.
"Now, we have shown that we can get fusion to produce a lot of neutrons in a small space."

Producing an abundant and clean source of "pure fusion energy" continues to be a goal for fusion
researchers. But the physicists say that harnessing the other product of fusion—neutrons—can be
achieved in the near term .

Nuclear waste causes extinction and latent genomic instability.

Mary Olson 95 - Director of the Southeast Office for the Nuclear Information & Resource Service.
“Nuclear Waste Isolation Means Zero Release of Radioactivity”, NIRS publications –
http://www.nirs.org/radiation/nwisolation_zeroradioactivity.pdf
There is no safe dose of ionizing radiation. In the words of Dr Helen Caldicott (1994), all it takes is one cell and one radioactive decay for the
possibility of cancer, or a genetic defect. No one can say that there will be damage and harm, but no one can guarantee that there will not.

Reports of increased incidence of human cancers and diseases, particularly in children, as well as reproductive impacts in
the effluent pathways of nuclear facilities undercut conclusions drawn primarily from study of external doses of
gamma radiation. We are still in the process of describing the effects of chronic low doses of ionizing radiation on diverse populations. A number of new
studies that sound an alarm about low doses of radiation were reviewed by Resnikoff and Fairlie (1997) and also Gofman (1997).

Epidemiological studies, including the work of Wing et al (1991), Morgenstern et al (1997), Burlakova (1996) and others deliver findings that low doses of ionizing
radiation cause more harm per unit of dose than higher exposures, calling into question standard dose-response ratios. These findings were anticipated by an
independent analysis of data from Japanese atomic bomb survivors by Gofman (1990)

Genetic impacts are discussed less frequently than cancer. A recent review by Edwards (1997) reports that ionizing
radiation can cause genetic impacts that are not displayed for several generations. This genomic
instability is an issue for all forms of life. Latent genetic damage not yet displayed, is like a time bomb . We
should think of this as the committed dose to the biosphere, and our job as limiting the total body-burden of Earth.

Each time some relatively low dose is approved, it allows levels of radiation or release of radioactivity that may become persistent- Radionuclides with a

long half-life are cumulatively loaded into the environment and may result in impacts on health or long-term damage to the gene pool. Both entail loss and
cost not only to the individual, but also to the systems they are part of. Genetic effects may be persistent within the population
generation after generation. It is interesting to note that non-persistent radionuclides may also engender persistent effects within a population this way. Exposure
standards which allow the release of radioactivity are based on the Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury (Gofman 1993). This is not sustainable.

What matters biologically is the sum of all these relatively small doses. The "just a little" paradigm does not
remember that it is the straw that breaks the camel's back . The loading of the environment with releases of
radioactivity from multiple sites - in the US alone, it is thousands of sites - violates the principle of precaution.
Altering the collective gene pool of life on Earth is not an experiment that is reversible. In this case we can't wait
until we are sure adverse effects are attributable to this cause and then adjust our programs. We must, from now on decide that zero is the only acceptable level,
and allow no further increase in background radiation levels.
People of the future have an equal right to a sustainable biosphere. They deserve the chance to continue to isolate our wastes.
Anything we do with our radioactive waste must not preclude the possibility for them to maintain radioactive
waste containment.
Reflections on Radiation Standard Setting

The International Committee on Radiological Protection (ICRP) makes recommendations to regulatory bodies for radiation standards. ICRP advocates defining a
justification for radioactive practices. This is then used to justify the exposures that the standard will allow.

However, the exact opposite is what happens today (at least in the U.S.). If a set of assumptions can be given to show that a radioactive practice will meet the set
regulation, it is automatically justified. The affected parties have little or no recourse. We must note that the vast majority of the involuntarily affected parties can't
intervene because they have not yet been born, or they are not homo sapiens. There is also a large group of people out there now who would be banging down the
door if they knew what was happening. They simply do not know because their governments and schools do not tell them. The informed public does not tolerate
any level of involuntary and uninformed radiation dose. The only real cure for radiation health effects is prevention, and informed people know this

In examining the "permissible dose" levels recommended by the ICRP for practices which result in the wastes we are concerned with, it is easy to see that ICRP
privileges radioactivity when compared to the regulation of other harmful materials.

The recommended standard of 100 millirems annual exposure for the public translates, using ICRP's dose - response assumptions, to a risk of
3.5 fatal cancers in 1000 people exposed annually over a lifetime of 70 years. ICRP uses a linear, quasi-no-threshold model. Doing the math, this is a lifetime

fatal cancer risk of 1 in 286.

By comparison, the regulation of toxic substances in the U.S. looks very protective. These also permit a lethal risk to those exposed, but the limit is set at only 1 fatal
cancer in 1,000.000 or in some cases, 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 10,000.

The nuclear industry is enjoying a tremendous privilege. That's a nice way to say it. The honest way to say this is that the nuclear industry has been granted a
generous "bag limit" on the local populations. This bag limit is 35 times higher than the least protective toxic standards.

Some think that these numbers don't mean anything. They share a collegial assumption that the linear, no-threshold model is conservative, designed to err on the
side of safety. This is based on the idea that we have no data about low-dose exposures. Indeed we do. If ICRP were only to incorporate conclusions from the
Hiroshima survivors (Preston 1987), they would multiply the risk factor by 3.4 —substantially increasing the acknowledged risk associated even with 100 mr dose
levels to a 1 in 84, lifetime risk of fatal cancer. Other studies already cited place this factor even higher.

Permissive radiation standards result in a subsidy to the nuclear industry. Those subject to lax regulation don't have to spend as much to prevent exposures and
environmental contamination, or reduce waste production. Instead, the real cost is bora by those who receive the "allowable" dose. In fact, many of these people
get a higher dose, since standards set an average allowable dose, but radioactivity is not known to distribute itself evenly in the environment. Communities in the
effluent pathways suffer far more than the projected average.

It is important to note that ICRP and national regulators who adopt their recommendations are under attack for the use of a linear, no-threshold model. Boosters for
an industry that depends upon irradiating people, are saying that there is a huge threshold of exposure before any harm occurs. Some take the radical position that
radiation is healthful. Decades of data do not support this, to the contrary, there is no safe dose.

Nonetheless, ICRP's model, is not truly a linear, no-threshold equation. The use of the Standard Man, the ICRP's non-conservative Dose, Dose-Rate Effect Factor,
adoption of "effective dose equivalent," and the use of averages create an effective threshold in their model. The public, and certainly other species, do not fit
ICRP's assumptions in calculating the risk. There are layers of impact that are invisible to this model stemming from the greater sensitivity of the fetus, children and
elders to radiation, and other factors.

The resulting underestimation of harm becomes yet another cost to society and bonus to the nuclear waste
generators . Those who suggest that these more sensitive groups might "skew" the results of study of low-dose radiation health effects are
signing a death warrant for our species, and others as well. After all, Standard Men are not known to reproduce alone.
"Effective dose equivalent" is a pernicious revision to radiation regulation. Any mechanism that permits a regulator to say that a dose has gone down while allowing
radioactivity releases to go up is clearly serving those who contaminate the biosphere, not those that work to protect it.

In my work with communities in the path of discharges from nuclear facilities that are ostensibly in compliance with so-
called acceptable limits, it is clear that there is already a level of sacrifice of health and life that is not acceptable. One is reminded

of other societies (who we might view as bizarre) sacrificing humans to their Sun God. Yet, here we are in the 20th century, living with regulations that

condone the deaths of people who are in the communities that host nuclear sites.
Independently, a credible legislative deterrent to an aggressive DOE staves off SOP
backsliding and creates a resilient future precedent.
Jacobs 19 [2019, Sharon B. Jacobs teaches and writes in the areas of energy law,
environmental law, and administrative law. Her work has been published in the Harvard
Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Iowa Law Review, William & Mary
Law Review, Administrative Law Review, and the Ecology Law Quarterly., “The Statutory
Separation of Powers”, The Yale Law Journal,
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/JacobsArticle_gtwkhhne.pdf] HongruiH
Some members of Congress were concerned about the use of emergency rhetoric to justify far-reaching
executive powers. Senator Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.) protested that “[i]n the name of emergency—one that is yet to be proved to this
Senator—we are being asked, in essence, to delegate all Federal powers over the price and allocation of energy supplies to the head of a new
department, subject to the direct control of the President.” 183 He objected to doing so “without any meaningful check or balance over the
administrative use of such powers.”184 Such a delegation of legislative powers, he concluded, “may result in standing the Constitution on its
head.”185 This concern was also raised by members of the House Committee on Government Operations in separate statements attached to
theircommittee’sreport.186 Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) supported the creation of an independent National Energy Board with broad
regulatory powers in order to “provide adequate countervailing checks and balances to the centralized distributive power inherent in the
187 Notwithstanding differences of opinion about how to allocate powers
proposed [Department of Energy].”
between the Department of Energy and an independent agency, what isclear isthat members of
Congress understood their design decisionsin a separation-of-powers frame. It is hard to write off the
separation-of-powers discussions in Congress around the DOE Act as veiled partisan wrangling because
both houses of Congress were, like President Carter, solidly Democratic. Congress more likely sought to
preserve its own authority as a check on the President. This demonstrates the latent effects of the
Founders’ original separation-of-powers decisions—structural separation of powers begetting statutory
separation of powers.

In addition, some of the legislative statements evince a desire to divide delegations among executive
actors not merely to preserve constitutional separation of powers, but to position administrative actors
as checks on one another.

D. Checks and Balances As described in the previous Section, the DOE Act separated federal authority
over the energy system between FERC and DOE. Yet the bill also left behind entanglements between the
two agencies. Some of these entanglements seem to have been adopted as a sop to the administration
in exchange for the creation of FERC. Others may have been the result of accident rather than design.
Collectively, however, these entanglements are examples of the kinds of provisions that can operate as
checks and balances in a statutory separation of powers. Three such entanglements are discussed below
using the typology established in Part I: two that provide DOE with leverage over FERC, and one that
doesthe reverse. These long-overlooked provisionsreceived more attention after Energy Secretary Rick
Perry invoked them in an effort to enhance the status of coal plants in the energy marketplace.
However, they are still poorly understood, even by agency insiders.

SOP collapse wrecks multilateral and institutional resilience – extinction

Chas Freeman 20. Chairs Projects International, Inc. Retired U.S. defence official, diplomat, and
interpreter, public speaker, and the author of five books. “The Struggle with China is not a Replay of the
Cold War: Remarks to the Asia American Forum.” John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal. October 4,
2020. https://johnmenadue.com/the-struggle-with-china-is-not-a-replay-of-the-cold-war-remarks-to-
the-asia-american-forum/

Four years ago, the U.S. unilaterally decided that geopolitics are inherently driven by great
power military rivalry that precludes
cooperation. The policies derived from this militaristic reconceptualization of international relations are generating
a series of zero-sum games between adversaries seemingly as interested in hurting each other as they
are in raising their own status. The newly pugnacious U.S. stance legitimizes xenophobia and justifies
bilateral approaches to foreign relations that don’t just ignore issues like global terrorism, pandemic
diseases, climate change, migration, nuclear proliferation, or regional tensions but actually cripple [hurt] the
global governance and international coordination needed to tackle them. The United States is going out of its
way to demonstrate its indifference to the interests and sensibilities of its past and potential partners. It
is withdrawing from international organizations it can no longer dominate. These actions amount to unilateral
diplomatic disarmament and the creation of politico-economic vacuums for others – not just China – to fill.

Future historians will puzzle over why Americans have chosen to dismantle and discard the connections and
capacities – other than military prowess – that long enabled the United States to direct the trend of events in most global
and regional arenas. When they unravel this mystery, they will also need to explain the simultaneous collapse of the
separation of powers structure on which the American republic was founded and on which its liberties were
built. The checks and balances that made America uniquely resilient are now on life support. A legislative
branch that refuses to take a stand on the issues entrusted to it by the plain text of the U.S. Constitution has been
sidelined by an increasingly despotic and bellicose presidency. The American judiciary, once the custodian of
constitutional rectitude, is now selected and appointed by reference to political rather than legal criteria. The
result is governance with declining legitimacy at home and next to no appeal abroad.
 1AC---Plan

The United States federal government should strengthen its protection of nuclear
fusion patents by prohibiting governmental agency infringement on those patents.
 1AC---Solvency
Only fusion patent protection solves---it increases private investment whilst avoiding
trade secrets, facilitating universal development.
Wooley and Baker ‘22 [Russell; part of the Chemistry team at Carpmaels. He has a diverse portfolio
of work across a broad range of core chemistry technologies, with a particular focus on energy storage
and ophthalmic devices -- MChem (University of Oxford) PhD Materials Science (Imperial College
London) Chartered Patent Attorney European Patent Attorney European Design Attorney CertIP
Certificate in Intellectual Property Law UPC Representative – Senior Associate; Adam; Associate -- works
within the Engineering and Tech teams at Carpmaels & Ransford -- MEng Mechanical Engineering &
Aeronautics (Durham University) Registered Patent Attorney European Patent Attorney CertIP
Certificate in Intellectual Property Law UPC Representative; March 21 2022; "Patenting fusion";
Carpmaels and Ransford; https://www.carpmaels.com/patenting-fusion/; ‫]بالل‬

Once consigned to the realms of science fiction or dismissed as being perpetually 20 years away from fruition, there is a growing hope
that fusion power may be on the path towards commercialisation . In a field traditionally dominated by large, state-
funded efforts, a number of entities in the private sector are taking different approaches to surpassing the “breakeven” point, where a
useful amount of energy can be extracted from a fusion reactor compared to the significant amounts of energy
required to initiate and sustain the reaction. Achievingthis goal brings the promise of clean and green power , free
from reliance on the uncontrollable natural phenomena required by traditional renewable power sources (e.g. wind, sunlight, etc.), and free
from the unwanted radioactive waste resulting from traditional nuclear power generation. Given the universal need for clean
and green power, if and when the fusion code is cracked, the whole world will want in .

Due to these advantages, achieving this goal naturally also brings the promise of commercial opportunities .
Indeed, a recent article in Nature notes the significant amount of funding obtained by the private fusion sector, said to sum to more than two
billion dollars according to an October 2021 survey by the Fusion Industry Association. In the three months following the survey, this total has
more than doubled thanks to billion-dollar backing for both Helion Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), The Engineer reports.
Why the sudden cash injection to the private sector? A recent flurry of technological breakthroughs is likely
to be playing a part; the Joint European Torus (JET) made national headlines in February 2022 by comfortably
beating its previous record for production of sustained fusion energy.

JET’s big brother, the much larger ITER reactor, is slated to begin testing in 2025. ITER (a breath of acronym-free fresh air – ITER
translates as “the way” in Latin) is designed in a similar fashion to JET, and aims to be the first fusion device to produce net
energy . The recent success of JET makes this claim sound all the more reasonable. The US is not far behind; its National Ignition Facility
(NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory produced a sizeable 1.3 million joules of fusion energy in August
2021.

Although JET, ITER, and NIF are state-funded, the public sector does not have a monopoly on the buzz
around fusion. The private sector has expanded in recent years, with the main players including: TAE Technologies,
Helion Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, General Fusion, and Tokamak Energy. As the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems has noted,
“Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build”.

Due to the level of investment and opportunity for profit, it is not surprising that a
large number of patent applications are
filed in the field of fusion power. Analysis of patent families owned by the main players listed above shows a significant
increase in the number of filings over the last 5-10 years. Tokamak Energy has largely led the way, building a large
portfolio in a short space of time. Understandably, given where much of the research and development in this field takes place, there is a bias
for all of these applicants towards filings in the US and Europe.
Patent families owned by selected fusion companies grouped by filing date. A decrease in the number of families in the last 11/2 years is expected due to the lag between filing and publication. Data and grouping of patent families
obtained from Orbit Intelligence.

The International Patent Classification (IPC) provides another way of reviewing patent filing trends, where code G21B covers fusion reactors. Analysis of PCT applications classified under this code filed in the last 20 years shows a
slight increase in the number of recent filings, likely reflecting the expansion of the private sector noted above (e.g. the peak of filings in 2018 coincides with the peak of Tokamak Energy’s filing strategy). Other busy applicants in
this field include academic or non-profit institutions – from the US, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, and from France the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA /
Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives). This likely reflects that fusion power has traditionally relied on state funding, e.g. the ITER and NIF experiments noted above.

PCT applications classified under IPC code G21B. A decrease in the number of families in the last 11/2 years is expected due to the lag between filing and publication. Data obtained from Orbit Intelligence.

Delving deeper into the IPC, it is of note that there is a dedicated code for inventions in the field of “cold fusion”. Cold fusion is a proposed form of fusion said to occur at much lower temperatures than those typically used in fusion
reactors. There was a surge of interest in this concept in the late 1980s but it is now typically viewed with scepticism by the scientific community. IPC code G21B 3/00 covers cold fusion, described as “low-temperature nuclear
fusion reactors, e.g. alleged cold fusion reactors”. It may well be that the use of the word “alleged” indicates a degree of suspicion from the writers of the IPC over whether cold fusion is possible. Indeed, other uses of the term
“alleged” in the IPC are for fields firmly within the realms of science fiction, namely, various forms of perpetual motion machines (F03B 17/04, F03G 7/10, H02K 53/00, H02N 11/00, and lastly H02K 53/00 “alleged dynamo-electric
perpetua mobilia”), and also alchemy (G21G 5/00: “alleged conversion of chemical elements by chemical reaction”). Accordingly, it could be that the classification of an invention under code G21B 3/00 as relating to cold fusion
might cast doubt on whether the invention can be repeated, perhaps leading to objections of an insufficient disclosure of the invention or even a lack of industrial applicability. However, analysis of patent applications classified
under code G21B 3/00 shows that this does not necessarily signal the end of the road, as some such applications have been granted, although there are differences in approach depending on the patent jurisdiction.

Although there is a noticeable upward trend in the number of patent filings in the fusion field from the private sector, the total number
of filings remains relatively low when compared to many other fields also boasting investment, public
interest, and potential for growth. A field such as fusion is unlikely ever to reach the number of filings
seen in sectors such as medical tech nology or consumer electronics, where the number of units sold and relative
similarity between competing products demand a bristling patent arsenal. That said, for only one of fusion’s private-sector
pioneers regularly to have double-digit filing years seems amiss. Why might this be?
It is possible that the value of a fusion-related patent is somewhat limited by the number of potential infringers, and the divergence of approaches being taken. While all of the entities discussed in this article, private or state-
funded, are similar enough to be grouped under the umbrella-term “fusion power”, the techniques each is investigating are, in some cases, quite different. Take JET/ITER and NIF, for example, as the two leading state-funded
projects of Europe and the US, respectively: one aims to confine nuclear plasma with magnets; the other directs the world’s most energetic laser at plastic spheres. How relevant is one’s innovation to the other?

Another possibility is that the patent term of 20 years is somewhat off-putting for this industry. The lead-time on new technology making its way into research facilities is long enough: ITER’s design phase was completed in 1998,
but consistent Deuterium-Tritium Operation is planned to begin as late as 2035. Even if the private sector halved this timescale, a fusion patent might provide only one year of useful protection. Perhaps amassing a large portfolio
which relies on net energy fusion being cracked and commercialised within 20 years of making your filings is less attractive than funnelling more investment into R&D. Significant delays between filing and commercialisation are not
unique to fusion; in the pharmaceutical space, for example, clinical trials and regulatory approval can take up an appreciable amount of the 20-year patent term. Pharmaceuticals, however, can benefit from specific additional
protection in the form of Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs), which extend patent term by a maximum of 5 years beyond the original 20. Given the paramount importance of solving the global energy crisis, an equivalent
term extension available to fusion innovators does not seem unreasonable, although none appears to be calling for it at present.

With all of that said, a convincing case for filing fusion patents can still, and should, be made. It can certainly be argued that the
potential
value of strong protection in this field far outweighs the risk that commercialisation of the invention
takes time to materialise. Indeed, if fusion power is now actually 20 years away, rather than being perpetually 20 years away,
patent families filed now and covering core technologies may prove to be exceptionally valuable in their
final few years of term, precisely when the market is clamouring for this new-fangled fusion power.

On divergences in approach, while this is true for now, one method will be first to achieve net energy, and it is not unreasonable to expect a
significant narrowing of the breadth of approaches when this comes to pass. Moreover, notwithstanding divergent approaches, private fusion
entities should appreciate that they are not alone, and be prepared to use their patent portfolios to secure further investment ahead of their
competitors. Indeed, although private investment at the present stage may be sufficient to bring fusion power close to commercialisation,
actually achieving commercialisation, i.e. getting to the stage of building fusion reactors at a scale to replace fossil-fuel power stations, may well
require significant state investment. A patent monopoly on core technology gives governments a reason to select
one supplier over another rather than base a decision solely on price . Technological breakthroughs
may be decisive for winners and losers, but only if they are well protected .
Also important to note is that innovation in the fusion sector may have relevance outside the construction and operation of fusion reactors.
Parallels can be drawn between fusion and astronautical engineering in this regard. NASA is famous for commercialising its space-intended, but
accidentally-otherwise-useful technology, particularly via licensing. The full list of such technologies is as extensive and varied as it is highly
profitable: LASIK technology; scratch resistant lenses, freeze drying processes; enriched baby foods; and aircraft de-icing, to name but a few.
While the demands of space travel may require invention in a broader range of fields than fusion (we’re not holding our breath for ITER’s line of
baby foods), fusion is pushing the envelope in vacuum generation, superconducting magnets, heat resistant coatings, and control systems. A
NASA-style trickle down of this cutting-edge technology to adjacent commercial sectors, ready to implement the technology immediately,
should be possible and lucrative. A brief review of applications owned by the five private entities above suggests that such a strategy is at least
being considered; a recent Tokamak Energy Ltd application is pursuing a superconducting electromagnet “in particular, but not exclusively” for
use in tokamak plasma chambers, and independent claim 1 to the electromagnet makes no mention of a tokamak. Patents based on fusion
research but not limited to fusion may provide valuable additional income streams.
There appears, therefore, to be value in pursuing patent protection for at least some of the inventions
generated on the road to achieving workable nuclear fusion. Moreover, given the complexity of fusion
reactors, it is likely that innovators will amass a significant amount of “ know-how ” in the finer details of
what is required to make their individual designs work. Where patent protection is not pursued , it would
be advisable for innovators to put in place robust policies for identifying and protecting such know-how as trade
secrets . For more information on trade secrets see our article here, the first in a series of articles on trade secrets and confidential
information. Complementing trade-secrets with patent protection for key concepts and technology with application outside fusion may well be
the optimal strategy. Moreover, private fusion companies should pay close attention to their competitor’s filing strategies, and be prepared to
take action against patents which may affect their freedom to operate in this lucrative sector.

No alt causes - patents are key---high skilled talent is uniquely attracted to patents.
Lo and Whyte 24 [2/27/24, Andrew Wen-Chuan Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris
Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Dennis G. Whyte is the
Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT, a professor in the MIT Department of
Nuclear Science and Engineering, and former Director of the MIT Plasma Science &
Fusion Center, “What Fusion Energy Can Learn From Biotechnology,” SSRN Online
Journal, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4779516] /recut HongruiH
Both fusion and biotech face complex IP landscapes. Protecting the development of innovation through
patents and IP rights management is crucial to both fusion energy and biotechnology to attract
investment and maintain an economic competitive advantage. The two fields also share common
challenges in the commercialization of IP developed at universities, private research facilities, and
government national laboratories. Both industries place a strong emphasis on strategic patents and
licensing agreements to protect their IP and create revenue streams , which is vital to their substantial
R&D investments. However, collaboration between nonprofit institutions and for-profit entities can be problematic because of the
obvious differences in their objectives and constraints. Therefore, bottlenecks often occur when negotiating commercialization rights with
academia.

Moreover, the gestation lags involved in fusion and biotech investments, typically a decade or longer before any cash payouts are possible, and
these lags reduce the overall value of IP because a significant fraction of the 20-year patent life must be devoted to R&D before any positive
cash flows are realized. This phenomenon gives rise to “patent cliffs” for biopharma companies—steep declines in revenues when a blockbuster
patent expires—something that fusion companies will eventually need to address (see Section 5).

The importance of IP also underscores the requirement in both fields for highly specialized skills and
knowledge. Competition to attract highly skilled and specialized professionals such as physicists,
biologists, chemists, and data scientists is an issue in both industries, particularly during a growth stage,
when a scarcity of talent becomes a rate-limiting factor, and it becomes challenging to find and retain
talent. Fusion is presently in this stage.

Fusion is possible, reaching commercial viability, and unlocks limitless, safe, carbon-
free energy.
Davis ’22 [Nicola; December 12; the Guardian's science correspondent and presenter of the Science
Weekly podcast. She has a MChem and DPhil in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford; The
Guardian, “Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean ‘near-limitless energy’”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthrough-in-nuclear-fusion-could-mean-
near-limitless-energy]

Researchers have reportedly made a breakthrough in the quest to unlock a “near- limitless , safe , clean ”
source of energy: they have got more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than they put in .
Nuclear fusion involves smashing together light elements such as hydrogen to form heavier elements, releasing a huge burst of energy in the
process. The approach, which gives rise to the heat and light of the sun and other stars, has been hailed as having huge
potential as a sustainable , low-carbon energy source.
However, since nuclear fusion research began in the 1950s, researchers have been unable to a demonstrate a positive energy gain, a condition
known as ignition.

That was, it seems, until now.

According to a report in the Financial Times, which has yet to be confirmed by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California that is behind the work, researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat
the fuel with lasers.

Dr Robbie Scott, of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) Plasma Physics Group, who contributed to
this research, described the results as a “momentous achievement”.

“Fusion has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy,” he said. “This seminal result from the
National Ignition Facility is the first laboratory demonstration of fusion ‘energy-gain’ – where more fusion energy is output than input by the
laser beams. The scale of the breakthrough for laser fusion research cannot be overstated.

“The experiment demonstrates unambiguously that the physics of Laser Fusion works ,” he added. “In order to
transform NIF’s result into power production a lot of work remains, but this is a key step along the path.”

Prof Jeremy Chittenden, professor of plasma physics at Imperial College London, agreed. “If what has been reported is true and more energy
has been released than was used to produce the plasma, that is a true breakthrough moment which is tremendously exciting,” he said.

“It proves that the long sought-after goal, the ‘ holy grail ’ of fusion, can indeed be achieved .”