COUNTERPLAN/NUCLEAR ABOLITION

ADVANTAGE: NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE SOCIETY THEY CREATE OPPRESS WOMEN

NUCLEARIZATION HAS PROFOUND NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON WOMEN

Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Sheba Chhachhi, Tanika Sarkar , Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, 2001, Why Women Must Reject Nuclearisation

India's decision to become a nuclear weapon state has a profoundly negative impact on women's lives. On the one hand, women being already disadvantaged within existing social and familial structures, will bear a larger part of the social cost of nuclearisation. This means:

- a decrease in access to resources, education, employment, services

- a reduction in both physical and social mobility

- and an increase in violence, fear and sexual oppression.

SUPPORT FOR THE DOCTRINES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE USED ACTIVELY AGAINST WOMEN

Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Sheba Chhachhi, Tanika Sarkar , Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, 2001, Why Women Must Reject Nuclearisation

On the other hand, valorisation of the ideologies which underwrite nuclearisation is a valorisation of ideologies that justify and maintain the existing status of women in society.

- The economic sanctions against India have given the government an opportunity to proceed with a detrimental economic liberalization in the name of `survival'.

- The secrecy, disinformation and lack of public accountability that accompany nuclearization are a recipe for anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. They exclude the majority of citizens, and of course women, from any policy and decision-making.

- Nuclearisation produces social consent for increasing levels of violence. It legitimizes male aggression, and breeds the idea that nuclear explosions give a `virility' to the nation which men as individuals can somehow also share.

- In the present political situation, the masculinist rhetoric of nuclearisation has been combined with a false patriotism and Hindutva ideologies. This effects all women in so far as it gives new militaristic meanings to national identity, and demands `othering' and animosity towards our neighbours.

- And it effects women from the minorities even more since they become the implicit or explicit targets of this chauvinism.

NUCLEARIZATION’S CLIMATE OF SECRECY CREATES A TECHNO-ELITE WHICH REINFORCES THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN AND THE WEAK

Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Sheba Chhachhi, Tanika Sarkar , Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, 2001, Why Women Must Reject Nuclearisation

Secrecy also feeds the myth of scientific and bureaucratic expertise. Women, for whom even primary literacy is hard to come by, often have a common-sensical gut reaction against nuclearisation but since they are educationally the most deprived, they are less able to monitor and sift the information they get. What is more, the strange character of nuclear policy-making not only sidelines moral and ethical questions but genders them. This elite gets to be represented as rational, scientific, modern, and of course masculine, while ethical questions, questions about the social and environmental costs are made to seem emotional, effeminate, regressive and not modern.

This rather dangerous way of thinking which makes out that questions about human life and welfare are somehow neither modern nor properly masculine questions, or that men have no capacity and concern for peace and morality, can have disastrous consequences for both men and women. It trivializes human suffering. It pejoratively casts human caring as a sign of weakness or effeminacy, as the concern of the oppressed, as irrelevant to modern life. It carelessly rejects the histories of such caring in our own country or callously reverses them, as in the misuse of Buddhist symbolism. It downgrades non-nuclear countries as `backward' and as unequipped to step into the twenty-first century. In short, it breeds a politics based on relegation of the weak and a neo-Darwinian survival of the fittest.

NUCLEARIZATION CREATES A MINDSET OF VIOLENCE WHICH IS THEN USED AGAINST WOMEN

Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Sheba Chhachhi, Tanika Sarkar , Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, 2001, Why Women Must Reject Nuclearisation

Nuclearisation, more than conventional militarisation, creates an atmosphere of tension, insecurity, fear, even panic. It gains consent for weapons of mass destruction by spreading the utterly false premise that economic pressures and social problems can be redressed through an accumulation of the capacity for violence. This sense of an increased capacity for violence against so-called enemies translates into and justifies everyday aggression against women, minorities and other underprivileged sections. Consequently, women's fear of sexual violence, used even otherwise as a form of containment, increases with the celebration of masculinist violence. They are left with only two options: either to accept greater containment of their activity and mobility or to militarise themselves, either retreat from public spaces or allow themselves to be pulled into the language of violence against ‘others'.