CRITIQUE/PROLIFERATION IMAGE

LINK: FOCUS ON TECHNOLOGY ENTRENCHES THE PROLIFERATION IMAGE

TECHNOLOGY AVAILABILITY FOCUS REINFORCES THE PROLIFERATION IMAGE

DAVID MUTIMER, Prof. Political Science York University, 2000; THE WEAPONS STATE PROLIFERATION AND THE FRAMING OF SECURITY // VT2002 acs p. 62-63

The second implication of the proliferation metaphor for the problem of nuclear weapons spread is an extreme technological determinism. Animal reproduction is an internally driven phenomenon, and so the metaphor of proliferation applied to the development of nuclear technology highlights the autonomy in the growth of that technology and its problematic weapons variant. It is worth recalling Frank Barnaby's words: "A country with a nuclear power program will inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise, and will accumulate the fissile material necessary to produce nuclear weapons." In fact, the text from which this quotation is drawn presents an interesting example of the autonomy of the proliferation metaphor. The book is entitled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: NuclearWeapon Proliferation in the 1990s. Notice that the weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by some form of external agent-say, a human being or a political institution. Under most circumstances such a title would be unnoticed, for the implications are so deeply ingrained in our conceptual system that they are not recognized as metaphorical.

THE PROLIFERATION IMAGE CREATES TECHNOLOGY AS THE CENTRAL ISSUE. AND LINKS TECHNOLOGY SPREAD WITH WEAPONIZATION

DAVID MUTIMER, Prof. Political Science York University, 2000: THE WEAPONS STATE: PROLIFERATION AND THE FRAMING OF SECURITY // VT2002 acs D. 117

Despite drawing on many of the same resources as the "proliferation" image, the objects and identities constructed by an alternative image of "disarmament" paired with "development" are strikingly different. The "proliferation" image constructs an object that fundamentally connects the technology underlying weaponry to the weaponry itself and directs attention to that technology in the first instance. This technology, if left unchecked, will produce deleterious effects-the technological cells will proliferate outward from their source inevitably to produce the cancer of destabilizing weapons. This natural, autonomous process Of Spread must be controlled to prevent the cancerous outcome or be excised through "surgical" strikes.

THE PROLIFERATION IMAGE FOCUSES ON TECHNOLOGY AND IGNORE THE CRITICAL ELEMENTS AS TO WHY NATIONS DEVELOP THESE WEAPONS

DAVID MUTIMER, Prof. Political Science York University, 2000; THE WEAPONS STATE: PROLIFERATION AND THE FRAMING OF SECURITY // VT2002 acs p. 156

I have shown that the "proliferation" image is rooted in a technological rendering of the security problem of weapons. By generalizing to all forms of weaponry the view that nuclear technology of any kind produces the capacity for nuclear weapons, "proliferation" constructs as its object of security concern the movement of that underlying technology. This framing highlights the connections between technological development and military capacity while downplaying or hiding other crucial features of the practices of arms production and transfer. These masked features include the reasons for which states produce, transfer, and acquire arms-including, crucially, links between the possession of arms in general and certain categories of arms in particular and claims to statehood and status within the international hierarchy of states. "Proliferation" hides the fact that to be a state in the contemporary world means having certain military assets; moreover, to be a leading state means, among other things, having access to a wide range of highly advanced military technologies. Indeed, and ironically, the "proliferation" image tends to hide weapons themselves in its focus on the technological underpinnings of those weapons.

PROLIFERATION IMAGE FOCUS ON TECHNOLOGY STOPS US FROM CONSIDERING WHY NATIONS GET WMD

DAVID MUTIMER, Prof. Political Science York University, 2000; THE WEAPONS STATE: PROLIFERATION AND THE FRAMING OF SECURITY // VT2002 acs p. 156-157

The central technological character of the "proliferation" image produces a particular range of practices in response. Those practices are centered on a set of supplier controls that restrict and monitor the movement of technologies for producing arms. It is here that ignorance of the weapons is at its most blatant and its most damaging. Technologies have increasingly wide applications; the term dual use misses-often by several orders of magnitude-the uses to which technologies relevant to arms can be put. The point in the process of arms acquisition that is the most difficult and in some ways the most visible is the point at which certain technologies are assembled into arms-the point of weaponization. Yet this point of possible intervention is largely ignored by a "proliferation" image that produces a problem of technology movement rather than of arms production and possession.