Going Ballistic

MAD World

The United States has immense military capabilities, including thousands of nuclear weapons of unimaginable destructive power. Surely, our massive nuclear arsenal will cause bin Laden, and his acolytes or imitators, to rethink aspirations for nuclear mass murder, and to step back from the atomic abyss. Won’t it?

Of course not.

Because our nuclear weapons, and our nuclear doctrines, are all directed at the power of states. And Al Qaeda is not a state. Osama bin Laden does not control any territory. Terrorists are non-state actors. And our vast, bristling nuclear arsenal can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to deter a non-state actor.

There are at least five fundamental reasons why this is so.

First, if the terrorist does not control any territory, then there is no infrastructure, no capital city, no place to threaten to retaliate against. This is the crucial difference between Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For all the current turmoil about the mere possibility that Iran might someday acquire a few nuclear weapons, it is inconceivable that Ahmadinejad could ever actually use one, without ensuring both personal and national suicide. But bin Laden does not face such a constraint. Mohamed ElBaradei, in his February 2008 speech in Munich, stated this as clearly as anyone. “This, to me, is the most danger we are facing today,” he said. “Because any country, even if they have nuclear weapons, would continue to have a rational approach. They know if they use a nuclear weapon, they will be pulverized. For an extremist group, there is no concept of deterrence. If they have it, they will use it.”

Second, if the terrorists are not traditional “rational actors” wanting to preserve their own lives, then threatening them with nuclear obliteration is no discouragement at all. As we saw on 9/11, and in many horrific terrorist episodes since, many are quite willing to commit suicide to serve their odious aims.

Third, if the terrorist does want to preserve his own life and we seek to deter him by threatening to kill him, we can do that in any conceivable circumstance with conventional weaponry alone.

Fourth, we may not know where the perpetrators are. After all, we still cannot locate bin Laden nearly seven years after the horror of 9/11.

Finally, we may not even know who the perpetrators are. Some terror attacks in recent years have been followed by no claims of responsibility at all. Imagine it’s the day after, the month after, the year after the sudden vanishing of an American city, and we never get any idea at all who did it.

The U.S. Army didn’t protect us on 9/11. The U.S. Air Force didn’t protect us on 9/11. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 “aircraft carrier battle groups” (no other country has even one), didn’t protect us on 9/11. And the thing that protected us the least on 9/11 was our swollen atomic stockpile, our so-called “nuclear deterrent,” our arsenal of the apocalypse. More than 10,000 American nuclear warheads, of incomprehensible destructive force. And they failed utterly to deter 19 men armed with box cutters.

Nor will they deter the nuclear terrorists.

What are we going to do, threaten to fire a nuclear cruise missile through the balcony window of their $750-a-month bachelor apartment in suburban Las Vegas?

“My City Was Gone” 

The Los Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR, the American affiliate of my own organization, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize) projected the results of an atomic warhead the size of the Hiroshima bomb – about 15 kilotons – detonating at noon on a weekday in downtown Los Angeles. They concluded that more than 117,000 people would perish instantly, more than 15,000 more would die within a few hours, and more than 96,000 after that would slowly wither away.

Similarly, the RAND Corporation released a study in August 2006 calculating the effects of a 10-kiloton device exploding shortly after unloading onto a pier at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest in the United States. They concluded that 60,000 people would die at once, 150,000 would be directly exposed to hazardous radiation, and 2 to 3 million would have to relocate immediately because their homes would be hopelessly contaminated.

However, many of the city-busting hydrogen bombs produced during the protracted Cold War, and still in service today, are far more potent than 10 or 15 kilotons. Like 170 kilotons. Like the 550 kiloton warhead still quite common in the Russian arsenal. Like the B-83, America’s largest warhead today, at 1,200 kilotons (1.2 megatons). That’s about 100 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

You can raise those PSR and RAND casualty estimates accordingly.

The aspiring nuclear terrorists are probably not in a hurry. Time is on their side. Everything we have learned since 9/11 about those in the inner circles of terror indicates that they are tough, smart, implacably dedicated, and in it for the long haul. (Recall the enormous flap when television host Bill Maher, immediately after 9/11, asserted that men who rationally chose to slam themselves into concrete buildings could hardly be called cowards.)

That is not to say that a successful nuclear terror attack will be easy for aspiring nuclear terrorists to make happen. Many may try but fall short along the way. But if those who aspire to pull off the necessary sequence of events fail 999 times out of 1,000, but manage just a single time to obtain an atom bomb, or to build an atom bomb, and then to transport it into the heart of a large American city, we lose. “You have to be lucky every single time,” the Irish Republican Army used to say. “We have to be lucky just once.”

So is there anything we can do to prevent the nightmare of nuclear terror? Indeed. There are answers in the short term, answers in the medium term, and answers – most importantly – in the long term. Because the only long-term solution to the threat of nuclear terror – and to all the other worrisome nuclear scenarios we can conjure – is the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Short Term Fixes

In the short term, we must do everything possible to ensure that no nuclear warheads or materials find their way into the clutches of Al Qaeda or anyone else with similar mass murder ambitions.

Michael Levi’s important 2007 book On Nuclear Terrorism provides grounds for optimism. The physicist argues that nuclear terror will likely be quite a bit more difficult to pull off than some (often with political motives) have argued. Levi argues that while the “lucky every time/lucky once” framework is not untrue when considered over the course of many plots, each individual plot can be tackled from precisely the opposite perspective. The aspiring nuclear terrorists, he argues, have to succeed at every step of a complex and difficult process. The authorities, on the other hand, only need to nab them once. Consequently, Levi advocates a systematic, interactive, many-layered strategy of prevention, one that integrates “controls over nuclear materials and weapons, military power, diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, border security, and consequence management,” all seeking to disrupt the aspiring nuclear terrorist at many potential chokepoints along the way.

For all our worries about North Korea, Iran, and the several states that may eventually follow their lead, priority number one in the nuclear terror realm has to be Russia. Russia today has several thousand nuclear weapons, and hundreds of tons of nuclear material, at perhaps as many as 250 sites. “The actual amount of weapon-usable nuclear material in Russia,” says national security expert Joseph Cirincione, “may not even be known by the Russian government.” In 1997, retired Soviet General Alexander Lebed claimed that when the USSR unraveled at the end of 1991, Soviet authorities lost track of more than 100 nuclear weapons roughly the size of a suitcase. Lebed’s widely publicized claim has never been conclusively confirmed or refuted. But what he put forth was hardly an implausible scenario.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, instituted almost immediately after the December 1991 dissolution of the USSR to help secure the late Soviet Union’s enormous nuclear arsenal, has done much to diminish these dangers. So too has the more recent U.S. Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a program established in 2004 to secure dangerous materials of Soviet or other origin which found their way into civilian nuclear programs of other countries. And the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, which George Bush and Vladimir Putin unveiled together at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, is another promising step. But the pace of all of them has been slow, much remains to be done, and it is difficult to understand why anything should be considered a better investment in national security than programs like these.

Russia is not the only country where we have to worry about loose nuclear weapons and materials. The long history of transfers of nuclear technology and knowledge by the now infamous A.Q. Khan network certainly suggests that Pakistan, or particular Pakistani individuals, could serve as a source for aspiring nuclear terrorists. The martial law declared by President Pervez Musharraf in late 2007, followed soon thereafter by the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and subsequent electoral setbacks for Musharraf, set off a flurry of commentaries about the worrisome nuclear chaos inside Pakistan that – still – might ensue.

Of course, enhancing port and border safeguards in the United States must remain a perpetually high priority. The Bush administration, commendably, has made considerable progress in this regard since September 11, 2001. Before 9/11, not a single container crossing our border was screened for radioactivity. Today, more than 80 percent are.

Still, the sheer volume of global commerce makes this job almost impossibly big. To find smuggled nuclear materials in the vast sea of consumer goods shipped by container around the world is to seek the proverbial needle in a haystack. An article in the October 2006 issue of Risk Analysis magazine reported the results of a rigorous statistical evaluation of U.S. container screening capabilities, and concluded, “The likelihood that the current screening system would detect a shielded nuclear weapon is quite low (around 10 percent).”

So it is beyond naive to imagine that these kinds of short-term steps, no matter how elaborate, can forestall the fateful day forever. Strict controls over all things nuclear may well save us in the short term. But in the medium term, we need to reduce not just the availability of nuclear weapons and materials, but also the motivations for nuclear terror.