A Less Perfect Union
Several leading scholars have identified nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat the United States and its allies face and have concluded that such an attack is very much within the realm of possibility.
Others strongly believe that the dangers the United States is facing are limited—or believe that such a sense is useful for other matters they are concerned about (such as civil liberties)—and typically make statements of the kind that follows. John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, argues in Foreign Affairs: “A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists—like that presented by Japanese Americans during World War II or by American Communists after it—has been massively exaggerated. Is it possible that the haystack is essentially free of needles?” Likewise Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, says, “The [7/7 terrorist] bombing in London was terrible, but it wasn’t like the Blitz,” adding, “terrorists can make life unpleasant, but bin Laden isn’t going to end up running Great Britain, while Hitler very well might have.”
These authors equate existence with the survival of a nation, and the survival of the nation with the survival of a fair number of its citizens, its infrastructure, and other assets such as select factories and residential buildings. But a nation is more than the aggregate of X million individuals. Nations have communitarian dimensions. Their citizens have a sense of purpose that is in part composed of their identification with the nation as a whole, with its well-being. Hence, when their national soccer team loses, they will feel a loss. When the president is assassinated, they feel personally aggrieved, threatened, and diminished. If large segments of the population are killed and much of the nation is laid to waste, the remaining citizens will be severely traumatized, say in the ways Germans were at the end of World War I.
Citizens also rely on the national state for their security. If the security of any major part of the nation is violated, citizens of other parts will lose their sense of security and their trust in their leaders and political institutions. Often they then seek safety by supporting strong-armed leaders and nondemocratic forms of government.
Furthermore, nations have communal assets that do not belong to any one citizen, but, if destroyed, many will be affected. Some of these assets are symbolic; for instance if the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument were destroyed, Americans would survive but feel abused. Other communal assets are “objective”; thus, if the water reservoirs of a city are deliberately contaminated, its citizens will feel endangered even if no one was killed or lost any private property.
It follows that even if a nuclear attack “only” laid to waste a major U.S. city (such as Chicago), let alone one of special symbolic importance (such as Washington, D.C.) or several cities (whether all at the same time or in rapid succession), the nation would continue to exist—but it would not be the same nation. The analogue is to a person whose eyes have been gouged out, eardrums pierced, and right leg severed. His name and social security number will remain the same but perhaps little else will. A nation so attacked will be much less liberal, less respectful of individual rights, less tolerant of foreigners, and much more belligerent in its dealings with other nations, as well as with “non-state actors” overseas. We have seen such developments in Britain following the relatively small number of IRA terrorist attacks in England (most attacks occurred in Northern Ireland). They led to significant diminution of individual rights (as embodied by the 1973 Northern Ireland Emergency Provisions Act), as well as to the introduction of many tens of thousands of cameras in public spaces, and the City of London’s security and surveillance cordon, the so-called Ring of Steel.
There is often a strong correlation between those who are concerned that the fear of terrorism will lead U.S. society to tolerate major reductions in civil liberties, that we will “do the work of terrorists for them” by destroying America as we have known and loved it—and those who minimize threats by terrorists. They view the fear of an attack—which they argue has been drummed up and exaggerated by right-wing forces or those in power—as much more damaging than the effects of such attacks. Some of these threat-minimizers carry their position to the next step when they argue that terrorists, whose casualties number in the thousands, should not be treated any differently than other criminals.
After all, the number of people killed in the United States every year by garden-variety criminals greatly exceeds those killed by terrorists over the last 100 years. Also, by treating terrorists the same way as criminals, civil libertarians hold, the rights of those suspected of being terrorists will be maintained, and with that our liberal democratic regime. This position raises two issues. One of the basic assumptions of the criminal system is that there is no room for state action unless a crime has already been committed. Evidence is then collected to prosecute the suspects. Deterrence of future crimes is based on the success of such post-crime prosecution. However, in the case of massive terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, the goal must be to prevent an attack before it occurs. Moreover deterrence cannot be expected to be the result of post-attack prosecution of terrorists, as many of them have shown their willingness to commit suicide in their attack. Furthermore, punishing the villages or countries from which the terrorists hail will not deter the terrorists; indeed it is welcome from their viewpoint, as it tends to increase their ranks and local support for their activities.
Second, the criminal system allows those accused to face their accusers and have access to all the relevant evidence. In the case of terrorism, such disclosures would cause grievous damage to the public interest by discouraging sources and compromising important means of finding information about terrorism.
Neither of these factors suggests that terrorists should be denied basic human rights, or that the way to confront them is by declaring a 100-year war. Ways and means must and can be found that are specially tailored to their status, which is fundamentally different from both criminals and soldiers. I can offer here merely a few illustrations of an approach that balances the interests of upholding individual rights and ensuring security. For instance, lawyers should be given access to classified information—but terrorists may be limited in their choice of lawyers to those who have security clearance. The courts may hold their sessions in secret, as long as the courts’ independence is secured. These two brief examples may not be the best way to proceed, but they illustrate that a third way can be found between the global-war-on-terror rubric favored by the Bush administration and the criminal-justice approach favored by threat-minimizers.
There are those who take a longer view, a very long one. The American philosopher and author Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argues that the threat of radical Islamist groups is not existential, because in the longer run the Western march of history toward democratization will win. He also holds that recent setbacks to democratization in Muslim nations are a sort of childhood disease nations may go through but will outgrow on their own and will have no lasting effects on history.
Predicting the future is a treacherous business. Past historical experience suggests that the record of those who see history marching in one clear direction is not exactly sterling. There is also plenty of evidence that the human costs of the traumas of the kind Afghanistan suffered under the Taliban are very high indeed. If these are “childhood diseases” or “labor pains” of a new democratic order, we should go a long way to help people avoid them.
Only fatalists would sit back and rely on the march of history to do their bidding.
(This piece first appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Amitai Etzioni is Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. His most recent book is Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy just published by Yale University Press.
I'm not a threat minimizer. It's absolutely true that the destruction of a major US city, while it wouldn't destroy the nation, would change it.
Last time that happened it was a natural disaster that destroyed New Orleans. The government was so concerned with terrorism that it was unable to respond to the unexpected.
That's what has me concerned about all of this. The government and a bunch of big brains are sitting around wondering how to stop terrorists from nuking Chicago at a time when, well, nobody is credibly trying to nuke Chicago. I don't care how much IQ or resources you muster, but if you design homeland security around disaster hypotheticals you will always be hit by the unexpected.
By the way, the criminal system is fully equipped to deal with terrorists. It dealt with the freaking mafia. It dealt with homegrown militias. It dealt with Timothy McVeigh.
It's the threat-exagerators who underestimate the powers of our legal system here. By the way, take a look at the last few "terrorist" busts. They've universally been the arrests of out-of-touch nutjobs who like to play GI Joe in their backyards and who think that JFK airport can be blown up by setting off a Death Star style chain reaction.
It's time for people to stop exagerating the threats we face and to look at what we're really dealing with, in a broad way. All of this sitting around fretting about nuclear suitcase bombs that don't exist really isn't making us any safer.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
June 20, 2007 12:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know where to begin with a post that begs so many questions. Has it proven that policing is impossible, when such work is exactly what has rounded up the last terror threats? Has it proven that the abstraction of terrorism really is the threat rather than a slogan? Has it proven that we are better and safer as a nation for combining a militaristic, unilaterial unprovked response with suppression of freedom at home? Has it proven that, if community and community ideals are more important than survival, that precisely these can survive such immoral government behavior? Frankly, this makes me sick.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
June 20, 2007 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Katrina. New Orleans. (actually, much of the Gulf Coast around New Orleans also). I too once thought that the nation would be shocked by the devastation of a large city. But the damage to New Orleans was essentially equivalent to what would have resulted from a smart terrorist using his stolen nuclear weapon at the most critical spot. An entire city _was_ destroyed. And the nation... yawned.
Of course I also thought that the nation would rally around and help the survivors recover and rebuild. That was foolish of me.
sPh
June 20, 2007 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
And of course this line too:
Irving Libby participated in the destruction of a CIA operation that was focused on nuclear proliferation by terrorists. He then obstructed an investigation into who ordered the destruction of the CIA operation. Was he sent to Gitmo? Tortured? His family and associated "interrogated"? No, of course not. For some reason it seems that only certain classes/types of people are marked for torture; other classes get a free pass for equally or more destructive actions.
sPh
June 20, 2007 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's funny (or maybe it's not) but whenever I hear about threats to our nation from terrorists wielding nuclear, chemical or biological weapons I begin thinking more about the weapons then the terrorists.
I wonder sometimes just how pervasive nuclear technology (or chemical & biological for that matter) would be if we had seriously sat down with the Soviets and truly tried to closed the door on the R&D, production and stockpiling of this stuff for all these years. The processes required in order to develop and produce these things is no small task and forgive me if I'm skeptical that bin Laden has the capability of doing it from some cave in Tora Bora. So I wonder where will they come from then? Perhaps from the same places that all of the bullets, assault rifles and bombs come from? We fret away endlessly about terrorists armed to the teeth at our gates yet we are the #1 arms seller on the planet. The irony is as painful as it is obvious. And because we've been researching and building these even deadlier technologies for so long, not only are they much more readily available but so too is the means by which to manufacture them for oneself.
In some ways I think that we (the collective industrialized we, not just the US) manufacture all of these terrible tools of destruction for various reasons (commonly profit) and then find the world flooded with them and that they pose dire threats to our safety. It's at this point I just shake my head in frustrated disbelief because the sollution most commonly put forth is to build even more of them and to go forth and use them.
June 20, 2007 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can only conclude from this that several leading scholars are idiots, and have identified the object that they've stuck their heads up as each others asses.
Hmmm.
I'm caustic these days.
Comes with not suffering fools gladly, or at all.
Look, I love 24 as much as the next man. It gives me a thrill to see Jack Bauer cutting the head off an innocent bystander or shooting an ambassador who just happened to walk down the wrong hallway. I too believe in the redeeming power of torture, and one near superhuman secret agent to restart his own heart with electric paddles.
But the difference is that I appreciate the distinction between fiction and reality.
So let's get this straight. Nuclear terrorism as a possibility? I don't think so.
Here's how it works. Nukes are hard to build. Yeah, yeah, we've all read the readers digest thing about the grad student who built a model in his basement, yadda yadda yadda.
Well, guess again. A working nuclear weapon consumed billions of dollars of resources and hundreds of thousands of man hours from some of America's hottest brains in the Manhattan project.
The fact that they did it made it easier to build more and bigger and badder bombs. But its never like rolling off a log.
Every nuclear state has achieved its status only after achieving and extraordinary level of technological sophistication and substantial industrial infrastructure. It cost billions of dollars and years of work in each case...
Even North Korea and its atomic fizzle represented a major research and development project.
The idea that Al Quaeda's Achmed and Hamad are going to cobble one together, even if one of them is a graduate student, is laughable.
Yeah, give Achmed and Hamad a few billion dollars, a decade to play with, and a staff of a few hundred technicians and bottle washers, sure.
Very few entities outside of states have the resources and technological skills to build a nuclear weapon.
Many states don't. I think we can take it for granted that Uruguay, Peru, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, etc. etc. will never be a nuclear power .... population in the single digit millions, gnp in the single digit billions, and industrial base that consists of two donkeys and a waterwheel. Not happening.
A few non-state groups might be able to develop a nuclear weapon. In this category, I'd have to guess the Roman Catholic Church, the Mormon Church have the wealth and infrastructure possibly. Not the Southern Baptists, they're too disorganized and ignorant. Scientologists, nah, they're just flakes. Microsoft might be able to do the trick. GM possibly, once upon a time. Sony, Toyota, AT&T, ITT, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell. I could see Bechtel or Halliburton trying but screwing it up royally.
I don't see Al Quaeda ever having the guts or gumption, the money, the know how, the access to the industrial plant, ever to put one together. The resources necessary are just out of their league. And let's face it, Al Quaeda is the Microsoft of terrorism.
The notion that any terrorist group, or organized criminal group - the Medellin or Cartagena Cartel, the Thailand White Slave Trade, the Mafia, the Triads, the Tong, the Yakuza could manage it is just a nonstarter. By nature these groups are organizationally diffuse, feudal in structure, and simply lack the capacity to get one off.
So, what if they buy one? Good question.
Who in their right minds is going to sell a nuke? Particularly when there's a good chance that a nuclear weapon could be traced back to country of origin? Which would invite nuclear reprisal.
What's the going rate on a nuke? How much could you sell a nuke for to repay the investment of building one? It's just not economic. Or sensible. A nuke is a major national security investment based in the concept of control and deterrance. You don't give them away, any more than the United States air force lets precocious 10 year olds go on training jaunts with its stealth fighters.
What about if they steal one? Sure, a possibility. It's probably some of the most closely guarded, most secure technology in the world. But yes, I suppose that Al Quaeda allied with magical unicorns and in league with the easter bunny could make off with one.
What if one was bought/stolen from a failed/destabilized state? Here we're thinking Russia or Pakistan? Well, we can guard against that, can't we. And the resources we can bring to bear in those situations are vastly greater than Al Quaeda or the Mafia can exert. The loose nuke scenario is one of palpable negligence.
It involves entirely hypothetical situations which by nature would be short duration.
But let's look at the other side of the coin.
What's in it for Al Quaeda. Seriously. Al Quaeda does cost/benefit analysis just like everyone else. They don't have unlimited resources. They go for the biggest bang for the buck.
Their biggest bang? 9/11. 3000 dead. A trillion dollars worth of damage. America castrated and squealing like a stuck pig for 6 years, incessantly licking where its balls used to be, and engaged in random convulsions of impotent rage and crippling fear.
The buck? 250,000 or less. Fourteen guys with box cutters.
So you figure that they'll spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions or a billion dollars for a nuke, that they'd commit hundreds or thousands of personnel to a project like this?
Nah. If 9/11 was what they could do with 14 guys, some box cutters and a quarter mill, imagine the operations, imagine the sheer number and variety and intensity of operations that they could pull off with say 50 million and 300 equally dedicated and skilled operatives.
And seriously, look at the risk factor. The sort of investment of personnel, money and time for a nuke is going to make waves, much more likely to catch attention, much more likely to be caught and foiled.
Whereas if Osama Bin casts his bread upon the waters... well, they're much harder to detect, harder to catch, harder to stop. Guarantee that with 50 or 100 9/11 projects, no matter how many Uncle Sam stops some will get through.
So a nuclear terrorist attack is a fantasy for prime time television adventure serials.
It's not real life.
June 20, 2007 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
This pretty much sums up my feeling on the terrorist "nuke" threat. Although when the manic politician or reporter on TV says "nuke" they mostly mean a "dirty bomb" (that clever new fantastical weapon that combines Pigpen with one of those cherry suicide bomb vests no doubt). And while I can agree that one of these "dirty bombs" would be a much easier undertaking, that still doesn't mean that it would be easy.
Most of the uber killing inventions we've concocted over the years are not only expensive but also extremely temperamental and require very careful handling. Messing with incredibly toxic/poisonous/radioactive substances would only take one slip to take you out instead. It's very dangerous stuff as anyone can imagine. And as you say, why spend all of that time and all those resources on such an enterprise when there are just many more cheaper and effective options? And why would anyone drop XXX millions of dollars on one nuke that may likely be discovered and foil everything? Surely that amount of capital and all those resources could sustain any operation for years.
If we were serious about getting control of and tracking all of these horrible technologies there would be virtually no chance for them falling in "the wrong" hands. But we are so wrapped up in not only our own fear of still needing these awful things, but our indignation at being asked to have any of those potential rules apply to us.
It would seem that this entire meme is of the same frame of mind as I used to be at 10 years old. I "knew" there were no monsters or axe murderers in the dark but that didn't stop me from running like hell from one light switch to the next when I was turning them off.
June 20, 2007 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
A nuclear weapon is as good or as bad as the people who own it.
June 20, 2007 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nukes don't kill people, people do?
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
June 20, 2007 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
That pretty much covers it.
America could be "the land of the free and the home of the brave", but that would be insufficiently profitable and offer insufficient control to those who are the real threat to our society.
June 21, 2007 6:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Two nukes in every garage? Live the dream, baby!
June 21, 2007 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nuclear terrorism would be difficult (thank goodness, for otherwise we'ld have seen it already) but by no means impossible. Prof. Etzioni is perfectly correct when he states that "such an attack is very much within the realm of possibility." All this snarky and uninformed talk about "Achmed and Hamad" doesn't change the reality. Here is a good article to start with:
www.silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/CEF/Quarterly/May_2006/Lee.pdf
June 21, 2007 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I must disagree when the New Orleans tragedy is mentioned as comparable to the nuclear bomb in a US city.
San Francisco could disappear tomorrow in an earthquake and it would not have any impact at all on the governance of the US. But a 300 lb nuclear bomb carried in on a 40' saltwater fishing boat docked at Broadway and Embarcadero in SF would mark the end of the liberal experiment in America.
June 21, 2007 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
So as a result we will pre-destroy our liberal experiment in order to save it? I used to think we were tougher than that.
By the way, the British Government was prepared for 400,000 casualties on the first night of the Blitz (200,000 physical and 200,000 psychiatric)[1].
sPh
[1] Total killed in 6 years of the war was approximately 91,000.
June 21, 2007 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
"RATS Exercise in Tashkent: Concern Over Nuclear Terrorism?"
Is that what you were referring to? Ultimate conclusion? Not much threat of nuclear terrorism, since production has switched to low grade.
Let's be serious here. Nuclear terrorism is very much within the realm of possibility.
Also within the realm of possibility:
* Allah manifesting a plague of locusts and frogs upon Chicago, as evidence of his divine reality.
* Aliens from outer space invading, either in concert with Osama Bin Laden or as an independent third force.
* A volcano swallowing up New York City.
* An Al Quaeda mole becoming President or Vice-President, or infiltrating White House staff to the extent of getting control of the nuclear football.
* A significant portion of the American population spontaneously converting to Islam.
* An Islamic Lex Luther invents a giant Infidel-kill-otron death robot and sends it on a rampage through the US.
And about a thousand other things. Possibilities are just what they are, possibilities. They have to be realistically assessed. We can't go around shitting ourselves over every possibility.
We have to deal with actual probabilities. With actual realistic threat assessments.
Nuclear terrorism is for guys like Blofeld and Doctor Evil, and frankly, Austen Powers and Jack Bauer have that situation handled.
It's called "living in the grown up world."
June 21, 2007 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"By the way, the British Government was prepared for 400,000 casualties on the first night of the Blitz (200,000 physical and 200,000 psychiatric).. Total killed in 6 years of the war was approximately 91,000."
You are illustrating my point (I think it is Prof. Etzioni's point as well). The raw body count is pretty unimportant in terms of psychic impact. A million people killed in a cataclysmic SF earthquake would have much much less long term impact than 30,000 killed by an off-shore A-bomb.
How many times do we have to hear some idiot comparing the 3000 dead in 9/11 to the monthly automobile death toll. They are NOT comparable. Be honest and agree that 9/11 is much more horrible.
June 21, 2007 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
.> You are illustrating my point (I think it
> is Prof. Etzioni's point as well).
You are welcome to that opinion; I disagree. It is a good thing IMHO that the people holding your line of thought weren't in charge of the defense of Leningrad.
Note that Churchill had to win out over the faction that wanted to preemptively surrender, then convince the British public that they could hold on and defend themselves. That required leadership and courage, but he was able to do it. You and Etzioni are suggesting that we shouldn't even try. Contrast this with Bloomberg's statement on the JFK non-event last week.
sPh
June 22, 2007 6:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Huh?
The theme of Etzioni's article is that we must take the terrorist threat very seriously and do more to guard against it. I agree.
Essentially all of the other comments disagree. They say that the terrorist threat is exaggerated, or that other issues are more important, or ...
So what does this have to do with preemptive surrender?
June 22, 2007 9:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nah, the theme of Mr. Etzioni's article was that too much bad television impairs the critical judgement of people who ought to know better.
Hysterical terror is not a useful way of proceeding through life.
June 22, 2007 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Valdron: "Let's be serious here. Nuclear terrorism is very much within the realm of possibility."
Good for TPMCafe. Noone used "existential", as the author did, in a non-comprehensive way. That might be unique among blogs. Congrats.
If we had been serious about nuclear threat, we would have been serious about Russian/USSR nuclear weapons long before 11th September, 2001. We wouldn't have dropped or broken every nuclear treaty since 1966.
This adminstration is a disgrace in terms of diplomacy, treaty obligation, or thought to the future. Might makes right.
We have blown 50 years of diplomatic progress and continuity.
Don't give me serious.
June 23, 2007 7:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
My point is that nuclear terrorism is seriously within the realm of possibility in the way that alien invasions, spontaneous mass religious conversion and parts of north america sinking into the sea are.
I believe it's Mr. Etzioni who blathers about the the nuclear threat being not only serious, but probable and imminent and the greatest threat we are facing.
Me, if I was to pick 'greatest threats', I'd point to global warming, environmental degradation, the collapse of oceans fish populations, deindustrialization of America, the increasing gap between rich and poor, crippling budget deficits, avian flu, the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases, a runaway military industrial complex, etc.
All of these greatest threats, to one extent or another, can be addressed coherently by careful thinking and sustained action.
I suppose that the nuclear threat could be addressed the same way. Unfortunately, Mr. Etzioni's approach goes for the chicken little route.
June 24, 2007 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink