Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism - Couverture rigide

Schwartz, Benjamin

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1468309943 ISBN 13 : 9781468309942

Editeur : Overlook Books, 2015

Synopsis

 

A nuclear weapon explodes in a major American city and no one can prove who is responsible. The devastation is horrifying, but even more alarming is the limited options available for the United States government to respond. What happens next? 

In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz looks at what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States, the event that Presidents Obama and Bush, as well as would-be Presidents Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, D.C., Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a Commander in Chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifying reality. 

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Benjamin Schwartz has served in a variety of national security positions within the United States government, including in the Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy. This is his first book.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Copyright

This book is dedicated to the late Harvey Sicherman.
A man who understood the power of words and how to wield that power in service of American statecraft.

May his memory be a blessing.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or official policies of the US Department of Defense or any other agency of the US government.

<table class="table"><tbody><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-copyright">COPYRIGHT  </td><td></td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1">DEDICATION  </td><td></td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-preface003">INTRODUCTION  </td><td class="toc-preface">The Explosion</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter001">ONE   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The Persistent Danger:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn1">Two Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter002">TWO   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The New Threats:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn2">Three Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter003">THREE   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The Lessons of Nuclear Deterrence:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn3">Three Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter004">FOUR   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The Lessons of Countering Terrorism:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn4">Four Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter005">FIVE   </td><td class="toc-chapter">Global Impact:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn5">Five Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-chapter006">SIX   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The Red Line:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="td3" id="fn6">Fifteen Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-appendix001">CONCLUSION   </td><td class="toc-chapter">The New Order:</td></tr><tr><td></td><td class="toc-chapter" id="fn7">Twenty-Three Days “Right of Boom”</td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-endnotes">NOTES  </td><td></td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-acknowledgements">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  </td><td></td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1" id="toc-index001">INDEX  </td><td></td></tr><tr><td class="toc-preface1">ABOUT THE AUTHOR  </td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

INTRODUCTION

THE EXPLOSION

ON AN OTHERWISE CALM AND UNEVENTFUL MORNING, A small nuclear weapon explodes in downtown Washington, DC. The device generates a yield of fifteen kilotons, roughly the same force unleashed by the bomb Little Boy over Hiroshima. The casualty count rises to over a hundred thousand, and the destruction is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. The blast’s electromagnetic pulse burns out electrical components across the metropolitan area. Radiation leaves the center of the city uninhabitable for the first time since it was declared America’s capital in 1790, and the scientific community predicts that it will remain so for a decade. The stock market plunges as investors anticipate draconian customs regimes that will choke global trade. Fear of further attacks paralyzes America and much of the Western world.

Hours after the explosion, a little known terrorist group claims responsibility. It is the first time the president, who was not in Washington at the time of the blast, and his surviving cabinet members, including the director of national intelligence, have heard of the group. After searching intelligence databases, analysts report that the group is linked to three hostile governments, all of which have issued statements condemning the attack and denying involvement. It will take weeks for the remnants of the US intelligence community to assess that one of these three governments is probably lying, but even then the US government won’t have irrefutable evidence of complicity. Unlike a ballistic missile or bomb delivered by enemy land-, air-, or seacraft, the origin of what analysts will call a “container-based improvised nuclear device” is difficult to determine and impossible to prove.

Nuclear forensics will ultimately provide strong evidence that the fissile material used in the device originated from the country under suspicion. Signals intelligence will record celebrations and praise of the attack by midlevel officials in that country’s military and intelligence establishment. However, the intelligence reporting taken as a whole will suggest that negligence within that country’s weapons industry and at its nuclear complexes is at least as plausible a scenario as a deliberate transfer by government officials to the terrorist group. Yet there is no conclusive reporting that points to either willful negligence or human error. Either way, there is no way to know if the transfer occurred through official policy, the machinations of a venal or ideologically motivated individual, or simple incompetence. There is almost nothing about the origins of the attack that the president of the United States knows for certain.

The world awaits a response from the White House. What happens next?

Many books have been written on the topic of nuclear weapons, and many others have been written on terrorism. A smaller but still sizable number of authors have focused on nuclear terrorism, particularly since al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11, 2001. Purveyors of popular culture, from American novelists to Hollywood directors, have also addressed the subject. Author Tom Clancy envisioned terrorists targeting the Super Bowl with nuclear weapons in The Sum of All Fears in 1991. Hollywood offered us the George Clooney vehicle The Peacemaker in 1997. The acclaimed post-9/11 TV drama 24 presented a bleak, dangerous world in which terrorists were always only a few ticks away from nuclear disaster. Americans have had so much entertainment on the issue that they may feel sufficiently educated.

Yet there are very few authors, academics, or entertainers who have really thought through the scenario described above or examined in detail the question of what happens in the days, weeks, and months after such an attack. Presumably, part of the reason for this is that the US government’s response to nuclear terrorism is unknowable. Ask anyone who has spent time at the White House on the National Security Council staff and they will tell you that decisions of war and peace are in no small part the product of fickle factors like the personality of the president and the people who surround him. Thoughtful national security practitioners also know that happenstance and dumb luck have a prominent role in shaping discussions in the White House Situation Room. These conditions make realistic speculation difficult to formulate. The wide range of possible scenarios and the salience of unknowable factors make it difficult to anticipate hypothetical policy prescriptions.

Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe diminution of US government capacity that it is difficult to even know where to begin. Admitting the limits of American power, particularly the “hard power” of the US military and intelligence community, is also not a popular pastime. A politician would need to be unusually brave to publicly focus on the day after an act of nuclear terrorism instead of the days before. Accepting nuclear terrorism is an unacceptable position, his opponents would surely retort.

There are also no precedents, history, or cases of nuclear terrorism to provide context or demand consideration. People—particularly pundits and politicians—who have not studied much history often use the term unprecedented to describe the unfamiliar, but the scenario laid out above is truly something new under the sun. Since a successful nuclear terrorism event has not happened before, and it is not happening now, there is less appetite for thinking deeply about it than there is for considering more traditional security issues. From the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, to the Japanese empire’s attack on Pearl Harbor, to al-Qaeda’s attacks that culminated in the events of 9/11, Americans are conditioned to contemplate surprise attacks and expect that the US government can respond swiftly and severely, to manifest the prediction made by Japanese admiral Isoroky Yamamoto that a surprise attack against America would “awaken a sleeping giant.”

People may assume that the answer to nuclear terrorism is tragic but quite straightforward: retaliation with nuclear weapons. But it won’t be that simple. First, in a nuclear terrorism scenario the adversary has every incentive to obscure the origins of the attack and to conduct its activities in countries and through entities that are unaffiliated with the belligerency. This approach is consistent with the well-established practice of using civilians and noncombatants as both targets and human shields. Consequently, it wouldn’t be clear to the US government who or what to target for retaliation. Second, unlike US retaliation plans developed during the Cold War, an American nuclear response wouldn’t necessarily set the conditions necessary to prevent follow-on attacks. The ultimate outcome of the US government’s response must be to deny the adversary the ability to access nuclear materials. Given the global nature of the nuclear industry, striking back with atomic bombs wouldn’t guarantee that outcome. Third, we don’t live in a world where the moral, legal, and political environment is likely to legitimize a retaliation that results in the violent death of hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with perpetrators who could number fewer than a hundred. In 1957 Henry Kissinger wrote a treatise titled Foreign Policy and Nuclear Weapons in which he noted, “As the power of modern weapons grows, the threat of all-out war loses its credibility and therefore its political effectiveness…. The American people must be made aware that with the end of our atomic monopoly all-out war has ceased to be an instrument of policy, except as a last resort, and that for most of the issues likely to be in dispute our only choice is between a strategy of limited war or inaction.” When Kissinger wrote these words he was thinking about the Soviet Union and was concerned about the ability of the United States to prevent communist expansion through coercion and low-intensity conflict, but his words are just as applicable to the type of nuclear terrorism scenario imagined above. Unfortunately, few have thought about what a “limited war” against nuclear terrorism would look like.

The great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz is renowned for his observation that the fog of war is a permanent condition of armed conflict, but it is also true that the density of this fog shifts over time, growing and dissipating with changing conditions—especially changes in technology. The atomic bomb has been in existence for six decades and in this time that fog hasn’t threatened to obscure the origins of a nuclear attack. In the first two and a half decades after its creation, only five countries—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—possessed the bomb. The acquisition of the weapon by Israel, India, and Pakistan ushered in what Yale University professor Paul Bracken termed “the second nuclear age.” During neither period were these weapons and their components completely secure. Accidents happened. In 1961, the US Air Force mistakenly dropped two hydrogen bombs over North Carolina with a multi-megaton combined payload—hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all but one of the bombs’ safety systems failed.1 Nevertheless, the second half of the twentieth century—the high modern industrial age—was an era of strong centralized governments during which a small number of nuclear suppliers were closely watched by government regulators. Massive governments oversaw weapons of mass destruction. In this environment, attribution of a nuclear detonation would have been straightforward and culpability would have been clear.

The United States was able to avoid nuclear war during this time, despite repeated standoffs with the Soviet Union and China, because a significant number of Americans thought very seriously about the day after a nuclear attack. Tremendous time, energy, and resources went into planning for nuclear war. The US government made it official policy—articulated publicly by presidents and cabinet secretaries—to respond to a Soviet invasion of West Germany with nuclear weapons. It backed up this policy by deploying a massive nuclear arsenal and establishing a comprehensive nuclear command-and-control system. Just as today, during the Cold War no one could truly know how the United States would react if Soviet tanks actually crossed the Fulda Gap. Even presidents and cabinet officials who articulated these threats couldn’t know if their vows were promises or bluffs, but their words possessed enough credibility to keep the Soviet Army at bay.

In the case of nuclear terrorism, it is not the uncertainty of America’s response options that is notable today—uncertainty has always existed and always will—but the degree of it that is alarming. Since the dawn of the nuclear age and the devastation inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most powerful force preventing the use of nuclear weapons has been the plausible threat of effective retaliation. The articulation of this threat—which the US defense establishment calls declaratory policy—is manifest through public warnings. But words are not enough. To be effective, declaratory policy requires that the target audience understand the threat and that the threat be credible.

Credibility rests on a foundation of capability, interest, reputation, and risk propensity. The United States has substantial defense capabilities, but because the use of capabilities accrues costs, credibility requires that US interests be seen to be of such importance that Americans will bear costs and accept risk to defend them. To deter the Soviets, the US government not only declared its intention to use nuclear weapons but also created first- and second-strike capabilities through a nuclear triad. It also deployed American servicemen and -women to serve as a human trip wire in Europe. Having suffered the calamities of two world wars in two generations and having employed two atomic bombs, the American public was perceived by the world as willing to support the use of those weapons in order to protect vital interests of national and international security.

Today the United States possesses no comparable credible threat to compel governments to prevent the transfer of nuclear weapons and related materials to terrorist groups. Effective compellence requires both a perception that attribution of identity (where the weapon came from) is likely and the establishment of a “return address” (a target that can be held at risk). The inherent opacity of nuclear terrorism frustrates these conditions. Foreign governments don’t have much reason to believe they will be held accountable if terrorists exploit their country’s territory, markets, or other resources to attack the United States. Adversarial governments such as the regime in North Korea would be in a much stronger position vis-à-vis the United States if an atomic bomb happened to go off in Washington DC. Countries that have good relations with the United States, such as China and Malaysia, have even less reason to be concerned than countries like Iran and North Korea because they are unlikely to be targets of a wounded and angry American public in the days after a nuclear terrorism event. Ultimately, the incentive for governments to do nothing can be high. European and Chinese companies make a sizable profit from trading in nuclear-related technology.2 These governments have an incentive to cooperate with the United States just enough to claim due diligence and to avoid responsibility, but not enough to actually eliminate threats emanating from their territory that are directed at the United States.

Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, international politics has been premised on the principle of state sovereignty, which holds that states are responsible for maintaining the peace or at least preventing the export of violence from the territories over which they are the supreme authority. In truth, this condition has always been honored more in word than in deed. The international security system and the powers that defend it don’t really hold the Lebanese government responsible for Hezbollah’s actions, the Mexican government responsible for the gang violence in the American Southwest or the US government responsible for the flow of automatic weapons into Mexico. The United States did not retaliate against Germany for hosting many of the al-Qaeda operatives who conducted the 9/11 attacks. Yet this is a gap in the international security system that poses a problem of an entirely different order of magnitude when it comes to nuclear terrorism.

Arguably the most likely reason why planning for the day after an act of nuclear terrorism hasn’t been the focus of US national security policy is that doing so is difficult. But this is only part of the reason. Another is that the US national security community continues to divide the problem in a manner that obscures the issue. The bureaucratic structure of the federal government is demonstrative in this respect. There are offices with names like Missile Defense that deal with the issue of nuclear weapons primarily by formulating policy to deter nuclear weapons states. There are other offices with names like Counterterrorism that focus on kinetic operations aimed at dismantling al-Qaeda and countering other terrorists who threaten the United States. And then there are Counterproliferation and Nonproliferation offices charged with managing policies to prevent nuclear proliferation. These three types of offices have broader functions, but the point here is that the issue of nuclear terrorism crosses all three yet isn’t any single office’s primary responsibility. There is no office singularly focused on the problem of state-enabled terrorism or state failure to prevent terrorist use of nuclear weapons that is capable of marshaling all instruments of national power to meet this threat.

This isn’t the product so much of poor thinking as it is of learned and applied history. The trifurcation reflects the history of three distinct national security problems, each of which spawned specific policies based on unique premises. The problem that gave birth to Missile Defense was the need to manage the US nuclear arsenal in a manner that deters other states from employing nuclear weapons, reassures allies that they are protected under the US nuclear umbrella, and dissuades states from developing and/or expanding nuclear weapons capabilities. Those tasked with addressing this problem are focused intently on providing advice on nuclear declaratory policy and US nuclear weapons posture, which are expressed officially in the Nuclear Posture Review. As might be expected (and quite appropriately), they are steeped in the literature, philosophy, and traditions of nuclear brinkmanship and international security theory. Such people are committed to the proposition that nuclear war can be deterred and military balances managed in order to promote peace.

The US counterterrorism community is a separate and very different tribe. In one respect, these people are the product of al-Qaeda and the post-9/11 wars. But terrorism and the essential premises behind US policy for combating terrorism existed long before Osama bin Laden. “The deliberate targeting of civilians and noncombatants with violence to achieve political purposes”—a standard description of terrorism—is far from a novel form of violence. However, the fundamental challenge posed by an unattributable nuclear attack isn’t terrorism as a tactic, but terrorism as a phenomenon. Terrorism emerges from a sociological, geographical, and political condition that’s been around since the dawn of civilization: the existence of groups that can organize and effectuate violence without occupying fixed territory. Groups like al-Qaeda follow in the footsteps of desert nomads and mountain dwellers who for centuries have harassed settled polities by raiding and then retreating into terrain inhospitable to pacification.3 This dynamic remains the central problem posed by terrorism, and it lends itself to a time-tested response: isolation and preemption. After much trial and error, this has become the de facto strategy of the US counterterrorism community.

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation people, who represent the third arm of the US national security bureaucracy in question, have a very different mandate from both the missile defense and counterterrorism communities. In essence, they manage two types of approaches: (1) nonproliferation supported by multilateral regimes, treaties, and UN sanctions; and (2) counterproliferation effectuated by military and covert action. The former comprises an alphabet soup of agreements and activities, including the G-8 Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT), the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), and UN Security Council Resolutions 1540 and 1874, among others. The latter includes kinetic action such as the US-led invasion of Iraq (an event that represented only one chapter in a longer counterproliferation campaign dating back at least to the Israeli raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981), the US-led interdiction in 2003 of the motor vessel BBC China transporting components to Libya’s nuclear program, the 2007 Israeli air strike on Syria’s clandestine nuclear reactor, and the covert actions that have reportedly been conducted against Iran’s nuclear program.4

Each of these three tribes in the national security community has done a reasonably successful job of fulfilling its mandates. Nuclear weapons states have deterred each other from employing atomic bombs for nearly two-thirds of a century. America’s military and intelligence professionals removed Osama bin Laden from the battlefield and nearly vanquished al-Qaeda’s original senior leadership while managing the broader terrorist threat in a manner that preserved Americans’ way of life with minimal disruptions. By all reasonable measures, the nonproliferators also have exceeded expectations. At the time the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968, experts predicted that the world would confront twenty-five to thirty nuclear weapon states within twenty years. Over forty years later, only four states are not parties to the NPT, and they are the only additional states that possess nuclear weapons. Military action played a role in this success. At tremendous cost, the US-led wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003 put an end to that government’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Interdictions on the high seas pushed the Libyan and North Korean proliferation efforts back on their heels. Israel’s raid into Syria appears to have ended Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear program.

Unfortunately, these policies may no longer be able to sufficiently manage the threat posed by nuclear terrorism. Ten years ago, Graham Allison—the founding dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, adviser to secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger under president Ronald Reagan, and himself assistant secretary of defense under president Bill Clinton—wrote Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. The book achieved international acclaim, becoming the standard on the subject in many colleges and graduate schools as well as think tanks and military academies. In his book, Allison puts forward a doctrine of “Three No’s”: “no loose nukes, no new nascent nukes, and no new nuclear weapons state.” While characterized as general conditions, each no was targeted at the activity of a specific country. “No loose nukes” was a reaction to the proliferation of nuclear materials emanating from the former Soviet Union, principally Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. “No new nascent nukes” responded to the growth of the Iranian nuclear complex. And his warning about “no new nuclear weapons state” was directed squarely at the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea).

A decade later, Allison’s “Three No’s” have become three yeses. Today North Korea is a member of the nuclear weapons club; it has conducted three live nuclear weapons tests, in 2006, 2009, and 2012. The regime has enough fissile material for anywhere between six and eighteen atomic bombs, according to public estimates, as well as the knowledge acquired from over twenty years of work on nuclear weaponization. The DRPK began a plutonium route to the bomb in the late 1980s when it built a clandestine separation plant at Yongbyon despite signing the NPT in 1985. A uranium enrichment program was later exposed as well, first brought to light in October 2002 when American officials in Pyongyang accused North Korea of having a secret, relatively large such program and then confirmed it in November 2010 when the DPRK invited an American scientist to a production-scale gas centrifuge plant at the Yongbyon site.5

With respect to “loose nukes,” the threat faced today is unprecedented. The good news is that the danger that Allison focused on—fissile material leaking out of the former Soviet republics—has been substantially curtailed, though not eliminated. When Allison served in government he was confronted by a slew of nuclear smuggling cases. Between 1992 and 2002, eleven cases of attempted sales of highly enriched uranium and two cases of attempted plutonium sales occurred. In contrast, between 2002 and 2012 there have been only four cases—all but one of which was linked to a single country, Georgia. This is a good news story, which is probably due in no small measure to the efforts of the United States to provide rapid security upgrades as part of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program.6

Unfortunately, this good news has been accompanied by extremely dangerous developments in Pakistan. The country is in the midst of a massive expansion of its nuclear weapons complex at a time when radicalization is on the rise and its military is under frequent attack from insurgents. Moreover, the size of the nuclear complex is not only expanding but, according to Feroz Khan, a thirty-year veteran of the Pakistani program, the military is also planning to produce miniaturized tactical nuclear weapons, deploy them in a ready-to-launch state, and mate them with new delivery vehicles. From a proliferation perspective this is a frightening prospect, particularly considering that Pakistan has an unparalleled history of proliferation. This is all occurring in a country that hosted Osama bin Laden and the senior leadership of al-Qaeda for over a decade and where the military intelligence service continues to court, co-opt, and coordinate with a wide array of terrorists groups.7

With respect to the issue of “nascent nukes” the Islamic Republic of Iran has progressed well past the point of having uranium enrichment capability. Despite robust international sanctions, Iran has procured a wide range of nuclear-related goods from illicit foreign suppliers. Today it possesses two gas centrifuge plants and has the ability to build more if it chooses to do so. In addition, the Bushehr power reactor is now operational and in 2013 the government nearly completed the Arak heavy water reactor that experts assess is better suited to making plutonium for nuclear weapons than to producing medical isotopes, as the Iranians claim. These facilities are fed by Iran’s large uranium conversion and fuel fabrication plants. In November 2013, Iran and the P-5 + 1 reached a six-month agreement that eliminated dangerous stocks of low-enriched uranium, granted increased access to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, froze expansion of the program, and lengthened the time it would take Iran to “break out” of IAEA safeguards and “dash” to a bomb. Yet Iran’s massive nuclear infrastructure remains in place and experts publicly estimate that the breakout time has only expanded by a month or so. Using its declared facilities, Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb in a few months’ time.8 If ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei gave a green light today for the production of a uranium-based weapon, it is possible that the IAEA would not detect it and the United States would not be able to act in time to prevent Iran from producing sufficient highly enriched uranium for a bomb. The bottom line is that Iran now possesses a sizable nuclear industry composed of multiple facilities spread across the country, some of which have been built deep underground in locations that are difficult for foreign airpower to attack. Iran is a large and wealthy country; Iranian scientists are capable; and the atomic bomb is 1940s technology.9

The reality of the three yeses represents a tipping point because the atomic bomb and its ingredients are now so dispersed that loss of government control is both a viable and plausible scenario. The latter condition actually increases the incentive for some governments to exacerbate the former. It is time to think as seriously about the day after nuclear terrorism as Cold War strategists thought about a “hot war” between the United States and Soviet Union. The fog of war won’t be eliminated, but examining the issue can help dissipate it, promote effective preparation, and help identify actions that can be taken prior to a crisis - “left of boom” – in order to diminish the probability of attack. First and foremost, defining and developing credible response capabilities would not only leave the United States with just that but would also boost our ability to compel states to regulate nuclear trade, enhance nuclear security, and increase counterterrorism activities within their own countries.

This is uncharted territory, but history is the best guide. The methodology of this work is to integrate lessons from the past—the successful deterrence of nuclear weapons states, enduring approaches to combating terrorism, and effective counterproliferation regimes in the context of evolving cultural and international legal norms—in order to promote practical thinking about the days after a nuclear terrorism attack. The theory and practice of nuclear weapons deterrence, reassurance, and compellence contain lessons for managing the unique dangers of the nuclear age. Centuries of irregular warfare and special operations provide lessons on how to effectively respond to terrorism. The evolution of the legal and political foundations of the international security system is also relevant for consideration because morality, legality, and legitimacy directly affect the political feasibility of retaliatory actions. The issues of morality and justice have direct and tremendous security implications because the political will for a nation such as the United States to engage in violent retribution for WMD terrorism depends on the issue of legitimacy. The threat of total war, which could cost hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, simply isn’t a credible response to nuclear terrorism committed by only a few dozen people.

Belligerency was clearly transparent when the movement of massive military formations across borders was necessary to inflict massive destruction. This is no longer the case. The world’s reaction in 2013 to chemical weapons use against Syrians is a case in point. Despite clear evidence that Assad’s government deployed chemical weapons and that sarin-filled rockets were fired from government-controlled territory into opposition areas, culpability still became a contentious issue with Russia and China, whose governments asserted that Syrian opposition forces could be to blame. One can only imagine the potential for disagreement in the event a government chooses to facilitate, rather than directly use, WMD. The transfer of a nuclear weapon by a state to a nonstate actor violates treaties and UN resolutions and comes closest to a direct act of aggression, but what about less direct assistance? For example, is the transfer of fissile material a form of aggression? What about the transfer of funds? Or simply providing a sanctuary? If terrorists utilize a banking or transportation system to support their operations, are companies culpable?

Consider the following hypothetical situation. The North Korean government helped build a nuclear weapons complex for Syria that was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007. What if the Israelis hadn’t struck, and atomic bombs were eventually produced, acquired by Hezbollah in the midst of the chaos of Syria’s civil war and then employed by Hezbollah operatives. Would North Korea be held accountable and retaliated against? If so, does the North Korean regime know this? In other words, what is the legal standard for culpability in the case of nuclear terrorism?

The most dangerous thing that governments can do with respect to nuclear terrorism is to do nothing at all, to not build institutions capable of securing nuclear weapons–related materials. Holding governments responsible for policing their own territory was relatively straightforward when nuclear weapons could only be built and deployed by governments. It is far more complicated when it is plausible for nonstate actors to acquire these capabilities. In a Hobbesian world bereft of a Leviathan —either in the form of a multinational world government or a superpower—national governments are the first and best line of defense against nuclear terrorism. But unlike during the Cold War, today there isn’t a credible security framework that suggests that national authorities and their citizens will be held accountable.

The emergence of conditions that make it plausible for terrorists to acquire and employ nuclear weapons without an evidentiary chain that implicates a government is a fundamental change in the international security system that warrants new plans and policies. In charting a way forward, it is worth consulting some pertinent history and considering together topics that often are studied in isolation: (1) nuclear proliferation and efforts to contain the spread of the bomb; (2) conflict escalation among nuclear powers; (3) counterterrorism; (4) the evolution of the international system of states; and (5) the effect of moral considerations on warfare. This book brings these subjects together in an attempt to highlight lessons from the past in order to generate ideas for the future.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PERSISTENT DANGER

TWO DAYS “RIGHT OF BOOM”

WHILE MANY IN THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT have long debated whether or not the threat of nuclear terrorism was real, this isn’t a question on anyone’s mind in the days after the nuclear explosion in downtown Washington, DC. World leaders are unanimous in their expressions of shock, and defensive of their conduct.

“We always knew this was a possibility,” remarks the president, flanked by prime ministers and presidents from the closest allied nations, “but there were no signs of a new threat.”

While most Americans are silenced by a collective horror, a small number search for someone familiar to blame: “If only the government had …” and “The administration hadn’t …” These voices murmur with varying degrees of derision.

Yet even with the clarity of hindsight, intelligence officials, academics, and pundits can’t point to any single event that marked the moment when nuclear terrorism became an urgent problem. A few thoughtful observers recall the warning of Paul Bracken, who stated that often during periods of rapid change “we are caught up in the spiral of events, lost in its energy, blind to the accumulation of slow changes remaking our world.”1 The proliferation of nuclear knowledge and materials occurred gradually for over half a century. A radioactive crater now testifies to the fact that a tipping point had been passed but gives no indication of how, when, or where. “How did this happen?” is the question on the lips of nearly everyone. But no one in a position of authority can identify a single cause.

The magnitude of the attack overwhelms all response resources. Public officials announce a twenty-four-hour curfew throughout Washington while emergency officials are dispatched to the blast site. They contend with the unique features of a nuclear detonation: the explosive blast, direct nuclear radiation, and thermal radiation. The blast’s shock wave generated surface winds approaching one hundred miles per hour, blowing off building walls and breaking glass with enough force to cause injury throughout a three-mile radius. Few of the buildings in a half mile of the blast remain standing, and those that do are not structurally sound. The city’s underground infrastructure—tunnels, the subway system, water mains, power, telecommunications and gas conduits—are now blocked and will remain so for weeks. One mile from ground zero, sturdy buildings are standing but have been rendered unstable, as have most family homes. People are desperate to get as far away as possible, but rubble and overturned vehicles clog streets and fires rage across the city.

Panic induced by the visible devastation is compounded by fear of unobservable dangers. There is no consensus on the geographic boundaries of radioactive dust and debris. Nuclear radiation and contaminants associated with building materials, such as asbestos and heavy metals, are detectable as far as ten to twenty miles from the blast site. Victims within this range are already experiencing nausea and vomiting. In the days ahead an agricultural embargo will be declared for the Chesapeake Bay, all of Delaware and parts of New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, but that is far from the minds of the first responders.2 While emergency responders deal with the immediate human consequences of the attack—treating the injured, stabilizing damaged infrastructure and rebuilding water, sewage, and electrical systems—the “experts” suddenly see a malign trend that had hitherto been obscured by other concerns: the slow but inexorable spread of the technologies of clandestine nuclear warfare.

COULD THIS REALLY HAPPEN?

Is the scenario above simply the product of an overactive imagination and a penchant for alarmism?

This is a reasonable question to ask. And it is worth answering before embarking on an exploration of potential responses to nuclear terrorism. Those who assert that there is a genuine threat of nuclear terrorism should acknowledge at the outset that there are legitimate reasons for skepticism. In fact, those who have paid closest attention to the issue over the years may be most conditioned to be incredulous. They have heard public officials repeatedly issue dire warnings of impending terrorist attacks, watched and seen that no attack materializes, and then have been presented with little or no evidence to support the initial alert.

It is also perfectly understandable that reasonable people question the competence and/or trustworthiness of US national security officials, particularly those responsible for nuclear issues. This is especially so in light of the second American-led invasion of Iraq—a war justified to the public largely on the basis of nonexistent nuclear weapons. Moreover, warnings of impending doom didn’t originate with then vice president Dick Cheney. “I think we have to live with the expectation,” remarked a Los Alamos atomic engineer in 1973, “that once every four or five years a nuclear explosion will take place and kill a lot of people.” This statement is cited in John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy, which detailed concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nonstate actors over forty years ago.3 In the context of this history, accusations of Chicken Little–like behavior aren’t flippant reactions.

While exaggeration may mislead the credulous and offend the perceptive, neither the absence of a precedent for nuclear terrorism nor the intelligence failure regarding Saddam Hussein’s WMD program change the growing threat. Many of these conditions aren’t new; they have existed since the dawn of the nuclear age, and the world has been very fortunate that the danger has been effectively managed for so long. Other conditions are truly unprecedented. The world crossed from Graham Allison’s “Three No’s” into three Yeses with a whimper rather than a bang, but we have nevertheless entered an environment of extraordinary risk. Allison’s contention that “[t]he detonation of a terrorist nuclear device in an American city is inevitable if the U.S. continues on its present course” is certainly debatable.4

Yet an objective assessment of the current nuclear security situation and its future trajectory leads to an unavoidable conclusion: We are more vulnerable to nuclear terrorism than at any time since the dawn of the nuclear age.

THE ENDURING THREAT

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Overlook Books
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1468309943
• ISBN 13: 9781468309942
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible