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Sunday, September 10, 2006

Five Years After 9/11: Fear itself (mushroom cloud edition)

I'm not really in favor of a "don't worry, be happy" attitude about terrorism. There is a real and continuing threat out there, made much more severe by the Cheney-Bush policies in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel's occupied territories.

But this piece by military analyst William Arkin that calls for a reassessment of the danger of nuclear terrorist attack is certainly worth reading: The continuing misuses of fear Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Sept/Oct 2006.

Arkin tries too hard to sound contrarian at times. Which gives me reservations sometimes about what he's really trying to say. Because most times when someone is trying to sound like they're criticizing the assumptions of both major parties, they're really just flacking for the Republicans with some strange twist.

But I don't see Arkin as really doing that. So, while I don't feel comforable with some of his formulations, and I'm not even convinced about his main point, he presents an important challenge to the conventional wisdom about the threat of nuclear terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons:

Anxiety about nuclear terrorism predates the events of 9/11. It goes back at least to the early 1970s when European terrorism was rampant and nuclear weapons were stored at more than 1,000 depots worldwide, a high percentage of them in western Europe. Since then, concern about nuclear terrorism has ebbed and flowed with the times and been employed by counterterrorism and security types, by arms control and nonproliferation specialists and activists, and by anti-nuclear power advocates. The joining of proliferation and counterterrorism concerns in the 1990s - with the specter of a WMD terrorist attack - proved a particularly potent and enduring combination.

Today, government officials and analysts, even the communities that one might expect to express deep skepticism in the aftermath of the Iraq experience, enlist nuclear terrorism and tout it as the great fear. The recent Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (the so-called Blix commission) couldn't resist including terror in the title of its final report earlier this year, placing counterterrorism on equal ground with disarmament and nonproliferation. The threat, the commission said, demanded improvements in security and greater control of nuclear materials as well as a return to general arms control and disarmament negotiations.

There is no factual answer as to whether the threat of nuclear terrorism is actually worthy of equal billing. One thing is clear, though, in the post-9/11 environment: A threat that is nightmarish and enduring and can neither be proved nor disproved is a powerful lubricant. The cataclysmic threat of nuclear terrorism, impervious to either deterrence or international law, produces a presumption of extraordinary action, even preemption, in dealing with it. The intensity of the professed danger suggests that there is little that can be done beyond the military sphere; the unpredictability of the enemy leads to the conclusion that the use of force is no longer a final option, but the only option. (my emphasis)

As Arkin points out, the number of usable nuclear weapons has dramatically decreased since the end of the Cold War, which would tend to reduce the chance that a terrorist group would get their hands on a functional nuclear weapon.

But as I read his piece, Arkin is saying that we need to approach terrorists threats using our heads more than our fears and wild imaginations.

And it's an idea that resonates a lot with me. Because for five years, the Cheney-Bush administration has been cynically promoting fear to justify its Bush Doctrine policy of preventive war, its torture policy, its illegal spying on American citizens, its kidnapping and secret prisons, its criminal outing of Valarie Plame as a undercover CIA officer. And that's only referring to practices that clearly violate the law.

The overall result, especially with the Iraq War and all connected with it, has been brutally damaging to American interests in the world.

I'm not under any illusions that the Cheney-Bush government will change their approach as long as they are in power. But I do think it's important for people to realize what's happening and at least help block them from pursuing even more disastrous actions. Among which a military attack on Iran would be at the top of the list.

Nuclear terrorism is clearly a possibility. The fact that it may be a distant one is offset by the possible terrible consequences of even one occurence of an actual nuclear bomb explosion in a populated area. But the fact also is that as long as the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear device exists, there will be some risk of a nuclear attack of some kind. The phantom of removing the risk entirely can only result in the preventive war doctrine the Bush administration pursued in Iraq.

My understanding is that if a terrorist group could acquire the right quantity of fissile material, and had nuclear engineers who knew how to build a bomb, it would be possible to construct a functional nuclear bomb. But, in practice, it would have to be constructed in the place where it was intended to go off, and those reading the fissile material for the bomb would likely expose themselves to lethal amounts of radiation in doing so. For zealots bent on martyrdom, that presumably wouldn't be a large obstacle.

But that is pretty much the same as saying that IF the local Baptist Church had fissile material ready for bomb usage and IF that had some nuclear engineers who could do the job and IF they had the intent to do so and IF the scarce, high-qualified people who could make the bomb operative were willing to do it and IF they could keep it all secret, they could have a functional nuclear weapons, too. Or if somebody gave them a nuclear weapon, they would have a nuclear weapon. Which brings us back to the kind of nonproliferation regime (arrangements, processes, agreements) that have brought the actual successes the world has had so far in nuclear nonproliferation.

Arkin writes:

In the world I see after 30 years in this business, the United States and Russia have withdrawn thousands of nuclear weapons from service; nations have denuclearized aircraft and naval ships; and they have lessened high operational - readiness levels. In this world, the spread of nuclear weapons - particularly U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, which were once deployed in scores of countries at many hundreds of sites - has significantly declined. Britain and France have significantly reduced their arsenals; China's arsenal has pretty much stood still. Worldwide stockpiles of nuclear weapons have declined by more than two-thirds since the late-1960's Cold War peak.

In this world, the roster of countries out of the WMD business far exceeds the numbers who have gone nuclear in the past 30 years: Iraq, Libya, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina, not to name the list of northern democracies, from Japan to Sweden. Former Soviet republics agreed to relinquish physical possession of former Soviet weapons. Nuclear-weapon-free zones now exist in Latin America, the South Pacific, Africa, and Southeast Asia. International bodies are experienced and unsentimental in pursuit of the craft of inspections and disarmament. Like it or not, disarmament by force in Iraq has also communicated to potential state proliferators the cost of defying the international community. Post-Iraq, moreover, there is ever-greater vigilance in both monitoring and interdicting the trade in nuclear materials.

All of the evidence indicates that the threat of nuclear, biological, or chemical war has diminished to a lower level than at anytime in most of our lifetimes, yet the specter of a "nuclear handoff" from a nuclear nation to a terrorist group or the supposed ready availability of nuclear materials drives a completely different supposition. This cataclysmic picture has no factual rebuttal, yet that does not mean that nuclear terrorism is a vital, valid, or, even, the most important WMD threat. (my emphasis)

Further progress on such international control mechanisms is what is needed. But it's exactly that kind of international cooperation the Bush Doctrine and the Cheney-Bush administration reject in favor of their nationalist unilateralism.

And the country has to get a grip on fear and its dangerous effects in its antiterrorism policy:

The devastating consequences associated with the universal and unchallenged assumption of nuclear terrorism are what should be of concern to all. Since 9/11, we have gone to war with Iraq because of nuclear fear; our domestic security apparatus gave single-minded attention to WMD, seducing the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to prepare for the wrong disaster before Katrina; "global strike" programs, counterproliferation efforts, and attempts to "combat weapons of mass destruction" presume preemption and demand a preemption, a resurgence of American nuclear capability and missile defenses.

As Arkin himself says more than once, there is a general consensus that nuclear terrorism, either in the form of an actual nuclear bomb or a "dirty bomb" is a significant risk. In their book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (2005), Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon stress that the most significant avenue for that risk to become reality is the existence of "600 tons of poorly secured nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union" and insufficiently secured highly-enriched unranium in a number of research reactors in various places. And they describe the level of consensus on the threat that Arkin recognizes and challenges:

Acquiring the fissile material is the key step [in building a nuclear bomb]. Turning that material into a weapon would require complex engineering, but if it is not already within the capabilities of radical Islamists, it probably will be soon. When the Center for Strategic and International Studies canvassed a group of leading scholars of radical Islam and nuclear weapons experts in 2005, a third of the respondents believed that the terrorists already had the capability to make a bomb, while the average of the other respondents' estimates put the necessary skills in the terrorists' hands in about five years.

Nuclear terrorism can be avoided, as Graham Allison has written in his 2004 book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. The key is securing loose nuclear material, but current efforts along this path need to be invigorated enormously, something that does not look likely in the near term. When Steve Coll of the Washington Post asked sixty nuclear and terrorism experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory about the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the next several decades, only three or four thought the chance was negligible.

But because such an attack is a real though unlikely possibility, serious thinking about is what is needed on the part of the foreign policy establishment and the general public, as well. Even by our "press corps", though serious thinking on such a topic by the latter seems an even more distant possibility than a terrorist group constructing a nuke in a basement in Topeka or Fort Lauderdale.

Because, as Arkin writes in one of the sections quoted above, "A threat that is nightmarish and enduring and can neither be proved nor disproved is a powerful lubricant." If we don't want to be scammed into more dangerous, disastrous and diverting foreign policy adventures like the Iraq War, we'd better make sure the lubricant of fear doesn't send us sliding down that particular slope.

posted at 12:47:00 AM by Bruce Miller

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