Saturday, September 17, 2011

What Happened to Nuclear Terrorism?

Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate in economics, has just reminded us how wrong he (and many others) have been about nuclear terrorism:
In 1982 I published an article that began, “Sometime in the 1980’s an organization that is not a national government may acquire a few nuclear weapons. If not in the 1980’s, then in the 1990’s.” I hedged about the 80’s but sounded pretty firm about the 90’s. It’s now the 2010’s, twenty-nine years later, and there has been no nuclear terrorism nor any acquisition of such weapons by any terrorist organization that we know of; and I think we’d know by now. I don’t know of anyone—and I knew many colleagues knowledgeable on the subject—who thought my expectations outlandish. Something needs to be explained!
He then goes on to explain how hard it would be for a terrorist organization to make an atomic bomb, using the sort of arguments long made by Robert Mueller:

If you have weapons-grade uranium for which you know someone is willing to pay a high price you probably need someone able to get it out of the country, who can meet someone somewhere who can be in touch with someone who is in touch with someone who is known to be willing to kill to get the stuff, who may pay handsomely. At every stage someone has much money, someone has stuff worth much money, someone gets a commission, and somebody may be willing to kill for the money or for the bomb material.

Eventually, if all goes well, a “supplier” and a “customer” representing the terrorist organization may meet in a public place, each with a few unrecognizable body guards, to consummate the deal. At that point I fantasize that the seller and the buyer recognize each other, one is from the CIA and the other from the Israeli Mossad. Each is engaged in a “sting” operation, and they shake hands and go back to work.

And even if you get the uranium, you still have to make a bomb, which is not easy.

If terrorists did get a bomb, what then? Obviously nobody likes the idea of terrorists with nuclear weapons. It is no fun to get blown up. But possession one or a handful of nuclear weapons would, I think, do nothing to help today's terrorists achieve their goals. Terrorists are not actually very interested in just making things go boom. What al Qaeda wants is to revolutionize the politics of the Islamic world; how would blowing up a city or two help them achieve that goal? The US has found it pretty much impossible to revolutionize the politics of Afghanistan and Iraq despite our having thousands of nuclear weapons. The world has decided that nuclear weapons are uniquely horrible, so anybody who uses one against a city will instantly become widely hated. And, ultimately, what good does it do to be able to destroy things? We could destroy everything in Iraq, but would that help us achieve our goals there?

The one place I can actually imagine terrorists setting off an atomic bomb would be Tel Aviv. This would be a serious blow to Israel and might kill many Israelis. But would it help the Palestinians achieve their goals? I doubt it. On the contrary it might lead to a massive ethnic cleansing operation and leave the Palestinian survivors very much farther from having a state in Palestine than they are today.

There is only one reason to have nuclear weapons, and that is so you can't be blackmailed by other people who have them. They are unusable, and I am not much afraid of them.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It strikes me that Schelling's approach here is as wrong-headed as his original essay: he's basing his arguments on first principles, things like his own idea of what people's goals are and how they pursue them. I don't have much sympathy with an alarmist, basically right-wing approach that says the US is surrounded by terrorists who "just want to kill us." But I'm not much impressed by Schelling either. Like any human, terrorists do what they do for complicated reasons, often several motives held simultaneously; most people do not pursue clear goals like "a Palestinian state," and certainly they don't usually pursue them in anything like an efficient or rational manner. Terrorists may simultaneously embrace outlandish fantasies (the world-caliphate, winning back Cordoba, etc.), practical goals (a Palestinian state), simple vengeance (the enemy must be made to suffer, too), competition with each other, and a desire to make more of their own ethnic, etc. group see that the group is in a war situation, that violence is the answer, and so forth. I can imagine many circs in which a Palestinian group would esteem the notion of setting off a nuke in Tel Aviv--especially a very extremist segment, a sort of Palestinian "Real IRA", that finds itself frozen out when a larger group decides to become a bit moderate.

Of course, it is a very interesting fact that nuclear terrorism hasn't happened yet. But I'd be more interested in an answer that actually looks at groups that have considered or tried this, what obstacles they've met, etc. It may be that the practical difficulties and law enforcement opposition are too great for nuclear terrorism to be a viable option for terrorists. But an argument based simply on what "makes sense" doesn't really tell us much.