The Next ‘Failure Of Imagination’ Could Mean The Death Of…Millions
Graham Allison is the the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I mention this up front because what he has to say is so alarming that you might think him a kook. I wish that was the case, because his message is terrifying, and it’s worth remembering when Democrats accuse the President of cooking up security concerns in an election year:
Risk equals probability times consequences. During the Cold War, strategists understood that even the slight possibility of a nuclear war that could kill every American made it imperative to do everything possible to avoid nuclear conflict. Similarly, the magnitude of the consequences of even a single nuclear bomb exploding in just one U.S. city swamps differences in judgments about the likelihood of such an attack. A terrorist armed with one nuclear bomb could murder a million people–killing in one day twice as many American souls as died in both World Wars combined.
On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of New York City’s Times Square. If terrorists detonated a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the blast would kill them all instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire, and fallout in the hours and days thereafter.
The blast would instantly vaporize Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within half a mile of the point of detonation. Buildings three-quarters of a mile from ground zero would be fractured husks.
Lest this seem too hypothetical, recall an actual incident that occurred in New York City one month to the day after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A CIA agent, code-named Dragonfire, reported that Al Qaeda had acquired a live nuclear weapon produced by the former Soviet Union and had successfully smuggled it into New York City. A top-secret Nuclear Emergency Support Team was dispatched to the city. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these nuclear ninjas searched for the 10-kiloton bomb whose blast could have obliterated a significant portion of Manhattan. Fortunately, Dragonfire’s report turned out to be a false alarm. But the central takeaway from the Dragonfire case is this: The U.S. government had no grounds in science or in logic to dismiss the warning.
In a nutshell, Allison says a nuclear 9/11 is not a crackpot rightwing fantasy, but a real risk. In fact, he thinks it a likelihood.
Let me repeat that, and let it sink in: he thinks it a likelihood.
…[M]y best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world’s most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: “It’s inevitable. I don’t see any way that it won’t happen.”
Read the rest, including considerations of who, what, when, and how, and more importantly, how to prevent the unthinkable, including the proposal for a Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism:
Construction of this new alliance should begin with the United States and Russia, who have a special obligation to address this problem since they created it–and since they still own 95 percent of all nuclear weapons and materials.
Initially, members of the alliance would join in five common undertakings. First, they would embrace a principle of assured nuclear security to personally assure that all nuclear weapons and materials on their own territory are secured to a “gold standard”–beyond the reach of terrorists or thieves. Assured nuclear security requires sufficient transparency to allow other leaders to reassure their own citizens that terrorists will never get a nuclear bomb from another member of this alliance. Second, the alliance would shape a global consensus in support of enforcing the Three Nos. Third, the new alliance should reinvent a more robust nonproliferation regime to control the sale and export of nuclear technologies, materials, and know-how. While Security Council Resolution 1540 obligates sovereign states to close the loopholes exploited by black-market WMD networks, it currently lacks necessary enforcement mechanisms. Fourth, the new alliance would provide a formal infrastructure to apply “lessons learned” from U.S.-Russian and other cooperative ventures against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the nuclear challenge. For example, this fall, a first-ever joint field exercise seeking to find and capture hypothetical terrorists who have stolen nuclear material will involve Americans and Russians working together in Russia. Finally, this alliance should be not just a signed document but a living institution committed to its mission.
Establishment of a Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism could help us overcome the psychological barriers to sustained, focused action. Faced with the possibility of an American Hiroshima, many are paralyzed by a combination of denial and fatalism. Either it hasn’t happened, so it’s not going to happen; or, if it is going to happen, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Both propositions are wrong. The countdown to a nuclear 9/11 can be stopped, but only by a combination of imagination, a clear agenda for action, and fierce determination to pursue it.
It’s a spinechilling possibility, but it’s not a fantasy. We need to remember, in a time of great partisan distrust, that North Korea and Iran, while probably not stupid enough to try to nuke us directly, have the means and the motive to share technology with people who most decidedly would jump at the chance…
Mark, kudos for bringing up, and underlining this grave threat to your readers, as illustrated by Graham Allison’s clearly stated and cogent argument backed by historical experience, and most of all by imagination.
The reality of a nuclear attack in one of the major cities of America by fanatic apocalyptic terrorists is an Alice in Wonderland tale only for people who lack imagination, and are congenitally stricken with flabby, sloppy, and fatalist thinking. But fortunately for mankind, ther are still people of a Tiresias stature who can foresee this great danger and are optimistic enough, unlike the pessimists, that they can forestall it. And we all know that it’s not pessimists who win wars, that is the vocation of the intrepid and of the optimists.
Mark,
Thanks for posting this. The mindset that refuses to understand the danger we face from a Nuclear-armed terrorist group is nothing new. Our national leaders, newspapers, radio commentators, the guy on the street, all felt the same way in the period 1933-1941. It was not a problem for us. No one would ever attack us here. It’s Europe’s problem. It’s Asia’s problem. It will never happen here.
The over-riding danger to all Americans in particular, and Western Civiliazation in general, is the failure to understand that Islamic Facists WANT to take over the world. It’s not a joke, it’s not a delusion, it’s a fact. They feel commanded by God to establish Islamic rule worldwide, a global Caliphate that will enforce obediance through sharia law.
We are in a war. Not a war between nations, although the CAIR shills and Iranian puppeteers would have us think so. They would say “It’s America’s fault!”, or “It’s the POpe’s fault”, but it isn’t, and it never was. It is a war between to very divergent philosophies. One that would rule via dark-aged reason and brute force, or one that believes in free will and human dignity. One side that has lived for nearly 13 centuries under a despotic, soul-crushing, mysoginistic and tribal enabling system, or one that brought the Rennassaince, the Enlightenment, and freed humanity from the rule of Monarchs and Petty Kings.
Judaism, Christianity, all have moved on, evolved, corrected themselves where errors were found and tried to right wrongs they committed. Islam has not, and cannot. All other religions understand that the human is fallible, that when he writes down something, it is possible to make a mistake, that it may be revised to excise mistakes and bring improvement, enlightenment to the whole. Islam refuses to accept that the Koran is riddled with errors. Rather that deal with the mistake, they destroy those whi point it out. Rather than accept that it is inspired by God, they claim it is the exact word of God. And therein lies the danger, and the seeds of all our current misery.
Islamic Facists are striving mightily to get nuclear weapons, either through development or through purchase or theft. They don’t care how, they simply intend to obtain them. Just like Hitler rebuilding Germany’s military, the Islamicists toil on towards there goal, and when they reach it, they will use.
Our own press speaks of “moderate Muslims”, but where are they? They are as invisible as moderate Germans in 1939. If they even exist, they are unwilling to speak out, to say what needs to be said, to act, to even try and resist. And where did this closed mindset of Islamic group-think come from? Well, it should be no surprise that the vaunted SS of Hitlers Germany counted at least one entire division of islamists among it’s ranks. They came together and joined the SS to fight for Hitler, and after the war the survivors came back to their various countries and tribes. They reinvigorated the Muslim Brotherhood. They created the Baathist Party. And they taught their followers to goose-step and raise their hands in the party salute.
Just look at the pictures. Watch the film at 11. It’s there for anyone to see who chooses to. Hitler strove for a nuclear bomb to attack America with. Now his heirs in the Middle East are taking up his cause, replacing Nazism with Sharia, the Gestapo with Hezzbollah and Revolutionary Guards, the SS with Fehdayeen, the German-American Bund with CAIR. It’s all laid out in plain sight, but most folks seem to not be able to see it. And that blindness will kill them. It will bring a great sorrow to this land that will dwarf the national misery of our own civil war. And we will have only ourselves to blame, because folks kept saying: “It won’t happen here”. Ask the Jews of Europe how well that mindset served them.
Respects,
Gwedd
Sadly, I fear the American public will awaken to this danger on the clear, bright morning when Los Angeles, or Rome, or some other western city is destroyed forever.
The dirty little secret of nuclear proliferation is that once you have enough plutonium or enriched uranium making a basic 1945 bomb is very, very easy. (Sure the scientists in the Manhattan Project were brilliant, but they were working with electronics and tools vastly inferior to what’s available in a typical university machine shop and still managed to get all three of their first attempts to work flawlessly.)
We are rapidly running out of time to prevent this atrocity.
Totally unrelated note, but, I wonder if Sam Nunn could be persuade to return to politics in ‘08.
Verse 9:123 – “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.”
It should be clear that this verse commands Muslims to wage war on all non-Muslims around them. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Verse 47:3 – “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly.”
That is what I call a harsh religion. You are supposed to strike off the heads of those to whom you evangelize?
Verse 48:29 – “Muhammad is Allah’s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.”
Verse 66:9 – “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil their fate.”
I think you would have to be an idiot to not be able to see the hostile nature and commands for the Muslims. It is clear with just these verses that the war they are commanded to wage on all non-Muslims is not evangelizing. They are commanded to fight to kill all non-Muslims including atheists, secularists, humanists, evolutionists, and all other religions but you will find that the Koran places special emphasis on killing off Jews and Christians. This is probably because of the rejection the Jews and Christians gave Muhammad. Keep in mind that I could easily have given you at least another 20 to 30 verses which are just as telling.
But don’t take my word about who the unbelievers are, take the word of Muhammad. I want you to notice that he placed special emphasis on Jews and Christians (People of the Book.) We will start with verse 5:17 – “Unbelievers are those who declare: ‘God is the Messiah, the son of Mary.’” Oops, I bet some of you blindly believed the Muslims who have been going around speaking at Christian churches saying they worship the same God we do (we already proved that to not be true), they also believe in “The Same Jesus” and even believe in Him more than we do, and that Islam and Christianity are the same religions. You should have read the Koran instead of letting the liars spoon feed you. Always remember this, it is considered a good deed for Muslims to successfully lie to their enemy. Then they go home, call you suckers, and laugh at you for being fools.
But, hey, lets not put everything on one obvious verse. Let’s look at at least a few obvious verses like verse 5:51 – “Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends. They are friends with one another.” Oops, strike two. How many more verses will it take for you to realize the US Muslims are lying to you and the Middle Eastern Muslims, including Osama Bin Ladden, are telling you the truth. I despise Osama for what he does but have to respect him for being honest, unlike the liars who have mislead many in this nation.
Verse 5:59 – “Say: ‘People of the Book, is it not that you hate us only because we believe in Allah and in what has been revealed to us and what was formerly revealed, and because most of you are evil-doers?’ Say: ‘Shall I tell you who will receive a worse reward from Allah? Those whom Allah has cursed and with whom He has been angry, transforming them into apes and swine, and those who serve the devil.” And those are the only ones who will receive a worse reward than the Jews and Christians. Doesn’t sound to me like we all have the same religion and worship the same God. Why would my God, whom I worship do that to me for worshiping Him?