Past articles from: Space and Security News

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Nuclear Terrorism: Dealing With the Threat
by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, retired
Reflections of a Cold Warrior
(as imagined by the author)

"Once upon a time, in a decade long, long ago, there was a communist threat (or at least, so we told the people). Oh, for those good, old days. Things were so simple then. We knew who our adversary was. We knew what weapons he had, and how many. (Of course, the figures were inflated and exaggerated for the public.) We knew our chosen opponent was rational and unwilling to commit national suicide. We had a good idea what it would take to deter him from starting anything (if he ever really wanted to), and we could calculate how many of what weapons we would need to do the job. (Of course, we always built a bunch more, just to be on the safe side, and even built weapons that were downright destabilizing and therefore counter-productive, because it was so profitable. Besides, we insiders knew it didn’t really matter, because the threat was mostly myth anyway.) In short, we had a great big commie bogeyman with which to scare the bejeebers out of the public, so they would let us raid the treasury to line our pockets, and at the same time, we didn’t have to really worry about nukes exploding in Times Square. Is this a great country or what?

"But now, things have changed. The communist threat has disappeared. Our defense budget is 26 times as big as that of all our potential adversaries put together, but how do we keep it that way? We are having a harder and harder time justifying our defense (corporate welfare, socialism for the rich) budget. And to make matters worse, now there’s a real threat, one we don’t know how to handle. It’s nuclear terrorism.

"For one thing, we no longer have just one opponent. There are so many out there who hate us! Any one of them would love to nuke us; and we don’t know which one will be able to do it first. And they’re all irrational, and perfectly capable of commiting suicide. We have no idea how to deter them. After all, deterrence is based on retaliation. But if a nuke goes off in Manhattan, whom do we retaliate against? And how? Even if we find out the nationality of the perpetrator, what do we do — nuke their whole country? And what if, like Oklahoma City, it’s one of us??

"Another problem with this new threat is that it’s much more difficult to translate into weapons programs. People don’t see how a fleet of B-2s or a dozen aircraft carriers or hundreds of new ICBMs is going to protect us from some nut in Queens with a homemade bomb. They don’t even seem to understand the need for "Star Wars" weapons in space and anti-missile missiles in the Dakotas. The problem, of course, is not that the people don’t understand the new threat. Since the World Trade Center bombings and the Federal Building in Oklahoma and the troop high-rise in Riyahd, they understand the new threat all too well. Just a few years ago, we could sell them ‘strategic defenses’ against nuclear terrorists, but not any more. They know now that no terrorist would use an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to deliver his nuke. Why would anyone use such a complex, costly, high-tech, visible means of delivery (and one which leaves a return address)? Unfortunately, the people also understand that all our sophisticated weaponry will be useless against a suitcase bomb or a nuke in a sailboat or a Ryder truck.

"So how are we going to justify spending a quarter of a trillion dollars a year on the military if the people know it won’t be able to provide them with any security whatsoever against the remaining threat they face? How do we justify the source of our profits, our power, and our opulent lifestyle? It would be nice to turn the Chinese back into the Yellow Peril again. After all, they are communists. But our corporate bosses won’t let us. They’re making too much money trading with China. North Korea might make a good bogeyman. But they have less military power than our friends in South Korea. And somehow Kim Il Sung’s son just isn’t as scary as his old man. Thank goodness for Castro. He’s the only commie they’ll let us vilify. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be down the tubes for sure. Sigh! I sure miss Brezhnev!

"Sorry; I still yearn for the days when a ‘threat’ was nothing more than a justification for doing what we had already decided to do anyway. Having to deal with a real threat takes some getting used to. Sure, the nuclear terrorist threat is years from being fulfilled. But we don’t know how many years. And we don’t have a clue what to do about it. We’re trying to buy up the world’s plutonium and nuclear scientists (especially those in the old Soviet Union). That can slow the terrorists down and maybe give us a few more years. But it can’t make the problem go away. And neither can our armed forces. We could quadruple their size, and spend a trillion dollars a year on the military, and we still would not be able to stop a single terrorist nuclear weapon. Eventually, the people who hate America will have nukes, and if they want to use them, there won’t be a thing we can do about it.

"So what do we do? Make them stop hating us? Turn our enemies into friends? Get real. That would mean changing our ways. We’d have to stop supporting third-world dictators who sell out to our multinational corporations. We’d have to quit exploiting people around the world. We’d have to end gunboat diplomacy and give up being king of the hill. Well, sure; it would work. How many terrorists threaten the Netherlands? Or Sweden? Or even Canada? But who wants to be a good guy? There’s no profit in that. Nah. Maybe we’ll be lucky and Russia will go back to the communists. Sigh!"

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