Abstract
For decades, the conventional wisdom was that terrorists wanted a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. That paradigm was swept away with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
It was, in the words of one Al Qaeda member, an American “Hiroshima”–a description that reflected the ideology of Osama bin Laden, who believed that, just as the atomic bombings compelled Japan to surrender in World War II, so too could catastrophic attacks compel the United States to disengage from the Middle East.
Five years later, the United States remains haunted by the prospect of a true American Hiroshima, one in which a terrorist group would use a nuclear weapon to destroy an entire city. Yet, the Bush administration's efforts to prevent such a scenario have been haphazard. While the White House has initiated programs such as the Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict trafficking of WMD-related technologies at sea, it has also undermined nonproliferation norms by pursuing policies such as the development of “bunker buster” nuclear weapons.
The United States remains
haunted by the prospect of a nuclear terrorist attack.
Indeed, Graham Allison–director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government–argues in this issue of the Bulletin that Americans are “more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago.” According to Allison, the war in Iraq, which the United States launched with the stated intention of preempting nuclear terrorism, has paradoxically increased the WMD threat: “As jihadi networks strengthen in Iraq, on one hand, and Iran and North Korea accelerate their fissile material production, on the other, the likelihood of a deadly nexus between a terrorist buyer and nuclear seller increases.”
William Arkin, a national security analyst and online columnist for the Washington Post, offers an alternative viewpoint. Arkin contends that exaggerated fears of a nuclear 9/11 are precisely what enabled the invasion of Iraq. Peace activists and arms control advocates, he says, share part of the blame for this state of affairs by relentlessly hyping nuclear terrorism to advance their own agendas. “A more accurate picture of the state of WMD five years after 9/11 is that the threat has indeed diminished,” he concludes.
While experts may disagree on whether the threat of nuclear terrorism has increased, one important fact deserves mention: Since 2001, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons has declined by slightly more than 4,600. That's progress, to be sure, but the total stockpile still weighs in at nearly 27,000–an arsenal of destruction that could recreate Hiroshima thousands of times over, affirming that the original nuclear terror remains with us.