We don’t speak often about the worst of the “what ifs” — a
terrorist attack on the United States that unleashes nuclear,
chemical, or biological weapons on our people. John Kerry seems to
think that our principal answer to the threat of terrorism is to
hire more police, firemen, and emergency medical technicians. But
the way to deal with this threat is to preempt it, by destroying
the terrorists’ ability to attack and to erect defenses against
what they may bring against us.
That our borders are still porous and that we don’t yet have the
cooperation of very many countries in interdicting terrorist
movements — or the movement of weapons that terrorists might use
— means we have to think about what other methods and means of
defense can be derived. Before we can devise the defenses, we need
to analyze the threat. Two of the very few experts who got it right
on Iraq, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely,
describe the threat in their book, Endgame: The Blue Print for
Victory in the War on Terror (Regnery Publishing, 256 pages,
$27.95).
McInerney and Vallely pose what they call “nuclear nightmares”
caused by three nations. First, a suicidal North Korea could
threaten America and Japan with nuclear attack if we defended South
Korea from invasion. Second — and I think most dangerous — is the
Iranian nuclear weapons program, which is likely to lead directly
to the third, nuclear terrorism in the United States.
For all the efforts of Tom Ridge’s Department of Homeland
Security, the threat of nuclear terrorism is virtually
undiminished. As McInerney and Vallely write:
Getting the bombs or the components for the bombs into
the United States would be simple. They are relatively small and
easily concealed in larger cargo or in a shipping container.
Smuggling them into the United States would not be
difficult…If the price was right, the criminal gangs that
currently move illegal narcotics and immigrants into this country
would help smuggle nuclear weapons [or] nuclear materials over our
borders. The bombs would not have to be huge “city busters.”
Weapons with even the relatively small yield of twenty kilotons and
exploded on the ground…would produce catastrophic results in
the target cities.
A 20 kiloton nuclear weapon exploded at ground level would
create a crater about 1,200 feet across. The heaviest damage would
be within a radius of about 2.5 miles, with the killing zone spread
out to over 3 miles. If the explosion occurred on the Mall in
Washington, D.C., the White House and the Capitol would be
destroyed entirely, the Pentagon as well as Reagan Airport would be
heavily damaged. If the bomb were carried in a hijacked airliner
and exploded at an altitude of one thousand feet, the range of the
damage would almost double. If the explosion occurred during a
normal business day, the casualties would number more than 600,000.
Two or three times that number could be killed in New York,
Chicago, or Los Angeles.
THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR terrorism grows daily, as North Korea and
Iran continue to develop these weapons. North Korea will sell them
to all comers, and Iran — which regards obtaining nuclear weapons
as a religious obligation — will give them away. It is not enough
for us to say that we can respond to a nuclear attack in kind,
because we probably cannot. If our intelligence services were good
enough to say with certainty which nation harbored or supported
nuclear terrorists, they would be good enough to enable us to
prevent the attack. They aren’t that good, and aren’t likely to be
any time soon. We have one option that is working now, and need to
devise others.
The president’s Proliferation Security Initiative is an
eleven-nation agreement to interdict the movement of nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons being shipped to terrorist
nations. It’s working, and its effect is spreading. But it is not
enough: It doesn’t reach inside the web of terrorist nations to
interdict ground shipment. And it also relies on our erratically
effective intelligence services. The most important gap in our
policy today is the lack of one to preempt nuclear terrorism that
is independent of our weak intelligence services. If we don’t
come up with the answer, some “nuclear 9/11” commission may have to
meet in a bunker in West Virginia.
It’s much easier to say what won’t work than to define what may.
The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency is willfully ignorant
of Iran’s nuclear programs. Nothing the U.N. can or will do is
likely to have any effect on the threat of nuclear terrorism.
Regime change in Iran and North Korea is the short answer, but we
are not now willing or perhaps even able to force the mullahs in
Tehran or the Stalinists in Pyongyang out of power. Ending those
regimes must be our goal, but we need something that can work now,
not five years from now. There is no “one size fits all” policy
that will solve this problem. Iran and North Korea — and any
others of that ilk — will have to be dealt with one by one.
Iran — as we hear endlessly — is ripe for revolution. Perhaps.
But we cannot wait for it to happen. Revolution should be brought
there now, in several measures. First, we must more openly and
substantially aid the Iranian opposition. No minute should go by
without a radio and television broadcast into Iran promising
freedom and support for the coming revolution. No day should go by
without aid — in terms of arms, money, and special operations
advisers — slipping into Iran to make the revolution succeed. When
it begins, and there is fighting between the revolutionaries and
the mullahs’ forces, we should do for them what we failed to do at
the Bay of Pigs: bring massive air power to bear immediately,
assuring the fall of the theocracy.
Revolution will not happen in North Korea, no matter how much we
try to foment it. But we can weaken North Korea and lessen its
threat by preempting its nuclear abilities. A military strike on
the nuclear facility at Yongbyon would cripple North Korea’s
nuclear program and give us time to find a permanent solution.
THERE ARE OTHER IDEAS of which I am not yet convinced. One is to
tell Iran and North Korea and other terrorist nations that we will
launch a nuclear strike at them all if any terrorist — regardless
of which one, or the source of the weapon — explodes such a weapon
here. Would any of these nations bow to such a nuclear threat?
There are two very big flaws in this idea. First, the credibility
of the threat will depend on the president who delivers it. The
Iranians would have believed Ronald Reagan. Would they believe
George Bush? Maybe. Would they believe John Kerry? Hardly. Second,
no American president can, or should, launch nuclear weapons
targeted at a nation that only might be responsible for
devastating America. No president can, or should, go down in
history as the man who killed millions of innocent people by
launching nukes at the wrong nation.
We may be able to reduce or even eliminate the threat of nuclear
terrorism from Iran and North Korea if we act quickly. But what if
we don’t? We may, literally, be back to ground zero in more than
our policy debates.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author of the
forthcoming book, Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old
Europe Are Worse Than You Think.
