Annihilation from Within

by Fred Charles Iklé

  This is not the end of the Oedipus tragedy. Throughout the world, plutonium accumulating as waste from nuclear power reactors, or excess left from weapons programs, has become a troublesome product whose cost of disposition, as Richard Garwin puts it well, “is greater than the value to anyone who might buy it—except to those who want to make nuclear weapons.”19 The authorities responsible for nuclear energy in Russia, the United States, and other nations have been trying to find a way out of this disastrous situation. They are promoting projects that would let the countries with accumulated plutonium “waste” make the plutonium safer and at the same time squeeze economic value out of it.

  The leading proposal now is to recycle the plutonium and mix it with uranium, a mixture called MOX that can be used to fuel power reactors. Yet while the MOX is being shipped to the reactors its plutonium could still be extracted. In fact, that extraction would be easier than obtaining plutonium by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. North Korea, let us note, asserts that it has mastered some time ago the more difficult reprocessing of spent reactor fuel to build bombs. A safer fuel-mix (the Urex-Plus fuel) is supposed to be ready within five years and would gradually replace MOX. But a dictatorship that receives Urex-Plus fuel for its power reactors could acquire the know-how to extract plutonium from this fuel to build bombs, particularly if it coerces its technicians to do their work despite being exposed to high levels of radiation. It seems we will experience a second coming of the Atoms for Peace project. More and more countries will demand nuclear power reactors, citing their “inalienable right” granted by the Nonproliferation Treaty “to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.” Almost inevitably, the spread of reactors and fuel-deliveries to every corner of the globe will enlarge the number of countries capable of starting an illicit bomb-making program.

  Plutonium is an element that essentially did not exist on our planet. Only human ingenuity and the intense conflicts between powerful nations have created this element in such huge amounts. And once created, we cannot make it go away. What an emblematic predicament of mankind’s Faustian bargain! For six decades, statesmen, strategists, and arms control experts have tried, and tried again, to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Now we begin to realize that our attempts to escape the predicted calamity have helped bring it about—Sophocles’ Oedipus writ large. A sad ending of good intentions. Ineffably sad.

  4

  ANNIHILATION FROM WITHIN

  If you keep gazing into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  The beginning of wisdom is fear.

  —MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

  THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE did not empower ruthless cults or crazed anarchists to extirpate law and order in every province of the realm. But such an unprecedented reign of violence might become mankind’s fate in this century. The ineluctable dissemination of technology and scientific discoveries will make nuclear and biological weapons accessible to merciless insurgent movements, small terrorist gangs, secretive anarchist groups, and genocidal doomsday cults. Although some scholars and officials have warned of this peril, nobody so far has gazed into this deep abyss.

  During the last few years, the media has published frightening news, based on confirmed events as well as credible rumors, about jihadist terrorists trying to obtain a nuclear bomb. One shudders to think what our enemies could do, should they succeed in this quest. They might manage to smuggle the bomb into an American or European city and cause a cataclysm beyond all telling. Dozens of writers have published gripping stories about such a calamity.1 But their stories usually end before the morning after the nuclear destruction and ignore the ensuing long-term upheaval that would engulf our whole planet like a global tsunami.

  If we keep gazing into this abyss, we burden our psyche with disquieting thoughts. As Nietzsche warned, the abyss will gaze back into us. Yet fear is the beginning of wisdom. I shall now try to shed some light into this world of darkness, a world that will confront all nations with security threats they have never faced before.

  Neglecting Defensive Measures

  The recent waves of terrorism confound our strategic planners more than the proverbial fog of war. Overawed by the boldness and skill of the 9/11 attack, military experts have come to interpret the tactics used by militant Muslims as if they were a new form of warfare. Yet these attacks—always stealthy and often indiscriminate—are much like the tactics that have been employed in protracted insurgency wars (as in Chechnya or Sri Lanka), or that have been used to exert political pressure and gain attention (as by the Red Brigade in Italy or the Palestinian Intifada). It is also worth recalling that the use of stealth and surprise is a time-honored stratagem. Stealthy attacks by disguised fighters served Allied war aims in World War II, a tactic that was known as “sabotage.” The bravest Allied fighters carried out dangerous sabotage attacks on military targets in Nazi-occupied territories, especially France and Norway. One might argue that such stealthy attacks in World War II had been preceded by a declaration of war and therefore should not be likened to “terrorist” attacks.2 At which point an annoying critic will interject that the only declared war since then has been Osama bin Laden’s jihad.

  America’s military planners have fought terrorist tactics primarily with offensive measures, sometimes to the neglect of complementary defenses. Many successful offensive operations have been carried out since 9/11, above all the defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. As if to justify an exclusive reliance on offensive warfare, we keep condemning the ruthlessness and immorality of stealthy attacks. With laudable compassion and a somewhat maudlin mien, we describe our civilian victims of such attacks routinely as “innocent.” In fairness, shouldn’t we keep in mind that our combatant victims are just as innocent? It was our neglect of defensive measures that made it easy for the enemy in 1983 to launch the deadly assault on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut; and again in 1996 to bomb the U.S. military quarters in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and again in 2000 to launch a shaped charge into the destroyer USS Cole. Oddly, we blamed each of these disasters on the “cowardly” sneak attacks of terrorists. We scarcely blamed the tragic losses on the shameful failure to defend our military assets and our military combatants—whether they are resting in their quarters or on full alert.

  The idea that “offense is the best defense” remains popular among U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders, perhaps because of America’s past experience. During its entire history, the United States has been attacked within its territory only three times: in 1812, 1941, and 2001. So we continue to tell ourselves that the best way to fend off attacks on the 9/11 model is to go after the terrorists in their lairs and “bring them to justice.” Clearly, to achieve an effective offense-defense synergy we must carry out offensive strikes against aggressors who are preparing to attack us, as well as against organizations that support these aggressors. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out, terrorists have an advantage: they “can attack at any time, in any place, using virtually any technique.” And since the United States cannot defend against all these potential attacks, it has become accepted U.S. policy to pursue the war on terrorism abroad. The object, Rumsfeld explained, is “to go after them where they live and plan and hide, and to make clear to states that sponsor and harbor them that such actions will have consequences.” As President George W. Bush put it: “We are fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home.”3

  Now the time has come to look beyond today’s familiar threats: Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists, Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities, North Korean nuclear bombs. Although these contemporary problems have not yet gone away, the United States, other democracies, and indeed most nations ought to prepare themselves to cope with a new, potentially more overwhelming form of aggression. Nations will have to prevail against an attack that seeks to annihilate their political orde
r from within. My next chapter will address how we might cope with this new challenge; but first I shall explain its insidious progression and nearly unstoppable force.

  Dark Warnings

  Within the next half century, perhaps even within a decade or two, a nation might be vanquished—not by a foreign terrorist organization or by the military strength of a foreign power, but by a small group of domestic evildoers ruthlessly using weapons of mass destruction against their own country. This grim prospect is not new. We were told about it quite some time ago.

  Theodore B. Taylor, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a nuclear physicist, wrote a memorandum in 1966 entitled “Notes on Criminal and Terrorist Uses of Nuclear Explosives.” He warned, “I am becoming increasingly concerned that not enough attention has been given to the possible ways by which a few people that have a very small number of nuclear explosives can … cause violent disruption of human activities on a national, or even international scale.” Taylor discussed several compelling scenarios and added that “the group [that would use these nuclear explosives] need not be identifiable with any organization against which the U.S. could retaliate.” Among recent assessments of such covert attacks, a usefully comprehensive one is the book America’s Achilles’ Heel by Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer.4

  In 1973, when I became Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Taylor’s warnings spurred me to have my staff review the danger of poorly guarded nuclear materials. One problem that caught our attention was the fuel used in research reactors that the United States had donated to dozens of countries. Incredibly, the fuel the U.S. Government provided was highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the ideal material for making bombs. I tried to have the safer, low-enriched uranium substituted; but the U.S. agency that provided this dangerous fuel (a predecessor of the Department of Energy) failed to take action. Only recently has the United States begun to retrieve this dangerous uranium—at, alas, a maddeningly slow pace.5 On this issue, as on so many others, policy initiatives to control dangerous technologies can easily be defeated by hidebound bureaucrats and parochial technicians.

  We also must not forget that in the fall of 2001, someone in the United States obtained anthrax spores (in the aerosol form suitable for biological warfare) and sent deadly amounts by U.S. mail to members of Congress and other addressees, thus causing more than a dozen fatalities plus huge cleanup costs. Actually, had this quantity and quality of anthrax been employed more effectively, it could have done far greater damage. It might have shut down the nationwide mail systems. Despite an intensive, prolonged search by the FBI, the “someone” could not be found. Over four years, FBI agents and postal inspectors have pursued leads on four continents and conducted more than 8,000 interviews.6 It appears that this advanced biological warfare agent was obtained within the United States, and without the assistance of a foreign government. Several types of mass destruction weapons can be manufactured at home without help from abroad. In 1995, entirely on Japan’s territory and undetected by the normally competent Japanese police, chemists belonging to the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo manufactured the poison gas sarin—a rather complex task.

  These episodes offer heavy hints about our future—about a time when criminal dissident groups or cults can employ weapons of mass destruction against a nation without the support of a rogue state and without any need of a hideout in a failed state. Even if the perpetrators required some technological assistance from another country, the foreign source need not present the attacked nation with suitable targets for retaliation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) received the hard-to-detect Semtex explosive through Libyan diplomatic pouches. Libya did not suffer British retaliation, even though the British government had been struggling to put an end to IRA attacks in Ulster and England for more than a quarter century. The IRA also received money and arms from sympathizers in the United States, the better to commit acts of terrorism against the British government. Her Majesty’s Government did not deem a retaliatory strike against these American suppliers a viable option. Or consider the guilt of Dr. A. Q. Khan, the founder and longtime leader of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. When the U.S. Government learned that he had provided designs for building nuclear weapons as well as material assistance to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and perhaps other countries, the United States neither carried out a retaliatory strike against Pakistan nor tried to kill Dr. A. Q. Khan, who still lives comfortably in Pakistan.7

  Let us admit it, we have had no end of a lesson: anthrax in the United States, sarin in Japan, a Pakistani mail-order business for nuclear weapons components, scientific papers on the Internet explaining how to engineer lethal viruses. We can hear the distant thunder, we can see the dark clouds, we feel the chill in the air that precedes the approaching storm, and yet we are grasping for reasons to deny what our knowledge is telling us.

  The Anarchists’ Return

  The “curse of dual-use technologies” will become a growing predicament for all democracies—indeed, for all nations that want to be part of a peaceful international order. As I have noted in chapter 2, genetic engineering, molecular biology, and other life sciences serve valuable peaceful purposes, as do several applications of nuclear technology. Yet all these great achievements can be misused to build weapons of mass destruction, in some cases with but minor modifications.

  Exploiting dual use to inflict immense injury on a society is not a new idea. The nineteenth-century anarchists had thought of it. As documented in Walter Laqueur’s magisterial history of terrorism, the International Anarchist Congress of 1881 passed a resolution that its affiliated organizations and individuals ought to learn about the most deadly weapons by studying chemistry and other technologies. At that time, the anarchists also gleefully welcomed Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, expecting that it would empower them to destroy the political order they wished to erase.8 It turned out dynamite was not destructive enough, although the anarchists amply demonstrated that they had the necessary ruthlessness. Between 1880 and 1914, they killed U.S. President McKinley, assassinated over a dozen European prime ministers, and killed many other senior statesmen. What they lacked were the necessary tools. Now, in the twenty-first century, they will have the tools to pursue their ambition in ways far more consequential than the assassination of McKinley in 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.

  Anarchists and doomsday cults are likely to attack their own country from within, not from abroad. They want to create havoc in their homeland and may not care about preserving the wealth and strength of their nation. Like Karl Marx’s proletarians, they believe they “have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Although today’s anarchists and leaders of doomsday cults can obtain far more destructive weapons than dynamite, few will have the strategic brilliance and political cunning to win in their country, let alone “to win the world.”

  The lack of a winning strategy is well illustrated by Shoko Asahara, the founder and leader of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. Shoko Asahara gained the world’s attention in 1995 when his followers released the poison gas sarin in Tokyo’s subway. The attack injured some 6,000 people, in addition to killing 12 subway passengers. As a manager, Asahara was astonishingly effective and successful. He built up a global organization with assets worth several hundred million dollars and a scientific-technical staff competent enough secretly to manufacture sarin. Yet his strategic thinking was utterly vacuous. He fantasized that he could cause some kind of Armageddon in Japan and then miraculously impose his cultist state on Japan, or perhaps on the whole world. This story conveys a significant point: The fact that a cult leader possesses the charisma to recruit technically competent followers who can build weapons of mass destruction does not mean he has the savvy to lead his cult to victory.

  But another aspect of the story is troubling. Precisely because his goals were so nebulous, Asahara found it relatively easy to recruit and retain w
ell-educated followers. The renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami watched Asahara’s followers in their court trials and interviewed several of them. He found that the cult members, looking back at the crime in which they had participated, repeatedly praised Asahara’s “correctness of aims.” He had won their hearts and minds by letting them hitch their own well-meaning private fantasies to his vague pronouncements about “the five races living in harmony” or “the whole world living under one roof.” What the technicians and scientists working for Asahara had in common, Murakami concluded, “was a desire to put the technological skill and knowledge they had acquired in the service of a more meaningful goal.”9 This is a cautionary tale for those who contentedly assume democracies will be able to control the dark side of science.