Also In This Issue Related stories are available to subscribers only: Smuggling Nuclear Materials: "Highly Credible" Incidents In Which Materials Have Been Trafficked And Intercepted Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Poll Track: National Polling On Nuclear Weapons · Insider Interview: Larry Johnson: Putting Terrorism Into Perspective (6/30/04) · Opening Argument: "Has Bush Made Matters Worse?" (6/28/04) · National Journal Cover Story: "On Guard, But How Well?" (3/05/04) · Well-Read Wonk: "How To Survive A Terrorist Attack" (4/10/03) Additional Resources On The Web 9/11 Commission Report [PDF] · Congressional Research Service Report: North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program [PDF] · International Atomic Energy Agency 2003 Annual Report [PDF] · Beyond Arms Control: How To Deal With Nuclear Weapons [PDF] [an error occurred while processing this directive]

By Corine Hegland and Greg Webb,
National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 15, 2005

With this article, National Journal inaugurates a six-part series assessing the threat posed by nuclear weapons in terrorist hands. This week, we focus on terrorist groups' ability to acquire and use nuclear materials and devices. Subsequent installments will appear every two weeks.

On July 22, 2004, the 9/11 commission released its public report [PDF] on the September 11 attacks. The document warned, "The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world's most dangerous terrorists acquire the world's most dangerous weapons."

On September 30, 2004, in the first debate between President Bush and John Kerry, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the Democratic nominee: "If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States?"

"Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia," Kerry replied. "Now, there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today."

When given his turn, Bush said: "I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network."

On February 16, 2005, Porter Goss, director of central intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, "It may be only a matter of time before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons."

More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuclear threat has changed shape but not ended. In the former Soviet states, bombs and the makings of bombs remain in sites and stockpiles where security is lax. Pakistan and India threaten each other with nuclear warheads. Libya tried to build a bomb; North Korea says it actually has done so; and Iran won't admit to what it is widely suspected of trying to do. Osama bin Laden has declared that acquiring nuclear or chemical weapons is a religious duty of Muslims; U.S. raiders of Qaeda camps in Afghanistan found rough designs for a nuclear bomb; and the father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, had a profitable sideline selling blueprints and machines for building bombs to anyone willing to pay the asking price.

Bob Harney grew up with a bomb shelter. It was just a room inside his boyhood home in Arizona, a small space roofed with cement and some dirt, but in the 1950s, that was enough for some peace of mind. His grandparents over in Oklahoma didn't bother building a shelter. They thought their tornado cellar would do just as well.

Back then, when two little nuclear bombs dropped on Japan had ended a great war, the nuclear threat was worth planning for. Sure, one hit from the Russians could take out hundreds of thousands of people, but the Soviet Union couldn't attack everywhere at once. Even for those Americans within hailing distance of a ground zero, some food and water and dirt meant surviving the fallout. Back then, Harney said with a laugh, you simply stocked a week's worth of supplies for when "either Mother Nature or the Russkies attacked."

Within decades, of course, the bomb shelters would join other artifacts of early Cold War bravado as campy relics, at best. First to challenge the little refuges came the hydrogen bomb, which was easily a hundred times more powerful than the simple devices that had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Then came mutually assured destruction, a doctrine requiring that each side prepare to obliterate the other by placing thousands of nuclear warheads aboard intercontinental missiles, launchable on a moment's notice. The Russians even built a plant far underground that could keep making weapons after the Earth's surface had been destroyed. As MAD took hold, everyone came to realize that the only way to "win" a nuclear war was never to fight one in the first place.

Harney, a large man with a remarkably ready laugh for someone who has spent his entire life with the Bomb, saw the evolution of the nuclear threat firsthand. In 1971, at age 21, he was working with the nuclear weapons group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; by 27, he was a staff scientist with the directed-energy weapons group at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; by 33, he was working on the Strategic Defense Initiative at Martin Marietta. Now he teaches military and civilian students at the Naval Postgraduate School in California about nuclear weapons and unconventional forms of terrorist attack.

"By the 1980s, the weapons were so big that civil defense was a joke: There would be a crater 80 feet deep where Manhattan was," Harney says. "But in the 1950s, when I was a kid, we had a bomb shelter. And for the weapons of that time, the shelter would have made some significant difference."

The nuclear threat today, Harney points out, does not stem from the specter of 5-megaton hydrogen bombs raining across the countryside. The Russians aren't coming anymore.

The terrorists, however, are. And while waging thermonuclear war is beyond their reach, they might be able to make one or two bombs of the old kind, similar to the 10-plus kiloton one that leveled Hiroshima and rapidly killed 70,000 people. That potential is bad. Very bad.

But maybe not as bad, and maybe not as likely, as you might think.

A Gambler's Risk
In the crapshoot of predicting a nuclear terror attack, Graham Allison gives the house advantage to the terrorists. Allison was a senior Pentagon official and now directs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. As he sees it, terrorists have a better than 50 percent chance of pulling off a nuclear attack in the next 10 years. Drawing on that old lesson taught to generations of journalism students, Allison explains: "There's plenty of whos, there's plenty of what, there's plenty of where, there's plenty of how to get it here to the United States -- so I can't see why this hasn't happened already."

Few other proliferation and terrorism experts, however, sign on to Allison's dire assessment. Even former Sen. Sam Nunn, a champion of nuclear nonproliferation and the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, has rated nuclear weapons fourth on a list of credible threats posed by terrorists. On April 5, he told National Journal that terrorists are more likely to use radiological weapons (also known as "dirty bombs"), chemical weapons, or biological weapons.

There is no "technical or scientific basis" for assigning odds of a nuclear terror attack at more than 50 percent, according to David Albright, a former weapons inspector in Iraq and the president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Albright rates the likelihood at less than 1 percent.

But, Albright cautions, less than 1 percent is still too much risk. "We would never accept a situation where the chance of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1 percent," he said. "A nuclear terrorism attack is a low-probability event, but we can't live in a world where it's anything but 'extremely low-probability.' "

Most experts interviewed by National Journal agreed that nuclear terrorism is an event with low probabilities but high consequences. "It's the last scenario," said Gary Ackerman, director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. "People say we could never have a military government in the U.S., but a nuclear bomb changes a lot of calculations. If a terrorist ever releases a nuclear bomb in a massively populated U.S. area, it's not game-over, necessarily, but whatever you wanted to achieve in the war on terrorism is pretty much lost."

How does a president say no to a terrorist blackmailing Washington with a nuke, however unlikely that terrorist might be to have a nuke? "If we believe a terror network might have three or four of these, after the first one goes off, there's no way in the world we could avoid acceding to their demands," said John Arquilla, co-director of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School.

"Urgency and likelihood don't correlate here," agreed Jim Walsh, who heads the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University. "There's great urgency, even though it's only one-chance-in-something, because eventually you will roll snake eyes, and you can't wait until the day before to try to stop it."

Who Wants It?
As American troops swarmed through terrorist training camps in Afghanistan after September 11, Jose Padilla, a onetime Chicago-gangster-turned-Islamic-holy-warrior, made his way through Faisalabad, Pakistan, to meet with a Qaeda leader named Abu Zubaida. Based on his Internet research, he told Zubaida, Padilla thought he could build and explode a nuclear bomb in America.

Zubaida was skeptical, according to the Justice Department. He suggested that Padilla look into a dirty bomb instead. A little radioactive material bound to a conventional explosive could deliver a powerful blow to the infidels, and the bomb would be easier to build than a nuclear device. But Padilla was adamant, and Zubaida eventually gave in, sending Padilla to see Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who had planned the September 11 attacks.

Mohammed was equally unconvinced. Why not, he suggested, go with an earlier, simpler plan to fill high-rise apartments with natural gas and explode them? Padilla wanted the atom, though, and Mohammad finally gave his blessing to either a natural-gas explosion or Zubaida's dirty bomb -- but not to a nuke. According to the Justice Department, Mohammed hosted a farewell dinner for Padilla on April 4, 2002. A month later, Padilla was arrested at the Chicago airport and held as an enemy combatant.

Nuclear power makes an awesome, awful weapon, tearing apart the very core of matter. Governments want nuclear bombs for show-and-tell, for scaring off any schoolyard bully thinking about attacking them. With hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory to hide in and with homegrown scientific and military-industrial complexes in place, large nation-states don't find it difficult to build a bomb: With the exception of Iraq, nearly every half-competent state that has wanted one has either built a weapon or developed the capacity to build one on short notice.

But terrorists follow another story line. They don't, by and large, control their own territory. They don't, mostly, have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on research and development. And they do need to think about how their supporters and opponents will react to a nuclear-armed terror group. Even the September 11 airplane-as-bomb attacks, which were unthinkable but not quite so unthinkable as a mushroom cloud, sparked dissent among Qaeda leaders, according to the 9/11 commission report. Some Qaeda members argued that mass casualties on American soil would be counterproductive because they would bring the full weight of America's wrath upon the group.

Very few people, in other words, actually want and could handle a nuclear device. David Tucker, co-director with Arquilla of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare, uses a Venn diagram to demonstrate just how hard it is for a group to use a nuclear bomb. He points to one circle and says that it represents groups that are willing to attack the United States; the next, overlapping circle represents groups that are willing to kill people indiscriminately; the next, those terrorists willing to use nuclear weapons; and the last, the groups capable of doing so. There's a red section in the middle where all four circles overlap. That area, he says, is the universe of people to worry about. It's a pretty small space. (See chart, p. 1140.)

"If you think of these as four different hurdles that people have to go through, you can see why most groups don't make it," Tucker said. "Most terrorist groups don't care to attack the U.S., and of those, not all are willing to kill indiscriminately."

Only a handful of terrorists fall into Tucker's red space. Apocalyptic cults such as Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin nerve gas into the Japanese subways in 1995 and tried to persuade the Russians to sell them a nuke, land smack-dab in the middle. Basque and Irish separatist groups don't: Unleashing a nuclear weapon would all but guarantee the annihilation of their movements.

Not even Al Qaeda falls neatly in the red. In 1998, bin Laden declared that acquiring chemical or nuclear weapons "for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty." But nuclear weapons are harder and more expensive to acquire than other weapons of mass destruction. Although Al Qaeda clearly demonstrated its interest in the atom when the group was safely ensconced in the Sudan, and then in Afghanistan, evidence gathered since then does not indicate that it made a concerted push on the nuclear front. Two senior leaders did, after all, reject Padilla's plan to use the bomb.

"I think we mistake our high focus on means with their focus on outcomes," said John Parachini, a terrorism expert at the Rand think tank. "We're focused on exotic means, particularly nuclear weapons. They are focused on outcomes, and how to get them with what is simple, safe, and available." If they could get nuclear weapons, they would likely do so, he said, but such devices are only part of a portfolio of weapons development. "They're not going to put all their eggs in the hardest basket."

Al Qaeda of today, however, bears little resemblance to the Al Qaeda of old. Before September 11, Al Qaeda held territory, ran training camps, and had clear commanders and executive councils that weighed strategic decisions, including weapons development. All of that was smashed in 2001, by America's furious response to the crumbling skyscrapers and burning Pentagon. Al Qaeda today is an idea, a network, a virus that infects local groups and inspires spectacular attacks. Bin Laden has put out the call for nuclear weapons, and any local cell may try to respond.

State Sponsorship
Al Qaeda, even at its height, lacked the expertise of an older terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Lebanon-based Hezbollah falls somewhere on a border between the red and the white on Tucker's Venn diagram. On the one hand, with Iranian and Syrian sponsorship behind it, and with its hands in global drug trafficking, Hezbollah probably has the capacity to pull off an attack. On the other hand, it also operates as a legitimate political and charitable organization in Lebanon. A nuclear attack by Hezbollah would imperil the group's standing among Lebanese and represent a dramatic departure from its recent tactics: Despite its frequent Death-to-America rhetoric, the group hasn't attacked any U.S. targets since 1991. Its combat strategy is focused largely on the border between Lebanon and Israel and on supporting Palestinian groups. "So far, Hezbollah has remained neutral" in the jihadists' war, said Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School. But, he asks, what if it is mobilized against the United States, one way or the other?

Imagining Hezbollah taking sides is an uncomfortably simple exercise. Last summer, for example, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the spiritual leader of Iran, declared that sovereign borders wouldn't stop Tehran from striking back against an enemy. "If someone harms our people and invades [our country], we will endanger his interests anywhere in the world," said Khamenei, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute. What if Iran succeeds in its quest for the bomb and, feeling threatened, passes it off to Hezbollah?

Iran isn't the only state with nuclear ambitions that could be channeled into terrorism. North Korea has no known links with active terror groups, but it does make a tidy profit from missile sales to unsavory characters in the Middle East and, according to the State Department, is "likely" involved directly in drug trafficking. Furthermore, one of the world's most petulant, unpredictable dictators heads the country and claims to possess the bomb. Even if North Korea didn't hand a nuclear weapon to another group, its own special-operations forces, one of the world's largest, could try to plant one in the United States, or Japan, or elsewhere, and threaten to blow it up, if, for example, Pyongyang feared that a U.S. invasion was imminent.

The risk is so enormous, said David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for Canadian Security Intelligence Services, that taking out North Korea's nuclear facilities a decade ago, when Pyongyang first acknowledged its nuclear work, could have been "one of the greatest humanitarian initiatives of the 20th century," if it had taken place.

"How will this look five or 10 years from now if a city of a few million goes up, or a few cities of a few million?" he asked. "We will be condemning forever the day that we were luxuriating in second thoughts about North Korea or Iran."

The Nuclear Bazaar
In 1993 or 1994, when bin Laden was beginning to build his global army from his base in Sudan, Jamal Ahmed Al Fadl, a Qaeda operative, was sent to see Salah Abdel Al Mobruk, who had been a member of the Sudanese Cabinet. Mobruk, Al Qaeda had learned, had weapons-grade uranium for sale. In February 2001 in a U.S. trial in absentia of Osama bin Laden, Al Fadl testified that Mobruk sent him on to another man, Basheer. Basheer asked whether Al Fadl was serious. Yes, Al Fadl replied -- $1.5 million serious. Soon after, Al Fadl was taken to a town north of Khartoum, where a third man pulled a 30-inch-long cylinder with South African paperwork out of a leather bag.

Bin Laden bought that cylinder, according to the 9/11 commission report, in his only confirmed effort at nuclear acquisition. But the cylinder was a fake. According to a U.S. Energy Department report cited by the Congressional Research Service, the cylinder was likely just a holder for radioactive material.

Rogue groups have only three ways to get a nuclear bomb: Hope for a thoughtful gift from a state that has a bomb -- Pakistan, maybe, or Iran, or North Korea; buy one on the black market; or make one from scratch. Ignoring the gift option, the black market does not seem to be swarming with bombs for sale; even if one were available, most such finished devices come with fail-safe devices that make them very hard to detonate. Despite the perennial rumors of terrorists or disgruntled scientists walking out of the former Soviet Union with nukes in suitcases, no reliable reports confirm that any bombs are on the loose or being offered for sale. If fully assembled nuclear bombs are for sale, they are rare commodities, and anyone sniffing around for one is at least as likely to encounter a sting operation run by an intelligence agency as to find an actual weapon.

But making a simple nuclear bomb isn't very hard, once you have the material for it -- Padilla thought he could do it from plans he found on the Internet. There's clearly a bustling international bazaar of all ingredients nuclear: North Korea, Iran, and Libya bought the machines to make nuclear material through A.Q. Khan's network, and the companies that sold the machines through Khan were some of the same companies that had sold such equipment to Saddam Hussein before the first Persian Gulf War.

Terrorists, of course, follow a different story line from states. Making a bomb requires fissile material, in the form of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. Many states have the space, money, and security to make fissile material on their own, but nonstate groups would be hard-pressed to build and maintain a nuclear reactor or the facilities needed to enrich the uranium without being noticed. Khan was selling machines to make fissile material -- not, so far as anyone knows, the fissile material itself.

So the terrorist's easiest route to a nuclear bomb is purchasing the already-manufactured material. It takes only about 60 kilograms (130 pounds) of fissile material to build a simple bomb. And enough of that material is around to give government officials quite a few sleepless nights. More than 3,000 tons of the stuff is cached around the globe. Some of it is guarded well by battalions of soldiers, and some of it is guarded poorly by a padlock and a bored watchman. "The janitor knows where that is. The lathe operator at these places knows where that is," said Laura Holgate, vice president for Russia and New Independent States Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. "We have ... vastly overstaffed complexes with massive quantities of fissile material."

A Seller's Market
But the nuclear materials market, judging from the thousand-some transactions that have been tracked publicly, is a strange one. It is populated almost entirely by suppliers. Buyers are remarkably scarce. A 2002 Congressional Research Service report on nuclear smuggling concluded that the nuclear bazaar is "almost entirely supplier-driven, consisting of chains of sellers (usually petty traders carrying the goods on consignment) stretching outward from the source enterprise in search of prospective customers. International demand for such items seems thin or nonexistent."

Furthermore, out of those thousand-odd transactions, fewer than 30 -- all before June 2001 -- involved actual weapons-grade fissile material, according to Friedrich Steinhausler, chair of a NATO nuclear terrorism study group and a physics professor at the University of Salzburg, who keeps a database drawn from public and classified sources that Europol and other security organizations can query. Everything else involved only radiological -- sometimes strongly radioactive, but not weapons-grade -- material, or was a scam. And even if one buyer had gobbled up every known illicit shipment of highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium over the past 15 years (which is impossible, as the material has been recovered in all but one case), he still wouldn't have enough stuff to make a bomb.

But before you breathe too deep a sigh of relief, there's the problem of not knowing what we don't know. As William Potter, director of the Center on Nonproliferation Studies and the creator of the first open-source database that tracks the nuclear market, pointed out, larger quantities of stolen highly enriched uranium may never turn up on the public record. The CIA, for example, has acknowledged the problem of poorly tracked Russian nuclear material. "There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon," said CIA Director Porter Goss. But Potter suspects that such material is more likely to be buried in a cabbage patch somewhere, held for possible future sale, than it is to be in the hands of terrorists. "People took it because it's valuable, but they didn't know what to do with it," he said. "Material hasn't reached a [known] end user other than German intelligence, Russian authorities, and various sting operations."

The CIA, for its part, has acknowledged that it spends a fair amount of time shopping in the nuclear bazaar. The agency caught Khan after a "patient, decade-long operation involving million-dollar recruitment pitches, covert entries, ballet-like sophistication, and a level of patience we are often accused of not possessing," said former Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt in a June 2004 speech.

Something Missing
Nevertheless, a second curious hole exists in Steinhausler's database, beyond the scarcity of buyers, and it's a gap that repeats itself in Potter's data, in the International Atomic Energy Agency's data, in government reports, and in media accounts: There are no end users. No one has discovered an entity or person who has sought and obtained nuclear materials. No terrorists, no Colombian drug lords, no Mafia -- nobody. No "clear evidence exists of participation in the market by terrorists, rogue states, or major transnational crime formations," CRS declared. Even bin Laden has made only one confirmed attempt to purchase materials, and that was more than a decade ago.

The absence of end users is of scant comfort to Steinhausler. We may not be able to find them, he said, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Still, "every time somebody claims that he has information on the end user [of smuggled material], question him. It doesn't exist," Steinhausler said. "Whenever there is a trail leading to a bogus company in a third suspicious country, the trace disappears," he continued. "If anyone says anything else, it's a lie."

Experts differ on explanations for the paucity of end users. Some, such as Tucker, argue that the absolute numbers of potential end users is so tiny that their few attempts to purchase goods aren't likely to surface in the market "sample" of intelligence busts. "You don't have large numbers of people out there" trying to buy this stuff, he said. CRS concluded that the market itself is so skewed that it is "not clear that sellers and buyers have been able to connect in ways that could pose a serious danger to U.S. and Western interests."

Steinhausler insists that we're not seeing the completed transactions. "If I am a professional trafficker, I can assure you that you will not find me. The physics is on my side," he said, pointing to the ease of shielding radiation from detection and the small quantities that could turn a tremendous profit. "If you can smuggle tons of heroin, thousands of guns, or tens of thousands of people undetected, isn't it logical that you can hide a few kilograms of nuclear fissile material? The logistics are the same."

Preventing the transfer of weapons-grade uranium and, to a lesser extent, plutonium is the key to keeping nuclear weapons away from terrorists. Indeed, it's the only way, if one is to believe physicist Luis Alvarez, who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Historian Richard Rhodes, the author of two books on the history of nuclear weapons, says that Alvarez once told him that someone with enough weapons-grade uranium in two pieces could craft a crude nuclear explosion using no specialized equipment. Such a device could produce a blast like that of 2 million pounds of TNT. That's a 1-kiloton yield, one-tenth that of the Hiroshima bomb -- almost trivial by nuclear weapon standards. U.S. strategic nuclear warheads, for example, have yields larger than 100 kilotons. But a smaller nuclear explosion would still dwarf typical terrorist attacks using conventional bombs, or even most conventional military weapons. Consider that in 2003, to great fanfare, the United States tested the largest conventional bomb in its military arsenal, a weapon whose explosive power totaled just 18,000 pounds of high explosives.

"I don't think there are any nuclear secrets left, especially when it comes to these first-generation weapons," said Charles Ferguson, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former naval nuclear reactor officer. There may be some "tricks of the trade" that would prevent terrorists from fully exploiting the bomb, he added, but a large nuclear blast may be unnecessary to achieve terror. "Even if they're going to get an Oklahoma City-type explosion out of a weapon, kill several hundred people, and knock down a few buildings, that might be sufficient to meet the terrorists' needs," he said.

And If They Get It?
The Naval Postgraduate School runs an 18-month master's degree program for fire and police chiefs, public health officials, and other people on the front lines of the war on terrorism. David Tucker teaches a course about the terrorist threat. Each time, he whips out his chart with the little red dot representing the tiny number terrorist groups that could handle the hurdles they must surmount to carry off a nuclear attack. Each time, the students dispute him, arguing, "If this ever happens, we can't handle it, and therefore I don't care what you and your experts say, it's a huge problem."

Even pulling Bob Harney in to talk about the difference between a little nuclear bomb and the big arms race of the Cold War doesn't make much of a difference. "Universally, what people say is 'Well, the guy knows a lot, but it is a big problem,' " Tucker said.

The students have a point. A nuclear attack would be a very big problem for the country. But to focus on the catastrophe while ignoring its low probability would also be a big problem. "The possibilities are infinite, but if they are so infinite, why haven't they happened?" said Rand's Parachini. "We have to understand better why what we fear hasn't happened, so that when those barriers start to diminish, we'll know."

And be able to prepare. Tucker's colleague at NPS, John Arquilla, points out that a nuclear attack would damage America twice over. The hit from the blast and radiation would be destructive, but so would the hit to our idea of ourselves as a nation. Because if such an attack happens -- if the barriers fall, if the terrorists do the unthinkable -- then what?

"That's where the word 'Armageddon' comes in," answered David Harris, adding, with a Canadian's gift for describing the American psyche, that the United States is "either paralyzed or rendered into an international nuclear werewolf, heaving strikes in almost any direction just to neutralize anyone who might do second strikes."

That's because in the war on terrorism, there is no mutually assured destruction. You can't nuke an underground network. And you can't pre-empt it by wiping out Tehran, or Pyongang, or Karachi, without killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and thereby murdering the idea of America.

But if Chicago goes, and if the terrorists say that Washington and Los Angeles are next, what then? Would we be willing then to abandon Israel, to pull out of Iraq, to allow sharia law in America? Or do we then blow Tehran off the map?

We might, according to Arquilla. And that, he said, is the only way we can lose the war against terrorism.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Need A Reprint Of This Article?
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.