William J. Perry, Ashton B. Carter and Michael M. May write an Op-Ed in today’s Times about the prospect of nuclear terrorism. The threat of a bomb going off in an American city, they write, is “incalculable,” but higher than it was five years ago. Their argument recalls arguments of the early Cold War: we must find ways to make this unthinkable event thinkable.
All familiar stuff. But there is an important difference. In the early Cold War, the questions was whether the United States could survive a nuclear attack: whether it would have the capacity to launch a second strike, and whether the “vital nodes” of the industrial system would be destroyed. But now, these authors note, the prospect of nuclear terrorism does not threaten our entire system: “After all,” they argue, even in the event of a nuclear detonation “the underlying equation would remain a few terrorists acting against all the rest of us, and even nuclear weapons need not undermine our strong societies.”
The biggest threats, rather, concern auto-immune response: the instinct to immediately strike whatever country was the “source” of the material; the instinct to undermine the constitutional structure of U.S. government. It is to forestall these responses — and, of course, to minimize the loss of human life — that , they argued, preparedness planning is necessary.
Hollywood has already been there:
The Sum of All Fears is a 2002 film directed by Phil Alden Robinson, from a screenplay by Paul Attanasio and Tom Clancy, based on the book of the same name by Tom Clancy.
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, an Israeli A-4 jet carrying a nuclear bomb gets shot down over the desert in the Middle East. In 2002, the bomb is found by a man named Olson, he sells it to an Austrian neo-fascist named Richard Dressler for 50 million dollars on the black market. Meanwhile, the United States becomes concerned when Nemerov becomes president of the Russian Federation, because of his strong military control. Jack Ryan and the CIA Director William Cabot go to Russia to inspect their nuclear weapons program.
When Ryan notices that three Russian nuclear scientists are missing, Cabot tells Ryan that the Russians don’t know where they are. Cabot sends John Clark to track down those missing scientists. Those scientists are repairing the nuclear bomb Dressler bought in Ukraine. When President Nemerov takes responsibility for an unauthorized gas-warfare attack on the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, it concerns American President J. Robert Fowler and his administration, in response he sends peacekeeping troops to Chechnya. The nuclear bomb arrives in a crate in Baltimore, Maryland, and is placed at an American football stadium secreted in a cigarette vending machine. Meanwhile, President Fowler and Cabot are attending a game at the stadium. Ryan calls Cabot to tell him that the bomb is in Baltimore. Cabot realizes that the bomb is at the stadium and evacuates the President, before it explodes. The bomb does explode, destroying a significant portion of the city of Baltimore.
After the disaster, President Fowler is rescued by United States Marine Corps troops, and taken airborne on a Boeing E-4B Advanced Airborne Command Post with his cabinet. Immediately, they fear that the bomb was Russian. Ryan and his girlfriend Dr. Catherine Muller survive the blast, but Cabot dies later at a hosptial. After learning about the explosion, Dressler calls his neo-fascist friend who is a general in the Russian Air Force. The general orders his Tu-22M Backfire pilots to strike an American aircraft carrier in the Black Sea under the false information that the United States had launched an ICBM attack on Moscow. The strike is successful, in response President Fowler orders three United States Air Force F-16s to attack a Russian air base. Then, the President orders SNAPCOUNT, a strike using B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and ICBMs that would use nuclear weapons to destroy Russian missiles and planes. This would initiate a Russian counterstrike and possibly World War III. When the B-2 stealth bombers are discovered over Poland, President Nemerov orders to shoot them down.
Jack Ryan tries to stop the nuclear war, by going to The Pentagon and telling Nemerov that the nuclear bombing of Baltimore was a terrorist attack by a group of neo-fascists. Nemerov proposes a plan to Fowler to a stand down, preventing a nuclear war. Days later, both presidents sign a pact to reduce weapons of mass destruction. Later still, John Clark and Russian agents assassinate all the individuals responsible for the the explosion in Baltimore. At the end, Ryan and his girlfriend Cathy Muller get engaged.
Auto-immune responses to false alarms/errors may also be of note. A short entry from James der Derian back in 2003 – ‘networked pathologies’ (http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/911/index.cfm?id=15) is interesting on this point.
From the work you all are doing on vss he is wrong about the inability of states to “envision”, but i thought it’d be interesting to put out there.
Anthony — the Der Derian stuff is definitely interesting. It is interesting that there is this narrative of “unimaginability” in much of the discourse about new threats. Of course, Beck has something like this as well. And that was the point about nuclear war back in the early days of Kahn, civil defense, etc., as Andy points out in “Preparing for the Next Emergency.” But as you point out, the discourse about “unimaginability” has always been the flip side (and often traveling companion) of new techniques, at various levels of formality and quantification, precisely for imagining such things, from the Delta methodology to formal systems analysis forward.