Nuclear Terrorism, 60 Years Later

I’ve written some version of this sentence about 10 bazillion times: “The United States must prepare itself to overcome the new threats of the 21st century, including nuclear terrorism.” But is the threat of nuclear terrorism actually new?

Because transnational terrorist organizations today are more prevalent, more organized, more determined, and more lethal than ever before, the threat of nuclear terrorism in the 21st century can indeed be described as new or unprecedented.

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age, however, analysts have recognized that the mere existence of these weapons made catastrophic terrorist-style attacks possible. This was made clear to me today as I read One World or None.

This short volume, which originally appeared in 1946 but was reissued in 2007, contains more prescience per page than anything I’ve ever read on nuclear issues. Why did the contributors, who were mostly scientists, see the nuclear future so much more clearly than other policymakers at the time? “The answer is surprising in its simplicity,” Richard Rhodes notes in the preface. “The scientists had done the numbers. They understood, as the statesmen and generals did not, that nuclear energy represented a vast change of scale.”

In his chapter titled “The New Technique of Private War,” Edward U. Condon evaluated what nuclear energy’s vast scale meant in the context of possible sabotage. If one were to change “special agent” to “terrorist”, Condon’s passage below could have made a rather eloquent appearance in the 2010 QDR:

In the age of atomic explosives the special agent has not been freed from the traditional restriction of his profession—his physical means must still be small. But no longer does this connote small destruction.

Expanding upon Robert Oppenheimer’s impish observation that only a screwdriver could detect atomic devices smuggled into the United States, Condon powerfully described the nation’s vulnerability to a terrorist-style nuclear attack. Remember, this was written in 1946:

We must accept the fact that in any room where a file case can be stored, in any district of a great city, near any key building or installation, a determined effort can secrete a bomb capable of killing a hundred thousand people and laying waste every ordinary structure within a mile. And we cannot detect this bomb except by stumbling over it, by touching it in the course of our detailed inspection of everything within a box or case or enclosure the size of a large radio cabinet, everywhere in every room of every house, every office building, and every factory of every city, and every town of our country.

Parts of One World or None certainly show their age. Yet Condon’s words demonstrate that although we have successfully prevented all-out nuclear war, we have yet to protect ourselves against another fundamental threat in the Atomic Age: the nearly unstoppable power nuclear weapons can provide to individuals hell-bent on inflicting catastrophic death and destruction.