The Three Conjectures

A Pew poll finds 40% of Americans worry that an US city will be destroyed by a terrorist nuclear attack . James Lileks thinks the annihilation of a city is a dead certainty and will only mark the start of a long, wearying struggle against Islamists armed with nuclear car bombs.

The imminence of the threat is open to debate. Despite the perception that technological diffusion has put weapons of mass destruction within easy reach of Islamic terrorists -- the cliché of a mullah brewing anthrax in a cave -- terrorist weapons remain at the 1970s level. The Al-Qaeda attack on the September 11 was the most sophisticated terrorist assault in history. Yet it did not employ any new technological elements, just the creative use of old techniques like the airline hijacking. High explosives,  small arms, and poison gas still comprise the terrorist arsenal. 

The limiting factor is the lack of terrorist engineering resources to make sophisticated weaponry. The principles of ballistics, explosive chemistry and aeronautics needed to make combat aircraft are well known; but groups like Al Qaeda don't have the personnel, facilities and secure environment to turn the concepts into a working object and so have no combat aircraft. Making a uranium A-bomb of the simplest kind is comparable in complexity to manufacturing a Douglas DC-3, even given the fissile materials. But the SAFF (Safing, Arming, Fuzing, and Firing) issues alone pretty much ensure that it cannot be developed from a mullah's cave. US weapons are one point safe -- with less than a one in a million chance of detonating accidentally if their explosive primers were improperly activated. Unless the Islamists engineer similar precautions, their weapons would be unusable. The safety record of terrorist bomb factories and the history of prematurely detonating car bombs would see Islamabad vaporized before Manhattan. Analogous problems exist for biological weaponry. There are no Biosafety Level 4 facilities in tribal areas or tents in North Africa and an accidental plague that wiped out the population of the Middle East would hardly help the Islamist cause. Only a state  in the near term -- Pakistan, Iran or North Korea -- will have the manufacturing resources and secure territory to make the weapon that Lileks and the Pew respondents fear.

Conjecture 1: Terrorism has lowered the nuclear threshold

These obstacles to terrorist capability are the sole reason that the War on Terror has not yet crossed the nuclear theshold, the point at which enemies fight each other with weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist intent to destroy the United States, at whatever cost to themselves, has been a given since September 11. Only their capability is in doubt. This is an inversion of the Cold War situation when the capability of the Soviet Union to destroy America was given but their intent to do so, in the face of certain retaliation, was doubtful. Early warning systems, from the DEW Line of the 1950s to the Defense Support Satellites were merely elaborate mechanisms to ascertain Soviet intent. That put the Cold War nuclear threshold rather high. Even the launch of a few multimegaton warheads at US targets or a nuclear exchange between forces at sea would not necessarily precipitate Central Nuclear War if American national command authority was convinced that the Soviet strike was accidental or could be met with a proportional response; in other words, without the intent to initiate an all out nuclear exchange, there would be none.

In stark contrast, the nuclear threshold against a terrorism may be crossed once they get the capability to attack with weapons of mass destruction. Unlike the old early warning systems, designed to gauge Soviet intent, the intelligence systems of the War on Terror are meant to measure capability. The relevant Cold War question was 'do they intend to use the Bomb?'.  In the War on Terror, the relevant question is simply 'do they have the Bomb?' This puts the nuclear threshold very low. Just how low was empirically demonstrated in the days immediately following the September 11, when it was reported that the United States had considered -- and rejected -- a nuclear response to the World Trade Center attacks. The threshold had almost been crossed. However that may be, we now know from National Security Presidential Directive 17  that a terrorist WMD attack, including biologicals and chemicals, will go over the line:

"terrorist groups are seeking to acquire WMD with the stated purpose of killing large numbers of our people and those of friends and allies -- without compunction and without warning. ... The United States ... reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all of our options -- to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies."

Some reports have suggested that the US would preemptively use tactical nuclear weapons -- bunker busters -- to destroy terrorist WMDs. We're no longer in Kansas.  In the halcyon days of the Cold War Soviet boomers would cruise the American coast with hundreds of nuclear weapons unmolested by the US Navy.  Now a single Al Qaeda tramp freighter bound for New York carrying a uranium fission weapon would be ruthlessly attacked. The taboo which held back generations from mass murder has been mentally crossed by radical Islam and their hand gropes uncertainly for the dagger.

Conjecture 2: Attaining WMDs will destroy Islam

This fixity of malice was recognized in President Bush's West Point address in the summer of 2002, when he concluded that "deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend." The enemy was equally indifferent to inducement or threat. Neither making nice -- Jimmy Carter's withdrawal from Iran, Reagan's abandonment of Lebanon, Bush's defense of Saudi Arabia, Clinton's rescue of Albanian Muslims from Serbian genocide, the payment of billions in aid to Egypt and Pakistan -- nor the gravest of threats would alter the enemy's intent to utterly destroy and enslave America. Allah had condemned America. The Faithful only had to find the means to carry out the execution.

Because capability is the sole variable of interest in the war against terrorism, the greater the Islamic strike capability becomes, the stronger the response will be. An unrepeatable attack with a stolen WMD weapon would elicit a different response from one arising from a capability to strike on a sustained and repetitive basis. The riposte to an unrepeatable attack would be limited. However, suppose Pakistan or North Korea engineered a reliable plutonium weapon that could be built to one-point safety in any machine shop with a minimum of skill, giving Islamic terrorists the means to repeatedly attack America indefinitely. Under these circumstances, there would no incentive to retaliate proportionately. The WMD exchange would escalate uncontrollably until Islam was destroyed.

Consider a case where Islamic terrorists obliterate a city, causing five times the deaths at Hiroshima and an American limited response.

Iteration	Non-Islamic Losses	Islamic Losses
1	- 5 x 10^5	-2 x 10^6
Total	- 5 x 10^5	-2 x 10^6

In a war between nations, the conflict might stop at this point. But since there is no one with whom to negotiate a peace and no inclination to stop anyhow, the Islamic terrorists will continue while they have the capability and the cycle of destruction continues.

Iteration	Non-Islamic Losses	Islamic Losses
1	- 5 x 10^5	-2 x 10^6
2	- 1 x 10^6	-5 x 10^6
3	- 5 x 10^6	-1.5 x 10^7
4	- 8 x 10^6	-3.0 x 10^7
5	- 1.5 x 10^7	-5.0 x 10^7
Total	- 2.95 x 10^7	-10.2 x 10^7

At this point, a United States choked with corpses could still not negotiate an end to hostilities or deter further attacks. There would be no one to call on the Red Telephone, even to surrender to. In fact, there exists no competent Islamic authority, no supreme imam who could stop a jihad on behalf of the whole Muslim world. Even if the terror chiefs could somehow be contacted in this apocalyptic scenario and persuaded to bury the hatchet, the lack of command and control imposed by the cell structure would prevent them from reining in their minions. Due to the fixity of intent, attacks would continue for as long as capability remained. Under these circumstances, any American government would eventually be compelled by public desperation to finish the exchange by entering -1 x 10^{^9} in the final right hand column: total retaliatory extermination.

Iteration	Non-Islamic Losses	Islamic Losses
1	- 5 x 10^5	-2 x 10^6
2	- 1 x 10^6	-5 x 10^6
3	- 5 x 10^6	-1.5 x 10^7
4	- 8 x 10^6	-3.0 x 10^7
5	- 1.5 x 10^7	-5.0 x 10^7
6	0	-8.93 x 10^8
Total	- 2.95 x 10^7	-1 x 10^9

The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the 'rational' American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset. 

Iteration	Non-Islamic Losses	Islamic Losses
1	- 5 x 10^5	-1 x 10^9
Total	- 5 x 10^5	-1 x 10^9

James Lileks and the Pew respondents would not lose America; but like the boogeyman in Seven, Islam would take it's soul. The most startling result of this analysis is that a catastrophic outcome for Islam is guaranteed whether America retaliates or not. Even if the President decided to let all Americans die to expiate their historical guilt, why would Islamic terrorists stop after that? They would move on to Europe and Asia until finally China, Russia, Japan, India or Israel, none of them squeamish, wrote -1 x 10^{^9} in the final right hand column. They too would be prisoners of the same dynamic, and they too have weapons of mass destruction.

Even if Islam killed every non-Muslim on earth they would almost certainly continue to kill each other with their new-found weaponry. Revenge bombings between rival groups and wars between different Islamic factions are the recurring theme of history. Long before 3,000 New Yorkers died on September 11, Iraq and Iran killed 500,000 Muslims between them. The greatest threat to Muslims is radical Islam; and the greatest threat of all is a radical Islam armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Conjecture 3: The War on Terror is the 'Golden Hour' -- the final chance

It is supremely ironic that the survival of the Islamic world should hinge on an American victory in the War on Terror, the last chance to prevent that terrible day in which all the decisions will have already been made for us. That effort really consists of two separate aspects: a campaign to destroy the locus of militant Islam and prevent their acquisition of WMDs; and an attempt to awaken the world to the urgency of the threat. While American arms have proven irresistible, much of Europe, as well as moderates in the Islamic world, remain blind to the danger and indeed increase it. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad recently "told an international conference of young Muslim leaders ... (that) ... Muslims must acquire skills and technology so they can create modern weapons and strike fear into the hearts of our enemies". Fecklessness and gunpowder are a lethal combination. The terrible ifs accumulate.