The Nightmare Scenario

posted at 1:54 pm on June 17, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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In the comments to “What The President Should Have Said to the Iranian People,” CK MacLeod responded to my belief that aggressively spreading democracy is the best long-term defense against nuclear terror by doubting that a convincing scenario for a nuclear terror attack could be devised. Certainly it’s easy to frighten ourselves with Hollywood visions of a doomsday attack: terrorist flies a Cessna over the Empire State building, shouts “Allahu Ackbar!”, and detonates the suitcase nuke in the back seat. The more serious nuclear terror scenario would need to envision a rogue regime believing it could pull off such an attack without inviting its own complete destruction; complete the delivery and deployment of the device successfully; and gain something that would justify the risks and expense involved in perpetrating the attack. There are insane jihadists who think nuking an American city would be worth any sacrifices necessary, and would do so as soon as they had the capability, but is there a terror-sponsoring regime that would put that capability in their hands?

Following are the general outlines for the nuclear terror plots that seem most plausible to me. It’s a bit uncomfortable writing this stuff down, but I take comfort in knowing that intelligence and counter-terrorism professionals are way ahead of me on this. Although it is an unpleasant discussion, the plausibility of nuclear terror is an important issue that should be confronted squarely.

The Nuclear Umbrella: The most logical, and essentially guaranteed, result of a rogue regime achieving nuclear capability is the immediate foreclosure of the Saddam Hussein option. The regime could take all sorts of provocative actions without ever needing to worry about military retaliation. Their nukes would do the same thing ours do: sit in storage and terrify everyone by their mere existence. Obviously this isn’t a “nuclear terror attack” scenario, but it deserves mention because it could still result in a good deal of death and destruction, and I think it highlights the importance of spreading democracy as a method of de-fanging the world’s bad actors. Leaders chosen by free and fair elections are generally too preoccupied with domestic concerns, as the only sure path to political power, for violent military adventurism, and a republican system is exponentially less likely to sustain the kind of decades-long global outlaw misery that afflicts a country like North Korea. The nature of the state living beneath the Nuclear Umbrella is crucial. Nobody stays up at night worrying about what the nuclear France of 2009 might be up to… but the France of 1814 would have made aggressive use of such a deterrent, without ever feeling the need to actually launch one of their weapons. Considering the incredible expense of building nuclear weapons, and the price paid on the international stage for their relentless pursuit of this technology – along with the distinct lack of enemies that are actually inclined to stage conventional invasions of their territory – I doubt the ultimate goal of the rogue state nuclear quest is to mothball those warheads and keep them strictly for deterrence purposes.

The “Crazy Mahmoud” Sneak Attack: High-ranking members of the Iranian government and military have often said they would drop the “Islamic bomb” on Israel, the moment such a weapon becomes operational. Of course, blood-curdling threats to murder the Zionist entity are delivered by Islamist governments with the same frequency the American government announces winning lottery numbers. Still, Mahmoud Amadinejad once belonged to a deranged sect that believed its sacred duty was ushering in the end of days, so the Hidden Imam can return and lead the non-radioactive faithful to Paradise. Iran has been waging low-intensity war on Israel for some time, using its Hezbollah proxies, and that war has featured the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Would they try to deliver that knockout atomic blow, and if the Iranian leadership wanted to, could it pull off the attack?

We know nothing about the command-and-control infrastructure Iran might be designing for its nuclear weapons, so it’s hard to say how many people would need to be either Hidden Imam cultists, or absolutely loyal to Amadinejad or one of the nuttier generals, in order to arrange a sudden missile launch. However, I don’t think they’d risk using their uncertain missile technology to make such an attack – their missile accuracy is low, and the missile could be shot down. Also, a missile launch would give Israel time to retaliate, even if other nations were reluctant to do so. A much more reliable tactic would be smuggling a nuclear device into Tel Aviv, and other key Israeli population centers. This would necessarily involve a much larger chain of custody for the weapon, making secure deployment much more difficult, and requiring a lot more true believers to pull it off. Since rational calculations are of limited use when predicting the actions of fanatics, the real questions would be: are there enough fanatics to carry out a nuclear doomsday attack, and are they crazy enough to do it?

The Nuclear Handoff: What if a rogue state with nuclear capabilities decided to sell its weapons to someone who would be willing to use them, rather than orchestrating an attack directly? The most obvious culprit here would be North Korea, which has literally starved itself to death in pursuit of atomic weapons. As long as nuclear blackmail of the West continues to be profitable, their nukes are a profit center. The problem is that the West is bankrupt, and may not be able to afford the payments necessary to keep North Korea in the style to which they have become accustomed… even if the West remains eternally willing to participate in the bi-annual nuclear shakedown. The global jihad is well-funded, and the mentally unstable North Korean leadership might find the idea of selling doomsday weapons to be used against its hated enemies to be irresistable.

Would they get away with it? A lot depends on the nature of the weapons sold. It occurs to me that instead of functioning multi-stage warheads with superfluous L.E.D. countdown timers spinning down to 00:00:00, terrorists could do a lot of damage with a supply of radiological material for some dirty bombs. Even a very small device could do incalculable economic damage, far beyond the number of people it killed, as utter panic gripped a major urban area like Wall Street. After deploying the first such device to establish their credentials, terrorists could do immense damage by simply threatening to detonate more – a plausible threat could turn any major city into a chaotic nightmare. They could get two or three effective “detonations” for every actual device in their possession. The results would be crippling. To put it simply, Barack Obama’s America could never absorb the economic damage from a 9/11-scale attack, the way George Bush’s America did. Terror attacks on economic centers would push an already overstressed, worse-than-broke system into total collapse.

Smuggling radiological material through our porous borders would be no more difficult than smuggling drugs, especially if the material was shipped over time, in very small amounts. Would the supplying country face total destruction as the punishment for their actions? I’m not at all convinced they would. It would be very simple for them to claim these materials were stolen. How would we get the evidence to prove otherwise, since we have loudly declared we will never use coercive interrogation techniques? Politely ask captured terror operatives if they feel like ratting out their bosses, then politely ask the bosses if they wouldn’t mind signing an affadavit that they obtained their weapons from Kim Jong Il?

Even if we did obtain sufficient physical evidence to pinpoint the source of the weapon and establish culpability, does anyone think China would allow us to nuke North Korea into oblivion? Maybe an already aged, obscenely wealthy Kim would have to go into exile after taking personal responsibility, but that’s about the worst-case scenario for them. We don’t have any effective response other than nuclear annihilation to threaten them with. Their own nuclear umbrella, and the potential damage to South Korea, precludes conventional military retaliation, which is also something China would never allow. Sanctions obviously wouldn’t be an acceptable response, or likely to cause them any pain they aren’t feeling already – the American president would be more likely to lose his office than Kim Jong Il. In short, precisely identifying the rogue state culprit behind a low-intensity nuclear attack would be less than certain, and effective retaliation less than assured. It’s the kind of dice roll that madness, desperation, or overwhelming hatred might lead a dictator to make.

The Blind Shot: There is some debate about the feasibility and effective payload of the fabled “suitcase nuke,” but there’s no question such devices are getting smaller all the time – and every new weapon comes as a nasty surprise for the people on the wrong end of it. If a bomb could be made small and simple enough for very small martyr teams to carry them, a cell the size of the 9/11 gang could set a couple of them off in a coordinated attack that left no one to interrogate. The trick would be covering up the construction and delivery of the weapon, leaving no trail that pointed definitively back to a state sponsor. In light of this, it’s troubling to consider the reports that al-Qaeda has been working to establish ties with Mexican border gangs. It would not be difficult to pay such gangs to smuggle a few guys and some luggage across the border, and once in the United States, they only need to rent some ground transportation to reach their targets and get their weapons running. The number of reliable suicide operatives who could pull off the technical aspects of such an attack are certain to be small, so it’s not a tactic that could be easily repeated – but the terror effects would be enormous.

We toppled the Taliban because they were sheltering al-Qaeda. Having learned from that experience, I suspect al-Qaeda, or a similar organization, would want a much more secure rat hole next time. What could be better than a large state with an organized military, and a nuclear umbrella? Perhaps one reason we have not seen follow-up attacks on the 9/11 scale is that terror organizations are waiting for a friendly state to get that nuclear umbrella open, giving them an impenetrable fortress to hide in.

Why would even a malevolent state get involved in taking a blind, small-scale nuclear potshot at a U.S. city? What would the strategic benefit be? Besides the above-mentioned economic damage, a true nuclear detonation, however small, could do immense political damage to the American government. Obviously, this could be done by vaporizing Capitol Hill, but a more subtle chain of political destruction could begin with even a relatively tiny nuclear detonation, at a much “softer” target, anywhere in America. Consider the chain of events: after the blast, an international terrorist organization takes direct responsibility, or is proven to have been responsible. The CIA determines the leaders of this movement are hiding in a nuclear-armed Iran. The government of Iran officially denies involvement in the attack, and a tenuous chain of evidence makes it difficult to absolutely prove they are responsible. They also adamantly refuse to extradite the terror suspects named by America as primary culprits. The American president would have few good military options, and the world community would be unlikely to sanction the wholesale nuclear obliteration of Iran – especially if the terrorists were careful to stage their attack with a low-yield device, making Iranian genocide something the less sympathetic great powers would strongly object to.

The American president could tell the rest of the world to get bent and start dropping bombs anyway, but this would effectively destroy Western political order, and it’s not hard to imagine the current U.S. president looking for any alternative to such a devastating retaliation – but anything less than that would bring his government down. A furious America could tear itself apart trying to deal with the aftermath of a small mushroom cloud in Des Moines. It might not even be necessary to detonate the warhead – what happens if we catch the would-be perpetrators of atomic terror, and we do manage to tie them to leaders hiding in Teheran? A bomb that might have gone off could still have the desired effect, creating a state of panic and political chaos, as the Administration tries to deal with an unspeakable provocation, to which every possible response is either inadequate or unthinkable.

The Tom Clancy novel “The Sum of All Fears” deals with this type of situation, and is vastly more detailed and chilling than the awful Ben Affleck movie adaptation. For one thing, the perpetrators in the book are not Austrian neo-Nazis. (All these years later, it’s still hard to keep a straight face when describing the mangled plot of the movie adaptation.) The ultimate response devised by the book’s heroes, as the only way to respond with anything less than the nuclear annihilation of Iran, is more far-fetched than the terrorist plot, especially when you compare the demonstrated competence of the real-world CIA to the abilities of Clancy’s fictional agents.

The Nightmare Scenario: All of the above situations suppose that a single rogue state, working with terrorist cutouts, attempts a limited but terrifying attack, while maintaining enough deniability to protect itself from apocalyptic retaliation. What if that setup is turned on its head, and instead of a lone rogue state trying to hide from a vengeful America after sponsoring a limited attack, the perpetrators are a coalition of hostile states that act in concert to deploy massive strikes on key targets?

We already know the Axis of Evil has regular internal communications. Terrorists and terror states have cultivated relationships with lesser vermin like Hugo Chavez and the Castro regime. A broader assortment of hostile states would benefit greatly from erasing American global power. The southern American border is porous enough for those with thousands to spend on gaining illegal entry – what would MS-13 be willing to do for a billion-dollar bounty? (The northern American border is not exactly an iron barrier, either.) If nuclear terror was directly engineered by state actors, instead of outlaw organizations, and they weren’t especially concerned with keeping their identities secret, they might be able to think on a larger scale, and execute their plan with professional intelligence operatives instead of mistake-prone suicide fanatics.

Here is the Nightmare Scenario: Hiroshima-level devices are carefully smuggled into New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, assembled by trained military and intelligence operatives, over a period of months. At the appointed hour, all three are detonated, producing unimaginable levels of carnage – along with the destruction of the nation’s political and economic systems. The culprits are revealed to be several rogue states working in concert. Who do we nuke? Everyone? With conventional military operations out of the question against multiple, widely separated enemies – several of whom would, by definition, have nuclear deterrents against conventional attack – what retaliation is possible? The geographical isolation that helped America develop so quickly and securely might prove to work against us, as China and Russia find it more in their interest to finish off a wounded United States than allow massive retaliatory strikes to produce gigantic fallout clouds along their borders.

By all means, please use the comments section to blow holes in any or all of these scenarios. Bloggers usually wince when commenters point out their mistakes, but in this case, every flaw in my reasoning or crucial fact I’ve ignored will be music to my ears. My overall feeling about the shadowy menace of nuclear terror is that none of our worst fears are likely, but I don’t think all of them are impossible. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to smaller and more unstable states, and eventually non-state actors, increases the chances of someone making the kind of miscalculation that ends with thousands of dead innocents. In previous eras, the defenders of a nation were most concerned with threats from smart enemies, but in the atomic era, we should be much more worried about the foolish and crazy ones. I continue to believe the worldwide spread of democracy is the best defense, both to produce the kind of republican states that are less likely to act aggressively or make deadly mistakes, and to drain the totalitarian swamps that outlaw terrorists like to use for cover.

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