Say Nuclear Terrorism Threat Is Overstated
“Countries won’t give nuclear weapons to terrorists.”
Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, Western leaders, lawmakers and national security officials have feared that terrorists would obtain a nuclear weapon, or the fissile material to make one, and use it to attack Western capitals or regional rivals.
After 9/11, President George W. Bush explained the need to invade Iraq by lumping it with Iran and North Korea in his 2002 State of the Union speech, calling them “an axis of evil” that threatened world peace. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger,” he said. “They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”1
President Barack Obama echoed Bush’s concerns when he told a 2016 White House summit on nuclear security: “There is no doubt that if these madmen ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb or nuclear material, they most certainly would use it to kill as many innocent people as possible.”2
And former CIA Director R. James Woolsey (1993-95) famously said in 1994, “Terrorists don’t want a seat at the table, they want to destroy the table and everyone sitting at it.”3
But some terrorism experts say those assumptions are based on cartoonish perceptions of anti-American regimes and terrorists as single-minded, suicidal fanatics. Counterterrorism officials could better avoid catastrophe by approaching such threats with an eye toward terrorists’ strategic priorities, they say, and not simplistic assumptions that detonation is their primary goal.
Moreover, they note, citing detailed studies and empirical data, the likelihood of a government providing a nuclear bomb or fissile material to a terrorist group is vastly overstated.
“Countries won’t give nuclear weapons to terrorists,” says Keir Lieber, an expert on nuclear weapons and geopolitics at Georgetown University. And “it is implausible that terrorists could develop a nuclear weapon on their own.”
Even a state sponsor of terrorism would avoid giving a nuclear weapon to a proxy terrorist group, according to Lieber and Daryl G. Press, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and an expert on nuclear deterrence. “Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons a state can acquire,” the two wrote in a 2013 article in the journal International Security. “Handing that power to an actor over which the state has less than complete control would be an enormous, epochal decision—one unlikely to be taken by regimes that are typically obsessed with power and their own survival.”4
In addition, they argued, forensic examination of the radioactive isotopes that remain after a nuclear blast would reveal the uranium mines, reactors and enrichment facilities where the bomb originated, exposing the state sponsor to retaliation. Plus, they added, a state sponsor would worry that terrorists might use such a weapon in an unexpected way or provoke a response that would end the sponsor’s regime.5
However, there is still some cause for concern, experts say. If a terrorist group obtained a nuclear weapon, its leaders would more likely be guided by strategic considerations, such as potential rewards, rather than sheer rage. Knowing the impact a nuclear blast and the ensuing retaliation would have on public opinion, the group’s leaders would seriously consider other options than detonation, they say. But that could still create some painful dilemmas for the terrorists’ targets.
For instance, a group could engage in nuclear blackmail, declaring that it has a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it unless the group’s conditions were met.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that advocates for nuclear disarmament, paints a frightening nuclear blackmail scenario in which a terrorist group somehow obtains two nuclear bombs, places one in Washington and one in New York City and threatens to destroy the nation’s capital unless the United States withdraws its forces from the Middle East. Then, to prove the group’s capability, it could detonate the bomb in New York or off the coast.
“What does a U.S. president do” in such a situation? Cirincione asks. “There is no good response.”
Christopher McIntosh and Ian Storey, terrorism experts at Bard College, say a nuclear-armed terrorist group also could announce that it has a nuclear weapon but present no demands, instilling fear among its enemies, “without committing the organization to a definite strategic path,” they wrote.6
Or a terrorist group could simply suggest—but not confirm—that it has a nuclear weapon, a strategic posture used by Israel for 50 years, according to Avner Cohen, author of the 1999 book Israel and the Bomb.
McIntosh and Storey say a terrorist group also could keep its nuclear capability a secret until it decides conditions are right to unveil it and issue demands.
But numerous studies have shown that terrorist groups try to avoid stepping over a line that will draw catastrophic damage to their organizations and communities. For example, after a border attack in 2006 by the Iranian-backed military group Hezbollah that killed several Israeli soldiers, Israel launched a full-scale war that killed or wounded some 5,600 people, displaced another million and destroyed much of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.
Many Lebanese blamed Hezbollah for their suffering, causing Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, to declare that, had he known Israel’s response would be so devastating, he would never have ordered the attack.
—Jonathan Broder
1 “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address,” The Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2002, https://tinyurl.com/rq8zyq4.
2 David Smith, “Barack Obama at nuclear summit: ‘madmen’ threaten global security,” The Guardian, April 1, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/t4o9r3e.
3 Nicholas Lemann, “What Terrorists Want,” The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2001, https://tinyurl.com/qmgejrz.
4 Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to Terrorists,” International Security, Vol. 38, No. 1, Summer 2013, https://tinyurl.com/uwua7p8.
5 Ibid.
6 Christopher McIntosh and Ian Storey, “Would terrorists set off a nuclear weapon if they had one? We shouldn’t assume so,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/s3h69no.
Decades later, former advisers to Khrushchev disclosed that 43,000 Soviet soldiers had secretly amassed on the island to defend the missiles against a U.S. invasion, according to a new history of nuclear warfare by Slate defense reporter Fred Kaplan. In his review of the book for The Washington Post, author Evan Thomas noted that those troops were armed with tactical nuclear weapons.40
Arms Control Treaties
Shaken by the missile crisis, Washington and Moscow agreed the following year to establish a communications hotline between their leaders to mitigate the risk of accidental nuclear warfare. The two countries also signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which forbade most nuclear test explosions.41
Another major arms control effort occurred in 1968 with the signing of the U.N.-sponsored Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It recognized the five existing nuclear-weapons states—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China—and required their pledge to work toward nuclear disarmament. The treaty also obligated non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons but guaranteed them the right to civilian nuclear power, subject to certain safeguards. Eventually, 187 countries signed on, making the treaty one of the pillars of a global arms control architecture. (Israel, India and Pakistan refused to sign and later became nuclear weapons states. Cuba and South Sudan have refused to join the treaty but do not have nuclear weapons.)42
In 1972,