Stopping Nuclear Terrorism

The Dangerous Allure of a Perfect Defense

Michael Levi

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Article preview: first 500 of 3,188 words total.

Summary:  Nuclear terrorism poses a grave threat to global security, but seeking silver bullets to counter it does not make sense. Instead of pursuing a perfect defense, U.S. policymakers should create an integrated defensive system that takes advantage of the terrorists' weaknesses and disrupts their plots at every stage, thereby chipping away at their overall chances of success.

MICHAEL LEVI is Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of On Nuclear Terrorism.

A successful nuclear attack by terrorists would be catastrophic. Intense fears of nuclear terrorism have led to a search for a perfect defense: destroying all terrorist groups that threaten the United States, sealing U.S. borders against loose nukes, or locking up all existing nuclear weapons and materials. Yet none of these strategies is a silver bullet. It is fantasy to believe that terrorism can be eliminated or that thousands of miles of U.S. borders -- not to mention the borders of U.S. allies -- can be sealed. Initiatives to secure nuclear weapons and materials are vital, but they will always fall short, too.

Rather than search for a perfect defense, which will never exist, counterterrorism strategists must use the many imperfect tools at their disposal to confront the many imperfect terrorist groups that they face. To pull off a nuclear attack, a group would need to acquire nuclear materials or a weapon, build a bomb or unlock an existing one, move that weapon to its target, and detonate it. Securing nuclear weapons and materials, although critical, confronts only one part of a plot and cannot eliminate the threat entirely. Strategists must build on this one defense to develop an integrated defensive system that also draws on border security, law enforcement, intelligence operations, military and diplomatic initiatives, and emergency response efforts. To do so properly, they must develop a more realistic picture of nuclear terrorism that draws on a careful understanding of how terrorist groups work and how their plots can fail.

FIGHTING A MIRAGE

When strategies for preventing nuclear terrorism rely on silver bullets, less dramatic -- but nonetheless crucial -- measures are neglected. The search for a perfect defense is partly driven by outsized fears of terrorists' capabilities and the assumption that a worst-case, or "perfect storm," scenario will occur. But terrorists do not have superhuman powers; their plots are imperfect and contingent and can be derailed. Consider the analogy of a police department seeking to prevent bank robberies. If the department assumes that all thieves have cars that travel 200 miles per hour, the department will give up on planning carefully for car chases and focus almost entirely on guarding the banks. If it instead realizes that many thieves will have cars that travel only 100 miles per hour, it will also carefully develop tactics for chasing down robbers. Realistically assessing the full spectrum of possible threats -- in this case, from Ferraris to Ford Escorts -- spurs broader and more careful planning by the police department. The same would be true of the U.S. government's homeland security and counterterrorism policies if Washington adopted a more nuanced view of the nuclear terrorist threat.

Moving away from worst-case assessments of the capabilities of nuclear terrorists will require strategists to rethink many basic assumptions. Terrorist groups are limited in their capabilities. Some terrorist groups, for example, lack expert personnel but have extensive resources. Analysts generally assume that wealthy groups will use their resources, whether money or connections, to ...

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