The sum of all fears

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 1:06PM UAE / November 5. 2009 9:06AM GMT

Stuart A Reid considers a new book’s attempts to calm our every nuclear anxiety.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda
John Mueller
Oxford University Press
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Just weeks after September 11, 2001, the then-CIA director George Tenet came to President George W Bush with bad news. Al Qa’eda operatives, he said, may have penetrated the United States again, this time armed with a 10-kiloton atom bomb. The device, thought to have been stolen from Russia, was allegedly hidden in New York City. If detonated there, a weapon of that size could turn hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents into radioactive ash. Soon, nuclear specialists from the Department of Energy were racing to Manhattan, and Dick Cheney was headed to his undisclosed location with hundreds of government staffers in tow. Fearing widespread panic, the administration said nothing to the public, the FBI, or even New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani.

There was, in fact, little reason to be scared. The source of the tip – who claimed to have overheard the plot in a Las Vegas casino – had already been deemed “non-credible” by intelligence analysts. Besides, as John Mueller points out in his wide-ranging new book, Atomic Obsession, an act of nuclear terrorism involves so many highly technical and conspicuous steps that it is almost impossible to pull off. Mueller, a political scientist who last allayed paranoia about terrorism in Overblown, now hopes to deflate the hype surrounding nuclear weapons. This involves several interrelated arguments: nuclear terrorism is unlikely, atomic explosions are less powerful than commonly believed, and the bomb has been irrelevant to postwar history – thus nuclear proliferation should be met with apathy. “Sleep well,” he counsels.

There is no doubt that all things atomic weigh heavily on practitioners of foreign policy. With a twitch of the nuclear sabre, North Korea has extracted massive amounts of aid from the international community. The Bush administration created a specific category for nuclear rogues – the “Axis of Evil”– and invaded one member, Iraq, that it could not bear to see get the bomb. Barack Obama has called for “a world without nuclear weapons”; Iran’s pursuit of them is, in his words, “unacceptable”, and nuclear terrorism is “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security”.

When it comes to nuclear terrorism, Mueller’s scepticism is particularly well placed. To begin with, the evidence that terrorists have any real interest in going nuclear is thin – a boastful rant here, an alleged meeting there, but not much in the way of concerted efforts, let alone actual progress. Osama bin Laden may never have uttered the remark frequently attributed to him about wanting to carry out a “Hiroshima”, and an oft-repeated allegation that al Qa’eda tried to purchase uranium in the early 1990s is probably bogus. The group’s interest in nukes, Mueller relates, “never went beyond searching the internet”.

Part of the reason terrorists are not interested in nuclear weapons is that they are extraordinarily difficult to buy, steal or build. No country has ever given a nuclear weapon to another, and it is hard to imagine any government handing one over to terrorists, especially since they would likely be discovered. “Loose nukes” are, to date, only hypothetical – those “suitcase bombs” allegedly missing from the Soviet Union’s old arsenal, experts agree, would no longer work. Anyway, a terrorist who obtained one would not only have to maintain it (an activity usually reserved for teams of PhDs) but also, in many cases, possess the codes necessary to unlock it. The hurdles to making a bomb from scratch – procuring fissile material, recruiting top scientists, setting up a machine shop, all the while keeping everything under wraps for years – are daunting. As an intercepted al Qa’eda memo on bomb-making advised: “Make use of that which is available... rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach.”

Not all of the book’s claims are so relieving. One contention – that even if terrorists did obtain a nuclear weapon, the effects of a detonation would be less horrible than we think – does little to inspire confidence. Although a one-kiloton bomb (puny, in terms of nuclear yield) would kill many if detonated in Times Square, in New York, “that same bomb exploded a few blocks away in the middle of Central Park,” Mueller reassures us, “would not be able to destroy any buildings on the park’s periphery”. It is similarly cold comfort to hear that higher background radiation levels “may be beneficial by activating natural coping mechanisms in the body”.

Still, Mueller is right that the effects of a nuclear explosion have been overstated by everyone from J Robert Oppenheimer, the man responsible for the first one, who said that just a few atom bombs could “blow up New York”, to the many academics and policymakers who have called nuclear terrorism an “existential threat”. Though Atomic Obsession sometimes seems to be dredging for good news where there is little, its clinical discussion of the actual effects of nuclear explosions – a useful primer on megatons, blast radii, and radioactive fallout – helps dismantle much of the mythology surrounding the weapons’ supposedly apocalyptic power.

Mueller’s enthusiasm for puncturing conventional wisdom, though refreshingly provocative, becomes problematic when he turns his eye to international politics, both past and present. Many international relations theorists have attributed the post-Second World War great-power peace to nuclear deterrence. Since the leaders of both the Soviet Union and the United States knew that either country’s nuclear arsenal could destroy the other, the logic goes, they had every incentive not to initiate war; doing so would have amounted to national suicide. Mueller contends that other factors – namely, the spectre of a plain old-fashioned large-scale conflict – were more than enough to deter another world war. As he sees it, nuclear weapons are best viewed not as a special class of weaponry with distinct strategic implications but as merely an additional type of weapon – especially powerful, yes; fundamentally different, no.

It is true that nuclear weapons hold no monopoly over mass destruction. As the game theorist Thomas Schelling observed: “There is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick.” But, as he added, what makes nuclear weapons unique is their mutually destructive nature. Wars fought with machetes, bullets or cruise missiles can be immensely destructive, but they can also be won. Nuclear wars are by their very nature unwinnable. The weapons are a game-changer.

As a nuclear apathist, however, Mueller is committed to believing otherwise. As a result, he goes out of his way to construct a rather convoluted reading of the Cold War. To him, the reams of literature on deterrence theory, the widespread public fear of nuclear war, multiple arms-reductions treaties, and each superpower’s massive and expensive arsenals are proof only that the bomb was undeservedly hyped – not that it was influential. In an especially tortured section of the book, Mueller contends that even the Cuban missile crisis was less about the prospect of nuclear war than the memory of recent “prenuclear” wars. This is a curious interpretation of an incident that began with the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida, was made public by the US President, John Kennedy, in a speech that explicitly invoked the threat of “worldwide nuclear war”, and ended with the United States agreeing to remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey.

Mueller does briefly admit that nuclear weapons have “substantially influenced political rhetoric, public discourse, and defence budgets and planning”. But then he goes on to inexplicably downplay the importance of all this in matters of war and peace, concluding that the weapons “have been of little historic consequence”. Mueller is trying to have it both ways: he sees the weapons as irrelevant, except for when decision makers mistakenly treat them as relevant – at which point they still somehow remain irrelevant. In doing so, he overlooks something crucial about international relations: perceptions matter.

This oversight precludes any examination of what might be the most important question about our nuclear fears: Why do they exist? One answer is psychology. Studies of risk perception show that humans routinely underestimate the risk of events that are voluntary, understandable and pedestrian while overestimating that of those that are uncontrollable, complicated and unfamiliar. We also tend to be more afraid of catastrophic risks (a city going up in smoke) than chronic ones (going out for a smoke). Throw in the adjective nuclear (whether it modifies energy, weapons or terrorism), and our ability to accurately calculate probabilities appears to break down entirely, overwhelmed by images of instantaneous, fiery death from above – inspired, perhaps, by the nuclear nightmare scenarios found in Tom Clancy thrillers and movies such as Dr Strangelove. When subjects in one study were asked to rank the relative riskiness of 30 activities and technologies, they put nuclear power first, ahead of cars, guns, cigarettes, alcohol, and motorcycles – which all kill many more people per year.

For decades, analysts and amateurs have forecast epidemics of nuclearisation: the atomic virus was bound to spread quickly from country to country. Kennedy, during his 1960 presidential campaign, predicted that in four years, “10, 15, 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity.” When he said this, four countries – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France – had tested a nuclear weapon. By 1964, only China had joined them. There did, in fact, end up being something of a traceable chain reaction (from Russia to China to India to Pakistan) but it came drip by drip, and the club’s roster now stands at nine.

Yet “cascadiological hysteria”, as Mueller calls it, is still alive and well in foreign policy circles. The former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft (who helped form President Obama’s national security team) recently asserted that if Iran were to join the nuclear club, “you could have 20 or 30 countries close to nuclear”. Pessimists like these worry that a fully nuclear Iran or North Korea, in addition to magically gifting nuclear technology to dozens of countries, could use its new-found powers to dominate or destabilise its neighbourhood. Mueller convincingly shows that such a move would be unlikely: even Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he suggests, would act with restraint, knowing that if they did not, their immediate neighbours would band together in the face of a common threat. Yet fears about proliferation disrupting world order persist.

The consequences have been substantial. Economic sanctions intended to punish governments that flirt with acquiring nukes have hurt their populations. Other anti-proliferation measures have slowed economic growth by making the development of civilian nuclear energy more difficult. And minor countries have been able to extort concessions from major ones merely by threatening to enrich uranium. The clearest example of the “proliferation fixation” gone awry, of course, is the disastrous war in Iraq. “Even if Saddam did acquire nuclear arms,” Mueller writes, “it seems most likely that he would have used them as all others have since 1945: to deter an invasion rather than to trigger one.”

This is the argument nuclear optimists make about the actions of would-be nuclear states. Mueller’s intense nuclear apathy, however, puts him in an awkward spot. It is difficult to simultaneously observe, as he does, that nuclear weapons do not matter and that states regularly turn to them for reasons of security. The case is weakened by his knee-jerk dismissal of nuclear aspirants as undertaking a fool’s errand. When, for instance, Mueller mentions that Israel devotes 10 per cent of its military budget to its nuclear programme, he breezily criticises the programme as wasteful rather than considering why the country might have wanted it. This is the same logical tic that leads him to take 60 years of nuclear non-use not as evidence of the power of deterrence, but as proof of the weapons’ futility.

As frustrating as it might be to an impassioned rationalist like Mueller, nuclear weapons have become desirable, important and useful because people think they are, and act accordingly. But he is too busy trying to pierce our atomic fixations to ask what motivates them. The specific reasons, of course, vary from situation to situation. They can help weak countries get noticed, or frighten away aggressive neighbours. For politicians seeking to tap into intertwined feelings of national pride and humiliation, they provide just the right status symbol. Yes, the atomic obsession is a costly one to pursue. But, measured by the goals of the obsessed, it has paid off.

Stuart A Reid is an associate editor at Foreign Affairs.