Several leading scholars have identified nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat the United States and its allies face and have concluded that such an attack is very much within the realm of possibility.
These authors equate existence with the survival of a nation, and the survival of the nation with the survival of a fair number of its citizens, its infrastructure, and other assets such as select factories and residential buildings. But a nation is more than the aggregate of X million individuals. Nations have communitarian dimensions. Their citizens have a sense of purpose that is in part composed of their identification with the nation as a whole, with its well-being. Hence, when their national soccer team loses, they will feel a loss. When the president is assassinated, they feel personally aggrieved, threatened, and diminished. If large segments of the population are killed and much of the nation is laid to waste, the remaining citizens will be severely traumatized, say in the ways Germans were at the end of World War I.
Citizens also rely on the national state for their security. If the security of any major part of the nation is violated, citizens of other parts will lose their sense of security and their trust in their leaders and political institutions. Often they then seek safety by supporting strong-armed leaders and nondemocratic forms of government.
Furthermore, nations have communal assets that do not belong to any one citizen, but, if destroyed, many will be affected. Some of these assets are symbolic; for instance if the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument were destroyed, Americans would survive but feel abused. Other communal assets are “objective”; thus, if the water reservoirs of a city are deliberately contaminated, its citizens will feel endangered even if no one was killed or lost any private property.
It follows that even if a nuclear attack “only” laid to waste a major U.S. city (such as Chicago), let alone one of special symbolic importance (such as Washington, D.C.) or several cities (whether all at the same time or in rapid succession), the nation would continue to exist—but it would not be the same nation. The analogue is to a person whose eyes have been gouged out, eardrums pierced, and right leg severed. His name and social security number will remain the same but perhaps little else will. A nation so attacked will be much less liberal, less respectful of individual rights, less tolerant of foreigners, and much more belligerent in its dealings with other nations, as well as with “non-state actors” overseas. We have seen such developments in Britain following the relatively small number of IRA terrorist attacks in England (most attacks occurred in Northern Ireland). They led to significant diminution of individual rights (as embodied by the 1973 Northern Ireland Emergency Provisions Act), as well as to the introduction of many tens of thousands of cameras in public spaces, and the City of London’s security and surveillance cordon, the so-called Ring of Steel.
There is often a strong correlation between those who are concerned that the fear of terrorism will lead U.S. society to tolerate major reductions in civil liberties, that we will “do the work of terrorists for them” by destroying America as we have known and loved it—and those who minimize threats by terrorists. They view the fear of an attack—which they argue has been drummed up and exaggerated by right-wing forces or those in power—as much more damaging than the effects of such attacks. Some of these threat-minimizers carry their position to the next step when they argue that terrorists, whose casualties number in the thousands, should not be treated any differently than other criminals.
After all, the number of people killed in the United States every year by garden-variety criminals greatly exceeds those killed by terrorists over the last 100 years. Also, by treating terrorists the same way as criminals, civil libertarians hold, the rights of those suspected of being terrorists will be maintained, and with that our liberal democratic regime. This position raises two issues. One of the basic assumptions of the criminal system is that there is no room for state action unless a crime has already been committed. Evidence is then collected to prosecute the suspects. Deterrence of future crimes is based on the success of such post-crime prosecution. However, in the case of massive terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, the goal must be to prevent an attack before it occurs. Moreover deterrence cannot be expected to be the result of post-attack prosecution of terrorists, as many of them have shown their willingness to commit suicide in their attack. Furthermore, punishing the villages or countries from which the terrorists hail will not deter the terrorists; indeed it is welcome from their viewpoint, as it tends to increase their ranks and local support for their activities.
Second, the criminal system allows those accused to face their accusers and have access to all the relevant evidence. In the case of terrorism, such disclosures would cause grievous damage to the public interest by discouraging sources and compromising important means of finding information about terrorism.
Neither of these factors suggests that terrorists should be denied basic human rights, or that the way to confront them is by declaring a 100-year war. Ways and means must and can be found that are specially tailored to their status, which is fundamentally different from both criminals and soldiers. I can offer here merely a few illustrations of an approach that balances the interests of upholding individual rights and ensuring security. For instance, lawyers should be given access to classified information—but terrorists may be limited in their choice of lawyers to those who have security clearance. The courts may hold their sessions in secret, as long as the courts’ independence is secured. These two brief examples may not be the best way to proceed, but they illustrate that a third way can be found between the global-war-on-terror rubric favored by the Bush administration and the criminal-justice approach favored by threat-minimizers.
There are those who take a longer view, a very long one. The American philosopher and author Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argues that the threat of radical Islamist groups is not existential, because in the longer run the Western march of history toward democratization will win. He also holds that recent setbacks to democratization in Muslim nations are a sort of childhood disease nations may go through but will outgrow on their own and will have no lasting effects on history.
Predicting the future is a treacherous business. Past historical experience suggests that the record of those who see history marching in one clear direction is not exactly sterling. There is also plenty of evidence that the human costs of the traumas of the kind Afghanistan suffered under the Taliban are very high indeed. If these are “childhood diseases” or “labor pains” of a new democratic order, we should go a long way to help people avoid them.
Only fatalists would sit back and rely on the march of history to do their bidding.
(This piece first appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Amitai Etzioni is Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. His most recent book is Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy just published by Yale University Press.
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