Annihilation from Within

by Fred Charles Iklé

  5. Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, who have been tracking this problem at Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project, wrote in 2004 that 130 research reactors were still operating on HEU, and many with inadequate security (Washington Post, September 11, 2004). Since then this number has been reduced—slightly.

  6. Allan Lengel, Washington Post staff writer (Washington Post, September 16, 2005).

  7. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf confirmed in 2005 that D. A. Q. Khan provided North Korea with centrifuge machines for making enriched uranium that can be used to build nuclear bombs (New York Times, August 25, 2005).

  8. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, ch. 2 (“The Philosophy of the Bomb”), esp. 49, 56–57. On nineteenth-century anarchism and its religious precursors, see also James Joll, The Anarchists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  9. Haruki Murakami, Underground (New York: Vintage, 2000), 361–62 and 301–302. In the assessment by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, Asahara’s goal was “a delusion of fantastic proportions” (The Cult at the End of the World [New York: Crown, 1996], 156).

  10. The Stimmung versus Haltung distinction was used by the Nazi authorities in their surveys assessing the reaction of the German population to the Allied bombing attacks (The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, European War, report 64b, “The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale,” vol. 1:42–43).

  In an analysis of World War II bombing that I conducted shortly after the war, I found further evidence of the “threshold” at which a society’s deportment suddenly deteriorates. The elasticity of resources is one key factor. Fred Charles Iklé, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958).

  11. Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs (January-February 2002): 56.

  12. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, 141. In his follow-on study, Walter Laqueur wrote: “Terrorism has been with us for centuries, and it has always attracted inordinate attention…. It has been a tragedy for the victims, but seen in historical perspective it seldom has been more than a nuisance.” And as to assassinations, Laqueur concluded that “the number of prime ministers and heads of state murdered since the end of the Second World War is in excess of sixty, but it is difficult to think of a single case in which the policy of a country has been radically changed as the result of a terrorist campaign.” Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3 and 46.

  13. Kerensky, quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), 336–37.

  14. Trotsky, quoted in Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1966), 254 and 257–63. Selznick’s book, although dating from the Cold War, is worth reading today. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the organizational stratagems that a ruthless and cunning dictator can use.

  15. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 360–61, 381.

  16. Ibid., 407–409.

  17. Lothar Kettenacker, “Sozialpsycholgische Aspekte der Führer-Herrschaft,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Führer State (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 102 and passim. This collection of essays offers a sophisticated reinterpretation of Hitler’s political appeal. See also Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 151 and passim. For a recent psychological interpretation of political leaders, see Jerrold M. Post, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

  18. Jonathan Stevenson, “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles (New York: Free Press, 1996), 127.

  19. On these Russian extremists, see Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev, “Disrupting Escalation of Terror in Russia to Prevent Catastrophic Attacks,” BCSIA Discussion Paper 2005-10, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2005. Simon Saradzhyan (a foreign policy analyst who worked in Moscow) reports that in 2005 the director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) told his counterparts from the other former Soviet republics the terrorists seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction (7–8).

  20. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, and he received many other honors. But It Can’t Happen Here was one of Lewis’s less highly acclaimed books. In 2004, Philip Roth published the novel The Plot Against America, a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 election—a plot even less credible than the earlier and more timely plot used by Sinclair Lewis

  21. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Direct Books, 1991).

  22. A series of scholarly studies have arrived at divergent conclusions. For instance, Walter Hofer et al., Der Reichstagsbrand: Eine wissenschaftliche Dokumentation (Berlin, 1972) conclude that the Nazis were culpable for organizing the arson. But other historians argued this conclusion was based on forged documents and that only one person, the Communist-affiliated arsonist Van der Lubbe, was responsible (Eckhard Jesse, “Der Reichstagsbrand—55 Jahre danach,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [1988]: 194–219).

  23. Oppenheimer’s interest in Sr-90 is reported by Jonathan Schell, who cites Joseph Rotblatt as his source in The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 55.

  On the U.S. nuclear targeting plan for 1962 briefed to President Kennedy, see Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 25.

  5. Time to Get Serious

  1. A sophisticated and comprehensive report on the projects that are part of the “revolution in military affairs” is Michael G. Vickers and Robert C. Martinage, The Revolution in War (Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2004).

  Andrew Marshall (Director of Net Assessment in the U.S. Defense Department) played the leading role in developing this revolutionary perspective as an area of study and to guide the relevant Defense Department decisions.

  2. Lowell Wood’s unclassified contributions on this issue are largely in the form of briefings. A recent example dealing with the gamma-ray color camera is “Finding Nukes … at High Speeds and Long Ranges,” a briefing given to the Defense Science Board on May 23, 2004. Sadly, Wood’s proposals and those of his colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories did not receive the necessary long-term funding and institutional support for team work to develop and test these important approaches, build prototypes, and find cost-saving improvements.

  3. The inadequacy of today’s sensors is no secret. False-alarm rates are so high that an effective line of defense could not be established without an economically intolerable blockage of commercial traffic. Other applications of these inadequate sensors are farcical: In December 2005 the FBI and the Energy Department admitted that thousands of searches for radioactive materials had been conducted since 9/11, to look around the country for radioactive devices (“dirty bombs”) in parking lots and other easily accessible areas. Unless someone had sprinkled plutonium or cesium in the sidewalk, it seems doubtful this operation would have detected a “dirty bomb” that was reasonably hidden. And a shielded HEU-bomb could not have been detected even if it was in a car parked in the street. But this FBI search did stir up strong complaints from American Muslim organizations, since it was reported that many mosques and homes of Muslims were monitored—from the outside (Mathew L. Wald, “Widespread Radioactivity Monitoring Is Confirmed,” New York Times, December 24, 2005, A11).

  One domestic source of bomb material is the continued use of research reactors that still operate on HEU (see chapter 4, note 5). The last section of chapter 3 deals with the prospect of a new domestic source—the MOX economy. To prevent theft or illicit sales of nuclear materials “at the source” require
s greatly improved security for many disparate sources, and not only for the Soviet nuclear detritus, even though Russia now owns by far the largest collection of fissionable material and weapons that need better protection.

  4. John Lehman, “Getting Spy Reform Wrong,” Washington Post, November 16, 2005; Newt Gingrich, “Getting the Lessons of Iraq Exactly Right,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2005.

  The case for giving more weight to common sense in the workings of the U.S. government has also been made by Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (New York: Random House, 1994), Paul C. Light, Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995), and Jonathan Rauch, Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1999).

  5. Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 50–51. Flynn offers rich and highly disturbing detail about the weak defenses to protect U.S. territory from smuggled weapons at ports and the land border. Flynn also recognizes the limits of going to the “source” and hideouts abroad. “It would seem that we are barely capable of hunting down these violent young men even when they are in our midst” (11).

  6. The Quadrennial Defense Review Report of February 6, 2006, mentions the requirement “to locate, tag and track fissile materials rapidly … and to deploy specialized teams to render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world” (34). And the report adds “the need” for “capabilities to detect fissile materials such as nuclear devices at stand-off ranges” (35). See www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/QDR20060203.pdf.

  7. Norman Ornstein, “How Many Warnings Does Congress Need to Protect Itself?” Roll Call, May 31, 2005.

  8. From 2001 to 2003, the Brookings Institution conducted the Presidential Appointee Initiative (with Paul C. Light as the senior advisor), a study that examined the problem in great detail and made actionable recommendations. Apart from a fine study and a couple of legislative draft proposals in Congress, the initiative ended with zero implementation.

  9. Paul Schott Stevens, U.S. Armed Forces and Homeland Defense: The Legal Framework (Washington D.C.: CSIS Press, 2001): see section on the Posse Comitatus Act (22–27). The statutory authorities for domestic emergencies include the Insurrection Act, the Stafford Act, and the National Emergency Act of 1974 (ibid., 14–19).

  10. Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 156, 187, and passim.

  11. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford University Press, 1999), 207.

  12. Predictably, this extraterritorial repatriation of Haitian refugees was challenged in court in 1993. The lower U.S. court used the UN Protocol on refugees to interpret U.S. law, since the relevant U.S. act (the Refugee Act of 1980) was enacted to conform U.S. law to the UN Protocol (to which the United States had become party in 1968). But then the Supreme Court held that neither the UN Protocol nor U.S. law applies to U.S. actions outside U.S. territory. Alan B. Simmons, ed., International Migration, Refugee Flows, and Human Rights in North America: The Impact of Free Trade and Restructuring (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1995), 283–88.

  13. For a purely legal assessment of the UN decision on the Protocol, see Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 12–13 and passim.

  14. The astounding case in England has been widely reported by British newspapers, e.g., the Press Association, the Birmingham Post, the Guardian, and the Telegraph all on January 20, 2003, and the Sun on January 19, 2003. The number of Afghan postliberation asylum applicants in the Netherlands is given by the Dutch report Migration and Development Cooperation, issued by the Advisory Council on International Affairs (The Hague, June 2005), 18.

  15. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 10 and 357.

  16. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 182.

  6. Restoration

  1. Wesley T. Wooley, Alternaives to Anarchy: American Supranationalism Since World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

  2. Hedley Bull is quoted here from his magisterial and widely acclaimed book The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1st ed., 1977]), 280 and 299. Hedley Bull was professor at the Australian University, the London School of Economics, and then at the University of Oxford until his untimely death in 1985.

  3. William Nordhaus and James Tobin, “Is Growth Obsolete?,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Economic Growth, Fiftieth Anniversary Colloquium V (New York: distributed by Columbia University Press, 1972), 1. An excellent assessment of the economist’s changing views of perpetual growth is H. W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth: A Study in Contemporary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Arndt notes that T. W. Hutchinson’s comprehensive Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) lists not “a single reference, explicit or implicit, to economic growth as an objective of economic policy.”

  4. Herman E. Daly is now Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Among his writings on this topic are Steady-State Economics (San Francisco: W. H Freeman, 1977; 2d ed., 1991), and Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HOW SHOULD AN AUTHOR EXPRESS HIS GRATITUDE to those who unstintingly offered wise counsel, inspiration, and guidance, and who helped disentangle a whirligig of ideas? Perhaps simply by saying “thank you.”

  Daniel Seligman and I became friends in the 1970s when he worked for Fortune magazine. In 1987, Dan joined a Defense Department commission on long-term national strategy, which Albert Wohlstetter and I cochaired. Wohlstetter and I came to esteem Dan highly for his deep understanding of the political and social environment and his ability to bring clarity to the most opaque issues. Dan, you encouraged me to navigate my story to its destined ending without shying painful, yet inescapable conclusions. Thank you for your help and companionship on this journey.

  Owen Harries and I celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in Sidney, Australia, awed by the end of the Cold War unfolding before our eyes. Four years later, we took advantage of that historic transition as we worked on a project that brought senior U.S. and Russian defense officials together to overcome the strategic thinking of the Cold War. At that time, Owen was editor of The National Interest, and he published several articles of mine which provided the foundation for this book. Owen, thank you for inspiring the ambitious agenda of my book and for greatly enriching its themes.

  Gerald Aronson (M.D., psychiatrist, and expert on neurology) opened a window for me into the vast realm of brain science. He thus helped me venture a bold forecast about superhuman intelligence systems that nations might learn how to build. Gerry and I have collaborated before. In the 1950s, we worked on a successful RAND project (chapter 3 tells that story). Of course, the proof that superhuman intelligence can be developed is not yet in hand. But thank you, Gerry, for helping me to articulate this portentous vision.

  I owe thanks to many others.

  Joshua Lederberg, Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University, had the patience and kindness to advise me on problems of prolonging human lives and on possibilities for brain-computer systems that might reach superhuman intelligence. To my knowledge, Joshua Lederberg is the only Nobel Laureate who actually read my very first book (The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction) and even thought well of it.

  I am grateful to Paul Kozemchak, Philip Merrill, Wolfgang Schürer, Henry Sokolski, and Lowell Wood for their helpful comments on the finished draft, or on parts of it, and for the guidance and essential data they provided. To Conrad Heede I owe thanks for his always reliable and timely research assistance; and I also want to thank those who preceded Conrad during my lon
g dalliance with this book: Dove Waxman, Steven A. Cook, and Lisette Andreae (for research on German sources). My warmest thanks to Carol Purdey and Terri Silver for their splendid assistance in keeping abreast of ever-changing drafts, reshuffled chapters, and endless endnotes.

  CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C, offered a wonderfully stimulating home for my project. I am greatly indebted to former CSIS president David M. Abshire for inviting me to join CSIS, and to the current president of CSIS, John J. Hamre, for his gratifying endorsement of my work and for having been so patient as my book kept creeping along. Thank you Dave and John.

  At the terminus of the journey, to my delight, a new group of helpful supporters stepped forward—the highly professional team of Columbia University Press, my publisher. From the outset, Senior Executive Editor Peter Dimock was interested in the message of my manuscript and has cheerfully led me by the hand through every turnstile of the publication process. My profound thanks to you, Peter. And thanks to all the other superbly professional staff members of Columbia University Press.

  As Samuel Johnson noted, “what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” If you read this book without pleasure, dear reader, it is not that it was written without effort. Blame the grim message—not the messenger.

  INDEX

  9/11 attacks

  ABM. See Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

  Abshire, David

  Acheson, Dean

  Acheson-Lilienthal report

  Adams, Gerry

  Afghanistan

  Africa

  Allen, Richard V.

  Allison, Graham