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By Alex Fak
Omissions can speak volumes. So it was with the Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. on Wednesday. Mr. Powell said Saddam Hussein was aiding terrorists (probably true). He said Iraq was working on nuclear weaponry (also perhaps true). But he neglected to link the two, as has been done in the media lately: he did not say that Hussein would help terrorists use a nuclear weapon. He did not say it because it is not true.
The anxiety about radicals possessing the weapons of mass destruction goes well beyond Iraq. It stems from the concern about the so-called "new" or "modern" terrorist. This creature is fervently religious and answers only to God. It goes for the highest number of casualties; murder has become an end in itself. It would inevitably use a weapon of mass destruction if it could get one (indeed, two-thirds of all biological attacks of the 20th century occurred in its last decade). With the help of the Hussein regime in Iraq, it finally can.
So it seems odd when Adrien Guelke and Brian Jenkins, two terrorism experts, separately point out that there is no evidence that any terrorist organization ever attempted to purchase a nuclear weapon. Perhaps something is wrong with our anatomy of the "new" terrorist.
In fact, a lot of things are wrong. Take religion, for instance. It remains doubtful that it is the main motivating factor behind today's deadlier strains of terror. More likely, it is a convenient rallying point for diverse ethnic and political motives. Michael Scott Doran, an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, has argued that despite the high loss of life in the bombing of the U.S. Army barracks in Saudi Arabia and in the attacks on September 11, the body count was not what motivated the perpetrators. Rather, Osama bin Laden and his kind attempted a tactical maneuver at finding a common enemy to unite the disparate Islamic fighters. Likewise, before the 9-11 attacks, the hijackers were carousing in bars, not getting high on the opium of the masses.
Anyway, religious terrorism is not inherently more ruthless than the secular kind. The dreaded suicide bombings, for instance, were actually pioneered by the socialist and Marxist groups during Lebanon's civil war. A. A. Khalil, a historian of terror in the Muslim world, notes that such avowedly secular groups as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Progressive Socialist Party had launched suicide attacks against Israeli targets long before the religious Hizballah got around to it.
But even if apocalyptic terrorists existed, and even if they were able to acquire nuclear material, the possibility of setting it off would be slim. First, they would need a triggering device. One cannot just set off a dynamite stick near a nuclear bomb, hoping that it would get detonated this way. The bomb, essentially, needs to set itself off by triggering a nuclear reaction, a complicated process that would have cost terrorists millions of dollars on top of their bill for the raw nuclear filling.
Then, the bomb needs to be delivered. This is hard--few states, much less groups, possess launching and guidance capabilities that would let a nuclear bomb come off the ground and not land in the vicinity of their heads. Delivery method has been a problem even for chemical and biological weapons. When the Libyans tried to use chemical weapons in Chad, they induced casualties among their own troops as the gas drifted over their battle lines. In 1995, Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese millinnarian cult, could not come up with a better triggering and delivery device for its Tokyo subway attack than to punch the bags containing the deadly serin gas with umbrellas. This goes some way to explain the relatively small fatality rate in that assault.
In his speech, Secretary Powell did mention that terrorist groups trained within Iraq were producing ricin and other poisons. They would "have no compunction about using such devices against innocent people around the world," he said. Perhaps. But the feared chemical and biological weapons are hardly the stuff of mass destruction. Surprisingly, fatality rates from chemical weapons tend to be smaller than those from conventional arms. David Rapoport, editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, has written a long story of how Aum's numerous attempts to unleash both biological and chemical weapons ended in nearly complete failure. And all those biological attacks of the last decade have not produced one memorable destruction.
States like Syria have indeed undertaken a strategy of sponsoring terrorist attacks as proxies for their own national aggressions. But as Rapoport notes, it is unlikely that they would trust their terrorists with any sort of "mass destruction" weapon; the regimes would have too much to lose by giving such power to agents they cannot control. For some time yet, state-sponsored terror will be confined to the run-of-the-mill car bomb.
Of course, one unconventional terrorist attack tomorrow--and this column will be derided to heaven. But such an attack is unlikely. The "new terrorist," armed with the weapons of mass destruction, is a ghost of popular imagination. Expending immense resources to exorcise it would be a costly ritual of superstition.
Student Life - Independent newspaper of Washington University
February 7, 2003
Boo! A Rebel With a Nuke
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