Via WaPo: Report Sounds Alarm on Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction
The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world.
[...]
“Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013,” says the draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.
These are pretty bold claims and as serious as such potential threats may be, upon what (apart from fear and rank speculation) would such an estimate be based? A more than 50% of a WMD attack in the next five years? This seems rather alarmist and it is difficult to accept that there is hard evidence to back the claim. Like so much of our post-9/11 anti-terrorism/national security policy, this seems vested more in worst-case-scenario thinking as well as scare tactics to galvanize support for policy proposals than something based in empirical evidence.
Beyond that, let’s consider the most well known terrorist attack of recent vintage (9/11) and the most recent attack (Mumbai). In both cases fairly mundane tools were used, even if used dramatically. The September 11th attacks used hijacked basic transportation (hijacked with box cutters, lest we forget) and in the Mumbai attacks it was speed boats and small-scale hand weapons. In both cases a lot of death, destruction and fear were generated with what were, at the end of the day, fairly unremarkable tools. In both cases the complexity was not in the weaponry, but in the planning and training. It would seem, therefore, that the next major attack will be one with conventional weapons. Indeed, whether we are talking about Oklahoma City, Bali, Madrid or London, terrorists can do a lot of damage with very simple weapons–certainly simple relative to WMD
and sometimes truly simple ones like trucks filled with fertilizer.
It is not that I do not think that the US security apparatus shouldn’t be concerned about potential WMD attacks, it is just that I would like a better sense that there is a realistic assessment of the situation. We have heard for years about the threats of suitcase nukes or nuclear bombs in shipping containers and such and they have been presented as the rationale for any number of anti-terror policy. After all, who can complain about trifles like warrantless wiretaps, unlimited detentions and militarization of domestic security if there is a 50% chance of a nuclear terrorist attack?
Really these estimates come across, to me at least, as a combination of fear-mongering designed to forward specific policy initiatives and cowardly policy-making made by people who would rather over-estimate threats rather than have a finger pointed at them down the road in case their estimates end up to be wrong.
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December 2nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Well, the national security apparatus in the USA can’t really complain about terrorists wielding small arms weapons. Then they’d have to worry about the NRA.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I agree with some of the generalities of this report - that the risk is growing and not shrinking, for example - but I don’t understand how they were able to quantify this into a 50% probability of attack in the next five years.
If all the report said was that the risk has grown, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. That will continue to be true for the forseeable future, if for no other reason than the advancement of technology and the lack of a credible deterrent against the use of WMD by terrorists.
But to quantify that threat? I don’t know how you can do that. It seems like they pulled the numbers out of thin air (or someplace else) to me.