Joe talks about nuclear proliferation in the context of mathematical progression below, and expresses his anxiety that we aren’t solving the problem fast enough. I want to suggest something slightly different, and that is the notion of a ‘threshold’. Sadly, it will make him even more anxious – but hey, why should I be here by myself?
I took his post to suggest that the odds of a Nuclear Bad Thing happening increase in parallel with the dispersion of nuclear capability. Actually, it’s worse than that. There’s a threshold – probably a low one – past which it really doesn’t matter much.
I’ll use the example of drinking water.
Water that is 10-6 parts sewage is drinking water. Water that is 10 -5 parts sewage is sewage (note that these are rhetorical rather than exact concentrations, etc.).
It doesn’t matter once the concentration goes up past some threshold level level.
Similarly, as we look at gun ownership in the U.S., one of my arguments with the supporters of strict limitations on gun ownership is that once we have, say, five or six million guns in the U.S., it doesn’t matter how many more we have (we currently have something like 300 million), we won’t see a meaningful change in the violence people commit with guns.
Similarly, once the possession of nuclear technology went past the core five countries, it doesn’t much matter how many more have it, it is going to be essentially impossible to control with the level of absolute certainty that is required.
So we have to find ways to adapt.
First, we have to adapt strategically.
One of the key things that frightens me is that the keystone to preserving a virtually fallout-free 20th Century – Mutually Assured Destruction – doesn’t map well to people who believe that blowing themselves up in a paroxysm of fury and hate is actually a good thing to do.
Next, we have to adapt tactically.
We have to harden our cities, and we have to start now. The good news is that it already looks as though we already have.
And, to some extent, we need to harden our hearts.
Joe and others have posted frequently about the madness that is at the heart of the Islamist movement. It is madness that must be turned and blunted – or must be stopped. I’m not yet at the point of arguing that we must stop it. I believe it can be turned, and that other voices can be found. But we must move to weaken the forces of hate and strengthen the forces that oppose them – all over the world.
That’s a burden, and we have to carry it – alone if needful, although I think that it doesn’t have to be.
Because the alternative will be even worse.
Congratulations. I’m even more anxious now.
Interesting, but I wouldn’t call radiation detectors in subways, “hardening our cities against nuclear weapons”. “Hardening” implies some capacity to resist damage in the event of an attack, not merely to detect an attack.
A relatively simple way to genuinely “harden” society against nuclear (and other sorts of) attack, would be to encourage stockpiling of food, fresh water, potasium iodide tablets, ){Possibly other anti-radiation drugs as well.) and other sorts of consumables, in order that people could simply stay in their homes for a few weeks without severe privation. The extent to which this would aid coping with an attack can not be overstated.
Brett –
I’m aware of the use of the term ‘hardening’ to imply reduced effects from an actual attack; I’ve also seen it used as a way to describe more effective defense – ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’ targets.
Knowing what’s going on – awareness – is the biggest tool we have in building a responsive, effective defense.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still a lot of problems with this…
A.L.
Joe and AL,
My opinion is you can not stop the Arabs from getting major weaponry and/or Nukes.
The Iranians are almost there, and there is barely a wimper. They all see how North Korea is being treated thanks to their nukes and they are embarrassed by their inept states, and potentially being overthrown as well. SOLUTION NUKES.
If you got the money you can find the states (France, Pakistan), the scientists (Russian Pakistani, Ukranian, Indian?), the parts (pick anywhere). Thus, they’ll all get em… eventually.
I haven’t read any Hal Lindsey yet, but can you logically parse anyway out of the Greek Tragedy building in the Middle East and Islamic States and now inside Europe and here as well?
LET ME KNOW……… because I can’t.
Mike
“I believe it can be turned, and that other voices can be found. But we must move to weaken the forces of hate and strengthen the forces that oppose them – all over the world.”
Turned how? What voices might those be? This seems unrealistically optimistic to me.
Virtually the whole world is clamoring for America’s comeuppance…hell, a very significant percentage of our own people believe we have it coming to us, and while many other Americans may not go that far they are utterly unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation.
Iran is on the verge of producing nukes. Pakistan has them as is well known, but the news that they may be engaged in supplying them to Saudi Arabia is extremely alarming.
Once these countries have nuclear weapons it is only a matter of time before the Jihadists get them, what’s to stop them?
The Jihadists will definitely use them against the U.S. and Israel, and anyone who doubts it is a fool.
If they are as smart as I think they are they will wait until they have more than one in place in our cities and will deliver an absolutely devastating blow to us. The wealthier and more technologically advanced a society is, the more disruptive such an attack will be and the terrorists know this.
In order to prevent the inevitability of a rogue nuclear attack we need all of the western powers united in a commitment to stop these dangerous regimes from developing and proliferating these weapons NOW, and by any means necessary.
That just ain’t gonna happen.
We can’t even get the American people moving as a unified force, let alone the Europeans and Russia.
Even if we had the political will to take the gloves off and forcibly disarm these regimes before it’s too late our military is tied up in Iraq, and we obviously aren’t going to get any outside help at this point.
The window of opportunity is closing fast.
I agree that the window is closing, but I think we have decades, not months. And a lot can change in a decade.
Simply put, if the Arab nations nuke Israel, Israel will nuke them all.
If they nuke us, there’s a really good chance that we’ll nuke them all, and we can do a more thorough job than Israel can.
Israel probably won’t survive, but we will.
I don’t like that future much at all. And I’m willing to do something – what little I can – to stave it off.
I’ve talked about it before.
A.L.
Decades? I’m extremely skeptical…what makes you think we have that much time?
Assuming that Paki nukes are now for sale, the Nork’s will be soon, and Iran will have some within a year or two, why would it take “decades” for them to find there way into the Jihadist’s hands?
And if we’re nuked not by an Arab nation, but by an amorphous terrorist organization (which I believe is far more likely) how do we retaliate? Nuke everyone who is a potential enemy of the U.S.? That’s a big list at this point.
As to us surviving, if for example they take out NYC or DC (or both simultaneously) the resulting chaos and financial devastion would be almost unimaginable, not to mention the largest loss of human life in one day in the world’s history. How would it affect the millions of communications and transactions that take place everyday, that we now take for granted, that form the basic structure of our economy? Will people living in LA or Chicago or any other big city fear that they’re next and try to desert them? The imagined total ramifications are staggering.
There is simply no precedent…Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller cities, and we came to the aid of defeated Japan and helped them back on their feet.
Yes, we may “survive”, but it will be a brutal and insecure world at best, and at worst, runaway nuclear escalation
I don’t like that future either, and I would do whatever I could to stave it off as well, including military service, (when the military is ready to accept able bodied 50 year old volunteers, and I’m serious about this), but I’m afraid that there are not enough people in the civilized world who sufficiently comprehend the gravity of the threat to mobilize the force necessary to nip this in the bud.
I’m open to being convinced otherwise by evidence or reason, but witnessing the paralyzing disconnect and division in America coupled with the almost universal hatred for the U.S. in the rest of the wolrd has left me rather pessimistic.
On the defensive side, the only real solution is disperal.
The FAA drastically loosens its rules as to what types of aircraft are allowed to fly, and what people are allowed to pilot them. Machines like the Skycar come into general use. People commute hundreds of miles to their jobs, live several miles from their nearest neighbor (whom they visit by aircraft), and everything from houses to shops to offices to factories are scattered across hundreds of miles of countryside.
To fuel all this, lots of nuke plants pumping out hydrogen might fill the bill. They won’t be near population centers (especially since there won’t be population centers as we think of them today) and thus maybe the protesters and the powers that be will let up on them.
That is the only defensive move that has a chance in hell of working. Everything else is either offense or wishful thinking.
A particularly juicy risk-management problem, characterized by catastrophic severity, unknown but possibly high probability, and lengthy (years to decades) exposure.
Glad to see you caught the item about people being treated with I-131 and getting “caught” in NYC subway stations.
Anyway, some suggestions:
1. Beware of any claim to exclusivity in managing this risk. There may be many complementary methods of mitigating it.
2. I blogged about Ralph James here. I am encouraged by the idea of a sensor net — among other things, it helps avoid the false-positives (and false-negatives) problem — but fear that official overreaction to a “dirty bomb” could be far more destructive than the bomb itself; see Times Beach for an analogue.
3. I believe we are not yet at the threshold of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, nor will we be as long as the bulk-technology era lasts. Isotope separation is still cumbersome; plutonium metallurgy and explosive lenses are still non-trivial engineering problems.
4. In the near and medium term, therefore, proactively managing the risk includes evaluating the internal security of nuclear states’ arsenals and the maturity of their processes for authorizing use of nuclear weapons. If either of these appear less than robust, we should have contingency plans for seizing or destroying those arsenals. (I suspect that such plans exist in the case of Pakistan.)
5. Once the nanotechnological threshold is crossed, by which I mean a general-purpose molecular assembler becomes available, WMDs of all types become as scalable as the software for nanofactories, which is to say the scalability of copying software. Anything that can replicate itself in, say, 10^4 sec could become available to every person on Earth in a matter of days. Drexler suggests active shields as the solution to this sort of thing.
How about an updated MAD policy? Let it be known that ANY nuclear attack on the West will result in the instant obliteration of Mecca. This might even encourage Muslims to keep their Islamists under control.
Anything short of this will probably be taken as more weakness on our part.
Hunt: include the use of ANY WMD, be it chemical or biological, against the U.S. and any of its allies, with the same end result, and you got a deal….
hunt –
I call that the “Godfather” defense…
“If anything should happen to one of my children…if they should be hit by a car when crossing the street, or catch a cold … you’d better be there to make sure it doesn’t happen…”
…and I get tempted by it sometimes myself…but I doubt that it would work.
A.L.
New York was already nuked. The energy release at the World Trade Center on 911 was over a kiloton.
California may have been nuked if the recent fires were set by terrorists. The total energy release may have been in the megaton range.
Nukes are not magic. They are simply another aspect of living in a high-energy society.
not mecca… every population centre of every country that has a muslim majority
let them know that they will all die if they don’t get a handle on their idiots
mecca is nothing and can be bargained away as a symbol…
middle east, north africa, hindu kush, malaysisa, inonesia, etc… well at least its an incentive
shoul be backed up by a demonstration test, broadcast live of a 25M warhead.. or (preferably, not sure if they’re legal) a mirv weapon armed with multiple 25M warheads hitting vastly dispersed targets
not very many people know just how ridiculously powerful the US is… we need to show them… and publicly announce that we’ll always have at least one fully loaded nuke boomer off of morocco, in the med, off the horn of africa, off the coast of karachi, and near the straights of malacca, guaranteeing 30 minute response times
the people we’re concerned about can barely manage a regatta, never mind threaten boomers or ships under decent ROEs
We need to think of this as a constant war, and act accordingly (look funny at US service member, you don’t look again)
and i think the chance of averting a major catastrophe has passed… if we steal all the nukes (or destroy them) and either kill or bring over the scientists involved, we may put the genie back in its bottle.. course we need to confiscate france’s weapons (they are more our enemies than china, and should be included on the nuke threat list)
I think the policy of threatening Mecca is a really bad idea on so many levels, but let’s stick to cold-blooded, amoral practicality.
In the realm of nuclear weapons, it’s best never to make specific threats. Especially in a democratic system, where it’s questionable in the extreme that a threat of that magnitude and seriousness could/would be carried out by subsequent governments. And when (not if) it’s publicly repealed, you’ve now created a huge display of weakness.
Practical argument #2: proposing to nuke Mecca makes the idea of a nuclear terrorist strike MORE interesting to Islamists, not less. It’s the perfect way to start the divine war they seek of all Muslims vs. the West – they nuke a city, they know Mecca is next, and then the war is on for sure.
Or, they could get the nuke, create a very public confrontation, then detonate it in Mecca themselves. After such specific threats, what would Muslims around the world believe? Now the ultimate war is on, and we didn’t even do anything except make a stupid threat a while back.
Which is a long way of saying that this threat is stupid, and that stupid threats have immense potential consequences when they involve nukes – they can bite you later with megadeath consequences, all without you having to do anything to trigger it.
Something the Iranian people should be considering these days, but which isn’t being pointed out to them enough. Let’s not follow their government’s example of idiocy, hmm?
Joe,
Do you really think they’d do it themselves?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that Islam regards Mecca and that big black rock as just about the most important thing in the whole world.
Would making a Haj to a radioactive pit still get you into heaven? Would facing a glassy plane 5 times a day do the job? The removal of Mecca would show that God is not on their side fairly strongly.
I’d love to have a solution that avoided islamicide / genocide, but so far they seem a little thin on the ground.
Kill them all and let God sort them out? That seems so medieval.
Frankly, I like the “Godfather” defense the best of any I’ve heard so far, but I’ve still got an open mind despite occasional episodes of senior attention deficit disorder.
Hunt, my broader point was that anything one says re: nukes carries a lot of freight, and so one must make statements with incredible care and precision. The scenario I floated has been floated before by others in simulation scenarios, and I thought it was a good example for the “think before you speak, your words will set consequences in motion” point.
In answer to your question: I don’t know. Nobody knows. How far could an ideology of suicide, a demonstrated capacity to set Islamic teachings aside for attractive enough ends, and a revelations/Ragnarok complex extend?
I do know that I don’t want to find out, or to be in a position where we encourage people to consider that gambit as an option. All we have to do to defuse that little problem is not say a really stupid thing… sounds easy enough to me.
None of you guys seem to get it. You still dress up debates s important as this in terms of Liberal and conservative, left and right. You have an illusion that you are looking objectively at the problem, but you are really concerned with your opinion winning.
Sort that one out and you might come up with a truth. Fail in that and you are borthers fighting in a burning house.
BTW, Fear tends to cloud one’s judgment.
toc:
Your comments have both a mom-and-apple-pie and a fortune-cookie flavor (maybe that’s just the crust on the apple pie I’m tasting, I’m not sure). Care to tranform those platitudes into something constructive?
What are your actual views? Just telling people they’re missing what’s actually going on is not as substantive as telling them what you think they’re missing.
bq. It can be tricky calibrating one’s utterances if one is concerned about appearing supercilious.
See? I can do it too. May I encourage you to unpack and display your intellectual wares in this little marketplace? Please, please do.
Cordially,
Nort
AL: Just by the way, I wish I’d written this post. If that’s where “toc” is coming from, well and good.
There’s a complex, probably wicked problem about circles of concern and circles of influence and fads and popular fallacies.
Is caring about the TV show “Survivor” more important than caring about surviving? Along some axes, includig the “shop as usual, don’t freak out the easily-froken” one, yes. Yes it is.
But those are not the only axes.
I keep thinking of that Rockwell illustration of the father looking over his peacefully-sleeping children while a newspaper with horrible headlines peeps out of his (sweater? jacket?) pocket.
We need to preserve the peace of the innocent. And we need to cowboy up. And we need to have a reasoned, civilized and appropriately firm response to those who shriek that doing either of those things is “denial” or “censorship” — on a case by case basis.
This is work. “Ain’t nothin’ ‘simple’.”