A few brave analysts, such as Mueller, John Parachini, and Michael Levi, have taken the chance by examining the disaster scenarios component by component.271 For starters, of the four so-called weapons of mass destruction, three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272 Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would yield only minor and short-lived elevations of radiation, comparable to moving to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released in an enclosed space like a subway (where they would still not do as much damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was responsible for a tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy, as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would develop them. It’s no wonder that biological and chemical weapons, though far more accessible than nuclear ones, have been used in only three terrorist attacks in thirty years.273 In 1984 the Rajneeshee religious cult contaminated salad in the restaurants of an Oregon town with salmonella, sickening 751 people and killing none. In 1990 the Tamil Tigers were running low on ammunition while attacking a fort and opened up some chlorine cylinders they found in a nearby paper mill, injuring 60 and killing none before the gas wafted back over them and convinced them never to try it again. The Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo failed in ten attempts to use biological weapons before releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subways, killing 12. A fourth attack, the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed 5 Americans in media and government offices, turned out to be a spree killing rather than an act of terrorism.
It’s really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym. Mueller and Parachini have fact-checked the various reports that terrorists got “just this close” to obtaining a nuclear bomb and found that all were apocryphal. Reports of “interest” in procuring weapons on a black market grew into accounts of actual negotiations, generic sketches morphed into detailed blueprints, and flimsy clues (like the aluminum tubes purchased in 2001 by Iraq) were overinterpreted as signs of a development program.
Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities. There may have been a window of vulnerability in the safekeeping of nuclear weapons in Russia, but today most experts agree it has been closed, and that no loose nukes are being peddled in a nuclear bazaar. Stephen Younger, the former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has said, “Regardless of what is reported in the news, all nuclear nations take the security of their weapons very seriously.”274 Russia has an intense interest in keeping its weapons out of the hands of Chechen and other ethnic separatist groups, and Pakistan is just as worried about its archenemy Al Qaeda. And contrary to rumor, security experts consider the chance that Pakistan’s government and military command will fall under the control of Islamist extremists to be essentially nil.275 Nuclear weapons have complex interlocks designed to prevent unauthorized deployment, and most of them become “radioactive scrap metal” if they are not maintained.276 For these reasons, the forty-seven-nation Nuclear Security Summit convened by Barack Obama in 2010 to prevent nuclear terrorism concentrated on the security of fissile material, such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium, rather than on finished weapons.
The dangers of filched fissile material are real, and the measures recommended at the summit are patently wise, responsible, and overdue. Still, one shouldn’t get so carried away by the image of garage nukes as to think they are inevitable or even extremely probable. The safeguards that are in place or will be soon will make fissile materials hard to steal or smuggle, and if they went missing, it would trigger an international manhunt. Fashioning a workable nuclear weapon requires precision engineering and fabrication techniques well beyond the capabilities of amateurs. The Gilmore commission, which advises the president and Congress on WMD terrorism, called the challenge “Herculean,” and Allison has described the weapons as “large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient.”277 Moreover, the path to getting the materials, experts, and facilities in place is mined with hazards of detection, betrayal, stings, blunders, and bad luck. In his book On Nuclear Terrorism, Levi laid out all the things that would have to go right for a terrorist nuclear attack to succeed, noting, “Murphy’s Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong.”278 Mueller counts twenty obstacles on the path and notes that even if a terrorist group had a fifty-fifty chance of clearing every one, the aggregate odds of its success would be one in a million. Levi brackets the range from the other end by estimating that even if the path were strewn with only ten obstacles, and the probability that each would be cleared was 80 percent, the aggregate odds of success facing a nuclear terrorist group would be one in ten. Those are not our odds of becoming victims. A terrorist group weighing its options, even with these overly optimistic guesstimates, might well conclude from the long odds that it would better off devoting its resources to projects with a higher chance of success. None of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable.
If current pundits are to be believed, then as you are reading these words the New Peace will already have been shattered by a major war, perhaps a nuclear war, with Iran. At the time of this writing, tensions have been rising over the country’s nuclear energy program. Iran is currently enriching enough uranium to fashion a nuclear arsenal, and it has defied international demands that it allow inspections and comply with other provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has taunted Western leaders, supported terrorist groups, accused the United States of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust, called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and prayed for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Muslim savior who would usher in an age of peace and justice. In some interpretations of Shi’a Islam, this messiah will show up after a worldwide eruption of war and chaos.
All this is, to say the least, disconcerting, and many writers have concluded that Ahmadinejad is another Hitler who will soon develop nuclear weapons and use them on Israel or furnish them to Hezbollah to do so. Even in less dire scenarios, he could blackmail the Middle East into acceding to Iranian hegemony. The prospect might leave Israel or the United States no choice but to bomb its nuclear facilities preemptively, even if it invited years of war and terrorism in response. A 2009 editorial in the Washington Times spelled it out: “War with Iran is now inevitable. The only question is: Will it happen sooner or later?”279
This chilling scenario of a nuclear attack by Iranian fanatics is certainly possible. But is it inevitable, or even highly likely? One can be just as contemptuous of Ahmadinejad, and just as cynical about his motives, while imagining less dire alternatives for the world ahead. John Mueller, Thomas Schelling, and many other foreign affairs analysts have imagined them for us and have concluded that the Iranian nuclear program is not the end of the world.280
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Ahmadinejad has repeatedly declared that Iran’s nuclear program is intended only for energy and medical research. In 2005 Supreme Leader Khameini (who wields more power than Ahmadinejad) issued a fatwa declaring that nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam.281 If the government went ahead and developed the weapons anyway, it would not be the first time in history that national leaders have lied through their teeth. But having painted themselves into this corner, the prospect of forfeiting all credibility in the eyes of the world (including major powers on whom they depend, like Russia, China, Turkey, and Brazil) might at least give them pause.
Ahmadinejad’s musings about the return of the Twelfth Imam do not necessarily mean that he plans to hasten it along with a nuclear holocaust. Two o
f the deadlines by which writers confidently predicted that he would set off the apocalypse (2007 and 2009) have already come and gone.282 And for what it’s worth, here is how he explained his beliefs in a 2009 television interview with NBC correspondent Ann Curry:Curry: You’ve said that you believe that his arrival, the apocalypse, would happen in your own lifetime. What do you believe that you should do to hasten his arrival?
Ahmadinejad: I have never said such a thing.... I was talking about peace.... What is being said about an apocalyptic war and—global war, things of that nature. This is what the Zionists are claiming. Imam . . . will come with logic, with culture, with science. He will come so that there is no more war. No more enmity, hatred. No more conflict. He will call on everyone to enter a brotherly love. Of course, he will return with Jesus Christ. The two will come back together. And working together, they would fill this world with love. The stories that have been disseminated around the world about extensive war, apocalyptic wars, so on and so forth, these are false. 283
As a Jewish atheist, I can’t say I find these remarks completely reassuring. But with one obvious change they are not appreciably different from those held by devout Christians; indeed, they are milder, as many Christians do believe in an apocalyptic war and have fantasized about it in bestselling novels. As for the speech containing the phrase that was translated as “wiping Israel off the map,” the New York Times writer Ethan Bronner consulted Persian translators and analysts of Iranian government rhetoric on the meaning of the phrase in context, and they were unanimous that Ahmadinejad was daydreaming about regime change in the long run, not genocide in the days ahead.284 The perils of translating foreign bombast bring to mind Khrushchev’s boast “We will bury you,” which turned out to mean “outlive” rather than “entomb.”
There is a parsimonious alternative explanation of Iran’s behavior. In 2002 George W. Bush identified Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the “axis of evil” and proceeded to invade Iraq and depose its leadership. North Korea’s leaders saw the writing on the wall and promptly developed a nuclear capability, which (as they no doubt anticipated) has put an end to any musings about the United States invading them too. Shortly afterward Iran put its nuclear program into high gear, aiming to create enough ambiguity as to whether it possesses nuclear weapons, or could assemble them quickly, to squelch any thought of an invasion in the mind of the Great Satan.
If Iran does become a confirmed or suspected nuclear power, the history of the nuclear age suggests that the most likely outcome would be nothing. As we have seen, nuclear weapons have turned out to be useless for anything but deterrence against annihilation, which is why the nuclear powers have repeatedly been defied by their nonnuclear adversaries. The most recent episode of proliferation bears this out. In 2004 it was commonly predicted that if North Korea acquired a nuclear capability, then by the end of the decade it would share it with terrorists and set off a nuclear arms race with South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.285 In fact, North Korea did acquire a nuclear capability, the end of the decade has come and gone, and nothing has happened. It’s also unlikely that any nation would furnish nuclear ammunition to the loose cannons of a terrorist band, thereby giving up control over how they would be used while being on the hook for the consequences.286
In the case of Iran, before it decided to bomb Israel (or license Hezbollah to do so in an incriminating coincidence), with no conceivable benefit to itself, its leaders would have to anticipate a nuclear reprisal by Israeli commanders, who could match them hothead for hothead, together with an invasion by a coalition of powers enraged by the violation of the nuclear taboo. Though the regime is detestable and in many ways irrational, one wonders whether its principals are so indifferent to continuing their hold on power as to choose to annihilate themselves in pursuit of perfect justice in a radioactive Palestine or the arrival of the Twelfth Imam, with or without Jesus at his side. As Thomas Schelling asked in his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, “What else can Iran accomplish, except possibly the destruction of its own system, with a few nuclear warheads? Nuclear weapons should be too precious to give away or to sell, too precious to waste killing people when they could, held in reserve, make the United States, or Russia, or any other nation, hesitant to consider military action.”287
Though it may seem dangerous to consider alternatives to the worst-case scenario, the dangers go both ways. In the fall of 2002 George W. Bush warned the nation, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The “clear evidence” led to a war that has cost more than a hundred thousand lives and almost a trillion dollars and has left the world no safer. A cocksure certainty that Iran will use nuclear weapons, in defiance of sixty-five years of history in which authoritative predictions of inevitable catastrophes were repeatedly proven wrong, could lead to adventures with even greater costs.
These days one other gloomy scenario is on people’s minds. Global temperatures are increasing, which in the decades ahead could lead to a rising sea level, desertification, droughts in some regions, and floods and hurricanes in others. Economies will be disrupted, leading to a competition for resources, and populations will migrate out of distressed regions, leading to friction with their unwelcoming hosts. A 2007 New York Times op-ed warned, “Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous—and more intractable—than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.”288 That same year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their call to action against global warming because, according to the citation, climate change is a threat to international security. A rising fear lifts all the boats. Calling global warming “a force multiplier for instability,” a group of military officers wrote that “climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror.”289
Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.
In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent int
ernal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature.” Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.
No reasonable person would prophesy that the New Peace is going to be a long peace, to say nothing of a perpetual peace. There will certainly be wars and terrorist attacks in the decades to come, possibly large ones. On top of the known unknowns—militant Islamism, nuclear terrorists, environmental degradation—there are surely many unknown unknowns. Perhaps new leaders in China will decide to engulf Taiwan once and for all, or Russia will swallow a former Soviet republic or two, provoking an American response. Maybe an aggressive Chavismo will spill out of Venezuela and incite Marxist insurgencies and brutal counterinsurgencies throughout the developing world. Perhaps at this very moment terrorists from some liberation movement no one has heard of are plotting an attack of unprecedented destruction, or an eschatological ideology is fermenting in the mind of a cunning fanatic who will take over a major country and plunge the world back into war. As the Saturday Night Live news analyst Roseanne Roseannadanna observed, “It’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”