Under the Nuclear Deluge: Practical Planning for the Unimaginable

Under the Nuclear Deluge:
Practical Planning for the Unimaginable

by R.J. Godlewski

Paper Originally submitted to American Military University

July 7, 2009

I am incensed, and I think we should all be incensed, that the courageous passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were the White House’s first and only line of defense on September 11—not the CIA or the FBI or the Immigration and Naturalization Service or any other office or agency that we pay our taxes to support.   (Baer 2002, xix)

    The evolutionary nature of terrorism dictates that its practitioners will utilize the most destructive weapon at their disposal and when this option finally reaches the nuclear stage, the subsequent evolution of society may become its first casualty. With the United States firmly pegged as Islamic terrorism’s ennemi public numéro un, America’s leaders have emulated the character Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark – desperately trying to outrun the nuclear “boulder” at the expense of merely getting out of its way. Stepping aside of nuclear terrorism may not seem politically palatable, but until the United States Government seriously considers proactive response to the threat, even simple blackmail could significantly disrupt America’s future  (Ferguson and Potter 2004, 5).  Such a future may, therefore, rest entirely within the hands of ordinary citizens.

Alice through the cooking gas.

    High-casualty terrorist attacks on American interests have had “significant strategic outcomes” for the benefit of those perpetrating such heinous crimes  (Merari 1998, 192). Nothing, however, could be considered more strategically “significant” than a nuclear attack upon American soil. Although few terrorist groups can be considered sufficiently motivated to unleash nuclear horror upon the United States  (Ferguson and Potter 2004, 6), this does not preclude the existence of a rogue state inspiring a non-state partner. Nor does it dismiss the reality that prior to September 11, 2001 few considered the use of commercial aircraft as guided missiles capable of taking out one of the world’s most recognized landmarks.

    In fact, the events of 9/11 may have been a low-cost, low-tech alternative to using a crude nuclear device to topple the World Trade Center  (Hughes 1996, 56).  Would the “next 9/11” progress further up or down the technology scale? The world will not know until it actually happens. Fortunately, there is some historical precedence in terrorists using tried and true methods to enact their craft  (Ellis 2007, 118-151). This would seem to suggest that the nuclear option is not considered practical enough for experimentation. Having said that, we need to consider not only September 11th – which took vehicular borne attacks to literally new heights – but also the Chechen separatists’ use of cesium-137 in Moscow  (Aloise 2007, 6).

    Nuclear devices thus represent the epitome of terror weapons and, therefore, symbolize the Holy Grail for any organization that seeks to grab the attention of the world’s political, media, and public bodies. Just the mere thought of vaporizing tens of thousands, if not millions, of innocent souls is sufficient enough to safeguard the objective of any terrorist organization. Moreover, a nuclear weapon in the hands of a rogue organization need not be as accurately delivered as its Cold War superpower cousins. A simple device touched off within the confines of any metropolitan area will far exceed the total death and destruction of both the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001.

    The lethality of a nuclear explosion rests with the combination of blast, thermal, and radiation energies unleashed upon the target environment  (Glasstone and Dolan 1977, 588). The significant difference in comparsion with conventional explosives being that those caught outside during a nuclear attack are more susceptible to radiation exposure than those safely tucked away in office buildings  (Glasstone and Dolan 1977, 588). The awesome power of even a relatively small Improvised Nuclear Device (IND) warrants considerable attention from the federal government. Yet, the question remains, has the United States Government effectively planned for this potentiality?

To defend or not to defend, that is the question…

    Albert Bandura defines terrorism as a “strategy of violence designed to promote desired outcomes by instilling fear in the public at large”  (Bandura 1998, 162). The loss of one or more American cities would certainly qualify as “instilling fear in the public at large.” In consideration of this, the United States had created the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) both to prevent terrorists from detonating a nuclear or radiological device within its territories as well as to mitigate the effects of just such an event should the unfathomable occur  (Aloise 2007, 5).

    The success of adequately preventing a nuclear attack upon the United States from a rogue nation or a terrorist group is subject to much debate. It is nearly impossible to disprove a negative. On the other hand, efforts to absorb the implications of a nuclear detonation on American soil are easier to grasp, particularly within a nation that conducted a multitude of nuclear experiments from 1945 to 1992  (U.S. Department of Energy 1993, i). From this angle, is it possible to decipher the intent of the agencies most qualified to protect the nation.

    Gene Aloise, in his testimony on the subject before the U.S. Senate, identifies the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), and the Department of Energy (DOE) as the three U.S. agencies directly responsible for preventing and/or reacting to a nuclear event within U.S. jurisdiction  (Aloise 2007, 2).  It is his testimony regarding the implementation of radiation background surveys – ostensibly to gauge future contamination assessments – that bears closer scrutiny, however,  for it suggests inter-agency squabbling as the rule instead of cooperation. When DHS, for instance, tells DOE that Homeland Security does “not have the expertise or capability to conduct surveys”, the nation remains in deep trouble  (Aloise 2007, 4). One can only imagine what, precisely,  DHS does have the expertise to handle.

    A more recent effort is the new National Security Education Center dedicated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but even this project seems centered more on structural engineering than true national defense  (Sauer 2009, 19-20). If this is indeed the case, then it suggests that the United States is more inclined to deal with a nuclear attack than to prevent one. However, Department of Defense Directive AD-A270 485 (March 24, 1987) offers an enticing sentence at the conclusion of Paragraph E detailing the responsibilities of DOE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the range of military agencies in relation to dealing with an IND threat: “Nothing contained herein shall restrict the national security responsibilities of the Department of Defense.”

    With such language available, it suggests that U.S. defense agencies are instructed to protect the United States of America at any cost. What of the U.S. civilian agencies, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whose proper function is the obtaining of actionable intelligence from foreign sources?

“I just hoped our capacity to spy hadn’t died completely with it.”  (Baer 2002, 167)

    Clausewitz reminds us that intelligence, in war or in peacetime, remains a fleeting concept and that war itself “is a flimsy structure that can easily collapse and bury us in its ruins”  (Clausewitz 1984, 117). This reality is aggravated by the fact that nuclear war    -- even if it is not one involving a superpower adversary – redefines the term “ruins” immeasurably. Therefore, while the United States may have survived an “intelligence failure” of the magnitude of a 9/11, it is pressing our luck to assume that we would be able to withstand nuclear Armageddon.

    Unfortunately, our current CIA is better suited to logistics than true human intelligence (HUMINT) capability. Any government organization that can send one hundred pounds of Starbucks® coffee to remote Afghanistan upon mere request is worth noting  (Schroen 2007, 220). Unfortunately, intelligence has very little to do with convenience and much to do with “dealing with asymmetric adversaries who have raised innovation to an art form”  (Godlewski 2008, 87).  It certainly cannot be left solely to the comforts of the Georgetown “elite within the elite…well-to-do liberal Democrats” that originally swelled the ranks of the CIA  (Thomas 2006, 99).

    To survive within a nuclear-armed asymmetrical world dominated by fanatical Islamists, we must stay one step ahead of our adversaries, “constantly evolving our ability to look beyond the anticipated and understand the seemingly inconsequential”  (Godlewski 2008, 85). We must deal with people who are no less patient than a Saint Simeon Stylites of old who:

“made his permanent abode on a pillar sixty feet high. It’s circumference at the top was little more than three feet; a railing kept the saint from falling to the ground in his sleep. On this perch, Simeon lived uninterruptedly for thirty years, exposed to rain and sun and cold. A ladder enabled disciples to take him food and remove his waste. He bound himself to the pillar by a rope; the rope became embedded in his flesh, which putrefied around it, stank, and teemed with worms; Simeon picked up the worms that fell from his sores, and replaced them there, saying to them, ‘Eat what God has given you’”  (Durant 1950, 60).

The difference being, the people currently living in caves “uninterruptedly”, possibly for longer than thirty years, want to dominate the world through force instead of prayer. They have matched the patience and dedication of Saint Simeon and mated it with the diabolical hatred of an Osama Bin Laden or an Ayman al-Zawahiri.

    Technology will simply not permit us to understand people such as these. Neither will the everlasting turf war between the FBI and the CIA  (Baer 2002, 230-231). Whereas the Russians, for comparison, have held no qualms about assassinating Saudi Wahabis  (Baer 2002, 149), Americans have become fixated on those “maligned” terrorists residing down at Guantanamo. To survive, we must clear away the faulty perceptions we have of our enemies…and ourselves  (Hayes 1981, 148).

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” George S. Patton

    Until we are willing enough to understand that there are people in the world quite prepared to kill us irrespective of what we do in turn, we shall be handicapped in our efforts to survive. Once we understand the threat, we can plan a course of action in which to defeat or eliminate it. We can finally realize that only the private sector “can match the drive, determination, and absolute resilience of our enemy” (International Nuclear Emergency Response Team 2009, 2). This, of course, also requires standing conventional political wisdom on its head. It means making a concerted effort to deal with an enemy that we refuse to see  (Baer 2002, 279).

    When nineteen young terrorists orchestrated the outcome on September 11, 2001, many within their own culture could not understand how mere students could thwart the impenetrable CIA  (Gerges 2006, 183). Sadly, they did not twart; they simply entered American hospitality with the nation’s arms spread wide open. A nuclear 9/11 may already have begun to unfold. The vestibule of nuclear horror may have been created while our nation’s borders were – and still are – porous. We have already seen bickering between DHS and DOE over conducting preliminary background radiation surveys. Without this knowledge, we have very limited opportunity to detect rogue nuclear devices from a field awash with medical, industrial, and research emissions.

    If indeed our national security and our national agencies have been compromised through bureaucracy, then it rests with the nation at large to answer the question of nuclear fission or nuclear fiction.  Part of this effort demands that the concept of neighborhood watches be expanded to include the Mousseblin¹  (Balor 1988, 238). The average citizen has an uncanny ability to be in places that neither federal agencies nor police officials dare tread. Their only downfall is that “it is exceedingly difficult for a schoolteacher, bank teller or truck driver to believe that they have any role” in defeating terrorism  (Godlewski, Integrated Technical Warfare: An Organizational Guide to Creating a Corporate Counterterrorism Force 2006, 21). Nevertheless, they do.

    Any hardened terrorist – nuclear or otherwise – operating within America wades through a sea of some three hundred million lives. Their actions, their thoughts, and their intentions are duly observed if not noted. It is time that such intelligence is noted by the community at large and there is some indication that these average citizens are beginning to understand this. The author of this paper, R.J. Godlewski, has been involved within an Internet-based counterterrorism training program geared² towards the general public. Based upon the number of downloads enacted, it is apparent that thousands of participants from dozens of countries have, at a minimum, considered the implications of citizen involvement within the war against radical Islamists and their secular brethren. The United States needs to capitalize upon this.

    America is the only nation on the planet where its citizens have constitutionally guaranteed rights to arm themselves, speak their minds, challenge their government, and, as appropriate to all common law sovereignties, arrest their fellow citizens.  They therefore possess all the tools necessary to defeat terrorism if adequately utilized. With the advent of advanced computer technology, wireless communications, and the abundance of photographic and videographic mobility, the United States is saturated with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability. All that its population needs is a stern push into the right direction.

“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”  Isoroku Yamamoto

    The law of municipal economics dictates that taxpayer services will always be subject to want. There are simply not enough firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical personnel to go around. In this context, the respondents to nuclear attack barely register. Some estimates hold that merely 950 people nationwide are sufficiently trained to respond to a nuclear or radiological threat (Aloise 2007, 6). Therefore, it is assumed that for these personnel to be effective, they must arrive at the scene as rapidly as possible. This, of course, is highly problematic in a nation as large as the United States.

    Not only must the general population be trained and educated enough to notice when something is amiss, they must be able to deliver this knowledge in sufficient detail to the appropriate authorities as quickly as possible. This, too, is problematic in a nation as apathetic as the United States. Washington, for all its inherent intrusiveness, would be better employed if it devoted its efforts and resources into making the average person on the street more perceptible to these dangers than routing millions in research grants to academic institutions whose efforts are questionable in relation to national security.

    An effort must be made to “deputize” all American citizens for they all represent the frontline in the war against nuclear terrorism. This model of direct citizen involvement is viable and a facsimile is presented by this author’s own International Nuclear Emergency Response Team [INERT]³. The seriousness of nuclear terrorism proves that conventional thoughts of individual civilians as innocent bystanders is faulty and extremely dangerous.

    Instead of enacting further gun control legislation, Congress needs to significantly reduce these restrictions on law-abiding citizens to corral would-be terrorists into areas ripe for ambush by limited federal personnel. Instead of conducting town hall meetings about the economy and press conferences dealing with the environment, the President must use the media to keep the threat of global terrorism at the focus of national attention. Instead of reducing Islamic terrorists to mere criminals, the United States government needs to remind everyone that this is not a police exercise, but a national war of will. That not only do the gloves come off, but the uniforms as well – that each of us is now a soldier in the war against radical Islam.

 ¹Civilian street people, merchants, etc.
  ²See http://independentcounterterrorist.rjgodlewski.com for details.
 3 See  http://www.nuclearresponse.org.  

References

Aloise, Gene, interview by the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management. COMBATING NUCLEAR TERRORISM: Federal Efforts to Respond to Nuclear and Radiological Threats and to Protect Key Emergency Response Facilities Could Be Strengthened. U.S. Government Accountability Office, (November 15, 2007).

Baer, Robert. See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

Balor, Paul. Manual of the Mercenary Soldier. Boulder: Paladin Press, 1988.

Bandura, Albert. "Mechanisms of moral disengagement." In Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, by Walter Reich, 161-191. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Durant, Will. The Age of Faith. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

Ellis, John W. Police Analysis and Planning for Homicide Bombings: Prevention, Defense, and Response. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd., 2007.

Ferguson, Charles D., and William C. Potter. Improvised Nuclear Devices and Nuclear Terrorism. Research Paper, Stockholm: The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, 2004.

Gerges, Fawaz. Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.

Glasstone, Samuel, and Philip, J. Dolan. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Third Edition. Washington: United States Department of Defense; United States Department of Energy, 1977.

Godlewski, R.J. "Cultivating Creativity within Intelligence Analysis." American Intelligence Journal, 2008: 85-87.

—. Integrated Technical Warfare: An Organizational Guide to Creating a Corporate Counterterrorism Force. Michigan: Road Sailor Books, 2006.

Hayes, Stephen K. The Ninja and their secret fighting art. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1981.

Hughes, David. "When terrorists go nuclear." Popular Mechanics, 1996: 56-59.

International Nuclear Emergency Response Team. "The Power of Preparedness." INERT, May 2009.

Sauer, Nan. "The National Security Education Center." Nuclear Weapons Journal,, 2009: 18-25.

Schroen, Gary C. First In: An Isider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.

Thomas, Evan. The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

U.S. Department of Energy. United States Nuclear Tests: July 1945 through September 1992. Historical, Oak Ridge: Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 1993.

Comments

[EDGE]

Good post...but you knew that. :O)

[Debbie]

Ron, how's this:

The Israeli Intel site "Debka" is reporting that Iran has begun the mass production of long-range, solid-fuel Sejil surface missiles.

http://prometheusclarion.blogspot.com/2009/07/flashpoint-iran-producing-long-range.html

[Ron Russell]

Many on the left say if Iran developes a nuclear weapon it will be years before they can develope a delivery system--what about the camel, a truck or in the hole of a cargo ship, they already have these systems. Some have their heads in the sand and finger you know where! Certainly not in the wind unless its the hot greenhouse gas kind.