GSN reported yesterday that White House WMD coordinator Gary Samore spends his time equally worried about Pakistan’s nuclear security and North Korea’s ongoing proliferation activities.
“The thing that keeps me up at night? Pakistan,” White House Coordinator for WMD Counterterrorism and Arms Control Gary Samore. “This is a country that is facing very serious internal and external security threats, has a dysfunctional political system [and] is seeking to expand its nuclear weapons program.”
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Samore later admitted his nightmare scenario is a “toss-up” between Pakistan falling into political chaos and North Korea selling its nuclear material and expertise to other countries.
I would add that the real nightmare is that you can imagine both countries suffering from both sets of problems, perhaps at the same time: Pakistan’s proliferating days may not be behind it, and the collapse of the North Korean regime is a real and frightening possibility. But notice that central to both concerns is the state—unstable and unpredictable, but a state all the same.
By contrast, here’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy at the CNAS conference this summer (exchange begins at about 46:45).
Question: “What are the real existential threats that you’re focused on in the senior leadership at the Pentagon, what are the things that keep you guys awake at night, if any?”
Flournoy: “Oh they’re many, but the thing that keeps me awake at night is the nexus between terrorism and WMD—the possibility that a terrorist organization could either acquire a ready-made weapon or fabricate something improvised that would nevertheless have a catastrophic effect on us if employed skillfully. That would be truly catastrophic—could potentially be truly catastrophic.”
Nuclear terrorism is a kind of stimulant in the Obama White House. It’s keeping all kinds of people awake, including President Obama, who said in April that nuclear terrorism is “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term.”
That’s some serious stuff. I don’t have a security clearance, so I don’t know what the President and Secretary Flournoy are reading every morning. But I’m tempted to believe the outgoing National Security Adviser when he says that the Obama administration is really concerned about proliferation, broadly construed.
So why frame proliferation as nuclear terrorism? Why bring out a bogeyman? The bogeyman framing is easy to explain if you imagine nuclear terrorism to be a salient and luculent focal point through which to make some progress on the less sexy arms control and nonproliferation agenda. But if we’re talking about real threats to American and global security, nuclear terrorism is a problem of unstable states and rogue officials, like A.Q. Khan but without, you know, the state backing. In other words, 21st century problems remedied by 20th century arms control and nonproliferation, with some facilities and materials security thrown in.
The likelihood of nuclear terrorism happening depends on whether the 38 states with weapons-usable materials secure them effectively. Even if you expand the club of key states to include the 56 countries with research reactors, you’re talking about a fraction of the countries in the UN General Assembly, of countries party to the NPT. Think about it: securing all nuclear materials is politically easier than gaining universal support for the Additional Protocol at the NPT review conference. It is not by any means easy. But it is surmountable, in part through ad hoc efforts like the Nuclear Security Summit that bypass the ossified Conference on Disarmament and the NPT Review process.
On the other hand, terrorism is an inherently insurmountable problem. We just don’t know what causes ordinary people to become “radicalized,” so it’s difficult to imagine a preventative solution. Killing or capturing them all is a just stop-gap, and some evidence suggests that attacking them might convince more people to take up arms. Obviously, counterterrorism isn’t the only element of the nuclear security agenda. But framing matters, and framing nuclear security as a nuclear terrorism problem implies that if we just kill all the terrorists, the problem goes away. And it’s easier to justify killing Anwar al-Awlaki if you imagine him nuking New York.
Much the same can be said about cybersecurity (Deputy SECDEF William Lynn said “the cyber threat” is what keeps him tossing and turning). Most of what people are worried about is securing critical infrastructure from any and all attacks. The challenge is unprecedented, born of a world that depends on critical networked infrastructure. The international security implications are stickier. Consider attacks on networked infrastructure perpetuated by civilians (i.e. non-state actors) but that appear to serve state aims. Remember those guys who attacked Georgian servers during the 2009 August War? How do you deter nationalistic civilians from prosecuting real and harmful attacks on state assets? How do you even establish that they were state supported? Do you hold responsible the state their attacks originated in? And what if, through some kind of technological legerdemain I can’t begin to understand, you can’t identify where the attacks originated?
Clearly, nuking any state that cyber-attacks isn’t an option. It’s not clear to me either that conventional kinetics are ethically or politically justifiable responses to cyber-operations. We just haven’t evolved the toolkit—the norms—to deal with a world in which security can be influenced by the traditional bystanders in such an immediate and harmful way.
Brian
Filed under: Arms Control, Grand Strategy, cyber, terrorism
