This commentary was published by Common Dreams on 20 July 2003 at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0720-01.htm.

Even a casual reading of current news stories and speeches about the threat from North Korea reveals a gathering bipartisan war party. While the press reports on centrist and liberal leaders urging more adroit diplomatic efforts from the Bush administration, the ten thousand pound bipartisan guerrilla in the room insists that if the North Koreans don't back down from their nuclear ambitions the U.S. will forcibly disarm them -- that is, start a second Korean war.

Graham Allison, director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, is one prominent centrist helping build the consensus for the next preventive counter-proliferation war. In a 14 July 2003 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Europe entitled Nuclear Terrorism Poses the Gravest Threat Today, Allison makes a case that nuclear terrorists are coming and that America must be prepared to take preventive action. Given the seriousness of the issue it is remarkable how flimsy is his evidence and his reasoning. It is worth closely reviewing this text, because it is likely we will hear similar lines of argument again and again in the coming months.

Early in his op-ed Allison quotes Czech President Vaclav Klaus:

...a fundamental question: Was 9/11 an isolated act, or typical of phenomena the world will face in the first half of the 21st century?

To which Allison provides an answer:

Beneath the headlines, deeper trendlines point to the latter. The relentless diffusion of deadly technologies allows progressively smaller groups to wreak increasingly greater destruction. Globalization has enhanced terrorists' ability to travel, communicate, and transport weapons. America's overwhelming dominance on all conventional battlefields drives rational adversaries to asymmetric responses like WMD terrorism.

Allison's answer is hypothetical in nature and at best remotely related to the realities of 9/11. The only diffusion of technology relevant to the events of 9/11 is the increasingly common use of wide-body commercial aircraft. The terrorists didn't need to build and transport weapons; they simply took advantage of dangerous vehicles available every day in the vicinity of their targets. As for communications and coordination, this rather basic commando-type operation could have almost as easily been carried out long before the age of cell phones and electronic money transfers. And the statement that "America's overwhelming dominance on all conventional battlefields drives rational adversaries to asymmetric responses like WMD terrorism" is neither substantiated nor convincing as it stands.

Next Allison presents a what if:

In 1993, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, tried to collapse the World Trade Center by exploding a truck filled with fertilizer-based explosives. Had that same truck carried an elementary nuclear weapon, the blast would have vaporized not just the World Trade Center, but also the entire New York financial district.

Yes, we all should be deeply impressed by the threat of a nuclear explosion. But, Ramzi Yousef didn't have a nuclear weapon and Allison can't tell us about any terrorist who has one.

Of course, it is a possibility that someday a motivated terrorist organization could get a nuclear weapon, since there are thousands in the world, including hundreds small enough to transport in an SUV. However, this threat has been around for longer than commercial jet airliners or SUVs.

If my memory serves me right, several of the bad guys in rather old James Bond movies stole nukes and threatened civilization. And critics of nuclear weapons have been complaining from day one of the nuclear-age that nations building and storing thousands of bombs are bound to leak one to irresponsible actors sooner or later. So if there is something about 'loose nukes' worth worrying about, and there certainly is, it is linked in a fundamental way to nations, including prominently the United States, still arming themselves with nuclear weapons. Notably Allison doesn't make this connection.

Allison goes on to say:

The status quo is fatally flawed. The U.N.-chartered, rule-based international security order that was accepted pre-9/11 leaves America or Europe vulnerable to a series of nuclear 9/11s.

But our existential vulnerability to nuclear weapons existed long before 9/11 and so the allusion to 9/11 in Allison's diatribe against a U.N.-chartered, rule-based international security order is quite beside the point.

If Allison wishes to argue in favor of the sort of unilateralist 'might makes right' international security order being constructed by the Bush administration he is free to do so. On the other hand, it may be the very rule-based type system he disparages that has the best chance of permanently reducing our vulnerability to nuclear weaponry.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty with its requirement that nuclear powers pursue disarmament contains the germ of eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Such a disarmament program coupled with comprehensive international controls on fissile materials is ultimately the only regime that can reduce the nuclear threat toward zero. Allison's preferred international class war between the nuclear haves and the nuclear not-yets is inherently unstable and prone to the very disaster he hopes to avoid.

Not only does Allison evoke the fear of 9/11 to lead us toward preventive war doctrine, but he vastly exaggerates the significance of a speculative nuclear terror incident. He says:

...leav[ing] America or Europe vulnerable to a series of nuclear 9/11s... [is] incompatible with our survival as free nations whose fundamental institutions and values are intact.

A nuclear terror incident would be a terrible thing as we all should understand from observing the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would not, however, result in the destruction of our free nation and our fundamental institutions and values. Instead it would take either a nuclear war with a large nuclear power or the establishment of a dictatorial "war on terror" national security state founded on fear to have that effect.

Which brings me back to the current target of the preventive war advocates -- North Korea. Allison points out, correctly I think, that the most likely source of a terrorist nuke would be Russia. Pakistan is the next most likely source, and then, says Allison, "...comes North Korea, the world's most promiscuous proliferator."

He doesn't mention that history has shown that nation-states are loathe to share nuclear weapons. It is a very hard case to make that reclusive North Korean leaders prone to paranoia will think it is a good idea to sell a nuclear weapon to Jihadists over whom they exercise no control.

But Allison doesn't try to make the case. Instead he employs the cheap rhetorical device used so successfully by the Bush administration in making its case for war on Iraq -- use the name of your target enemy in successive sentences with the name of a currently feared and loathed enemy. Thus Allison's next sentence after "North Korea, the world's most promiscuous proliferator" begins, "Were al Qaeda terrorists to acquire a nuclear device..."

By now we should expect this sort of threat-mongering from the extreme right-wingers occupying Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices. It is another indicator of the enormity of the crisis we face as a nation that a Harvard centrist (one well-positioned to advise and serve a future Democratic president) is so eager to join the right-wingers in spreading fear in support of a foolish and dangerous national security strategy.

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