Throwback: Life in the Shadow of Nuclear Terror

After it came up in a conversation today, I decided to dredge up one of the newspaper articles I wrote; this one is from 2006. While I didn't mention it in the article itself, it applies equally to the potentially greater horror of biological or chemical warfare. So here, from my archives:

Life in the shadow of Nuclear Terror

For most of the students now attending college, the Cold War and its ever present fears of nuclear war are something not remembered, but only heard of from parents and older siblings… something studied in school. Therefore, it seems to have an air of unreality.

During the Cold War, nuclear strikes were staved off because of a belief known as mutually assured destruction, or MAD… perhaps the most appropriate acronym in history. This is the idea that if one nation launched nuclear weapons at another, that nation would then launch a nuclear counter strike before the first weapons arrived. Those missiles would pass one another in the air, and both nations would be completely destroyed, thus no one wins.

Currently, there are eight countries around the world with nuclear weapons, one nation strongly suspected to have nuclear weapons, two that likely have secret nuclear weapons programs, and seven countries with nuclear capabilities but with no known nuclear weapons.

At present, 188 nations have signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NNPT); however that list only includes six of the eight nations who have confirmed nuclear weapons arsenals. Despite disarmament treaties such as the NNPT and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), nuclear weapons continue to be developed around the world, and the present age of terrorism presents unique dangers not engendered in the wars of the past.

Regardless of what treaties are signed, the threat in today’s world is not nations and their nuclear arsenals, but rather rogue terrorist organizations obtaining nuclear weapons. The frightening thing is that there is no such thing as MAD between a nation and a terrorist organization… and even if their were, the most common terrorists attacking the USA, radical Islamic terrorists, are not afraid to die; because of their beliefs they would welcome death in a war against their enemies.

The only value of nuclear weapons in a war against terrorism, from a national perspective, is as a motivator to people of the nations that harbor terrorists into ceasing their support of terrorism in fear of thermonuclear retaliation for their actions. The same ‘fear as motivation’ applies to those governments and large organizations that fund terrorism.

The wars of today are now and will continue to be unlike any war fought before. The age of allowing the enemy to strike first has, in the opinion of many, come to an end… because the power of nuclear weapons often means that the first strike will be the only strike whatsoever.

All effort must be made, politically correct or not, to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of those who would seek to use it as a means of instilling terror. Beyond that we must simply hope that the fear of unrestricted warfare in response to nuclear terror will be sufficient to deter those who would pursue it, or at least enough to deter those who would support it. There truly are no other defenses against nuclear terror.