Experts Predict a Possible Terrorist Strike with a Nuke in the US by 2013 -- What Can We Do to Stop It?

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2008.

The dilemma is especially acute when it comes to nuclear terrorism. A recent study conducted by the research firm American Environics found that even mentioning the  words "nuclear" and "terrorism" together is counterproductive in trying to engage the public. First, it scares people -- "increases mortality salience," in social psychology jargon -- and second, it's cognitively jarring, as people are accustomed to using different mental frames when considering terrorist threats (pre-emption) and nuclear threats (deterrence). This is a serious bind for those advocating bold new nuclear policies. How can you raise awareness and deepen understanding of an issue that dares not speak its name?

"Fear provokes support for strong defense policies, not mutual disarmament and arms control," says Rob Willer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the American Environics study. "Support for those kinds of cooperative and disarmament policies are a more difficult outcome, requiring a basis for trust, a sense of security."

Unlike the arms control negotiations of the 1980s and '90s, there isn't much basis for trust when it comes to Islamist terrorist groups or doomsday cults. Nor is a sense of security likely to be established until new policies are put in place -- policies whose political success requires first confronting the reality of the situation head-on.

"The incoming administration has a robust 12-point plan on nuclear policy," says Naila Bolus, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, which supplies grants for peace and security initiatives. "Understanding the role of fear and how to use or counter it will be an important element in our ability to accomplish the[se] goals. Fear can be both a motivator and an inhibitor, and recent research has shown that, post-9/11, certain phrases such as 'nuclear terrorism' can trigger a reflexive conservative response that leads the public to oppose further reductions in nuclear weapons."

"Nonproliferation and disarmament advocates see an opportunity with the election of Obama to increase public fears of nuclear terrorism as a way to advance their agendas," says Michael Shellenberger, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that strategizes effective messaging for progressive causes. "[But] raising fears of nuclear terrorism increases support for military action -- including pre-emptive nuclear bombing -- by the U.S."

Wary of this conservative reflex, some Democratic advocates for arms control have criticized the "scariness" of last week's WMD commission report. "[Post-Iraq], a fear-based strategy of reducing nuclear dangers is not politically sustainable," Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, told a Washington audience shortly after the commission report was made public. "We [don't need] to terrify the American people with alarming details about possible threats to the homeland," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, told Global Security Newswire. "It's time to retire the fear card."

But is it really possible to "retire the fear card" in an age of mounting nuclear threats? And is it desirable?

Among the lessons of the global disarmament movement of the 1980s is that fear has the potential to generate and sustain energy and focus in confronting nuclear threats. It was mass-audience nightmare-inducing films like The Day After and Threads that fueled the U.S. and European anti-nuclear movements, not anemic statistics about strategic redundancy. One million people did not fill Central Park demanding a nuclear freeze because they were dreaming of kittens in the summer of 1982. It was gut-fear that motivated President Ronald Reagan, his secretary of state, and their Soviet counterparts to abandon arms racing and begin seriously contemplating total nuclear disarmament in the mid-'80s. (Their conversion experiences are recounted in Richard Rhode's important history of the nuclear arms race, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.)

As during the first nuclear age, the bald facts of the second are terrifying. It is not "hyping" them -- as Shellenberger and others suggest -- to describe them accurately and argue for an urgent response. Along with the lingering threat of global thermonuclear apocalypse, groups of different stripes and levels of technological sophistication continue to seek the stuff of nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed 18 incidents of theft or loss of weapons grade uranium or separated plutonium in the last year alone; there are hundreds of known cases since the end of the Cold War. (Fortunately, almost all of these cases have involved material of poor quality and small quantity.) It's anyone's guess how many incidents have gone unreported. As Harvard's Mathew Bunn reminds us in his annual report, Securing the Bomb, it takes relatively little of this material to set off a chain reaction. "Fat Boy," the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, was made with 6 kilograms of plutonium. That amount fits in a soda can.

See more stories tagged with: nuclear weapons, barack obama, arms control

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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