Terrorism And Global Security

The Nuclear Threat

Louis Rene Beres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367305345
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000314366
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The enormous potential for destruction that lies latent in nuclear technology inevitably gives rise to the possibility of nuclear terrorism—the use of nuclear explosives or radioactivity by insurgent groups. Professor Beres considers the factors that might foster such terrorism, the forms it might take, and the probable consequences of each form. He then identifies a coherent strategy of counternuclear terrorism, one that embraces both technological and behavioral measures, that suggests policies for deterrence and situation management on both national and international levels, and that points toward a major refashioning of world order.

Part 1
Understanding Nuclear Terrorism

1
The Specter of Nuclear Terrorism: An Overview

A Surrealist System: The Terrorist as Microcosm

The terrorist is a study in contradictions. He wishes the rebirth of a certain kind of order, but in the delivery a gravedigger must wield the forceps. He wishes to impress a worldwide public with the reasonableness of his claims, but chooses the tirade as his preferred means of communication. He stamps his predilections for violent excess with the imprimatur of innocence, yet it is only through the destruction of innocence that his aims can be realized.

How can we understand such contradictions? Even in the admittedly absurd theater of modern world politics, the terrorist appears more than merely avant-garde. He appears genuinely pathological. Or is it, rather, the entire global human condition that is diseased, a disintegrating nonlandscape of irrationality in which only verbalized chaos remains truly comprehensible?

What is producing such contradictions? Is it an intangible but pervasive crisis of existential emptiness and despair from which human beings cannot escape? Is it the objectification of individuals into vast networks of social, economic, and political manipulation? Is it a fundamental disequilibrium that fractures the integrity of Earth's highly integrated system of cultural and biological adaptation?¹ Or is it "simply" the failure to satisfy the diverse political hopes of unhappy people in unbearable circumstances?

Perhaps, in the Orweilian logic of our time, contradictions must be redefined altogether. Why should they offend our sense of correct reason? After all, we live in a world where peace is sought through competition in strategic arms; where the legal equality of states coexists with an institutionalized hierarchy of authority in the United Nations; and where societies achieve high measures of growth through despoliation of their environment. It is a world wherein Watergate figures reap huge profits from accounts of their misdeeds; where convicted U.S. war criminals return to their pastoral hometowns as heroes; and where a former president of South Vietnam now runs a liquor store in California.

Against the backdrop of such a world, can the alleged contradictions of modern terrorism cause real consternation? Since George Orwell wrote the grim fantasy 1984, his notion of doublethink has become a new orthodoxy of worldwide human relations. Understood as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them," doublethink is now manifest not only in expressions of political propaganda, but also in the most widely revered documents of national and international law.

One such manifestation in the international legal order concerns the issue of effective counterterrorism. Although specially constituted UN committees have continually condemned acts of international terrorism in principle, they have exempted from the definition of such acts those activities that derive from "the inalienable right to self-determination and independence of all peoples under colonial and racist regimes and other forms of alien domination and the legitimacy of their struggle, in particular the struggle of national liberation movements, in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter and the relevant resolutions of the organs of the United Nations." This exemption, from the 1973 General Assembly Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on International Terrorism,² is corroborated by Article 7 of the General Assembly's 1974 Definition of Aggression. According to Article 7:

Nothing in this definition, and in particular Article 3 [inventory of acts that qualify as aggression³] could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States⁴ in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination; nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.⁵

Although such an exemption may be intended to protect the legitimacy of certain forms of insurgency, it has the same effect as earlier distinctions between just and unjust wars. That is, it offers a legal justification for virtually any acts of violence that can be cloaked in the appropriate juridical terms. To better understand the problem, we must first turn to its source—the individuals who practice the deeds that occasion this study.

Facing the Gorgon Head: The Nature of Modern Terrorism

Today's terrorists are spurred on by a variety of motives. Some are moved by the wish to alter the devastating inequities of an unjust order. Here, there exists a long and venerable tradition. Where it is understood as resistance to despotism, terrorism has been countenanced and supported in the Bible and in the writings of ancient and medieval classics. The tyrannicide motif can be found in Aristotle's Politics, Plutarch's Lives, and Cicero's De Officiis. According to Cicero:

There can be no such thing as fellowship with tyrants, nothing but bitter feud is possible: and it is not repugnant to nature to despoil, if you can, those whom it is a virtue to kill; nay, this pestilent and godless brood should be utterly banished from human society. For, as we amputate a limb in which the blood and the vital spirit have ceased to circulate, because it injures the rest of the body, so monsters, who, under human guise, conceal the cruelty and ferocity of a wild beast, should be severed from the common body of humanity.⁶

Other terrorists, in the fashion of bandits, are moved by the selfish search for material gain. Still others, like the protagonist of André Malraux's The Human Condition, base their motive, consciously or unconsciously, on the need to escape from one form or another of private anguish. In this last category, we discover the "incapacity for authentic relatedness" described in the various writings of Erich Fromm, the emptiness of T. S. Eliot's "hollow men," and the bottomless rage that is brought on by repeated and unrelenting doses of misfortune, a rage that produces the kinds of effects asserted by Shakespeare's Second Murderer in Act 2, Scene 1 of Macbeth.

I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world,
Hath so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.

Occasionally, this combination of traits foments a genuinely psychopathic breed of terrorist, one who says, with Jerry Rubin, "When in doubt, burn," or one who feels, with Kozo Okamoto, the surviving terrorist of the Lydda Airport massacre, "a strange ecstasy" in meting out death to innocents. Here, we are faced with the values of a Nechaev, the nineteenth-century Russian terrorist who served as one of the models for Dostoevski's major figure in The Possessed:

He (the revolutionary) knows of only one science, the science of destruction. To this end, and this end alone, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. To this end he will study day and night the living science: people, their characters and circumstances and all the features of the present social order at all possible levels. His sole and constant object is the immediate destruction of this vile order.⁷

One modern terrorist who has explicitly identified himself with this "revolutionary catechism" is Renato Curdo, founder of the Italian Red Brigades. In his writings, Curcio cites approvingly from Nechaev:

The revolutionary has neither personal business nor sentimental interests. He is without ties, property, or even a name. In the depth of his being, not only in words but in deeds, he has ruptured every tie with civil order and with all of the civilized world—with law, with custom, with morality, and those conventions generally recognized as of this world.⁸

In certain cases, today's terrorists bear a bizarre resemblance to punk rockers, whose dominant rationale is to move, to shock, to goad, to outrage, to reveal potency without any real underlying ideology. For punk rockers, the essential tools of the trade are guitar, bass, and drums amplified to a neurologically destructive volume. For psychopathic terrorists, the essential implements are the instruments of violence, readied for indiscriminate slaughter.

Should such terrorists ever acquire the instruments of nuclear violence, the results may well include an unprecedented spasm of gratuitous killing and maiming. It would surely be a major mistake to conclude that such terrorists are incapable of wreaking profound unhappiness because of their condition. As Freud points out:

Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics, and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.

But we must not assume that only psychopathic terrorists are captivated by the romanticization of excessive violence. Adhering closely to Frantz Fanon's words in The Wretched of the Earth, Al Fatah has articulated a doctrine of "liberation" through cataclysmic violence. Although such liberation is cast in terms of its unifying and purgative effects, it is also directed at a clear set of political/historical objectives.⁹

Origins and Regularities

Terrorism is not a recent phenomenon. It is older than the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. Early examples include the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.; the examples of the Sicarii, a religious sect, during the first century A.D. Zealot struggle in Palestine; and the acts of secret Islamic armed bands in the twelfth and thirteenth centunes. Contemporary scholars, however, tend to focus upon much later origins, namely the methods of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon during the French Reign of Terror (1793-1794). Perhaps the single most astounding fact about these terrorists is that their accusations, coming from the Committee of Public Safety, led a nation of 27 million people into sending as many as 40,000 to the guillotine and 300,000 to jail. All told, Robespierre and his band probably numbered no more than twenty-two.¹⁰

How is it that such a small group could wield such enormous power? The answer, of course, is fear. By manipulating fear in a special way, the terrorists were able to affect political behavior in a fashion totally disproportionate to their numbers.

In the political realm, fear produces intimidation when it issues from the threat of violence. It is not necessary to modify this statement by speaking exclusively of arbitrary or indiscriminate violence, since these characteristics are an irremediable part of the definition. All violence, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, is unpredictable.¹¹

Unlike power, force, or strength, violence is always applied with unforseeable effects. The ensuing domination by Fortuna, or fate, creates a devastating aura of uncertainty, one in which the hegemony of means over ends paralyzes the will of potential opponents. As a result, terrorism is consecrated as an "improvement" upon war as the ultima ratio in world affairs, a strategy whereby the weak become effectual participants on the global stage.

Since the close of the eighteenth century, we have had a great many instances of terrorism. Historically, we may point to the struggle that led to the Irish Treaty of 1921; the tactics of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine; the postwar movements for national liberation in Algeria and Kenya; and the diverse array of current activities throughout the world, including even North America. During World War II, terrorism took place as an adjunct to conventional warfare, occasioning many people to question the reasonableness of a blanket condemnation of a strategy that clearly had its place under certain conditions. After all, many who found it difficult to accept other forms of insurgency could not quarrel with partisan or resistance efforts directed at brutal foreign oppressors.

In view of this astounding heterogeneity, are there any ascertainable regularities, common features concerning characteristics and composition that are essential to theorizing about terrorism? Looking over the current landscape of operational groups, we find anarchists, separatists, Marxist-Leninists, black nationalists, new left activists, right wing reactionaries, Castroites, Trotskyists, and every conceivable brand of anti-imperialist and national liberationist.¹² Their intellectual and spiritual mentors include a gallery of heroes featuring Bakhunin, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky,¹³ Sorel, Marighella, Mao, Giap, Fanon, Marcuse, Malcolm X, Guevara, Debray, and Guillen. What could this tangled skein of programs and participants possibly have in common?

This question appears even more problematic when one considers the fragmentation and factionalization within particular groups and movements. For example, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been split since 1969 into an "official" faction, which exhibits a Marxist-Leninist orientation, and a "provisional" faction, which aims at unification of Ireland. The situation among the Palestinian groups is Byzantine in its complexity. Subsumed under a loose umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are Al Fatah, which is nationalist and non-Marxist; Black September, the principal terrorist arm of Al Fatah; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is dominated by the Marxist-Leninist Arab National Movement of George Habash; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP—GC), which formed as a splinter from the PFLP in 1970 because of major disagreements; and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), which is Maoist in ideology.

Nonetheless, these strange bedfellows have identified enough commonality to cooperate across geographic and ideological lines. The IRA Provisionals have established links with the PFLP. The Red Army Faction of West Germany, sometimes known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, is believed to have extensive ties to the Japanese Red Army Group and to various Palestinian terrorist organizations. The Red Army (Rengo Sekigun) operates in Western Europe in alignment with Palestinian groups as well as with the Red Army Faction. Outside of Europe, it is also known to coordinate operations with the Uruguayan Tupamaros....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 Understanding Nuclear Terrorism
• Part 2 Preventing Nuclear Terrorism
• Introduction
• Notes
• Index