A few days ago I posted the first of what I hope will be many rants about the likelihood of a nuclear bomb going off in American cities sometime in the next 5-10 years. A couple of people have asked me what’s the point and suggested I was just trying to scare the bejesus out of everyone for partisan (?) political reasons.
In fact, the one piece of good news about this particular threat is that Democrats are more out front on it than Republicans. John Kerry tried to make it an issue in the last campaign (“The President wants to take ten years to secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal. I’ll do it in four years”) but failed for the same reason he failed to make anything stick: he seemed not to really care about it.
Well, I do care about it.
Maybe it’s because I came from the duck-and-cover generation of Americans who were told to get under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Maybe it’s because I was a college sophomore in DC during the Cuban missile crisis and was awakened one night by a fire alarm some dingbat set off in the dorm and I rushed outside holding my shoes (actually, just one shoe; don’t ask me what I was thinking) because it struck me that the streets would soon be very hot. Maybe it’s because I was part of a team that answered an RFP from the bipartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative to make a short film about the possibility that a stolen nuke might blow up an American city (we didn’t get the bid, but did get to talk to a bunch of very serious people in a posh law office across from the White House who were worried that it was only a matter of time before a city in the U.S. was leveled).
Or maybe it’s just because I find it easy to put myself in the shoes of an Islamic fantasist with lots of connections, lots of money, and lots of hate.
Here’s another reason: for the first time in history, it’s possible for a small group of people to bring down an empire.
Back in the days of Assyria or Egypt or Persia or Rome, it was pretty much club against club, sword against sword. If you were a military superpower of 280 million, and your enemy could only muster nineteen guys armed with boxcutters, you had the upper hand.
On 9/11 we saw an example of what the military folks call asymmetrical warfare.
Nineteen guys, spending less than a half million dollars, killed 3000 people and very nearly sent a multi-trillion dollar economy into the tank.
If I’m Osama bin Laden (or one of his followers with decades to live) I can do the math. For the few millions dollars it will cost me to buy a nuclear bomb from the North Koreans or the Russians or the Pakistanis, I can kill millions of Americans, do trillions of dollars in damage, and, just maybe, decapitate the American government and cripple the Great Satan so grievously we won’t have to worry about it any more.
Why wouldn’t I do that if I could?
Well, I would -- especially when I realize there’s absolutely no downside. There’s nothing that the pissed off U.S. can do that hurts me or my cause. It can only help my cause. You say they’ll retaliate by dropping some nukes on my cave complex and killing me and all my henchmen? Fine. We’re all ready to die. We love death. We love destruction. We want the nuclear genie out of the bottle. We want the U.S. to nuke Damascus and Baghdad and Tehran. We despise those governments. You say you'll hit us closer to home by dropping a nuke on Mecca? No problem. We’ll worship the black hole in the ground and tell our children about the decadent maniac who did this to us.
We want chaos. We want a smoking and confused battlefield where order has broken down and there is no authority except at the barrel of a gun or the machete blade. We want Cambodia when Pol Pot came in. We want Somalia, the Sudan, Rwanda. We want the Night of the Long Knives. We want people to kill and room to kill them in.
Because, when you get right down to it, that’s how we get our kicks. We can wrap it up with lofty sentiments and religious screeds and lists of complaints about how badly we've been treated. But the bottom line here is that we enjoy destroying stuff. We’re Ted Bundy. We’re the D.C. snipers. We’re every sociopathic thug who's ever walked the planet beating on things.
But we're in a much better position than our ancestral assassins because this is the day of supersizing everything, including things to kill people with. All we’ve got to do is let it be known we have the money to buy a couple of atom bombs and bide our time. Sooner or later, someone’s going to want to make a deal with us. Someone who wants to put the Great Satan in its place, preferably a fantasist like us who already has a few nukes in his closet and wants to take a Big Place on the World Stage.
(Someone like the
world leader who had five holes in one the first time he played golf?)
Everything is in place for this kind of thing to happen... the right combination of kooks and holy warriors, technical wizardry and the imperatives of international commerce.
And if you think it can't happen to us, read some more history.
Every great civilization that's ever existed on this earth has been brought to its knees by people it initially considered uncivilized barbarians.
The pyramids of skulls came later.
