Annihilation from Within

attack us, as well as against organizations that support these aggressors. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out, terrorists have an advantage: they “can attack at any time, in any place, using virtually any technique.” And since the United States cannot defend against all these potential attacks, it has become accepted U.S. policy to pursue the war on terrorism abroad. The object, Rumsfeld explained, is “to go after them where they live and plan and hide, and to make clear to states that sponsor and harbor them that such actions will have consequences.” As President George W. Bush put it: “We are fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home.”3
Now the time has come to look beyond today’s familiar threats: Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists, Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities, North Korean nuclear bombs. Although these contemporary problems have not yet gone away, the United States, other democracies, and indeed most nations ought to prepare themselves to cope with a new, potentially more overwhelming form of aggression. Nations will have to prevail against an attack that seeks to annihilate their political order from within. My next chapter will address how we might cope with this new challenge; but first I shall explain its insidious progression and nearly unstoppable force.
Dark Warnings
Within the next half century, perhaps even within a decade or two, a nation might be vanquished—not by a foreign terrorist organization or by the military strength of a foreign power, but by a small group of domestic evildoers ruthlessly using weapons of mass destruction against their own country. This grim prospect is not new. We were told about it quite some time ago.
Theodore B. Taylor, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a nuclear physicist, wrote a memorandum in 1966 entitled “Notes on Criminal and Terrorist Uses of Nuclear Explosives.” He warned, “I am becoming increasingly concerned that not enough attention has been given to the possible ways by which a few people that have a very small number of nuclear explosives can … cause violent disruption of human activities on a national, or even international scale.” Taylor discussed several compelling scenarios and added that “the group [that would use these nuclear explosives] need not be identifiable with any organization against which the U.S. could retaliate.” Among recent assessments of such covert attacks, a usefully comprehensive one is the book America’s Achilles’ Heel by Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer.4
In 1973, when I became Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Taylor’s warnings spurred me to have my staff review the danger of poorly guarded nuclear materials. One problem that caught our attention was the fuel used in research reactors that the United States had donated to dozens of countries. Incredibly, the fuel the U.S. Government provided was highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the ideal material for making bombs. I tried to have the safer, low-enriched uranium substituted; but the U.S. agency that provided this dangerous fuel (a predecessor of the Department of Energy) failed to take action. Only recently has the United States begun to retrieve this dangerous uranium—at, alas, a maddeningly slow pace.5 On this issue, as on so many others, policy initiatives to control dangerous technologies can easily be defeated by hidebound bureaucrats and parochial technicians.
We also must not forget that in the fall of 2001, someone in the United States obtained anthrax spores (in the aerosol form suitable for biological warfare) and sent deadly amounts by U.S. mail to members of Congress and other addressees, thus causing more than a dozen fatalities plus huge cleanup costs. Actually, had this quantity and quality of anthrax been employed more effectively, it could have done far greater damage. It might have shut down the nationwide mail systems. Despite an intensive, prolonged search by the FBI, the “someone” could not be found. Over four years, FBI agents and postal inspectors have pursued leads on four continents and conducted more than 8,000 interviews.6 It appears that this advanced biological warfare agent was obtained within the United States, and without the assistance of a foreign government. Several types of mass destruction weapons can be manufactured at home without help from abroad. In 1995, entirely on Japan’s territory and undetected by the normally competent Japanese police, chemists belonging to the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo manufactured the poison gas sarin—a rather complex task.
These episodes offer heavy hints about our future—about a time when criminal dissident groups or cults can employ weapons of mass destruction against a nation without the support of a rogue state and without any need of a hideout in a failed state. Even if the perpetrators required some technological assistance from another country, the foreign source need not present the attacked nation with suitable targets for retaliation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) received the hard-to-detect Semtex explosive through Libyan diplomatic pouches. Libya did not suffer British retaliation, even though the British government had been struggling to put an end to IRA attacks in Ulster and England for more than a quarter century. The IRA also received money and arms from sympathizers in the United States, the better to commit acts of terrorism against the British government. Her Majesty’s Government did not deem a retaliatory strike against these American suppliers a viable option. Or consider the guilt of Dr. A. Q. Khan, the founder and longtime leader of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. When the U.S. Government learned that he had provided designs for building nuclear weapons as well as material assistance to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and perhaps other countries, the United States neither carried out a retaliatory strike against Pakistan nor tried to kill Dr. A. Q. Khan, who still lives comfortably in Pakistan.7
Let us admit it, we have had no end of a lesson: anthrax in the United States, sarin in Japan, a Pakistani mail-order business for nuclear weapons