Apocalypse When?
by Graham Allison, Joseph Cirincione, William C. Potter and John Mueller
11.12.2007
In the previous issue of The National Interest, John Mueller argued that the threats from nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war are exaggerated. Rather, we may pose the greatest threat to ourselves: the price we pay for making nuclear weapons the "supreme priority" carries a hefty price in money and in lives. Graham Allison, Joseph Cirincione and William Potter weigh in. Mueller has the last word.
The Three “Nos” Knows
Graham Allison
“RADIOACTIVE HYPE” by John Mueller sharpens the barbs from his recent book, Overblown, in ways that demonstrate that he is, above all, a committed contrarian. One can agree with many points in his article and book. But his central propositions about the danger and appropriate responses to terrorism, nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are profoundly mistaken. Specifically, “Radioactive Hype” argues that:
–“Threat-mongers”—for which the 9/11 Commission, my book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe and presidential candidates of both parties are the poster children—have greatly exaggerated the threat of terrorists exploding a nuclear weapon in one of our cities.
–An “obsessive quest to control nuclear proliferation—particularly since the end of the Cold War—has been substantially counterproductive.”
–This “nuclear obsession” drove the United States into “the current disastrous Iraq War” and now threatens war with Iran.
Given the space allotted, my response to each proposition must be abridged but will reference my earlier work on this topic and other analyses from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where these issues are addressed in greater depth.1
How Serious is the Threat of Nuclear Terrorism?
MUELLER IS entitled to his opinion that the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is “exaggerated” and “overwrought.” But analysts of various political persuasions, in and out of government, are virtually unanimous in their judgment to the contrary. As the national-security community learned during the Cold War, risk = likelihood x consequences. Thus, even when the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon was small, the consequences were so catastrophic that prudent policymakers felt a categorical imperative to do everything that feasibly could be done to prevent that war. Today, a single nuclear bomb exploding in just one city would change our world. Given such consequences, differences between a 1 percent and a 20 percent likelihood of such an attack are relatively insignificant when considering how we should respond to the threat.
Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb who Enrico Fermi once called “the only true genius I had ever met”, told Congress in March that he estimated a “20 percent per year probability [of a nuclear explosion—not just a contaminated, dirty bomb—a nuclear explosion] with American cities and European cities included.” My Harvard colleague Matthew Bunn has created a model in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period to be 29 percent—identical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar in 2005. My book, Nuclear Terrorism, states my own best judgment that, on the current trend line, the chances of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade are greater than 50 percent. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has expressed his own view that my work may even underestimate the risk. Warren Buffet, the world’s most successful investor and legendary odds-maker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events, concluded that nuclear terrorism is “inevitable.” He stated, “I don’t see any way that it won’t happen.”
To assess the threat one must answer five core questions: who, what, where, when and how?
Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack? Al-Qaeda remains the leading candidate. According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Al-Qaeda has been substantially reconstituted—but with its leadership having moved from a medieval Afghanistan to Pakistan—a nation that actually has nuclear weapons. As former CIA Director George J. Tenet’s memoir reports, Al-Qaeda’s leadership has remained “singularly focused on acquiring WMDs” and that “the main threat is the nuclear one.” Tenet concluded, “I am convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives want to go.”
What nuclear weapons could terrorists use? A ready-made weapon from the arsenal of one of the nuclear-weapons states or an elementary nuclear bomb constructed from highly enriched uranium made by a state remain most likely. As John Foster, a leading U.S. bomb-maker and former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote a quarter of a century ago, “If the essential nuclear materials are at hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using information that is available in the open literature.”
Where could terrorists acquire a nuclear bomb? If a nuclear attack occurs, Russia will be the most likely source of the weapon or material. A close second, however, is North Korea, which now has ten bombs worth of plutonium, or Pakistan with sixty nuclear bombs. Finally, research reactors in forty developing and transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear weapons.
When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack? If terrorists bought or stole a nuclear weapon in good working condition, they could explode it today. If terrorists acquired one hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, they could make a working elementary nuclear bomb in less than a year.
How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target? In the same way that illegal items come to our cities every day. As one of my former colleagues has quipped, if you have any doubt about the ability of terrorists to deliver a weapon to an American target, remember: They could hide it in a bale of marijuana.
Non-Proliferation Policy
READERS OF Mueller’s judgment that policies aimed at preventing proliferation have been “obsessive” and “counterproductive” should be aware of his criteria for what constitutes an “overreaction.” In Overblown, he argues that America’s reaction to Pearl Harbor was exaggerated. America’s overreaction led it to declare war on Japan, when a policy of “military containment and harassment” would have been sufficient to pressure Japan to withdraw from its empire.
Mueller’s claim that the quest to control proliferation has been “substantively counterproductive” misunderstands the impact successful policy has had in preventing what would have been catastrophic outcomes. Mueller takes to task President John Kennedy’s 1962 prediction that if states acquired nuclear weapons at the rate they achieved the technical ability to build bombs, there could be twenty nuclear powers by 1975. He argues the claim was exaggerated simply because it did not happen. But the purpose of Kennedy’s warning was to awaken the world to the unacceptable dangers of unconstrained nuclear proliferation. The United States and other nations’ refusal to accept those consequences motivated an international initiative to create the non-proliferation regime, the centerpiece of which is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Thanks to this regime, 183 nations, including scores that have the technical capability to build nuclear arsenals, have renounced nuclear weapons. Four decades later, there are only eight and a half nuclear-weapons states, not twenty or forty. (North Korea is the only self-declared but unrecognized nuclear state.)
The gravest challenges to the non-proliferation regime today are North Korea and Iran. If each succeeds in becoming a nuclear-weapons state, we are likely to witness the unraveling of the non-proliferation regime and a cascade of proliferation. As Henry Kissinger recently said, “there is no greater challenge to the global nuclear order today than the impending proliferation of nuclear weapons and the increasing likelihood that terrorists may conduct a nuclear 9/11.”
Nukes and Iraq
SENATOR CHUCK Hagel (R-NE) identified the war in Iraq as “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” I share many of Mueller’s criticisms of the Bush Administration’s wrongheadedness in launching an unnecessary war and incompetence in its conduct of the war. Where we part company, however, is on the cause of the war, which he traces to our “nuclear obsession.” Yes, in making the case for attacking Iraq, President Bush focused on the danger that Saddam would transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. But this was not only a false premise; it was a flimsy argument. There was and is a real danger that Al-Qaeda would get a nuclear bomb and attack an American city. A sober assessment of that danger should have led the United States to urgently pursue an agenda to prevent that catastrophe—that agenda did not include attacking Iraq.
As Nuclear Terrorism argues in detail, the appropriate response to the real threat of Al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons should have been to undertake a global campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism. A strategy to that end should be organized under a “Doctrine of Three Nos”: No loose nukes, no new nascent nukes and no new nuclear-weapons states. Had half the energy and resources devoted to the misguided Iraq War been focused on the real nuclear danger, the risk of nuclear terrorism today would have been reduced to manageable levels.
The most important truth about this issue is that there exists a feasible, affordable agenda of actions that, if taken, would shrink the risk of nuclear terrorism to nearly zero. Exaggerated contrarian claims add to the fog generated by Bush Administration rhetoric to distract from doing what so urgently needs to be done.
Graham Allison is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and the faculty chair of the Dubai Initiative at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Cassandra’s Conundrum
Joseph Cirincione
FIRST, LET me agree with one of John Mueller’s main points: The dangers to our national security are very often hyped, and this alarmism produces undesirable consequences. And it is not just venal politicians and ideologues who participate in this threat exaggeration, but otherwise well-intentioned reporters and, yes, experts. This was pointed out to me not by a journalist, but by a man who pretends to be a journalist: Jon Stewart. Interviewing me on his Daily Show shortly after the hyped-up scare of Jose Padilla’s alleged “dirty bomb” plot in 2002, he asked about my role in the media coverage. “For a guy like you”, he said, “is this like when you see the weatherman and a hurricane is coming, and the weatherman never really gets to be at the top of the news, but in a hurricane, he is. And he’s got his big rain slicker on and saying, ‘It’s a devastating event!’”
He was right. That is exactly what it is like for dozens of experts put in front of the cameras and microphones and asked to play their role in the frenzy of “Crisis with Iran”, “Showdown with Iraq”, “America in the Crosshairs” or whatever title, music and drama can convince the viewer not to flip the channel. We try to give just the facts, but it is hard not to get caught up in the moment or to provide a sound bite that will be used absent any qualifiers. Couple this media tendency with an administration’s inherent dominance and ability to frame any national-security debate, and Mueller is right to be very worried about the use of fear to manipulate even the informed public.
In the prelude to the Iraq War, we saw a considerable amount of threat-mongering. Now, some of the same people who claimed we had to invade that nation or risk nuclear weapons in the hands of an Iraqi dictator are trying to convince us that we must continue to occupy that nation or risk nuclear weapons in the hands of Iranian dictators. As Mueller points out, some want to go further, attacking Iran directly. His arguments about the futility of a military answer to the Iranian program are on point, particularly the negative lessons of Osirak.
Just Because You’re Paranoid. . . .
MUELLER GOES too far, however. His major thesis—“the obsessive quest to control nuclear proliferation . . . has been substantially counterproductive and has often inflicted dire costs”—is not correct. I wish it were true that we had an “obsessive quest.” I wish we truly did make the number one threat to our national security our number one national-security priority. But we do not. Non-proliferation is a political and budgetary afterthought: an occasional speech, an occasional presidential finding and about $2 billion per year total on all our non-proliferation and counter-proliferation programs—about what we spend in Iraq every week.
Let me be clear: Nuclear proliferation is a real danger. George Bush and John Kerry were correct when they agreed in a 2004 debate that it is the number one threat to America. The threat comes in four flavors. Most serious is nuclear terrorism. As terrible as another 9/11 attack would be, a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city, kill hundreds of thousands, wreck the economy and change the political life of the nation, perhaps permanently. Our number one priority must be to make sure any further terrorist attack is non-nuclear.
Second is the danger from existing arsenals. There are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the planet several times over. Even a small regional war in South Asia using one hundred weapons would trigger a nuclear winter that could devastate food crops around the world. Accidental or unauthorized use is a real risk. Consider the September flight of a B-52 with six nuclear weapons that the crew didn’t know they had. If the most sophisticated command-and-control mechanism in the world fails to stop the unauthorized possession of the equivalent of sixty Hiroshimas, what is going on in other nations?
Third is the risk of new nuclear nations. I agree with Mueller that the danger here is not that Iran or North Korea would use a nuclear bomb against America or their neighbors. Deterrence is alive and well; they know what would happen next. Nor is it that these states would intentionally give a weapon they worked so hard to make to a terrorist group they could not control. Rather it is the risk of what could happen in the neighborhood: a nuclear reaction chain where states feel they must match each other’s nuclear capability. Just such a reaction is underway already in the Middle East, as over a dozen Muslim nations suddenly declared interest in starting nuclear-power programs. This is not about energy; it is a nuclear hedge against Iran. It could lead to a Middle East with not one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, but four or five. That is a recipe for nuclear war.
Finally, there is the risk of the collapse of the entire non-proliferation regime. Kennedy was right to worry about ten, fifteen or twenty nuclear nations. He did not make this number up. It was based on a 1958 NPT that warned that while there were then only three nuclear nations (the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom), “within the next decade a large number of individual countries could produce at least a few nominal-yield weapons.” Indeed, several nations already had programs underway. Subsequent NPTs confirmed the proliferation danger and the linkage to existing arsenals. Other nations’ decisions on proceeding with programs, the intelligence agencies concluded, were linked to “further progress in disarmament—aimed at effective controls and reduction of stockpiles.” Kennedy negotiated a limited nuclear test ban and began the process to get the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty completed by Lyndon Johnson and ratified by Richard Nixon. This bipartisan dam held back the nuclear wave; its abandonment by the current administration risks a return to the 1950s nuclear free-for-all.
Cassandra Was Right
JUST BECAUSE some of the predicted nuclear catastrophes did not occur does not mean that those warning of them were wrong. Jon Stewart shared Mueller’s skepticism. “For all the scenarios that we have concocted, nothing has ever really happened”, he said. I told him what I tell Mueller: This is not because the dangers were not real; it is because leaders took action to prevent them. As a result, there are fewer countries with weapons or programs now than there were in the 1960s, ‘70s or ‘80s. More countries have given up nuclear weapons or programs in the past twenty years than have tried to acquire them. Negotiated treaties have cut in half the number of nuclear bombs from Cold War levels. And most of the 183 non-nuclear nations that have signed the NPT believe what the treaty says: No one should have nuclear weapons. Over 66 percent of the American public agrees, according to an Associated Press poll.
For any president who understands this widespread anti-nuclear desire, the programs to denuclearize are already in place. They could be reactivated or accelerated to effectively eradicate nuclear terrorism, shrink global arsenals, stop new nuclear nations and rebuild the nuclear levees. It just takes vision, honesty and the courage to put our money where our threats are. And it wouldn’t hurt to have less hype and more factual analysis.
Joseph Cirincione is the author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2007) and the director of Nuclear Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Non-Proliferation Parody
William C. Potter
THE ESSAY “Radioactive Hype” by John Mueller makes a number of intriguing and counterintuitive assertions. Most provocatively, it raises questions about the human costs and other unintended consequences of a “non-proliferation first” foreign policy. It also reiterates the important—but now familiar—warning that one should not exaggerate the proliferation threats posed by terrorists or states.
Mueller is correct in highlighting the by-products of past ill-conceived military ventures undertaken in the name of WMD non-proliferation and the potential for similar, if not greater, casualties should military initiatives be launched against other “axis of evil” states. He also is right on, although probably for the wrong reasons, in disputing Graham Allison’s forecast about the proliferation chain effects that a North Korean bomb would trigger. (The concept of a “chain reaction” itself is suspect given the process by which states make nuclear decisions.)
A fatal flaw in Mueller’s thesis, however, is that the situation he depicts—an alleged U.S. foreign-policy fixation on WMD non-proliferation—bears no resemblance to current U.S. policy. Indeed, the hallmark of the Bush Administration’s new approach to nuclear-weapons spread is acquiescence to and management of—rather than prevention of—proliferation. This policy is most evident with respect to the three latest states to test nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan and North Korea. There is little reason to believe that the U.S. response to Iran’s nuclear machinations will be any different. Although the administration relishes a tough-guy image and would like the public to believe it employs a set of finely calibrated tools toward each would-be proliferator, the underpinning of its policy is the same—“proliferation is inevitable; learn to live with it.” In the case of India, this disregard for non-proliferation has led the administration to jettison nearly three decades of U.S. nuclear export-control policy and to disregard commitments made by the United States when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995. In the North Korean case, we have returned to a diplomatic status quo ante, with the important exception that Pyongyang now has a much larger stock of nuclear-weapons material and a demonstrated weapons capability.
Mueller’s attempt to dismiss the threat posed by nuclear terrorists as alarmist fantasy also falters due to a number of mistaken assumptions. Unfortunately, contrary to Mueller’s assertion, there is substance and not only rumor about terrorist efforts to acquire fissile material and nuclear weapons. Although the number of relevant terrorist groups involved is small, it is neither zero nor one. In addition to a larger body of evidence involving Al-Qaeda that Mueller acknowledges, there is solid documentation about the sustained efforts in the early 1990s by the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo to obtain nuclear weapons and their components. Among the obstacles that proved most difficult for both Aum and Al-Qaeda to overcome was access to the fissile material needed to build an improvised nuclear device—that is, a crude but real nuclear explosive. The two organizations were also inhibited by their dearth of in-house technical expertise, unfamiliarity with the nuclear black market and lack of access to potential nuclear suppliers. However, what is fantasy is not the difficulty of building such a device but Mueller’s confidence that the luck we have enjoyed to date will hold indefinitely.
An optimistic undercurrent in Mueller’s essay is the conviction that no grand proliferation imperative is at work. This view is a sound one, and the author is correct to observe that dire proliferation forecasts in the past have been well off the mark. It does not follow, however, as Mueller would have us believe, that nuclear renunciation decisions occurred in a vacuum or were preordained because nuclear weapons are “dangerous, distasteful, costly and likely to rile the neighbors.” In fact, much of the credit for the slow pace of weapons spread may be attributed to U.S.-Soviet cooperation to counter proliferation during the Cold War, the implementation of the NPT and its nearly universal adoption, the rapid spread of nuclear weapons–free zones and the adoption of stringent nuclear export-control guidelines—all of which led leaders in a number of potential proliferators to conclude that the economic and political costs of “going nuclear” would outweigh the benefits.
In short, non-proliferation efforts in the past, while not uniformly successful, have served U.S. and international security well. The answer to the excesses Mueller observes is not to abandon non-proliferation as a foreign-policy priority, but to restore its proper emphasis on diplomacy, export controls, physical protection, international safeguards, intelligence collection and analysis, and respect for legally binding treaties. To advocate such measures is not hype, but common sense.
William C. Potter is the director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is a co-author of The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (Routledge, 2005).
Apocalypse Later
John Mueller
I WISH, first, to thank my distinguished detractors for their considered comments and, second, to register a few points of clarification, disagreement and dismay.
Dismay is the easiest. All three seem in various ways to want to detach quiet and methodical programs for securing Russian fissile material and improving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—programs I am happy to support—from the more spectacular consequences of the non-proliferation obsession, particularly the Iraq War. But that war was principally packaged and sold as a quest to prevent or roll back Iraq’s supposed nuclear development. As Francis Fukuyama has crisply put it, a pre-war request to spend “several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to . . . Iraq” would “have been laughed out of court.” Similarly, the sanctions against Iraq, popular on both sides of the political aisle, were substantially designed to keep the evil, if pathetic, Saddam Hussein from obtaining a nuclear capability. Not bad goals, but in carrying them out, each venture inflicted more deaths than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Costs like that, I modestly suggest in my article, can reasonably be labeled “dire.”
That’s the kind of policy that logically (and actually) follows when nuclear non-proliferation is designated a “supreme priority” (Allison) or “our number one national-security priority” (Cirincione). It also follows that there should be wars against North Korea and Iran if diplomatic and other devices fail to rein in those countries’ nuclear programs, wars that could easily engender the same calamitous human costs. Moreover, the intense hostility toward those particular regimes, due in considerable part to hysteria over what might conceivably happen should they obtain an atomic bomb, has had the perverse effect of enhancing the appeal of such weapons—for the sake of deterrence if nothing else.
To explain the remarkably slow pace at which nuclear proliferation has taken place, all three essays put a great deal of weight on the beneficial effects of the 1968 NPT. Indeed, Joseph Cirincione suggests that, without that document, there would have been a “nuclear wave”, and the conclusion in the 1958 National Intelligence Estimate that a large number of countries might soon develop a nuclear capacity would have come true. (At the time, the same spooks were also estimating that the Soviet Union would have 500 intercontinental nuclear missiles by the early 1960s, an estimate that proved to be, shall we say, wildly off the mark.)
In contrast, I suggested in my article that most countries fail to pursue nuclear programs because they come to realize that nuclear weapons are dangerous, distasteful, costly and likely to rile the neighbors. Since any signatory can legally withdraw after giving suitable notice, I’m less willing to put so much stock in a piece of paper—and maybe Cirincione agrees since he suggests that the treaty would be no hindrance to a bunch of signatory states if Iran gains an atomic capability.
In his response, Graham Allison repeats his 2004 prediction of a nuclear terrorist strike within ten years. Applying arithmetical logic, the interval should perhaps now be shortened to seven years, but I’ll leave that to others, since I’m still trying to internalize his 1995 declaration that “we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out.” He marshals the testimony of others who (roughly) agree with his alarming estimate, but it seems to me that, as briefly outlined in my article, the difficulties confronting the would-be atomic terrorist are monumental—and consequently likely to be profoundly dispiriting to any terrorist with a brain.
There are literally dozens of major hurdles, all of which must be conquered. Even if the terrorist stands a fifty-fifty chance of overcoming each of these, the chances of ultimate success—that is, of coming up with and successfully setting off a bomb that would be, as Allison puts it in his book, “large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient”—are almost vanishingly small. As Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland’s Spiez Laboratory, have said, the construction of even a simple bomb is difficult, dangerous and extremely exacting; the technical requirements “in several fields verge on the unfeasible”; and the task “could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group.” I have much expanded my argument and presented it as an academic paper.2
Allison suggests I am a “committed contrarian.” Let me refer to my past works to see how my “contrarian” predictions have held up.
In 1967—before the NPT cast its awesome spell—I argued that, contrary to the overwhelming wisdom of the time, the pace of proliferation was likely to be slow. In 1986, I proposed that, contrary to the overwhelming wisdom of the time, the Cold War might well be coming to an end. In 1989, in my book Retreat from Doomsday, I suggested that, contrary to the overwhelming wisdom of the hysterical 1980s, major war—war among developed states—might not recur (so far, so good, on that one). Finally, in January 2003, I protested that a war in Iraq would supply terrorists with new recruits, inspire them further and provide them with inviting new targets in the foreign military and civilian forces occupying a defeated, chaotic Iraq.
My newest prediction is that anyone who managed to get past the first paragraph of my “Radioactive Hype” article would forget that “I consider dissuading more countries from obtaining nuclear weapons to be quite a good idea and preventing terrorists from getting them to be an even better one.” I seem to have scored three for three on that one.
I have nothing against making non-proliferation a high priority. I would simply like to top it with a somewhat higher one: Not killing hundreds of thousands of people in the service of worst-case scenario fantasies.
John Mueller is a professor of political science at Ohio State University and the author of The Remnants of War (Cornell University Press, 2004). His most recent book, Overblown (Free Press, 2006), concerns exaggerations of international threats, including the one presented by terrorism.
1 Relevant documents can be accessed at www.belfercenter.org.
2 It and several other “contrarian” items are available at http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/tnistuff.html.
11.12.07
In the previous issue of
The National Interest,
John Mueller argued that the threats from nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war are exaggerated. Graham Allison responds.
09.01.06
With America facing grave threats, the Bush Administration has failed to demonstrate a willingness to establish a hierarchy of priorities.
03.01.06
Graham Allison, Ian Bremmer, Harlan Ullman and Derek Chollet.
10.23.02
09.01.02
Forging a U.S.-Russian alliance to prevent nuclear terrorism should be America's top priority in the post-September 11 world; here is a blueprint for one.
11.01.07
In the previous issue of
The National Interest,
John Mueller argued that the threats from nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war are exaggerated. Joseph Cirincione responds.
11.12.07
In the previous issue of
The National Interest,
John Mueller argued that the threats from nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war are exaggerated. William C. Potter responds.
10.30.08
A nuclear Iran may not be the biggest threat to Israel. Fear is a danger in and of itself. Until now, Israel has triumphed in the Middle East against overwhelming odds because of a clever, rational defense policy that used force as a last resort. If it adopts this attitude again, it can certainly withstand an atomically armed Tehran.
11.12.07
In the previous issue of
The National Interest,
John Mueller argued that the threats from nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war are exaggerated. Now he gets the last word in the
Apocalypse When? forum.
08.29.07
Public enemies are unlikely to obtain nuclear weapons, despite widespread fears to the contrary.
09.01.02
The attacks on Washington and New York were the first of their kind; they may also be the last. A case against rushing to conclusions.
03.01.97
A policy consensus is emerging that stresses economic enrichment through open markets, allows for the inclusion of less developed countries with their acts together and seeks to alleviate or at least contain troubles in other parts of the world at low cost.