More Reasons to Fear the Bomb

by John Thompson

03/08/04

Sometime, possibly very soon, some terrorist group is going to use a nuclear bomb. When that day comes, there will be much more to worry about than merely the damage of the attack; fear that inevitable day for three reasons.

Making a nuke is no great trick - the Americans constructed the first weapons sixty years ago, and the science isn’t complicated. Making a big hydrogen bomb rather than an atomic bomb is somewhat trickier, and shrinking the whole package down to a manageable size requires really expensive engineering and really costly machinery; but North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran are showing that bomb building 101 isn’t too difficult.

Between these three of states, and some of the more blurred records for the old Soviet inventory, a nuclear weapon will someday trickle down into the hands of some non-state actor who is prepared to use them.

Al Qaeda will probably be the first to use an atomic weapon in an act of terrorism, and it need not be complicated or large. The emerging nuclear states know that fissionable materials are too expensive to let too much out of their hands, and a 20 kiloton package would be adequate for terrorism anyway.

What could a 20 kiloton weapon (equal to 20,000 tons of TNT detonating simultaneously) do? Bomb damage assessment charts suggest the following:

• People standing in the street at 2.7km from the blast have a 50% chance of being killed or injured — the closer you are, the worse your odds until you face a 100% guarantee of being killed.
• Buildings with a heavy reinforced concrete structure (most modern buildings) within 543 metres of the centre of the blast have a 50% of collapsing.
• There will be broken windows (with attendant casualties), minor fires and structural damage on all buildings within 3.8 kilometres.

Essentially, a 20 kiloton weapons in the heart of a modern city might cause as much physical damage as the 9-11 attack did, but it would do it instantly. At the World Trade Centre on that day, over 20,000 people had a chance to flee the buildings and as many more curtailed their trip to their offices. If al Qaeda had detonated a 20 KT bomb at street level outside the WTC say, around 9:30 AM, some 40,000 people would have been killed.

The day that nuclear terrorism makes its debut will be a tremendous tragedy and a wave of panic and terror will wash around the planet. It will be day to fear, and so will be what comes next.

There was a blessing in disguise when the Americans dropped their first atom bomb on Hiroshima 59 years ago (well, several blessings — this attack and Nagasaki induced Japan’s surrender, thereby saving at least another million lives). Hiroshima was the perfect nuclear target: A flat bowl of a city where over 90% of the construction was of wood. The primitive 10 kiloton bomb the Americans dropped into the centre of the bowl leveled almost all of the flimsy buildings (a concrete structure directly under the epicenter still stands as a memorial), and ignited the debris. The results gave an exaggerated impression of what nuclear weapons could actually do.

Since Hiroshima, what really kept the nuclear swords sheathed for all these long decades was the fear that their use would result in an equally traumatic response — the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) Doctrine that governed affairs between the Soviet Bloc and NATO. To keep these weapons from use in the future, the user must understand that he has as much to lose (or more) in retaliation.

Now, how does this calculation affect terrorists with a martyrdom complex? What possible deterrent can we offer? Threaten to turn the al Aqsa Mosque into a Jewish girls’ school? (Actually, this might work…) Use the bomb on cities in Muslim countries whose cooperation we need against al Qaeda? Inactivity would bring on more attacks, so we must have a response that induces similar fear among the friends and admirers of al Qaeda, and so our protection might then rest on very draconian behavior.

There is something else to be afraid of too. For decades, our ideas of what nuclear weapons are capable of have been defined by Hiroshima and by the enormous H-bombs of the early Cold War. What happens, however, when we find that the damage that smaller nuclear weapons can do is not so destructive after all? When we discover that it actually takes much more than a single nuclear bomb to destroy a modern city, and that our society is so large and rich that we can absorb the damage? After a couple of uses of atom bombs by terrorists and a few similar responses by us, might we discover that the bomb is really not so scary after all? The day we make that discovery is a day to be truly afraid.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca