The New Nuclear Threat

We have more to fear from Islamist fanatics than we do from former Soviet states.

U.S. President Barack Obama summed up the nuclear threat in a nutshell this week at the Washington Nuclear Security Summit: "Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history – the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up."

If it seems dismayingly unambitious to you that one of the aims of the conference is to secure all nuclear materials within the next four years – decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union – you’re not alone.

Yet the biggest reason why we are still threatened by nuclear conflagration doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the lax security standards in the former Soviet republics. The alarming situation we find ourselves in today is a result of the rise of fanaticism.

And let’s be clear about where the threat is coming from: fanatics motivated by Islamist ideology. This includes Islamist state actors such as Iran and segments of Pakistan’s power brokers, as well as terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.

Some critics will suggest that this threat is overstated. After all, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s leaders were quite willing to jail, torture, and murder millions of their own citizens to keep their hold on power, yet, despite all their bluster about burying the Americans, they never fired their nuclear weapons at their stated enemies.

Islamist theocracies and terrorist groups, however, are very different. It’s not because they aren’t rational actors. They may be perfectly rational. It’s just that they’re working from an entirely different set of assumptions.

Islamist ideology is all about rejecting the decadence and wickedness of this corrupt world for a better existence in the afterlife. Even for Islamists ensconced within relatively comfortable Western countries, electric cars, iPads, and medical technology that can extend life by decades are no consolation for the fact that Satan rules this plane of existence.

How do you escape this hell on Earth? Why, please God and go to heaven of course. What’s the easiest way to do that according to their ideology? Kill infidels. How do you kill the largest number of infidels in the least amount of time? Nuke them.

But what if this results in a counter strike by the infidels? Even better, say the Islamists. All those tens of millions of Muslims who could be killed in a nuclear retaliation would also go to heaven. Mutually Assured Destruction becomes a win-win.

I think that Obama understands that we live in a riskier world. Indeed, most people probably understand this. So we do what rational actors have always done when catastrophic danger lurks and no obvious solution presents itself: we try not to think about it.