The National Interest

IT IS easy to overlook the fact that the most startling characteristic of our era is that we are still here. John Mueller reminds us that with the dawn of the nuclear age, we became obsessed first with the idea of all-out nuclear war, then with the idea that nuclear weapons would inevitably spread throughout the world, and, lately, that nuclear terrorism would threaten our cities.

Whether an optimist, a pessimist, a political scientist, a policy maker or merely a person of a certain age, almost all of us and much of our sense of culture has been preoccupied by the atom.

At the start of the Cold War, many levelheaded American officials like George Kennan doubted that this conflict could last for long without either igniting world war or undermining American society. Others looked to a longer and brighter future, and as early as 1946, Bernard Brodie, the father of nuclear-deterrence strategy, believed that mutual and stable deterrence was possible. Others still foresaw nuclear power making electricity too cheap to meter or expected peaceful nuclear explosives to be a key to economic progress by cheaply building ports and canals. And more recently, Columbia professor Kenneth Waltz argued that while nuclear weapons would spread, the result would be to replicate the stability that characterized Soviet-American relations.

Meanwhile, observers of social life and culture saw an enormous impact of things nuclear; from the bikini to the changed and contested images of science and scientists as saviors or menaces, to the (in)famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how close we were to doom, all the way to visions of a freer, cleaner and better world. Whatever they believed about it, everyone knew we were living in the atomic age.

With the iconoclasm that typifies his work, Mueller will have none of this. Nuclear weapons have been remarkably unimportant; Albert Einstein had it exactly backward when he said that “the atom has changed everything save our way of thinking.” For Brodie, the most important “twin facts” about the new bomb were that “it exists” and “its destructive power is fantastically great”; for Mueller, they are that nuclear weapons have had little impact on actual events and that their dangers have been vastly exaggerated. He summarizes his argument sharply: “nuclear weapons have had at best a quite limited effect on history, have been a substantial waste of money and effort, do not seem to have been terribly appealing to most states that do not have them, [and] are out of reach for terrorists. . . .” Far from having nightmares about the bomb, we should “sleep well.” A more critical summary would be the picture of Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman with his idiotic grin and slogan “What, me worry?” paired with the comic strip Pogo’s “We have met the enemy and they are us,” which encapsulates Mueller’s argument that the unfortunate effects of nuclear weapons stem from our excessive worries about them. The failure of disasters to materialize is less the result of human contrivance than of the natural course of things, Mueller claims.

And that is really a central and rarely asked question. Is it to the credit of our clever policy makers and their wise strategies that we have thus far escaped nuclear Armageddon? Or is it instead simply the general social and historical flow of events that has led us to our current moment?

FOR MUELLER, the benign consequences of nuclear weapons—or at least a lack of malign impact—occurred despite national policies, not because of them. The half-century of peace followed from the broad course of economic development and perhaps progress in human affairs. In other works, Mueller explains that a general aversion to war has emerged among world powers.¹ He argues that this trend has nothing to do with nuclear deterrence. For even without nuclear weapons, peace would have been maintained because conventional wars have grown too expensive and human beings seemed to have lost much of their taste for violence. Indeed, if anything, arms-control agreements have been more a hindrance than a help in lowering the level of nuclear arms because by drawing attention to these weapons, they magnified their importance. Similarly, most nations chose not to pursue nuclear weapons because they saw that the costs were great and the benefits few. Terrorists, presumably beyond many of these calculations, have found that the barriers in their way are simply insurmountable.

Underlying each of these claims is the general but not fully articulated theme that it is the impersonal forces and flow of history that brings us to where we are rather than conscious policy, either for good or for ill. In much the same vein, Mueller has earlier argued that we overestimate the value of democracy and underestimate the civilizing and restraining impact of capitalism.² For Mueller, then, the invisible hand works quite well, or rather there are lots of invisible hands out there, and if we worry too much and try to thwart them, we are likely to make things worse. One could take this perspective a step further and argue that academics and intellectuals, while having fun with their thoughts, create trouble for the rest of us by generating excessive fear and leading us to centralized policies when we would be better-off acting on our impulses and not looking for solutions from governments. This perverse line of argument is consistent with a strand of standard theories of international politics that maintains that many conflicts and wars are created by our thinking too much. Preventive wars come from the concern that the world will badly deteriorate unless the state attacks now (and it is not only the Iraqi case that looks foolish in retrospect). And people who understand the collective-action problem (Why clean the dishes when Susie, John or Mary may?) are less likely to be able to work together. After I have explained the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma to my students and they learn that while mutual mistrust is unfortunate, trusting others who may not reciprocate can be worse, they are much less cooperative in the games that I play in class (but I hope not in the rest of their lives).

Unlike Mueller, many attribute this long peace to wise policies and adept statesmen. War was prevented by the well-crafted strategy of nuclear deterrence that made it clear to even risk-prone leaders that aggressive actions could lead to the destruction of their countries. Those policies made sure that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would have meaningful incentives to launch a nuclear first strike even—or especially—in times of high tension. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) inhibited, if not prevented, proliferation. The agreement, adopted over strong opposition in many countries, not least of which the United States, was supplemented by both national efforts to keep other countries out of the nuclear business, and a general stance that put nuclear weapons into a uniquely dangerous and indeed immoral category. The reason bad things have not occurred, then, is that wise men and women foresaw that unless strenuous efforts were taken, disaster was inevitable. Thus, nuclear fears became a self-denying prophecy. The aversion to war that Mueller has discussed may owe more than a little to the nuclear arsenals that have led people to equate large-scale violence with the destruction of everything we value. It is then the nuclear obsession, and the policies that follow from it, that are responsible for our living in a safer world.

So then, did good things just happen by themselves or did policies help us get through the Cold War? If we look back at this fifty-year case study, who was right? And what does this tell us about the risks of future nuclear annihilation?

MUELLER AND I debated some years ago how important nuclear weapons were to both the tensions and the simultaneous peace of the Cold War. Mueller thought they were “essentially irrelevant.” I believed they played a significant role.³ The flood of information available since then has not led either of us to change our minds. Mueller’s position is that while nuclear weapons probably did not provoke, neither did they deter. Or, to be more precise, they were not necessary for deterrence. There were other, more basic forces at play. The Soviet Union was not highly motivated to expand, and the expected costs of a conventional war would have been more than enough to inhibit any ambitions that did arise. The overwhelming power of nuclear weapons led analysts to downplay how destructive a conventional war would have been, but the Soviets, having lived through World War II, had a better understanding. “A jump from a 50th-story window is quite a bit more terrifying to think about than a jump from a 5th-story one, and quite a bit more destructive as well; but anyone who finds life even minimally satisfying is readily deterred from either adventure.” Perhaps the expectation of having to fight another World War II would not have been enough to stop another Hitler. But it was enough to deter the Soviet leadership.

Yes, Stalin blundered by authorizing Kim Il Sung’s attack on South Korea; Khrushchev took unnecessary and eventually self-defeating risks in threatening Berlin and putting missiles into Cuba; even the cautious Brezhnev became embroiled in Afghanistan. But even absent nuclear weapons, no Soviet leader was so highly motivated or out of touch with reality that he would have sent troops marching into West Europe and faced the likely consequences—an American counterattack and a long war. Furthermore, the status quo was, if not completely acceptable to Soviet leaders, at least one that they could live with, especially because for much of the time they expected the world to eventually go their way as long as it was not destroyed by war.

There is certainly something to this, and without the ability to rerun history, there can be no disproof. But there are lines of rebuttal. To start with, without the initial American atomic monopoly and longer-lasting nuclear advantage, the United States might not have become committed to the defense of West Europe in the first place. Nuclear weapons, though no panacea, were seen as a great equalizer that offset the enormous Soviet advantage in conventional forces. They may not have been necessary to deter Stalin, but nuclear weapons were likely key to emboldening Truman and a large segment of American public opinion to abandon deeply rooted isolationism. Relatedly, although Mueller is quite right to talk of the high costs of nuclear weapons, they allowed the United States to keep the size of its army down, most dramatically in President Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy that put a firm cap on military spending. Without nuclear weapons, the United States might well have faltered when faced with the apparent need to stay on something like World War II footing. It may then have been the atomic obsession that allowed the United States to follow a policy of containment rather than withdrawal or preventive war.

Mueller may also be too quick to dismiss the possibility that in a world absent nuclear weapons, the Soviets would have seen limited conventional wars as safe. As University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer showed, conventional deterrence can falter when the attacker believes that a quick victory is possible.⁴ In the prenuclear era, states used limited force to change the status quo even when they would have shied away from a worldwide conflagration (think of the wars that led to the unification of Germany and Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example). Without nuclear weapons, the American threat to wage an all-out war might have seemed neither credible nor efficacious. And in a world without them, aggression by the Soviets would have increased in probability.

Indeed, the influence of nuclear weapons may have extended even more broadly. The Cold War saw multiple crises and several wars in which the United States and the USSR were involved either directly or indirectly. So a story goes: back in the 1980s, an American said how significant it was that none of these involved nuclear weapons. More perceptive, a Soviet analyst replied, “actually, they were all nuclear wars.” It is notable that these crises greatly diminished after the onset of mutual second-strike capability in the mid-1960s. Of course, the chronology does not prove cause and effect, and even scholars less ingenious than Mueller have been able to come up with alternative explanations like the effects of learning or the mellowing of the Soviet system. But sometimes the obvious one is correct.

One can go further still and note that all international politics in this period was conducted under the shadow of nuclear weapons. The knowledge that any confrontation, not to speak of war, could lead to overwhelming destruction was likely never far from anyone’s mind. The effects of this fear saturated our consciousness and ways of thinking about politics, and may well have influenced the selection of leaders on both sides. Even Richard Nixon, who talked about his “madman theory,” was rash only in his private statements.

Maybe nuclear weapons only had a modest impact, as Mueller insists. Maybe history would have been pretty much the same without them. But the very pervasiveness of our nuclear fear—and the weapons’ very influence—was so widespread that trying to trace out the likely course of a nonnuclear world simply does not make much sense.

BUT NUCLEAR weapons are still very much with us, and whatever the effect (or lack thereof) they may have had during the Cold War, people fear the extent and consequences of proliferation in the present. Even though there is disagreement on specific policy prescriptions, there seems to be a consensus that we are at a crucial moment in history; that nuclear weapons will spread unless the United States and the international community act strongly; and, that proliferation is a significant threat. It will come as no surprise that Mueller disagrees, noting that we have always overpredicted the pace and consequences of nuclear proliferation. The world has frequently been seen as at the point of no return. Mueller concedes these predictions are difficult to make, but the fact that there have been so many errors, and all false alarms, should give us pause.

Though Mueller is disturbed by them, he finds these skewed results by no means puzzling. The explanation of course comes from the American—and perhaps other nuclear powers’—obsession with nuclear weapons that has them talking all fear, all the time, coupled with the greater common sense of nonnuclear states which see gaining atomic technology as uncertain, expensive and perhaps dangerous, and all for gains that are small and evanescent. This is why we have seen far less proliferation than projected.

Building a bomb calls for industrial and engineering infrastructure and talent, usually at great opportunity cost. And to what end? Intimidation and, even more, security (two objectives that are often linked) are important, but Mueller argues that they are often not best gained by nuclear weapons, at least as long as the state in question does not face a serious threat from the United States. Other scholars stress that decisions can be driven by domestic politics or by the desire for status (which can be magnified by American pressure not to go nuclear). But for Mueller the former can often be controlled, and although the French and Indians were strongly motivated by the latter, it is far from clear that possessing nuclear weapons produced greater respect and more than temporary pride. Other states have observed this and few seem to believe that nuclear weapons provide the key to any club they want to join. This sensible decision making has falsified the past predictions that one country getting the bomb would lead to cascades among its neighbors. Mueller is confident that this pattern will hold in the future.

Everyone agrees that the pace of proliferation has been slow, though they may disagree on the reasons. But Mueller, along with most scholars, makes the mistake of paying little attention to “virtual proliferation”—the fact that many countries could produce nuclear weapons on quite short notice, the most prominent of these being Japan. That countries of this kind have held back is significant and consistent with many of Mueller’s points, but it does mean these states have not completely turned away from the bomb. They have only sensibly decided that no threat is likely to emerge so quickly that they could not assemble weapons in the interim.

Even more subject to dispute is Mueller’s claim that the strenuous efforts by the United States and others to curb the spread of nuclear weapons have been unnecessary, if not counterproductive. Instead, what has mattered, according to Mueller, are the autonomous decisions of nonnuclear states, who have been little affected by American threats or promises or by the laws and norms embodied in the NPT. Mueller is clearly right that the countries that pose the greatest threat to the nonproliferation regime (North Korea and Iran) were NPT members at the time they started their programs and that it is hard to point to any specific case where signing inhibited a country. But he overlooks the potential indirect effects. The debates that were triggered by the need to decide whether to sign the treaty in some cases pushed states away from nuclear weapons, and signing raised the bar for those in government and society who would argue for taking a different course. Furthermore, the treaty reinforced the idea that nuclear weapons are not normal weapons that states should consider adding to their arsenals, and it gave some countries confidence that their neighbors had foresworn them. Not as much of an impact as its proponents are wont to claim, but not entirely to be ignored either.

Mueller also downplays the influence of the United States in countries’ decisions to abandon weapons or programs. He argues these states were largely guided by judgments of their own interests that were beyond American control. And yet, especially in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, American threats and rewards were likely essential. Mueller’s conclusion that “For the most part the successes [of the efforts by the antiproliferation community] have been limited and might well have happened anyway” is a useful corrective to the much more American-centered conventional wisdom but errs in the opposite direction. There is much to what he says, but perhaps not as much as he says.

OF MOST current relevance is his argument that American attempts to prevent Iran and North Korea from getting nuclear weapons are misguided on two counts. First, much of the motive for these countries is security, primarily security against threats from the United States. American pressure on these countries has greatly increased because of their nuclear programs, which means that the American response to the fear of proliferation has increased rather than decreased the incentive for these countries to become nuclear powers. If it would go too far to say that this is all nothing but a vicious circle, let alone a giant misunderstanding, Mueller is certainly right that we need to consider the possibility that a vigorous antiproliferation policy is a basic cause of proliferation and that what is needed is “a calmer assessment.” If the United States wants to halt proliferation and is willing to live with repugnant regimes, then the best policy may be to try to make the regimes more secure.

This stance is supported by the second leg of his argument. Just as nuclear weapons had little impact on Soviet-American relations, so too will the consequences of other countries getting nuclear weapons be slight. Both proliferation optimists and proliferation pessimists are wrong. Optimists like Waltz were wrong to believe that nuclear weapons were necessary to keep the peace in the Cold War, and the parallel claim that more nuclear states will be better is also incorrect. Nuclear weapons are not likely to stabilize relations between hostile country pairs, in part because states usually already have other forms of deterrence available to them and are not likely to follow their neighbors into a nuclear program. More importantly, the fears voiced by nuclear pessimists who dominate the political landscape that a few weapons in the hands of North Korea or Iran would be disastrous are yet another example of our atomic obsession. These countries face not only powerful neighbors but also a United States with overwhelming military superiority. To attack the United States would be suicidal, and to assume that a small nuclear arsenal would provide a shield that would permit them to engage in major mischief is to greatly underrate the American ability to reply at all levels of violence. Mueller, joined here by Waltz and most analysts, argues that nuclear weapons are most efficacious in preventing direct attacks (for all Mueller’s belief in the exaggerated effect of nuclear weapons, he is not so extreme as to see them as having no effect at all); Iran and North Korea could not use their bombs to coerce their neighbors. Although complete proof is of course impossible, it is significant that North Korea has not behaved more provocatively after acquiring a nuclear capability than it did before. In parallel, we can ask what the United States is now deterring Iran from doing that it would not be able to deter if Iran became a nuclear power. This is not to say that the United States would be better-off if Iran and North Korea joined the nuclear club, but only that the consequences would be modest, and that here, as elsewhere, preventive war would be a cure worse than the disease.

Here Mueller and I agree, and indeed the previous paragraphs blend his views and mine. But the competing arguments need to be acknowledged. The claim that North Korea is driven mainly by security was more persuasive before the United States provided the guarantees that critics had called for and, even more, before North Korea drew back from its stated willingness to give up nuclear weapons as part of a normalization agreement. It now seems relatively clear that North Korea is seeking to be recognized as a nuclear state, although the goals that nuclear status is designed to reach and the central question of whether its neighbors and the United States will be harmed if North Korea cannot be deflected from this trajectory remain much more obscure. While this does not deny Mueller’s argument that we should remain calm, it does indicate that the consequences of North Korea’s nuclear program may be more serious than he says. Although Iran is a much more open country than North Korea, its intentions are at least as unclear, partly because its program is less advanced. But it seems closer to a safe assumption than to a worst-case one that Iran is seeking, at a minimum, to be within months of a nuclear capability (the “breakout” option) if not to develop a stockpile, and it is easier for scholars than for policy makers to dismiss the consequences of this. Even leaving aside the likelihood of an Israeli attack (whether based on exaggerated fear or not), we would have to live with the possibility that Iranian leaders would feel emboldened by nuclear weapons, a danger magnified by the pressures they would likely feel from Hamas and Hezbollah, and one that would be refracted through the complex if not impenetrable prism of Iranian domestic politics.

AT THIS point, many readers are likely to believe that Mueller’s previous analysis is dangerously complacent; they will be even less receptive to the good news in the last third of his book where he argues that the threat of nuclear terrorism is also greatly exaggerated. Such an attack would do much less physical damage than is generally believed; the social, political and economic consequences, although great, would not be catastrophic; most importantly, the chances of terrorists gaining access to a nuclear weapon or even a “dirty bomb” are vanishingly small. I for one am convinced (perhaps because I am already inclined toward this position), but think that self-denying prophecies may have been at work here as well: nuclear terrorism may be unlikely because of American efforts, ones that were stimulated by alarmism.

Mueller points out that we can be quite confident that no terrorist group has even come close to getting nuclear material, let alone to assembling a weapon. For example, “over the years, known thefts of highly enriched uranium have totaled less than 16 pounds or so, [which] is far less than required for an atomic explosion.” The obvious reply, however, is that the fact that there have been any thefts is more significant than the amounts—so far—taken. In parallel, he argues that assembling any device, and especially anything more than a dirty bomb, is an extraordinarily demanding task, one requiring specialized facilities and a large number of trained technicians and scientists. Doing this is hard enough; doing it with the requisite secrecy is next to impossible.

He reinforces his argument by debunking several common scary stories, such as the break-in at a South African nuclear facility in 2007, where many barriers remained between the attackers and the uranium, and the exaggerated claims about al-Qaeda’s interest in nuclear weapons, let alone its progress in procuring them, which was essentially zero. Most impressively, he catalogs the steps that would be required for terrorists to steal, buy or assemble a nuclear device. By proceeding carefully, he isolates twenty steps, although he admits that the number is a bit artificial and that other analysts could either lump together or split apart some of his requirements. But the key point is that a large number are involved, and all are essential. Simple arithmetic takes over from there, and the multiplicative probabilities involved lead to a vanishingly small probability of success.

Here, of course, arguments can and should take place. Some may feel that Mueller’s list and mathematics are little more than debaters’ points. I think it is a sensible approach, although I do wonder if a parallel analysis of terrorism with conventional weapons would lead us to think that this too could not happen. To the correct claim that terrorists need to succeed only once, Mueller points out that failures can dim future prospects. Plots that are foiled often unravel significant parts of a network and point to weaknesses in intelligence that can be remedied.

Even those who refuse to accept Mueller’s reassurances will be hard put to rebut his argument that the common claims that the threat is “existential” or that our “survival” is at stake make little sense, or at least mislead us as to the problem. Even in the worst case, a terrorist weapon would be small and, barring the movie scenario of planting it in a football stadium, would “only” kill tens of thousands. An unprecedented disaster for the United States, to be sure, although not for countries that have been battlegrounds of the twentieth century. Above all, however, the nation’s survival would not be at stake. Or, rather, the threat to our political and moral survival could come only from our overreaction to an attack.

MUELLER’S TREATMENT stimulates and provokes even when it does not convince. His assertive style and knack for picking telling quotes that often make the author seem thoughtless if not deranged will put off some readers, even if they do not hold the beliefs he skewers. Even critics can see that this is done for the good purpose of making us reconsider established views, but even believers will see that Mueller certainly leaves us with many loose ends.

To start with, he never fully explains why we are so obsessed with nuclear weapons. It might have been helpful for him—or for subsequent analysts—to ask who the “we” is. Is this a particularly American malady? Does it stem from a pathological social and political system? Is it the product of our age? Is it only atomic destruction or other threats that we so overestimate? Elsewhere, Mueller has implied that our paranoia is more free-floating,⁵ but his discussion here is brief and unsatisfying.We really want to know whether this stems from the human psyche or elite manipulation or, if both, the triggering conditions. Not having answered these questions, Mueller’s policy prescriptions, many of which I agree with, are not anchored in an analysis of how people are to be brought to reason more sensibly about the magnitude of the threats we face.

In part, the problem may lie in the difficulties we have in judging events of high consequence but low probability. Standard rationality indicates that we should respond very differently if the probability is 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000, but it is the very possibility itself that we tend to dwell on. Thus we are willing to pay much more to reduce the chance of an undesired outcome from 1 percent to 0 percent than from, say, 33 percent to 32 percent, and only part of the reason is that in the former case we would not need to spend anything on protecting against the event. We want to put horrible things out of our minds, which means both that we will exclude certain possibilities from our consciousness when we can and that we may become obsessed with them when we cannot. Compounding these impulses, it is extraordinarily difficult to make sensible probability estimates of unlikely events. How are we to judge whether the likelihood is 1 in 1,000, 1 in 100,000 or something in-between? Are these estimates of likelihood for each week, year or decade? It is terribly difficult to develop a sense of proper proportion when we deal with numbers like these.

Throughout his study, Mueller catalogs the cost of getting this wrong, running the gamut from wasteful spending to the war in Iraq. But—and Mueller would undoubtedly agree—there can be costs to underestimating threats as well. Though current scholarship portrays Neville Chamberlain as much less naive than the stereotyped view, he and his colleagues nevertheless did not take the Nazi menace seriously enough. Before 9/11, the Bush administration could not bring itself to see that terrorists without the sponsorship of a significant state could inflict grave harm on the United States, and the remnants of this view contributed to the impulse to overthrow Saddam. Even if overestimates are more likely than underestimates, we must take account of both.

I suspect, however, that overestimates are indeed more common. In a significant number of cases, our responses have made things worse, and the appropriate mantra would be “don’t do something, just stand there.” One such case mentioned in passing by Mueller is the movement for abolishing nuclear weapons that is now championed by President Obama. Leaving aside the fact that no one has even tried to rebut the powerful argument made almost half a century ago by the Nobel Prize–winning student of strategic interaction Thomas Schelling, that just about the most dangerous number of nuclear weapons in the hands of the great powers would be zero, if the menace of these arms is overestimated, our efforts will at best be misdirected and the diplomatic resources would be better spent elsewhere. Indeed, if Mueller is right, a strenuous effort could backfire, encouraging other countries to believe that the focus on ridding the world of nuclear weapons shows how powerful they are.

The most general gravamen of Mueller’s charge is that not only do we overworry (international politics as a Jewish mother?), but that many problems will be more likely to fade through the natural processes of human, social and political development than by being made the target of explicit policy interventions. “Benign neglect,” so controversial if not infamous in the context of racial inequalities, often is the best policy. Many of our ills may be likened to autoimmune diseases, with unfortunate consequences being less the result of the underlying condition than of our misguided responses to it. Instead of losing sleep over nuclear weapons, we should lose sleep over those who lose sleep over them. Pogo was right.

Robert Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University. His Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and Iraqi War will be published by Cornell University Press in early 2010.

¹ Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

²Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

³ John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 55–79; Robert Jervis, “The Political Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 13, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 80–90.

⁴ John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

⁵ Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006); “The Catastrophe Quota,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no.3 (September 1994): 355–75.