When the Romans set out to annihilate Carthage they first had to lay
siege to the city and overcome its defenses. When Francisco Pizarro
led a small band of Spanish soldiers into Peru and destroyed Incan
society, he first had to prevail in fierce fighting. No more. A
century and a half into the Industrial Revolution, advances in
science and technology have reached the stage where leading
industrial nations can make weapons of mass destruction that are so
lethal relative to their size and weight that they can be used to
circumvent defenses--even in clandestine ways--for the purpose of
annihilating a country's society without first defeating its military
forces.
Today, our perception of these weapons and the problems they present
is crucially shaped by our recent experience during the Cold War.
Despite much initial alarm and then sustained tension over four
decades, this was a period during which military strategy
unexpectedly became insulated from the nuclear threat, and in which
great restraint was observed as far as all weapons of mass
destruction were concerned. Our current strategic thought tends to
project this peculiar experience into the future. It assumes that the
use of mass destruction weapons will either be deterred or be
confined to localized disasters caused by strategically incompetent
terrorists. Competent adversaries, this thinking implicitly assumes,
will have to emulate the "revolutionary" military technology that we
now possess, but at the same time adhere to our old,
counter-revolutionary strategy, as worked out in our superpower
rivalry with the former Soviet Union. But, unfortunately, our old
strategy is not an immutable law of nature. A highly competent enemy
might well emerge who will seek to destroy the United States by using
mass destruction weapons in a truly revolutionary kind of warfare.
