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.

Science fiction writers had anticipated mass destruction weapons
decades before 1945, the year when the United States detonated the
first three atomic bombs. Scarcely twenty years later the United
States itself had to fear the kind of attack that could annihilate
its society without first having to defeat any of its powerful
military forces. Another twenty years on, the United States and the
Soviet Union had both accumulated tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons, a few other countries had acquired much smaller stockpiles,
and many more had gained the capability to make atomic bombs or
biological and chemical weapons. What has been the impact on war and
peace in the world, indeed on human civilization, of the accumulation
and proliferation of all these mass destruction weapons?

If you and I were asked today to prepare an epitaph for the
twentieth century brief enough to fit on a tombstone, we might not
waste any words on nuclear proliferation. Instead, we would confine
our lapidary inscription to more influential events. We would recall
the technological revolutions in computers, communications,
agriculture, and public health, as well as the almost fourfold
increase in the world's population that these revolutions made
possible; and we would surely note the two World Wars, the quick rise
and defeat of fascism, the expansion and collapse of Soviet
communism, the wave of decolonization that swept the world from India
through Africa to Central Asia, perhaps the progress toward Europe's
unification, and the economic rise of the Asia-Pacific region. These
were the changes that profoundly transformed the human condition in
the last hundred years. Compared with such upheavals, the social,
economic, and political changes wrought by the A-bomb and the H-bomb,
by nuclear reactors and nuclear proliferation, have added little. Not
surprisingly, while the term "nuclear age" was in vogue forty years
ago, it is rarely used today.

The Frozen Military Revolution

In 1945 it all looked different. The fiery revelation that one of
nature's most powerful forces had been unlocked slashed like a
flaming sword into people's consciousness. Oh, that just a single
bomb could now destroy a whole city! Is it not self-evident, people
then argued, that this new nuclear age must radically change the
world of sovereign nations? Senior statesmen and informed scientists
expected the A-bomb and the yet-to-be-developed H-bomb to transform
military strategy more profoundly than anything in all of history, a
transformation that would compel nations to make a clear break with
traditional uses of force in international conflicts. And they
correctly anticipated that the H-bomb would be followed by entirely
new biological weapons of mass destruction.

Nobody could have foreseen that half a century later military
planners, as well as most scholars, would shrug off these cosmic
questions and instead nibble at the edges of the problem--worrying,
say, about whether a tactical nuclear weapon could be stolen in
Russia and sold to Iran, or whether Iraq might still be hiding some
Second World War-type biological or chemical agents. The horrors that
could have happened--but did not--make a spine-chilling story. In the
Korean War the United States did not use nuclear weapons against the
massive Chinese assault on its forces. North Vietnam did not use
sarin or some other poison gas against U.S. bases in South Vietnam.
After the 1986 U.S. raid on Libya, Qaddafi did not respond by
arranging for a "martyr" to spread anthrax in the New York subway
system. During the war against Afghanistan, the Soviet Union
abstained from using nuclear weapons. During the Gulf War Saddam
Hussein spared allied troops his ready arsenal of chemical weapons.
Most important of all, of course, has been the avoidance of the
ultimate catastrophe, so much feared from the l950s until the end of
the Cold War--the mutual nuclear destruction, by design or accident,
of the Soviet Union, Europe, and North America.

America's carefully designed deterrence strategy, its repeated,
consistent exercise of self-restraint, and its vigorous diplomacy
against the spread of nuclear and other mass destruction weapons
effectively imposed rules of warfare throughout the world that
essentially put these weapons into a forbidden realm. As a result,
not a single nuclear bomb has been used since the attack on Nagasaki;
the Soviet Union never attacked Western Europe; and the very sporadic
uses of chemical or biological agents have been furtive, of limited
impact, and have not involved the two superpowers. In theory, nuclear
weapons could of course have been used not to cause mass destruction
but to eliminate some important military targets without civilian
damage. But in no war since l945 has this happened. In hindsight it
seems clear that the American-made rules worked to the benefit of all
peaceful nations--though they proved particularly helpful to U.S.
foreign policy.

It was surely an extraordinary feat for the United States to develop
the atomic bomb within three years while straining every muscle to
win a two-front war. But what followed on the heels of this awesome
accomplishment was even more extraordinary. By simultaneously coping
with two fateful global forces that threatened nations
everywhere--nuclear weapons and expansionist Soviet communism--the
United States was able to reconstruct and conserve a world order of
independent sovereign nations. The farsighted American statesmanship
that brought this about had to be underpinned by a sustained
intellectual project in strategic analysis. It seems fair to say that
it was the combination of America's political foresight with its
intellectual leadership in nuclear strategy that created what in
retrospect seems an historic miracle: During a prolonged period of
almost unprecedented international tension, the United States
encapsulated the nuclear revolution in military affairs within a
cocoon of non-use.

The widely expected nuclear revolution in the way wars are fought
has until now been frozen in its tracks due to the rules of warfare
that the United States invented, propagated, and imposed on the
world, and the main impact of all the unused nuclear weaponry has
been to preserve the international order. While many social,
political, and technological developments in the last half century
have begun to challenge the role of sovereign nation-states, nuclear
weapons cannot be blamed for the fading of national boundaries or the
growing global interdependence that one hears so much about lately.
Far from transforming the contemporary world of disunited nations,
the nuclear age--reined in by America's rules of war--has worked like
a formaldehyde solution to preserve the Westphalian state system. In
fact, most U.S. military planners have become so accustomed to this
formaldehyde that they regard it as the natural environment whose
laws will govern all possible wars.

Read any of the hundreds of Pentagon reports and scholarly articles
on the coming Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA in Pentagon-speak)
and you will find scarcely a thought about nuclear or other mass
destruction weapons, save for a shy aside. To be sure, these writings
contain fascinating points about "information warfare", where
computers are pitted against computers and zapped by electronic
attacks; about instrumented battlefields, where the commander can
view on a television screen every piece of equipment belonging to
friend or foe and give orders to every tank and foot soldier. The
U.S. military has taken the lead in the relevant technologies for
this kind of warfare and American superiority can be maintained for
years to come. Encouraged by the victory in the Gulf War, American
strategists are now eagerly looking forward to the RMA--that is to
say, their chosen RMA.

Bumbling Enemies with Ski Masks

Alas, America's future enemies will not necessarily fight according
to our Marquis of Queensberry rules. As A.J. Bacevich has recently
written, "those disadvantaged" by the existing rules of warfare will
have a powerful incentive to recast "the terms of conflict in ways
that play to their strengths and exploit our vulnerability." Bacevich
anticipates that the "disadvantaged" will use "subversion, terror,
and banditry" and that, "in the future, such unconventional methods
could become more effective still if combined with . . . weapons of
mass destruction." Others have warned of Russia's inadequately
protected nuclear slag-heap from which a terrorist group, or a
country that sponsors terrorists, could acquire materials to make
nuclear bombs or even obtain a finished weapon. However, when today's
military planners seek to anticipate such eventualities they tend to
postulate enemy strategies that reflect our past experience with
terrorism. Pentagon briefings on nuclear terrorism are likely to
depict the perpetrators as youthful fanatics with ski masks, wanton
enemies who might well cause grievous harm--but fumbling enemies
nonetheless. The briefing charts will not show the potential
Napoleons or Lenins undoing the existing world order with a grand
strategy based on weapons of mass destruction.

Past experience with terrorists is a poor guide for a truly
revolutionary use of mass destruction weapons. By and large,
terrorists either have acted as if they were subject to at least some
rules of war, or else have badly botched what they were trying to do.
For some terrorists it may have been their self-image that ruled out
certain types of violence. For others their code of conduct may have
been dictated by the need to attract new recruits to their cause or
to maintain a level of support in the society at large. In any event,
during recent decades the perpetrators of the majority of terrorist
acts have not employed the kind of sophisticated technologies that
could presumably have been obtained by them without an insurmountable
effort. Consider the safeguards against terrorism used by commercial
airlines. Even airlines that are prime targets for terrorists, such
as El Al, have managed with rather basic precautions to thwart
utterly conventional terrorist attempts. Or consider the cement
planters, with their dried-out juniper bushes, that now ring federal
office buildings. Isn't it reassuring that terrorists refrain from
using a rocket that would fly over these junipers? No need for fancy
new technology: the perpetrators could copy the old Congreve rocket
with which the British attacked--remember the red glare?--Fort
McHenry.

Fortunately, there have been few occasions in modern times when
terrorists, acting in violation of all rules and traditions of
warfare, have sought to kill tens of thousands of people. And
mercifully, in each instance so far, they have gone about it in such
a bumbling way that the intended cataclysm shrank, at most, to a
localized disaster. They have caused dozens of fatalities, not tens
of thousands, and have achieved none of their political goals. The
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York exemplifies such
bumbling. Even more compelling is the case of the pseudo-religious
Japanese sect, Aum Shinrikyo, which produced several types of poison
gas, and one day in l995 scattered sarin in Tokyo's subway. Experts
estimated that Aum Shinrikyo had acquired the technical capability to
kill tens of thousands of people. In actuality, twelve people were
killed in that subway attack.

Pseudo-religious cults can indeed inflict a great deal of harm--on
their members as well as on society. Walter Laqueur is right to warn
us of the many sects and cults nestled in our midst that "could
attempt to play out a doomsday scenario" (for instance, by blowing up
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem at the end of this millennium), sects
that "have their own subcultures, produce books and CDs by the
thousands, and build temples and communities of whose existence most
of their contemporaries are unaware."

But the story of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult provides an object
lesson concerning the innate contradictions of nihilist terrorism. At
one level such groups can, with astonishing competence, prepare
technologically complicated, destructive acts--a truly frightening
prospect in our age of mass destruction weapons. At another level,
however, their nihilism stultifies their strategy. Aum Shinrikyo's
leader was able to build up a complex criminal organization, extort
hundreds of millions of dollars from his followers, recruit Japanese
youths highly skilled in science and technology, enlist competent
business managers who organized his worldwide supply network as well
as a large affiliate in Russia, all the while having informants and
defectors murdered with impunity. Surely, some extraordinary evil
competence was at work here.

But in sharp contrast, Aum Shinrikyo's leader proved totally
incompetent when it came to thinking through the sect's overall
policy and shaping a grand strategy. He apparently wanted to cause
mass casualties that would destroy the Japanese government; but his
vision of what was to follow remained totally vacuous--some fantasy
of a new realm over which he would rule. The means for causing havoc
were in hand; the plans and preparations to seize power were not.
Unlike purposeful revolutionaries (who may use terrorist means),
nihilist movements like Aum Shinrikyo sooner or later are bound to
employ careless tactics and bizarre strategies. He who merely seeks
to destroy for destruction's sake is not likely to prepare for
possible mishaps along the way, or for realistic follow-up strategies
to exploit success. Leaders who believe they must bring about and
preside over the end of the world will attract followers who are
imbued with lunatic ideas, are eager to flirt with suicidal projects,
and have their minds stuffed full of patently false assumptions. The
absurdity of their goals does nothing to mitigate the grief and pain
that nihilist groups can inflict on people. But it does limit the
scope of the calamity.

From Terrorism to Revolution

We can be sure that the time will come when serious and ambitious
revolutionaries organize themselves to use mass destruction weapons
for realistic political ends, not for clumsy terrorism or
self-destructive nihilism. A ruthless and able leader of a
totalitarian movement--another Lenin--could develop a strategy for
these weapons that would serve his political plan. Temptations to act
out some religious--or secular--fantasy would never divert him. He
would resolutely reject any terrorist acts that were strategically
inconsequential and merely risk punishment. Such a leader would also
prohibit any enterprise that only served to inflict revenge, and
would deride as "infantilism" (Lenin's scolding word) the grim and
pointless vengeance on which many terrorist movements spend most of
their time and assets. Instead, this leader would seek to destroy the
political order of a nation, or even of a group of nations, by
attacking his chosen enemy from within. While he would use mass
destruction weapons to serve his political ends, he would also
shrewdly shape and adjust his ends the better to exploit these
weapons.

When Lenin seized power in Russia in l917, he imposed a purposeful
ruthlessness on his Bolshevik organization, rejecting the kind of
nihilist fantasies and aimless anarchist exploits that were in favor
among some nineteenth-century revolutionaries and would-be reformers.
However, he was able to succeed only because the First World War had
ravaged Russia for two and a half years, decimating and demoralizing
its soldiers and sailors and inflicting near starvation on its
people. Given this devastation, the socialist revolution in February
1917 (which ended the czarist regime and preceded Lenin's seizure of
power) quickly led to the undoing of the entire political order.
Alexander Kerensky wrote retrospectively that the word "revolution"
was inapplicable to what happened at that time in Russia: "A whole
world of national and political relationships sank to the bottom, and
at once all existing political and tactical programs . . . appeared
hanging aimlessly and uselessly in space." The First World War had
thus created the platform of political devastation on which Lenin
could build his totalitarian dictatorship.

A twenty-first century "Lenin" will not need to wait for a third
world war to create such a platform. A strategically purposeful use
of mass destruction weapons could do the trick. This use would be
totally different from the kind of nuclear attacks that American
deterrence theory has focused on from the late 1940s until this day.
The aggressor to be deterred would not sit in the Kremlin--the
dominant scenario for U.S. nuclear strategy during the Cold War. Nor
would the aggressor rule over some rogue country utterly vulnerable
to U.S. retaliation--a frequently mentioned scenario today.

To seize power by using mass destruction weapons, this future
terrorist leader might well require some foreign support. However,
the foreign sources of such support need not present the victim of
aggression with suitable targets for retaliation. Recall that in the
late 1970s and early 1980s the Irish Republican Army (IRA) received
the hard-to-detect Semtex explosive through Libyan diplomatic
pouches. Libya did not suffer British retaliation. The IRA also
received monies and arms from sympathizers in the United States, the
better to commit acts of terrorism against the British government.
Her Majesty's Government did not deem a retaliatory strike against
these Americans a viable option. If retaliation is ruled out, so is
deterrence.

Against aggressors who live in the country they are attacking, the
vaunted nuclear deterrent is impotent. And just because these
aggressors would be located within the country's borders, it cannot
be assumed that domestic police and security forces could render them
harmless. A competent organization of totalitarian revolutionaries
that employs covert tactics to cause death and destruction is
difficult to eliminate, especially with the means available to a
democratic government. For more than a quarter century the British
government has been struggling to put an end to IRA attacks in Ulster
and England. Imagine if the IRA changed its style of warfare one day
and started to use new biological weapons instead of dynamite,
Semtex, and other conventional explosives. What could the British
government then do that it is not doing already? This question is not
easily answered, especially since the British government possesses
some of the world's best intelligence services, equipped with the
most sophisticated technology, and unencumbered by anything
comparable to the U.S. Bill of Rights.

U.S. officials whose job it is to prevent domestic terrorism must
sometimes envy their counterparts in London and Belfast for the
permissive investigative powers with which British democracy is
comfortable. Last year, for example, the British parliament gave the
police the power to stop and frisk anybody in the streets, without
needing grounds for suspicion. The U.S. Congress, deliberating
anti-terrorist legislation at the time, balked at the
administration's proposed wiretap authority and at the authorization
of U.S. Army assistance even in the event of chemical weapons use
within the United States. Conservative Republican members of Congress
made common cause with members at the opposite end of the political
spectrum--and with the American Civil Liberties Union--to pull the
sharper teeth from the anti-terrorist legislation.

In the United States, police and other investigative forces must also
cope with the noble American tradition that demands special deference
to religious institutions. Abuse of this privilege by
pseudo-religious cults is not uncommon. By painting itself with a
religious veneer, a criminal organization can inhibit government
authorities from collecting intelligence on its activities and from
forestalling crimes it may be preparing. In the 1970s, for example, a
"Reverend" Jim Jones started a cult in California with leftist
tendencies. That cult had built some links to California politicians
but also engaged in weapons trafficking and coercion of its members.
By l978, the good Reverend, having moved his cult to Guyana, arranged
the mass suicide and murder of 911 people, including children and a
visiting congressman. The FBI had been leaning over backwards to
respect the civil rights of this Jones cult--indeed, a year before
the massacre the Justice Department had opened an investigation into
the FBI's possible harassment of the cult. During the Congressional
inquiry after the massacre, the FBI alluded to this tradition
concerning religious organizations to explain why it had not
infiltrated the Jones cult. The authorities in Japan--tutored in
religious freedom by the United States--exhibited the same inhibition
by failing to investigate several murders and other crimes that Aum
Shinrikyo had committed well before its gas attack in Tokyo's subway.

Civil liberties, freedom of association, tolerance for dissident
views peacefully expressed--all these benefits of a democratic
society give citizens faith and confidence in their political order
and thereby strengthen democratic government. But a skillful
totalitarian leader--for whom democratic government is the very
enemy--can transform these sources of strength into serious, perhaps
fatal, weaknesses. In control of a competent organization that has
mass destruction weapons in hand, such a leader would be capable of
inflicting unbearable stress on the targeted society. He could force
the incumbent government to abandon civil rights and constitutional
principles, one by one, thus compelling the government to dismantle
the foundation of its own legitimacy.

Between Hammer and Anvil

At the same time, a future Lenin could attack from the opposite
direction by adopting a Jekyll-and-Hyde strategy. To this end he
would split his own organization into two branches. One branch would
consist of clandestine cells manned by highly disciplined killers in
control of secret weapons, ready to inflict death and mass
destruction when ordered. This "Mr. Hyde" branch would appear to be
independent of the seemingly benign "Dr. Jekyll" branch, a political
movement operating in the open as a legitimate party or public
interest association, whose purpose would be to propagate
revolutionary ideas and a political program designed to mobilize
throngs of followers. Exploiting its ostensible legitimacy, this
movement would also seek to discredit and delegitimize the incumbent
government in every way possible. It would noisily assert that the
government's methods of tracking downthe hidden mass destruction
weapons discriminated against certain ethnic or racial groups. It
would stage mass demonstrations and launch law suits against alleged
or actual violations of civil liberties and constitutional rights. It
would encourage all sorts of disgruntled groups and alienated people
to join the nationwide melee, the better to handicap government
security forces looking for hidden mass destruction weapons. The two
branches, by cooperating in this manner, would seek to bring about
the collapse of the democratic government and impose their new order.

Such dual structures are already functioning effectively today
(although, of course, as yet without mass destruction weapons). They
play a key role, for example, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
in the Irish-British conflict. Sinn Fein, a legal political party in
Northern Ireland, successfully plays the Dr. Jekyll part by posturing
as a benevolent political movement that just happens to endorse the
goals of the IRA, suitably presented in an idealistic and benign
light. The well known connections between the IRA and Sinn Fein
hardly seem to spoil this dual strategy. It is no secret in Ireland
or England (or for that matter in Washington) that Sinn Fein's
present leader, Gerry Adams, belonged to the IRA in the past and had
been in charge of the Belfast IRA operations at a time when its units
killed fourteen soldiers as well as civilians. To this date, Adams
keeps refusing to condemn IRA bombings that cause grievous casualties.

Yet, the fiction of Adams being the leader of an independent,
law-abiding party enables him to translate the politically unfocussed
staccato of terrorist acts into steady negotiating pressure designed
to lever the outcome in the desired direction. As if to reinforce
this fiction, in 1995 President Clinton invited Adams to the White
House. Should there be a settlement regarding Northern Ireland that
gives the IRA most of what it seeks, it will have been hewed into
shape between the hammer blows of the IRA's destructive attacks and
the anvil of Sinn Fein's unrelenting political demands.

One's mind recoils from visualizing the turmoil and anguish that
such a hammer and anvil strategy would cause should it lead to the
employment of weapons of mass destruction. The leader of such a
revolutionary campaign would be likely to make every effort to
conceal his role in instigating the use of these weapons, and might
well insinuate that his opponents were responsible for the havoc. In
1933 the Nazis blamed the communists for having burned down the
Reichstag in Berlin, a false accusation that greatly helped Hitler to
seize power. (The countercharge that the Nazis were the arsonists is
in doubt to this day.) The totalitarian leader could also encourage
speculation that the first attack might well be followed by others,
to inflame the panic and despair that fuel political chaos. The
societal fabric and the strands of legitimacy that hold democratic
government together could be torn asunder by the fear that the
nuclear destruction of half a city, or the killing of tens of
thousands of people with a new biological weapon, would soon be
followed by similar cataclysms in other cities. We can get an inkling
of such havoc by imagining the reaction in the United States had the
Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 been followed by another two such
disasters within a few weeks--with the FBI having as little success
in finding the perpetrators as it did after the pipe-bomb attack at
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

To be sure, in nearly all instances in this century when democratic
governments were challenged by repeated, clandestinely executed
terrorist attacks, the resulting political changes--if any--were
minimal. These past experiences, though, do not speak to the
consequences of such attacks were they to be carried out with mass
destruction weapons. Every type of injury has a threshold where it
becomes lethal. Perhaps it is still possible to keep criminal,
revolutionary movements from acquiring and using the nuclear bombs
necessary to cross this threshold. Much will depend on prudent
management of the nuclear detritus in Russia. But nuclear fusion and
fission are not the only man-made phenomena on earth that can cause
mass destruction.

For the foreseeable future, mankind is fated to live with the
continuing dynamic that the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions
have unleashed over the last two hundred years. In l945, the atom
bomb project succeeded because nuclear physics had made great
advances before the Second World War. During the next half century
advances in biology and genetic engineering might well cause a more
radical transformation of society and of the world order than any
other field of science. Unfortunately, developments in these fields
are likely to create opportunities for producing mass destruction
weapons that rival the most powerful nuclear bombs.

These opportunities will not be confined within a super-secret
Manhattan Project, dedicated entirely to military ends. Unlike the
achievements in nuclear physics in the first half of this century,
today's progress in biology and genetics rushes forward to help
create more bountiful crops and healthier harvests, to cure hitherto
incurable illnesses, to improve and prolong human life. Such
discoveries cannot be locked up for national security reasons. And in
many instances only a thin line will separate the production of
agents that cure illnesses from those that can be employed to spread
disease and death. The knowledge and techniques for making biological
super-weapons will become dispersed among hospital laboratories,
agricultural research institutes, and peaceful factories everywhere.
Only an oppressive police state could assure total government control
over such novel tools for mass destruction. In a free and open
democracy, those who wish to destroy the political order that they
despise will inevitably find ways to acquire these tools.

What Should Be Done?

This grim prospect has no parallel in history. Will democracy have to
"murder itself" to protect the people? "Remember", wrote John Adams
on a gloomy day in 1814, "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes."