We're ALL Going to DIE!

U.S. Debates Deterrence for Nuclear Terrorism

WASHINGTON, May 7 —

Every week, a group of experts from agencies around the government — including the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the F.B.I. and the Energy Department — meet to assess Washington’s progress toward solving a grim problem: if a terrorist set off a nuclear bomb in an American city, could the United States determine who detonated it and who provided the nuclear material?

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So far, the answer is maybe.

That uncertainty lies at the center of a vigorous, but carefully cloaked, debate within the Bush administration. It focuses on how to refashion the American approach to nuclear deterrence in an attempt to counter the threat posed by terrorists who could obtain bomb-grade uranium or plutonium to make and deliver a weapon.

A previously undisclosed meeting last year of President Bush’s most senior national security advisers was the highest level discussion about how to rewrite the cold war rules. The existing approach to deterrence dates from the time when the nuclear attacks Washington worried about would be launched by missiles and bombers, which can be tracked back to a source by radar, and not carried in backpacks or hidden in cargo containers.

Among the subjects of the meeting last year was whether to issue a warning to all countries around the world that if a nuclear weapon was detonated on American soil and was traced back to any nation’s stockpiles, through nuclear forensics, the United States would hold that country “fully responsible” for the consequences of the explosion. The term “fully responsible” was left deliberately vague so that it would be unclear whether the United States would respond with a retaliatory nuclear attack, or, far more likely, a nonnuclear retaliation, whether military or diplomatic.

But that meeting of Mr. Bush’s principal national security and military advisers in May 2006 broke up with the question unresolved, according to participants. The discussion remained hung up on such complexities as whether it would be wise to threaten Iran even as diplomacy still offered at least some hope of halting Tehran’s nuclear program, and whether it was credible to issue a warning that would be heard to include countries that America considers partners and allies, like Russia or Pakistan, which are nuclear powers with far from perfect nuclear safeguards.

Then, on Oct. 9, North Korea detonated a nuclear test.
Mr. Bush responded that morning with an explicit warning to President Kim Jong-il that “transfer of nuclear weapons or material” to other countries or terrorist groups “would be considered a grave threat to the United States,” and that the North would be held “fully accountable.”

A senior American official involved in the decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing private national security deliberations, said, “Given the fact that they were trying to cross red lines, that they were launching missiles and that they conducted the nuclear test, we finally decided it was time.”

Mr. Bush was able to issue a credible warning, other senior officials said, in part because the International Atomic Energy Agency has a library of nuclear samples from North Korea, obtained before the agency’s inspectors were thrown out of the country, that would likely make it possible to trace an explosion back to North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. The North Koreans are fully aware, government experts believe, that the United States has access to that database of nuclear DNA.

But when it comes to other countries, many of that library’s shelves are empty. And in interviews over the past several weeks, senior American nuclear experts have said that the huge gap is one reason that the Bush administration is so far unable to make a convincing threat to terrorists or their suppliers that they will be found out.

“I believe the most likely source of the material would be from the Russian nuclear arsenal, but you shouldn’t confuse ‘likely’ with ‘certainty’ by any means,” said Scott D. Sagan, co-director of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, who has studied the problem known in Washington and the national nuclear laboratories as “nuclear attribution.”
Mr. Sagan noted that nuclear material in a terrorist attack might also come from Pakistan, home of the network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The Bush administration is also finding a skeptical audience when it warns of emerging nuclear threats, since its assessments of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity in advance of the 2003 invasion proved wildly off the mark. On Sunday, defending his new book during an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, made the case that any past errors should not blind the public to the threat of nuclear attack posed by Al Qaeda today.“What I believe is that Al Qaeda is seeking this capability,” Mr. Tenet said.

Pakistani officials have been visiting Washington recently offering assurances that their nuclear supplies and weapons are locked down with sophisticated new technology. During a presentation at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonprofit organization here that studies nuclear proliferation, Lt. Col. Zafar Ali, who works in the arms control section of the Pakistani Strategic Plans Division, said that while Al Qaeda and other groups may want a nuclear weapon, “there are doubts that these organizations have the capability to fabricate a nuclear device.”

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from the NYT

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Follow this link to some excellent comments about when shit hits the fan, What done?

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/05/08/feds-wonder-if-jihadis-nuke-us-who-do-we-nuke-in-return/#comment-394369

Some comments from hotair:

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The key to Nuclear Deterence is THREAT!
We need to make the statement NOW that if we are nuked by ANYONE using Jihad as an excuse, we will declare war on Islam itself, and Nuke Mecca, and other sites holy to Islam, including in Saudi Arabia.
What you have to do is make the threat large enough that reasonable Moslems will ensure the rabid jihadists are not able to carry through an attack… you have to threaten all the holy sites of Islam itself.
MAD worked in the Cold War because it was in BOTH major powers interests to reign in the crazies…. we need to bring the Islamic people into reigining in theirs.
Its the THREAT that needs to be made… and I’d do it on National TV to the Congress, and the UN.

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We did not bomb religious sites during WWII, and that was good decision making on the part of the commanders. However during WWII, we were not at war with Shinto or other religions of Japan or Germany. But today WE ARE AT WAR WITH ISLAM, and we need to wake up to that fact.

Enemy identification is real important in war. And just like the point that Robert Spencer has made time and again, we are not at war with terrorism, that is a tactic and not the enemy. After being nuked by jihadis I don’t think we would have a problem with identifying anyone as the enemy that identified themselves as Islamic. But I hope we don’t have to get nuked to adopt that policy.

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In the event of a nuclear terrorist strike on the United States, both Mecca AND Medina MUST suffer a nuclear strike in retaliation. It is the ONLY reponse that makes sense. Not only would it be necessary to nuke those cities, but it would ONLY be a sufficient response if the “dirtiest” nuclear device in the U.S. inventory were utilitized in the strike. By “dirty” nuke, I mean a device that would make their two “holiest” sites completely uninhabitable (certain poison to human life) for the next 10,000 years. The nuclear contamination MUST be THAT severe.

Okay. Now. WHY?

Because it is the ONLY way to STOP the violence. The total, complete, and eternal destruction of their “holiest” sites would END Islam, once and for all. Islam is a system of “works”. The fanatic element responible for the violence is trying to perform “works” (on Allah’s behalf) that will secure a guarantee of eternal reward (in paradise). One of their required works is that “at least once in their life” they must make a pilgrimage to their holy sites. If they can not make their pilgrimage, they can not complete the “works” required to secure their “salvation”. By their own stupid rules, outlined their “holy” books, if Mecca and Medina were unapproachable, then ALL muslims all doomed to eternal damnation.

So what effect would this have? Simple. It would completely destroy all incentive…to do ANYTHING. There would no longer be ANY point in being a Muslim, because there would be no possibility of ever being able to do the “works” required by Allah to secure eternal reward. Within a generation, Islam would disappear from the face of the earth.

Game over. (Game, set, match, actually).

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