What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima

This isn't likely to help you sleep at night. Steve Coll, the WaPo's former managing editor, has a deep, learned background in researching the results of nuclear proliferation. Here are the "highlights" of a long, interesting and ultimately jarring story.

At a conference on the future of al Qaeda sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory last month, I posed a dark question to 60 or so nuclear weapons scientists and specialists on terrorism and radical Islam: How many of them believed that the probability of a nuclear fission bomb attack on U.S. soil during the next several decades was negligible -- say, less than 5 percent? At issue was the Big One -- a Hiroshima-or-larger explosion that could claim hundreds of thousands of American lives, as opposed to an easier-to-mount but less lethal radiological attack. Amid somber silence, three or four meek, iconoclastic hands went up... This grim view, echoed in other quarters of the national security bureaucracy in recent months, can't be dismissed as Bush administration scaremongering. "There has been increasing interest by terrorists in acquiring nuclear weapons," Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's chief nuclear watchdog, said in a recent interview, excerpts of which were published in Outlook last Sunday. "I cannot say 100 percent that it hasn't happened" already, he added, almost as an afterthought. ...At the center of their pessimism stands the unique figure of Osama bin Laden, still at large, still espousing his ideology of mass-casualty attacks against Americans, with a special emphasis on nuclear weapons -- an ideology that seems destined to outlive him... ...His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan's fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God's will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy. Listening to him on tape after tape, it is difficult to doubt bin Laden's intent. There is evidence that he and his allies have experimented with chemical and biological weapons, typically low-level toxins. But in public, bin Laden talks mainly about nuclear bombs... ...Unlike states, which so far have proved deterrable by the threat of retaliation even when led by madmen, [a terrorist] cell may be utterly indifferent to and beyond the reach of the traditional mechanisms of nuclear deterrence. ...President Bush's pledge after 9/11 to make "no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them" does not seem likely to intimidate a future jihadi nuclear cell. If it had been discovered that the A.Q. Khan network intended to carry out a direct attack on the United States, who in its ranks would be deterred by Bush's threat? The government of Pakistan, which today claims it did not know what Khan was doing? Khan himself, who seems to have been in it for money and glory? His business partners in Malaysia and Dubai, with no political assets to defend? ...

WaPo: What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima