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September 13, 2003
Threshhold
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
Required reading: Belmont Club on the nuclear threshhold in the age of terrorism. I've long felt, like James Lileks, that it is inevitable that we will lose a city to nuclear terrorist attack some time in the next 20 years. Wretchard follows the chain of logic to demonstrate why, once the Islamists demonstrate the capability, the rational response is the immediate and total destruction of the Muslim world.
Actually, I think that there is a more measured response that might avoid this. If you look at the Muslim countries, there are four basic tiers in which they fall: nations with intent against the West and with WMD capability in place or close (Iran, Syria, Pakistan?); nations with intent against the West but no WMD capability (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia); nations with no pronounced intent towards the West, but with WMD capability (Pakistan?); and nations with neither pronounced intent against the West, nor WMD capability, though often with insurgent anti-Western forces within the country (Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait). The question about Pakistan's intent is whether they will be able to resist the Islamists, or will give them help to keep them away from Pakistan itself, or will fall to the Islamists.
If a nuclear terrorist attack were launched within the US or Europe, every city in a first tier nation with more than 10000 people could be obliterated, along with their entire military and major economic targets (occupying those critical to us and destroying the rest). This would almost certainly remove their ability to strike at us again. Then we could watch the second tier countries, and let them know that any attempt to acquire WMDs would cause them to meet the same fate. At that point, it could either go towards an outright race to acquire WMDs to use against the West, or the moderates could take over and the Muslims could roll over. If the former, we could obliterate the second tier countries, and mop up anything left over in the first tier countries. If, at that point, there was still a valid attempt to acquire the means to act against the West, we could push to the extremity of the analysis and eliminate every Muslim nation - a nuclear genocide.
This would, needless to say, be very bad politically, economically and socially. However, it would still be better than being destroyed ourselves. By putting in detents in the escalation scheme, we could potentially avoid the worst-case scenario, though I don't hold great faith in the ability of extremists to see reason.
UPDATE (9/21): Belmont Club offers a postscript and some reader response. As clarification of my comments, I agree with Belmont Club's statement that "If Islam desires the secret of the stars it must embrace the kuffar as its brother -- or die." I am simply positing that it is not necessarily the case that, once nuclear exchanges start, they can only end with the destruction of every Muslim state. I believe that cutting the heart out of the Muslim states - the destruction of the radicalised Arab states in particular - would do it. If not, we would eventually get to Belmont Club's end state: Islam - and much else - would be gone.
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