Nuclear war---cash is key

The critical issue is how a nuclear terrorist attack may “catalyze” inter-state nuclear war, especially the NC3 systems that inform and partly determine how leaders respond to nuclear threat. Current conditions in Northeast Asia suggest that multiple precursory conditions for nuclear terrorism already exist or exist in nascent form. In Japan, for example, low-level, individual, terroristic violence with nuclear materials, against nuclear facilities, is real. In all countries of the region, the risk of diversion of nuclear material is real, although the risk is likely higher due to volume and laxity of security in some countries of the region than in others. In all countries, the risk of an insider “sleeper” threat is real in security and nuclear agencies, and such insiders already operated in actual terrorist organizations. Insider corruption is also observable in nuclear fuel cycle agencies in all countries of the region. The threat of extortion to induce insider cooperation is also real in all countries. The possibility of a cult attempting to build and buy nuclear weapons is real and has already occurred in the region.[15] Cyber-terrorism against nuclear reactors is real and such attacks have already taken place in South Korea (although it remains difficult to attribute the source of the attacks with certainty). The stand-off ballistic and drone threat to nuclear weapons and fuel cycle facilities is real in the region, including from non-state actors, some of whom have already adopted and used such technology almost instantly from when it becomes accessible (for example, drones).[16]

Two other broad risk factors are also present in the region. The social and political conditions for extreme ethnic and xenophobic nationalism are emerging in China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. Although there has been no risk of attack on or loss of control over nuclear weapons since their removal from Japan in 1972 and from South Korea in 1991, this risk continues to exist in North Korea, China, and Russia, and to the extent that they are deployed on aircraft and ships of these and other nuclear weapons states (including submarines) deployed in the region’s high seas, also outside their territorial borders.

The most conducive circumstance for catalysis to occur due to a nuclear terrorist attack might involve the following nexi of timing and conditions:

Low-level, tactical, or random individual terrorist attacks for whatever reasons, even assassination of national leaders, up to and including dirty radiological bomb attacks, that overlap with inter-state crisis dynamics in ways that affect state decisions to threaten with or to use nuclear weapons. This might be undertaken by an opportunist nuclear terrorist entity in search of rapid and high political impact.

Attacks on major national or international events in each country to maximize terror and to de-legitimate national leaders and whole governments. In Japan, for example, more than ten heads of state and senior ministerial international meetings are held each year. For the strategic nuclear terrorist, patiently acquiring higher level nuclear threat capabilities for such attacks and then staging them to maximum effect could accrue strategic gains.

Attacks or threatened attacks, including deception and disguised attacks, will have maximum leverage when nuclear-armed states are near or on the brink of war or during a national crisis (such as Fukushima), when intelligence agencies, national leaders, facility operators, surveillance and policing agencies, and first responders are already maximally committed and over-extended.

At this point, we note an important caveat to the original concept of catalytic nuclear war as it might pertain to nuclear terrorist threats or attacks. Although an attack might be disguised so that it is attributed to a nuclear-armed state, or a ruse might be undertaken to threaten such attacks by deception, in reality a catalytic strike by a nuclear weapons state in conditions of mutual vulnerability to nuclear retaliation for such a strike from other nuclear armed states would be highly irrational.

Accordingly, the effect of nuclear terrorism involving a nuclear detonation or major radiological release may not of itself be catalytic of nuclear war—at least not intentionally–because it will not lead directly to the destruction of a targeted nuclear-armed state. Rather, it may be catalytic of non-nuclear war between states, especially if the non-state actor turns out to be aligned with or sponsored by a state (in many Japanese minds, the natural candidate for the perpetrator of such an attack is the pro-North Korean General Association of Korean Residents, often called Chosen Soren, which represents many of the otherwise stateless Koreans who were born and live in Japan) and a further sequence of coincident events is necessary to drive escalation to the point of nuclear first use by a state. Also, the catalyst—the non-state actor–is almost assured of discovery and destruction either during the attack itself (if it takes the form of a nuclear suicide attack then self-immolation is assured) or as a result of a search-and-destroy campaign from the targeted state (unless the targeted government is annihilated by the initial terrorist nuclear attack).

It follows that the effects of a non-state nuclear attack may be characterized better as a trigger effect, bringing about a cascade of nuclear use decisions within NC3 systems that shift each state increasingly away from nuclear non-use and increasingly towards nuclear use by releasing negative controls and enhancing positive controls in multiple action-reaction escalation spirals (depending on how many nuclear armed states are party to an inter-state conflict that is already underway at the time of the non-state nuclear attack); and/or by inducing concatenating nuclear attacks across geographically proximate nuclear weapons forces of states already caught in the crossfire of nuclear threat or attacks of their own making before a nuclear terrorist attack.[17]