No nuke terror NOR retal

This last point is worth emphasizing. Even in the remote case where an actor successfully acquires a nuclear weapon and primarily seeks raw numbers of casualties—whether due to outbidding or audience costs—other forms of WMDs are likely to be more appealing. As Aum Shinrikyo indicates, this is particularly the case for the group that overcomes the inevitable political and technological hurdles (Nehorayoff et al. 2016, 36–37). For these groups, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons (CBRW) are considerably easier to acquire, use, and stockpile. This is especially true when considered over time, rather than a single operation.18 While there are certainly downsides to CBRWs vis-à-vis nuclear weapons (delivery may paradoxically be easier and the maintenance risks comparatively smaller), they are undoubtedly easier to procure and produce (Zanders 1999). More importantly, CBRWs are perceived as easier to produce and thus likely to be viewed by targets as iterable. Unlike a nuclear attack, CBRW threats are more credible because a single CBRW attack can likely precipitate an indefinite number of follow-ups.

In addition to the problem of iterability, a terrorist organization must always worry about the possible ratchet effect of an attack—a problem Neumann and Smith (2005, 588– 90) refer to as the “escalation trap.” A terrorist organization is different than a state at war because it manipulates other actors primarily through punishment. Campaigns are a communicative activity designed to convince the public and the leaders that the status quo is unsustainable. The message is that the costs of continuing the target state’s policy (such as the United States in Lebanon, France in Algeria, or the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland) will eventually outweigh the benefits. Once an organization conducts a nuclear attack, it lacks options for an encore. Not even the most nightmarish scenarios involve an indefinite supply of weapons. If a single attack plus the threat of one or two others does not induce capitulation, the organization might unwittingly harden the target state’s resolve. The attack could raise the bar such that any future non-nuclear attack constitutes a lessening of costs vis-à-vis the status quo.

There are also heavy opportunity costs involved in pursuing, developing, and maintaining a nuclear capacity, let alone actually deploying and delivering it. As Weiss puts it, “even if a terror group were to achieve technical nuclear proficiency, the time, money, and infrastructure needed to build nuclear weapons creates significant risks of discovery that would put the group at risk of attack. Given the ease of obtaining conventional explosives and the ability to deploy them, a terrorist group is unlikely to exchange a big part of its operational program to engage in a risky nuclear development effort with such doubtful prospects” (Weiss 2015, 82).

Organizational Survival

Terrorist organizations are not monolithic entities, nor are they wholly self-sufficient actors. Historically speaking, these groups consider the public reception of their attacks in a complex manner. As Al Qaeda, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of the 1970s, the IRA, and anarchist groups of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all demonstrate, these groups’ thinking about public reception is nuanced and complex, regardless of time or place. We focus on two types of audiences that would be affected by decisions to attack: those internal to the group itself, and their own broader public.

While many claim that terrorists are undeterrable, the argument misconstrues the relational dynamics between a terrorist organization, target state, international community, and the internal dynamics of the organization itself (Talmadge 2007). It is undoubtedly the case that deterring a terrorist organization in the traditional sense is difficult (Whiteneck 2005; Mearsheimer and Walt 2003). Many lack a recognized territorial base, work on the fringes of the global economy, and are internally structured to be difficult to combat directly. Nearly all possess some permutation of these factors. Combined with the symbolic importance of even relatively small terror attacks—especially given the role of international media—physically denying a group the ability to conduct attacks is uniquely challenging. It is minimally a vastly different proposition than precluding a state’s ability to successfully invade its neighbor or conduct ongoing missile strikes.19 Despite these concerns, there are important reasons deterrence can and empirically does work in the case of terrorist organizations. This is especially possible when the state-terrorist relationship is not zero-sum and the target retains some influence over the realization of the group’s eventual goals (e.g., by denying the group access to territory or withholding international recognition) (Trager and Zagorcheva 2006, 88–89). Nuclear attack presents two significant threats to the organization’s continued existence: internal threats of disintegration and external threats to their continued operations and survival.

Terrorist organizations are not unitary, homogenous organizations. This is especially true for groups possessing the size and competence likely necessary for operational nuclear capacity. As many have noted, the terrorist organizations of the present are vastly different from those Marxist- Leninist groups that terrorized Europe and the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s. There is a well theorized psychological value of the organization to individual terrorists themselves (Post 1998), but there is more to the organizational valuation of survival than captured in this atomistic picture. Modern, large-scale terrorist organizations are typically heavily intertwined with the social fabric of the groups from which they originate (Cronin 2006; Hoffman 2013). Beyond significant networks of financial connections, accounts, and moguls (Hamas, for example, draws funding from a massive international system of mosque-centered charities, while the IRA’s extensive connections to the Irish diaspora in the United States were well documented), many terrorist organizations build extensive networks of sub-organizations that tie them to the communities in which they are based. Hezbollah, like the IRA, is internally divided between a military arm and a political arm and has run an extensive network of community schools, medical care centers, and religious outreach groups. Together they are designed to embed the organization in the social life of (predominantly southern) Lebanon’s Muslim population and provide Hezbollah with fresh recruits (Parkinson 2013). The group’s persistence as a dominant political force in southern Lebanon nearly two decades after the initial Israeli decision to withdraw demonstrates terrorist organizations grow to exceed their initial military objectives. The spread of Al Qaeda and its affiliates has followed a similar path.

Maintaining the continued support of these multiple audiences is therefore a crucial consideration for these organizations. While these audiences could conceivably be more casualty-acceptant than the individuals deciding the group’s operations, the broader public will usually moderate extreme behavior. The literature assessing so-called “radical- ization” and violence by individual actors emphasizes that there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between ideological extremism and acceptance of extraordinary violence in pursuit of those goals (McCauley and Moskalenko 2014; Jurecic and Wittes 2016). It is important to resist the assumption that a politically extreme ideology automatically corresponds to shared assumptions regarding casualty-acceptance.

Some argue that the move toward “mass-casualty” terrorism obviates these concerns. Aside from the fact that the trend line is either flat or receding in terms of the death toll of individual attacks (even if campaigns themselves might be becoming deadlier), there is an orders of magnitude distinction in casualties between a nuclear attack and even the 2001 attack in the United States. While the psychological restraints on nuclear use among states do not translate precisely to this context, there is good reason to believe that transgressing the longstanding nuclear taboo would have dramatic and negative effects on broader public support. In an urban environment, the media would inevitably capture the attack and its gruesome after-effects in photography or video. This imagery would be inconceivable, ubiquitous, and inescapable. Even if supporters accept a highly retributive mentality, or as Hamid (2015) argues about the Islamic State, actively accept the potential of death, this would pose a severe problem for all but the most extreme supporters.20

Beyond these supporters, a nuclear attack affects the internal dynamics of the terrorist organization in multiple ways. There could be divisiveness regarding the most effective use of the weapon. This would be magnified by the scale of the opportunities and perceived opportunity costs. Such debates have the potential to splinter the organization as a whole (Cronin 2009, 100–02). Factional conflict in terrorist organizations appears frequently over questions of goals and tactics (Crenshaw 1981; Chai 1993). A decision to attack with a nuclear weapon risks considerable internal alienation over a variety of issues—targeting decisions, method of attack, campaign goals, potential deaths of supporters, and the domestic and international response (Mathew and Shambaugh 2005, 621–22). Finally, a nuclear attack would exponentially raise the threat to each individual who composes the extended organization. Post-nuclear attack, the greatest strengths of a terrorist organization—its lack of material territory, economy, or overt institutions and reliance on individuals—could turn into its greatest weaknesses (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Jones 2008). Currently, a wealthy financier found to have ties to a terrorist group would be monitored for intelligence, arrested, and brought up on criminal charges. Post-nuclear attack, the consequences would be immediate and rather worse.