The impact to terrorism is small and they won’t go nuclear

Thus far, 9/11 stands out as an extreme outlier: scarcely any terrorist act, before or after, in war zones or outside them, has inflicted even one-tenth as much total destruction. That is, contrary to common expectations, the attack has thus far been an aberration, not a harbinger.8 And al-Qaeda central, the group responsible for the attack, has, in some respects at least, proved to resemble President John Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—an entity of almost trivial proportions that got horribly lucky once. The tiny group of perhaps 100 or so does appear to have served as something of an inspiration to some Muslim extremists. They may have done some training, may have contributed a bit to the Taliban's far larger insurgency in Afghanistan, and may have participated in a few terrorist acts in Pakistan. In his examination of the major terrorist plots against the West since 9/11, Mitchell Silber finds only two—the shoe bomber attempt of 2001 and the effort to blow up transat- lantic airliners with liquid bombs in 2006—that could be said to be under the "command and control" of al-Qaeda central (as opposed to ones suggested, endorsed, or inspired by the organization), and there are questions about how full its control was even in these two instances, both of which, as it happens, failed miserably.9 And, although some al-Qaeda affiliates have committed substantial damage in the Middle East, usually in the context of civil wars, their efforts to carry out terrorism in the West have been rare and completely ineffective.10 Even under siege, it is difficult to see why al-Qaeda could not have carried out attacks at least as costly and shocking as the shooting rampages (organized by other groups) that took place in Mumbai in 2008 or at a shopping center in Kenya in 2013. Neither took huge resources, presented major logistical challenges, required the organization of a large number of perpetrators, or needed extensive planning.

However, there is of course no guarantee that things will remain that way, and the 9/11 attacks inspired the remarkable extrapolation that, because the terrorists were successful with box cutters, they might soon be able to turn out weapons of mass destruction— particularly nuclear ones—and then detonate them in an American city. For example, in his influential 2004 book, Nuclear Terrorism, Harvard's Graham Allison relayed his "considered judgment" that "on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not."11 Allison has had a great deal of company in his alarming pronouncements. In 2007, the distinguished physicist Richard Garwin put the likelihood of a nuclear explosion on an American or European city by terrorist or other means at 20 percent per year, which would work out to 91 percent over the eleven- year period to 2018.12

Allison's time is up, and so is Garwin's. These oft-repeated warnings have proven to be empty. And it is important to point out that not only have terrorists failed to go nuclear, but as William Langewiesche, who has assessed the process in detail, put it in 2007, "The best information is that no one has gotten anywhere near this. I mean, if you look carefully and practically at this process, you see that it is an enormous undertaking full of risks for the would-be terrorists."13 That process requires trusting corrupted foreign collaborators and other criminals, obtaining and transporting highly guarded material, setting up a machine shop staffed with top scientists and technicians, and rolling the heavy, cumbersome, and untested finished product into position to be detonated by a skilled crew, all the while attracting no attention from outsiders.

Nor have terrorist groups been able to steal existing nuclear weapons—characteristically burdened with multiple safety devices and often stored in pieces at separate secure locales—from existing arsenals as was once much feared. And they certainly have not been able to cajole leaders in nuclear states to palm one off to them—though a war inflicting more death than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined was launched against Iraq in 2003 in major part under the spell of fantasies about such a handover.1'1

More generally, the actual terrorist "adversaries" in the West scarcely deserve accolades for either dedication or prowess. It is true, of course, that sometimes even incompetents can get lucky, but such instances, however tragic, are rare. For the most part, terrorists in the United States are a confused, inadequate, incompetent, blundering, and gullible bunch, only occasionally able to get their act together. Most seem to be far better at frenetic and often self-deluded scheming than at actual execution. A summary assessment by RAND's Brian Jenkins is apt: "their numbers remain small, their determination limp, and their competence poor."13 And much the same holds for Europe and the rest of the developed world.16 Also working against terrorist success in the West is the fact that almost all are amateurs: they have never before tried to do something like this. Unlike criminals they have not been able to develop street smarts.