The “terrorist nuclear threat” is overblown – empirics say there’s little chance they can acquire them in any way.

However, there is of course no guarantee that things will remain that way. And, in suggesting that they will change damagingly, Goldberg, in particular, is rechanneling an argument that has been around for a long time. It was in 1974 that journalist John McPhee decided that, although only a small proportion of nuclear professionals expressed a “sense of urgency” about the atomic terrorist, he would devote an entire book to a physicist he was able to find who did (nothing, of course, is as boring as a book about how urgent something isn’t). That was Theodore Taylor, who proclaimed the problem to be “immediate” and who explained to McPhee at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a bomb.” To fabricate a crude atomic bomb, Taylor patiently, if urgently, pointed out, was “simple”: all one needed was some plutonium oxide powder, some high explosives, and “a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store.” “Everything is a matter of probabilities,” Taylor assured his rapt auditor, and at the time he thought either that it was already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then,” or that “in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late.”10 Nearly a half-century later, we continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their “simple” task. The argument received new impetus with the 9/11 attacks which 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. 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. For example, 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. An al-Qaeda computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001 indicated that the group’s proposed startup budget at the time for research on weapons of mass destruction (almost all of it to be focused on primitive chemical weapons work) was some $2,000 to $4,000.14 In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, officials had many more al-Qaeda computers, and it appears that nothing in their contents suggested the miserable little group had the time or inclination, let alone the money, to set up and staff a uranium-seizing operation, as well as a fancy, super-high-tech facility to fabricate a bomb.15 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.16 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 are a confused, inadequate, incompetent, blundering, and gullible bunch, rarely able to get their act together. All 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.”17 And much the same holds for Europe and the est of the developed world.18 This holds even for the putative “mastermind” of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: just about all of his many terrorism schemes either failed or did not even begin to approach fruition. Overall, as a terrorism planner, he had a fertile mind but a feeble record of accomplishment, one characterized by fanciful scheming and stunted execution.19 In this context, 9/11 clearly stands out as an aberration. Except perhaps for the use of vehicles to deliver mayhem, there has there has been remarkably little innovation in terrorist weaponry or methodology since 9/11.20 Like their predecessors, they have continued to rely on bombs (many of which fail to detonate or do much damage) and bullets.21 There is another aspect to this argument. It is held that, whereas the number of bathtub deaths does not fluctuate much from year to year, terrorism deaths are not very evenly distributed over time and this somehow makes the phenomenon unpredictable and unstable. It is a “fat-tailed distribution” in which there are many small events and a few “outliers that are really important.”22 Thus, we should give up, suggests Bloomberg’s Justin Fox: “Five or 10 or even 50 years of data isn’t necessarily enough to allow one to predict with confidence what going to happen next year.”23 As Figures 1 and 2 suggest, the frequency and destructiveness of terrorism and terrorism cases in the United States is indeed anything but uniform.24 However, many natural hazards show the same pattern as terrorism. For example, the frequency and destructiveness of tornados range widely: the death count can vary by up to twenty-fold from year to year. Moreover, they are also far more likely than terrorism to kill. However the lumpiness doesn’t preclude sensible analysis. Concern about this unevenness, as bathtub critics Justin Fox and Kenneth Anderson both note, stems from a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that stesses the importance of extreme events which he calls “Black Swans.” Taleb argues that “almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps” and “our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the extremely improbable.”25 However, the account suffers from selection bias. It focuses on those unexpected and emotion-engaging events and phenomena (like 9/11) that became consequential (and therefore Black Swans), while ignoring ones that failed to do so. Moreover, insofar as Black Swan events carry an “extreme impact,” this quality derives not so much from their unexpectedness or from the emotions they initially trigger as from the reaction or overreaction they generate. These reactions are sometimes as unexpected as the event itself, and often they do not correlate well with the event’s size or with its objective historical importance. Moreover, although some unexpected and emotion-engaging events do have considerable consequences, much consequential development in human history—probably most of it—stems not from such events, but from changes in thinking and behavior that are decidedly gradual and often little-noticed as they occur.26