Refusing to be preempted.

• Author: Will, George F.
• Position: Worldview - War on terror - Viewpoint essay

WHAT I HAVE TO SAY about the war on terror draws heavily on my earlier life as a professor and student of political philosophy. A long life in journalism and around Washington, D.C., has taught me not just that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. We are in a war of terror being waged by people who take ideas with lethal seriousness, and we had better take our own ideas seriously as well.

I think the beginning of comprehending the war is to realize what occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. What happened was that we as a people were summoned back from a holiday from history that we understandably had taken at the end of the Cold War. History is served up to the American people with uncanny arithmetic precision. Almost exactly 60 years passed from the October 1929 collapse of the stock market to the November 1989 crumbling of the Berlin Wall--years of depression, hot war, and Cold War, at the end of which the American people said: "Enough, we are not interested in war anymore."

The trouble is, as the Soviet Union's Leon Trotsky once said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." This is a war with a new kind of enemy--suicidal, and hence impossible to deter, melding modern science with a kind of religious primitivism. Furthermore, our enemy today has no return address in the way that previous adversaries, be it Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, had return addresses. When attacks emanated from Germany or the USSR, we could respond militarily or we could put in place a structure of deterrence and containment. Not true with this new lot.

Our enemy today refutes an axiom that has governed international relations for nearly 400 years, since the Peace of Westphalia, when the nation-state system began to emerge in Europe. The axiom was that a nation mortally could be threatened or seriously wounded only by another nation--by massed armies and fleets on the seas, and an economic infrastructure to support both. This no longer is true. It is perfectly clear now that one maniac with a small vial of smallpox spores can kill millions of Americans.

On the other hand, the enemies who attacked us on 9/11 failed to ask themselves the question, "Then what?" That is the question Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto asked when the Japanese government summoned him in 1940 and told him to take a fleet across the Noah Pacific and deliver a devastating blow against the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto said he could do that if his government would design some shallow running torpedoes and a few other things. He said he could run wild in the Pacific for six months, or maybe a year--but he asked his government, "Then what?" Yamamoto knew America, and he loved America. He studied at Harvard University and had been back to the U.S. as a diplomat in Washington, D.C. He understood that, after Pearl Harbor, Japan would have an enraged, united, incandescent, continental superpower on its hands, and that Japan's ultimate defeat would be implicit in its initial victory. Our current enemies will learn the same thing.

Meanwhile, we have worries--and these are not new worries. In 1946, Congress held what today are remembered, by the few who recall such things, as the "Screwdriver Hearings." They summoned J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, and asked him if it would be possible to smuggle an atomic device into New York and detonate it. Oppenheimer replied that of course it would be possible. Congress then asked how it would be possible to detect such a device. Oppenheimer answered: "With a screwdriver." What he meant was that every container that came into the city of New York would have to be opened and inspected.

Some 7,000,000 seaborne shipping containers pass through our ports each year.. About five percent will be given cursory examination. Around 30,000 trucks crossed our international borders today. If this was a normal day, about 21,000 pounds of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin were smuggled into our country. How hard would it be, then, to smuggle in a football-sized lump of highly enriched uranium sufficient to make a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon to render Manhattan uninhabitable for the next 100 years?

To enrich uranium is a very complex process that requires scientists and vast physical plants but, once you have it, making a nuclear weapon requires only two or three good physics graduate students--and there is an enormous amount of fissile material floating around the world. In 1993, some officials from the Department of Energy, along with some Russian colleagues, went to a Soviet-era scientific facility outside Moscow and used bolt cutters...