Terror in extremis.

• Author: Gallucci, Robert L.
• Position: Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? - Book review

Brian Michael Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), 457 pp., $26.95.

Brian Jenkins does not think we, as a nation, should ignore the risks associated with a nuclear terrorist attack. He does not believe the consequences would be trivial. He thinks we ought to take specific steps to reduce the likelihood of such an event occurring. But he also thinks that the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack is lower than "expert" estimates, that these estimates create an atmosphere of terror, that deterrence is still a useful defense against the threat, that by planning we can reduce the effects of an attack if it occurs, that we should stop hyping the threat and putting our civil liberties at risk, and that, in general, we ought to be less hysterical in our approach to nuclear terrorism.

In short, he sounds like the experienced field operative turned cold, calculating analyst of terrorism that he is. Jenkins seeks to overturn the emerging conventional wisdom of what constitutes the greatest threat to American security, and his arguments cannot be dismissed. But to what extent they ought to be embraced and genuinely cause us to revise our risk assessment about nuclear terrorism is a fair and important question of national security. Or, as President Bush is supposed to have asked simply, "How real is this nuclear terrorism thing?" Jenkins's major complaint in his new book, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?, is that experts, government officials and the media together have made Americans the victim of nuclear fears by exaggerating the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist event occurring, overstating the impact such an event would have, and injecting emotion and hysteria into the national-security discourse on the subject. He quotes academics, respected national-security experts and senior government officials who have pointed to nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat facing the nation in the post-9/11 world. He refers to popular television shows and movies that moved from dramatizing a superpower nuclear exchange during the cold war to plots involving stolen or improvised nuclear devices during the war on terror. After discussing former-CIA Director George Tenet's deep concern about a nuclear terrorist attack, described in a book Tenet wrote after leaving office, Jenkins quotes Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview on Face the Nation last year: "The threat to the United States now of ... a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities is the greatest threat we face.... It's something we have to worry about and defeat every single day."

The net effect of all the hype, Jenkins argues, is that al-Qaeda is "the world's first terrorist nuclear power without, insofar as we know, possessing a single nuclear weapon," and Americans are the victims of nuclear terror without ever having experienced any act of nuclear terrorism.

What we want to know, of course, is whether the author has it right. Jenkins, who has been studying and writing about terrorists and terrorism for more than thirty years, knows what he is talking about when he dissects the motives of and self-imposed constraints on terrorists. His chapters on terrorists are extremely well-written and informative surveys aimed at placing the nuclear terrorist act in the proper context. He has good and bad news for us...