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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26569 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I always thought, in a certain sense, it's kind of strange that this hasn't happened already. Possible reasons why, as far as I can guess:

  1. Nuclear weapons security worldwide really is that good, including in Russia, Pakistan, etc.
  2. Just too destructive to really be interesting to terrorist groups. How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once? Not just the trigger-pullers, but every individual involved in getting the device to a target.
  3. Anyone who might possibly steal one, or be unofficially allowed to take one, is too afraid of retaliatory action to actually do it. Russian ultra-nationalists might not care about personally surviving, but they care if somebody nukes Russia back in retaliation.

Or maybe all of them at once. The idea is very popular in dramatic fiction, but somehow never seems to happen in real life. Or even has any stories leak out about it ever coming anywhere near happening.

How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once?

Your classic bomb-throwing anarchist, commie terrorist or car-bombing separatist might shy away from nukes. However, religious extremists are different. I think the reason that 9/11 did not explode a nuke in NYC was not that they wanted to minimize casualties, but that they did not have a viable path to getting a nuke (or getting it into NY).

Perhaps Hamas would not use a nuke against Israel (not that I would bet on it), but the fact that a significant portion of the Gazans support them indicates that there is likely a more radical fringe.

There's also another avenue-

4. The nuclear states basically fedpost-spam the potential supplier and customer networks, so that no one know who wants to buy knows who a possible actual 'legitimate' supplier is and no one who could sell one knows who a 'legitimate' buyer is.

There are absolutely terrorist and extremist groups with high interest in WMDs and WMD-substitutes (we had the Tokyo nerve gas attacks, for one, but the field of bioterrorism is basically just weaponizing natural epidemics). However, the groups that have interest in obtaining nukes are not the same as the groups that have access to nukes, and so all you really need to do is break the chain of commerce between the client (the person who wants the bomb) and the supplier (the smuggler).

This can be done pretty effectively by just stirring doubt and distrust on both sides, especially as both sides are in a psuedo-prisoner's dilemma where both need to be hidden from the eyes of the government authorities to work. A terrorist group / proxy needs to believe they're not being approached by an agent of the government, but runs into the issue that the local government and the local nuclear handlers probably share the same appearance/accent/cultural mannerisms (because a corrupt supplier is part of the government). In reverse, the corrupt supplier needs to believe that not only is their potential contact not a member of the government as well (or an ally of their government), but that the sale won't reveal their otherwise hidden network. Both parties will be 'better off' if they can trust eachother and make the deal, but each also has major payoff incentives to 'defect' and not engage, for fear of revealing themselves.

This is why the more credible loose-nuke risks come in contexts of state collapse (where the state is no longer in a position to monitor/maintain control deterence), widespread corruption (where the ability of the state to monitor is compromised by the state's agents being routinely bribed), but especially black markets (where a standing economic exchange system exists absent, and despite, state efforts). These are the cases where there's more credibility on the suppliers as having access, and more trust on the buyers to getting away with it, and more reason for both to believe the other actor isn't part of the state.

It should be noted that the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway was a back up plan. The group’s original plan was to detonate a nuclear device in Tokyo. They had put together a working group of ex-Soviet scientists to build one. They didn’t get that far, but they got a hell of a lot further along than any Islamic terrorist group ever has.

There's only around 12 thousand nukes in existence, almost all in the US and Russia. They are large heavy objects mounted on huge delivery platforms. Not exactly stealable.

Just you wait - if George Clooney and his 10 closest friends set their mind do it, even a multi-ton missile can disappear.

It might be mostly the second, thinking about it for a few seconds. Just what kind of personality type does it take to seriously want to use a nuke in terrorism (is it some sort of extreme misanthrope, someone whose political convictions are second at best to the nihilistic urge of "kill 'em all"?), and how many of that kind of person does it take to pull off a terror-nuke plot?

I could see an extreme eco terrorist thinking detonating a nuclear bomb in, say, Houston to be a net positive.

Spoken like a true Houstonian.

I mean it would wipe out some backtaxes and make Sheila Jackson Lee either be quiet or generate an amusing soundbite about nuclear weapons, what's not to like?

Just what kind of personality type does it take to seriously want to use a nuke in terrorism (is it some sort of extreme misanthrope, someone whose political convictions are second at best to the nihilistic urge of "kill 'em all"?)

I don't think either extreme misanthropy or nihilism are required or even particularly likely characteristics of a terrorist who would want to use nukes. Merely the conviction that life on Earth is just a very short term pit stop, where your behavior during it determines your placement in the eternity of afterlife would be enough to convince a perfectly regular, pro-social, well-adjusted member of society to believe that murdering 5-6 figure number of people is not only justified but obligated.

I think that's a bit too charitable. There have to be thousands (10s of 1000s?) of muslims who would love to nuke the US, and I've heard quite a few bubbas talk about glassing the desert.

You can probably get a large coordinated group of people EITHER smart enough to steal a nuke OR hateful enough to want to use it, not both.

The Bubbas want the US to glass the desert, assuming they aren't just mouthing off. They're not generally interested in setting up a terrorist organization to steal a nuke to re-enact Trinity in the Middle East.

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