While bin Laden is dead, his deputy and successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been al Qaeda’s advocate-in-chief of nuclear jihad. In a 300-page treatise entitled Exoneration published in 2008, Zawahiri argues that the death of millions of men, women, and children in a nuclear attack on the United States is a justifiable means to its ultimate end of establishing a global Islamic caliphate. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative and head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s weapons of mass destruction and terrorism unit, argued in Islam and the Bomb, a report of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, that “Zawahiri’s fatwa in 2008 may have started the clock ticking for al Qaeda’s next largescale strike on America.” His ambitions have surely been amplified, not diminished, by the death of bin Laden. Unquestionably, al Qaeda’s core has been significantly degraded by a decade of war and focused attacks conducted by the U.S. and its allies around the world. During the same decade, however, the concept of jihad attacks by homegrown terrorists has taken root. Faisal Shahzad (the “Times Square Bomber”) is a good case in point. He lived in America for 13 years, earned an MBA, bought a home in a comfortable Connecticut suburb and owned a Mercedes, and became a U.S. citizen. Then one afternoon in May 2010, he packed his car with explosives, parked it in the middle of New York’s Times Square, and attempted to detonate a bomb. As Shahzad stated at his trial last June: “Until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and stops the drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking the U.S.” Fortunately, his plot to murder hundreds of innocents failed because of a technical glitch. But the question remains: what if the next Shahzad succeeds, this time with a nuclear bomb hidden in the rear of his car? The discovery in February this year of a plot by Saudi national Khalid Aldawsari, a college student in Texas, to attack U.S. nuclear
“Today, and for as far into the future as the eye can see, civilised people will live in a world in which super-empowered small groups can kill on a scale which was previously the exclusive domain of national governments.”
power plants serves as a vivid reminder that self-radicalised individuals’ aspirations are not limited just to car bombs. Last month’s attack in Norway by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik is the latest reminder that ambitious individuals and small groups can conduct terrorist attacks that claim mass casualties. Breivik used fertiliser from his own farm to create a bomb that he detonated in downtown Oslo, killing eight people, then ferried to an island retreat where he killed 69 more with an automatic machine gun. The U.S. is not terrorists’ only target. Consider Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Mumbai (2008). January’s suicide bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, coupled with last year’s discovery that two men had tried to sell 120 grams of highly enriched uranium to an operative posing as an Islamic extremist in Georgia, show Russia’s vulnerability to its own mega-terrorism threat. If a 20-year-old suicide bomber could kill nearly 40 people and injure 180 more at a bustling airport, and two men could smuggle fissile material across a border in a cigarette case, it requires little imagination to envision a nuclear attack that kills thousands. As the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism stated in 2008: “If one maps terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, all roads intersect in Pakistan.” Since then, the risk has escalated. Terrorist attacks in Pakistan claimed more than 2,500 victims in 2010, up 160 per cent from 2008.
Pakistani officials insist that the country’s nuclear arsenal is “200 per cent safe”, a dubious assertion given the Taliban raid on a Karachi naval base in May. If four Taliban fighters storm a facility located only 15 miles away from a nuclear-weapons storage site and hold off 100 commandos, rangers, and marines for 16 hours, what does that say about the country’s ability to secure its nuclear weapons? The biggest fear is that a Pakistani Bruce Ivins will acquire and use nuclear or biological material. Ivins was a U.S. government microbiologist who abused his access to dangerous materials to perpetrate the 2001 anthrax attacks, killing five people and endangering hundreds more. Pakistan has the world’s most rapidly expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons and stockpile of nuclear material. As an increasingly unstable country with growing numbers of Islamic extremists within its security ranks, the risk that the world’s deadliest weapon will end up in dangerous hands has escalated. On 11 September 2001, al Qaeda killed twice as many people as the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The terrorist threat shown by 9/11 did not die with bin Laden. The relentless advance of science and technology has inexorably placed the means of mass murder in the hands of more individuals. Mega-terror will remain a defining threat of the 21st century. Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS); founding dean of HKS; and a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense.
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