A Vote Against Nuclear Terror

I’ve traditionally regarded single-issue voters as the living dead of the election season, zombies who stagger to the polls with mindless fixation. It is nothing short of horrifying to watch citizens ignore most foreign and domestic policy and choose the next leader of the free world based on his stance on steel tariffs or ethanol subsidies.

But this year is different.

When a country faces a threat to its very existence, voting on other issues becomes a luxury. As during the Cold War, when the steadiness of a candidate’s nuclear trigger finger could determine the fate of Western civilization, this year many Americans will vote for the candidate they think will better protect them from terrorism. That’s why President Bush remains in a dead heat with John Kerry, even though most Americans don’t agree with Bush’s domestic policies. But to choose a president based on his strength in the “war on terror” defines the problem too broadly. The existential threat to America comes not from terrorism writ large, but from nuclear terrorism specifically -- and addressing that is what matters first and foremost.

Understanding why requires abandoning the idea that Sept. 11 “changed everything.” It didn’t. In fact, the U.S. has proved to be extraordinarily resilient, and life today is much the same as it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Three thousand lives were lost, and the grief is still palpable. But our democracy, economy and stability? These things remain intact. Which means that, although a future attack of similar magnitude would be undeniably horrible, it also would be manageable.

Of course, the fear is that the next attack will be much worse, that terrorists might use a “weapon of mass destruction.” But that term is badly misleading, conflating threats that, though all serious, are quite different. Chemical weapons, for example, are not necessarily more powerful than conventional explosives. Radiological weapons, or “dirty bombs,” are more likely to disrupt than destroy, covering an area with radioactive debris. Biological weapons have the potential to kill thousands of people, but they are also very difficult to deliver effectively. Moreover, biological agents act slowly and many can be treated or vaccinated against; our public health system would be able to mitigate their effect. Each of these attacks has the potential to generate mass terror and substantial fatalities, but seem unlikely to fundamentally undermine our society.

Nuclear weapons present a different class of problem. An attack with a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon could kill 500,000 people. Unlike a chemical, biological or radiological weapon, a nuclear bomb destroys property as well as life. It would instantly raze everything in a one-third-mile radius, destroy hundreds of buildings beyond that, and set a three-square-mile area aglow with fire and radiation. The damage could be economy-stopping. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York destroyed seven buildings, killed 2,800 people and cost $90 billion (as is estimated). A nuclear attack could cost trillions. That is not a blip from which our $11-trillion economy could easily recover. An attack on Washington might not be as costly but could present inestimable difficulties by decapitating the federal government.

How likely is this? No one knows with any degree of precision, but the answer I find most haunting comes from Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University: “I believe it’s likely enough that it significantly reduces the life expectancy of everyone who lives and works in downtown Washington, D.C., or New York.”

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed turned Russia and the newly independent states into a rich source of nuclear weapons and the fissile material needed to make them. Even now, we cannot account for all of the 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union deployed during the Cold War. (Indeed, in 1997, Boris Yeltsin’s national security advisor, Gen. Alexander Lebed, claimed that 100 “suitcase nukes” were missing.) What’s more, Russia has 460 tons of inadequately secured weapons-grade fissile material, making the country an attractive target.

But, since Sept. 11, Bush has asked for no more money for Russian threat reduction programs than President Clinton did in his last budget. In fact, in February, Bush cut funding for the Pentagon’s efforts by 10% -- even though there have been confirmed thefts of fissile material from Russian facilities.

Beneath the static of a war on terrorism defined so broadly that it encompasses our entire foreign policy lies a threat that matters far more than the others. Bush has proved incapable of seeing that. And, although his failure is no guarantee of Kerry’s success, at least Kerry has made securing Russia’s nuclear material a priority, promising to secure it all within four years, compared with 13 at the present rate. That could make the difference between the America we know now and an America in which everything really does change. And it’s enough to make the difference in whom I vote for.