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The new containment: an alliance against nuclear terrorism

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by Graham Allison, Andrei Kokoshin

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Bin Laden himself has declared that acquiring nuclear weapons is a religious duty. "If I have indeed acquired [nuclear] weapons", he once said, "then I thank God for enabling me to do so." When forging an alliance of terrorist organizations in 1998, he issued a statement entitled "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam." Characterized by Bernard Lewis as "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose", it states: "It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God." If anything, the ongoing American-led war on global terrorism is heightening our adversary's incentive to obtain and use a nuclear weapon. Al-Qaeda has discovered that it can no longer attack the United States with impunity. Faced with an assertive, determined opponent now doing everything it can to destroy this terrorist network, Al-Qaeda has every incentive to take its best shot.

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Russia also faces adversaries whose objectives could be advanced by using nuclear weapons. Chechen terrorist groups, for example, have demonstrated little if any restraint on their willingness to kill civilians and may be tempted to strike a definitive blow to assert independence from Russia. They have already issued, in effect, a radioactive warning by planting a package containing cesium-137 at Izmailovsky Park in Moscow and then tipping off a Russian reporter. Particularly as the remaining Chechen terrorists have been marginalized over the course of the second Chechen war, they could well imagine that by destroying one Russian city and credibly threatening Moscow, they could persuade Russia to halt its campaign against them.

All of Russia's national security documents--its National Security Concept, its military doctrine and the recently-updated Foreign Policy Concept--have clearly identified international terrorism as the greatest threat to Russia's national security. As President Putin noted in reviewing Russian security priorities with senior members of the Foreign Ministry in January 2001, "I would like to stress the danger of international terrorism and fundamentalism of any, absolutely any stripe." The illegal drug trade and the diffusion of religious extremism throughout Central Asia, relating directly to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, threaten Russia's borders and weaken the Commonwealth of Independent States. The civil war in Tajikistan, tensions in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, and the conflicts in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh--all close to the borders of the Russian Federation--provide feeding grounds for the extremism that fuels terrorism. Additionally, Russia's geographical proximity to South Asia and the Middle East increases concerns over terrorist fallout from those regions. President Putin has consistently identified the dark hue that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) give to the threat of terrorism. In a December 2001 interview in which he named international terrorism the "plague of the 21st century", Putin stated: "We all know exactly how New York and Washington were hit.... Was it ICBMs? What threat are we talking about? We are talking about the use of mass destruction weapons terrorists may obtain."

The new containment: an alliance against nuclear terrorism

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by Graham Allison, Andrei Kokoshin

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