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Book Reviews
06/01/2005
June 2005
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COUNTERING THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR DISASTER
Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. Graham Allison. Times Books. 264 pages; index; $24.
Reviewed by James Jay Carafano
Sometimes, the old axioms work best. That holds true for summarizing Graham Allison’s Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. One in particular comes to mind, “What’s interesting isn’t new and what’s new isn’t interesting.”
Graham Allison is a national treasure, one of America’s most thoughtful, creative and provocative thinkers on international security issues. In his most influential book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Allison outlined three alternative models for evaluating presidential choices in a crisis. More than 30 years after its publication, his framework is still discussed and debated.
Allison does not write books very often. The fact that he chose to take on the question of nuclear terrorism ought to tell us something. The age when only great powers can bring great powers to their knees is over. If bad people, the kind who would not be deterred by America’s nuclear arsenal and military power, get a nuclear weapon, then we have a problem.
Nuclear Terrorism is divided into two parts. The first provides an overview of the nuclear threat. The second offers a prescription for dealing with the problem.
In the first half of the book, Allison offers a clear, balanced and judicious description of the danger of nuclear attack in the 21st century. He discusses the consequences of nuclear and radiological (dirty bomb) threats, the proliferation of technologies, prospects for smuggling weapons and materials and the means for delivering bombs to their target. And he gets it just about right. Missing is the debate over how much nuclear material is actually needed to make a bomb. Allison’s take, like most threat assessments, assume terrorists would need a fairly substantial amount of highly enriched uranium to build a bomb. That is only true if the most basic gun-type bomb design is used. If terrorists had access to more modern, sophisticated bomb designs, they might require only a few kilograms to turn Washington into a wasteland.
Others also argue that an innovative enemy could make a near-nuclear weapon with a mix of a modest amount of nuclear material and conventional explosives. Also missing is a discussion of delivering weapons by cruise missile or short-range ballistic missiles fired from a commercial platform, like a container ship, equipped with an improvised vertical launch tube.
Quibbles aside, it is hard to think of a better introduction to the contemporary nuclear danger. But while this is interesting material, it is not new. Allison brilliantly summarizes and explains, but adds nothing new to the public record, and he all but ignores a legitimate public policy debate. For example, the Gilmore Commission covered much the same ground and reached opposite conclusions. While the commission, chaired by former Virginia Governor James Gilmore, acknowledged the challenges of nuclear proliferation, they concluded that terrorists would choose simpler and more available means to achieve their ends. Allison never takes the fundamental debate head-on—should the United States focus on high-consequence and low-probability events like nuclear weapons or low-consequence and high-probability incidents like your average car bomb.
Allison skips the controversy and assumes taking catastrophic terrorism off the table has to be a high priority. He is probably right. If the Iraq war taught us anything, it was not to be complacent over what we think we know about catastrophic dangers.
The prescriptions offered in Nuclear Terrorism, however, are more than disappointing.
Allison’s proposal offers three nos and seven yeses. The nos are: no loose nukes, no new nascent nukes (preventing the construction of national nuclear enrichment or reprocessing facilities) and no new nuclear states. The yeses are: making prevention of nuclear terrorism a priority; focusing the war on terrorism just on al Qaeda; conducting a humble foreign policy; building a global alliance against terrorism; increasing intelligence capabilities; developing means to deal with dirty bombs; and constructing multilayered defenses.
If this sounds like a tired, unimaginative laundry list of things we have tried before, that is because it is. Allison opts for passive measures and voluntary cooperation over a forward-looking strategy that prioritizes ends, ways and means.
Taking catastrophic terrorism off the table requires a more muscular approach, with perhaps three steps, not 10. The first has to be destroying any transnational terrorist group with any intent to use weapons of mass destruction—the Aum Shinrikyos and the al Qaedas. That means getting the leaders, breaking up the networks, drying up the sources of funding and disrupting recruiting.
The second priority has to be proactive measures to prevent the development or use of weapons. Administration efforts like the Proliferation Security Initiative and missile defense are exactly the right thing to do.
The third and last priority should be cooperative threat reduction—for the simple reason that it is the least likely to prevent the kind of dangers that we will face in the 21st century. That is not to say that there is not more that can be done. For example, one proposal that could greatly strengthen the existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) would be adding a provision to require countries that withdraw from the treaty (like North Korea) to return all nuclear technology and materials to supplier countries and authorize treaty states to forcibly remove or destroy nuclear programs if the withdrawing nation does not comply. Still, the lion’s share of U.S. resources need to be invested in proactively reducing nuclear threats rather than passive protection and response measures and programs that require voluntary compliance with untrustworthy states and renegade transnationals.
There is also a role for diplomacy. After all, in the last 40 years, more states have given up potential weapons programs than fielded nuclear arsenals. Invasions and air strikes are not the only option. Successful nuclear diplomacy, however, requires strength not weakness. Allison offers neither a prescription for strong diplomacy nor a framework for making hard strategic choices.
JAMES JAY CARAFANO, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and coauthor of Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom.
A REASSESSMENT OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC
The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac. Jeffry D. Wert. Simon & Schuster. 559 pages; photographs; maps; notes; index; $30.
By Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired
Few armies during the American Civil War have such a storied history as the Union Army of the Potomac. Defeated more frequently than it was victorious, the Army of the Potomac was the North’s largest and best-equipped army. Mired in controversy since its inception in 1861 under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, the Army of the Potomac’s senior leadership “was cursed with internal dissension, political intrigue, and ineptness at times.”
In his latest work, Jeffry Wert presents a convincing reassessment that by war’s end, there were “few if any, better fighters in the Union armies.” Unlike other histories that concentrate on the major battles and campaigns of the war, Wert’s account of the Army of the Potomac concentrates on several important themes.
The Sword of Lincoln explores the President’s relationship with the Army and the impact of politics upon its operations, as well as the Army’s leadership from army to regimental level. A third integral aspect of Wert’s narrative explores the morale and attitudes of the common soldier.
Wert is hardly a stranger to Civil War history. The author of six previous books on the Civil War, including biographies of controversial Generals George A. Custer and James Longstreet, Wert contends that the history of the Army of the Potomac merits a recounting, since history is “always more than words cast on metal or sculpted in stone.” Not since Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the occasion of the Civil War’s centennial has an author written a more thoroughly researched and provocative study.
In portraying Lincoln as a meddlesome commander-in-chief—not always to the detriment of Union fortunes—Wert sees executive interference most frequently taking the form of dictating strategy and appointing commanders. That, coupled with the proximity of the Army of the Potomac to the nation’s capital, convinced many commanders to focus more on not losing a campaign than destroying Robert E. Lee’s opposing Army of Northern Virginia.
At the heart of Lincoln’s intervention was his desire to spur his commanders to act aggressively. Not until he summoned Ulysses S. Grant to Washington in March 1864 to serve as general-in-chief of all Union armies did Lincoln find a general who shared his desire to pursue a “grimmer prosecution” of the war.
By that time, the North’s political generals and those who had pursued a more conciliatory course had long since vanished from the scene. To be fair, Confederate armies faced identical hardships and were also cursed with more than their share of inept commanders.
With respect to the Union armies, however, by 1864, Generals John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Irvin McDowell and William Rosecrans gave way to the likes of Grant, William T. Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan—commanders who viewed the destruction of the enemy’s armies as the prerequisite to victory.
Wert’s assessment of the Army of the Potomac’s command structure is sure to attract a fair share of criticism. As a collective group, Wert opines that the army’s principal commanders were unduly influenced by Maj. Gen. George McClellan, who organized and trained the army in the wake of the disaster of First Bull Run. Wert posits that McClellan’s influence extended far beyond his two tenures as the Army of the Potomac’s commander.
During the Seven Days’ and the Antietam campaigns, McClellan proved reluctant to use the superb fighting force and as a result, he forfeited opportunities that led to widespread dissent within the ranks and defeatism within the army’s senior command structure.
Not until “Fighting” Joe Hooker reorganized the army in the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg did the North’s principal fighting force rid itself of “Little Mac’s” influence.
Wert’s analysis of Gen. George G. Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, is particularly riveting. Described as more “of a smoothbore than a rifle,” Meade engineered the Army of the Potomac’s first major victory. Gettysburg not only marked a turning point in the Civil War, but also a turning point in the Army of the Potomac’s fortunes.
In three days of struggle, the army confronted its record of defeat and emerged with a discipline of adversity which would become the hallmark of its character. So, too, did it evolve into a resilient force that only desired “a fair fight with their enemy, convinced that they could whip them every time on such a field.”
On the debit side, Wert is perhaps too kind in excusing Meade’s haphazard pursuit of Lee’s army after Gettysburg. Opportunities to annihilate a defeated foe are few and far between.
Wert makes his most intriguing assessment in describing the morale and attitudes of the common soldier who filled the ranks of the Army of the Potomac. In a sense, the Army of the Potomac reflected the North’s increasing diversity and its woeful militia system.
Once properly trained, the force evolved from some of “the very dregs of creation, collected from cities” to a highly disciplined force that eventually became the “sword of President Abraham Lincoln.”
By the time the Union’s victorious armies marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on May 23, 1865, the Army of the Potomac was every bit as effective a military force as its more famous adversary, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the height of its efficiency under Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Wert is to be commended for his provocative analysis of an army that endured unspeakable hardships at the hands of inept commanders. Writing in October 1863, Sgt. Charles Bowen of the 12th U.S. Infantry wrote his wife, “I look forward to the time when a man can say with pride, ‘I belonged to the Army of the Potomac.’ We look to history to give us our just due and to place all the blame where it belongs.”
In The Sword of Lincoln, Jeffry Wert has made a monumental contribution to fulfilling Bowen’s dream.
COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant. |
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