US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism Since 9/11: Worst-Case Scenarios

349 Pages·2019·3.038 MB·English

by  David Seed

David Seed
US Narratives of
Nuclear Terrorism Since 9/11
Worst-Case Scenarios
US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism Since 9/11
David Seed
US Narratives
of Nuclear Terrorism
Since 9/11
Worst-Case Scenarios
David Seed
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-54327-1 ISBN 978-1-137-54328-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54328-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968344
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Beginnings 43
3 Pre-emptive Investigations 79
4 Suitcase Nukes 115
5 After the Blast 151
6 Visions of Apocalypse 189
7 EMP and Cyberterrorism 233
8 Bioterrorism 271
Bibliography 303
Index 335
v
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
seCret/PubliC
“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term
and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtain-
ing a nuclear weapon” (Sanger 2010). With this grim warning, President
Barack Obama opened the 2010 nuclear summit in Washington, DC. The
following year his warning was repeated in a Rand Corporation report
which tacitly recognized the role of fiction in dramatizing this fear, stating
that “so far, at least, nuclear terrorism has occurred only in novels. Nuclear
terror, on the other hand, is a fact. What matters now is whether we are its
victims or its masters” (Jenkins and Godges 98). Indeed the threat from a
smuggled nuclear device has been institutionalized by Homeland Security
since 2004 as National Response Scenario Number One, designed by the
Department of Homeland Security. Popularly known as a “nuclear 9/11”,
this scenario includes elaborate emergency management procedures and is
based on a premise that highly enriched uranium and bomb components
have been smuggled into the USA for a 10-kiloton device which would
probably target Washington, DC, New York or Los Angeles.1
American Narratives explores the different ways in which US nov-
elists have dramatized fears of nuclear terrorism since the 1970s. 9/11
serves as a major reference point in this fiction, but the surge of novels
during the 1990s reflected rising anxieties over nuclear materials appear-
ing on the black market after the collapse of the Soviet Union.2 Further,
I address terrorist scenarios which specifically involve nuclear and related
© The Author(s) 2019 1
D. Seed, US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism Since 9/11,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54328-8_1
2 D. SEED
weapons rather than terrorist attacks generally. In their survey of fic-
tion dealing with terrorism from 1970 to 2001, Robert Appelbaum and
Alexis Paknadel find that the exaggerations heightening conspirators’
capacity to inflict damage suggest this is a “fiction of fear, nightmarish
in its concocting of terrors, ghoulish in its concocting of agents of
mass destruction” (Appelbaum and Paknadel 402). In contrast to such
a sweeping and impressionistic account, this book will demonstrate the
care taken by the majority of writers to authenticate their narratives,
often through close reference to news items, official reports and similar
documents.
The focus of this study will fall on US fiction and will only bring in
British fiction as they connect to the former national theme. Among the
very few British writers engaging with this subject, Alistair Maclean sets
Goodbye California (1978) entirely in the USA, describing the s eizure
of a terrorist group led by a fanatical Moslem of nuclear m aterials and
physicists from a California power plant. One of the group’s “demon-
strations” is to detonate an atomic device along the San Andreas Fault
to trigger an earthquake. In Ian Fleming’s Moonraker (1955), former
Nazi Hugo Drax plans to drop an atomic bomb on London. By
1979 the film adaptation had replaced national revenge with a more
grandiose target—the whole human race. Nuclear issues became a sta-
ple theme in the Bond movies generally, from the theft of nuclear mis-
siles in Thunderball (1965) to the seizure of a nuclear submarine to
target New York in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and the theft of plu-
tonium in The World Is Not Enough (1999). The Bond style impacted
on James Cameron’s 1994 film True Lies, where a jihadist threatens to
destroy Miami with a smuggled nuclear device. The potential threat is
completely overshadowed by the film’s repeated use of comic effects and
the final showdown between the conspirator and Arnold Schwarzenegger
playing the role of a covert counter-terrorism agent. However,
Cameron’s plans for a remake were put on hold after the impact of 9/11
because, as he explained, “terrorism is no longer something to take as
lightly as we did in the first one” (Brew 2010).
On the other hand, the lure of the nuclear spectacle persists. Vince
Flynn’s 2010 novel American Assassin is essentially an exploration of
CIA training for their special operatives, but when adapted for the screen
in 2017 a nuclear bomb was introduced through a conspiracy by Iranian
hardliners headed up by a renegade American special agent. The latter
carries the bomb towards the American Sixth Fleet, but is killed by the
1 INTRODUCTION 3
protagonist who jettisons the device before it can reach the target ves-
sels. The explosion which follows offers a visual spectacle divorced from
human casualties and the fleet survives intact from what is in effect a
man-made tsunami.
Given the extreme nature of the threats posed, plausibility becomes
a constant concern in these narratives, which begins to emerge before
the Cold War has ended, but which frequently draws on the nuclear fic-
tion of this earlier period. In fact, we shall see in the following chapters
how the Cold War functions as a complex inheritance, both material and
in the collective mentality of the security establishment. This continuity
is explicit in the December 2017 number of Harper’s magazine which
ran a forum called “Destroyer of Worlds: Taking Stock of Our Nuclear
Present”, whose title echoes J. Robert Oppenheimer’s declaration after
the Trinity atomic bomb test in 1945.3 The investigation of the past
is sometimes mimed out as a symbolic historical excavation, for exam-
ple, in Jefferson Bass’s Bones of Betrayal (2009), a murder mystery set
in the Oak Ridge nuclear plant. The narrative is introduced and framed
by post-9/11 measures like the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response
Team (DMORT) Weapons of Mass Destruction programme to prepare
for responses to terrorist “dirty” bomb explosions and similar events.
The novel opens in with such a disaster simulation, alerting the reader
to the continuing possibility of such events.4 In most cases, however, the
prime targets in this fiction remain the cities of New York, Washington,
DC and Los Angeles.
In his 2007 survey of the nuclear threat, The Seventh Decade,
Jonathan Schell has argued that, in contrast with the polarities of the
Cold War, “nuclear policy has always been a scene of rampant illusion
and obfuscation, and just recently the maze’s trap doors, dead ends,
false bottoms, illusory exits, mirages, and misleading appearances have
multiplied” (14). Transpose these terms on to narrative and we have a
foretaste of the complex variety of plots which we shall be examining in
this study.
During the Cold War, novels repeatedly dramatized the worst case
of nuclear war, whereas the fiction published since the collapse of the
Soviet Union has confronted a more fragmented geopolitical situation
where terrorists, with or without the covert backing from nuclear states,
might be able to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The term repeat-
edly used to describe such a threat to the USA is “asymmetrical”, denot-
ing the massive imbalance in military resources. In the fiction examined
4 D. SEED
here, this imbalance manifests itself as the disproportion between the
usually small number of conspirators and the massive damage which even
a single nuclear weapon could cause.5 One narrative which exemplifies
the transition out of Cold War polarities is Nimitz Class (1997), by the
British author Patrick Robinson, where a US aircraft carrier disappears
from the Indian Ocean apparently in a nuclear detonation. As an acci-
dent is discounted, the likelihood emerges, as one character notes, of
“military terrorism” (124) on a grand scale. The event proves to be the
result of Iraqi money financing the “hiring” of a lost Russian submarine
by a captain who, under false identity, has been trained by the British and
Israelis. Russian and American agencies join forces to track down and
neutralize the rogue sub, a collaboration reflecting the new geopolitical
status quo.6
Throughout the 1990s, reports began to emerge of a growing black
market in nuclear materials within the former countries of the Soviet
Union which were to feed into the plots of subsequent novels. One of
the first journalists to report on the Ukraine, for example, was the jour-
nalist Mary Mycio, whose 2013 novel Doing Bizness (discussed below
in Chapter 2) billed itself as a “nuclear thriller”, but which essentially
describes how by the early 1990s Ukraine had become a nuclear bazaar
for competing customers.7 Much closer to the dates in question, T. Davis
Bunn’s Riders of the Pale Horse (1994) explores the conditions favour-
able to smuggling nuclear materials in the post-Soviet Caucasus rather
than describing actual instances, tracing the networks which might oper-
ate in the region.8 To bolster the topicality of his subject, Bunn adds an
epilogue dramatically entitled “We Have Been Warned”, which assem-
bles a series of news reports from 1992 to 1993 concerning nuclear
smuggling, militant Islam and speculative scenarios of nuclear attacks
on American cities. Just in case any of Bunn’s readers miss the point, he
makes his warning explicit: “the danger, both to Christian evangelism
and to the Western world as a whole […] is growing as the power base
of Islamic fundamentalism extends itself wider and wider” (Bunn 344).
Suffice it to note that the smuggling and seizure of nuclear material have
remained staple ingredients of this fiction.9 For example, R. L. Young’s
The Black Ships (2014) briefly describes attempts to hijack seaborne ship-
ments of nuclear material, extrapolated from an actual 2013 theft of
Cobalt-60 pellets in Mexico. We shall return to these writers’ use of news
items below.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
extraPolative sCenarios
In 1962, the strategist Herman Kahn examined the threat of thermo-
nuclear war through the scenario, which he explained as “an attempt to
describe in more or less detail some hypothetical sequence of events”
(Kahn, 143). He continued that scenarios “help to illuminate the inter-
action of psychological, social, political, and military factors, including
the influence of individual political personalities upon what otherwise
might be abstract decisions” (144). The more Kahn fleshes out scenar-
ios, the closer they approach narrative summary. Indeed later in Thinking
About the Unthinkable, he incorporates into his discussion novels like
Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959)
as explorations of possible nuclear futures. For him, such novels share a
characteristic of scenarios in modelling possible events, often suppressed
from public consciousness not because they are improbable, but because
they represent a reality too terrifying to contemplate.
Deliberately or not, in his Counter-Terrorism Handbook (2005) James
H. Jackson echoes Kahn’s words when he argues that terrorism since
the late twentieth century has been a continuum, affected but not ini-
tiated by the events of 9/11. Turning to nuclear terrorism, he contin-
ues: “one of the excuses voiced by the US intelligence and administrators
over 9/11 was that never before had such an attack taken place. It is
an absurd defence. It is the role of those charged with national security
to think the unthinkable, to plan for the unlikely” (131). Jackson here
opens up the collective role performed by the writers discussed in this
volume. They are fleshing out the scenarios that he accuses the security
establishment of ignoring. In short, they are thinking the unthinkable.
Sometimes with deliberate intent, the novels examined here are
extending a practice followed by a number of non-fictional security
studies. The following example makes the strategy explicit. During an
extended discussion of nuclear security in the USA, Barry L. Rothberg
steps briefly aside from contemporary fact and states:
Consider a fictional scenario to focus the problem. America wakes up to
CNN reports that a low-yield nuclear device has been detonated in lower
Manhattan. The World Trade Centre, the Empire State Building, and Wall
Street have been vaporized. The immediate death toll is well over a mil-
lion, and more will die from radiation and fallout. A long-term increase in
incidences of cancer will add to the carnage. (81)