During the last 20 years, the threat of terrorism has completely shaped countries’ foreign policies. The East-West dichotomy of the Cold War was side-lined with the end of the communist endeavour figured by the Soviet Union, however, other dynamics took place, and one of them has categorically been the rise of terrorism. Following these changes, this essay pretends to register two different aspects of the post-Cold War security architecture: the new challenges that emerged and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. To dissect these issues, this paper will start by providing an introduction to the background that led to the changes that we are seeing today in terms of the fluctuations in the balance of power and in the rise of new threats.
After portraying the above, this analysis will identify some modifications that took place after the collapse of the status quo ante bellum of the Cold War and provide some recommendations for further action. Moving forward, this paper will also address the possibility of nuclear terrorism in the current landscape. Through this structure, this paper will portray how the security architecture has changed worldwide and how threatening actually is the chance of a terrorist nuclear attack.
Historical background
During the Cold War, the dynamics regarding European security were a product of the development of the hegemonic dispute between the United States and Soviet Republic. The race between these countries separated the globe in half, both in terms of the balance of power, and also regarding the ideological and economic structure of states. This dispute led to a security dilemma, as posed by Robert Jervis (1978), “…many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the security of others”, and thus, this tension was characterized by concerns on the context of military security and the nuclear balance (Sperling and Emil 1995).
Although there were some divergencies, (e.g. Siberian pipeline crisis [for more on this see Blinken 1987], the 1973 oil crisis [for more on this see Aybet 2000] and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 [for more on this see Matthew 2003]) the countries’ alignment to their according blocs – similar to an Eastern vs Western dynamic – was vehemently clear. Nonetheless, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR, the security landscape changed worldwide and provided space for different types of threats. However, not to be tautological, there are authors who make the case that the world did not change as much as perceived, disputing this idea and even predicting that these so-called changes only opened space for more conflict. This argument is present mainly in authors looking at these events through a realist lens, reflecting the questions between a “New World Order” or “Back to the Future” (see Mearsheimer 1990 and Kruzel et al. 1992).
Challenges for the post-Cold War security architecture
To put it briefly, this analysis identifies three major changes within the European context: (1) a new security architecture, (2) the need for redefinition of NATO and (3) an Eastern European security vacuum.
The first consequence, as argued here, is the need for typical and traditional metrics of security to be tweaked in order to comprehend the new environment, adding non-military threats and individual security to the lexis (hard to soft threats – hard to soft approaches) (moreover, there is an ongoing debate about similar issues, opposing wide to narrow interpretations of security, partially presented in Aldis and Herd 2004). Comprehend the new environment in the Weberian connotation of the word, meaning, considering the emerging trends that begin to insert themselves in security debates, looking at them das verstehen and not only erklären (Tucker 1965). These new threats that characterize the emerging landscape are, for example, related to questions regarding environmental change, natural phenomena, human security, and much more (Human Development Report 1994).
In the same context and transversal to the first challenge, there is the fact that west European states and the former Soviet Republics must partake in the decision between “bandwagoning” (concerning East European countries, inside this option there is also the west-east dichotomy, for more on this see Larrabee 1993), or mutating from security importers to exporters. Concerning NATO, knowing that the former security concerns are no longer, it needs to readjust itself in order to cope with its existential crisis, and here, following Larrabee’s (1994) ideas, NATO needs to shift from “… an alliance structured mainly for collective defence against an outside attack into one designed primarily for crisis management.”.
The threat of nuclear terrorism
As previously mentioned, the post-Cold War world brought a new worldwide security landscape. The second half of the 20th century was the stage of many changes, and one of those was the creation of the nuclear weapon. In fact, since the success of the Manhattan Project until the 2006 North Korean nuclear test, the world has witnessed a proliferation of nuclear weapons. Nowadays, there are nine countries with this capability (USA, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel [although unproclaimed, there is extensive research on Israel’s nuclear power programs, for more on this see Cohen 2003], India, Pakistan and North Korea [ordered by date]), from which three are outside of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and plus 24 other states with weapons-usable nuclear material (see Litwak 2016).
During the Cold War, non-proliferation was a concern for the leaders of the opposing poles, considering all the dynamics that surrounded the conceptualization of a so-called “nuclear umbrella” in the context of the previous alliances that were formed during the Cold War (Epstein 1977). They had relative success, contradicting JFK’s prediction of a world where 25 countries would have developed nuclear weapons (Kennedy 1963). With the emerging paradigm, the risk of nuclear war between the Great Powers decreased in parallel with the increase of the probability of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon (there is a very pertinent speech from President Obama, before a Nuclear Security Summit, where he states that “…one of the greatest threats for global security: terrorists getting their hands on a weapon of mass destruction…” [Obama 2016]). In this context of armed groups having the possibility of securing nuclear weapons, the major focus relies on terrorist groups like Aum Shinrikyo and Al Qaeda, whose efforts on obtaining nuclear weapons or Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) have been far from few (for more on this, see Daly and Rosenau 2005 and Litwak 2016). There are three key ways an organization like the ones mentioned can obtain nuclear weapons: (1) steal one, (2) buy one, or (3) build one.
There are numerous reports of attempts to steal nuclear material, mainly deriving from Russia or former USSR countries, and some of them had as destination terrorist organizations (Zaitseva and Hand 2003; Daly and Rosenau 2005; Sheets 2008). Buying the material is as hard as robbing it, and there are also extensive accounts on this (Countdown to Zero 2010). When it comes to building it, with the right technical expertise, it becomes a plausible situation, considering the illustration presented in the documentary “Countdown to Zero” (2010) where a group of experts addresses this question and actually build a budget of only around 6 million US$ for the hardware, coupled with about 20 people who had to be knowledgeable in different fields necessary for building the material. The only issue with this latter instance is finding the right people that would be able to manage the materials needed, considering the high volatility and unstableness of one of HEU (Bunn and Wier 2006).
Considering the picture painted by this description, the likelihood of an attack does not seem to be very high, but it also does not seem to be such a farfetched concept. If one bases this idea on motive and on seemingly empirical evidence, an attack of the proportion mentioned here does not look like such a stretch of the imagination (for motive, see Abu Gaith 2002). To prevent this, or to at least mitigate the threat, two pathways seem to be viable: (1) continuing efforts towards non-nuclear proliferation (stopping countries like Iran and averting others to continue developing their arsenal), and (2) deterrence by denial instead of by punishment (block the door by safeguarding vulnerable sites). This latter measure is based on the idea that deterrence by punishment has a focus on intention, whereas deterrence by denial “focuses on denying terrorists access to nuclear weapons or fissile material through physical security measures adopted by states” (Litwak 2016). These avenues seem to be the most viable solutions to tackle such a problem, as they constitute practical and normative routes that the international community should follow. Although imperfect, they could have an important impact of the availability of nuclear material, and thus, prevent a tragic event from ever taking place.
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By Mahmoud Refaat: The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
