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CounterPunch
March 21,
2003
Nuclear Plants as Terror Weapons
The Nightmare
Waiting at the Back Door
By FLOYD RUDMIN
The Bush and Blair administrations are right about
one thing: Terrorism threatens our world as never before. Terrorism
is the great game of pain that is now playing out as power politics
in many parts of the world.. The "winners" are the
ones who can cause the most harm and horror, yet can harden themselves
to be unfeeling and unmoved by that harm and horror. The "losers"
are the rest of us.
Humans are naturally sympathetic beings:
We learn by imitation. We perceive ourselves in others. We can
imagine emotions and empathize. We can love. We can grieve. Terrorism
is inhuman. It requires unusual mental states of mind. To choose
to be inhuman requires extreme confidence and some form of moral
immunity. Terrorists need words and rhetoric and ways to say
they themselves personally did not choose to do it. For example,
* by seeing themselves as actors in historical
drama;
* by saying their actions are caused
by those they hurt;
* by self-righteously doing the will
of God.
War is formalized terrorism by a state,
and a war on terrorism is sure a cycle of escalating horror.
The Bush and Blair administrations are
right about a second thing: 9-11 changed everything. What changed
was the scale of non-state terrorism. Previously in history,
such terrorism was limited, for example, to killing people by
assassination, hijacking an air plane, bombing a market, blowing
a hole in a ship, or using a car bomb to tear the facade off
a building. Such terrorist actions were most often in remote
areas with least security. In contrast, the 9-11 terrorists completely
destroyed two of the greatest buildings in America, in the very
heart of America's greatest city, and then hit the headquarters
of American military command in the national capital. The political
and economic consequences of 9-11 are still beyond measure.
What could plausibly be an escalation
beyond that?
The Bush and Blair administrations are
right about a third thing: It is technology that gives non-state
terrorists ways to match the terror of the nation states' war
machines. On one hand, our globally interlocked, technological
economy is more vulnerable than its size suggests. Hurt it any
where and it hurts every where. On the other hand, modest knowledge
and modest equipment can create germs for warfare and poison
gas. But biological and poison gas terrorism, while deadly and
horrible, would still be localized, contained, and the consequences
containable.
But the Bush and Blair administrations
are wrong to now mount a war on Iraq in order to find biological
and chemical weapons. Iraq may or may not have such weapons,
and if so, might or might not have distributed them to terrorists.
More importantly, this war is proof that our governments did
not learn the lesson of 9-11. The terrorists that attacked America
did not build or buy the airliners they used, and did not smuggle
them into America from Iraq. They simply weaponized the large
scale technology that was already in America waiting to be used.
What other technology is now waiting to be weaponized and would
be an escalation beyond 9-11?
While the world is watching the war in
Iraq, there is a nightmare waiting at the back door. No one seems
to be paying attention to the likelihood of a terrorist attack
on a nuclear power station. The horror and economic consequences
of breaching a nuclear power reactor would certainly exceed 9-11.
It would be the escalation that matches the American war machine
now in action in Iraq and elsewhere.
Even best-case nuclear security seems
to be a sham. The UK is a militarized nation long experienced
with terrorism. The UK has sided with the USA knowing that this
might make it the target of more terrorism. Therefore, the UK's
nuclear reactors are very well protected, right? Wrong. Just
to demonstrate this, Greenpeace on October 14, 2002, had 150
activists breach security at the UK's Sizewell reactor. Then
things tightened up, right? Wrong. On January 13, 2003, 30 Greenpeace
activists again penetrated security at the very same reactor
site and climbed onto the dome. The British government's security
response was to simply deny these events, but has recently admitted
them. Fortunately for us, Greenpeace carries banners, not bombs.
Is nuclear plant security any better
in America? The US is the world's most militarized nation knowing
that its current actions make it the target of terrorism. What
is their priority on nuclear plant security? The International
Nuclear Safety Center, headquartered at the US government's National
Argonne Laboratories, publicly
posts handy maps showing even the most amateur terrorists where
the world's nuclear reactors are all located.
As best case examples of nuclear security,
the US and UK are not a cause of confidence. Nuclear security
is worse in the rest of the world. Less militarized nations,
who know they have no enemies, probably cannot imagine someone
shooting their nuclear plant with a military missile, or crashing
a commercial plane into it, or placing a bomb in the underwater
cooling pipes, or sabotaging it from the inside. Once state and
non-state terrorists bring out their rhetoric that they are all
doing the will of God, then some private person with a wrong
bent of mind might believe the rhetoric and independently act
on it. .
To severely damage the US or the UK,
or France or Russia, it is not necessary to breach the nation's
own reactor. A neighbor's reactor would do. To "win"
a war of escalating horror, any reactor anywhere in the world
would do. Worrisome are the reactors in the do-gooder nations
who naively think their self-image protects them, including here
Canada. Sweden, and Finland. However, most worrisome are the
reactors in the former communist countries of Lithuania, the
Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Ukraine,
and Russia. Many of these reactors lack concrete containment
domes and suffer from lax management and poor financing. Chechnyan
terrorists or Al-Qaida, or anyone wishing to seem to be these
terrorists, may seek revenge by breaching a reactor. Anyone,
anywhere, could do it, and the consequences would not be contained
or containable.
Proponents and opponents of the Iraq
war would be wise to both agree that we need better security
at nuclear power plants every where in the world.
Floyd Rudmin
is professor of social and community psychology at the University
of Tromsø in Norway, where he also teaches in the Master's
Program in Peace and Conflict Transformation. He is a board member
of Science for Peace and vice-president of the Canadian Peace
Research & Education Association. He can be contacted at
frudmin@psyk.uit.no
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