Few who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 will forget the fear and apprehension they felt. The world stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust as U.S. ships imposed a blockade to force Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief as the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, but all agreed a cataclysmic nuclear war had been only narrowly averted. Of the lessons that came from this episode, the one that stands out is that never again should the United States be put in a position where its cities are so close to nuclear destruction. Many assumed that lesson had been learned as decades of arms control, détente, and the end of the Cold War seemingly removed the specter of nuclear attack from our collective consciousness.
Well, just when you thought it was safe not to worry about nuclear annihilation, a new crisis has emerged that actually poses a greater threat of an American city being obliterated by a nuclear weapon than anything that occurred during the Cold War: As Pakistan becomes engulfed in chaos, there is a real chance that its nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of extremists determined to kill as many Americans as they can. Although the public has yet to pay much attention to what is happening in Pakistan and there is nowhere near the level of hysteria that gripped the United States nearly 50 years ago, the prospect of a nuclear weapon from Pakistan exploding on American soil is much higher than a Soviet attack from Cuba ever was. If anything can make one nostalgic for the bad old days of the Cold War, what is happening in Pakistan today is surely it.
It helps to first look back at the Cold War to see why the current nuclear threat from Pakistan is so much worse. To be sure, during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union each had some 10,000 nuclear warheads ready to strike each other. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could prevent the other from launching a devastating attack, nor could either country defend itself once a strike had been launched. The conflict between communism and capitalism, a series of regional confrontations, and the natural competition between the two strongest states in a bipolar system all threatened to turn the Cold War hot. And yet, a superpower nuclear war never happened. The reason the Soviet Union and the United States never came to nuclear blows is crystal clear: Deterrence worked. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States recognized that launching a nuclear attack would be suicidal, and neither leadership embraced death for their countries or themselves.
What is happening today in Pakistan, sadly, is very different. Pakistan has far fewer nuclear weapons -- about a hundred -- than the Soviet Union had during the Cold War. But it is far more likely that one of those weapons will be used against the United States because it is not the government of Pakistan that would order them to be launched. Pakistan hosts a wide range of extreme Islamist groups that seek to harm the United States. Of particular concern are the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which originated in Pakistan. Both groups are blood enemies of the United States. Al Qaeda in particular has declared its intention to kill between 4 and 10 million Americans as payback for U.S. policies in the Middle East. If al Qaeda acquired a nuclear weapon and smuggled it into an American city, deterrence would be of little use. What threat could be invoked against al Qaeda terrorists to prevent them from killing millions of Americans once they had the capability to do so? Given its fanatical aims, lack of a "return address," and embrace of death, it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of a threat that would dissuade al Qaeda or a similar group from carrying out its horrific mission the way the Soviet Union was deterred during the Cold War.
The key, then, is to prevent extremist groups such as al Qaeda from getting control of a nuclear weapon in the first place. The good news is that nuclear weapons are not easy to make. They require fissile material such as plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which is beyond the capability of any group, including the Taliban and al Qaeda, to manufacture on its own. The only way for nonstate actors to get a nuclear weapon is acquiring one from a country that has one, and the most likely country where that would happen is Pakistan.
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