In the parlance of disaster preparedness, “right of boom” refers to the terrifying moments after a crisis hits. In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz examines what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States—the event that many experts have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. While many assume such an attack would automatically trigger a globally devastating exchange of nuclear attacks, Schwartz demonstrates that the realities are far more nuanced and complex.
Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, DC, Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a commander in chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifyingly real possibility.
“Should be required reading.” —The Washington Free Beacon
In the parlance of disaster preparedness, “right of boom” refers to the terrifying moments after a crisis hits. In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz examines what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States—the event that many experts have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. While many assume such an attack would automatically trigger a globally devastating exchange of nuclear attacks, Schwartz demonstrates that the realities are far more nuanced and complex.
Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, DC, Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a commander in chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifyingly real possibility.
“Should be required reading.” —The Washington Free Beacon
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Overview
In the parlance of disaster preparedness, “right of boom” refers to the terrifying moments after a crisis hits. In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz examines what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States—the event that many experts have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. While many assume such an attack would automatically trigger a globally devastating exchange of nuclear attacks, Schwartz demonstrates that the realities are far more nuanced and complex.
Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, DC, Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a commander in chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifyingly real possibility.
“Should be required reading.” —The Washington Free Beacon
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468311549 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE PERSISTENT DANGER TWO DAYS "RIGHT OF BOOM"
WHILE MANY IN THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT have long debated whether or not the threat of nuclear terrorism was real, this isn't a question on anyone's mind in the days after the nuclear explosion in downtown Washington, DC. World leaders are unanimous in their expressions of shock, and defensive of their conduct.
"We always knew this was a possibility," remarks the president, flanked by prime ministers and presidents from the closest allied nations, "but there were no signs of a new threat."
While most Americans are silenced by a collective horror, a small number search for someone familiar to blame: "If only the government had ..." and "The administration hadn't ..." These voices murmur with varying degrees of derision.
Yet even with the clarity of hindsight, intelligence officials, academics, and pundits can't point to any single event that marked the moment when nuclear terrorism became an urgent problem. A few thoughtful observers recall the warning of Paul Bracken, who stated that often during periods of rapid change "we are caught up in the spiral of events, lost in its energy, blind to the accumulation of slow changes remaking our world." The proliferation of nuclear knowledge and materials occurred gradually for over half a century. A radioactive crater now testifies to the fact that a tipping point had been passed but gives no indication of how, when, or where. "How did this happen?" is the question on the lips of nearly everyone. But no one in a position of authority can identify a single cause.
The magnitude of the attack overwhelms all response resources. Public officials announce a twenty-four-hour curfew throughout Washington while emergency officials are dispatched to the blast site. They contend with the unique features of a nuclear detonation: the explosive blast, direct nuclear radiation, and thermal radiation. The blast's shock wave generated surface winds approaching one hundred miles per hour, blowing off building walls and breaking glass with enough force to cause injury throughout a three-mile radius. Few of the buildings in a half mile of the blast remain standing, and those that do are not structurally sound. The city's underground infrastructure — tunnels, the subway system, water mains, power, telecommunications and gas conduits — are now blocked and will remain so for weeks. One mile from ground zero, sturdy buildings are standing but have been rendered unstable, as have most family homes. People are desperate to get as far away as possible, but rubble and overturned vehicles clog streets and fires rage across the city.
Panic induced by the visible devastation is compounded by fear of unobservable dangers. There is no consensus on the geographic boundaries of radioactive dust and debris. Nuclear radiation and contaminants associated with building materials, such as asbestos and heavy metals, are detectable as far as ten to twenty miles from the blast site. Victims within this range are already experiencing nausea and vomiting. In the days ahead an agricultural embargo will be declared for the Chesapeake Bay, all of Delaware and parts of New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, but that is far from the minds of the first responders. While emergency responders deal with the immediate human consequences of the attack — treating the injured, stabilizing damaged infrastructure and rebuilding water, sewage, and electrical systems — the "experts" suddenly see a malign trend that had hitherto been obscured by other concerns: the slow but inexorable spread of the technologies of clandestine nuclear warfare.
COULD THIS REALLY HAPPEN?
Is the scenario above simply the product of an overactive imagination and a penchant for alarmism?
This is a reasonable question to ask. And it is worth answering before embarking on an exploration of potential responses to nuclear terrorism. Those who assert that there is a genuine threat of nuclear terrorism should acknowledge at the outset that there are legitimate reasons for skepticism. In fact, those who have paid closest attention to the issue over the years may be most conditioned to be incredulous. They have heard public officials repeatedly issue dire warnings of impending terrorist attacks, watched and seen that no attack materializes, and then have been presented with little or no evidence to support the initial alert.
It is also perfectly understandable that reasonable people question the competence and/or trustworthiness of US national security officials, particularly those responsible for nuclear issues. This is especially so in light of the second American-led invasion of Iraq — a war justified to the public largely on the basis of nonexistent nuclear weapons. Moreover, warnings of impending doom didn't originate with then vice president Dick Cheney. "I think we have to live with the expectation," remarked a Los Alamos atomic engineer in 1973, "that once every four or five years a nuclear explosion will take place and kill a lot of people." This statement is cited in John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, which detailed concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nonstate actors over forty years ago. In the context of this history, accusations of Chicken Little–like behavior aren't flippant reactions.
While exaggeration may mislead the credulous and offend the perceptive, neither the absence of a precedent for nuclear terrorism nor the intelligence failure regarding Saddam Hussein's WMD program change the growing threat. Many of these conditions aren't new; they have existed since the dawn of the nuclear age, and the world has been very fortunate that the danger has been effectively managed for so long. Other conditions are truly unprecedented. The world crossed from Graham Allison's "Three No's" into three Yeses with a whimper rather than a bang, but we have nevertheless entered an environment of extraordinary risk. Allison's contention that "[t]he detonation of a terrorist nuclear device in an American city is inevitable if the U.S. continues on its present course" is certainly debatable.
Yet an objective assessment of the current nuclear security situation and its future trajectory leads to an unavoidable conclusion: We are more vulnerable to nuclear terrorism than at any time since the dawn of the nuclear age.
THE ENDURING THREAT
The greatest danger remains the great discovery — the knowledge that can't be unlearned. Physical matter is made up of atoms. An atom is composed of a nucleus, which is an assembly of bounded protons and neutrons that is orbited by electrons. The number of protons in an atom's nucleus defines the element, the basic category of physical matter. The total number of protons and neutrons, taken together, is called the atomic weight. Variations in an element's atomic weight reflect variation in the number of neutrons bonded with its protons. These variations are known as isotopes. Uranium-235 is an isotope that contains 143 neutrons (which we know by subtracting the 92 protons from the total atomic weight of 235). Bombarding a nucleus that has a large number of protons with additional neutrons can split the atom, a process known as fission. Uranium-235 is especially well suited for this type of reaction given the high number of protons. In keeping with Albert Einstein's famous equation E=mc, when fission occurs energy is released because the "binding energy" that holds the neutrons and protons together needs an outlet. The world has known this since 1938, when Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn figured it out while working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
The tremendous energy unleashed by an atomic bomb occurs because a chain reaction takes place when neutrons emerging from one fission reaction trigger other fission reactions — a process that requires enough fissile material for "supercriticality." The concept of a chain reaction was investigated by Frederic Joliot-Curie in France and Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd in the United States in 1939. This work prompted Albert Einstein to sign his famous letter to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in August of that year:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable — through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America — that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.
A year after Einstein's letter this theory was the subject of a fission weapons study produced by Suzuki Tatsusaburo and Sagane Ryokichi for the Japanese Army as well as the subject of a report drafted on the other side of the world by Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch for the United Kingdom's Military Application of Uranium Detonation committee. In 1941 Soviet scientists, Yuly Khariton and Yakov Zel'dovich calculated that twenty-two pounds of U-235 was sufficient to achieve a chain reaction, a measurement henceforth called the critical mass. From then it took only one year for theory to become reality. In 1942, Enrico Fermi initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a Chicago laboratory. The journey from this physics experiment to weaponization was not long. In 1943, both the US and Soviet governments initiated separate atomic bomb programs. On July 16, 1945, the Fat Man design was tested in New Mexico in what became known as the Trinity Event and less than a month after that the US military dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From the beginning no single person and no single government ever controlled the secret of the atomic bomb. The United States was the first government to own the weapon, but the device was designed by a multinational scientific community that built upon discoveries made primarily in Europe. It is notable that of the twenty-four intellectual "all-stars" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1943 to 1945 — that is, the directors, division chiefs, and their deputies — 25 percent were from the United Kingdom and Canada; 21 percent were from the United States; 21 percent were from Germany and Austria; 17 percent were from Hungary; and 17 percent were from other European countries. Japan, which was in many ways the most European of the non-European countries, also had a modest nuclear weapons program known as the N Project located at the Aviation Technology Research Institute of Tokyo as well as a parallel effort called F Project (for fission) at the Imperial University of Kyoto. The Soviets also weren't far behind by 1945. In Leningrad, Yuly Khariton and his associates replicated the atomic research conducted by their peers in Berlin, Paris, New York, and Chicago.
One month before the Trinity Event, a committee composed of prominent nuclear physicists involved in the Manhattan Project submitted a report; the Franck Report, named after committee chairman James Franck, was addressed to president Harry S. Truman, and its subject was the "political and social problems" associated with the atomic bomb. Among the conclusions of the authors was the assertion that it would be impossible for the United States to keep the knowledge behind the atomic bomb a secret. Written before the politicization of atomic secrets and the intrigues of the Cold War, it is a statement worth quoting at length:
[A]lthough we undoubtedly are at present ahead of the rest of the world in this field, the fundamental facts of nuclear power are a subject of common knowledge. British scientists know as much as we do about the basic wartime progress of nucleonics — with the exception of specific processes used in our engineering developments — and the background of French nuclear physicists plus their occasional contact with our Projects, will enable them to catch up rapidly, at least as far as basic scientific facts are concerned. German scientists, in whose discoveries the whole development of this field has originated, apparently did not develop it during the war to the same extent to which this has been done in America; but to the last day of the European war, we have been living in constant apprehension as to their possible achievements. The knowledge that German scientists were working on this weapon and that their government certainly had no scruples against using it when available, was the main motivation of the initiative which American scientists have taken in developing nuclear power on such a large scale for military use in this country. In Russia, too, the basic facts and implications of nuclear power were well understood in 1940, and the experiences of Russian scientists in nuclear research is entirely sufficient to enable them to retrace our steps within a few years, even if we would make all attempts to conceal them. Furthermore, we should not expect too much success from attempts to keep basic information secret in peacetime, when scientists acquainted with the work on this and associated Projects will be scattered to many colleges and research institutions and many of them will continue to work on problems closely related to those on which our developments are based. In other words, even if we can retain our leadership in basic knowledge of nucleonics for a certain time by maintaining the secrecy of all results achieved on this and associated Projects, it would be foolish to hope that this can protect us for more than a few years.
One of the signatures of the report and principal minds behind its articulation was Szilárd, who had spent a great deal of time focused on this subject and was arguably the best qualified to make such a judgment. Szilárd and the other authors anticipated that a nuclear arms race was coming. Few, however, knew how quickly this would happen.
KNOWLEDGE PASSES FROM GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT
Gleaning the security implications of the Manhattan Project's motley crew does not take the diplomatic acumen of a Benjamin Franklin, who once aptly remarked that "three can keep a secret if two are dead." The men of the Manhattan Project traveled freely after the war, and some talked. A select few deliberately transferred information to foreign governments. Among the Los Alamos affiliates who provided vital information to the Soviet Union, including full-dimensioned drawings of Fat Man, were Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass, and Lona Cohen. After the war, Fuchs returned to his native Germany and explained the inner workings of Fat Man to Qian Sanqiang, who promptly became China's chief nuclear weapons scientist. The idea of a French bomb was born on July 11, 1948, when French veterans of the Manhattan Project working at Chalk River violated their oath of secrecy and informed Charles de Gaulle of the Allied nuclear weapons program. The Chinese atomic bomb was likely a product in part of Joan Hinton, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, an attendee at the 1945 Trinity Event, and an ardent communist. She moved to China in 1948, where it is very likely that she shared her insights on the implosion technology of Fat Man.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly in December 1953, president Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed that "the dreaded secret, and the fearful engines of atomic might, are not ours alone. ... If at one time the United States possessed what might have been called a monopoly of atomic power, that monopoly ceased to exist several years ago." He didn't know how right he was. It wasn't until decades later that the full extent of atomic espionage became known.
The Greek historian Thucydides attributed the birth of empires to "fear, honor, and profit." The same attributes of human nature explain the spread of the atomic bomb two thousand years later. The Soviets' atomic capability was imperative in confronting the Americans during the Cold War. On August 29, 1949, a Soviet bomb based on the Fat Man implosion design detonated. The spies that provided this critical information not only propelled the Soviet nuclear program but also started the cascade of events that ended with a British bomb. In July 1946, the US Congress responded to the revelation that the most significant Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project was carried out by British citizens and British-sponsored émigrés by passing a bill known as the McMahon Act that curtailed US-UK nuclear cooperation. Fearing US abandonment, the British launched a unilateral program; a British bomb detonated on October 3, 1952. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and American opposition to French involvement in the 1956 Suez Crisis motivated the French cabinet on December 26, 1957, to authorize the development of an atomic bomb. A French bomb exploded less than three years later. President Eisenhower's threat to employ nuclear weapons if an armistice agreement wasn't reached in the Korean War spurred Mao Zedong to pursue atomic capability for China. To help their communist comrades, the Soviets codified an agreement with China on October 15, 1957, called the New Defense Technical Accord, which committed them to providing technical nuclear training, a supply of ballistic missiles, hands-on construction, and a prototype of an atomic bomb. A Chinese bomb detonated on October 16, 1964. Four years later, these five countries — the victorious powers of the World War II and the only permanent members of the UN Security Council — legitimized their atomic power as "recognized nuclear weapons states" under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Right of Boom"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Benjamin E. Schwartz.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS,
COPYRIGHT,
DEDICATION,
INTRODUCTION The Explosion,
ONE The Persistent Danger: Two Days "Right of Boom",
TWO The New Threats: Three Days "Right of Boom",
THREE The Lessons of Nuclear Deterrence: Three Days "Right of Boom",
FOUR The Lessons of Countering Terrorism: Four Days "Right of Boom",
FIVE Global Impact: Five Days "Right of Boom",
SIX The Red Line: Fifteen Days "Right of Boom",
CONCLUSION The New Order: Twenty-Three Days "Right of Boom",
NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
What People are Saying About This
“This is a book every American can and should read. In RIGHT OF BOOM, Benjamin Schwartz writes with the literary skill and imagination of a great novelist, informed by years of experience in the US government agencies responsible for our nation's security. He explains why an instance of nuclear terrorism on American soil is more plausible than every before—and imagines what will happen if such a terrifying event should ever take place.”—Alan Luxenberg, President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute
“In today's international scene, so full of constant surprises, Schwartz in RIGHT OF BOOM does the great service of forcing us to think ahead about what would be the ultimate tragic surprise—an attack of nuclear terrorism. With nuclear explosive material today in the hands of more and more countries and with so much of it stored in conditions of questionable security, the scenario he sketches is becoming more plausible almost daily. One cannot read Schwartz's analysis without realizing that this would be an event of transforming importance in international relations, indeed for the world as we know it. Most importantly, the book offers practical thoughts on how to avoid that tragedy and, if it cannot avoided, how to deal with the aftermath—advice our nation's policymakers would do well to heed.”—John McLaughlin, Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and former Deputy Director and Acting Director, CIA (2000–2004)
“RIGHT OF BOOM effectively bridges the gap between an often aloof scholarly literature and the frequently sensationalist and unreliable popular treatments of the danger of nuclear terrorism. Schwartz makes a compelling case for imagining the unimaginable and highlights the urgency to do so before it is too late. His chilling forecast of the all too plausible consequences of our failure to treat nuclear terrorism as an imminent threat, along with lucid explanations of the latent tools that we already have available ‘left of boom’ that could help to prevent the horrific scenario that he weaves, offer a valuable and accessible contribution that should be of interest to anyone interested in national security issues." —David A. Cooper, Ph.D., The James V. Forrestal Professor and Chair of the National Security Affairs Department of the U.S. Naval War College and the former Principal Director for Homeland Security Integration, Director of Nonproliferation Policy, and Director of Strategic Arms Control Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
“RIGHT OF BOOM makes an important contribution to the literature of nuclear terrorism. Rather than focusing on ‘What if?’, Ben Schwartz analyzes ‘What then?’ This is a ground-breaking analysis of the policy dilemmas that would ensue after nuclear terrorism. Like Herman Kahn before him, Schwartz urges us to ‘think about the unthinkable’ before it happens so we can deal with it more effectively.” —Mark M. Lowenthal, President of the Intelligence and Security Academy; former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production
"Are we prepared to face the reality of nuclear terrorism and do we understand the consequences of such an act? How would national and international leadership and citizens around the world respond to such a devastating reality? Would we know who did it; would forensic evidence quickly point to the culprit and more importantly, how would the fear of a next attack change our culture and faith in government? These are just a few of the important issues raised by Benjamin Schwartz in RIGHT OF BOOM. This thoughtful and fresh approach to the prospect of catastrophic and deliberate nuclear destruction is a must read for students and practitioners interested in a range of security related issues from terrorism, deterrence, and homeland security to countering weapons of mass destruction policy and proliferation prevention."—Richard A. Love, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, National Defense University
"America is about to enter the whole new world of the second nuclear age, a world defined by a quantum leap in the number of threatening nuclear powers. Benjamin Schwartz’s masterful book provides us with the light that can guide us through the darkness. RIGHT OF BOOM should be read and internalized by anyone with responsibility for America’s national security.” —Professor James Kurth, Swarthmore College
“How would the United States government respond if a nuclear bomb exploded in the heart of Washington, D.C.? With a deep sense of the history of nuclear proliferation, knowledge of pragmatic policymaking, and the growth of terrorism, Schwartz unpacks this nightmarish scenario from the multiple vantage points of the senior policymaker, ally, rogue state, and terrorist. As he adroitly guides us through the various phases of ‘right of boom,’ Schwartz convinces the reader of the acute limitations of the state in containing nuclear terrorism in the face of insurgencies, nefarious non-state actors, and uncooperative governments. At the same time, Right of Boom smartly identifies a path for governments towards resolution for a doomsday event that no one believes could happen—but as Schwartz emphasizes, is already within the realm of the possible. In doing so, RIGHT OF BOOM contributes to the important dialogue underway on the future of American national security and its relevance in a changing global order.”—Shamila N. Chaudhary, Senior South Asia Fellow, International Security Program at New America; and former Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the White House National Security Council
“I had the honor or serving alongside Ben Schwartz, whose singular passion for preventing and preparing for weapons of mass destruction terrorist attacks leaps off the pages of RIGHT OF BOOM. It describes a rare event, WMD terrorism, something we must never allow to happen and do everything we can to prepare for if it does.”—Andy Weber, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs
“In RIGHT OF BOOM, Benjamin Schwartz, a seasoned national security professional and gifted writer, provides an analysis of how to prevent and respond to a nuclear terror attack on the United States, as well as the international political history necessary to place in perspective such an unprecedented calamity. RIGHT OF BOOM is a highly-readable, authoritative, and thought-provoking account of one of the leading security challenges of our time.”—Matthew Kroenig, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council, and author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons