Conor Friedersdorf had a good post on torture the other day which included this interesting tangent on the issue of whether al-Qaeda (or Islamic militancy more generally) constitutes an "existential threat" to the United States:
Perhaps the term “existential threat” obscures more than it clarifies. I’d have said, immediately after the September 11 attacks, that radical Islam posed an existential threat to America, though I never thought that Islamic terrorists possessed a nuclear weapon, or that an Islamic state commanded an Army capable of invading the United States, or that radical Islam threatened America more than the Cold War era Soviet Union.I think this technological effect, though real, is greatly exaggerated. It obscures the facts that even operating (let alone building) a nuclear weapon is tremendously difficult, that biological weapons are very hard to deploy effectively, and that chemical weapons have never been significantly more deadly. And even if used effectively, none of those tools currently have the ability to "destroy whatever society" they're turned against, at least in the hands of terrorists. Until al-Qaeda has a Soviet-level nuclear arsenal, its absolute maximum damage will be a mushroom cloud or two (and, again, this is a tremendously unlikely outcome). Horrific, obviously, but nothing that would threaten the existence of the United States, or even of the United States' current political system.So what did I mean when I used the term?
Technological advancement is enabling ever smaller groups of people to possess weapons that can kill ever larger numbers of their fellow human beings. I worry less about suitcase nukes than I do about a virus that can be cooked up on a terrorist’s budget, and that decimates the world population upon its release. Insofar as radical Islamic terrorists are willing to die for their cause, possessed of impressive resources, and growing in number, I think that time is on their side — that eventually they’ll be able to get their hands on a weapon so destructive that it’ll destroy whatever society it is turned against, and that they’ll be willing to use that weapon. Therefore, I reasoned, they are an existential threat — though not, I believed, an immediate or “imminent” one.
The obvious response is one of trends, the argument that these tools, in the hands of terrorists, may not be existential threats now, but they will be in the near future, which makes defeating those terrorists an imperative now. There are two problems with this line of argument. For one thing, I don't buy that these kinds of tools are getting deadlier, or more widely available. The end of the Soviet Union has made nuclear weapons considerably easier to steal but it's highly doubtful that enough weapons to, say, eliminate the American government could be stolen. And I'm hard-pressed to think of an increase in the deadliness of nuclear weapons since the h-bomb. Similarly, while I'm no expert on the science involved, to the best of my knowledge there hasn't been much progress in weaponizing the kinds of diseases that would be truly devastating in the wrong bands (Ebola, smallpox).
But more generally, the response to the existence of such a trend - if real - shouldn't be cracking down on current terrorists, which is a indirect way of preventing the usage of future weapons. The current response is something considerably more boring and bureaucratic, like strengthening institutions like the IAEA and programs like Nunn-Lugar, or setting up a more rigorous way of securing research sites that work on bioagents. If the concern is that technological progress will inevitably lead to a killer app for terrorists, the correct response is to control the killer app, not try to target its potential users before it's even invented.
One last thing - Conor is totally right to say the the term "existential threat" is the wrong thing to be worrying about. As I said before, I don't think one or two nuclear detonations in American cities constitutes an "existential threat", but it'd still be a huge humanitarian catastrophe and blow to the nation, and one we ought to be expending a lot more resources trying to prevent. "Existential threat" is a pretty specific thing, and whether a particular threat fits that description should not determine one's response to it.
