For a comprehensive overview of Western predictions of cataclysmic disasters and decline, see W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Wagar reviews the vast literature prophesying man-made calamities and nuclear warfare, from the nineteenth century to the 1980s. Still famous today is H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free, a story about a devastating nuclear war. Wells finished this book before World War I and lived to witness the nuclear attacks in 1945.
I developed the central theme of this chapter eight years ago in my article “The Next Lenin: On the Cusp and Truly Revolutionary Warfare,” The National Interest (Spring 1997). I am indebted to Owen Harries, then editor of The National Interest, for his encouragement to publish such an article, which was rather premature at that time.
2. For the many definitions of “terrorism” that have been proposed, see Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 12–18. Pillar reports that the U.S. Government, for keeping statistics on terrorism, classifies military personnel who are off-duty as “noncombatants” (14). Walter Laqueur, the preeminent scholar on the history and political dynamic of terrorism, predicted correctly that disputes about a definition of terrorism “will continue for a long time” and “will make no notable contribution towards the understanding of terrorism” (The Age of Terrorism [Boston: Little Brown, 1987], 72).
3. Donald H. Rumsfeld in an editorial in the Washington Post, October 26, 2003, B7; President Bush in his speech at Quantico (Virginia), July11, 2005.
4. Theodore B. Taylor’s ideas gained wider attention thanks to the book-length story by New Yorker writer John McPhee: The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973). The authors of America’s Achilles’ Heel offer a wealth of information on reports from the last few decades about all kinds of evildoers who used, or tried to use, biological agents, chemical poisons, and sham nuclear bombs (Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America’s Achilles’ Heel [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001], 29–47). For further data on nuclear theft and other opportunities for nuclear terrorism, see Robin M. Frost, Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11, Adelphi Paper 378 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
5. Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, who have been tracking this problem at Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project, wrote in 2004 that 130 research reactors were still operating on HEU, and many with inadequate security (Washington Post, September 11, 2004). Since then this number has been reduced—slightly.
6. Allan Lengel, Washington Post staff writer (Washington Post, September 16, 2005).
7. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf confirmed in 2005 that D. A. Q. Khan provided North Korea with centrifuge machines for making enriched uranium that can be used to build nuclear bombs (New York Times, August 25, 2005).
8. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, ch. 2 (“The Philosophy of the Bomb”), esp. 49, 56–57. On nineteenth-century anarchism and its religious precursors, see also James Joll, The Anarchists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
9. Haruki Murakami, Underground (New York: Vintage, 2000), 361–62 and 301–302. In the assessment by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, Asahara’s goal was “a delusion of fantastic proportions” (The Cult at the End of the World [New York: Crown, 1996], 156).
10. The Stimmung versus Haltung distinction was used by the Nazi authorities in their surveys assessing the reaction of the German population to the Allied bombing attacks (The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, European War, report 64b, “The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale,” vol. 1:42–43).
In an analysis of World War II bombing that I conducted shortly after the war, I found further evidence of the “threshold” at which a society’s deportment suddenly deteriorates. The elasticity of resources is one key factor. Fred Charles Iklé, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958).
11. Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs (January-February 2002): 56.
12. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, 141. In his follow-on study, Walter Laqueur wrote: “Terrorism has been with us for centuries, and it has always attracted inordinate attention…. It has been a tragedy for the victims, but seen in historical perspective it seldom has been more than a nuisance.” And as to assassinations, Laqueur concluded that “the number of prime ministers and heads of state murdered since the end of the Second World War is in excess of sixty, but it is difficult to think of a single case in which the policy of a country has been radically changed as the result of a terrorist campaign.” Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3 and 46.
13. Kerensky, quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), 336–37.
14. Trotsky, quoted in Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1966), 254 and 257–63. Selznick’s book, although dating from the Cold War, is worth reading today. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the organizational stratagems that a ruthless and cunning dictator can use.
15. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 360–61, 381.
16. Ibid., 407–409.
17. Lothar Kettenacker, “Sozialpsycholgische Aspekte der Führer-Herrschaft,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Führer State (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 102 and passim. This collection of essays offers a sophisticated reinterpretation of Hitler’s political appeal. See also Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 151 and passim. For a recent psychological interpretation of political leaders, see Jerrold M. Post, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
18. Jonathan Stevenson, “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles (New York: Free Press, 1996), 127.
19. On these Russian extremists, see Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev, “Disrupting Escalation of Terror in Russia to Prevent Catastrophic Attacks,” BCSIA Discussion Paper 2005-10, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2005. Simon
