Benjamin Schwartz > Quotes

“subsequently stated that al-Qaeda was working through the central Asian black market to acquire a nuclear weapon and/or fissile material.”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“diminution of US government capacity that it is difficult to even know where to begin. Admitting the limits of American power, particularly the “hard power” of the US military and intelligence community, is also not a popular pastime. A politician would need to be unusually brave to publicly focus on the day after an act of nuclear terrorism instead of the days before. Accepting nuclear terrorism is an unacceptable position, his opponents would surely retort.”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“INTRODUCTION THE EXPLOSION ON AN OTHERWISE CALM AND UNEVENTFUL MORNING, A small nuclear weapon explodes in downtown Washington, DC. The device generates a yield of fifteen kilotons, roughly the same force unleashed by the bomb Little Boy over Hiroshima. The casualty count rises to over a hundred thousand, and the destruction is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. The blast’s electromagnetic pulse burns out electrical components across the metropolitan area. Radiation leaves the center of the city”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“uninhabitable for the first time since it was declared America’s capital in 1790, and the scientific community predicts that it will remain so for a decade. The stock market plunges as investors anticipate draconian customs regimes that will choke global trade. Fear of further attacks paralyzes America and much of the Western world. Hours after the explosion, a little known terrorist group claims responsibility. It is the first time the president, who was not in Washington at the time of the blast, and his surviving cabinet members, including the director of national intelligence, have heard of the group. After searching intelligence databases, analysts report that the group is linked to three hostile governments, all of which have issued statements condemning the”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“President Obama reflected the mood of many Americans when he publicly stated, “We must be humble in our expectations that we can quickly resolve deep-rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred.”24 In keeping with this principle, his administration acted to remove the United States from the war in Iraq and made plans to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan. These policies were often characterized as “ending wars,” but in practical effect they simply removed Americans from conflicts that were—and still remain—far from over. His administration dramatically rescaled America’s objectives in the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda affiliates could launch fifty car bombs a month in Iraq, the Taliban could take control over sizable Afghan villages, and 150,000 Syrians could be killed without provoking American military action so long as such violence remained contained.”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“attack and denying involvement. It will take weeks for the remnants of the US intelligence community to assess that one of these three governments is probably lying, but even then the US government won’t have irrefutable evidence of complicity. Unlike a ballistic missile or bomb delivered by enemy land-, air-, or seacraft, the origin of what analysts will call a “container-based improvised nuclear device” is difficult to determine and impossible to prove. Nuclear forensics will ultimately provide strong evidence that the fissile material used in the device originated from the country under suspicion. Signals intelligence will record celebrations and praise of the attack by midlevel officials in that country’s military and intelligence establishment. However, the intelligence reporting taken as a whole will”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“suggest that negligence within that country’s weapons industry and at its nuclear complexes is at least as plausible a scenario as a deliberate transfer by government officials to the terrorist group. Yet there is no conclusive reporting that points to either willful negligence or human error. Either way, there is no way to know if the transfer occurred through official policy, the machinations of a venal or ideologically motivated individual, or simple incompetence. There is almost nothing about the origins of the attack that the president of the United States knows for certain. The world awaits a response from the White House. What happens next?”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“All revolutions destroy defining structures of a previous era. The information revolution was no different. The limitations imposed by distance and geography were fundamental to the social, economic, and political structure of the nation-state. In 1995 Frances Cairncross, senior editor of the Economist, pointed out that information technology destroys distance, insamuch as distance serves as a barrier to communication.15 Decades earlier, scholars such as Daniel Bell accurately predicted that information technology would grind down the institutions of the modern era through deindustrialization.16 In 1997, William Julius Wilson confirmed, “Today’s close interaction between technology and international competition has eroded the basic institutions of the mass production system.”17 Just as there was a correlation between the development of industrial economies and the rise of centralized governments, there is a correlation between their disintegration. In 1937 the eminent sociologist William Ogburn correctly predicted that industrial technology would result in greater political centralization because the industrial economy required it. More recently Joseph S. Nye has suggested that while “the twentieth century saw a predominance of the centripetal forces predicted by Ogburn, the twenty-first may see a greater role of centrifugal forces.”18”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“in an American city is a real possibility. A lot has been made of the fact that al-Qaeda seeks to acquire an atomic bomb and wouldn’t hesitate to use one. Allegedly, Osama bin Laden decided sometime after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 that al-Qaeda should construct an “improvised nuclear device”: a crude atomic bomb but one capable of generating a nuclear yield. The earliest evidence of this decision is the testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda defector, who reported that bin Laden attempted in 1993 to procure uranium from former Sudanese president Saleh Mobruk, who supposedly had fissile material of South African origin. In 1998, bin Laden declared that “acquiring WMD for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty,” and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahari”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism

“It almost goes without saying that the president of the United States has access to more and better information than the public does when it comes to matters of national security. Therefore, even if we assume away all the facts relayed above, it is notable that men as different in temperament and philosophy as George W. Bush and Barack Obama both publicly declared that the single most important national security threat we face is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. There is a good chance these presidents know something about the issue that we don’t. But even in the absence of supersecret presidential eye–only intelligence, there is enough information in the public domain about the threat to reach the conclusion that a single atomic bomb going off”
― Benjamin Schwartz, Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism