Stardate 20031125.1121

(On Screen): There's a hell of a lot of good and perceptive writing going on out there in the blogosphere now. I sometimes wish I could invent the 72-hour day, just so I could read everything. Blogs, like all things resulting from human activity, are subject to Sturgeon's law, and many who try to blog either become bored with it and quit, or have little to say which would be of interest to anyone other than their friends. But with so many people trying it, even among the residual 10% of non-crap there are now thousands of people writing damned good stuff.

So it's hardly surprising that I sometimes find things which are good and worthy of comment weeks or even months after they were originally posted. (Such as how I recently commented on something Donald Sensing had posted more than a year before.)

I just ran into a post by the pseudonymous Wretchard at the site "Belmont Club" where he (?) makes three conjectures about WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and the future of Islam. He is correct to refer to them as conjectures, which are the result of intelligent speculation but which are not claimed to be proved, or even to be probable. But they're intriguing, and worth consideration. I agree somewhat, and disagree somewhat.

He focuses on the difference between capabilities and intentions, a critical difference in strategic calculations, and one I learned to respect a long time ago. Capabilities are what an enemy can do; intentions are what he wants to do. He may want to do things but not have the ability, and he may have abilities he has no intention to use.

Anti-American activists like to focus on the fact that the US has one of the largest stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in the world, and is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons in war time (or, at least, the only one acknowledged to have done so). But they ignore the critical difference between intentions and capabilities. It's true that the US has the capability to use WMDs in extraordinarily devastating attacks at very short notice. But for more than fifty years the US has not done so, and would still rather not if it can be avoided.

Once the US and USSR both had credible capabilities to strike enemy cities using nuclear (or thermonuclear) weapons, military strategy focused instead on intentions. If your enemy has such weapons, you convince him to not use them. That was the point of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and it worked.

Wretchard's first conjecture is that when it comes to organizations like al Qaeda, there can be no question that they have the intention of using whatever weapons they can get to attack us (and everyone else on their shitlist). The only reason they haven't done so yet is because they don't have such weapons, but they're trying to get them.

So the USSR had the capability of using WMDs against us but had no intention of doing so. The terrorists have the intention, but not yet the capability. But that's much more dangerous, because it's pretty much only a matter of time before they get the capability, unless they're stopped first.

It's a matter of record that al Qaeda had attempted to acquire nuclear weapons or refined fissionables with which to make them, as well as having done at least some work at attempting to create chemical weapons. Saddam tried to develop nukes, and Iran is trying (and is suspected by some as having succeeded). Saddam also had and used chemical weapons. The chance that a militantly hostile regime might sell, or leak, such weapons to a terrorist group can't be ignored. Wretchard therefore conjectures that the threshold for use of nuclear weapons has been lowered, which is to say that there's an increased likelihood now that they'll be used, either by our enemies or by us. I think he's right about that.

Not all WMDs are equally destructive. There are basically three tiers. At the lowest tier is chemical weapons and non-contagious biological agents (that is, anthrax), which can cause extremely widespread casualties in the area where they're used, but are nonetheless highly localized and cause no physical damage at all.

The second tier is a dual one occupied by nuclear weapons (fission) and thermonuclear weapons (fusion). Though fusion weapons are far more destructive, as a practical matter this is something of a continuum ranging from peanut weapons with a couple of kiloton yields all the way up to massive blockbusters, such as the 50 megaton bomb once tested by the USSR. Most American warheads now remaining after the arms reductions are thermonuclear and have yields in the range of 400 kilotons, and almost all of those are deployed on missiles in silos and submarines.

Such a warhead will thoroughly destroy a good sized area, and cause lesser damage to a larger area surrounding the blast point. The damage and casualties depend a great deal on how it's used (such as whether the fusing and delivery permit a more effective air burst instead of a ground-level detonation) but any nuclear weapon detonated in a populated area will be very bad news, causing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of casualties and widespread destruction of structures.