After the 9/11 attacks, the United States declared war on terror. From that point forward, whenever any nation sought to kill or imprison people they disagreed with or didn’t like, they had merely to call them ‘terrorists’ and take whatever action they desired. No longer could the US, the UN and the West decry human rights abuses, imprisonment without due process, even extra-judicial murder, as these very same crimes could now be couched in terms of counterterrorism. When the US government, shortly thereafter, decided it would invade Iraq, it began to cast about for a justification that would stick. Naturally, they tried connecting Iraq with terror, as that was the boogyman that would justify any actions, from indefinite detention without trial to warrantless wiretaps to torture to aggressive war. Oddly, though they tried a number of approaches to link Saddam’s Iraq to international terrorism, al Quaeda and 9/11, nothing really resonated. Being nothing if not resourceful, the Bush/Cheney administration began casting about for a more effective justification for war. The one they found has become the all purpose “WMD Dodge”.

Of course, it’s not “WMD”, not the way it’s typically defined. It’s nuclear weapons, and the threat they pose should they fall into nefarious hands. You could almost hear the high fives in the Oval Office when the news networks kept playing that clip of Condoleezza Rice telling us to fear a “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”. It worked, and now the WMD Dodge is a global institution. Iran is building nukes and must be stopped. Israel launches a strike on Syria to knock out something they assure us was a nascent weapons program. And then there’s the poster child for nukes at risk, Pakistan. A Muslim nation, with a seething population of budding bin Ladens, not to mention the original bin Laden, sharing a border with Afghanistan, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons that might, on any given day, fall (or perhaps be given, it’s not always clear) into the hands of jihadis bent on the destruction of America.

This is the applause line, and it gets thrown into every conversation as something we must consider very seriously before we try anything as rash and radical as ending our involvement in a decade long war in an impoverished country 7000 miles away. Oddly, the power of nuclear weapons is so great that you never see this assertion challenged, or even critically questioned. I’m not terribly qualified to do this (my WMD is .300 Win Mag – I can’t afford a Barrett .50), but let’s at least see what some of the issues might be.

First, there’s possession of the weapons. Who has access? Certainly the Army, less certainly the civilians in government. The Prime Minister might order their use, but I’d be willing to bet if the Army refused to do so, the Civilian leadership would have no recourse. Much of the Pakistani military leadership are Sandhurst educated, Laphroaig sipping professionals, and they don’t want to see their strategic defense against India used to murder a bunch of civilians. So even if the government fell to Taliban influenced radical Islamists, they might have a very hard time getting their hands on the nukes.

Next, there’s weapons storage. Again, these Pakistani Generals are smart fellows, and it’s not like there isn’t a well accepted set of best practices already in place in the US and Europe for securing the stockpile. Standard procedure for all but the most forward deployed weapons is to store the warheads and the cores seperately. It takes some expertise to assemble and arm a warhead. So these Jihadis would have to break the security, get access to the cores, get access to the warhead and have someone with the ability to put it together. And they have to do all this while fighting off the loyal and less-than-sympathetic soldiers and officers in the storage facility. Remember, it’s not like they haven’t thought about all this, and you can be sure there’s quite a vetting process for the people who work with the nuclear weapons. The idea of losing a nuclear weapons scares them even more than it scares us.

Finally, there’s the PALs. That’s Permissive Action Links, devices based on modern digital encryption that prevent the arming or firing of nuclear weapons without the appropriate codes. You could take a live nuke out of the bomb bay of a B-1 and you couldn’t make it go boom no matter what you did. If you don’t have the codes, it’s inert, and if you tamper with it it just disables itself. So again, who has the codes, who can change the codes, and can the codes be changed remotely to disable a stolen warhead? I don’t know, but again, these are smart people and they’ve had years to think about all this.

But let’s, just for fun, assume that all this can be overcome and a hardy band of dedicated Jihadis has taken possession of an armed nuclear warhead. They’re somewhere in the heart of Pakistan and the Army will CERTAINLY know they have a weapon missing. So they, what, load their nuclear bomb on a truck and set out for the port of Karachi? With Pakistani special forces and air power after them, and if they somehow get the weapon on a ship, someone in the Pakistani Army would ask the US and perhaps the UN or NATO for help.

Certainly I understand that the loss of a nuclear weapon represents such a gigantic risk that even if it is highly unlikely, it’s an event that must be considered and planned for. But you don’t get the sense that anyone is considering the REAL risk level, and that allows political leaders to take actions that otherwise might be considered reckless or criminal. The real-world risk of nuclear terror calls for some action, but there needs to be a limit to what that risk can justify. And we need to do a better job of thinking about where those limits are.