Speakers at the final panel of the 25th Anniversary Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium yesterday discussed the scenario of a world following a 21st-century attack involving nuclear weapons.
At the panel, "The Day After: 21st Century Nuclear Attack," Jim Walsh, of the nongovernmental Fissile Material Security Working Group, said that a response to a nuclear attack could threaten democratic principles.
"If there was a nuclear attack here, I think there'd be a strong impulse to centralize authority, to go on alert, to look for enemies [and] to punish the guilty," he said.
In spite of this risk, Walsh was optimistic that the popular response in the event of a nuclear attack would be a cooperative one.
"The question for me is would the world rally, or would it retract?" he said. "I actually am optimistic about this particular question … When bad things have happened, it has been followed by a collective will to improve the state of affairs." He cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1964 Chinese tests of nuclear devices as cases in his argument.
Panelist Matthew Bunn, the co-principal investigator for the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, considered how global powers could prevent further attacks while upholding order following a nuclear crisis.
He described a scenario in which the volume of victims affected by radiation from a nuclear attack would cripple the country's medical resources.
Bunn was optimistic about the world's ability to prevent a nuclear attack.
"We have managed to prevent the use of a nuclear weapon in anger," Bunn said. "We have managed to keep a situation where there are no more states with nuclear weapons today than there were 20 years ago."
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy and former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Weapons of Mass Destruction Department, discussed al-Qaida's motivation for obtaining nuclear arms.
"We need to understand, particularly as we talk about a nuclear terror phenomenon, that the deeper aspects of the problem are, in fact, moral and ethical," Mowatt-Larssen said.
Al-Qaida's goal, he said, is to break the trust between individuals and their governments and bolster a narrative of the Western powers as corrupt.
"The key to denying al-Qaida … is to ensure that we're not provoked into the very actions that will prove their point," Mowatt-Larssen said.
Director of Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies David Cortright appealed to students to follow their ideals as civil servants.
"You are already leaders and you will be, in coming generations, the people who will be making decisions about these issues," he said. "As you enter government service, hold on to those ideals of truth and justice that you have as young people."
Cortright pointed to recent revolutions in North Africa as positive indicators of the spread of democracy.
"What happened in Egypt and Tunisia and other countries is the largest manifestation of people power we've seen in that part of the world," he said.
Cmdr. Robert Green, author of a book about nuclear deterrence, condemned the use of nuclear weapons as a political tool.
"I think nuclear weapons are being used as a fetishistic currency of power," he said.
Green called for the cessation of nuclear proliferation, arguing that it is ineffective in providing security and exacerbates political tension.
"It is worse than useless against terrorism: It stimulates hostilities, mistrust and arms racing," he said. "It provokes proliferation, it creates instability, it is immoral and implicitly unlawful and there are safer, more cost-effective, humane and lawful alternatives."
The ideology of nuclear deterrence is flawed, Green said, encouraging a shift in the global mindset regarding nuclear weapons.
"You've got to find another way," he said. "The best prevention is to shift the mindset."
Director of the Institute for Global Leadership Sherman Teichman said he was "ecstatic" about the quality of the five-day symposium.
"The quality of the education is really what it's about," he said. "Hundreds of hours of preparation have yielded a tremendous outcome. People think extremely highly of what is happening here."
