Jihadi Du Jour: "I Am Become Death": Assessing the Islamic Nuclear Threat

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

Upon detonating the first atomic bomb, its creator quoted the Bhagavad Gita saying "I have become Death." J. Robert Oppenheimer's realization of the power he had created was overwhelming and probably so due to his personal morality about life and death.

But what happens when this power comes into the hands of those who have stated that they love death as much as we in the West love life? I guess it didn't help that this weekend I watched "Broken Arrow" with John Travolta and Christian Slater. It was an action yarn about a US Air Force pilot who steals and tries to sell nuclear devices.

We have been hearing much lately about the desire of the jihadists to produce an American Hiroshima. In September, a video appeared with Abu Masri, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq recruiting nuclear physicists to "practice" on US military bases there. Also in September, as the 1998 Nuclear Cities Initiative expired, the stage was set for rogue scientists to enter the market as "free agents".

As recently as yesterday the warning from the Taliban to US Muslims is to leave the country because of an attack to happen during the Holy Month of Ramadan, a threat that we previously heard in association with terror suspect Adnan G. El Shukrijumah. With the North Koreans testing nukes, Iran trying to acquire them, and the lapses in Russian security over nuclear warheads of the former Soviet Union, let there be no failure of imagination that this can and probably will happen.

The dilemma, as I see it, for a good Muslim nuclear physicist is to which philosophy will he lean. And that it all comes down to what one refers to as a good Muslim. Is a good Muslim one who works for peace? Or one who works to fulfill Allah's will? And if it is the latter, whose interpretation of the will of Allah will it be? The moderate Muslims of the religion of peace? Or the voice of those like Mohammed Atta and the other 18 9/11 hijackers? Will they choose good or evil... or better whose good and whose evil will be the prism through which the choice is made?

Crossposted at BlogCritics.org.

Labels: American Hiroshima, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Nuclear Threat, War On Terror