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Robert Kupperman Dead at 71
by John Little on 26/11/2006Kupperman was one of the first to sound the alarm bell:
“Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss,” Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.
President Nixon created the high-level government panel in September 1972 after Palestinian commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. It involved members as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani.
“Terrorists are undergoing a dangerous metamorphosis from technological clods relying on fanaticism to skilled tacticians,” Kupperman warned in a 1988 op-ed article in The New York Times, written with journalist Jeff Kamen.
Kupperman was one of just a few early voices that tried to warn Americans about the rapidly evolving terrorist threat. Cause for Alarm, the book he co-authored with Jeff Kamen, was criticised by The New York Times in 1989:
The resulting assemblage, however, fails to present a convincing case. Tedious ”dire warning” sermons appear throughout some chapters like annoying commercials interrupting a good movie.
But with hindsight Kupperman and Kamen’s analysis overshadows their critics:
Robert Kupperman and Jeff Kamen, the authors of ”Final Warning,” believe terrorists soon may resort to such horrific acts in the United States, whether by lethal germs, poison gas, radioactivity or a few well-placed conventional bombs. The authors argue that terrorism, rather than nuclear war and conventional conflicts with troops and tanks, now poses the gravest threat to our security. In their effort to alert Americans to imminent danger, they stress several points.
Terrorism is effective. Consider the smiling young suicidal Shiite who in 1983 drove a yellow Mercedes truck over barbed-wire obstacles and past several sentry posts and delivered a bomb that killed 241 Americans at the United States Marine headquarters in Beirut. ”It was the worst single surprise attack on U.S. forces since Pearl Harbor,” the authors claim. Yet this country did nothing but indiscriminately shell the Lebanese coast from a World War II battleship and retreat from the ravaged city.
Terrorism will only get more devastating, the authors contend. A plastic explosive hidden in a cassette recorder aboard Pan Am Flight 103 killed 270 people just before Christmas 1988. The authors called it ”a statement in blood that there is no high ground anywhere – not even for American civilians, who had never before been targeted in such large numbers.” The need for terrorists to capture attention requires acts of increasing shock value, the authors say.
American turf is no longer immune.
Related:
Center for Strategic and International Studies Bio
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