"And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group"
About this Quote
Eagleburger’s line has the clipped, bureaucratic cadence of a man trying to smuggle alarm through the narrow gate of policy language. The phrase “beyond that” signals a hierarchy of fears: whatever the immediate debate is (a particular missile system, a specific state, a near-term contingency), he’s insisting it’s secondary to the nightmare scenario that rewrites every cost-benefit table. He doesn’t dramatize; he escalates by sounding practical.
The careful pivot - “not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons” - is doing two jobs at once. It drains the oxygen from a politically convenient, hardware-specific argument and reframes the conversation around leakage, custody, and state failure. That’s not a technical quibble; it’s a critique of the way Washington likes to fight the last procurement battle while the strategic environment changes underneath it.
Naming “Al Qaeda” pins the remark in the post-9/11 era, when the U.S. security imagination shifted from deterrence against states to prevention against networks. The subtext is that traditional nuclear logic - stable adversaries, identifiable return addresses, credible retaliation - breaks down when the potential user is a terrorist group. “Guarantee” is almost accusatory: he’s calling out the fantasy that policy can deliver certainty in a world of black markets, corrupt intermediaries, and collapsing arsenals.
As a diplomat, Eagleburger isn’t merely warning about terrorism; he’s defending a worldview where nonproliferation, cooperative threat reduction, and securing stockpiles matter as much as missiles and doctrine. The sentence is a pressure test: if your strategy can’t answer this, it’s not a strategy.
The careful pivot - “not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons” - is doing two jobs at once. It drains the oxygen from a politically convenient, hardware-specific argument and reframes the conversation around leakage, custody, and state failure. That’s not a technical quibble; it’s a critique of the way Washington likes to fight the last procurement battle while the strategic environment changes underneath it.
Naming “Al Qaeda” pins the remark in the post-9/11 era, when the U.S. security imagination shifted from deterrence against states to prevention against networks. The subtext is that traditional nuclear logic - stable adversaries, identifiable return addresses, credible retaliation - breaks down when the potential user is a terrorist group. “Guarantee” is almost accusatory: he’s calling out the fantasy that policy can deliver certainty in a world of black markets, corrupt intermediaries, and collapsing arsenals.
As a diplomat, Eagleburger isn’t merely warning about terrorism; he’s defending a worldview where nonproliferation, cooperative threat reduction, and securing stockpiles matter as much as missiles and doctrine. The sentence is a pressure test: if your strategy can’t answer this, it’s not a strategy.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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