Fear Factor
By Bill Keller
New York Times Editorial
Friday, 15 June, 2002
During the maximum jitters of the Cuban missile crisis, the high school where I was an impressionable
freshman happened to be holding an assembly. The star speaker was a priest from San Francisco, who
arranged to have his remarks interrupted by a student delivering a note. The priest studied the note, then
looked up with a somber face and announced that the Soviet Union and the United States had just
launched nuclear missiles at each other.
Forty years later, I can still hear the terrified whimper in that auditorium as we all considered our
imminent doom. But I can't remember a word of what the speaker said afterward. That's the thing about
fear: It gets your attention and then refuses to give it back.
Fear has been on my mind a good deal lately, since this paper's Sunday magazine assigned me to
survey the possibilities of nuclear terror, from stolen warheads and homemade nuclear explosives to dirty
bombs and the sabotage of nuclear power plants. Some of the threats actually struck me as less alarming
on close examination. Dirty bombs, for instance -- conventional explosives packed with radioactive
contaminants -- are fairly easy to make but the radiation is unlikely to be very lethal. Sober analysis had a
hard time competing with grisly scenarios, though, and readers were more likely to remember the
one-kiloton nuclear weapon I detonated (hypothetically) in front of the World Wrestling Federation gift shop
on Times Square.
By coincidence, the article landed just as the Bush administration was trying to inoculate itself against
further charges of insufficient vigilance. While the magazine was at the printer, Donald Rumsfeld was telling
Congress that terrorists would "inevitably" be armed some day with nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons, and New Yorkers were hearing vague warnings about the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of
Liberty. We now know that the government already had in custody a Chicago street punk turned jihad
wannabe who allegedly talked about making a dirty bomb; the man was put forward this week by our
hyperventilating attorney general as some kind of nuclear Jackal. As a fear-monger, I've had powerful
company.
Letters and e-mails have poured in. A few readers objected that I had published a "road map for
terrorists." Rest assured, the technical information in the article would not surprise a sophomore physics
major. The few useful details I learned that are not widely known I left out, thinking less about the next
World Trade Center than about the next Columbine High School. A couple of readers suggested that I had
abetted the evildoers by identifying targets; tragically, I'm not the first to think of New York City in this
regard, and the other iconic destination that came up in the article, Disneyland, was actually suggested by
an elderly Russian physicist.
A more common complaint was that it is senseless, sensationalistic or just way too depressing to dwell
on threats without offering answers. Not that the article was entirely without prescriptions, but it was not a
to-do list, and there was perhaps an undertone of fatalism. Some readers pleaded for guidance. One
mordant New Yorker wrote in asking for a list of neighborhoods likely to remain beyond the range of
radioactive fallout -- "and please indicate which have the best school systems."
The problem with threats like nuclear terror is that they are not solved but managed, not eliminated but
faced, cut down to size and endured.
We lived with our last great nuclear nightmare -- that hurricane of intercontinental ballistic missiles from
the Soviet Union -- for nearly half a century, and we kept our fears in check by employing a range of
defenses that were none of them foolproof. We fumbled for decades to find the right mix of military
readiness, geopolitical calculation, negotiation and attitude so we could coexist with the danger of
Armageddon. To a significant degree, we redesigned our society around the threat.
The things that worked best -- a sufficient arsenal to deter attack, the diplomacy of containment, the
painstaking business of arms control -- were imperfect and complicated. They also had unforeseen
consequences, some of which haunt us now, like the black market in nuclear remnants and the cold-war
blowback of places like Afghanistan. (Meet the new threat, son of the old threat.) But here we still are.
The easy answers were expensive placebos, like President Reagan's fantasy of an impermeable
defensive umbrella, or before that the brief national obsession with civil defense. Remember that? At one
point President Kennedy, afraid of being politically outflanked by New York's shelter-crazy Republican
governor, Nelson Rockefeller, planned to create fallout shelter space for 54 million people, who were to
survive the nuclear aftermath on barrels of crackers, water and hard candy. Civil defense succumbed to an
astronomical price tag and, as the cold-war historian Lawrence Freedman dryly put it, "the basic unreality
of the proposition that straightforward measures were available to survive a nuclear war."
Now, too, there is no single leap of technology, no grand strategic gambit or fortification that can render
us completely secure against a determined terrorist. That is not an argument for doing nothing, but for
doing many things at the same time, with the right degree of urgency and a steadiness of purpose.
People who worry about terror for a living will tell you that the first priority is prevention. That means
repairing an intelligence network that was built for the last threat, and locking up (or diluting) the fissile
stockpiles where the material for ultimate terror is available. Prevention of terror can be military, such as
denying terrorists the conveniences of a host state, and it can be geopolitical, such as pressing our Arab
allies to counter Islamist intolerance.
A close second is interdiction -- securing routes and borders, inventing better detection technology and
installing it at ports and other choke points, conducting stings to disrupt the market in fissile materials.
And if prevention fails, third comes response and recovery. New York City, as befits the foremost target,
has the most sophisticated response system in the country, enhanced and refined by sad experience.
In the end, though, the question is not just how to fight terrorism, but how to live with it. Even if you give
our leaders passing marks (or the benefit of the doubt) for dealing with the actual threat, they have been
dreadful at dealing with the fear of the threat. The silly color-coded gimmicks, the pre-emptive
we-told-you-so's, the hype and spin and bluster and political opportunism, the willingness to make terrorism
a lobbying prop for every cause on the Republican agenda -- these are eating away at the administration's
credibility. How much confidence can you have in people who contrived a bogus claim of a Cuban
bio-weapons threat just to embarrass Jimmy Carter when he visited Castro? Sure, it is important to tell us if
you arrest a suspect contemplating dirty-bomb terror. It's cynical overkill to stage a victory-over-terror press
conference a month after the arrest -- from Moscow -- and to invoke a newly invented category of military
justice, all because some loser dreamed of spraying Washington with gamma rays.
I live in a city that has been, twice, successfully targeted for major acts of terror, and I believe that
atrocities on a large scale remain well within the means of bad guys. And yet, here I stay. Personally, I
worry less about a dirty bomb than about a suicide killer packed with Home Depot shrapnel. Personally, I
don't lie awake over the vulnerability of nuclear power plants, though if I lived downwind of one I might keep
some potassium iodide tablets on hand. I do have bad dreams about the big one, an actual nuclear
explosion, but I practice what psychiatrists call healthy denial. I've ordered a potted Ohio spiderwort for my
windowsill; it changes color when the radiation level increases. I plan to name it Tom Ridge.
That's me. Maybe you cope with the fear by reading up on the world. Or maybe what works for you is a
set of hazmat suits for the family, or a fallout shelter. The companies that sell shelters on the Internet
report a surge of new business; makes a nice spare guest room, they say.
The urge to do something is normal, but problematic. I know a man who was stricken with a serious
case of doomsday anxiety during the cold war. He pored over climate maps and studied the trade winds,
looking for a refuge beyond the reach of windborne nuclear fallout. The most promising haven he found was
a small group of islands off the coast of South America where the radioactive poison would never reach.
Fortunately for him, the fear passed before he moved to his new sanctuary, because a few years later it
was under bombardment. The islands were the Falklands.
this adminstration is living off the Fear Factor more than any.....
Bush doesn't buy the Ashcrap fear......he's afraid for his job....and his job is in serious jeapordy.....as he can't convict anyone without any lawyers....he can't get anything done. he's in a hole
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