A new state of fear
Anthrax and warnings of more terror send America into higher anxiety
In the air above the nation's biggest cities, meanwhile, armed F-16 fighter jets now patrol the corridors. Twice last week, the jets scrambled to escort U.S. airliners with unruly passengers, including a mentally ill man who rushed an American Airlines cockpit. And back on terra firma, no place, it seemed, was too small to escape the jitters. In Dodge City, Kan., local police ran sweeps every two hours at the town's tiny airport where, just days earlier, concrete barriers had been put up to keep drivers from the terminal.
False alarms are adding to the tension. Police in the nation's capital have seen a fourfold jump in bomb threats. Bogus E-mails have raced through the Internet, warning Americans to avoid malls on Halloween, swamping FBI switchboards with calls from concerned parents. Anxious consumers stocked up on gas masks and antianthrax drugs.
If America seems under siege, the warnings of a major new terror attack appear, at least for now, only precautionary, albeit wisely so. Officials tell U.S. News they have no concrete intelligence of any specific imminent threat. Because they have not located all associates of the September 11 hijackers, and with U.S. military action underway, they have no choice but to prepare for the worst.
The worst may be very bad indeed. For decades, terrorists were menacing figures wielding machine guns and bombs, capable of inflicting damage but not of derailing whole societies. They wanted, in the words of analyst Brian Jenkins, "a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."
New age of terror. That, clearly, is no longer the case. The roots of change began with the 1995 nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway by the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult. Since then, terrorism experts have predicted the rise of a kind of superterrorism, fueled not by political creed but by religious and apocalyptic zeal. The tools of this new age in terror, they warn, are weapons of mass destruction--chemical, biological, and nuclear arms--and the goals are mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
Scary stuff, but given the results of the Aum attack, an influential group of analysts argue that the chances of a major chem-bio attack are exaggerated. They point out that all 10 of Aum's biological attacks, using anthrax and botulinus toxin, failed completely. The cult's most devastating attack, with the nerve agent sarin, killed only 12 people. The problem, experts say, is that should terrorists find the resources to create these agents--no easy task--"weaponizing" them would pose daunting challenges, even for countries like Iraq. As bad as the anthrax scares are today, say experts, they remain localized and under control. "To make the huge quantities required to inflict casualties is very tough," says analyst Amy Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center. Their best use, in fact, may be in causing chaos--what one expert calls weapons of mass distraction.
Still, the problem facing the public mirrors that faced by counterterrorism officials: gauging the level of threat. Terrorist use of a true weapon of mass destruction poses what analysts call "high consequence, low probability"--an event unlikely to happen, but devastating if it does.
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