To the List, As a New Yorker, the following article pretty well says it all for me. Keller and I are the same age. I too lived through such things as the Cuban Missile madness. Does anyone remember the movie "Fail Safe"? Much more frightening than Dr. Strangelove and my later years in the military made it worse as I sat next to an Officer specialist in CBR (Chemical, Biological, Radiological) in the infirmary for the Pentagon. We both had the flu. He was lamenting the President's ban on CBR. He said it was the best way to cleanse a city so that we could move right in and take over the technology with no problems from a dead population. This was the Puritan solution to the Pequot "problem" as well when they burned alive every man, woman, child and dog in the Pequot capital city. The Pequots burned in silence. Something that so freaked out the Puritan's Narragansitt allies that they turned away in respect for the Pequots stubborn courage. No running and screaming through the streets with burning buckskin. It merely frightened the Puritans and contributed to all of those "they are not human" stereotypes that plagues our relationship to enemies down to the present day.
I place that CBR conversation right up next to hitch hiking across Oklahoma and being picked up by drug dealers and a white lawyer who complained about the settlements that he got for the Cherokees which brought him ten million (10% of the settlement, multiply that by six for today's dollar) while each Cherokee got under $400. When I asked him questions he grew frightened and put me out quickly. They weren't harsh or even pushy but he sure was guilty. Lawyers, Drug Dealers and Death creation for expediency. I never forgave Kennedy or Khrushchev. The society lied to us constantly and we were taught most of all to be gullible. Those from off the reservation did not receive such hokum. My fellow soldiers couldn't believe how naive those of us from the Res were. When someone claimed something, our impulse was to accept their word. The most unbelievable things were said simply and as if they were true and we were supposed to believe them. The speeches by politicians, diplomats, Kings, Generals and even Princesses eventually broke down that gullibility but my "knee-jerk" reaction is still to believe what people say even when my own perceptions are screaming "fool don't listen to this person." "He is out to trick you for his own benefit!" "Look! Think! What is really being said? and What do I get by being such a fool?" In the world where I now live, my only reprieve is for the Russians (the Evil Incarnate Enemy) for they had the good sense to give up their system in the end rather than die in a Nuclear Winter. Something I still question our morality, or good sense, about. One of the things that I have noticed in my sixth decade is how cynical I am about humans. I've watched people, for little reason, destroy each other in the name of theories that are proven simply by virtue of the fact that they are spoken or written about in the Dictionary. I'm afraid the Cold War made little sense to me considering my people and profession's history with the systems of America. Why couldn't Truman have blown up an uninhabited island first and delivered an ultimatum? The history within my own family makes little sense and the fights make even less. A continuous competition and litigeousness over such things as Comparative Advantage, Land ownership, Private Property, Scientific Reductionism and Religious literality that proves that such people never translated a text or understood an Oriental much less a language of the people that they constantly abused and erased at will. How can we ascribe cost effectiveness to life? Today we treat other animals in the same way that we treated humans until Mengele showed us how monstrous that was. Anyone who knows the history of Tropical Medicine knows that he was not an aberration. So I watched the towers burst into flame and was fascinated at this latest example of such things. When they fell I felt strategic rather than emotional, from the same place where I have experienced people's disconnect from my own people's continuing travail over the last 200 years. Today I feel that the humans on the other side of the world have no sense whatsoever of the toys that they play with. I am embarrassed that it was the Soviets who chose to give up in the face of a Nuclear Winter, rather than my country. I am embarrassed that my own country shows so little empathy or intelligence that they would be too suspicious of anyone speaking Arabic to hire a translator for the FBI, CIA or NSA to translate their information. Americans are stupid about language reducing it to a rejection when another language is spoken. That gives our competitors an immense advantage. Well read Keller, I've said enough. Ray Evans Harrell June 15, 2002 Fear Factor By BILL KELLER 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.
