Afghanistan: The worst could come

By Gwynne Dyer AS the Rent-A-Threat analysts expound their ever more ingenious scenarios for new kinds of terrorist attacks on prime-time television, it seems fitting to ask: what is the worst that can happen? It certainly isn’t “bio-terror”. We have had weeks of saturation publicity about “anthrax attacks” throughout the United States (the vast majority of which are actually talcum powder, baking soda and cocaine attacks). Only one person has died, but most of the other 275 million Americans, if you believe the media accounts, have turned into panic-prone wimps Perhaps it’s because their knowledge of statistics is inferior to that of the average New Guinea highlander, so the infinitesimal risk of being infected by anthrax frightens them more than the far greater dangers posed by their neighbour’s driving and their neighbour’s handgun. Even Canadians (who have not had a single anthrax case) have taken to running out of buildings at the drop of a hat in what one Canadian journalist scathingly called “panic envy”. Things would get a lot more interesting if terrorists had access to some really dangerous disease like smallpox, which can spread from person to person and would encounter no resistance whatever in most of the present population. But no terrorists would be wasting their time with anthrax if they had smallpox, so that is probably not a danger in the present situation. Even if it were, prompt quarantine measures by an already alert medical establishment would probably confine the loss of lives to some thousands or tens of thousands. That would be quite a lot of people, but no more than the toll in a single big air raid in the latter years of the Second World War. Today’s people are not really more timorous than those of fifty years ago, but they have fallen victim to media hype. Having become targets, North American journalists have also become the chief panic-mongers. So if “bio-terrorism” is not the worst that can happen, what is? Nuclear terrorism, maybe? The time for stealing nuclear weapons is past, thanks largely to the decade-long effort (subsidised by the US Congress) to track down and render safe every nuclear weapons that belonged to the old Soviet Union. Terrorists of the ilk of al-Qaeda cannot make nuclear weapons on their own, lacking the specialised scientific personnel and the sophisticated equipment that would be needed. The most they could manage, given access to lots of fissile material, is a sub-nuclear explosion that scatters radioactive material over an area with a radius of one kilometre (one mile) or so. Even that is very unlikely, but imagine for a moment that terrorists did get their hands on a real nuclear weapon, smuggled it into a major Western city, and set it off. (Go on, pour your money down the Ballistic Missile Defence rat-hole. None of your real enemies care.) It would be a calamity that would dwarf the attacks of 11 September, or indeed anything else that has happened to the citizens of an industrialised country in the past half-century. But it would not be the end of the world. Such an attack could kill hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even half a million. But it would happen once, in one place, and then it would be over. If it were to happen in the United States, it would be a loss equivalent to four or five month’s population growth — and life would go on much as usual for everybody else. Making these calculations and comparisons may seem a bit cold-blooded or even ghoulish, but there is a reason for it. The point is that the very worst attack that terrorists could plausibly make would cause no more casualties than any single month of the Second World War. And it would not cost as many lives as the opening five minutes of the Third World War. A sense of proportion is always useful in times like these. Imagine what it would be like if the current military operations in the Persian Gulf region were taking place just a dozen years ago, when the world was still divided into two rival blocs bristling with nuclear weapons. With American aircraft bombing within earshot of the old Soviet Union’s border, we would probably already be deep into a crisis as bad as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. One false step, and hundreds of millions could die. There are serious risks in the current crisis: more terrorist attacks are possible, and violence could spread to other Muslim countries in the Middle East/West Asian region if the coalition strikes cause large numbers of needless Afghan civilian casualties. But compared to the scale of risks we lived with all the time until only ten years ago, these dangers are very small potatoes. We have emerged from a long period of deadly peril, when the great powers were perpetually ready to go to war with one another and blow half the world up. We now live in a period so safe that the worst threat is mere terrorism, and it is practically impossible to imagine a scenario in which the great powers could drift back into that kind of confrontation. Yet very few people seem to understand how great the change has been, or how lucky we are. In fact, if historical ingratitude were a crime, the entire chattering classes of the West would be serving life sentences at hard labour. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist