As the last three articles have portrayed, the world is extremely susceptible to chemical and biological attacks on civilian populations. This susceptibility is even worse in open socieities like the U.S. where freedom of movement and freedom of travel are fundamental and expressly protected by the Constitution. While the World Trade Center bombing may have shaken some of the invincibility from the American psyche, the fundamendal problems remain.
Terrorists continue to get more sophisticated with the types of bombs and devises they use. Some countries are known to support and aid terrorist activities as an extension of their national policy. Terrorism could even be argued to be Apolitics by other means, just as war was once thought to be. The goals remain the same: to so destabilize a society in order to further a group's goals and disrupt the regular patterns of life in a given country.
Attacks like the ones I described are not so farfetched. A cult group in Japan was able to utilize Sarin with horrible results in the Toyko subways where almost 5000 were injured and about a dozen were killed several years back. The World Trade Center bombing killed five and wounded almost two thousand with bomb materials that could be purchased from any home improvement center. It is quite easy for a group to get the formulas needed to make the nerve agents as they are based on other household cleaning agents. This is part of the problem of tracking down the sites that develop and build these weapons as these chemical agents are often made from common household chemicals. U.N. inspectors have to track down not only the factories which manufacture household chemicals, but also account for all of the chemicals that were produced or purchased.
What does a country like the US do to protect itself? Probably nothing because the cost to society would be too great and would so severely limit freedom of movement. The benefits from protecting against an extremely uncommon occurence would not outweigh the economic benefits of rapid transportation of goods and services. However, there has to be greater inspection of goods that are brought into the country. Some protective measures could be implemented that would give some protection without being obvious. Buildings could be protected by using large concrete tree planters to prevent trucks and cars from being driven into the structures. Monitoring devices should be installed to look for radioactive and chemical weapons devices as well as biological agents.
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