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Rethinking doomsday
www.thebulletin.org/article.php
Loose nukes, nanobots, smallpox, oh my! In this age of endless imagining, and some very real risks, which terrorist threats should be taken most seriously?
By Linda Rothstein, Catherine Auer and Jonas Siegel
November/December 2004 pp. 36-41, 44-47, 73 © 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
This year, beginning with the January/ February 2004 issue, the Bulletin began a series of articles we dubbed "Rethinking Doomsday." The effort was in direct response to the remarkable proliferation of potential death-and-destruction scenarios about which so much has been made since 9/11.
There is no doubt that the attacks of September 11, 2001 made clear that Americans faced very real dangers at home that few had foreseen and even fewer had taken seriously. Three years later, many, if not most, of us remain frightened.
But so many doomsday scenarios have been paraded on TV, in the newspapers, and in the course of political campaigns, that we can't help asking: How many possible terrorist attacks with how many possible weapons can there be? Must we, while worrying about nuclear holocaust or about terrorists commandeering airplanes or detonating conventional explosives, also worry that tomorrow we will come in contact with an evildoer bearing live smallpox stolen from somewhere in Siberia, with which he intends to infect the entire unsuspecting United States? (Government officials blithely assure us that we are all safer than we were before 9/11, but also say a smallpox epidemic is a case of "not if, but when.") How much time should we have devoted to the idea that the United States faced a gathering threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons? About a plot to poison the food supply? Or should we worry if foreign visitors are seen taking snapshots of the Flatiron Building?
Sometimes it seems as if the source of newly announced dangers must be the basement of the White House or a back room at a Washington think tank, where the thousands of monkeys who have yet to type out exact copies of the works of Shakespeare are nonetheless producing dozens of new ideas for attacks on America, to be trotted out on the news at 10.
The "rethinking" reader on page 39 lists the articles published in 2004 that led us to our own conclusions about rethinking doomsday. (Many are available at the Bulletin's web site, www.thebulletin.org.) The following is a recap of what we learned.
Entire Article:
www.thebulletin.org/article.php
www.thebulletin.org/article.php
Loose nukes, nanobots, smallpox, oh my! In this age of endless imagining, and some very real risks, which terrorist threats should be taken most seriously?
By Linda Rothstein, Catherine Auer and Jonas Siegel
November/December 2004 pp. 36-41, 44-47, 73 © 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
This year, beginning with the January/ February 2004 issue, the Bulletin began a series of articles we dubbed "Rethinking Doomsday." The effort was in direct response to the remarkable proliferation of potential death-and-destruction scenarios about which so much has been made since 9/11.
There is no doubt that the attacks of September 11, 2001 made clear that Americans faced very real dangers at home that few had foreseen and even fewer had taken seriously. Three years later, many, if not most, of us remain frightened.
But so many doomsday scenarios have been paraded on TV, in the newspapers, and in the course of political campaigns, that we can't help asking: How many possible terrorist attacks with how many possible weapons can there be? Must we, while worrying about nuclear holocaust or about terrorists commandeering airplanes or detonating conventional explosives, also worry that tomorrow we will come in contact with an evildoer bearing live smallpox stolen from somewhere in Siberia, with which he intends to infect the entire unsuspecting United States? (Government officials blithely assure us that we are all safer than we were before 9/11, but also say a smallpox epidemic is a case of "not if, but when.") How much time should we have devoted to the idea that the United States faced a gathering threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons? About a plot to poison the food supply? Or should we worry if foreign visitors are seen taking snapshots of the Flatiron Building?
Sometimes it seems as if the source of newly announced dangers must be the basement of the White House or a back room at a Washington think tank, where the thousands of monkeys who have yet to type out exact copies of the works of Shakespeare are nonetheless producing dozens of new ideas for attacks on America, to be trotted out on the news at 10.
The "rethinking" reader on page 39 lists the articles published in 2004 that led us to our own conclusions about rethinking doomsday. (Many are available at the Bulletin's web site, www.thebulletin.org.) The following is a recap of what we learned.
Entire Article:
www.thebulletin.org/article.php
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