Thoughts Following 9/11

10-10-2001 (Later):    After rethinking the problem, I've realized that what I said below is totally unrealistic. There isn't apt to be a national emergency or a national traffic jam. Instead, an attack would probably be like Florida's anthrax attack.  localized, and slow to be detected. Offhand, I could imagine three scenarios: wind-driven poison gas or spores, person-to-person contagion, and suitcase-sized nuclear bombs comparable to World-War II blockbusters.
    Wind-driven anthrax spores would be undetectable.
    Wind-driven poison gas would require immediate evacuation downwind from the point of release, as would wind-driven radioactive fallout from a tiny nuclear device. However, this evacuation would be localized, and would require outrunning the wind.
    Tiny nuclear devices would destroy a couple of blocks in a city. The one known Soviet-developed device weighed 163 pounds. Other nuclear devices might be detonated in aircraft, trucks, or ships. However, these are not readily available (and, one might hope, not available to terrorists at all). But in any case, they would produce localized effects rather than city-busting damage.
   I won't say more until I have done a better job of thinking this through.
10-10-2001:    I would reiterate yesterday's recommendation regarding The Politics of Rage- Why Do They Hate Us?, by Fareed Zakaria . Mr. Zakaria says, "Bin Laden and his fellow fanatics are products of failed societies that breed their anger. America needs a plan that will not only defeat terror but reform the Arab world."  I found Section 10 particularly interesting. The message in Section 10, written by Jonathon Alter, is that some intellectuals "are unforgivably out to lunch"."Critics of the war on terrorism don’t seem to understand: someone is trying to kill them." Arab terrorists are products of a resurgent fundamentalism in Muslim affairs, and the U. S., as the poster child for Western influence and the supporter of Israel, is, to a large degree, a scapegoat. For example, Mr. Zakaria points out that Arab nations may decry the plight of the Palestinians, but he suggests that neighboring Arab nations haven't helped them or been willing to take them in. (Lebanon has come the closest.)
   I'm working on contingency planning for Tommie and me, and for our family members, in the event of trouble. My first thought was that we would "head for the hills", but then I realized that U. S. traffic would be in a state of total gridlock. Legally, U. S. citizens aren't supposed to drive on Interstate highways during times of emergency, since the Interstates are reserved for official and emergency vehicles. Even if this weren't the case, under the best of conditions, Interstates can't accommodate more than, perhaps, 5,000 to 6,000 cars per lane per hour. (Imagine what would happen when you add out-of-state traffic to evacuation traffic in the neighborhoods of large cities.*) Everyone ought to be encouraged to become aware of alternative routes to get out of town. Everyone ought to be warned against blocking intersections, and thereby blocking cross-traffic to alternative routes.
    Ruth and I were in an emergency-evacuation situation like this once, when a blizzard suddenly descended on Birmingham, Alabama.. What happened was total gridlock. There would have been many ways to leave town, but people who were trying to use the main escape routes blocked the intersections so you couldn't get across town to the lesser roads. The reason was that, if drivers didn't block the intersections, other cars would enter from the side streets. Of course, once the side streets had emptied out, this would no longer have happened, but by then, everyone had adopted the practice of ignoring traffic lights and blocking intersections.
    This is terribly inefficient. Bumper-to-bumper traffic moves fewer than 1,000 vehicles per lane per hour.