Gallup’s question about personal danger was even more revealing. In August 2006, 44 percent of Americans said they were very or somewhat worried that they or their families would be victims of terrorism. That was actually up from 35 percent in the spring of 2002.
These numbers did not play out in smooth lines over the years. They bounced up and down considerably between 2002 and 2006, but the basic trend is unmistakable: Worry about terrorism did not decline as time passed and the threatened onslaught failed to materialize; instead, it slowly rose.
It’s not only the trend that makes these results strange. It’s that so many people think there is a real possibility—a worryingly high chance—that they could be killed by terrorists.
Almost 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. At the time, the population of the United States was around 281 million. Thus, the chance of any one American dying in the attacks that day was 0.00106 per cent, or 1 in 93,000. Compare that to the 1 in 48,548 annual risk a pedestrian has of being struck and killed by a car, or the 1 in 87,976 annual risk of drowning.
Of course, nobody knew at the time that September 11, 2001, would be a horribly unique day. There could have been other, equally destructive attacks in the months that followed. Presuming that there had been one attack each month for one full year—with each attack inflicting a death toll equal to that of 9/11—the total number of dead would have been 36,000. This would be horrific but it would still not be a mortal threat to the average American. The chance of being killed in this carnage would be about 0.0127 per cent. That’s roughly one in 7,750. By comparison, the annual risk of dying in a motor-vehicle accident is one in 6,498.
The slaughter of civilians by non-state actors to advance political goals is not new. It’s not even new to New York City. On September 16, 1920, anarchists drove a horse-drawn wagon down Wall Street containing one hundred pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of cast-iron slugs. In the midst of noon-hour crowds, the bomb was detonated. Thirty-eight people died. More than 400 were injured. Almost nine decades have passed since that dreadful day, and in all that time the deadliest terror attack in the world, aside from 9/11, was the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, which took 329 lives.
According to the RAND-MIPT terrorism database—the most comprehensive available—there were 10,119 international terrorist incidents worldwide between 1968 and April 2007. Those attacks took the lives of 14,790 people, an average annual worldwide death toll of 379. Clearly, what the world saw that September morning was completely out of line with everything that went before or since. Terrorism is hideous, and every death it inflicts is a tragedy and a crime. But still, 379 deaths worldwide annually is a very small number. In 2003, in the United States alone, 497 people accidentally suffocated in bed; 396 were unintentionally electrocuted; 515 drowned in swimming pools; 347 were killed by police officers. And 16,503 Americans were murdered by garden-variety criminals.
And that 379 figure actually overstates the toll inflicted on Americans, Britons, and other residents of the Western world because most deaths caused by international terrorism happen in distant, tumultuous regions like Kashmir. In North America, between 1968 and 2007, all international terrorist incidents combined—including 9/11—killed 3,765 people. That is only slightly more than the number of Americans killed while riding a motorcycle in the single year of 2003. In Western Europe, the death toll due to international terrorism between 1968 and April 2007 was 1,233. That is 6 percent of the number of lives believed lost every year in Europe to the naturally occurring radon gas that few people pay the slightest attention to.
In 2005, K. T. Bogen and E. D. Jones of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were asked by the U.S. government to conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis of the terrorism figures in the RAND-MIPT database. The researchers concluded that for the purposes of understanding the risk of terrorism, the world should be divided in two: Israel and everywhere else. In Israel, terrorism is a serious threat. The chance of being injured or killed over a lifetime (seventy years) ranged between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000, which is high enough that most people will at least know someone who has been a casualty of a terrorist attack. But in the rest of the world, the lifetime risk of injury or death falls between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in a million.
Compare that to an American’s lifetime risk of being killed by lightning: 1 in 79,746; or being killed by a venomous plant or animaclass="underline" 1 in 39,873; or drowning in a bathtub: 1 in 11,289; or committing suicide: 1 in 119; or dying in a car crash: 1 in 84. Bogen and Jones noted that if the risk posed by terrorism were considered in a public-health context, it would certainly fall within the range that regulators called de minimis: too small for concern.
The enormity of 9/11 in our consciousness also obscures an important trend. From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the number of international terrorist incidents steadily increased, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did terrorism. The peak was reached in 1991, when there were 450 incidents recorded in the RAND-MIPT terrorism database. By 2000, that number had plummeted to 100.
In 2000, the trend reversed. By 2004, incidents had soared to 400 a year. But Andrew Mack, the director of the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, which tracks international violence, notes that if you take the Middle East out of the equation, the trend is flat. If South Asia is also taken out, the decline in international terrorism that started at the end of the Cold War actually continued. “That suggests there has been a net decline in terrorism in all regions of the world except the Middle East and South Asia from the early 1990s,” Mack concludes.
Terrorist attacks are not the only measure of the terrorist threat, of course. We also have to look at foiled plots. Among Western countries, the United Kingdom has struggled most with terrorism since 9/11, but even there, only five plots were uncovered in the two years after the suicide bombings of July 7, 2005. In November 2006, the head of MI5 claimed her service knew of thirty more plots on the go. If we assume all these numbers represent actual attacks that would have been carried out if law enforcement hadn’t acted—a huge assumption—they still wouldn’t even come close to making terrorism a significant and rising threat to the safety of the average Briton.
The picture is more startling in the United States, where years of feverish intelligence work has uncovered astonishingly little. In March 2005, ABC News reported it had obtained a secret thirty-two-page FBI report that suggested there was a simple reason that networks of Osama bin Laden’s operatives hadn’t been uncovered in the United States: There may be nothing to uncover. The terrorists’ “intention to attack the United States is not in question,” ABC quoted the report saying. “However, their capability to do so is unclear, particularly in regard to ‘spectacular’ operations. We believe that al-Qa’ida’s capability to launch attacks within the United States is dependent on its ability to infiltrate and maintain operatives in the United States. . . . Limited reporting since March indicates al-Qa’ida has sought to recruit and train individuals to conduct attacks in the United States, but is inconclusive as to whether they have succeeded in placing operatives in this country. . . . U.S. Government efforts to date also have not revealed evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers.”