And yet, however unlikely it may be, it could happen. “We have learned that it is not beyond the realm of possibility for a terrorist group to obtain a nuclear weapon,” former CIA director George Tenet wrote in his memoirs. “Such an event would place Al Qaeda on a par with the superpowers and make good bin Laden’s threat to destroy our economy and bring death into every American household.” “Were a nuclear terrorist attack to occur,” said former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, “it would cause not only widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty.”
By most accounts, a successful nuclear detonation in an urban center would kill in the order of 100,000 people. With a death toll of 100,000, the chance of any one American being killed in the explosion would be 0.033 percent, or 1 in 3,000. As for the collective risk, a death toll of 100,000 is not much more than the number of Americans killed each year by diabetes— 75,000—and it is roughly equal to the number of American lives lost annually to accidents or to infections contracted in hospitals. So simply in terms of numbers of lives lost, a nuclear terrorist attack would hardly be the apocalypse.
It is often assumed, however, that such a strike would also unleash panic that would multiply the destruction and might even collapse the civil order. The problem with this assumption is that it’s based on a long-discredited myth: Decades of extensive research on how people behave in emergencies has consistently found that panic is quite rare. “Even when people confront what they consider to be the worst case, they organize themselves to provide succor and salvation to their friends, and even to complete strangers,” writes Lee Clarke, a sociologist at Rutgers University. Even people caught in the flaming wreckage of downed airplanes routinely look to the needs of others rather than pushing and screaming their way to safety. We should have learned this lesson on September 11, 2001, when New Yorkers responded to a bewildering disaster with dignity, compassion, cooperation, and generosity.
A nuclear terrorist attack would certainly do massive economic damage, but George Tenet’s claim that it would “destroy” the American economy is ridiculously inflated. Again, the best proof of this is 9/11 itself. The attack wasn’t on the scale of a nuclear detonation, of course, but the terrorists did destroy two vital cogs in the machinery of American capitalism, paralyze the most important city in the United States, halt all air travel, and bring American commerce and society to a shuddering halt. As expected, stock markets around the world plunged. But it took just forty days for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to bounce back to the level it had closed at on September 10, 2001. “If you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11,” William Dobson wrote in Foreign Policy magazine on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, “what is remarkable is how little the world has changed.” The value of American exports continued to rise steadily, and while the value of global trade dipped slightly in 2001 from $8 trillion to $7.8 trillion—it was a bad year even prior to the attacks—it “came racing back, increasing every subsequent year to $12 trillion in 2005.” The American economy was not devastated, nor was globalization set back. Instead, the United States picked itself up, brushed off the dust, and carried on. Even New York City proved to be so resilient that it was soon enjoying a new Golden Age.
Another demonstration of the fundamental strength of American society came on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore and breached the levees protecting New Orleans. More than 1,500 people died, while most of the rest fled. The parallel with a nuclear strike is far from exact, but here we saw a great American city suddenly smashed and abandoned. The experience was wrenching and the costs—estimated to be around $80 billion in direct damage alone—were huge. But America was not crippled. Far from it. The economy scarcely hiccupped, and the loss of one of the most storied cities in the nation did essentially no damage whatsoever to American military, political, or cultural power.
So let’s add this all up. First, 9/11 was a dramatic deviation from what terrorism usually entails. Second, even including the toll of 9/11, international terrorism poses an infinitesimal risk to the life of any individual American or any other resident of a Western country. Third, even if there were a long series of attacks in the United States, each on the scale of 9/11, the risk to any one American would still be much smaller than other risks people routinely shrug off. Fourth, outside the Middle East and South Asia, the rate of international terrorist attacks has been falling for about a decade and a half. Fifth, it is very hard for terrorists to get their hands on, much less deploy, chemical, biological, or—especially—nuclear weapons, and even if they did overcome the many barriers between them and a successful attack, the toll would very likely be a small fraction of what we see in our nightmares. Sixth, even if terrorists succeeded in launching a truly catastrophic attack with a death toll many times that of 9/11—such as by detonating a nuclear bomb—the risk to any one person would still be small and the United States would remain the most prosperous and powerful nation in history.
And finally, number seven: Almost one-half of Americans are worried that they or their families could be killed by terrorists—a level of concern that is actually higher than it was four years earlier, even though there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil.
No, this does not add up. The fact that people had wildly unrealistic worries in November 2001 made sense. Psychology can explain that. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. It also makes sense that the worry slowly declined as time passed and nightmares did not materialize. That, too, happened after Oklahoma City. But psychology alone cannot explain why the decline stopped, or why it crept back up as the United States enjoyed one terrorism-free year after another.
To understand that, we have to go back to September 12, 2001, and George W. Bush’s declaration that the events of the previous day were “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war. . . . Freedom and democracy are under attack.” British prime minister Tony Blair added his own rhetorical escalation four days later when he warned, “We know that they would, if they could, go further and use chemical or biological or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction.” This theme recast the destruction wrought by 9/11. Instead of it being the result of nineteen fanatics armed with nothing more than box cutters and good luck, it was definitive proof of the fantastic power, reach, and sophistication of the enemy. Instead of it being seen as a horrible deviation from the terrorist norm, it was both the new normal— expect more attacks on the same scale—and a sign that much worse was to come.
The media picked up this language and it became routine to say that “everything had changed.” We had entered the “Age of Terror.” Some conservatives dubbed it the “Third World War”—or fourth, for those who thought the Cold War should be included in the list. The president himself endorsed this view on May 6, 2006, when he referred to the passenger revolt on Flight 93 as “the first counterattack to World War Three.” Another popular phrase was “existential struggle,” which suggested that the very existence of the United States was in jeopardy. Others went further. “This conflict is a fight to save the civilized world,” Bush declared in October 2001. The logical end of this rhetorical expansion was reached by Irwin Cotler, Canada’s Liberal justice minister and a renowned human rights activist, who often referred to terrorism as “an existential threat to the whole of the human family.”