Greg Easterbrook, author of "The Here and Now" and editor of The New Republic, wrote a small article in the Sunday, February 16 edition of the New York Times entitled, "The Smart Way to be Scared."

The article deals with the improbabilities of certain terrorist attacks (i.e. chemical or biological attacks) and contrasting those odds with the probabilities of other terrorist attacks (nuclear detonation, dirty bomb, and conventional explosives). Then Easterbrook points out how little discussion has been given to the latter, more probable manifestations of terrorist attack, and how much--disproportionately so--discussion has been devoted to the far more unlikely manifestations of terror.

If the reader disagrees with Easterbrook, or is curious how he came to the conlusions that he did, post a comment and I will answer your questions based on the material within his article.

What I wish to discuss now, however, is the American policy of pre-emption. War with Iraq is officially a war to prevent terror attacks in the future. The Bush administration seeks to root out the threat before it rears its head as the reaper of more civilian lives.

Can the same be said for Homeland Security? I think not and Easterbrook shows us why. He is correct in saying there is far too much talk about a possible chemical attack. This amount of discussion is to be expected I suppose considering the US has already been victimized by a successful anthrax onslaught that killed an unastonishing toll of five. Easterbrook does not write, but I feel he would agree with me, that there has been far too much discussion regarding terrorists and aircraft. A few short months after 9-11 a teenage boy in Florida flew a small plane into a skyscraper for the sole purpose of taking his own life. However, the media still had to calm quickened hearts by assuring Americans the incident was NOT a terrorist attack. Around the same time a large passenger aircraft lost its tail piece and fell to the earth, killing everyone on board. Terrorists were the immediate suspects almost by default. However, this incident too turned out to be the result of a structural failure rather than disgruntled Arabs.

Now, over a year later, the plane talk continues as the warning level for the nation rises to Orange (whatever the hell that means, Im still not sure). The goverment tells us to live our lives as we always would, with the conspicuous exception of creating a bio-safe room in our homes with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Besides that one little thing, the terrorist havent managed to change the way Americans live (yeah right).

What is of note is the fact that such a bio-safe haven would be of use only in the event tha a chemical or biological agent was released from a low-flying plane. It seems to me everyone is still all caught up in this "terror from the skies" thing.

As I said before, this is not suprising. After all, we WERE attacked the first time with planes right?

Wrong. The first attack on US soil also took place at the WTC but failed to topple the towers. The terrorists in this case used conventional explosives--the sort of weapons by far and large preferred by terrorists all over the world by virtue of their cheap cost, easy mobility, and relative power.

Yet the government, as Easterbrook points out, doesnt discuss what to do in the event of a conventional explosion.

The most horrific option: Atomic attack or radiological "dirty bombs" has yet to be employed by any terrorist group. I have no doubt terror groups have access to all the fissile material they could ever want....hell, the Ukraine and Russia were both selling fissile material on the black market all throughout the nineties. Literally, these two countries were nuclear sieves. Complement this fact with the cost of fissile material: The amount required to produce a one-megaton explosion (one Hiroshima event) costs about the same on the black market as a laptop does at Best Buy.

Sure, border security at airports and various other entry points for the US is pretty tight......yet there are still plenty of places where a determined terrorist can slip into the country. Take the border of Texas and Mexico as an example. Then there is also the entire US-Canadian border. These two huge regions are largely unguarded.

Given the relative low cost of creating something like a dirty bomb, combined with the tremendous amount of unguarded space on US borders, a radiological attack seems far more likely to me than two or more planes being flown into buildings again.

So, where is the talk about that? Why doesnt the government stress this point at least as much as it stresses chemical or biological attacks?

None of this sounds like true pre-emption to me. All of it sounds like the same old game: "React, react, react, and--oh yes, forget anything that might have happened during the Clinton administration unless it can help us along in the effort to invade Iraq.

The quixotic artifice of the Bush administration is as rational as those Greenspan termed "exuberant" in the late nineties.