Our Resilient Society

Ben Friedman of the CATO Institute offers us some common sense about "WMD terrorism." That is to say, we will survive.

Our way of life survived various wars, the virtual destruction of a large swath of New Orleans, and other disasters. It would survive even nuclear terrorism. Incidents of chemical or biological terrorism are unlikely to cause mass casualties, although they could, and will not collapse our institutions. The danger to American values comes more from our reaction to terrorism than the thing itself. What’s more, these sorts of incidents are not nearly as likely as you generally hear.

Many national security experts and politicians believe that our society is brittle, that even a well-timed cyber attack could cripple our economy and institutions. This idea is akin to strategic airpower theory, which argues that the destruction of a few pressure points can halt a nation’s industrial output and cause its surrender. History proves this theory wrong. Industrial societies are resilient. The transition to a more information-based economy makes this doubly true. Information is hard to destroy, for one, living as it does in dispersed networks and brains. Second, lowered communications and transport costs make us less dependent on any particular supplier or region, making recovery from supply disruptions easier. And our wealth provides further insurance against disaster.

We need to guard against the Chicken Littles who keep screaming about how we can't take the risk of a terrorist CBRN incident. Of course we can. This is not to say that we ought to disregard the possibility, but that we can, given a rational and thoughtful threat assessment and risk management plan, take steps to intercept the threat and to mitigate any consequences of an attack. We don't need doomsayers talking about the need to take action on "one percent chances  of the imaginable coming due." Less rhetoric, more rational actions, please.

Comments

[Belphagor1527]

J,

Have you checked out the Cato counter terrorism conference (http://www.cato.org/events/counterterrorism/index.html)?

It's available for download mp3 or streaming video. Milton Leitenberg gives a talk about the threat of bio attack which I thought was interesting and was wondering (if you heard/saw it) what your thoughts were.

[J.]

I did (see this post). I really like Leitenberg's point of view and enjoy his publications. I was disappointed that chemical terrorism is so often ignored, but what are you going to do? Chem warfare isn't sexy anymore, it's so 1990s.

Hey Belphagor, send me an email msg, got something for you.