Will We Be Safer?

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Two years after that day in September, the nation is still worried about terrorism. At the airports we're taking off our shoes, at work we're flashing our badges, and at home we're making sure the duct tape is where we can find it in the dark. But these rituals seem inadequate for coping with some truly terrifying scenarios: "dirty bombs" slipped into the country, a smallpox outbreak. Well, there's help on the way. A variety of companies and laboratories, some fostered by Washington, are rushing to produce technologies that address our deepest post-9/11 fears. Many will come on line in the next year or two. The effort recalls the last time we launched a concerted attempt to resist a mortal threat: World War II's Manhattan Project, which produced the Bomb. This time the enemy is murkier and the battle more diffuse. "There isn't going to be one big breakthrough, one killer app," warns Katrina Heron, former editor of Wired, who along with David Kuhn is co-editing a book for HarperCollins on science and technology in the age of terrorism. "There isn't going to be a Los Alamos."

She's right--there will be many, many Los Alamos--type projects spearheaded by various teams of scientists and engineers seeking to head off a mind-numbing array of potential threats. This much you can count on: some will be elaborate but ineffectual (can you say Maginot Line?), some will be all hype, but some will improve our sense of safety. Because terrorists can pick targets anywhere, counterterrorism has to defend everywhere--from airports to office buildings to cargo ships to hospitals. Sept. 11 shed an urgent light on our vulnerabilities and galvanized us to protect ourselves with something better than duct tape. So get ready for the next wave of high-tech defense: radiation detectors, Internet safeguards, handheld anthrax "sniffers." There's no panacea, but in a world of ancient hatreds, modern shields still have their uses. Here's what's next in three key areas:

AIRPORTS Expect more big changes at the nation's air terminals--probably at the security checkpoints. The screening devices that currently check your bag and the beeping gateways you walk through are best at finding suspicious metal objects only. Soft explosives, such as plastique, can slip right through. In an age of suicide bombers, that's a fatal shortcoming. But as early as this November, L-3 Communications, a New York City manufacturer of screening devices, expects to demonstrate a machine that uses "millimeter microwave" technology, similar to what the military already uses to "see through" walls, to examine passengers for known explosives anywhere on their bodies. Even soft explosives show up. Why has this obvious safeguard taken so long to appear? "Until 9/11, no one believed that a bomber would get on the plane with his bomb," says Frank Lanza, the company's CEO. "Everyone assumed he would check the explosive in his luggage and stay off the flight."