"A Clear and Present Danger"

Sunday, Sep. 30, 2001 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

Trucks loaded with hazardous materials are being stopped and inspected around the country

Photograph for TIME by Steve Liss/Gamma

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If fear can erode constitutional protections, it can also eat the soul. Few objects speak to numbing, nameless dread so much as the gas mask, which not long ago seemed an artifact of World War I battlefields. Now there is a run on them. The Army Surplus Warehouse in Idaho Falls sold 180 masks through its website in two hours. A man in New York placed an order for 500 masks for his employees; they work in an office building near ground zero. A book on germ warfare became an unexpected best seller.

Across the country, people changed their behavior--Come to think of it, why shouldn't my teenage girl have a cell phone?--and redefined their lives. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported that her chums were debating the finer points of gas masks and antibiotics. St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, Fla., are among the few localities in the country that, under the auspices of the military, have held practice drills to respond to chemical and biological disasters. Says Lieutenant Scott Stiener of the Pinellas County sheriff's office: "We're going to have to be a lot more suspicious." Stiener wonders if we'll be able to trust the guy who comes to spray our house or office for bugs; he may have something dangerous in his can. Life has already changed for Bryan McCraw, police chief of the small town of Guin, Ala. McCraw ticketed a Saudi driver for running a red light on Labor Day but didn't search the car. On Sept. 11, cops stopped the same man for driving with a flat tire near Washington's Dulles Airport and found flight manuals in the vehicle. "I'm looking for drugs. I'm not looking for flight manuals," said McCraw. "Somebody is going to have to train us on what to do."

Somebody is going to have to train us all. As Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania prepares to step into his new job as director of Homeland Security, Americans want to know how real these threats are. You don't buy gas masks unless you expect an unspeakable horror. So people are asking: What are the chances that the clear and present danger will manifest as attacks using biological agents like anthrax or smallpox, or chemical compounds like sarin? Will they be sprayed from a crop duster or dumped in the water supply? What is the likelihood that the next attack would be marked not by smoke drifting from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn but by a mushroom cloud?

Officials cannot afford to be sanguine, but when it comes to biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, they try to be realistic. There have been reports that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has tried to buy fissile material and has experimented with chemical agents. But "it's very difficult for terrorists to manufacture, transport and dispense these types of weapons," says a counterterrorism official. (The spray nozzles on your garden-variety crop duster, for example, are not ideal for the dispersal of deadly germs.) In the Pentagon, officials take the same view: weapons of mass destruction, they think, are beyond the range of "nonstate" actors. Terrorists have so far not been able to acquire an assembled nuclear weapon. Nor do they have the expertise to build and deliver one.

But that's no reason not to make their job as difficult as we possibly can. In 1991, Congress passed a wide-ranging law--named for its principal sponsors, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar--to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation. Nunn-Lugar and other programs spend $872 million a year to safeguard the former Soviet Union's weapons of mass destruction. Washington has had some spectacular successes in this field; in 1994, more than 1,300 lbs. of fissile material were airlifted from Kazakhstan to the U.S. But critics contend that Nunn-Lugar is underfunded. The Bush Administration has proposed cutting its budget $100 million this year, a sum that took $20 million out of a program designed to find jobs for unemployed Russian nuclear scientists. Now we must hope they haven't gone to work for bin Laden.

But even if Nunn-Lugar were goldplated, it wouldn't obviate the great lesson of Sept. 11: you don't need so-called weapons of mass destruction to devastate a society. A few airplanes will do. "That's why it was so brilliant," says a Pentagon official. A senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney falls back on football metaphors. The Administration remains worried about the need to defend against "the long bomb"--a chemical, biological or nuclear attack. But just as crucial, this aide argues, is to protect against "short yardage"--attacks on bridges, tunnels, power plants, chemical-storage facilities and refineries. "There are hundreds of these targets," says a Pentagon official, "and attacking them with conventional means--a truck full of explosives--is a heck of a lot easier than building an atom bomb or a chemical weapon."