THE PRICE OF FANATICISM

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Even very sober public officials are deeply concerned. Three weeks ago, Georgia's Senator Sam Nunn sketched a lurid fantasy: how terrorists might wreck the central government of the U.S. On the night of a State of the Union address, when all the top officials are in the Capitol, Nunn said, a handful of fanatics could crash a radio-controlled drone aircraft into the building, "engulfing it with chemical weapons and causing tremendous death and destruction.'' This scenario, said Nunn, "is not far-fetched,'' and the technology is all readily available.

Many of the experts say they are surprised that chemical weapons have not been used in a major attack before. The ingredients for making them are available commercially and can be put together by almost any competent chemist. Muslim zealots, for example, are increasingly a younger generation of angry men who have the education and sophistication to construct weapons their fathers and uncles never dreamed of.

Even though radical groups have long had the power to kill more people than they actually did, the fact that they held back somewhat suggests they imposed certain restraints on themselves. Most such groups viewed themselves as political activists rather than wanton killers. They had to appeal to potential supporters of their program and were wary of producing a backlash of revulsion by using the most repellent methods. The cold war and the rules of state-sponsored terrorism curtailed their freedom of action. Governments knew more or less who was sponsoring whom, and the threat of retaliation was always present--as demonstrated when the Reagan Administration sent U.S. bombers to hit Libya in 1986 in retaliation for its support of several terrorist acts. But the end of the cold war and the beginnings of the Middle East peace process have taken Eastern European and some Muslim governments out of the sponsorship business.

At the same time, however, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the creation of new states and the breakup of others have triggered an explosion of ethnic conflicts, with racial and religious hatreds mixed in, giving fresh scope to terrorist free-lancers. Much of the violence committed today in the name of Islam is the work of small, loosely organized cells who emerge for little more than a single act of random vengeance. Sections of Pakistan are ungovernable safe havens for the remnants of 20,000 zealous volunteers from Muslim countries all over the world who went to join the Afghan mujahedin in their holy war against the Soviets. An estimated 1,000 fundamentalist fighters still gather in the country's lawless reaches to train and egg each other on. They frequently sally forth aboard international airliners, looking for new places to fight their messianic war.

Some free-lance terrorists have taken up residence in the U.S. They have brought with them a brand of activism previously almost unknown except for occasional episodes of violence among their kind, as when Sikh extremists attacked officials of the Indian government in U.S. cities.