AMERICA THE VULNERABLE

Saddam Hussein's unwatched arsenal of poisons and germs can redouble the threat to America, and the terrorists are already among us. That message fairly screamed at Americans last week. In the shadow of the World Trade Center, the target of a bombing in 1993, New York City began the week with a drill involving 600 police, fire fighters and FBI agents responding to a mock attack by terrorists supposedly using deadly VX nerve gas, which Iraq has produced in vast quantities. The following day, in Fairfax, Va., a jury convicted Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani, of assassinating two CIA employees in 1993. The day after that, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the "mastermind" of the World Trade Center bombing, and his driver were found guilty in a federal court in New York City.

An aftershock of the CIA-case conviction hit in Karachi, Pakistan, where four American auditors were shot to death, along with their driver, as they went to work at the local office of Union Texas Petroleum. In morning rush-hour traffic, two gunmen with assault rifles pulled up beside the Americans' station wagon, got out and riddled them with bullets, then drove away. It could have been a replay of the way Kasi killed two people and wounded three as they waited to make the turn into CIA headquarters one morning almost five years ago. A Pakistani group calling itself the Aimal Secret Committee said it had acted in retaliation for Kasi's conviction. In Fairfax, jurors in the case asked the judge if they were in danger, and he responded by sequestering them and ordering their names sealed.

In other words, yes, they are in danger. Americans no longer believe their country is immune to terrorism, as they did for decades, and they are spending big money to fight the threat--more than $400 million in federal counterterror programs alone. State and local efforts are becoming more serious too; the New York City drill is an example. But experts insist the country is essentially insecure. The borders are porous, the government cannot keep track of routine visa violators, and the population is forever on the move. The U.S. is a sea into which evildoers can dive and remain submerged. Terrorists, like anyone else, have little difficulty obtaining guns or the simple makings for oil-barrel truck bombs. Now the new terror could be an even more lethal destroyer--microbes. Germ weapons are small, cheap, easy to hide, simple to dispense and horribly effective. They may be the threat of the near future.

Officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them. It wouldn't take much. This is the poor man's atom bomb. A gram of anthrax culture contains a trillion spores, theoretically enough for 100 million fatal doses. The stuff can be spread into the air with backpack sprayers or even perfume atomizers. The U.N.'s specialists say that 100 lbs. of anthrax bacteria sprayed around a city of 1 million could kill 36,000 people within a week. And Saddam has produced anthrax in large amounts, along with botulinum, a poison that kills by paralyzing the victim, and aflatoxin, a carcinogen.