Washington, D.C., vaporized, New York City a barren poisonous wasteland and the white skeletons of hundreds of millions littering the globe.??This disturbing vision is what could be and what many believe would be if terrorists began to use weapons of mass destruction. The fear of these weapons was the cornerstone for the Iraq war. The failure to find such weapons and the lack of any U.S. casualties due to such weapons have made American concerns dwindle. The executive branch has become the little boy who cried wolf too many times ... but if you remember the story, the boy was eventually right. When it comes to being eaten, you only have to be right once.
??VX gas is an odorless and tasteless nerve agent. Sarin gas, while less powerful then VX, has similar effects. There are indications that both nerve agents were used in the 1980s during the war between Iran and Iraq. Sarin was used in two terrorist attacks in Japan in 1994 and 1995. As nerve agents, (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) they prevent the proper operation of the chemical that acts as the body's \off"" switch for muscles. After exposure, muscles become constantly stimulated. Eventually the muscles tire and are unable to function. Suffocation occurs in open air. Death can be caused by contact of the skin, eyes and inhalation. Symptoms can occur within seconds or take up to 18 hours to appear. Contact with clothing can spread exposure to others for 30 minutes after initial exposure. It can be placed in water, released in vapor form or used in liquid form.
??If knowing what nerve agents can do to you does not scare you, consider that any man carrying a thermos becomes a danger. A humidifier can kill off a building. A paint sprayer and unkind wind can kill off sections of a city. There will be no warning of tainted drinking water until millions start dying. The largest cities become ghost towns.??To more permanently contaminate a city, terrorists might use anthrax, a spore-forming bacteria which has a deadly affect when released in the wind and which can contaminate an area for years.
??Yet it is not anthrax or nerve agents that concern the guardians of this country most-that is reserved for the Holy Grail of destruction, a nuclear weapon. At the center of a ground-detonated thermonuclear device lies a crater 200 feet deep and 1,000 feet in diameter. Whatever was at the center of that crater, was vaporized in the first second of detonation. In a radius of 1.7 miles from the explosion 98 percent of the population is dead. After this first ring of damage, there is a second ring one mile out. In the second ring 50 percent of the population is dead and 40 percent injured, buildings have been blown out by the overpressure and few remain standing. At 4.7 miles the damage is still considerable, 5 percent of the population in that area is dead with 45 percent injured.??Fires have broken out, any electronics within a two-mile radius of the blast no longer work, and the area is littered with debris.
Fallout, depending upon the prevailing winds and the weather, will likely kill every human within 90 miles of the detonation. Within 30 miles of the detonation the area would be unsafe for 10 years; even 250 miles out from the detonation the levels of radiation would be considered unsafe for a period of two to three years.
??I know those in the executive branch have read reports on the ease of making a biological WMD and the fact that nuclear missiles have gone missing from Russian stockpiles. I imagine they must spend many a sleepless night wondering if today is the day they did not stop an attack that uses a WMD. After all, what makes a WMD so much more disturbing than any other form of terrorism is that it takes only one.
One mistake, one time, one terrorist organization overlooked and missed, and a horror unlike any seen on the face of the planet could occur. Sept. 11 could be repeated once a day for 300 days and still not equal the body count or destruction of one day of a terrorist attack using a WMD. The executive branch might call wolf a thousand times on the subject of a WMD, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen.
