Thomas Edison must be spinning in his grave. Apparently,
the Great Blackout of 2003 was triggered by a transmission
line sagging into a tree. How's that for a fragile electrical
grid? For the better part of two days, the news media flashed
images of hundreds of thousands of people coping with darkness
and no electricity. It hardly bears thinking what the
terrorists will be concluding--but thinking is what we
urgently must do about the way our interconnectedness has made
our society so vulnerable to terror and accident.
Electricity
is just the most dramatic example. Easily purchased grenade
launchers could take out power stations or high-voltage
transmission lines, creating a domino effect over hundreds of
square miles. A hacker cyberassault could do the same thing.
Gas pipelines running near or through major urban areas have
huge explosive potential. Our water supplies are exposed.
These networks serve us so well precisely because they are
interconnected, one area absorbing the overload from another.
But this is what makes millions of us concentrated in
geographic clusters so vulnerable to interruptions that, just
a few years ago, would have affected only thousands or
hundreds. After 9/11, we were assured that steps would be
taken to increase security at power stations--but what about
the thousands of transmission lines and substations? All the
king's men cannot provide enough round-the-clock protection
for them.
Reverberations. The tragedy is that the very science
and technology that have enriched civilized life have also put
more potent tools in the hands of evildoers. In a single
strike, terrorists can wreak havoc costing thousands of lives
and billions of dollars. It is the terrorist equivalent of
jujitsu, in which our urban concentration and our strengths in
technology can be directed against us. The result is a
chilling transformation in the killers-to-killed ratio.
This jujitsu effect is multiplied by its endless electronic
reverberation. The instantaneous transmission by nonstop
television, along with talk radio and the Internet, stimulates
millions to emotions of disbelief, anger, fear, and hatred.
Think what this could do to our national sense of security and
safety--never mind the stock markets! No wonder terrorists
will seek out targets that attract the most intense media
attention.
A recent book, Our Final Hour by Sir Martin Rees,
the royal astronomer of the United Kingdom and one of the true
wise men of science, warns how terror and error might well
threaten our future in this century. Like other experts, Sir
Martin underscores the potential of ordinary citizens to wield
destructive power that once was limited to those who held the
reins of power in states with nuclear weapons. "One person's
act of irrationality, or even one person's error," Sir Martin
says, "could do us all in. . . . The danger comes not just
from a network of al Qaeda-type terrorists, but from a fanatic
or social misfit with the mind-set of those who now design
computer viruses. . . . Even one could well be too many."
Sir Martin focuses on the fact that bioterror or bioerror
could kill a million people in one disastrous accident that
might create or release a fast-spreading pathogen. Such
destructive power is easily accessible to private individuals
since dual-use facilities outfitted with modest, easily
operable equipment may now be found in hospital labs,
agricultural research institutes, and peaceful factories
almost everywhere.
The conclusion? "The odds are no better than fifty-fifty,"
Sir Martin says, "that our present civilization on Earth will
survive to the end of the present century." Let's repeat that:
no better than fifty-fifty. But what can we do to stop one
disaffected loner? Restrict research? Make research more
transparent? Monitor those who carry it on, including everyone
who may want Ph.D.'s in microbiology? Is there any way for
high-risk individuals to be reliably identified?
The questions raise delicate issues: the rights of
unimpeded science, the rights of privacy. Against them now we
must set the very right to survive. Can we, in this vulnerable
new world, where evil runs rampant, live forever relying on
the good sense of millions of individual biologists?
Up until the 20th century, the greatest catastrophes were
natural disasters--famine, floods, and earthquakes. In the
last century, more people died in war or were murdered by
totalitarian regimes. In the 21st century, the risk is the
perversion of knowledge. We cannot go on any longer avoiding
the fact that the downside of science and technology,
especially from bioerror or bioterror from both microbiology
and genetics, can kill us all. Just what are we going to
do?