Dan Kaplan: Justifying paranoia in the face of terrorism

People say I'm paranoid. Yes, these people are right, I am paranoid, but I have good reasons. You know why? Because what the paranoid people and the vice president say is true, and I know it: the terrorists are coming back -- and soon. Yeah, yeah, you say, Cheney and Co. are using fear as a political tool. And you're right, they are. But reality's a bitch, and al Qaeda wants our blood. Yeah, yeah, you say, you can't live like that -- looking over my shoulder, wondering when the subways or malls are going to fill with death gas, when people are going to start getting sick, when the flash is going to whiten things before the heat and the surge come and say goodbye. And you're right, you can't live like that. Fear clouds things; it chokes the life out of lively moments, puts off your sleep, gets into your dreams. But my eyes are open, and I can't help it. So, in case yours are not, here's some eyelid tape and a bright light: VX gas, made famous by a starring role in The Rock, is oily. It's about as dense as water, takes longer to evaporate and clings to things. Clothes. The ground. You. It prefers to seep into the pores and eyeballs, but it is perfectly willing to go in through the lungs. And the lethal dosage is about the size of an eyedrop. Before you die, you shit yourself and wet your drawers. Then you stagger and twitch until you start convulsing. Then breathing stops, and you're dead. The whole thing's over in about 15 minutes, but not before you've suffered worse than the worst pain you could imagine. The good news is that, as chem-weapons experts say and the Aum Shinrikyo cult showed when they killed only 10 out of the thousands of people in the Tokyo subways, nerve gas is extremely difficult to disseminate effectively. There's also an injectable antidote. The bad news is that people learn from mistakes and you probably don't have the antidote. Plus, all it takes to make VX is a little expertise and money. And al Qaeda wants to have some. And the "axis of evil" does. Biowarfare is a similar story. According to a scientist deeply involved in the process, the former Soviet Union, looking for a cheap way to compete with the U.S. arms budget, created an extensive bioweapons infrastructure called Biopreparat. This infrastructure involved massive processing tanks (similar in appearance to beer brewers), approximately 55,000 scientists, island testing grounds and lots and lots of monkeys, all of them working together to manufacture tons and tons of lethal biological agents and teach them to be efficient killers. They toyed with anthrax, botulinum, plague and, best of all, smallpox and Ebola. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, dismantled the program and fired the scientists, many of whom tried to defect to the U.S. In their usual bright fashion, our intelligence agencies turned them away, and they went elsewhere to look for jobs and cash. Fortunately, bioweapons, like their chemical cousins, are hard to spread over a large area, and plans are in the works to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of smallpox vaccine. Less fortunately, the next five, 10, 20, 50 years offer plenty of time to practice, and those vaccines won't be done for a couple of years. Plus, their effectiveness against aerosolized smallpox is unknown, and when the government staged a war game involving Iraqi-financed terrorists and aerosolized smallpox sprayed in three separate shopping malls, they found that at least a million Americans would die. However, this game did not involve airports, rush-hour subways or King of Prussia. And we're preparing to go to war with Iraq. And then, of course, there's the bomb we've stopped worrying about and learned to love. Estimates put the global total of nuclear weapons somewhere between 24,000 and 34,000. Currently, we've got about 10,600 and Russia's got more. And it's hard to keep track of numbers like those; just ask Arthur Andersen. And, as our FBI and CIA have shown us, people responsible for these sorts of things can be wildly incompetent. And, as Enron, WorldCom and Martha Stewart have shown us, people with access can be wildly greedy. And there are lots of former Soviet high-ups with access. And now, the North Koreans have access, too. And it only takes one. Sleep well.

Dan Kaplan is a junior English major and Voice Editor of 34th Street magazine.

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