Thomas Harris’s first (pre-Hannibal) novel comes to mind. Black Sunday, about a terroist plot to seize the Goodyear Blimp, put explosives and schrapel in it, and blow it up over a stadium during the Super Bowl. Wikipedia says it’s the first novel to feature a terrorist plot against the US. I know I’ve tried to finish it every Super Bowl Sunday for the last twenty years, and never have gotten through that borefest.
I recently had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Randy Larsen, the director of the Institute for Homeland Security. It was quite an interesting talk and some of the scenarios and exercises that he talked about were quite eye-opening.
According to him, weaponized anthrax is not that hard to obtain. Some government agency recently made it from scratch using equipment bought off the internet for 250,000. Of course, being the government and all they didn't realize they could have saved big 's if they bought it all used for $50K. Anthrax spores can be obtained from numerous labs, etc, and is naturally present in a lot of Texas soil, for example. Mr. Larsen has snuck a vial of weaponized anthrax surrogate into a lot of places it shouldn’t have been and rarely been called out on it.
A biological attack seems inevitable given that at some point a group will obtain a biological weapon and that they are hard to detect and easy to deploy. A properly devised medical response is the best defense to prevent major loss of human life. The economic cost of decontamination could still be enormous though. Imagine a terrorist riding the subway around NY dispersing a little anthrax at every stop. The loss of use and cleanup could cost into the tens of billions.
No high tech needed.
[ol]
[li]Buy a rusting old tramp freighter[/li][li]Fill the holds with Ammonium Nitrate[/li][li]Deck cargo: huge, industrial rolls of twine/cord/yarn. Cotton is ideal.[/li][li]Deck cargo: screws/nuts/bolts/nails. In light wooden crates.[/li][li]Obtain: mechanical alarm clocs, batteries, stuff for firebombs.[/li][li]Misc hoses, pumps, hardware, etc. All hardware store/marine supply stuff.[/li][li]Arrange deck cargo with twinw rolls inside, hardware around the edges.[/li][li]Sail to 250 miles off New York.[/li][li]Pump fuel oil from ship’s bunkers to the holds. Soak Ammonium Nitrate.[/li][li]Soak deck cargo with fuel oil.[/li][li]Sail into harbor.[/li][li]Set timed firebombs in hold for 20 minutes.[/li][li]Tie wheel down, with ship aimed between Manhattan & Jersey.[/li][li]Take to the lifeboats.[/li][li]Wait for the explosion.[/li][/ol]
Ammonium Nitrate is highly explosive. It would take an additional 30 minutes or so to reach detonation temperature.
Note on prior ship/Ammoniun Nitrate incident–
The nuts & bolts would become shrapnel, the fuel-soaked twine, blazing incendiary material raining down on New York City.
And you could buy everything you needed in any port city on Earth, probably on credit. :smack:
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
This is a really good point. Blow up a major symbol of a nation’s economy (an economy that is a fundamental part of that nation’s sense of identity), and damage the center of the nation’s military structure, and you have - at least from the perspective of a terrorist - engaged in an act that has a point. Blow up a bunch of eight-year-olds in Duluth, and you’re just a garden variety murderer. The schoolkids might upset the American populace more, but I think an act like that would fall outside whatever framework the terrorist agenda operates within.
No one thinks that they, themselves, are evil.
Top 9/11? Sure, a lot of these plans would kill loads of people but the thing that made 9/11 most effective was because it was on live TV and the video from many vantage points has been repeated trillions of times. Without the video it become abstract and easier to forget about. To top 9/11 you’d need something spectacular when the cameras are in place.
In terms of numbers of lives or dollar value destroyed, sure it can be topped. I’ve always thought an explosive ship in New York Harbor would do more. Dirty bombs in a highly populated area would probably kill 10x what 9/11 did. But they’ll never top the visuals of those towers coming down. Had they remained standing, I don’t think the US reaction would have been as intense. But to see those 110 story towers come crashing down- that just can’t be topped.
To the few of you who questioned how we’re safer: How can you deny that we are? I mean, if we add one security guard to one airport terminal in one city than technically we’re safer than we were before by some small amount, right? Do you deny that the entire focus on homeland security is effective at all? Sure, there are still ways that we’re vulnerable, but not nearly so much as before. Even if we disagree about exactly how effective the current security is, it seems silly to think that there is absolutely no effect at all.
In any case, where we are truly more safe IMO is the fact that most governments of the world, led by the US, are seeking out and killing or capturing terrorists and freezing their bank accounts.
Let me ask you this: Would you rather be a member of Al Queda during the time period of 1995 - 2001 or 2001 - 2007? In the six years leading up to 9/11 you basically had to make a big mistake to get caught. You would have freedom of movement and information. You even had friendly governments allowing you to operate. In the six years since 9/11 you have your accounts frozen. The friendly Taliban toppled and a good chance of US troops kicking your door in or dropping a bomb on your car. Most countries are seeking you out wherever you are. There’s also a good chance that you’ve been rotting in Gitmo for the past few years if you did live.
On September 1, 2001, I was going thorough some magazines, and found a two page aerial shot of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building taken after the bombing. I clipped it and saved it. I had never realized how awful the devastation was.
I work at an airport, & everyone here ridicules the security.
The airport police are blatantly useless, openly mocked to their faces, & do nothing except prop up the walls & harass the occsional unfortunate traveller, when they are bored. Access to baggage areas is unsecured, & the airlines are disintrested.
Total efforts to protect the Tower are:
[list=a]
[li]A wire fence. (Which could easily be climbed, or ducked under, in several places)[/li][li]A gate lock (see fence)[/li][li]An electronic lock on the front door (ignoring the side door, left unlocked for smoke breaks by Tower personnel).[/li][/list]
Security is a joke.
I agree with this, it is a logical sequence of events in my opinion.
Strange… me, my father & a couple of friends came up with more or less the same scenario. We didn’t come up with the twin-bomb aspect, but we figured that if terrorists hit say… 1-2 dozen elementary schools widely spread across the country, that it would definitely terrorize people on a far more fundamental level than anything else we could think of.
Another thing to consider (this is more or less a follow-on to ** Debaser’s ** post) is that with the ongoing war in Iraq, the US troops there are functioning as a sort of lightning-rod for terrorists.
If you’re a dumb-ass 18 year old Arab kid with a hard-on to fight the imperialist US Crusaders, are you likely to spend years cultivating an identity and executing a long-term plan for something on the order of 9-11, or are you more likely to pack up your stuff & head to Iraq and try to blow up a HMMWV?
To give a real life example of this.
The IRA bomber responsible for the Brighton hotel bombing had plans for a follow up but he never managed to do it as he was arrested for something else. He said in a interview not to long ago however that the plans and material where in place and all he had to do was put in into action.
The plan was to plant 20+ bombs in small hotels and B&B’s all over the UK. They would be on long timers so he’d be well gone (by months) by the time they exploded. One bomb a week for 20+ weeks in random places all over the country. Can you imagine the panic that that would have induced? The tourism industry would collapse etc.
I’m actually quite surprised something along this hasn’t been done already. You don’t actually need very big bombs. Count your blessings IMO.
IIRC the 2ndary bomb to take out the emergency services was also a IRA invention(in terrorist terms).
We also invented the bike bomb and the proxy bomb(force a person to drive a car bomb into a police/army barracks while holding his family at gun point).
Aren’t we just great 
Sometimes I wonder how secure open pit mining sites are in this country. Most mines today have HUGE customized pieces of equipment that cost over a billion dollars and take over 2 years to design and build. Blowing up some mammoth mine machines would be devastating to the economy without causing much, if any, loss of life. However, I worry more about domestic eco-terrorists doing this rather than Muslim extremsits.
Yep. That’s where we got the idea. Seems to me that it’s a good thing the current crop of terrorists haven’t been taking lessons from the IRA, as the IRA was a lot more vicious.
ArchitectChore, have you ever seen those mining machines? All 20 lbs. of C4 is going to do to one of them is scratch the paint. The suckers are huge. Definitely not a soft target.
Let me be a little more clear on my objection. I’m not worried about us giving terrorists ideas - I’m sure that they have teams of people brainstorming this very subject.
What I’m worried about is some guy getting aprehended on a subway in NY with a bomb strapped to his chest and telling the cops he got the idea on this message board. Suddenly, I have nothing to do during my idle time at work.
What if I were to go into an unpopulated area and start shooting bullets straight up in the air? There is very little chance that I’m going to kill anything when the bullets come back down, but that is still a bad idea since there is still a small chance that something bad could happen and no chance that anything good could come of it.
/hijack
Back to your discussion.
What about the La Palma mega-tsunami? If terrorists could get a nuke or two to go off there they could do what some people fear nature will do someday – drop the entire damned cliff into the sea and send the mother of all waves right at us, wiping the entire Atlantic seaboard clean to the granite. Or maybe that threat is overhyped. But hey, it’s an idea, right?
Many of you are vastly overestimating the power and ease of using biological weapons. They are only useful when used by nations with sophisticated labs and teams of scientist and technical dispersion experts…and even then, they’re iffy. They’re more psychological than practical in most cases.
Terrorists using smallpox is a fantasy. It was eliminated in 1979; the last remaining speciments are frozen and kept under heavy guard in the US and Siberia. Are the terrorists gonna pull a Mission Impossible and sneak in and out? And even if they did it’s no big deal since we could quickly contain it and use vaccines.
Now, some people have wondered why terrorists just don’t blow up things willy nilly in the U.S. I remember posting to a thread like this a couple months ago but unfortunately I can’t find it. The main reasons:
- One should never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Related to the above, it would just draw sympathy from the rest of the world and it’s better for us to be hated.
- They may wish to outdo 9/11 sometime down the road, especially if it will be a suicide attack after traveling all the way to the U.S. mainland. Just taking out a couple dozen people wouldn’t be satisfying enough. This would mean a lot of planning. Look at the time gap between the first 1993 WWT attack and second attack.
I would think the most realistic and terrible terrorist trump card would be a sizable nuclear bomb going off in the heart of Manhatten; it would probably spell the end of our run as a liberal democracy. Perhaps I underestimate the American people or her leaders and how they would react…but it would certainly plunge us into an economic depression.
For terrorists, blowing up large infrastructure like bridges, underground tunnels, and dams would be excellent. Shortly after 9/11 I read some guy saying that a good plan would be to blow up all the bridges leading to and from Manhatten island, effectively cutting it off and stranding a couple million people. It sounds good, but it’s not clear to me how they would actually pull it out – I would think dozens of men crawling over a large structure would get attention. Maybe by boat?
It would appear our electrical grid is hanging on by a thread. A couple of well placed bombs at important intersections or even power plants themselves could place large parts of our country in darkness for quite some time.
The Liquid Natural Gas ship hijack/explode on shore idea is also really good. That would probably be a lot easier to pull off than acquiring an already made nuclear bomb, although I’m not sure how much damage it could actually do. Could it scour a city from the shore? Do those even go anywhere near NY?
Why limit the target area to NYC? Seems to me that there is a whole lot more of the country out there that is a lot more vulnerable. The only advantage in NYC is that it is compact and visible. But then, so are a lot of other places.