Premium
View Point: Risk Analysis and the Terrorism Problem in Two Parts
Author(s) -
Lave Lester
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/0272-4332.00049
Subject(s) - citation , library science , sociology , computer science , psychology
As Israel has found, it is impossible to prevent suicide bombers from killing a few people. That level of risk seems to be a part of living in an open society. We can and must deter actions that could kill thousands of people and destroy billions of dollars of property. Doing so rests in small part on risk analysis—finding the sensitive points where a group of terrorists could cause this level of destruction and then designing a system to prevent it. Since the United States has not attempted to prevent this kind of attack, taking these precautions is likely to be expensive and disruptive—at least until the system has been reconfigured to account for them. Certainly, it is now unlikely that terrorists will be able to hijack a large aircraft and crash it into a large building. There are many other targets, such as transmission lines that could be extremely disruptive. But anthrax has proven to be a psychological weapon, not a significant threat. Even the worst that terrorists have done to date is a small objective danger compared to those that we normally face—deaths from trauma on highways or even at home. Certainly this is a new threat and thus likely to lead to greater anxiety and perception of danger, but objectively even an annual repetition of September 11 would hardly affect U.S. life expectancy. It raised the annual death rate by about 3/1,000 ¼ 0.3%. Society has made the tradeoffs in terms of highway crashes and other transportation deaths to get a rough equilibrium of preventing deaths given cost and disruption of other desired activities. We have not arrived at a balance yet for terrorism and so there is much to be done. The panic set off by anthrax illustrates many of the points of good risk communication. The government did not prepare people for the threat, did not assess the threat quickly, gave misleading reassurances to the public, and continually had to rescind statements and policies. The resulting public distrust of government and its ability to handle these threats is just what risk communication experts would predict. There certainly is much advice to give government on handling future crises.