What's next? Foreseeable terrorist acts: to anticipate future terrorist targets and techniques,...

Like other metaphorical "wars"--such as the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, and the War on Drugs--the "war" on terrorism seems likely to fail so long as it emphasizes the use of power and force, massive interventions to treat symptoms. What is lacking is an exploration of the underlying causes

or of the remedies to deal with those underlying causes. We need to examine the principles, purposes, and necessary conditions for successful terrorism, from the terrorist's point of view. This will give us a different perspective on what needs to be done at even the tactical and operational level.

The military has extreme difficulty in responding to terrorism because the relationship between the military and terrorism is drastically asymmetrical. The U.S. military is dominated by high technology and is organized by chain of command, and its primary tool is military power marshaled against military targets. But the terrorist enemy is not organized that way, does not think that way. It is as if a boxer must face a kung fu fighter.

There are three goals of terrorism. Goal One is to demonstrate that a government cannot protect its people. It is to make people fearful of those things that they found in the past to be both safe and ordinary, such as going to work or going shopping. Goal Two is to evoke an extreme response, and the more extreme that response, the better. Goal Three is to use the extreme response as a mechanism for recruitment by evoking sympathy for the cause, for example, or generating hostility toward government or its policies.

To achieve these goals, the terrorist must have a target, ideally one with tremendous symbolic significance to underscore Goal One. In the case of international terrorism, something highly symbolic like the World Trade Center's twin towers is important because it will be a national symbol and it will be well understood globally.

Terrorists must also have the skills to achieve their objective, as well as access to the target.

With these goals and conditions in mind, we can begin to create a sampler of potential terrorist activities.

Ten Specific Impending Terrorist Disasters

For convenience of presentation, we will write these from the point of view of a terrorist group. The reader will understand that this is in no way advocacy, but is only intended to indicate how a terrorist might think in terms of the goals and conditions above

1. Disrupt Global Business

To begin, inventory the world's 100 largest multinational corporations. This is simple library work. Go a step further and determine which ones operate in a wide range of developing countries. Select a number of companies based on the scope of their activities and their worldwide prominence. Then, on some Tuesday afternoon, assassinate the top official in one of those companies' developing-world operations. The next Tuesday, do the same at another company in another part of the developing world. Repeat in week three. Then announce that, as a plan for the indefinite future, the top person in each of those 100 largest multinational companies operating in the developing world is a candidate for assassination. In weeks four and five, carry on the process.

The effect will be panic among the leadership in the developing-world operations of those corporations. The tension between personal safety and safety of their families versus loyalty to the company, high incomes, and prominence in their work will almost surely favor "Get me out of here!" Completely upsetting the leadership outside the home country of all global corporations could be quite dramatic, disruptive, and costly

2. Initiate Deadly Panic

Killing people is often expensive. It is a lot cheaper to allow them to kill themselves. Find some harmless powdery material--e.g., talcum powder or chalk. Then find an equally harmless, but obnoxious, unequivocally foul-smelling, unfamiliar odorant. Mix them together in 100-pound lots and fly over a public event--the Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade, a big sports event, a New Year's celebration--releasing this harmless powder. In the resulting panic, people would kill themselves attempting to flee through the limited number of too-narrow exits.

3. Deploy Radioactive Dust

There is great discussion of radioactivity. The discussion of combining an ordinary explosive device with radioactivity for disseminating over a large area in a detonation involves some degree of high technology. If one can lay one's hands on about 10 to 50 pounds of radioactive material, preferably in the form of fine particles of dust, one can distribute that by plane via a spray device over the central areas of major cities, creating fear with no visible damage.

This is the worst kind of terror because there is nothing obvious to do. Am I poisoned? Have I been irradiated? How dangerous is this? How do I get advice? How do I clean myself up? Should I go to work? Is it safe to visit downtown? Has this stuff been tramped into the subway system? Even when it comes to the public cleanup, questions and fears will lurk: How safe are we, how secure? Will the contaminant be washed into a lake or a river? Will it have downstream effects? Will other communities drink the radioactive material? Crisis and paralysis will hit simultaneously.

4. Deploy Dangerous Chemicals

The chemical industry uses, produces, handles, and sometimes delivers materials that are dangerous, often quite toxic, or even deadly. Unless the chemical facility is in an urban or suburban area, it is difficult to see how a terrorist action at a facility could create a significant event. A simpler approach would be to plot the movements of a chemical company's trucks through a metropolitan area and work out its routing. Hijack five or six trucks laden either with chemicals or chemical waste and head to center city. As the vehicles get within a half mile of downtown, open the release valves and let the obnoxious, perhaps dangerous, material spread.

5. Poison the Air

Release through the air ducts of a large office building an obnoxious, unfamiliar odorant. Block exits with trucks rammed into the front and side doors. Incapacitating the elevators would compound the effect but may not be essential. This simple, straightforward trick uses locally available supplies and allows people to kill themselves in their panic.

6. Silence Washington. D.C.

Cutting off Washington, D.C., from telecommunications for two or three days would have high symbolic implications. It might be done by targeting key node points in telecommunications networks. Because building backup systems is expensive, redundancy is low in telecommunications, leaving telephony (and access to the Internet) vulnerable. An explosion or contamination of three of six key nodes would achieve the desired effect. The disablement wouldn't be complete, of course, but it surely would be dramatic and would clearly illustrate a government's inability to protect itself or its people.

7. Put Servers Out of Service

Corporations of all sizes use corporate servers to handle their Internet communications. Those serving organizations may operate in warehouse-sized facilities, with hundreds of devices to serve their clients in managing the flow of information. Again, we encounter the choice between risk and the higher costs of redundant but secure systems. Knocking out several of these servers simultaneously in several cities could create business chaos and confusion and ultimately large losses among hundreds of corporations. Explosions are easily photographed and highly dramatic, but contamination might be even more attractive because everything would be unusable and untouchable though appearing normal.

8. Infect Pats

Direct hits on individuals would appeal to terrorists. When nerve gases for military uses were first developed, it became clear that we had to protect troops in the field, with extremely little time to act. Antidotes encapsulated in small cylinders, perhaps a half inch by two inches long, were supplied to troops. All one had to do was slam the end of that cylinder against one's thigh and immediately it would self-inject the antidote through the clothes, right into the body.

Those spring-loaded injectors could be loaded with, for example, rabies virus. In six or eight cities around the United States, conspirators could easily move through parks and other public areas and greet people out walking their dogs. The terrorist might comment on the dogs, reach down and pet them, and in a very friendly way slap the dog with the injector. That's it. The result would be micro-epidemics of rabies in multiple cities, making people frightened of their dogs, frightened for their children who've played with their dogs, and frightened for themselves.

9. Target Cruise Ships

Cruise ships as large as 10-story buildings hold thousands of people and might be extremely attractive targets. Bin Laden is purported to own, or to have control over, some 20 or more oceangoing vessels. Two distinctly different tactics could have the same outcome: One is simply to ram the cruise ship and hope that it will sink. Even if it doesn't sink, the ramming will cause enough panic to create a mini-Titanic. The other possibility is to pull alongside with your own ship loaded with ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate, used in the Oklahoma City bombing, is a standard material used in agriculture as fertilizer, but in large quantities it is explosive.

10. Miscellaneous

Terrorists can also do less violent things that may portend a threat or create a significant nuisance, such as simultaneously blacking out several cities or creating a dysentery outbreak by dispersing a bowel-infecting organism through the air-conditioning systems in theaters. For even more disruption, they could simultaneously coordinate such attacks in 10 cities and in 50 theaters.

Another possibility is to introduce hoof-and-mouth disease into the food chain. The disease spreads rapidly among animals and would create chaos in the agricultural sector.

Still another idea is to plant documents that look conspiratorial, agitate the system to create leaks, and thereby generate more and more warnings and effectively wear the response system out by "crying wolf" too often. What people are most frightened of are the exotic and the unfamiliar, the externally imposed, and the hidden, latent, and uncertain.

Policy Implications

* Think like terrorists. The above agenda has several policy suggestions latent in it that government has, to the best of my knowledge, not adopted. It is most important that we think like terrorists and plan our responses accordingly, not just disperse our current resources and build more at breakneck speed without understanding what the real threats are.

* Understand Islamic cultures and the root causes of their hatred. We need to address the question of why, in 60 countries that are predominately Islamic or have substantial Islamic populations, so many people hate Americans. Until we understand that, there is no hope of reducing or constraining, much less eliminating, Islamic-based terrorists who, much like the Japanese kamikazes of World War II, are willing to fight to the death.

We must assemble and organize a cadre of scholars to help us understand Islam, Islamic countries, and the actions that need to be taken to extinguish anti-Western beliefs and attitudes. Over the last five decades, American policies have introduced Western ways, tools, and values into the developing world, often making a small number of individuals wealthy while delivering virtually nothing of significance to the mass population. That is the underlying basis of the hatred throughout Islam toward the West and the United States.

* Prepare the public to expect terrorist acts. We must prepare the public psychologically and materially for terrorist events of many types-not only those on a large scale perpetrated by foreign ideologues, but also those set off by homegrown nuts, kooks, and hyper aggressive special-interest groups.

* Prepare for terrorist acts by good people. We must also be aware that many activities that look like terrorism may have a different purpose from terrorism. Consider, for example, what antinuclear activists may do in the United States as the nation not only extends the lifetime of existing nuclear power plants but also begins building new ones over the next decade. What will happen when activists' deeply felt fears of the risk of nuclear power are ignored? Some of them may be motivated to sabotage a nuclear facility to punctuate their arguments with a real demonstration of a leak, a breach, a disaster.

* Don't demonize. Finally, don't demonize the enemy. It's easy to do and far more difficult to retract, recant, and heal the breaches that demonization creates when the trouble is over.

RELATED ARTICLE: Truckers' Antiterrorism Plan

As it did 60 years ago in response to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the trucking industry has enlisted its members to create contingency plans to thwart potential terrorist attacks on transportation systems. Specifically, the industry seeks to deter terrorists from using trucks to convey weapons or using them as weapons themselves.

Among the actions recommended by the American Trucking Associations:

* Train professional truck drivers and truck-stop employees to report suspicious activity on public roadways.

* Facilitate communication between the trucking industry and various government agencies.

* Develop preparedness and response strategies coinciding with government threat-level warnings.

* Evaluate technologies that could help improve the security of trucks and their operations.

* Improve industry access to information databases for security and criminal background checks of commercial truck drivers and other employees in sensitive positions.

* Assess vulnerabilities and provide education and training to promote security risk management.

Source: American Trucking Associations, 2200 Mill Road, Alexandria, Virginia 22314. Web site www.truckline.com.

About the Author

Joseph F. Coates is principal of Joseph F. Coates Consulting Futurist Inc., 3738 Kanawha Street, NW., Washington, D.C. 20015. Telephone 1-202-363-7440; Web site www.josephcoates.com.

A longer version of this paper appears on the World Future Society's Web site, www.wfs.org/terror.htm.