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R: ALT1, S: NEWS, D: 06/19/1997,

Is Boston doomed?

Ebola. Nerve gas. Earthquake. Homemade thermonuclear device. One man's (only slightly) paranoid contemplation of what the city's future might hold.

by Michael Crowley

A perfect summer's day in Boston. You're happily seated in the Fenway Park bleachers with beer in hand. A brilliant sun beats down upon you and 25,000 fellow Red Sox fans. Hanson MMMbops over the public-address system. A couple of small planes trailing advertisements circle overhead. You're floating along in your blissfully ignorant little world. But not for long.

Gradually, the pleasant hum of the planes grows louder. In fact, it begins to get annoying. You look up and notice a curious thing.

Why, you wonder, is a crop duster flying over Fenway Park?

What you don't know until it's too late -- which it already is by the time the single-prop plane banks over the outfield and you've noticed the pilot's gas mask -- is that the crop duster is spraying a fine aerosol mist of nerve gas over the stadium.

Suddenly, you feel cramps, and you're having trouble breathing. In the three minutes or so you have left, you might notice the players vomiting and staggering across the field, and the thousands of people in the stands around you choking and suffering convulsions as the gas shuts down their nervous systems and freezes their respiratory muscles.

Five minutes. One airplane. Thousands dead.

Chances are, you haven't spent much time thinking about this sort of thing. Which is just as well, because the more you learn about the grisly fates that threaten residents of a big American city like Boston, the more you are overcome by a permanent, underlying sense of dread.

Sure, city dwellers are smarter to worry about a teenager with a gun, or a drunk behind the wheel of a car, than a terrorist with a suitcase nuke. Rather than obsess over a poison-gas attack, I'd do better to pause before stuffing my face with another Big Mac, or before making that 2 a.m. visit to my local Christy's, where a clerk was shot and killed this spring. And, granted, I'm someone who has always lugged around irrational phobias. I can't board an airplane without picturing CNN footage of its shattered cockpit being hauled out of the murky deep. Every drive through a major tunnel is one long, shifting calculation of my chances at escape should the roof start to cave in. But I can always take detours and stay off airplanes. It's a lot more difficult to deal with my fear -- no, my conviction -- that we, the inhabitants of major American cities, are doomed.

I ride the T and wonder if the guy with sunglasses lurking at the end of the car is choosing his moment to unleash hydrogen cyanide gas. The Celtics lurch toward overtime in a wild shootout, and I find myself eyeing the ventilation ducts of the FleetCenter, thinking of anthrax. Atop the Prudential Center, I conjure images of seven or eight well-timed explosives at the foundation, tipping the building over in slow motion with a low rumble and a rising cloud of dust.

My world view may be unusually dark. But plenty of experts agree that I -- and you -- have good reason to be afraid.

As we approach the century's end, every major American city is threatened by a whole panoply of new catastrophes that have joined the old standards, like earthquakes and tidal waves. And Boston has some particular vulnerabilities that, to my mind and those of the experts, puts it at the high end of risk. The city's historical significance, and its population of academic, high-tech, diplomatic, and cultural elites, surely recommend it to any terrorist who wants to make a statement. Its harbor provides convenient access for terrorists. In 1974, it was even the target of the country's first -- albeit false and crankish -- threat of nuclear terrorism. And, just for good measure, it turns out Boston is due for a major earthquake.

The fear that your city will suddenly be obliterated probably dates back at least to the time of Pompeii. But for me -- as for so many other children of the Cold War -- anxiety over sudden destruction was a part of growing up. The Day After etched into my mind images of Armageddon that reran through dozens of mushroom-cloud nightmares. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove suggested how capriciously the end might arrive, and, later, War Games proposed that it wouldn't even take a psychotic general, just a scrambled computer, to destroy the planet. My anxiety had very real, even physical effects: even though the test of my hometown's air-raid siren occurred at noon every Sunday, I can remember weeks when I actually held my breath in fear until that chilling wail ended.

Today, I look back almost with longing on those years. Grainy black-and-white footage of civil-defense drills and nuclear tests seem quaint compared to the dangers we face in the 1990s.

For a fundamental irony of our time, the experts agree, is this: the Cold War's end has probably made the world -- and surely America -- a more dangerous place. Although the threat of total destruction has all but disappeared, the risk of a cataclysmic attack in a city like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston has become more likely than an all-out nuclear exchange ever was.

And we're not talking about old-fashioned terrorism -- a car bomb here, a 747 there. We're talking about a large-scale threat made possible by a combination of technological advances, wider access to scientific information (thanks in part to the Internet), and tons of poorly safeguarded nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. The Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings showed it can indeed happen here. Taken together, you have airport-paperback fiction waiting to become reality in a city near you. Timothy McVeigh may be sentenced to die, but there will be others like him.

"In any city -- Boston, New York, Washington -- you're vulnerable," says Mike Rolince, who heads terrorism investigations for the FBI's Boston office. Or, as a US Senate committee concluded last year: "The threat of a terrorist using a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction in the United States is real. It is not a matter of `if' but `when' such an event will occur."

Part 2

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 2

by Michael Crowley

How can we be so sure? Let's begin with Supreme Truth.

Known in Japan as Aum Shinrikyo, Supreme Truth is the doomsday cult responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway which left 12 people dead and 5000 injured. That attack, and the details that subsequently came to light about the group, put to rest two doubts about the likelihood of what some people call "superterrorism."

The first was whether acquiring, developing, and using the deadliest weapons -- nuclear, chemical, and biological -- was really within the reach of a terrorist group. Not only did Supreme Truth successfully gas the subway, it was later discovered to have been working on all three forms of weapons. The other was whether any group would have a motive to use those weapons. Most traditional political terrorists, experts believe, would be dissuaded by the retribution provoked by a mass killing. Not so Supreme Truth, a doomsday sect interested only in maximum death and destruction. (Here in the US, the Heaven's Gate cult turned out to be a group of benign, if misguided, cultists. But what if they had believed it was their divine mission to take as many of their fellow vessels as possible to the Evolutionary Level Above Human?)

Among the spectacularly alarming collection of projects pursued by Supreme Truth was the acquisition of a nuclear bomb. And the scary part is, getting a nuke hardly requires wild, Broken Arrow tactics.

For that we have mainly the Cold War's end to thank. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did its system of accounting for and protecting its thousands of nuclear weapons and its weapons material -- 200 tons of plutonium and 1200 tons of highly enriched uranium. Not only is security around much of this stuff loose, often the guards and scientists haven't been paid for months. This in a society more or less ruled by a mafia well aware of the price a Saddam Hussein might be willing to pay to get the bomb. By 1995, the CIA had found 45 reported attempts to smuggle weapons-grade radioactive material out of the former Soviet Union.

And once bomb material gets into the wrong hands, it's not that hard to build into a weapon. The technology is 50 years old. Schoolkids have built bomb models from diagrams available in libraries, and now, inevitably, those diagrams are on the Web. Even 20 years ago, a government report concluded that "A small group of people, none of whom ever had access to the classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear explosive device. They would not necessarily require a great deal of technological equipment or have to undertake any experiments."

What if someone did set off a nuke in Boston? That scenario has been imagined by a Cambridge-based outfit called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

Picture this: a van pulls up on Congress Street, outside City Hall. Inside is a relatively small, 12-kiloton nuclear device, about the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

When the bomb explodes, temperatures soar to 4000 degrees, melting steel and exploding concrete. Winds from the blast approach 600 miles per hour. As one government analysis unblinkingly put it, "people and objects such as trees and utility poles are destroyed by the wind." In an instant, everything within a quarter-mile of the explosion is incinerated.

The fires ignited by the bomb shortly destroy almost everything within two or three miles. The dome of the State House blows out like an eggshell, and the building is flattened. The Prudential tower is gutted and set ablaze. Quincy Market disappears, and, if not vaporized, the FleetCenter is transformed to a massive skeleton.

Most people outdoors within a kilometer of the blast's center, from the Public Garden to Bunker Hill, would suffer severe third-degree burns, charring them badly enough to kill them instantly. This could happen to as many as 30,000 people.

As far as 2.5 kilometers away -- MIT and part of Southie, for instance -- people outside would still suffer fatal burns. Thousands of others would suffer secondary burns caused by the fires raging out of control throughout the city (don't bother calling 911 -- nobody's there to answer). And only a few thousand intensive-care burn beds exist in the entire country.

Tens of thousands might survive the bomb's immediate impact only to succumb to radiation sickness. A small nuke would likely deliver intense gamma rays to a region even larger than its blast area, and the resultant mushroom cloud would deposit radioactive fallout for miles. The worst radiation sickness, suffered by those survivors within a mile or so, starts with nausea and vomiting, and can lead to several weeks of hair loss, internal hemorrhaging, and, finally, death.

Maybe you're sighing in relief because you live outside Boston. You might get zapped by some burns, or mild radiation, you think, but someone will take care of you, right? Wrong.

Few survivors can hope for medical treatment, says Dr. Gururaj Mutalik, a physician and the director of IPPNW. "Even a minor incident," he says, "will overwhelm local hospitals."

The ultimate death toll in Boston, as imagined by IPPNW: 70,000 people.

To pull off an attack like this, a terrorist needn't even enter the country. The bomb could be detonated on a boat offshore. Either way, as IPPNW's director said last year, "Boston would be gone."

The horror of nuclear terrorism is our inability to react to or control it. One minute a city is there, and the next it's simply gone. There are plenty of serious academics, staid people who disdain sensationalism, who are convinced this will happen.

"We are living very much on borrowed time," says Graham Allison, a former dean and now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "If tomorrow a nuclear weapon exploded in Boston, or Oklahoma City, or New York, I think first we'd all be shocked, and second people would say, `This was inevitable.' "

Part 3

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 3

by Michael Crowley

If it's any comfort, a nuclear attack is thought to be the least likely form of modern terrorism. That's because it's easier for terrorists to get hold of the materials that go into chemical and biological weapons.

Supreme Truth loosed the nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo subway, leaving just 12 dead on the most crowded railway in the world. But their attack was about as inefficient as it could be. The cult members simply punctured their containers of sarin, and people were sickened by the evaporating fumes.

Both chemical and biological weapons have the potential to be far more deadly. Spread widely into the air, they could kill thousands of people easily. That could be done with an aerosol mist, like our hypothetical fifth-inning crop duster, or with a poisoned Oklahoma City-style bomb.

Biological weapons, the more deadly of the two, are based on the idea of cultivating and setting loose nature's most virulent organisms: anthrax, dengue fever, typhus, botulism, yersinia pestis, plague, malaria, or the alarmingly named Q fever.

Advancing technology has made biological weapons cheap and difficult to detect. One former arms-control official told Scientific American magazine she was " `absolutely convinced' that a major biological arsenal could be built with $10,000 worth of equipment in a room 15 feet by 15."

In 1995, a white-supremacist lab technician mail-ordered from a biomedical lab three vials of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. And during the 1994 ebola outbreak in Zaire, a group of Supreme Truth members traveled to the country, under the guise of a humanitarian mission, hoping to bring home a sample of the virus -- which, you'll recall, causes its victims to bleed from every orifice before they die -- for terrorist use.

In fact, biological weapons can be even deadlier than the kind of small nuclear bomb a terrorist today might build. Thirty thousand to 100,000 people might die if a bomb carrying anthrax spores exploded in downtown Washington, according to one government estimate. (The US government should know: it's been a biological-warfare pacesetter. During the Cold War, the US considered building a plant capable of breeding 130 million disease-spreading mosquitoes a month.)

Michael Moodie, president of Washington's Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (CBACI), says the FleetCenter -- where more than 20,000 people attend a typical Celtics or Bruins game -- would be a prime target for this kind of attack. It would take a fairly smart terrorist with some technical knowledge of the arena's air-conditioning and ventilation system. But if someone aerosoled dengue fever into the right vents, thousands of fans would spread out into the city with their newly acquired, highly infectious disease. Within a couple of days the aches and fever would begin, and TV news would report a mysterious new illness in the city. By then, an epidemic would be under way.

And since the effects of an attack like this take time to kick in, a terrorist could be out of the country before the first victims started throwing up.

Perhaps most dishearteningly, a terrorist needn't infiltrate anyplace at all to kill thousands.

We've seen the airplane at work. Or, in another scenario envisioned by CBACI, a terrorist might fit a taxicab with a tank that sprays anthrax from its trunk. A weekday afternoon spinning around highly populated areas of town -- the Common, the financial district, maybe up to Harvard Square (for Commencement) -- would be enough to plant spores in the lungs of tens of thousands of people, who would happily carry on with their lives for two or three days. That is, until they came down with high fevers, started vomiting and aching all over, and developed bleeding lesions. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands would die.

Scientists even believe that biological weapons can be designed to carry ethnic preferences. Whites, for instance, are 10 times more likely than blacks to survive a disease called Rift Valley fever -- a disquieting fact in a city famous for racial strife.

Chemical weapons are even easier to acquire, build, and deliver than their biological counterparts. (For example, a common chemical used to make ballpoint-pen ink can also be turned into mustard gas.) They may also have the most horrific effects. Chemical weapons -- such as sarin, VX, and hydrogen cyanide -- typically act swiftly and excruciatingly. Mustard gas, for one, doesn't aim to kill so much as torture its victims. Its task is to melt flesh. After the horror of soldiers coughing up their lungs in the trenches of World War I, the gas was banned under international law.

It requires a higher exposure to chemical weapons than biological ones to cause death, but they can still be used for mass killing. The World Trade Center bombers loaded their bomb with hydrogen cyanide, and according to the Henry L. Stimson Center, in Washington, had the nerve agent not been vaporized in the blast, everyone in the building could have been dead within six minutes. In case you were wondering, about 4500 people work in the Prudential tower.

The Boston T is another glaring target for a possible chemical or biological attack. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people would be exposed to the vapors from just a few packages left on Green Line trains during afternoon rush hour. (In fact, federal and local officials scrambled this January when the FBI received word of a threatened subway attack.)

"There are no safeguards to our system," admits Mike Rolince, a special agent who handles terrorism issues in the FBI's Boston office. "We don't have the wherewithal to, nor do we want to, stop every person who rides the T."

At least it's not as easy as some people think to poison a city's water supply. That would take vast amounts of chemicals or bacteria, which are often neutralized by sunlight and chlorine. Small consolation.

Part 4

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 4

by Michael Crowley

As if a suitcase of plutonium, a spray of dengue fever, or a jar of ebola weren't frightening enough, there are some less exotic -- but no less deadly -- threats to the city to worry about.

Some experts believe Boston is almost uniquely vulnerable to a massive disaster involving liquefied natural gas (LNG), a supercompressed and phenomenally explosive form of fuel.

Boston is the host to one of the country's largest facilities for storage of LNG, which is typically shipped overseas at more than 600 times its original density. If the fuel is spilled or ignited, it can explode with near-nuclear force.

"Successful sabotage of an [LNG] facility in an urban area," according to a government report, "could cause a catastrophe." And not all urban areas are created equal. According to the author of a book on domestic terrorism, "Of all the cities in the world, Boston is the most susceptible to destruction" from an LNG disaster.

When the Eagle Screams, a 1994 book on America's vulnerability to terrorism, details the risks posed by tankers unloading LNG in Boston harbor, storage facilities around the city, and trucks transporting the gas that could easily be hijacked or sabotaged. Terrorists could spill gas from a stolen truck into the Callahan tunnel, author Stephen Bowman writes, noting that the gas in one truck could deliver a fireball filling 16 miles of subway system. In other words: good-bye tunnel, and good-bye to probably hundreds of people in the vicinity.

The thought of a major accident at a nuclear power plant is so familiar that even I have been numbed somewhat to the fear of a meltdown. But it's worth noting that Boston lies within lethal range of three plants, most notably the Pilgrim nuclear plant just 35 miles or so away in Plymouth. In 1994, the Phoenix's Tim Sandler identified seven major hazards at Pilgrim, calling the plant a "nuclear time bomb."

Part 5

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 5

by Michael Crowley

In perhaps the ultimate expression of Northeastern elitism, I used to take a secret pride in New England's relative immunity to natural disaster. Sure, from time to time we're nailed by a wicked hurricane, but the really bad stuff hits elsewhere. The Midwest gets the tornadoes; the West Coast gets the earthquakes. Somehow it seemed appropriate.

But it's not quite true. Medium-sized quakes hit New England every 30 to 50 years (the last one was in New Hampshire in 1940). Says geologist John Smith of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA): "You talk to the guy on the street about earthquakes, and he laughs at you. He says, `They only have those out in California.' "

But at least three severe quakes have been recorded in our area. The most recent was a 1775 shaking of Cape Ann somewhere above six on the Richter scale. (That's big -- about the size of the 1989 earthquake near San Francisco which, despite the Bay Area's careful preparations, touched off raging fires and knocked down an expressway.) Geologists think such a quake can be expected every 300 years or so, which means we're due for an encore.

An earthquake that large is bad news for any city, but, according to Boston College geologist John Ebel, Boston is especially vulnerable to a big shake. The amount of damage caused by an earthquake depends on what kind of ground is moving, and on the strength of the shaking buildings.

Sadly, Boston loses big on both counts. First, much of the city is built on landfill, which in an earthquake can shake with up to three times the force of bedrock. Which makes it that much easier for all those old brick and cinderblock buildings that give our town such charm to be flattened when the Big One hits.

The good news is that highway and subway tunnels tend to shake with the ground, and are thus unlikely to collapse. Ditto for new highrises such as the Prudential Center, which have to be built to withstand the stresses of a stiff nor'easter.

According to a 1990 report, a rough estimate of the impact of a major quake in Boston suggested damages of $4 billion to $5 billion. Ten thousand people would be injured, and perhaps 300 to 500 killed.

Obviously, there's not much we can do to gird ourselves against an earthquake. Especially since, as Ebel says, "There's going to be no warning."

But are we any more helpless against a cataclysmic act of nature than we are against the new face of terrorism?

Part 6

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 6

by Michael Crowley

The policy wonks in Washington have long been worrying about superterrorism. Only recently, however, has the ominous drumbeat of terrorist events from Tokyo to Oklahoma pushed this menace up the fret list of influential government officials, from the White House and the Pentagon down to the state level.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the government's concern is a science-fictionesque outfit called the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST). NEST was born out of that first, crackpot threat against Boston in April, 1974 (a demand for $200,000 to be dropped off at a house in Allston -- no suspects were ever arrested). Since then, the Las Vegas-based team of nuclear experts, who can be summoned into action with their high-tech vans, helicopters, and airplanes on a few hours' notice, has responded to more than 80 threats around the country. But by the government's own admission, NEST would still have trouble finding, much less disarming, a hidden nuke. In 1994, when the feds staged "Mirage Gold," a mock nuclear-terrorism crisis in New Orleans, NEST was caught cheating.

Other efforts are under way in Washington. The Pentagon is tinkering with technologies like "laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy" to try to detect chemical and biological agents. Pentagon officials were also in Boston recently, part of an effort to create a new superterrorism-response team that will eventually be stationed in about 25 urban areas, including this one.

On a larger scale, however, the push for international safeguards against chemical, biological, and nuclear materials tends to get caught up in petty politics. Last year Bob Dole shot down US ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention -- widely thought to make those weapons harder for terrorists to get -- to score points for his presidential campaign. This year the treaty was ratified only after a long, xenophobic stall by Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Likewise, aid to Russia, even to protect "loose nukes," is opposed by isolationists and right-wingers. Until disaster strikes, there will be no constituency to press the government on these unsatisfyingly intangible goals.

Closer to home, there isn't a lot local officials can do to protect us from a disastrous attack. But should one occur, by all accounts Boston and other major cities will be woefully unprepared.

Not that people aren't thinking about it. In a dramatic terrorism-awareness tape prepared by MEMA, a gruff, camouflage-clad National Guard colonel appears onscreen, glaring at the camera: "A small group of committed radicals," he growls, "may be planning an act so outrageous it is beyond imagination."

But so far Boston, like other major American cities, remains largely unequipped to respond. In a 1995 simulation of a subway gas attack, New York City's response was so pathetic that a follow-up exercise was reportedly canceled by the mayor to avoid embarrassment. Among the faults in the city's response, according a US Senate report: most of the first responders were theoretically "killed" because they were unprepared for the gas, and communications were "abysmal." In a similar exercise in Los Angeles, according to the same report, "doctors literally `threw in the towel,' admitting that they and their facilities were hopelessly contaminated by the injured patients."

As for trying to get out before disaster hits, forget about it. Few cities are as famously difficult to escape as Boston is. Picture the crawling Friday-afternoon traffic on Storrow Drive, the JFK expressway, or the Mass Pike. Then imagine every single car in the city squeezing onto those roads, driven by people in varying states of panic and fear. State officials say that, given enough warning, the city could be evacuated. But most disasters -- from terrorism to earthquake to nuclear accident -- have a rude way of showing up unannounced.

Kathleen O'Toole, secretary of the state's Office of Public Safety, would be in charge of the daunting variety of state and local agencies that would respond to a catastrophe. From her corner office on the 21st floor of the McCormack state office building, where she looks out on downtown Boston and the harbor, O'Toole boasts of a new spirit of vigilance and readiness among city and state officials. In March, for instance, state and local officials held an anti-terrorism conference in Framingham that, O'Toole says, was symbolic of a new spirit of cooperation among agencies with a long history of turf battles. And, earlier this month, Boston was host to one of a nationwide series of hearings on protecting American infrastructure from sabotage. Nevertheless, almost no special new crisis training has been conducted by Boston or Massachusetts officials.

"We will never prevent all of these things from occurring," O'Toole concedes.

Illustrating the point is her office's sweeping view of downtown Boston in all its chaos: jets streaking perilously toward Logan, boats puttering suspiciously around the harbor, trucks lingering ominously by skyscrapers.

Part 7

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Is Boston doomed?

Part 7

by Michael Crowley

Are we nuts to be worrying about this stuff? Academics who study risk have long known that people tend to confuse their fear of a certain fate with the actual danger it poses. Fair or not, this condition is the bane of the nuclear-power industry. It is also a major obstacle to peace of mind.

"The fundamental premise in risk perception is that the risks that hurt and kill people, and the risks that upset people, are completely different," says Peter Sandman, a Newton-based risk-communication consultant.

Adds John Hammitt, an associate professor at Harvard's School of Public Health: "If the goal is minimizing the probability of early death, then people are definitely misallocating their efforts."

Experts like these have actually broken down fear into discrete components, a couple of which, it turns out, almost perfectly explain my brand of doomsday fixation.

The first component is what they refer to as catastrophic potential: the threat of sudden, mass death that provokes a basic human horror. Society can tolerate the thousands of deaths that cigarettes cause each year, Sandman points out, but people would recoil in horror if every expiration occurred on the same night in one city.

The other component, even more darkly descriptive, is dread. Gruesome fates feel more threatening, and thus more likely, than mundane ones. For most of us, simply driving a car is one of the riskiest things we do. But cars are commonplace and familiar. In the dark recesses of the mind, a Subaru simply cannot compete with a mushroom cloud.

What's more, summer blockbusters and TV movies aren't about head-on collisions on Route 128. What mass culture celebrates, in its peculiar way, is catastrophe. Movies like Outbreak, Con Air, and even the forthcoming Titanic hammer this point home. Or how about the two television movies in the past year about an asteroid hitting the earth?

And it's not just the entertainment makers. The news media inundate us daily with the worst modern life has to offer. Whom do I thank for those news reports about how fish were nibbling away at the submerged victims of TWA Flight 800? Or the detailed description of the woman who was freed from the rubble in Oklahoma City only when her leg was amputated -- without anesthetic -- with a pocket knife? If growing up during the Cold War instilled in me a sense that sudden demise was possible, living with CNN Headline News and MSNBC has conditioned me to feel that it is everywhere.

But just as I start to rationalize, to talk myself out of my phobias, some new horror always seems to turn up to darken my mood. This week Newsweek reported on the apparently growing risk of an "accidental" nuclear attack from Russia. During the writing of this story, my bogeyman was a recent book called The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, by philosopher John Leslie, which considers nothing less than the end of the human race ("Why Prolong Human History?" one chapter asks) and ponders fates that make inhaling anthrax on the Green Line sound like a merciful end.

If you've started to worry about my mental hygiene, consider some of the thoughts Leslie takes to bed at night: a giant solar flare destroying the ozone layer; the ignition of the atmosphere (something Robert Oppenheimer supposedly placed a one-dollar bet on before the first atomic-bomb test); and a "new, world-destroying big bang by mistake."

Finally, this: Leslie warns that scientists playing around with particle accelerators could "upset a space-filling `scalar field,' " disturbing the very balance of matter, "and destroy the world, a possibility taken seriously by some leading theorists."

I used to wonder at what point one gives up hope altogether. Now I think I know.

Web of doom

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.

Web of doom

The World-Wide Web offers plenty of sites where you can learn more about -- and, in some cases, pursue -- engineered catastrophe. In fact, many experts cite the Internet as a potentially key new resource for terrorists.

For instance, diagrams and instructions (albeit simplistic ones) for a nuclear device can be found simply by connecting to Yahoo and searching under "build nuclear bomb." About a dozen sites will give you the goods. The one with the simplest address is http://www.privnet.com/jcharrel/atomic.html.

Fortunately, the Web is filled with plenty of do-gooders as well. One of the best organizations studying the perils of an unstable post-Cold War world is the Henry L. Stimson Center, in Washington, a think tank devoted to arms control and peace. It makes its resources available at http://www.stimson.org.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Cambridge-based Nobel Prize-winning group that has imagined the consequences of a nuclear explosion in Boston, has gone online in its quixotic mission to rid the world of nuclear arms, at http://www.healthnet.org/IPPNW/IPPNW.html.

Perhaps the leading experts on chemical and biological terrorism are the folks at Washington's Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, who archive news clippings, policy papers, and speeches at http://www.capitol.net/~cbaci.

For more details on the make-up of chemical and biological weapons, how they might be delivered, and what they might do to you, check out the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies' summary of "Devil's Brews" at http://www.cdiss.org/bw.htm.

Growing concerns about terrorism have prompted new restrictions on civil liberties -- such as increased government wiretapping powers -- that have brought heated denouncements from libertarians like the ones at the Cato Institute, in Washington. Its website offers a report on protecting civil liberties from anti-terrorist hysteria. It can be found at http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-5.html.

-- MC