Terror what if? Computer model maps out impact from attack on city.
Now wouldn't THIS be a bummer, eh? The Defense Department's Consequences Assessment Tool Set has simulated a nuclear attack on downtown Houston, and the results aren't pretty.
The nuclear bomb is small enough to be hidden in a briefcase, but its force levels downtown Houston, flattening most of the 58 skyscrapers and killing about 130,000 workers.
Stunned and injured, those who can walk among the approximately 15,000 survivors downtown stagger away from ground zero covered with invisible and deadly particles of radiation and dust from crumbled buildings.
The chaos and devastation eclipses the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
The bomb explodes outside City Hall, destroying that building, the Houston Police Department's headquarters and the Harris County administrative offices. It kills most local leaders and law enforcement officials, crippling the city's immediate ability to respond to the disaster.
The wind drags the deadly radioactive cloud through the East End and beyond the Loop, killing 10 percent of those in its stream and sickening thousands more.
Now, of course, the debate is how to prepare for and react to that sort of scenario. Certainly, there are things that can be done to lessen the likelihood of that sort of an attack, or to mitigate the damages afterward. In an open society such as ours, however, how do you preclude the possibility? If it's a matter of someone carrying a nuclear device into Houston in a briefcase, well, people carrying briefcases into downtown every day.
Planning is good. The problem with planning for a terrorist attack is that we are planning for an attack that we understand and/or are familiar with. That assumes, of course, that terrorists are going to follow logical patterns. What about the illogical? It's likes trying to figure out which hole in the dike to stick your finger into.
In this case, planning may be good. It does not, however, indicate preparedness, since no one can say what is being prepared for. Terrorism is unpredictable and very difficult to adequately prepare for- hence the name. While I'm not advocating doing nothing, I'm not necessarily certain that the sums of money spent on these sorts of scenarios will in the end be justified. Of course, you can't very well justify not doing anything, can you??
