When I read this article in The Telegraph (with accompanying map) of the world’s cities that are most at risk of a terrorist attack to learn that no U. S. city is in the top 100 and U. S. cities are at very low risk indeed a number of possibilities occurred to me:
- Our strategy is working!
- We’re treating the risks of others as though they were our own.
- The risks here are mostly political and have been blown out of proportion.
- The U. S. cities at heightened risk are those where our media outlets are concentrated and consequently the risks are blown out of proportion.
I tend to think #3 is the closest to the mark although all of the above may be true in part.
I would also remind my fellow citizens that there are other ways of mitigating risk than military action or even the criminal justice system. If there’s a clearer instance of Maslow’s Hammer, I don’t know what it might be.
I supose it depends upon your definition of risk. If one means direct attack and the attendant damage then most US cities are probably pretty low on the danger scale.
If you define risk more broadly to include major disruption to the normal functioning of society then we might be higher up there than we would like.
It seems that a major terrorist incident in, say, a European city which involved major damage, loss of life and the application of some new technology (nuclear or biological) would have repercussions here. Judging from our reaction to 9/11 you could postulate significant restrictions on civil liberty and further increases in government surveillance and interference with what we now consider normal activities. Indeed at some level of terror activity basic freedoms would begin to vanish.
Don’t you think an American firm would have more reliable results? 😉