No warning. No protection. No sense. At once transfixed and unnerved by the Tokyo subway poison gas attack, city dwellers around the world found themselves crossing a new threshold of suspicion last week.
It was a lesson that travelers and residents of urban battlefields-Belfast, Tel Aviv and Beirut, among others-have known for years. Whether it’s a small package on a bus, an unattended box or even parked cars: Be suspicious of the commonplace.
What is most remarkable about the terror in Tokyo was not the number of dead-10 at last count, with others still in critical condition-or the 5,000 who were injured by the attack and attempts to flee the subway.
Rather, it was the combination of the setting, the choice of weapon and the chance selection of the victims that escalated the terror and made everyone feel vulnerable. As satellite images of commuters lying dead on subway platforms beamed around the world, it was the subterranean equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
The unpredictability of the setting was matched by the unsophisticated delivery of a colorless, odorless chemical called sarin, originally compounded more than 50 years ago in Germany. Whoever is responsible carried the poison in small glass bottles, then poured it out on the floor of the trains and on wadded newspapers.
There is nothing sensical in that act, of course, not even in this age of violence we inhabit.
When political or ideological radicals target government and military institutions there is a certain rationale to their lethal anger. We take comfort, however fleeting, in the rational as if it throws up some kind of shield for our own mortality. When someone dies of lung cancer, everyone wants to know if he or she was a smoker; we prefer a reason for death.
But true terror lies in its randomness. That’s why Charles Whitman shooting from a Texas tower in 1966 was such a big event. We gawk at accidents and thank our lucky stars we weren’t on the bridge when it collapsed or in the post office or restaurant when the robbers decided to kill all the witnesses.
That is why we feel that psychic shiver of relief in not being at the wrong place at the wrong time, as when a deranged gunman like Colin Ferguson, who was sentenced to 200 years in prison last week for killing six people and wounding 19 others, calmly walks down the train aisle shooting commuters in the face.
But when randomness becomes familiar, terrorism crosses another kind of threshold, you begin to tolerate the once-unimaginable.
When one visitor to Central America in the early 1980s remarked on a new wave of terror and the sheer fright of a car bomb exploding near his hotel, his friend from the Middle East replied matter-of-factly, “I hate when that happens.”
During the height of car bombings in Beirut at that time, adults came to accept the daily danger of walking down the street. In behavioral terms, car bombs created a certain learned helplessness. When pedestrians walking past the car were killed, others greeted it with a shrug and a sense of relief that it didn’t happen to them or to anyone they knew.
Children, upon hearing of a new car bombing, would dismiss it as insignificant unless it killed more than a few innocent passersby, or killed them in some particularly grotesque fashion.
We rely on intelligence agencies to know about foreign threats, and on the police to stop homegrown criminals. “Our intelligence nets have to be out there to anticipate this kind of activity,” William Webster, former director of the CIA and the FBI, said on ABC’s “Nightline.” But those efforts may not be effective, or they may be too Orwellian, or just too expensive to prevent these assaults.
At the same time, there is no comfort in knowing how thin our technology really is. Certainly the nerve gas was not something that governments, after spending trillions of dollars on defense, ever could guard against efficiently with either metal detectors or even Star Wars technology. The sight of space-suited emergency workers carrying cages of canaries suggested how much, for all our advancement, we still rely on nature.
But nature also is the villain in such popular movies as “Outbreak” with Dustin Hoffman and in the book “The Hot Zone,” which both describe the accidental release of a central African virus on an unsuspecting population.
A virus, too, is colorless and odorless and delivered by a handshake or a sneeze or a flea bite. It is something else to worry about. We know the cause but not the cure. It is death by magic.
Then, too, the escalation of terror may create an insatiable appetite for terrorists.
In the time of monarchs, those who believed they could shake the world had to kill only one person. Nearly 100 years ago at the turn of the century, anarchists shot President William McKinley; President Marie-Francois Sadi Carnot of France; King Umberto I of Italy; Empress Elizabeth of Austria; and Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain. A lone Serbian assassin with a pistol gunned down Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo in 1914, setting off World War I.
During World War II, civil defense worried about attacks on civilian targets such as the water supply in industrial cities such as Detroit. And 30 years ago, the U.S. Army conducted tests in New York to demonstrate how easily a saboteur could put chemicals in the subway ventilation system.
But what an escalation real terror has had since then. Airline hijackings, hostages, on-board bombs, suicide bombers at the Marine barracks and the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and 1984.
We have come to understand terrorism all too well. The politics of hijackings is familiar, even though the magnitude may change. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people in December 1988, while the bombing of the World Trade Center in February, 1993, killed six people and injured nearly 1,000.
At the moment, the hunt for the Tokyo terrorists focuses on a small religious sect in Japan, while other governments brace for copycat attempts and for those who may feel challenged to up the terror ante.
Oddly, the Tokyo attack came at a time when the fear of nuclear annihilation-at least by hostile governments-is abating. The terror of the U.S. and the Russians lobbing 100-kiloton warheads at each other is less than anytime in the last four decades. It would not take much to rekindle the fear of a rogue group, however, using stolen nuclear weapons or material to extort and intimidate.
That is because we don’t know who are the usual suspects anymore. In the modern world, who should we fear? The nihilistic new wave; the disaffected; those who are concerned with apocalyptic messages? The dangerous are more likely to be members of some marginal group, a sect led by a single charismatic figure, such as David Koresh in Texas, or Jim Jones who led his followers to death in the jungle of Guyana.
Terror by its nature is not predictable. In Albert Camus’ novel, “The Plague,” the disease that has killed so randomly suddenly stops infecting people.
No one knows why. But the bacillus still lurks in a trunk in some attic, waiting to be released once again.
