Bob Somerby, usually a bastion of very well-thought-out unconventional wisdom and necessary snark, succumbs to the siren of exaggeration today as he touches on Nick Kristof's piece from the NYT. Kristof's column ruminates on the very plausible nightmare in which a small nuclear weapon is detonated in Grand Central Station, killing perhaps 500,000 people and doing $1 trillion worth of direct damage.
Here's Somerby's reaction to this grisly scenario:
On the campaign trail, Candidate Gephardt routinely discussed the unthinkable possibility which Kristof examines. What would happen if a nuke went off in Times Square? American society as we know it would cease. But your mainstream press corps is more concerned with the price of John Kerry’s shirts.
I'll grant his major premise, that the press corps wants us to think more about John Kerry's shirts than about nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. But Somerby has let his rhetoric run away with his good judgement in his illustration of the threat. He argues that half a million deaths mean "American society as we know it would cease". But half a million is how many die each year from cancer. It's two-thirds of those who die from heart disease. (Source)
A trillion-dollar explosion would wreak short-term economic havoc, to be sure, but disasters also stimulate economies in the long term, as the business of rebuilding goes on. The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed more than 600,000 Americans, but our society went on. AIDS has killed half a million, but our society is still going on.
Mr. Somerby needs to read Mr. Mitchell's article and take a few deep breaths. Half a million dead and $1 trillion in damages is a grievous blow, but barely a dent in real terms to the society and the economy. It's quite a resilient thing, this American culture: it will, like the Internet, route around damage. So what if New York is uninhabitable for decades? People will move to Ohio and get on with their lives.
The only way our society will end after this type of attack is if we choose to let it end by giving up our liberties. The shrill reaction exemplified by Somerby's "American society as we know it would cease" is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't have to be so.
Of course it's important to think about nuclear proliferation, and devise stratagems to prevent terrorists either getting their hands on nuclear weapons or using them. But let's not make it worse than it is. Doing so just invites the jackboots to do whatever they will when disaster strikes. Don't give them what they want -- free license to trample our society -- before it's even happened.