Risk Assessment  

How Safe Is Too Safe?

by William E. Merritt

Despite government's best efforts, airline travel is not yet 100% safe from terrorists. But it is already too safe.

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It's hard to imagine America could have been so naive, but there was a time when our country was seized by the illusion that I was just the guy to help win the war in Vietnam. So, come the Summer of Love, I found myself at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., learning what to do when the Viet Cong slipped up behind me with a weapon of mass destruction.

Here's what I was supposed to do:

If they came tiptoeing up with chemicals or germs, I jump in a hole and pull a poncho over my head. That way, the germs or the chemicals wouldn't jump in after me. But if they were about to toss a 100-megaton atom bomb my way, forget the poncho and go straight for the hole. Ponchos melt, and the last thing you want in a nuclear blast is a poncho running down your neck. And the suddenly decaying plutonium atoms streaming their warming rays over my un-ponchoed skin were no problem at all — the army was sure to have a stock of aloe vera somewhere for just that sort of thing.

Looking back, those holes and ponchos don't seem like they would have been as effective as the drill sergeants made out.

What they really look like is a charm against fear — the official, military version of the diving-under-your-desk drills we all practiced in grade school to protect ourselves from turning into harmful, ionizing radiation during spelling class. Practicing how to dive under desks was one of the ways you could tell that nobody had a clue what to do about atom bombs.

It was no different from the medieval doctors who dressed themselves in bird suits and stuffed herbs in their beaks to ward off plague bacilli. Or from the tribesmen who anointed themselves with magic lotions to turn bullets into rain. Or whirled their way to dervish invulnerability before charging headlong into a British square. Or cut out a whole bunch of extra human hearts to make sure they would win before setting off to do something about Cortez.

You could see it with the Patriot missiles in the Gulf War. Since there wasn't a damn thing in the world we could do about Scuds, we put on a great show of shooting Patriots into the sky. We never hit anything. But, by God, it calmed our nerves.

Hitler may well have thrown away the whole Second World War shooting useless explosives into the air. At least that's what Albert Speer says in "Inside the Third Reich" when he mentions that something like 100,000 flat-trajectory eighty-eights were tied up as anti-aircraft guns because, when the bombers came, civilians had to see somebody shooting back or they would have lost faith in the government — even though the anti-aircraft guns never hit much of anything and those eighty-eights, if used as artillery on the Eastern Front at a time Germany was losing every battle by ten percent, might have turned the tide.

When you look back at all the 16th-century townspeople trying to do something about crop failures by burning old women at the stake, or running naked through the streets while hitting themselves with whips to make the floods go away, you begin to suspect there is a pretty good inverse mathematical relationship here: The more charms against fear, the less likely anybody has a clue what might really work. Which is pretty scary when you think about what's going on at the airport.

The fear-charmers were out in force the other day when I flew to Atlanta. They pulled an 80-something-year-old codger out of line and worked their comforting magic on every stitch and cranny of his person. Then they pulled aside an elegant, mid-twenties Asian lady — my personal first choice for a full-body search — and groped her.

By the time they got to me, terrorist suspects were backed up like al Qaeda in the processing line at Guantanamo. I had to hold out my arms. I had to submit to electronic devices and human hands. I had to take off my shoes and empty my wallet. Every rivet in my jeans, every eyelet in my shoes, had to be individually inspected and discussed.

The terrorist suspect behind me muttered that the pat-down was more thorough than you get visiting a jail. He said this with the quiet authority of a man who knew what he was talking about.

I would have bought into all this as just one more not-very-efficient government intrusion into our liberties if it hadn't been for the National Guardsmen dressed up in their most serious-looking noncombat combat suits. Because, the more I thought about it, the more I couldn't figure out what those guys were doing there. As far as I can tell, they never actually search any of us potential terrorists. They don't handcuff us into long daisychains, then lead us away for interrogation by CIA agents. They carry scary-looking M-16 rifles but they never seem to shoot anybody — even though hardly a week goes by that some airport or other doesn't close down after some hothead who is about to miss his flight skips around the metal detector and scoots off down the concourse.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me those guys weren't doing anything but standing around looking like Your Government Means Business. The whole thing made me think my plane just might blow up after all.

Wisdom From the Nazi Experience

Here's a bit of wisdom from Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's head commando.

Skorzeny is the guy who kept Italy in the war by landing gliders on the top of a cliff in the Apennines and rescuing Mussolini from the Italian army. Then, when Miklos Horthy began looking like he was going to surrender Hungary to Stalin, Skorzeny slipped into Budapest and kidnapped Horthy's son from under the noses of the Hungarian army — keeping another country in the war on Hitler's side.

Skorzeny was so effective that, when word got out that he and a handful of men had slipped behind American lines at the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower wound up house-arrested by his own security people for a week, while Sir Bernard Law Montgomery wound up really arrested when a couple of American enlisted men decided to run an informal culture check on people passing by in jeeps, and demanded Montgomery tell them who won the World Series.

After the war, Wild Bill Donovan tried to recruit Skorzeny to beef up security against the Reds, but it didn't work out. Skorzeny told the OSS the very idea was foolish because anything at all can be stolen, kidnapped, or blownup by somebody who wants to steal it, kidnap it, or blow it up badly enough. There is simply no way to guarantee the complete safety of anything.

I think Otto had a good point, here. When you think about what's going on in our airports, the real question is not how to make air travel 100% safe. Even Otto Skorzeny couldn't do that. The real question is: What degree of expense, inconvenience, disruption, intrusion, and inefficiency are we willing to tolerate to achieve a level of danger we can live with?

I, personally, would gladly accept a few notches more on the danger scale for the sake of the enormous savings in hassles and intrusions but, sometimes to my surprise, I am not the measure of all things. So, a few weeks ago, I set out to learn whether other people agreed with me about this and, for a while, I asked everybody I bumped into this question: If you knew that, on average, there would be one terrorist-related airplane crash in the United States every month, would you still fly? With the exception of one guy who, for the sake of scientific unanimity I immediately dismissed as a statistical anomaly, every single person answered the same way: "Sure. The risk would be too small to worry about."

On the other hand, I didn't run across anybody who thought airport security should be more intrusive and annoying just to squeeze down the risk one more vanishing increment toward absolute zero.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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