Freaked
: Years ago, when I was Sunday editor of the SF Examiner, it came out that the neutron bomb (you remember: it destroys life but leaves buildings intact) had been developed across the way at the Livermore Labs and in my sensationalistic effort to scare the bejesus out of the readers, I took an aerial photo of San Francisco, placed the epicenter of a neutron bomb smack-dab on the Transamerica Pyramid and drew concentric circles of death and destruction out from there: Would YOU survive?
Now, thanks to PBS [via Nick Denton] we can all play the same fun game with a suitcase bomb set off in Manhattan. How dead would I be? Very. Whether I’m working in New York or Jersey City that day, I’m just plain dead.
See, too the fallout map. Even Philly is sick.
You can detonate the bomb wherever you are.
When I did this in the ’70s in San Francisco, it was smart-assed sensationalism; it was fun.
This is now real. No fun.
If that didn’t freak me enough, I go now to the Washington Times — usually a scary experience but especially so today. They visit a tunnel in West Virginia where officials are training for responses to terrorist attacks in subway tunnels. “The Marines say the Washington Metro and New York subways are among the top targets for which they are training.”
Oh, joy.
I honestly sit on the PATH train these days and have daymares (v. nightmares) about blasts and flooding and grappling in the dark with no air and no escape.
Now I get to worry about gas, too. And more.
This, too is real:
The Defense Department set up the facility in the abandoned turnpike tunnel two years ago after a Border Patrol agent stopped an Islamic extremist trying to cross the Canadian border with material for a large bomb in his trunk. An investigation revealed that the explosives were part of a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.
Defense Department analysts realized that the United States increasingly was becoming a target for terrorists with conventional bombs, toxic chemicals, biological agents or nuclear weapons.
Blog book debate
: I get pissy about the people who would try to edit the blogbook according to the demands of a mob — here.
Eclipse
: The Sun isn’t online (yet), but the competition is:
Five days a week we take a piece of the Sun
