No more liquid on airplanes. No drinks, no shampoo, no toothpaste, no nothing. "Some passengers," a New York Times editorial sagely observed, "have complained about the inconvenience." Certainly I'm complaining. Two out of my three most recent flights were overnight trips to Boston, one for the family Seder, one for a Prospect fund-raiser. In light of the short stay, I didn't have much baggage and saved a lot of time by not checking anything. And, yes, I brought some toothpaste. Those days, it appears, are numbered, now that the foiled terrorist plot in London has prompted a new round of airline security measures. "Many more [passengers]," the Times continued, "might complain if they were not allowed to keep their iPods, cell phones or laptops with them." Indeed I would. "But forcing passengers to check most of their items and bring very little aboard with them might be the surest and cheapest route to greater security."
But greater security than what?
Precisely zero people have been killed in liquid explosive attacks on airplanes. The historical record indicates that we're pretty secure as things stand. But perhaps that's too flip. British law enforcement and intelligence services might not have done such a good job and hundreds could have died as a result of this bomb plot.
Nevertheless, people have been allowed to carry liquid onto planes since time immemorial and we're clearly not awash in exploding aircraft. What's more, inconveniencing air travelers isn't simply a matter of inconvenience. The more hellishly annoying you make it to fly, the more people will drive, either by switching methods of getting to the same destination or by choosing closer destinations. And air travel remains -- despite the risk of a bomb disguised as perfume -- enormously safer than driving. Despite our best intentions, in other words, security can kill.
It's not even clear how many lives can be saved by bomb-proofing airplanes. The dangerous thing about a guy with a bomb on a plane is primarily the fact that the guy has a bomb. Put him on a crowded rush-hour subway platform and he could kill a bunch of people with the blast and let the ensuing stampede do further damage. Or he could derail an Amtrak train. Most likely, such attacks would be less deadly than an exploding plane, but they'd still be pretty deadly. The ultimate number of lives saved could be quite small.
Indeed, as John Mueller pointed out in his seminal article, “A False Sense of Insecurity,” there's good reason to be very skeptical of terrorism-prevention schemes in general. Terrorism is exceedingly rare. We're blessed to live in a world where the actual number of people inclined to murder Americans in terrorist attacks is very small. As Mueller writes, "The number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts."
A murder, of course, is not the same as an accident. But according to the FBI over 16,000 people lose their lives to "conventional" murder in the United States each year, far more than were killed by terrorists even in 2001, to say nothing of a more typical year. Money spent securing airplanes against unlikely attacks with exotic explosives might well be better spent on conventional crime-fighting strategies -- more police, better supervision of parolees, more drug treatment, etc. At a minimum, it makes sense to channel terrorism security money into "dual-use" activities. Better surveillance or more law-enforcement personnel in mass transit would help reduce terrorism and ordinary crime.
Most of all, though, we should recall that what's scary about, say, al-Qaeda isn't the number of people it has killed, or even the number of people it can kill -- it's the number of people it would like to kill. Terrorists armed with liquid explosives are a problem on a par with lightning strikes or peanut allergies. Terrorists armed with a nuclear bomb is a legitimate nightmare.
"Enhanced security," however, does nothing to enhance our security against the small-but-terrifying chance that a substantial proportion of a major American city might someday be turned to radioactive rubble. The Bush administration, to its credit, has emphasized rhetorically that weapons of mass destruction are the essence of the terrorism problem. To its enormous discredit, however, it has utterly failed to adopt policies suitable to the challenge -- essentially the dreary, slow, and boring task of securing the world's nuclear materials and strengthening international arms control agreements aimed at reducing stockpiles of these most deadly weapons. Instead, it chose the absurdly ineffective path of invading Iraq in a failed and counterproductive effort to intimidate other states out of seeking nuclear arsenals.
Even worse, in moments of political peril the administration has consistently found that its interests are served by fostering a climate of panic and paranoia -- blowing the risks of conventional terrorism all out of proportion in search of improved poll numbers and drastic enhancements in executive power. At best, this results in waste of resources. At its worst, it does direct harm -- shredding the Constitution, destabilizing the Middle East, radicalizing the world's Muslim populations, and encouraging potential adversaries to unite against us, all while accomplishing nothing to reduce the genuine risk.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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