Educated Guesswork: Lessons from today's bombing

July 7, 2005

This was an incredibly low tech attack--conventional explosives and timers. As Slate points out, if the terrorists had better technology they would be using it. Almost four years after 9/11, that's very good news--and given the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal, a little surprising.
Precisely because the techniques are so primitive, the barrier to entry is really low. We have no realistic chance of stopping terrorism by limiting access to materiel, physical security, or by getting rid of a few state sponsors. Remember that the Brits controlled Northern Ireland for years and were never able to complete stop the IRA. That doesn't mean that it's not worth going after terrorists, but we need to realize that as long as there are aspiring terrorists, there will be terrorist attacks
This is a horrible event. That said, the death toll looks to be under 100, less than a bad day on America's highways. The West can absorb this level of terrorism indefinitely, and as the Brits have so bravely shown, we can learn to live with it without panicking. This is a lesson the US needs to learn as well.

Posted by ekr at July 7, 2005 10:06 PM | Filed under: