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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

The age of 'pretty survivable'

By: Allen Abel

Posted: 04/14/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Terrible beauty -- a 1999 photo of a French atomic bomb test.

WASHINGTON -- One of the joys of living in Washington is the certainty that, sooner or later, someone is going to detonate a nuclear or conventional bomb within a few blocks of the Capitol or the White House. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week, but the probability, as one expert on such matters predicted last week at a trade show called GovSec, is "definitely yes."

This was a former naval and U.S. Mint police chief named Lou Cannon who was addressing a seminar titled Encountering the Suicide Bomber: Are You Mentally Prepared?

"It's gonna come," Cannon predicted. "It's just a matter of when. There's just so much stuff to watch around here. They only have to get lucky once."

The leader of the session was an Arabic-speaking Christian Israeli named Christopher Hinn.

"We're always in a hurry," Hinn observed. "We go to the drive-thru at McDonald's 'cause we want it right now. But they will wait. They will wait for 40 years. We're going to be dealing with this for the rest of our lives."

Government Security Conference & Expo 2012 was filled with happy moments such as these. There were lectures and panel discussions on The Dark Side of Facebook and Violent Islamic Extremism for the North American Context: The Toronto 18 as a Case Study and Disaster Strikes: What's Your Social Media Plan? There were demonstrations of the latest innovations in explosives detection and bomb-squad robotics and software to guard against Chinese cyber-espionage in the (hopefully not mushroom) Cloud.

Encountering the Suicide Bomber: Are You Mentally Prepared? began with a video in which a young man blows himself up in a crowded market and all that remains is a child's bloodied shoe.

When the film ended, Christopher Hinn pulled a middle-aged white guy out of the audience and billowed a burqa over him.

"What does a Muslim look like?" he mused. "It could be some guy who looks like your next-door neighbour's mother."

I tried to envision the nice Mrs. Hahn who lives in the house beside ours obliterating herself in the dairy aisle at Safeway. But this was not an idle daydream: a few weeks ago, the D.C. police grabbed a Moroccan wannabe martyr from the Virginia suburbs as he walked toward the Capitol wearing what he thought was a belt of live explosives. (An FBI mole had facilitated the mission and filled the canisters with dirt.)

"I believe if he was allowed to do it, he would have done it," Christopher Hinn said. Lucky me: I was a block away that day, browsing through the Postal Museum.

The expert gave us some tips on how to spot the next human bomb: steely eyes, a blank expression, and much too much eau de toilette in preparation for paradise.

I wondered if there was a way to defuse such a person, perhaps by singing "Baby, you're a firework."

"Is there some word, some verse from the Qur'an that you can say to them that will make them change their minds?" Hinn mused. "Probably not. They are focused. They don't listen. They're going to their Maker. They are a device. The device does not care."

The next session I attended was sponsored by the federal government's Office for Bombing Prevention. It was scheduled just after Nuclear Security in the New Threat Environment and just before Homegrown Terrorists and Lone Wolves.

A speaker named Dennis Molloy told us about a secret bunker near the airport where 25 multi-lingual agents sleeplessly sift the Internet for what he called "not only your Islamists, but also your white supremacists, your animal and environmental fanatics."

Molloy showed us a website with links to topics such as Peroxide-Based Explosives Awareness and Chemical Pressure Bombs: Cigarettes and Incense Switch.

He warned us to expect a Madrid- or London-style attack anywhere, any time.

There was one ray of sunshine: the Federal Emergency Management Agency released a research paper that calculated when a 10-kiloton "dirty" nuclear bomb is detonated near the White House -- and sooner or later, one will be -- only those within a few blocks of the blast can expect to be incinerated. This would include the president and his family, which perhaps explains why Barack Obama has been spending so much of his time in recent weeks at billionaires' homes in Palm Beach and Hollywood, ridiculing Mitt Romney's wealth while holding out a tin cup, far from the radioactive rain.

"The report predicted terrible devastation for roughly one-half mile in every direction," FEMA disclosed, "with buildings reduced to rubble the way that Second World War bombing raids destroyed parts of Berlin. But outside that blast zone, the study concluded, even such a nuclear explosion would be pretty survivable."

In an age when "pretty survivable" is the best we can hope for, it is worth noting that, when we moved here from Toronto five years ago, living far enough from downtown to survive a dirty nuke was a real consideration. Now, when I walk my six-year-old daughter to school every morning, we remain safely within the Light Damage Zone: "windows broken, mostly minor injuries."

We haven't yet talked about the awful meaning of "definitely yes." I didn't take Lizzie to GovSec.

"Kids don't remember 9/11," Chrisopher Hinn told us. "They think everything's all right with the world."

Allen Abel is Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 14, 2012 J11

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