According to a federal commission, the prognosis for a terror-free future in America is grim, and the odds are that terrorists will up the ante by using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. What’s more, the prediction is that such an attack will happen in the next five years. What could happen in a WMD attack on America, and what would your world look like afterward?

The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism - created as one of the recommendations of congress’s September 11 commission - just issued a report that says it’s highly likely the United States will be attacked by terrorists with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in the next five years.

An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that.

In a report to be released this week, the congressionally mandated panel found that with countries like Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and with the risk of poorly secured biological pathogens growing, unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them.

“America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,“ the bipartisan panel concluded.

Prepared before the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week - which U.S. officials say were most likely carried out by Pakistani militant groups based in Kashmir - the report also singled out Pakistan as a top security priority for the coming Obama administration.

I’m not an expert in NBC warfare, but I think there are a few logically sound assumptions worth considering when assessing the likelihood of such attacks and the threat they pose to those of us in Greater Suburbia.

First is that terrorists have been at this terrorism game for a long time, and they have had very little success with biological and chemical agents. The 1995 sarin gas attacks in Japan were highly coordinated and involved 15 subway stations, not to mention the fact that sarin is an extremely deadly nerve agent as nerve agents go. Of the 3,000+ people affected by the attack, fewer than 1,000 required hospitalization - many of them only briefly - and only 12 died. That’s not to minimize those deaths, but simply to point out how ineffective the attacks were compared to what might have been expected, and certainly compared to what Aum Shinrikyo, the terrorist cult that carried out the attacks, was hoping for. The anthrax attacks in 2001, in which anthrax spores were sent via the mail to various politicians and journalists, were similarly duds when measured against the effects that were feared by experts and hoped for by the attacker(s).

Second is that it seems pretty obvious that delivery methods are a big problem for terrorists wanting to use biological and chemical agents. Gas tends to disperse fairly quickly when released, requiring any effective attack to use concentrations which appear to be well beyond the capability of terrorists, as does poisoning water supplies. Mailing anthrax is similarly ineffective. And beyond the purely technical shortcomings of such delivery media, there is the point that damage from such attacks is easily arrested once the attack is detected: When you poison the air in the subways, authorities shut down the subways, TV stations immediately broadcast the news, and people stop going into the subways. When you send anthrax through the mail, the post office starts scanning envelopes. When drinking water isn’t safe to drink, word gets out pretty quickly, and people stop drinking the water until it’s safe again.

Third is that, if bio-chem attacks had serious potential for terrorists, it’s probably safe to say that we would be seeing both an increase in frequency, and an increase in effectiveness. The fact is that we haven’t. There have been no significant chem-bio attacks since the anthrax mailings of 2001. While it’s certainly possible that there will be a sudden “eureka” moment in chem-bio weaponization that makes it the method of choice for terrorists, it’s far more likely that, as with the development of any other weapon, if there is to be any progress at all, it will likely be more or less steady, with the usual periods of fits and starts seen in an otherwise smooth trajectory.

For these reasons, I find it difficult to believe that a wide-scale chemical or biological attack is likely in the next five years.

A nuclear attack is another thing entirely, and here’s why I think so:

First, while terrorists have dabbled in chemical, biological, even computer terrorism over the years, they always seem to come back to explosions and gunfire. That may sound simplistic, and in a way it is, but to put it more accurately, it’s simple: Explosions and gunfire work, when your goal is to kill a lot of people with the most asymmetrical effectiveness possible. This is what underlies the assertion that, for example, what happened in Mumbai will happen here sooner rather than later.

Second, there are unstable and hostile governments - not just bands of glorified street thugs - that either have already produced, or are rapidly closing in on, nuclear weapons. Pakistan is the obvious example of the former, Iran the obvious example of the latter. But, there’s also the former Soviet states, and I for one am not terribly reassured that India is nuclear-armed.

Third is that the expertise needed to produce nuclear weapons is getting easier to acquire, from both scientific and personnel standpoints.

Fourth is that a nuclear bomb provides the potential for vast carnage and destruction in the kind of highly asymmetrical paradigm terrorists desire. A nuclear bomb can be made compact enough to fit in a truck, and when detonated in the middle of a dense urban area such as New York or Chicago, has the potential to kill a million or more people and lay waste to vital economic and governmental nerve centers, causing a ripple effect of disruption and terror never before seen.

In 2005 the American Digest posted this piece about an imagined nuclear detonation in San Diego that began this way:

THE TECATE TRUCK was just like all the other Tecate Beer trucks that went back and forth daily at the border crossing, except that it was not owned by Tecate. The driver of that truck spoke fluent Spanish and the truck was always loaded with Tecate. In time the US border guards got used to it. The difference was that this truck had, at its center, a narrow, hollow space shielded with thin sheets of lead so that no ambient radiation would escape.

It had cost The Base over $150,000 to convert the truck at a garage in Ensenada a year before. That was little enough when it came to securing the device which had cost the same group more than $10 million in Russia in 1997. In any event, the truck did its job and passed without incident over the border and into the United States at Tecate, California on August 6th. Dates were important to The Base, and this date was especially significant. After all, what could be more significant than the day on which Hiroshima was destroyed?

After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to it’s merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road thought the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway in downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. It’s total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.

The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.

The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth.

More recently, Brian T. Kennedy in the Wall Street Journal posited this scenario:

An ordinary-looking freighter ship heading toward New York or Los Angeles launches a missile from its hull or from a canister lowered into the sea. It hits a densely populated area. A million people are incinerated. The ship is then sunk. No one claims responsibility. There is no firm evidence as to who sponsored the attack, and thus no one against whom to launch a counterstrike.

But as terrible as that scenario sounds, there is one that is worse. Let us say the freighter ship launches a nuclear-armed Shahab-3 missile off the coast of the U.S. and the missile explodes 300 miles over Chicago. The nuclear detonation in space creates an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Gamma rays from the explosion, through the Compton Effect, generate three classes of disruptive electromagnetic pulses, which permanently destroy consumer electronics, the electronics in some automobiles and, most importantly, the hundreds of large transformers that distribute power throughout the U.S. All of our lights, refrigerators, water-pumping stations, TVs and radios stop running. We have no communication and no ability to provide food and water to 300 million Americans.

This is what is referred to as an EMP attack, and such an attack would effectively throw America back technologically into the early 19th century. It would require the Iranians to be able to produce a warhead as sophisticated as we expect the Russians or the Chinese to possess. But that is certainly attainable. Common sense would suggest that, absent food and water, the number of people who could die of deprivation and as a result of social breakdown might run well into the millions.

It is probably a safe bet that if there is going to be an NBC attack on the United States, any time soon, and on a scale that results in massive death and destruction, it’s going to be of the “N” variety; and that the target is not going to be Castle Dale, Utah, but New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle… some major urban center where millions of people are daily crammed together in a relatively small area, and preferably one that serves as a major financial or governmental center.

For people in smaller cities and the suburbs, then, let’s assume that you will not be threatened directly by the attack; that your life will not be endangered by the blast itself or even the delayed effects of radiation poisoning or fallout. What, then, is the scenario that you and your family could face?

As I’ve written in my description of the aftermath of Katrina, a disruption of the country’s financial system is something that is fairly easily done, and which has a ripple effect few people ever stop to think about. More than deaths in the six- or seven-figures, from the standpoint of the effect it will have over the widest area, for the most people, and for the longest time, this is what concerns me most.

When money stops flowing, I believe some Very Bad Things will begin to happen. While I saw first-hand an example of a grocery store taking checks with no way of verifying that they were backed by sufficient funds, this was done on a purely temporary basis, with the knowledge that bank systems would be back online in a matter of hours or days. Do not expect this graciousness to be extended by everyone, and don’t it expect it to be extended indefinitely by anyone. Thus, when the people who can’t get to their cash because ATM’s aren’t working, are also denied the ability to purchase food and medicine with checks, things will change quickly, and definitely for the worse.

When money stops flowing, the truckers who bring food and medicine to those grocery stores will not get paid. If you don’t work on the road like truckers do, and if you can imagine a scenario in which all of your waking hours are occupied by the challenge of providing food, shelter and security for your family, think about the trucker faced with the same challenges, whose work requires him to be away from his family for days on end. That’s stressful enough, but when the financial reward for his work goes from a sure thing to questionable to doubtful, he’ll have little reason to get behind the wheel of that truck. That goes not just for Kroger trucks, but Texaco trucks, Home Depot trucks, and CVS trucks.

When money stops flowing, how long will it be before utilities and similar services start shutting down? Word is that in Mississippi in the days following Katrina, one of the major electric power utilities called its bank and had $3 million in cash delivered to one of its locations, so it could pay employees and contractors until banks were back online. They could do that because of their size, but once you leave the ranks of utilities and Fortune 500 companies, few businesses have the kind of financial muscle to order up a pile of cash to see it through a crisis period during which online banking services are down. And even the big boys can’t call up their banks and have piles of cash delivered indefinitely. At some point it’s going to dry up. At that time, how long is it before basic services like water, power, and natural gas start going offline?

I want to pause here and note that I describe water, power and gas as “basic” services and not “essential” services for a reason: Because it’s only been in the last 70 or 80 years that all Americans have enjoyed these services; up until the 1930’s and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, there were large parts of the south that had no widespread electric power service. Hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans to this day get along just fine with none of those services. For hundreds of millions more, the quality of the services they do receive pales in comparison to what we take for granted here in America: Power is spotty, water quality rises and falls, and so on. So it is not only possible to live without these services, it’s been business as usual for mankind up until the turn of the last century, and is still the reality for a significant percentage of the world’s population today.

But back to the EMP attack as described in Kennedy’s editorial.

Thinking about the ways you could classify different disaster preparedness contingencies, and the criteria under which you would make those classifications, can quickly become a parlor game that produces as many classifications as there are people participating in the discussion. They are often fun to talk about, and I’m not faulting anyone - individuals or communities - who engage in those parlor games. After all, part of that is what we’re doing here.

However, let me suggest that what we’re concerned with here - and what most small-city and suburb dwellers should be concerned with - are five broad categories of disaster scenarios:

  1. The caught-in-your-car emergency. I’ve already written about one example in the James Kim story.
  2. The sub-72 hour emergency. An example might be a flood, or a chemical spill on a nearby rail line, that forces you and your family to vacate your home on very short notice.
  3. The sub-1 month crisis, during which all or some basic services are either down or spotty, and which results in a breakup of your family’s routines but on a temporary basis which has a foreseeable end. Hurricane Katrina is a good example of this.
  4. The 1-6 month crisis during which most basic services are either down or spotty, and which results in a breakup of your family’s routines, with perhaps long-term consequences.
  5. The 6-month-plus crisis during which all basic services are mostly or completely down, and which results in the long-term disruption of your family’s routines, and possibly its displacement as well.

What we’re most concerned with here, I suggest, are numbers 4 and 5 - specifically, whether the disruption of the power grid and banking systems will be massive enough to push the country past the “tipping point” where social order breaks down more or less completely, or whether the country is able to restore order before that tipping point is reached.

Much has been written about the frailty of social order in America, and how quickly things can devolve when the comforts we’ve become accustomed to are suddenly taken away, and doubt cast on the time of their return. Personally I have very little faith that America can remain an orderly and civil place for very long following an attack like the one Kennedy describes. It is not that a majority of Americans - left to their own devices - are incapable of adapting and soldiering through until services and order are restored. I believe most middle-class Americans - while being shocked and inconvenienced - would find a way to make it through without descending into chaos. No, it’s that I think there are enough Americans who are not capable of adapting, and putting up with a little discomfort and inconvenience, who would quickly descend into savagery, and cause the rest of the people to react accordingly, by withdrawing their charity, treating everyone with suspicion, and erring on the side of “every man for himself,“ all with the result that law enforcement is unable to cope, and society degrades in cycles that feed on themselves.

And as it happens, planning for these two scenarios - 4 and 5 - presents the most difficulty. In scenarios 1 through 3, it is clearly feasible - for anyone who chooses - to store away enough food, water and medicine for his family to last through the crisis, and there are no good reasons for not being prepared for crises of that duration. It’s when the crisis looks to last more than about a month that things get more complicated.

The percentage of Americans who are genuinely prepared to survive wholly or mostly on stored supplies for six months is, I would wager, perhaps one percent. For the rest, beyond the poor reasons of “That will never happen” or “I don’t want to turn into some survivalist nut,“ there are perfectly good reasons: Paying for that amount of supplies is not a trivial thing, nor is finding the place to store it all. Obviously this is not to say you should use these as excuses for not making this level of preparedness your goal, but it is to say that very few of us establish and maintain this level of preparedness, and that should be kept in mind as you think through this scenario: You may be prepared, but what happens when 99% of the rest of society is not?

So here is the basis for our scenario: A nuclear bomb detonated in the sky over Chicago, killing one million people and knocking out power across most of the country. It takes 3 months for power to be restored in all the places it’s lost. Forget for a moment the specifics of whether this would actually result from a device the size terrorists are likely to get their hands on. You’re sitting at your computer happily surfing the web, and without warning the power goes out.

What happens to your home? Your work? Your children’s school? Local law enforcement? Stores and utilities?

How do you deal with the need for water, food, heat, and protection?

Oh yes - did I mention that an EMP powerful enough to knock out grid power will almost certainly prevent your car from starting?