>The reason it makes sense to worry about terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars is that a WMD attack on American soil would cost potentially trillions of

>The reason it makes sense to worry about terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars is that a WMD attack on American soil would cost potentially trillions of dollars. Nope. The truth is that it simply doesn't make sense to worry about terrorism to anywhere near the degree we do. We'd have done far better to chalk the whole thing up to "act of God" and move on. Regarding the risk of a "WMD attack", you're making the same mistake you just accused the other guy of doing. He conflated suicide with homicide; the term "WMD" is intentionally vague so as to conflate actual nuclear weapons, "dirty bombs", and every variety of chemical weapon. The bad guys don't HAVE nukes or chemical weapons and 9/11 did nothing to suggest that sort of attack had become more likely than before. The risk of damage from a "dirty bomb" would be largely self-inflicted - we'd harm ourselves due to our own paranoia. The risk of damage from chemical weapons is pretty small even if our enemies had them, which they don't. If you correctly separate the threats you'll see each individual one is really really small. > Certainly 9/11's impact was massively expensive both financially and psychologically. 9/ll's impact as massively expensive because we chose to LET it be massively expensive. If we had shrugged it off, it wouldn't have been.