Putting the World on Hold : The New Terrorist Can’t be Trusted in negotiations and is bound by no practical restraint.

The undeniable power of terrorists to compel attention was vividly demonstrated last week when the Washington Post and the New York Times published 850,000 copies of the world according to the Unabomber in a special insert distributed with the Post. Newspapers ordinarily guard the independence of their news columns jealously but the publishers of the New York Times and the Post felt they had little choice--the Unabomber had promised to end his 17-year career of terror bombings if his 35,000-word manifesto was published.

Terror--bombings, assassinations, what revolutionary anarchists used to call “the propaganda of the deed”--has been a common fact of life for more than a century. Some terrorist campaigns have been carried out by large, well-organized groups claiming thousands of victims, but it is hard to think of one that has achieved abiding political victories. What terrorists win--the big groups and the crazed individuals alike--is the attention prompted by fear.

What the New York Times and Washington Post fear is the very good chance other lonely and misunderstood terrorists with a message for the world may seek out the same route to publication. Will newspapers soon be forced to carry a weekly supplement, distributed on Sundays with Parade perhaps, containing the thoughts of one-man groups on the problems of the age? One thing is sure: Any terrorist with the Unabomber’s genius for building undetectable bombs no bigger than a three-pound box of chocolates will force authorities at least to listen to his demands.

Terror was a long time in coming to the United States but its specter now sits in the councils of every major U.S. institution concerned with issues of public safety. The bombing of the World Trade Center in New York three years ago gave authorities a glimpse of what might happen; the bombing in Oklahoma City last spring made the nightmares flesh. As a result, the country has been made hostage to its fears, and can be shut down by a voice on a telephone promising to strike at some jugular that authorities know is exposed and vulnerable.

New York’s three major airports were closed, hundreds of flights grounded and thousands more delayed or diverted around the country this summer, after a bomb threat was delivered in an anonymous call to an unpublished phone number at a regional center for air-traffic control. What could the authorities do? If the caller knew the unpublished phone number, perhaps he knew how to plant a bomb in the building as well?

Terror with a political purpose has an Achilles’ heel--its goal (reunification of Ireland, say, or a homeland for the Palestinians) can become the target of official wrath. But terror for the sake of terror, terror that seeks only the riveted attention of a fearful world, is bound by no practical restraint. It may target and kill a man whose only offense is a genius for writing computer programs--the bete noir of the Unabomber--or seek to bring down a jumbo jet for the pleasure of saying, “See? I said I would do it, and I did.”

It is not twisted animosity alone that is dangerous, but its marriage to sophisticated technique. The Unabomber delights in making devices of wood, undetectable by conventional means for spotting hidden bombs. New York’s anonymous caller knew that a threat to the Long Island air-traffic center would render hundreds of aircraft blind in a nexus of air corridors leading into three of the world’s busiest airports. To poison an individual is one thing; to poison a water supply is a threat on a vastly different order of magnitude.

Readers may recall that the hero of Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” lived secretly beneath the streets of the city of New York, tapping electricity from a giant corporation and fantasizing about the power of one deeply angry man to disrupt and short-circuit the subtle technical matrix of a modern society. In an earlier age, an angry man could do little but hurl rocks at the windows of the mighty. Now, with a truckload of fertilizer and fuel oil, or a few insidious lines of computer code, he may bring the whole system to a painful and expensive halt.

The Unabomber speaks in the collective voice of a group but is thought to be one man acting alone. The FBI thinks at least two or perhaps three or more individuals were responsible for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, though others may have known of the attack beforehand or even contributed marginal and tangential aid. How much greater then is the threat of terror posed by a man in absolute command of all the resources of a sovereign state.

There was an element of rational, if cynical, calculation in the seizure of the independent oil kingdom of Kuwait by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in August, 1990. Iraq was broke after a long war with Iran. Kuwait was defenseless. Its neighbor, Saudi Arabia, would be terrified into accommodation if it suspected the United States would not fight to throw Hussein’s armies out. Hussein had a reasonable chance to take control of 40% of the world’s oil supply. So one could argue that the invasion of Kuwait made “sense.”

But Hussein is not one of those cool practitioners of realpolitik who play the odds and sensibly back off when things look unpromising. Before the war, he threatened to set Kuwait’s oil wells afire if attacked. When the U.S. expeditionary force attacked anyway, Hussein kept his word and carried out his threat, despite the fact it could no longer, in any way, improve his position. The lighting of Kuwait’s oil wells, which burned for months and pumped black smoke and millions of pounds of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, was very likely the single most wanton act of destruction in the history of the world.

The clinical literature of psychology has a word for such individuals: sociopath --someone indifferent to the pain of others. The crimes of sociopaths are typically heartless and careless. They want what they want, and nothing else matters. Add to that a touch of sadism and an element of deep anger with a sense of ideological mission as camouflage, and one has described a terrorist both dangerous and unpredictable. In the four years since the end of the Gulf War, inspectors for the United Nations have slowly collected the details of Hussein’s program to acquire weapons of mass destruction--not only lethal poison gases, but deadly infectious diseases and nuclear weapons that can be easily configured to spread huge quantities of radioactive materials with a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years. If Hussein had possessed such weapons in 1991, would he have used them?

The answer to that question is to be found in the smoke from Kuwaiti oil-well fires that spread eastward across Asia Minor to India. Hussein’s threat to set those oil wells alight was like the Unabomber’s threat to destroy mail planes between San Francisco and Los Angeles--something he could do, something the authorities had to take seriously. In 1991, it was decided to run the risk of Hussein’s environmental vandalism because his armies in Kuwait were a greater potential threat than the danger posed by fire and smoke. But a threat of nuclear fire and radioactive debris would almost certainly have forced the decision the other way.

Americans have lived under the threat of nuclear terror for so long they have managed at times to forget it. But the fear of nuclear war--even in the early 1950s, when for a few years it seemed more probable than not--was always tempered by a confidence that responsible political leaders on both sides understood the consequences of their acts and could sensibly weigh risks and goals. What distinguished Hussein from other national leaders, what placed him in the category of sociopath alongside the Unabomber, is a will both perverse and implacable that cannot be trusted, predicted or ignored.

Terror springs from the darker impulses of the primitive human brain. Early humans had no weapon with which to express their anger more lethal than sticks or stones. Now the Unabomber may destroy a plane full of passengers with a few dollars’ worth of materials from the local hardware store and lumber yard. Hussein and others like him dream of the deference accorded those in possession of a doomsday device. When the phone call arrives threatening terror, the authorities have little choice. The only real question is can he do it? If the answer is yes, the order must be issued to shut it down.