Fear Factor
The problem with threats like nuclear terror is that they are not solved but managed, not eliminated but faced, cut down to size and endured.

We lived with our last great nuclear nightmare — that hurricane of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union — for nearly half a century, and we kept our fears in check by employing a range of defenses that were none of them foolproof. We fumbled for decades to find the right mix of military readiness, geopolitical calculation, negotiation and attitude so we could coexist with the danger of Armageddon. To a significant degree, we redesigned our society around the threat.

The things that worked best — a sufficient arsenal to deter attack, the diplomacy of containment, the painstaking business of arms control — were imperfect and complicated. They also had unforeseen consequences, some of which haunt us now, like the black market in nuclear remnants and the cold-war blowback of places like Afghanistan. (Meet the new threat, son of the old threat.) But here we still are.

The easy answers were expensive placebos, like President Reagan's fantasy of an impermeable defensive umbrella, or before that the brief national obsession with civil defense. Remember that? At one point President Kennedy, afraid of being politically outflanked by New York's shelter-crazy Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, planned to create fallout shelter space for 54 million people, who were to survive the nuclear aftermath on barrels of crackers, water and hard candy. Civil defense succumbed to an astronomical price tag and, as the cold-war historian Lawrence Freedman dryly put it, "the basic unreality of the proposition that straightforward measures were available to survive a nuclear war."

Now, too, there is no single leap of technology, no grand strategic gambit or fortification that can render us completely secure against a determined terrorist. That is not an argument for doing nothing, but for doing many things at the same time, with the right degree of urgency and a steadiness of purpose.

In the end, though, the question is not just how to fight terrorism, but how to live with it. Even if you give our leaders passing marks (or the benefit of the doubt) for dealing with the actual threat, they have been dreadful at dealing with the fear of the threat. The silly color-coded gimmicks, the pre-emptive we-told-you-so's, the hype and spin and bluster and political opportunism, the willingness to make terrorism a lobbying prop for every cause on the Republican agenda — these are eating away at the administration's credibility. How much confidence can you have in people who contrived a bogus claim of a Cuban bio-weapons threat just to embarrass Jimmy Carter when he visited Castro? Sure, it is important to tell us if you arrest a suspect contemplating dirty-bomb terror. It's cynical overkill to stage a victory-over-terror press conference a month after the arrest — from Moscow — and to invoke a newly invented category of military justice, all because some loser dreamed of spraying Washington with gamma rays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/opinion/15KELL.html