Terrorism

From President Bush on down, our leaders are finally getting serious about the risks of bioterrorism. But in all of their proposals -- for early detection, for stockpiling vaccines, for upgrading hospitals -- they continue to ignore one of the weakest links in our homeland defense: the armies of Americans without health insurance.

Health experts say the early detection of illness is one of the best ways to counteract bioterrorism. But how can we do that when nearly 40… more

Selected reviews of Holy War, Inc. are featured below:

Sometime during the summer of 1918, an influenza virus that had recently swept through the United States and Europe evolved into a far more virulent organism. World War I was still underway when the first case of the new flu was reported in America, at Camp Devens near Boston. Within days new victims had appeared in military bases up and down the Eastern seaboard. By the time the virus hit America's cities, public health officials knew they were dealing with… more

Ken Alibek hardly seems like the sort of fellow to have overseen the development of the world's most terrifying biological weapon. A short, stout, moon-faced man in his early fifties, Alibek has a shock of black hair cut straight across his brow, like a schoolboy, and a whispery voice clotted with the round vowels and rolling R's of his native Kazakhstan. He scurries along a hallway of George Mason University, where he is a research biologist, trying to procure a… more

Toppling the Taliban will be easy. The Kremlin overthrew four Afghan governments in the 1970s, as a result of which it became embroiled in a decade-long war in Afghanistan that helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. That the Soviets failed to subdue Afghanistan doesn't mean that the United States will fail there, too. Ending Afghanistan's support of terrorism does not require the occupation of large tracts of its territory, the goal of the Soviets. Still, there are… more

At 10 o'clock on a cloudless and balmy Tuesday morning, two eras overlapped on the streets of Washington. A little more than an hour had passed since two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York. Just minutes ago, another had crushed one wing of the Pentagon, the American military command center outside Washington. Half the pedestrians on the street had no idea what had happened. They chattered loudly about plans for dinner, proposals to rent the… more