INTRODUCTION: 9.11 AS DISASTER: ON WORST CASES, TERRORISM, AND CATASTROPHE

Things will never be the same, some say, because of 9.11. We feel more vulnerable, more threatened, more at risk. It was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, goes the refrain. It was dramatic beyond our worst nightmares. Like millions of others, I watched the events of that lovely morning unfold on television. When the South Tower fell for a few seconds I could not see it collapsing. My blindness wasn’t because of the smoke and dust. It was a cognitive blindness. I could not believe my eyes and so, somehow, my mind denied my brain the truth of the moment. The 9.11 attack – especially the collapse of the World Trade Center – was a worst case. One of the attributes of a worst case is that it’s overwhelming. That’s why we say things will never be the same. The attacks were overwhelming in a number of ways. They overwhelmed our imaginations as we watched airliners crashing. It was instant death on a scale that few people outside of war have ever witnessed. The attacks overwhelmed our political and organizational systems too. In the wake of 9.11, and the anthrax poisonings later that Fall, it became painfully evident how ill-prepared our organizations were to either prevent or respond to attack and disaster. The list of failures is long, embarrassing, and massive. America’s intelligence and security organizations had plenty of information and warning but were poorly organized and in some cases patently incompetent. None of the 19 hijackers were even detained at the airports, even though some of them were carrying knives and didn’t have proper paperwork. While it’s wrong