Schneier on Security: Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest:
For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for “movie-plot threats”: terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives — these are all movie-plot threats. They’re good for scaring people, but it’s just silly to build national security policy around them.
But if we’re going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can’t they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn’t they be scared of things that are really scary? “Blowing up the Super Bowl” is a movie plot to be sure, but it’s not a very good movie. Let’s kick this up a notch.
I left my idea on Schneier’s site, but not all that well fleshed out.
The basic premise is that someone (a rogue state or group) wants to disrupt the US economically without spending a lot of money. Given the increasing use of electronic communications, a high altitude electromagnetic pulse, generated by a small nuclear weapon detonated high in the atmosphere, would be very disruptive, causing telecom networks to fail, the power grid to flake out, with all the attendant human chaos.
As a movie plot, you get to watch the plotters (hey, they could be Americans doing this to someone else, if need be) and their race against time and law enforcement as they try to foil the plot, and you can have lots of mayhem on screen if the thing works as the targetted economy tries to function with a downed air traffic control system, failing banking networks, even a lack of basic household electricity (traffic light? refrigeration? health care? all kaput).
Think about that when someone talks about the risks of nuclear proliferation. Osama’s heirs need not sneak a bomb into the US: they might just figure out how to launch one from a floating launch pad (it need only work once) into high altitude to inflict pain across the continental US.