Nothing is Sacred!

[LavCat]

Hmm. I work in the library of a small, quiet town (population about 750). No police force, not much crime except for speeding. It's been called "a one horse town," but there are more horses here than that. People are friendly. Just yesterday the letter carrier handed me the mail and his movies to return. One would not expect an anthrax attack here but there was. The little post office down the street from the library had to be closed and decontaminated.

Consider the repercussions if the decision were made not to close the building and people started coming down with anthrax.

The fact is that obtaining anthrax is so difficult that the only suspects can be mad scientists.
If shutting down a building for a day doesn't cost anything I would agree with you but if people start mailing powder letters around every day, the costs would be so huge that you could raise the wealth of several African countries to first world standards, and paying for the new Obama health care bill.


Apart from the fact that I don't believe your story (until I see it on CNN) there are so many easier and cheaper ways to harm people if you want to.

As you wish:
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/condi...y.anthrax/

Someone said anthrax could be weaponized for $2500, but it is true the cost of postage is increasing.

Plus, if you are a real terrorist and not a mad scientist you don't mail anthrax but you hide it in an office building giving the disease time to spread. E.g. putting some powder next to the powder milk jar.
So do you still agree we should close down a building every time we see some powder lying next to the powdered milk jar? Or for that matter if everything seems normal? A well trained terrorist should be able to hide something in your office without you seeing it.

No one is asserting our little post office was the *target* of the attack. As Tom Lehrer has said: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down."

The scientist, Bruce Ivins (now deceased), the primary suspect, was arguably more of a religious fanatic than a trained terrorist. Did Ivins do it, and did the perpetrator act alone? The FBI believes so, and closed their case a few weeks ago (2/19/2010). However the more I read, the more questions that I have. Just because Oswald acted alone does not mean everyone has to.

If the Dutch authorities closed the building because of some powder lying next to the powdered milk jar, I'd first ask if the powder in question was similar in color to powdered milk. If so I would agree that the authorities may have acted hastily. Was this really the case though? And what if the terrorist acted imperfectly, such that some of the milk were spilled? From reading current events, it seems terrorists are occasionaly foiled. I wouldn't cry over spilt milk.

Maybe because of the nature of this site, I tend to look at it as game theory. You receive an envelope of white powder, it could be anthrax or it could be talc. You can choose whether to close the building or not to close the building. Pretend I drew a diagram of four boxes. Label each with its own outcome. Only one choice can be catastophic (at least for the career of the bureaucrat in question). This is not to say that the person who mailed the talc should not be sent to jail.

Here is some more material on anthrax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks