Time to turn off the terror-vision

Since the 9/11 attacks, the world has been accustomed to living with the prospect of something even worse waiting round the corner. Thwarted terrorist catastrophes flit constantly through the media with names like thriller titles, from the 'ricin plot' to the 'gas-limo project'.

Terrorologists provide graphic descriptions of a hypothetical 'terrorist nuclear strike' on American cities and imagine ever more maniacal ways in which terrorists will bring about catastrophic destruction, from 'cyber-terrorism' to smallpox epidemics.

Many of these dark futures have become staples of popular culture, from Hollywood disaster movies to TV shows like 24. The recent sci-fi series Heroes described an attempt by a 400-year-old nihilist to unleash a virus with the ability to 'kill everybody'.

Why does the prospect of a terrorist-borne

catastrophe inspire such peculiar dread? The phenomenon is not as new as it appears. In the late 19th century, governments and the media depicted violent anarchism as a deadly threat to civilisation and interspersed real anarchist bombings and assassinations with hypothetical plots to blow up reservoirs or poison the water supply.

The fascination with anarchist violence was due partly to the belief that anarchists were uniquely evil, insane and destructive. But it also reflected a new sense of the fragility of industrial civilisation and the destructive potential of modern science. In effect, the anarchist 'mad dog' was the rogue agent in the international system, whose diabolical intentions were matched by an array of devastating potential weaponry.

Such fears have continued to accrue to 'the terrorist' as a consequence of the vast arsenal of destruction that so many modern states have acquired, from nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry to germs with a capacity to target particular genetic groups. But conventional wisdom continues to