heinlein v al qaeda
Glad I wasn't invited to the party. All I can think of is easy ways for terrorists to disrupt the united states with low-tech portable weaponry and a couple dozen guys.
Why attack a guarded, fortified, and structurally robust nuclear power station? If you could knock down about three specifically selected high tension lines on a hot day, you could black out 50 million people for as long as it took to re-string the lines. And you would drive away from the unguarded rural point of attack to do the same thing to the other coast. You could do that all year before they eventually caught you at random.
Why blow up a plane-load of fuel? Instead drive to within half a mile of three or four refineries and drop mortar rounds in until you hear a satisfying "foof"! If you could do a reasonable amount of damage, you could disrupt fuel supplies nation wide. Firing mortar rounds in Iraq is kinda scary, because the army has cool radar-controlled counter-battery artillery, but I bet none is deployed in Texas.
Why gather expensive radioactives for a dirty bomb? There must be something cheaply available that is radioactive enough to set off the simpleminded detectors that civil authorities have purchased. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to deny the city to its residents for 100 years, which would surely make your name known in heaven, but you could scare the living crap out of 2 million infidels who would kill one another trying to rush out of town. You could sprinkle the same stuff on every container ship leaving the foreign harbor of choice and freak out the border guards. It should be a high value port in Japan or Taiwan. Since it takes weeks for the ship to cross the ocean, you would be long gone before the first alarm shrieked.
We rely way too much on our infrastructure, and allow it to be profitably non-robust. Securing against these threats isn't all that expensive (not cheap for sure, but not all that expensive in the grand scheme of things). But I betcha we'll have to get clobbered a few times before we bother. Infrastructure slightly hardened against casual terrorist attacks might have interesting and useful properties in a natural disaster too. Too bad.
I wonder if there are cheap ways to defeat the bad guys too. Something like making the electricity and phones work, and giving every family a computer and an internet connection so they can get their own news. Or like raising their standard of living to the point where they have something to lose if the country goes down the toilet. Or educating their women. Bwah ha ha.
Sci-fi writers are a waste of time. They're just like the pentagon, all high tech and no sense.
I guess I'm glad the bad guys don't really want to hurt us, because they insist on rules of engagement that result in their own deaths. Extremists. Oy!