Comment Re:But is it reaslistic? (Score 1) 369
Is the public reaction generally panic? I don't think so.
You're right. I should rephrase. The median member of the public doesn't panic but enough of the public is swayed to allow stupid panic responses and bad public policy from people in government.
We should continue to secure all sorts of nuclear related materials, as we have been, to prevent dirty bomb attacks, or the theft or illegal sale of fissionable material.
Yup. That sounds like a very reasonable set of policies that we're already doing and should continue to do. I don't think many people would argue with you on that. But the tenor of the discussion I'm hearing here implies that this laptop is some sort of a revelation and that we should really do something different.
When people say we're "doing nothing" what they really seem to mean is that we're doing nothing that we weren't already doing. That may be true (the "doing nothing" claim certainly isn't), but that may or may not be a bad thing. Maybe what we're already doing puts us roughly in the sweet spot for cost/benefit. I haven't seen a lot of evidence that we're way off base as it is.
Requiring emergency shelters in new construction of various type of buildings as some countries do wouldn't add much to the cost and could pay off in many different disaster or attack scenarios.
That's an interesting thought. What are other countries doing, and what are the costs and benefits? Israel is the only one I can think of, but I'm not very familiar with their measures, and their needs are rather specialized.
Just 9-11 resulted in $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy.
And many, many times that in public response (wars, additional public safety spending, etc.). So as bad as 9-11 was, we're easily able to do a lot of harm to ourselves if we don't prioritize our use of resources. If we're thinking about ways to save literally thousands of lives per decade and we have a few hundred billion dollars to play with make that happen, there are a lot of options.