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Considered individually, these suggestions may or may not have their merits—I personally shudder at giving the fda more authority, given that agency's ongoing jihad on smokers—but, collectively, the fixes are a few fingers in a dike, at best. The uncomfortable reality—which Frist himself acknowledges even while trying to put a brave face on it—is that future chemical or biological attacks may be frequent, well nigh impossible to predict, and very taxing to deal with.

Frist notes, optimistically, that Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult spent tens of millions of dollars attempting to put together a biological weapons program yet in the end were only able to kill a handful of people in a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995. True, but Aum Shinrikyo was also a nutjob clandestine apocalyptic cult whose guru, Shoko Asahara, invited one of the prosecution's witnesses in the trial to come levitate with him. In the case of Osama bin Laden's organization and its imitators, the Bush administration has alleged, whole governments are plotting America's ruin, and are allowed to proceed largely unmolested. As long as this status quo continues, the U.S., with its waterways, roads, bridges, eateries and population centers, might as well be one fat target.

The only solution that is likely to have even a chance of working is to aggressively disrupt terrorist networks and either cow other governments into participating in this disruption or to "disrupt" the intransigent governments themselves. Any marksman will admit that it's very difficult to concentrate on hitting a target—even a big fat one—when there's a rock rapidly approaching your head.

In contrast, Frist's approach is primarily reactive; it's about treating the symptoms once they've developed. Even if fully implemented, his vision would solve few problems and save few lives while diverting resources away from approaches that are much more likely to bear fruit. "Stop, drop and cover" was a catchy slogan, and it may have given a few people a much-needed (if false) sense of security. But if the big one had dropped, it certainly wouldn't have counted for much.

Jeremy Lott is the 2002 Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern for Reason magazine.

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46