Lockerbie and anti-terror laws - 15 March 1996

The day we heard the sad, atrocious news from Scotland was, by a grim coincidence, the day the president of the United States met in an unprecedented summit with 27 national leaders in Egypt to deplore terrorism in the Middle East and hope to do something about it.

It was also the day that the House of Representatives in Washington tried and failed to write an anti-terrorism bill that would match a more drastic one passed by the Senate last June. And also on the same day there was a shot of good news. For the first time since the atomic age was born in the thunderclap of Hiroshima, the United States has discovered a way of containing the most dangerous form of liquid waste from nuclear weapons, and last Tuesday they opened a factory in South Carolina to prove it.

We all know that for more than 40 years, from the first days that four nations anyway began to stockpile nuclear weapons, there has been this general problem of safe storage and the particular problems of the leakage of radioactivity into the atmosphere and of liquid waste into the soil. We all know too of serious breakdowns and explosions. There have been 11 accidents at nuclear facilities since 1957,

The first, which the British government decided had caused 37 cancer deaths, was at a plutonium production reactor in Liverpool. The most frightening, in the United States, was the overheated reactor that threatened the meltdown of its core at place called Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979. 140,000 people were evacuated. But worst of all, as surely anybody who was alive and sentient 10 years ago will never forget, was the fire, the fires and explosions at a nuclear power plant, Chernobyl, in Kiev, which left 31 people dead on the spot and spewed radioactivity all over Europe. There is still a sizable stretch of northern Italy that is unfit for any growing thing and I believe a part of Cumbria that can no longer be cow pasture.

The new factory in South Carolina has taken liquid waste which had been stored in steel drums that are now rotting, turned it into solids and re-stored it in a form of glass that can absorb radiation. The stuff may not be safe for thousands of years but there'll be no leakage in, they say, the foreseeable future, which should take care of most of us.

About the Scottish obscenity, the one certain thing I think we can say, which I admit offers bleak comfort to the parents and friends, is that absolutely nothing can be done about such sporadic horrors which are happening all across the globe. They always did, but to know about them you had to take a daily paper interested in news from China, Siberia, Tibet, Chile, France, Germany, wherever, and dig the lurid item out of the inner pages and the fine print.

One of the many burdens television has loaded us with, is the certainty that every multiple crime, massive accident, big fire, small assassination, can be known about, can be seen that same day, by everyone alive with a television set. What I'm saying is that there's no way of taking precautions against the sudden brainstorm of a man with a gun, anywhere on earth. No magic formula, no psychiatrist, no detective, no witch doctor. The Romans thought they had portents of trouble to come. They didn't, and nobody has had since, except frivolous astrologers who pretend to.

But about terrorism organised, certainly this country's pretty steamed up after the appalling bombing of the World Trade Centre in this city and the more recent explosion of Oklahoma City's federal building. By the way, one of the conspirators in the World Trade Centre disaster is said to have been foiled in a plan, carefully worked out, to explode eight or nine American commercial air flights on the same day. Last summer the United States Senate passed what it called a Terrorism Protection Act. It increased the staff of the FBI and loosened the law that made tracing explosive devices an invasion of privacy.

But there've been lots of objections and there will be more to other parts of the act that give more power to the police and in some emergencies, the military, to trail suspects and to keep a closer watch on aliens, which is quite an undertaking when you consider that about 400,000 aliens, legal and illegal, pour into this country every week. The objections will be, as always, based on two phrases in the First Amendment to the Constitution: Freedom of speech and the right of the people peaceably to assemble. That last right can cover a multitude of gatherings.

As we learned in the heyday of the gangster era – I mean when gangsters were recognisable on the street and in nightclubs, not as now, well-groomed members of the Mafia who deny there is such a thing as the Mafia and who, when arrested in a meeting of their brethren or family, can always protest the invasion of the police, the FBI or whoever, into an innocent get-together of Friday night chums or a business meeting, involved entirely in making better and cheaper doughnuts or mousetraps or whatever business they pretend to be in. And you can see also how trigger-happy cops could intrude on any meeting of the newly arrived or old arrived aliens, under suspicion of being spies or nowadays, terrorists. Since the Oklahoma City bombing, the Islamic population of that state has been intimidated and in some places, bullied. Not because they took any part in the plot, but because, after the arrest of the Islamic suspects in the New York World Centre bombing, all members of an Islamic sect even the most decent and law-abiding families, lived, moved and worked under a cloud of suspicion.

Now assuming, which is a mighty, a miraculous assumption, that both houses of Congress will come to devise and agree on an effective bill to combat terrorism, there will remain the most American of stumbling blocks: the admirable concern for the liberty of the subject and the hysterical interpretation of the First Amendment by well-meaning groups that believe every child is innocent of swiping anything from the kitchen until they see the jam smeared on his face. Or, as one newspaper here put it, Congress is right to give federal law enforcement agencies more money and manpower but diminishing American liberties is not the solution to terrorism. What the solution can be, while still preserving everyone's right to say anything on his or her mind and to gather for innocent or villainous purposes, what the solution might be, it does not say.

In the numerous talk shows, panels and public discussions on television that came on while the House was debating its anti-terrorist bill, many people echoed a popular complaint. That advertising the techniques and tricks of bombers and plotters, terrorists in general, would give ideas to mischievous people, to which Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of a relevant Senate committee, had the right, blunt answer. The terrorists, he said, already have the ideas, more and better ideas than are advertised or discovered. The terrorists who plot and plan on a grand scale are intelligent, imaginative, ingenious. This is always hard for some people to believe, who think of a madman as somebody who babbles and foams at the mouth, someone to whom you cannot, in your mind's eye, attribute high intelligence.

Well just to add the final cheerful note to a frightening week, I ought to note what's also come up in Washington and no doubt in talks in the White House, is the discovery that in the vast area of what was the Soviet Union, there are 80, 80 centres, store houses, if you like, of enriched plutonium and uranium that are not monitored all the time, some of which are guarded by one person.

One former and, I guess, reformed spy, confessed this week, how easy it had been to get past single guard, go into a lab and swipe a pound or two of plutonium, which in itself may be harmless, but I ought to mention that a year or two ago, a young Princeton student, 19 I think, and not a whiz at physics, acquired a small amount of uranium and over the weekend, followed directions, well-known enough to have been published years ago, and made a bomb that could have destroyed half of the town of Princeton, New Jersey. He handed it over to the government.

Well there must be something or other that happened this week that could take our mind off these doomsday thoughts. There were two items I made a note of. The oldest living American Indian has died in Elko, Nevada. She was Mamie "Marie" Bill, Bill was the surname, a Shoshone. Her father and a brother both lived to be over 100, she died at 112. it's always interesting to know to what very old people attribute their longevity. They rarely let us down. Mamie Bill then said, it was entirely due to her diet: squirrel, rabbit and deer.

There was a curious and much questioned decision of the Supreme Court two weeks ago, having to do with what is known as the law of forfeiture. A husband had sexual contact with a prostitute in a car owned jointly by him and his wife. The innocent wife protested that her share in the car could not be held by the government. The court said the property on which the crime was committed was tainted and the government had the right to the whole car and its value.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.