Armageddon Can Wait - 22 November 2002

In a recent letter I remarked on the striking - to me - resemblance of the events of the past year or so to the chronicles of the Bible, or I should say of the prophetic books that warn us what's in store for wicked people everywhere.

I'm thinking of the apocalyptic sequence of worldwide floods and fires, earthquakes, terrorist eruptions and the one doomsday hour 14 months ago - that plume of brimstone, which we learned in childhood is the fuel of hellfire.

Well two or three things have happened recently, two of which stress the warnings but a third which suggests that we may yet be saved.

Last week a couple arrived in New York city from New Mexico and within 24 hours were in a hospital being treated for - wait for it - bubonic plague.

If we had, which happily we don't, a national daily tabloid what a feast day they'd have had of it - "Bubonic Plague Strikes New York!"

Two days later there was a dispatch from out west - from Los Angeles.

I quote: "A plague has descended from the sky, a rare and frightening thing. People are dying on the highways, planes are falling out of the sky, the hills are sliding into the city, cell phones have gone to static.

"Traffic is a coiled serpent. A pest or plague has fallen on Los Angeles - it is called rain."

It seems that after a 10-month drought, the longest since 1877, and the correspondent reporter goes on as pitilessly as Job - "Poisonous filth is bleeding into the ocean - oil, gasoline, antifreeze, brake pads, plastic bags, industrial waste, lawn fertiliser, animal dung.

"People," he ends, "are nervous about the rain. Very many stayed home."

In the city of the angels no angel was heard from but the burden of the story is the old one in Revelation: Babylon - I mean Los Angeles - is fallen, is fallen, that great city.

Well on the heels or in the wake of this mock melodramatic piece came news from the south which did not lend itself to humour.

In a normal week through the spring and summer the south, the Deep South - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia - tornadoes whirl through two or three small towns and destroy them.

This is so common as barely to make the end piece of the evening news.

But two weeks ago the dreaded black cone on the horizon appeared between the Gulf of Mexico and northern Pennsylvania - a 1200-mile path.

Seventy tornadoes whirled through and turned 70 small communities into trash heaps.

This unprecedented reach of disaster added another deep sigh to our daily anxiety.

But courage, men, the devil is dead.

On Tuesday last came wonderful great news, in a headline, an immense headline - one inch high, which is a massive headline for the New York Times - "Armageddon can wait."

The piece joyfully announced the discovery, a way of avoiding a planetary catastrophe that scientists now say is sooner or later bound to happen and that is the crashing on to our Earth of an asteroid.

Though they're always described as small, in comparison with wonderful us, they can run as wide, in diameter, as 490 miles.

For many years now scientists, in particular astronomers, physicists, engineers, have after careful calculations said that the chance of an asteroid colliding with our Earth is exceedingly remote.

However, the head of a scientific group at the national space administration says that new and more precise calculations suggest that there is a very good possibility of an Earth-crossing asteroid not crossing but hitting us with mortal consequences beyond the most satanic dreams of al-Qaeda.

"Time," says the NASA spokesman, "to begin work on a new method of dealing with this prospect."

Until now the agreed technique for destroying an asteroid headed our way has been a nuclear weapon, destroying it on its Earthbound path.

But now they've decided that such a weapon would smash the asteroid into smaller pieces and spread its lethal damage.

So what the NASA group and other scientists are working on are ways of deflecting the asteroid out of its threatening orbit.

There are several new techniques of doing this. But you're saved from hearing about them because they're not only too complicated to explain, they're too complicated for me to understand.

The simplest and at the moment the most beguiling new principle is to change the heat radiating from the asteroid which would change its orbit and force it to miss us.

And this can be done either by painting the asteroid black - I'll leave it to you to figure out how many teams of astronauts could do this across a 200-mile rock - or reducing the heat absorbed from the sun by the Yarkowski effect.

And if you don't know that Yarkowski invented this effect a century ago - a development of Newton's opposite motion theory - then frankly we have no business discussing this in front of the children.

All right so how soon is there a likelihood of a crashing asteroid?

The question reminds me of the American scientist who first discovered that our human eyes were beginning to grow closer together, which provoked the response from the late Robert Benchley: "My eyes are so close together as it is, I bet I make it - I bet I'm the first one-eyed man in the world."

Happily the answer from NASA is the same as the answer from the eye specialist.

"Soon", they say, could mean possibly this century, more likely through the next millennium or even beyond.

So the good word is don't panic but don't get too cocky either.

Back to Earth and more pressing problems.

Last Tuesday the Senate of the United States witnessed certainly an historic event: the creation of a government department bigger than any other except defence 50 years ago.

It's the new Department of Homeland Security and it was voted into being by the Senate, by a vote of 90 to 9.

It is, need I say, a massive response to the events of 11 September.

It will have 170,000 employees. It's a huge amalgam of 22 departments that had, until now, a separate existence.

It includes the entire Customs Service, the Immigration And Naturalisation Service, the Federal Emergency Service - which goes to work after natural disasters - the Border Patrol, the Coastguard, six or seven specialist science departments and - of all proud and until now independent groups - the Secret Service, founded during the Civil War to detect and prosecute counterfeiting but since the assassination of Lincoln has been solely responsible for the protection of the person of the president and his family and by extension, since the dreadful 11th, other members of the cabinet.

There was fierce and inconclusive congressional debate for weeks about the feasibility of this new corporation or incorporation but what swiftly concluded all useful debate and dealt the death blow to this lame duck Congress was simply the totally unexpected landslide of the president's party in the congressional elections.

Any possible nucleus of opposition shrank and collapsed. And this may turn out to be true of much domestic legislation in the new Congress which starts work in January, in the sense that most domestic issues cringe and shrink before the looming presence of another terrorist strike.

So the business of government is now enormously devoted to the physical safety of 280 million people, on the land, the sea, the ports, the air, the lakes, the dams, the centres of business, of diplomacy, of sports, any building or institution of the United States at home or abroad whose paralysis or poisoning could badly hurt the American economy.

The Twin Towers and the Pentagon were monstrous and from al-Qaeda's point of view very effective wounding strikes.

And how does this produce the impotence of the Democrats? Because if they were in power they'd have to have the same preoccupation, they'd be doing the same things.

The other day the government reported the new system of protecting every reservoir in the United States - which may well be an impossible task - with 24-hour patrols by men on foot, by helicopters and small special planes equipped with radar and sonar.

And what would the Democratic policy be? To use radar but not sonar?

There is, in the present preoccupation of the government, hardly any place for party politics. Al-Qaeda has, for the time being anyway, put it on hold.

In the general anxiety it's hard to get worked up about free prescription drugs for grandma, lower interest rates on mortgages and most of all for keeping untouched the personal freedom to come and go - the civil liberties that always have to go in wartime.

And if you want to know what that general anxiety is - it is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

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

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