The real safeguards

Technology, such as the vehicles mentioned below, can help. But the real defenses are of quite another type. Why are there no more hijackings to Cuba? The gadgets at the airports have helped, of course; but the real turning point came when Castro was persuaded to extradite hijackers.

Similarly, the experts on terrorism, sabotage and blackmail tell us, the two powerful defenses against these crimes have nothing to do with technological devices.

The first is a no-nonsense public policy on the issue. "Any person contemplating a threat," write Willrich and Taylor, "would know that a major policy would have to be reversed for the threat to achieve its purpose." The US government's response to blackmail has been better than that of business and industry, and better than that of West European governments; but it hasn't been good enough. The government has meddled in thousands of areas in which it has no business, to the detriment of its one and only mission, to protect the rights of its citizens; and security is their number one right.

The second powerful defense is infiltration of terrorist groups. It is a weapon that has been all but destroyed by the "America stinks" crowd in Congress and the press. They had no objections to the FBI infiltrating the Ku-Klux Klan (and neither had we), but when the intelligence organizations try to protect us from the Fascists of the Left, this crowd wails to high heaven about civil liberties, as though civil liberties were of any use to the dead.

The director of the FBI says that terrorism, though not necessarily nuclear, is on the rise and a major threat in the years to come. Yet the FBI and CIA are being bound and blindfolded.

The big boom to the terrorist is not plutonium; it is Sen. Frank Church and his benighted admirers.