In his autobiography, RF Delderfield recalls the air attacks on London of World War I: “they were the first air attacks on any civilian population & therefore carried with them the terror of the unknown, much as the threat of atomic warfare strikes the European today." He describes “the exhibitions of panic & mass hysteria which were commonplace in 1915” & allows that “the semi-abortive raids of the Kaiser’s Zeppelins” might appear trivial to his readers – those who “quickly adapted themselves to the air attacks of WWII, & to the shattering descents of flying bombs & rockets.”
Hiroshima. Dresden. Shock & Awe in Baghdad. Mass destruction in anyone’s book.
But chemicals in a young man’s underpants?
I do not underestimate the heinousness of what he allegedly attempted to do. Nor the nervousness, if not terror which one might feel on hearing about it. I flew regularly during the height of the Cuban hijacks, but it was after my third ‘lucky escape’ from an IRA bomb in London – the one in Harrods at Christmas 1983, which blew up moments after I left the store, that I realised that one should look at these things the other way round; if I were deluded enough to actually want to be standing next to one & get caught by the blast, then I would have to be very ‘lucky’ indeed to achieve an end with such a low probability of happening to me in the spot I happened to be in at the time.
If we react with a kind of blind terror & overstatement of the crime attempted, then we just begin to look like scaredy cats & the terrorists have achieved their true aim, which is to strike fear & terror into the hearts of men.
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