Dangers Increasing in 21st Century, Chertoff Says

The world would face an irreversible change for the worse if terrorists are able to acquire weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today (see GSN, Dec. 29, 2006).

“What we face in the 21st century is the ability of even a single individual , and certainly a group, to leverage technology in a way to cause a type of destruction and a magnitude of destruction that would have been unthinkable a century ago,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And that is only going to get worse.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once a weapon of mass destruction or a nuclear bomb gets into the hands of a terrorist,” Chertoff said. “You are not going to be able to reclaim that and it is going to transform the way in which we live” (Associated Press/New York Times, Jan. 25).