Web of doom

The World-Wide Web offers plenty of sites where you can learn more about -- and, in some cases, pursue -- engineered catastrophe. In fact, many experts cite the Internet as a potentially key new resource for terrorists.

For instance, diagrams and instructions (albeit simplistic ones) for a nuclear device can be found simply by connecting to Yahoo and searching under "build nuclear bomb." About a dozen sites will give you the goods. The one with the simplest address is http://www.privnet.com/jcharrel/atomic.html.

Fortunately, the Web is filled with plenty of do-gooders as well. One of the best organizations studying the perils of an unstable post-Cold War world is the Henry L. Stimson Center, in Washington, a think tank devoted to arms control and peace. It makes its resources available at http://www.stimson.org.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Cambridge-based Nobel Prize-winning group that has imagined the consequences of a nuclear explosion in Boston, has gone online in its quixotic mission to rid the world of nuclear arms, at http://www.healthnet.org/IPPNW/IPPNW.html.

Perhaps the leading experts on chemical and biological terrorism are the folks at Washington's Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, who archive news clippings, policy papers, and speeches at http://www.capitol.net/~cbaci.

For more details on the make-up of chemical and biological weapons, how they might be delivered, and what they might do to you, check out the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies' summary of "Devil's Brews" at http://www.cdiss.org/bw.htm.

Growing concerns about terrorism have prompted new restrictions on civil liberties -- such as increased government wiretapping powers -- that have brought heated denouncements from libertarians like the ones at the Cato Institute, in Washington. Its website offers a report on protecting civil liberties from anti-terrorist hysteria. It can be found at http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-5.html.

-- MC