There is a lot of concern and fear about the possibility of more terrorist actions on U.S. soil.

The military strikes on Taliban air defenses have caused many people to prepare for the possibility of retaliatory terrorist actions.

Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that those fears are very real and could be fulfilled. Many students and faculty can be heard expressing their worries about further terrorist activity on U.S. soil.

For those with family and friends who live in big cities or frequently travel by air, those fears are very real. However, living here in DeKalb, I haven’t started stockpiling food and water or purchased a gas mask just yet.

The Sept. 11 attacks had very obvious political and economic purposes. Nowhere else in the U.S. is there a target that can make a political statement like the one made in the attacks. The only remaining targets that could make such a statement are located in Washington, D.C. Of course, reports that plans have been obtained for the use of a car bomb on the Sears Tower raises serious concerns for us here in Illinois.

Tensions are high.

However, the point is not whether we should or should not be concerned about our fellow Americans, but rather whether we should be concerned about ourselves.

I personally am not overly concerned about my safety in DeKalb, but some threats could apply to us.

I’ve heard fears ranging from the possibility a terrorist would want to destroy our croplands with chemicals to the use of chemical or biological weapons against us. Is it not conceivable that through some paranoid view we actually could be a target?

I doubt it.

Croplands would not be a likely target for a terrorist, although destroying a country’s crops is an effective means of crushing a country’s support structure. The problem with this theory is the vast area that croplands cover. In order to destroy enough cropland in the U.S. to really hurt our ability to feed ourselves, an operation of impossible proportions would have to be mounted. The U.S. has far too much farmland for a renegade group of terrorists to destroy, even with the use of chemicals and airplanes. The defense department would catch on before terrorists had an opportunity to spread enough of a chemical to seriously affect our country’s ability to feed itself. After all, each year the U.S. harvests more than enough food, allowing for crops to be exported.

The fear of chemical or biological weapons against people is much more serious. Although methods of quarantines and emergency procedures are in place in case such an attack occurs, DeKalb is not likely to be under the threat of exposure to these kinds of weapons. They would be focused more on cities where they can cause more damage, like Chicago. Fortunately for us (if you can say there is anything fortunate about such things), the prevailing winds and jet stream travel from west to east across North America, making an attack on Chicago unlikely to reach us.

I did run across one horrifying possibility in my research: the possibility of an airplane crashed purposefully into the Byron Nuclear Power Plant. This event would likely cause widespread damage. The only precedent to such an event would be the historic Chernobyl disaster of 1986 in what was the Soviet-controlled Ukraine. When one of the Chernobyl reactors melted down, contamination spread to areas up to 200 miles from the reactor, and many of these areas are still completely desolate and uninhabitable. Radiation measurements

of more than 40 curies per square kilometer of Celcium-137, an exceptionally unsafe level of the radioactive substance, were taken as far away as Kryshaw, Belarus.

Our concern regarding an attack on the plant is that it would not only destroy area farmlands, but depending on weather conditions, it could still have dramatic effects on the Chicago area.

It is likely that were a terrorist organization to actually target a nuclear power plant, it would be unable to infiltrate or place an explosive device within a plant. The U.S. has very tight restrictions regarding who has access to these plants. The use of a jet as a missile could be a problem that apparently hadn’t been considered before Sept. 11.

Of course, there are more than 100 nuclear power plants in the U.S., so why target the Byron plant? It’s not likely that it would be targeted, but the effects would be devastating to all of northern and central Illinois, Southern Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and possibly even Ohio.

Before you go making plans to move to Utah or Nevada, remember that these plants are designed to withstand tornadoes and earthquakes.