Friday, December 17, 2004  Beacon No. 16: Hold the Smallpox,
I'll Take the Flu   Hard power is the application of military
force. No other nation dares resist the U.S. in a stand-up
fight, everyone says, for fear of bringing destruction down on
their own heads. For terrorists, large-scale sabotage will
backfire, too: It was simple for U.S. investigators to trace the
September 11 hijackers back to Al-Qa'ida, Usama bin Ladin and
Afghanistan, and quickly destroy the Taliban regime. So this
leaves terrorists, so far denied weapons of mass destruction, to
issue tape recordings from caves and perpetrate one-off
bombings. Doesn't it?  About 25 years ago, science-fiction
author Frederik Pohl wrote about intermediate steps between
combat and influence in The Cool War. In it, a Unitarian
minister named Hornswell "Horny" Hake is shanghaied into helping
a CIA successor called The Team to conduct something with
elements of sabotage and propaganda, but smaller than war. Here,
a Team member tells Hake how the world really w