Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World

Despite its title, this work is less a warning about how precarious our safety is in the face of 21st-century terror attacks-although it has a lot to say about this-than it is a sophisticated, intelligently written exploration of the systems that make up our world (such as buildings and cities, ports, molecular and cell biology, the Internet and digital media). These systems, their uses and the major government, industry and academic players that have a hand in them are treated in each chapter. In so doing, the authors not only present a straightforward introduction to these highly complex systems, but also a fascinating history of their growth and development up to and since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And because many of these systems have been around since the Cold War era, the book presents September 11 less as an incomprehensible historical anomaly than as part of the continuum of attack and counterattack between the U.S. and its shifting constellation of enemies. Yet on an even more fundamental level, the book explores our responses to 9/11 (indeed, all human responses to historical and political conflicts) in terms of the more general human drive toward the shared tasks of adaptation, system building and survival. ""The road to safety is not to simplify things. It is to try to arrange the world in such a way that its complexity keeps options open, offers alternatives, provides opportunities to adapt,"" the authors write. In the end, the volume's biological, species-wide perspective on the issues surrounding national security is its abiding strength and will keep it relevant long after 9/11 takes its place alongside Pearl Harbor, the Challenger explosion and the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln as remembered-rather than felt-national tragedies.