International Relations professor John Mueller wrote in this important book (and here is his 2025 paper, Military Policy Toward China: The Case Against Overreaction):
* The number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, until 2001 far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning. And except for 2001, virtually none of these terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Indeed, outside of 2001, fewer people have been killed in America by international terrorism than have drowned in toilets or have died from bee stings.Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, however, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began its accounting) is about the same as the number killed over the same period by lightning, or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts. In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
* There is little evidence that terrorists have made much, if any, progress in obtaining any kind of weapon of mass destruction, no matter how defined. However, the continual obsession about WMD has had the perverse effect of recommending at least some of them to the terrorists: as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, said of biological weapons, “We only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials.” Servicing this interest, a number of Pakistani scientists once apparently had wide-ranging—if, according to them, “academic”—discussions with bin Laden concerning nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Conceivably, these talks might eventually have led to something more extensive, but contacts were severed after, and because of, the events of 9/11.34 In the meantime, al-Qaeda’s scientific capacities seem to be very limited indeed.
* The chief costs of terrorism derive not from the damage inflicted by the terrorists, but what those attacked do to themselves and others in response. That is, the harm of terrorism mostly arises from the fear and from the often hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reaction (or overreaction) it characteristically, and often calculatedly, inspires in its victims.
* To begin with, the reaction to 9/11 has claimed more—far more—human lives than were lost in the terrorist attacks. Some of this derived from the fears that the terrorists inspired. Many people canceled airline trips and consequently traveled more by automobile after the event, and one study has concluded that more than 1,000 people died in automobile accidents in 2001 alone between September 11 and December 31 because of such evasive behavior. If a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of road deaths suffered after 2001 occurred to people who were driving because they feared to fly, the number of Americans who have perished in overreaction to 9/11 in automobile accidents alone could well surpass the number who were killed by the terrorists on that terrible day.
Moreover, the reaction to 9/11 included two wars that are yet ongoing—one in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq—neither of which would have been politically possible without 9/11. The number of Americans, civilian and military, who have died thus far in those ventures surpasses the number killed on September 11. Moreover, the best estimates are that the war in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, with one analysis suggesting that 100,000 Iraqis perished during the war’s first eighteen months alone. This could represent more fatalities than were inflicted by all terrorism, domestic and international, during the entire twentieth century.
The mental health costs stemming from the fear and anxiety induced by the 9/11 attacks are also likely to be extensive. A notable, but probably extreme, example of how severe these can be comes from extensive studies of the health effect of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986. It has been found that the largest health consequences came not from the accident itself (fewer than fifty people died directly from radiation exposure), but from the negative and often life-expectancy-reducing impact on the mental health of people traumatized by relocation and by lingering, and greatly exaggerated, fears that they would soon die of cancer. In the end, such lifestyle afflictions as alcoholism, drug abuse, chronic anxiety, and fatalism have posed a much greater threat to health, and essentially have killed far more people, than exposure to Chernobyl’s radiation. The mental health impact of 9/11 is unlikely to prove to be as extensive, but one study found that 17 percent of the American population outside of New York City was still reporting symptoms of September 11–related posttraumatic stress two months after the attacks.
The economic costs of the reaction to 9/11 are also high. Although the direct economic losses imposed by the terrorists, amounting to tens of billions of dollars, were spectacular, the economic cost of the reaction runs several times that.
* The yearly budget for the Department of Homeland Security is approaching $50 billion per year, and state and local governments spend additional billions. The United States now expends fully $4 billion a year on airline passenger screenings alone, and another $4.7 billion on zapping checked baggage; the air marshal program, massively expanded after 9/11, costs over half a billion more. Safety measures carry additional consequences: one economist calculates that strictures effectively requiring people to spend an additional half-hour in airports cost the economy $15 billion per year, another puts it at $8 billion. (By comparison, total airline profits in the 1990s never exceeded $5.5 billion per year.) Longer airport waits also harm the airlines by reducing short-haul passenger traffic, and they can cost lives by encouraging people to travel more by automobile. The reaction to the anthrax letters of 2001 will cost the U.S. Post Office alone some $5 billion—that is, $1 billion for every fatality inflicted by the terrorist. Various 9/11-induced restrictions on visas have constricted visits and residencies of scientists, engineers, and businesspeople vital to the economy, restrictions that, some predict, will dampen American economic growth in a few years. Universities are deeply concerned because they depend heavily on foreign graduate students, particularly in the sciences, and student visa applications fell some 21 percent from 2001 to 2004 while the number of graduate school applications from abroad fell by 21 percent between 2004 and 2005. The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress anticipates that economic growth will be lowered because of increased spending on security. In 2006, when oil was selling for $70 a barrel, market experts estimated that $7 to $10 of that price was due to fears of another terrorist attack in the United States.
Then there are the economic costs of the terrorism-induced wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Iraq alone, these are likely to run to a monumental $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
In addition, there have been great opportunity costs: the enormous sums of money being spent to deal with this presumed threat have in part been diverted from other, possibly more worthy endeavors. Some of the money doubtless would have been spent on similar ventures under earlier budgets, and much of it likely has wider benefits than simply securing the country against the rather limited threat of terrorism. But much of it has very likely been pulled away from programs that do much good—programs devoted to housing, health, and education, for example.
Thus, the country’s obsessive focus on terrorism after 9/11 has resulted in severe funding distortions. For example, after 2001 the government spent extravagantly and wastefully on a perishable (and, as it happened, utterly unnecessary) anthrax vaccine while letting itself become undersupplied with influenza vaccine. In 2005, 758 scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, raised an outcry because of what they saw as a major shift of research funds from pathogens of high public health significance to obscure organisms of high biodefense, but low public health, importance. Almost 75 percent of the appropriations for first responders went for terrorism rather than for natural disasters; and $2 billion was made available in grants to improve preparedness for terrorism but only $180 million for natural disasters, something that may have contributed to inept governmental measures to deal with the results of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The budget for the FBI has been increased since 9/11, but not enough to pay for all the terrorism work it is now required to do. Funds have had to be shifted from its other programs, such as fighting crime: after 9/11, in fact, fully 67 percent of those working on criminal investigations were reassigned to the counterterrorism beat. A rise in the rate of violent crime in 2005 has been attributed by some police chiefs in part to the pressure on local cops to divert resources and personnel to homeland security endeavors.
The costs of reaction are also extensive in other ways, many of them unmeasurable. For example, the park at City Hall in Manhattan was extensively and successfully refurbished in 2000. After September 11, 2001, major portions were chained shut in fear of terrorists, and ordinary citizens can now experience its beauties only by peering at it through a fence.
As two analysts put it, the country’s priorities have become “radically torqued” toward homeland defense and fighting terrorism while other important societal needs go underaddressed. For example, one observer has suggested that if a small portion of the excessive spending on airline security had been spent instead on enforcing automobile seat belt laws, the number of lives saved would likely have been considerable. This process is especially unfortunate because, as risk analyst David Banks puts it, if resources are directed away from sensible programs and future growth to pursue “unachievable but politically popular levels of domestic security,” the terrorists have won “an important victory that mortgages our future.”
