The Next 9/11: High Speed Rail

With all the heated discussion about high speed rail, one aspect is consistently overlooked: security. I have yet to hear anyone ask the question, "How do you secure all the rail in this country?" There's nearly a quarter-million miles of track in this country, and every spike and tie is a ripe target for terrorism.

Imagine a fundamental change in transportation infrastructure - Obama's vision for a future without cars. Everyone depends on trains to travel long distances, all in the name of a greener, less polluted world. We learn to tolerate the inconvenience of living by train schedules, traveling only where trains go, and being stuffed together into uncomfortable train cars built for quantity of transference and not quality of travel experience. We simply have no alternatives, the government having legislated in favor of environmentalism.

And then one day a series of small improvised explosive devices, placed along lengths of track no one ever sees except from the inside of a rail car, is detonated, coordinated to cause maximum damage in a single moment of incredible destruction. When trains moving at 90 or 100 miles per hour or more jump track the result will be unlike anything we've seen since September 11, 2001.

It becomes a simple matter for a terrorist organization to kill tens of thousands, and they would not even need to sacrifice to do it. The bombs need only be large enough to derail the lead car - maybe 10 feet of damaged track is all - and the entire train would wreck. The destruction would be awful. And what's more, government would react predictably, shutting down all rail traffic everywhere, disabling an economy with no other means to travel. You thought 9/11 shut us down? Just wait.

If the politicians pushing this idea - mostly Democrats - would admit to the likelihood of such an even, and then were forced to consider the cost of making high speed rail secure, we would quickly come to the consensus that it is unmanageable.

Attacks like this have already occurred - most recently in Spain. But the United States remains the big prize for extremists, and they will bide their time to get the biggest bang for the buck. Believe me, if I took this long to think of this then professional terrorists already have stretches of track in mind.

All they need to do is wait for Democrats to provide them with human targets.