Fire is what brought the towers down. An engineer friend explained that after a fire burns for awhile, the steel holding up the structure softens. When it fails, the part above falls with impact on the part below, which causes progressive collapse of the building, or pancaking, as one floor crunches onto the next onto the next. Once one floor goes there is no stopping it. The World Trade Center was likely designed to last 1-2 hours in a major fire, long enough for most people to evacuate. The tower that fell first lasted 57 minutes, in a fire driven by 100,000 pounds of jet fuel. No one anticipated that part when the building was designed, and there is no way to build a building to withstand such an event. The TV newscasters who keep asking what could have been done to make the buildings more resistant should go home. An astonishing thing is the way the towers collapsed straight down. As horrifying as that was, imagine how much more damage and loss of life there would have been would have been if they had tipped over like falling trees, landing on surrounding buildings for a quarter mile. A building demolition expert interviewed on NPR said that what made the disciplined collapse possible was the external skeleton, the girders that lined the edges of the towers. These girders contained the collapse. The expert considered this an extraordinary achievement by the architect. The World Trade Center was designed by the late Minoru Yamasaki, at the firm of Skilling, Ward, Magnusson and Barkshire, in Seattle. You have to think it's good he didn't live to see this. The rest of his firm is said to be shock, as are the employees of Boeing, whose engineers are acutely aware of the destructive energy contained in a 767 going three hundred miles an hour and full of fuel. A few random notes: This attack seems different from Pearl Harbor in the same way that the Vietnam War seemed different to fight than previous wars, which is that the enemy did not stand up and "fight like a man," but rather was hidden, hard to find, and devious, as well as surprising. The British felt the same way about the American "irregulars" in the revolutionary war. They felt we weren't fighting fairly or properly. In all three cases, one side deliberately ignored the "code of war" of the time to powerful effect. In this way the definition of war changes. It just changed again, whether we like it or not. Whatever we do to retaliate risks an escalation of terrorist-style attacks on American citizens. We will not get to watch our distant military on newsreels and TV like the old days. One of the things that makes this scary is that we have found a bomb, and it is everywhere. Every plane is a terrific bomb for a pilot who is willing to die. This attack has been called cowardly. That's silly. It was no more cowardly than flying a stealth fighter loaded with smart bombs into Iraq, when by the same definition the uncowardly thing would have been to ride in on a camel with a broadsword. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was headed for Washington but the plan was foiled by the passengers who had heard what the planes did in New York. Bravo. Instead of banning knives, perhaps we should issue one to every passenger on all commercial flights. This attack was a huge failure of American military intelligence. This attack points up the value of an unworkable and insanely expensive missile defense system. For those of you who are sleepy, that value would be zero. Bush said that we were attacked because we believe in freedom. This is not why we were attacked. There is much about the execution of our foreign policy that rarely makes it into US news reports. If you have lived abroad for more than a few months, you have seen this. If not, it is educational to talk to someone who has. At the same time, nearly all Arabs and other Muslims abhor terrorism. The Arab-Americans I know are as dismayed and horrified as we are. Our airport security has always been a joke. My dad's crutches were consistently handed around the inspection points by the nice people working there. All I could think was how much explosive or how many knives and zip guns I could have packed into each crutch, while they were busy making business travelers go through their briefcases. It is hard to fight people who believe they will achieve martyrdom and go to heaven following a suicide attack for their cause. It is an impossible stretch for us to understand how our enemy thinks when it is that different from how we think. It is difficult to protect yourself from someone who does not value his life on this earth. Of course fight them we shall. No one gets to do what they did. We need to start by repealing some laws, like the one that says we can't use intelligence agents to infiltrate groups with human rights violations (which wizard thought up that one?), and the one that says we can't assassinate heads of state. We must not try to bring anyone to trial. We must be as surgical as possible, to minimize the loss of innocent life that would would be both a new tragedy and a fuel for escalation. I support Bush's plan to treat harboring states and helpers as indistinguishable from the terrorists themselves. Above all, we must not rush. There is no advantage or need to hurry. We must take our time, learn everything we need to learn, make no mistake. And then it will be time to execute. I regret that that will not be the end of it. jb -- It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you in trouble. 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