Predictions

Can We Predict Where Terrorists Will Strike Next?

Analysts and intelligence officials periodically get together to anticipate what tomorrow's terrorists might do.

Will terrorists threaten mass destruction with nuclear weapons or global pandemics with designer pathogens? Will cities be contaminated with dirty bombs? Will tech-savvy terrorists remotely sabotage power grids or other vital infrastructure via the internet?

Are terrorists capable of triggering electromagnetic pulses that fry electronics, reducing modern technology-dependent society to a Mad Max movie? Will they shoot down airliners with hand-held missiles or bring them down with miniaturized bombs concealed in laptops or perhaps surgically implanted? Will they attack crowds in stadiums with drones carrying hand grenades or anthrax or merely white powder to provoke deadly panics?

Or might there be a mass uprising of individual fanatics ramming trucks into pedestrians, attacking diners with machetes, and carrying out other primitive, but nearly-impossible-to-prevent attacks?