A 10-KILOTON THEORY

Is James Atlas really "an overwrought hysteric," as I called him yesterday, because of his hand-wringing essay, "The Fear This Time," about life in post-9/11 New York? Well, I still think of him as an Upper West Side weenie.

But this morning New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that "a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon" exploding in Times Square would "vaporize or destroy" Madison Square Garden, the Empire state Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall, would "partly destroy" the United Nations building and much of midtown Manhattan, and would kill about 500,000 people.

"Could this happen?" Kristof asks, and answers: "Unfortunately, it could -- and many experts believe that such an attack, somewhere, is likely." He cites a "terrifying new book" -- Harvard professor Graham Allison's "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" -- as the source of that Times Square scenario. He points out further that Allison "did not pluck it from thin air" but rather from White House aides. Exactly one month after 9/11, they "told President Bush that a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City."

The C.I.A. found the report plausible. ... President Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for the weapon and sent Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in Washington instead. But to avoid panic, the White House told no one in New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

It isn't until the eighth paragraph, halfway through his column, that Kristof lets us know: "Dragonfire's report was wrong." (The italics are mine.) Not that there haven't been other "similar reports" -- as yet unconfirmed -- that Al Qaeda has gotten hold of a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union. So maybe when Atlas writes that "living in New York is like a terminal disease" waiting for another disaster much worse than 9/11 to happen, he's not just an Upper West Side weenie echoing cocktail party chatter in purple prose.

If it's any reassurance, Atlas should feel more secure knowing that God is looking after us -- at least according to Gary Walby. At a Bush rally in Florida yesterday, the Times reported, Walby "told the president during a question-and-answer session that though he always voted Republican, 'this is the very first time I felt God was in the White House.'"