By ROGER FRANKLIN in New York
Playwright Neil Simon picked the right place when he penned Lost in Yonkers, his family comedy set in the quiet commuter town just a 20-minute drive from Manhattan's skyscrapers.
Mention the suburb's name in a word-association test and the typical New Yorker are likely to answer "sleepy" and "safe".
But not last Friday. First came the shrieking sirens and moon-suited biohazard crews, then the roadblocks, circling helicopters and an iron-tight quarantine enforced by national guardsmen with automatic weapons.
For the remainder of a confused and anxious evening, the town was gripped by what has become one of America's greatest fears in these post-September 11 days: the chilling possibility that it had been selected as the target of full-fledged assault with chemical or biological weapons.
As it turned out - some four confused and anxious hours after the first members of a family described only as being "of Mideast origin" went into convulsions and collapsed in their apartment - the cause was later identified as nothing more sinister than an outbreak of extreme food poisoning.
But the smooth and speedy reaction - including the establishment of a sealed-off command post at a local hospital and the forced detainment of 500 residents in a school auditorium - confirms that quiet preparations for coping with the unthinkable are making progress. It is a game plan that has been developing since the spate of anthrax-laced letters that followed soon after the destruction of the Twin Towers.
If there is any reassurance to be found in the Yonkers incident, it is in officialdom's polished response. If the grim day ever comes, a small and limited release of terrorist toxins can be handled - or so it appears.
And the cause for concern? While official pronouncements have aimed to allay public fears, the capacity for coping with a larger, more widespread assault remains an unknown quantity.
Take smallpox, for example. The good news is that federal officials now say they possess enough vaccine to inoculate every one of the 280 million Americans potentially at risk. Scattered across the country in refrigerated stockpiles at drug companies like Aventis, which only last week donated 70 million doses to Uncle Sam, the reserves can supposedly be deployed at a moment's notice.
Administering the serum, however, may be a little more tricky. According to Tom Ridge, the man President George W. Bush appointed to oversee homeland security, volunteers who have yet to be organised will shepherd their fellow citizens to hospitals and church halls, where medical teams will administer the shots.
"The good thing about smallpox," an Administration official explained, "is that inoculations work within four days of exposure. Time would be tight. But if it happened, the incubation period does leave a window after the first cases are isolated."
Anthrax is another matter. Since it is not a virus, outbreaks would be limited by factors such as geography and wind dispersal. Once again, officials like Dr Donald A. Henderson, the veteran smallpox researcher whom Bush has placed in charge of co-ordinating civilian biowar defences, swear that the reserves of antibiotics are enough to cope.
In last year's anthrax incidents - an attack involving a total of perhaps no more than a single gram - victims required as much as a month in intensive care. Even then, several failed to pull through.
But what if the incident had been more than a scare? What if, for example, Bush launches his much-anticipated attack on Iraq and Saddam Hussein's sleeper agents in the US unleash the biological weapons that few doubt he possesses?
If that scenario unfolds the panic that struck home last week near Manhattan would spread nationwide. It's a deeply unsettling thought: an entire nation lost in Yonkers.
Story archives:
Links: Bioterrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Terror stalks the quiet streets of a New York suburb
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