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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Well, a lot of people have said "they could have killed more people" which seems reasonable if you look at compared to the Madrid/New York events. But I think it might also be over-estimating the skill / ability to control things on the behalf of those responsible.
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Yes, there's always the element of the unknown but an intelligent terrorist can offset that to some degree by using redundancy and excess capacity (
i.e., more and bigger bombs) to help compensate for the inevitable glitches and things he can't control or anticipate. For example, the Madrid bombers planted 14 bombs on 4 trains, each with 10-12 kg of high explosives; 3 of the bombs were duds or disabled by other bombs (fratricide) and one was set for the wrong time (T+12 hours)--but that still left 10 bombs. The London bombers apparently used fewer and substantially smaller bombs so their 'margin of error' was far less.
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One of the things I always felt about 9/11 was how fortunate the bombers were. Any number of things could have happened (e.g. one of the Twin Tower's headed plane hijacks failed, the buildings didn't collapse, the air-force shot them down, etc) which would have made their plan dramatically less sucessful (in terms of numbers killed).
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And yet one of their planes never reached its target--they could have been even more successful than they were. Shit happens, even to terrorists; but by hijacking four planes at once they increased the odds that at least part of their plan would succeed.
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Now, it could be that the organisers of such events plan in such meticulous detail that they can see every outcome, but it seems likely that you'd be thinking "Well, we'll put three bombs on the Underground, used by three million people every day, and explode 'em at rush-hour - that's bound to kill quite a few people" rather than specifically targetting a number of casualities.
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I'd look at it more as problem of maximizing their expected return. The terrorists' resources are limited, they have only so many bombs, so many agents, so much time to carry out their plans. Where do they put the bombs to get the most casualties? I'm sure they
do try to maximize the casualties, but not at the expense of a plan that's so intricate that it has little chance of success.
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