In the wake of dozens of deadly terrorist incidents in the last 15 to 20 years, most major Western cities have realized they’re vulnerable to attacks, even if the number of their potential “soft targets” is low.
Islamic radicals have proven time and time again that they can be very creative and very persistent when they’re looking to inflict casualties, and even an attack that claims a dozen lives, such as the horrific truck attack in Berlin prior to the Christmas holiday shows that terror can come at any time and any location where protections are not in place.
The British capital of London is one such city that has recently come to terms with the fact that many of its newest structures that are tall and/or fragile could produce a huge loss of life if they were to be attacked as the World Trade Center buildings were in New York City.
The possibility of the hijacking of an airliner has been made vastly more difficult by safety measures and standard precautions in recent years, but if one remembers, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was not undertaken with an airplane, but with a concentrated load of explosives packed into the back of a van parked in an underground parking garage.
That incident, which left six people dead and 1,042 injured (most from smoke inhalation) was fortunately not powerful enough to bring down either of the towers. It was originally intended to bring down both buildings by having one fall onto the other one, but the terrorists miscalculated the quantity of explosives that would be necessary to effect such an action.
But just because that attack was unsuccessful that way doesn’t mean that no one will ever try such a stunt again. At the end of the cult movie “Fight Club,” the characters of The Narrator and Marla embrace at the top of an office tower as similarly laden vehicles explode in the underground parking garages of surrounding buildings, causing the structures to collapse like presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did at the World Trade Center site this past September 11. Just because the movie’s finale was fictional doesn’t mean that no one has been “inspired” by this tableau to try something resembling it for real.
The fact of the matter is that in the last several years, 90 buildings have been planned or built in London with a height of 100 meters or more. Most of them are at least 25 stories, meaning that on any given business day, a powerful enough bomb set off at the base of one of these structures could collapse it, resulting in the deaths of hundreds or possibly thousands of people.
Despite the fact that the new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is of the Islamic faith and has encouraged greater respect for the practitioners of Islam in Britain’s capital city, the authorities are not fools.
The business district of London, which is referred to as “The City of London,” encompasses 1.12 square miles near the center of the great metropolis. This area is home to some 500 banks and financial institutions which account for the trading of some $2 trillion every day on foreign exchange markets.
Up until Brexit, this beating heart of the U.K.’s financial economy was recognized to be either the world’s first or second top capital in terms of the amount of funds changing hands on a daily basis.
The City of London in particular, like the Wall Street area in New York or La Defense in Paris, makes a hugely appealing target for those wishing to cause large-scale death and destruction in the name of rogue nations or stateless actors.
Until recently, London had only experienced serious fatal bombings on its buses, at its train stations and at historic buildings, both from al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and, in the more distant past, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which actually came close to killing the Queen of England in 1981 through the use of explosives.
Routes are now being looked at where wide trucks are able to drive in The City, and traffic routes may be limited to inhibit easy access from the kinds of vehicles that could deliver a deadly payload.
The Director of Building for The City of London, Simon Glyn, said of the effort, “The local situation has changed significantly over the past two years with several large-scale redevelopments approved or planned. The scale of these developments requires much greater levels of security than can be delivered on a site-by-site basis, and an area-wide solution is recommended.”
The City is formulating plans to erect a “Ring of Steel” around the tallest and most prominent of London’s financial buildings through a combination of restricted roads, street barriers and manned checkpoints as recommended by MI5, the nation’s internal intelligence service (MI5 is the equivalent of the U.S.’s FBI, whereas MI6 is the agency made famous by James Bond — the equivalent of our CIA, tasked with intelligence work outside the country’s borders).
In the years when the IRA was active, security measures were strengthened, particularly after deadly attacks at The City’s Baltic Exchange in 1992 and Bishopsgate in 1993. Closed-circuit security cameras kept a watch on roads, and security services manned numerous checkpoint stations. But many of these defenses were dismantled in the wake of the IRA ceasefire of 1994.
Now, a tax of 50,000 British pounds for each skyscraper erected will help fund studies to rebuild much of that protection and redouble it as necessary to protect against modern terrorism techniques and munitions. The tax is necessary because after the economic crisis of 2009, many firms were reluctant to contribute to security plans voluntarily.
So far, the 40-story building planned by Mitsubishi at Bishopsgate, a 62-story structure planned by AXA Investment Managers and the 1 Undershaft Building, which will be the tallest building in The City when it’s completed, have all contributed toward the so-called Ring of Steel. The developers of the latter building had already factored security into the structure’s cost in the building’s planning process.
Management for The City hopes that plans for the Ring of Steel can be fully implemented by 2022.
“Investment in the security of the Eastern City Cluster, which is one of The City’s most crowded public places and a significant target for terrorist attack, is considered both essential infrastructure and an important offer by The City of London to current and future occupiers in the area,” stated City building director Glyn. The City is well aware that the convenience needs of shoppers, diners and local businesses must also be taken into account as well as their protection.
In time, The City of London may come to resemble Wall Street and the Ground Zero area of New York City in terms of its defenses — both seen and unseen — in the battle against militant Islamic terrorism.
Hopefully, London will never have to go through an event like the 9/11 terror attacks, but one can never be too vigilant when it comes to protecting valuable urban infrastructure. Even London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan would likely agree with that sentiment.
