Can the actual risk of travel overseas be calculated?
Thirty-one Americans died in terrorist attacks abroad in 2002, which put Americans” risk of being killed by a terrorist that year at one in 9.3 million. The risk in 2002 may not be an accurate indicator of the danger in 2003, but experts believe it is still extremely low. “We are talking about odds of one in hundreds of thousands to perhaps one in tens of millions,” says Brian Jenkins, senior adviser to the Rand Corporation and an expert on international terrorism. Even with Jenkins’s most perilous estimate—one in hundreds of thousands—the risk of terrorism is well below that of many potential travel nightmares that don’t worry us nearly as much. Our poll shows the anxiety to be far out of proportion to the risk. When we asked readers how high a chance of being involved in a terrorist attack they would accept before deciding against a pleasure trip, more than half of the respondents (53 percent) said they would not go if the odds were one in 100,000 or greater. Says Jenkins: “If your p
