Few would doubt the need or utility for disaster preparedness. But the conduct of expensive and highly visible terrorism response drills all this week in Chicago and Seattle raises--or should raise--some pointed questions about both funding priorities and the political uses of what ought to be the least politicized of government's functions.

The $16 million exercises, code-named Operation TopOff2, are intended to simulate a bioterror attack of pneumonic plague (Chicago) and a "dirty bomb" (Seattle). The listed cost of $16 million does not cover person-hours, cost to local jurisdictions, or the economic disruptions of, for example, traffic even more snarled than usual in the two cities.

It is designed to find flaws in the country's emergency-preparedness systems, which is well and good. But as with a similar set of exercises three years ago in Denver and New Hampshire, the cracks are most likely to be found in local--not national--coordination. And the threats being "responded" to this year are, in each case, from a type of terror attack that not only has never happened, but ignores the more pedestrian but very real threat demonstrated again this week.

The four coordinated attacks on Western sites in Saudi Arabia is very much in the Al-Qaeda mold, both for the low-tech nature of the attack and the use, as in 1998's African embassy bombings and in 9/11, of multiple simultaneous strikes. Yet both the dirty bomb and plague scenarios assume an expensive and technologically savvy criminal effort by attackers willing to put all their eggs--or, in these cases, microbes or nukes--in one basket.

It's certainly possible that such attacks could take place. But with the risk that such an attack would be thwarted by law enforcement efforts with nothing to show for it at all, a rational terrorist is going to either--as Al-Qaeda has--go with a technology that enables use of multiple attacks (like conventional high explosives), or wait until they have enough microbes or nuclear material for a doubly unprecedented multiple attack. But neither TopOff nor TopOff2 have simulated these much more logical scenarios.

What the simulated spread of plague from Denver's Performing Arts Center three years ago turned up was a rapid spread that overwhelmed local hospitals; early feedback from this week's Chicago exercise says that the city's hospitals would be strained to capacity. In the original TopOff's New Hampshire scenario, what was found was that there was bad intra-agency coordination.

So far, then, what we know is that if someone ever releases pneumonic plague, we'd better hope it's in a city with more hospitals than Denver; and that if we want to prevent against the type of emergency response confusion that comes with bureaucratic confusion, 49 mostly larger states don't have New Hampshire's experience. Oh, and let's test that again while every federal agency related to such a scenario is in the midst of being reorganized into the Department of Homeland Security.

The limitations--like lack of either a realistic scenario or widely applicable benefits--are worth noting because the sheer size and cost of the exercises (the largest of their kind in US history) can only be explained when one other "benefit" is factored in: the benefit politicians gain by showing the public, as visibly as possible, that "something" is being done. The visibility and the improbable scenarios are the two elements that separate an elaborate, war game-style exercise like TopOff2 from your run of the mill disaster-preparedness exercise or modeling software.

Such public showiness, along with a generous yet haphazard use of taxpayer money, has characterized much of the Bush Administration's post-9/11 federal response to the threat of terror. While the two most deadly attacks in US history were a fertilizer bomb (Oklahoma City) and multiple hijackings with boxcutters, the big money seems to have gone into esoteric, high-tech scenarios that demand (of course) esoteric, and lucrative, solutions. For example, my colleague at Seattle Weekly, Eric Scigliano, reported recently on a system, announced by Pres. Bush in this year's State of the Union address and dubbed "BioWatch," that would install monitoring systems in major US cities to provide early warning for the release of pathogens like the plague. The only problems, of course, are that such a system only works if the pathogen is one being tested for, if the release is outdoors (rather than indoors, where it's most effective), and if the release is either right in front of a monitor or released in enormous quantities--quantities only possible with a bomb or airplane, both of which we already know how to detect. But because we wouldn't want to give those mythic terrorists an "advantage" by being able to circumvent existing, off-the-shelf monitoring systems, Homeland Security will order up a brand new one. The bidding process will be as quiet (and, doubtless, as generous and well-rigged for the politically connected) as any Iraq reconstruction contract.

Meanwhile, both Chicago and Seattle have enormous, important downtown hubs situated literally yards from where boats could pull up with the kind of explosives Al-Qaeda seems to have a lot of experience using. And annual federal spending on scientific research into the spread and treatment of diseases like pneumonic plague is substantially less than the cost of this week's TopOff2 exercises. These sorts of questions are ones Americans aren't used to asking; despite America's long record of violence overseas, nobody in this country, including our politicians and disaster planners, have much experience in sorting out the credible risks from the fanciful ones.

Politicians, however, including both Republican federal officials and the Democratic leaders of Chicago and Seattle, have plenty of experience in creating both vacant public spectacle and generous private largesse. The War On Terror is well-tailored for refusing to divulge to the public details of both prevention and response efforts. Public spectacle, in turn, is useful for creating the public fear that often allows such lack of accountability. Events like Operation TopOff2 encourage us to fear the improbable, and to spend a lot of money on it--and not ask if there are more probable threats we should be focusing on with those resources instead.