Only one month after the Sept. 11 attacks, senior Bush officials received a report that terrorists had a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon they were planning to use in New York City, and the news of the tip didn’t seep out to the public until this week. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the New York Police Department and FBI officials were all among those left uninformed. The reason top officials remained tight-lipped was to keep from unnecessarily alarming New Yorkers and the rest of the nation.

The people who needed to know about this matter were informed. There was no need to spread more terror throughout the nation. This tip was from a questionable source, and was basically brushed off immediately.

The people who deal with threats are properly trained to detect which ones are real and which are fake. These professionals made the right decision not to relay this message to the public.

The threat came from only one person, a code-named source, whom the top officials dismissed as a real threat after only a few weeks.

Telling the American public about a possible nuclear bomb in New York City would have created more chaos than imaginable. The people would have attempted to flee, and the mass hysteria would have done more damage than good.

It is good that the news is out in the open now, so the American public can openly discuss the situation and feel confident about the decisions that some of our nation’s top officials are making.

The action taken, in an attempt not to alarm society, was right and good for all. People can take comfort in the fact that these officials are doing their job in protecting the United States and that they are not foolishly scaring a nation already stricken by terrorist acts.