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The federal government has mapped out a few places that could be targets for a major terrorist attack.

NORAD, in Colorado Springs, Colo., for one. The West Wing of the White House. Or another New York City landmark.

But the director of an organization that analyzes the country's level of disaster response offers up one more — Tucson's elementary schools.

In his new book "Americans at Risk," Irwin Redlener blasts what he calls a slow emergency response by the government to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and last year's Hurricane Katrina. He lists five worst-case scenarios to further illustrate this lack of preparedness and what can be done to improve it: a tornado near Springfield, Mo.; a nuclear detonation in Chicago; an earthquake in Seattle; a flu outbreak in New York City; and an attack on two elementary schools in Tucson.

What is it about our local schools that has Redlener, the director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, on alert? He points to the September 2004 terrorist takeover of an elementary school in Beslan, Russia.

"What we learned from the Beslan experience is that in this age of terrorism, there's no place that's invulnerable to the realities of modern terrorism," he said. "It's got a very long reach and looks to demoralize America as much as possible."

More specifically, he says he picked Tucson for its proximity to the Mexican border, which he says is too open, and the city's purported links to three of the conspirators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"I was just trying to make people aware of the fact this wasn't just a Northeast (United States) problem," Redlener said.

He used details, some of which have not been publicly substantiated, from Christopher Farrell of Judicial Watch, a nonprofit conservative foundation with a mission of fighting government corruption, to link the three terrorists to Arizona.

Redlener said schools are natural targets for terrorists because campus security officers rarely carry guns. He devotes 10 pages of his book to a graphic rendition of the takeover of two unnamed elementary schools.

First, "radical Islamists" enter the United States through one of three entry corridors on the U.S.-Mexican border and immerse themselves in society.

The schools, "a large public elementary school with just over nine hundred students in kindergarten through grade 6 and a Catholic parochial school of more than four hundred students in pre-kindergarten through grade 8," would be taken simultaneously by terrorists with guns and grenades. Those who resist are killed execution-style and thrown out the windows, "where television crews capture the scene with long-range lenses."

The emergency response to the situation is severely hampered in this scenario, Redlener continues, by suicide bombers at the Tucson Police Department headquarters and the pediatric emergency ward at University Medical Center.

Twenty-eight hours later, the standoff ends when "commandos rush through the corridors, breaking down doors." More than 400 people, including students, have died.

Redlener, a father of two, said he's not out to incite panic and there is no government intelligence that proves Tucson is being targeted. What he hopes to do is awaken the public's consciousness that such an event could happen, and that the proper response agencies need to be making the right plans to prepare for it and the other four scenarios he mentions.

"It's simply to illustrate the kind of thinking that our intelligence community has to start having," he said.

Rural/Metro Fire Chief Les Caid said Tucson's responders include all school situations in their disaster planning.

"To say that this could never happen would be a real mistake in anyone's planning efforts," Caid said. "I'm sure the people in Columbine or the folks in Russia never thought it would happen to them."

But he said a suicide bomber could never get into police headquarters, and UMC employees are vigilant of suspicious people. Still, he said citizens should be made aware of all the possible dangers that they face.

"The challenge is not to scare everyone to death," he said.

Tucson Unified School District spokeswoman Chyrl Hill Lander said officials would rely on law enforcement in the event of such a situation. Schools would go into a "hard lockdown," she said, which means all classrooms would be locked and no one allowed to leave.

"Ever since Columbine, TUSD has been planning and preparing for any situation," Hill Lander said.

Redlener said he simply wants America to be more alert.

"The only reason to do this is this is a time where we need to have our eyes open," he said. "We have to be vigilant with our planning."