There is a lot of fear-mongering and it has been aided and abetted by the news media. Another example is the Three Mile Island scare. Nobody, but nobody, was harmed, and the system worked just exactly as it was supposed to work if there was a problem. Yet, there was a lot of fear created among the American people. There's an ugly monster after me.
Government always gets more power with fear.
That gave government more power to control our lives. People willingly give up their liberties as a result of fear. They easily ceded a lot of power to the government. As a matter of fact, if you look back through history, the kind of power the government wanted to get during the 1930s the Supreme Court routinely ruled against. They ruled against Roosevelt's New Deal legislation until he threatened to pack the court.