Geoffrey Sommer of the Rand Corporation suggests that if a real life Armageddon-style asteroid were discovered on a deadly collision course with the Earth politicians would be better off doing nothing and telling no one because advance warning of the end of the world would bring chaos to the streets, rioting in the shopping malls and send the economy spiralling out of control.

A group of scientists is working on a standardized protocol for dealing with the possibility of a comet or massive asteroid striking the Earth, saying humans can do more than the dinosaurs ever could before a colossal impact precipitated their extinction 65 millions years ago.

A new report by three specialists in asteroid research calls present
planning about how to respond to such a threat \"haphazard and unbalanced,\"
and points out that the person most likely to sound the alarm has conceded
\"he has no idea who in the US government would be receptive to serious
information\" about an impending impact.

Jonathan Tate proposes an alternative to the Torino scale agreement that would better communicate the risk of an asteroid collision and the response needed to the public.

Astronomers discuss a plan to coordinate assessment and ranking of potential asteroid threats to prevent unnecessary public panic.

A series of articles on the public policy debate surrounding asteroid 1997XF11. A March 11 report predicted that this asteroid was likely to collide with the Earth in 2028. However, within a few days, archived data was used to show that the prediction was wrong and that the asteroid was actually going to miss the planet. The debate that has followed this incident has tried to understand what led to the false alarm and how it could be prevented in the future. The fear is that a more dire false alarm could cause unneeded social unrest and panic. The main proponent of a policy has been Richard Binzel, from MIT. He argues for a 'hazard-index' similar to what is used for earthquakes that would give a quantitative assessment of the threat.

NASA requests astronomers to wait 72 hours before making asteroid and comet discoveries public.