Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009 - 21

FEATURE ARTICLE or by improper handling while traveling or shipping enroute to target. But that is only half the battle. Not only do terrorists have to ensure the virulence and lethality of the seed stocks and culture collections, they also have to devise a way of disseminating the agents properly in order to achieve the maximum effect. Despite the odds arrayed against them, the pace and proliferation of scientiﬁc innovation ensures that this threat will grow more dangerous with time. The Terrorists The 9/11 Commission admonishes that “the catastrophic threat at this moment in history is…the threat posed by Islamist terrorism especially the al Qaida network, its afﬁliates, and its ideology.” The unclassiﬁed version of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released in July 2007 stated that: “We assess that al Qaida will continue to try to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufﬁcient capability.” Because the al Qaida network has proven its ability to withstand sustained counterterrorism efforts by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the WMD threat to the homeland remains serious. In assessing the possibility of such an attack, two conditions must exist for a terrorist organization: the intent to use, and the capability to acquire and employ WMD. Only one terrorist group to date has employed what could be considered WMD successfully, the Japanese terrorist cult Aum Shinrikyo. In the 1990s, members of this group developed and used the chemical nerve agent sarin against passengers on the Tokyo subway, resulting in 12 deaths and about 1,000 injuries. (It is illustrative that the death toll would likely have been a million or more if a biological or nuclear weapon were used.) While there is little open source intelligence on the WMD capability of al Qaida, the group certainly has the intent to use such weapons when and if that capability is acquired. We know that al Qaida’s top scientist, Abu Khabab al-Masri, was in charge of building up the group’s WMD capability inside of rudimentary labs in Pakistan until reports of his death surfaced in late 2008. Al Qaida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith stated in 2002: “We have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of them children…and cripple them in the hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our obligation to ﬁght them with … biological weapons, to afﬂict them with the fatal woes that have afﬂicted Muslims because of their…biological weapons.” It is no comfort that Coalition Forces in that same year recovered documents in Afghanistan that included rudimentary designs for a crude nuclear device. In sum, al Qaida’s intent murder on as large a scale as possible is clear based upon their public statements, and their record of atrocities across the globe. Our Response: The Counterterrorism Paradox The security paradox we face is that terrorist planning is informed by close observation of what we are doing in the West—and the United States in particular—to counter terrorist strategies. The result is a situation in which our adversary, perhaps unwittingly at times, adapts their thinking and alters their behavior based upon what they see us doing. For this reason when we shore up our defenses in one area, such as the nation’s critical infrastructure, terrorists are likely to adjust their targeting preferences to those areas judged more vulnerable. With nuclear and biological weapons, the security equation becomes more difﬁcult. To counter nuclear weapons the most effective strategy is obviously to prevent them from gaining entry into the country by effectively patrolling our borders, and by working with foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies whose jurisdiction includes countries where such a device might originate. We may also install radiological monitoring devices in major metropolitan areas where a nuclear weapon would likely be used. These measures may either deter terrorists from attempting to use a nuclear weapon against the U.S., or, because of the increasing number of complications it must add to their plans, they may opt to switch to a different category of attack altogether. Biological weapons are more difﬁcult to counter because they are at least as likely to originate on U.S. soil as they are to be imported from abroad, and because the sheer number of pathogens that could be used makes both detection and treatment a different problem set for each pathogen. If the U.S. is known to have a major stockpile of smallpox vaccinations, then the paradox of counterrorism dictates that that is not the biological agent our enemy will invest their time and resources in. What this suggests is that the U.S. should stockpile vaccines and other medical countermeasures for some of the more accessible and deadly biological agents like Bacillus anthracis (the bacteria that causes the disease anthrax), because we can be conﬁdent that it will act as a deterrent. (And if it fails as a deterrent, at least we can be conﬁdent in our recovery and response). Another beneﬁt of this stockpiling strategy is that we only have to invest once in a nationwide logistical apparatus, after which we can add more vaccines for only the cost of their research, development and production. In the presence of a carefully planned strategy of prevention and deterrence, we could potentially force terrorists to funnel investments to only the most arcane and difﬁcult pathogens to develop and disseminate. This will push out the terrorists’ timeline for success, buying us, in turn, more time to improve our control of deadly pathogens at home, and to mitigate their development abroad. Of course any attack that occurs will have consequences at the local level—it may spread over potentially thousands of locales, but nonetheless the early response will also originate from within each community. We must in the short-term, therefore, concentrate on public health education to bolster resilience in our local communities. By raising awareness of potential hazards of man-made biological and nuclear terrorist incidents, we can at least begin to incrementally expose false perceptions and unfounded fears associated with “exotic” threats like WMD terrorism. By demystifying these subjects we instill a psychological resilience that is crucial to our ability to cope with catastrophe. Capturing and building up public trust in the government’s ability protect its citizens from a biological or nuclear attack should be a top priority. n Jeremy Tamsett is a subject matter expert on nuclear and radiological terrorism and homeland security. He is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Strategic Security (JSS), published by Henley-Putnam University. Visit www.homelanddefensejournal.com Homeland Defense Journal | 19

Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009