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CSIA Foundation

(Analyst's note:  Troubling.)

COLORADO SPRINGS One could be forgiven a little nostalgia for the 1950s and ’60s, when elementary-school students solemnly crawled under their desks in preparation for the impending mutually assured destruction of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. For the journalists here attending a Heritage Foundation conference last week on weapons of mass destruction, they seemed like the good old days.

That’s because another al-Qaida attack on the U.S. could be much worse than 9/11. The CIA figures it will more likely involve a biological weapon than a nuke, and says it could happen in the next few years.

Nuclear proliferation remains a huge concern: Should Iran develop such a weapon, the U.S. geo-political situation could become unmanageable. A nuclear-bomb detonation or other radiological attack in an American city would have immense material and symbolic impact.

But CIA officials particularly fear bio-weapons because, despite the extensive homeland-security apparatus erected since 9/11, things like anthrax are very difficult to keep out of the hands of terrorists. There are hundreds of biological agents that can be weaponized, either from stuff that’s already in America or that is brought in from abroad — much more easily than nuclear materials.

Take the microbe anthrax, which is about three microns (a single strand of hair has a thickness of about 100 microns) wide in its granular state, which is what a terrorist would want. Equipment for making such grains is available on eBay for less than $20,000. More exotic killers could include synthetic viruses and such hemorrhagic fever viruses as ebola. Preventing such an attack by an intelligent and focused foe is very challenging. We need to develop the kind of general situational awareness that Israelis exhibit daily — an awareness that has thwarted many Palestinian bombings.

And much effort must be expended to mitigate such attacks’ effects, with vaccines and very rapid response.

The difficulties in producing enough swine-flu vaccine in the current epidemic point to a much larger problem of unreadiness.

The Department of Homeland Security showed serious shortcomings in its response to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, when it integrated its activities poorly with (often inept) state and city agencies. Indeed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency may have actually interfered with some rescues in New Orleans by overruling local authorities. A bio-terror attack may look a lot more like Katrina than 9/11.

We will need better coordination of federal, state and local police and emergency-management resources, as well as greatly ramped-up preparedness, to minimize short and long-term damage to the country.

But a bio-terror attack must not become a WMD against the U.S. Constitution, which could quickly happen in the absence of resolute, calm and focused political leadership. Despite many film productions depicting the contrary, Americans generally react practically and logically to extreme events when they get good information. That, of course, presupposes responsible media coverage.

It was probably at that point when the dozen reporters and editors assembled began to recall their grade-school drills, because none of the above is assured.

We should hope that it doesn’t take a bio-terror attack to adequately prepare and educate ourselves, though in democratic societies, that is the way these things usually happen.

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