Target U.S.A.

AMERICA'S ACHILLES HEEL:

Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack

by Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer

The MIT Press, $22.50

"L.A. BOMBER PLEDGES GAS ATTACK" was the frightening headline that appeared in the Aug. 15, 1974 edition of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. A man known only as the "Alphabet Bomber," who turned out to be a mentally unstable engineer from Yugoslavia, had threatened to unleash the chemical nerve agent sarin over Washington, D.C. unless his demands to end all immigration and naturalization laws were met. He had already proven himself deadly with a bombing at Los Angeles International Airport that killed three people. When police searched his apartment after his arrest, they found all the ingredients except one to make a rudimentary nerve gas bomb.

Almost a quarter-century later, the threat of terrorists, criminals, mentally unbalanced individuals, or rogue states acquiring and using nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons is front and center on the national agenda. What the Alphabet Bomber failed to accomplish in the '70s--commit a major attack with a weapon of mass destruction and thereby usher in a new age of terrorism--the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinryko succeeded in doing in the '90s. Their attack in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995 with sarin was the watershed event in launching a major U.S. government effort to shore up this country's defenses against NBC terrorism.

Three months after the Tokyo incident, President Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39, which made preventing and managing the consequences of a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction "the highest priority" for the United States. Congress has followed suit by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to help train first responders--firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel--and the National Guard to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack involving NBC weapons. And the military has focused on research and development into detection systems that can give early warning when biological, warfare agents, which are invisible and odorless microorganisms, have been released over a particular area.

Yet Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer argue that not enough is being done to prepare the United States for NBC terrorism in their timely, compelling, and ambitious book, America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear; Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack.

The authors correctly depict NBC terrorism as a "quintessential low-probability, high-consequence event" for the United States, but one which is becoming more likely. Among the reasons they cite for their concern is the increased number of non-state actors--terrorists, paramilitary guerrilla groups, cults, militias, organized crime syndicates, lone individuals--that are capable of acquiring NBC weapons either through theft or by building the weapons themselves.

How bad could an NBC attack be? Take the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, add a few hundred thousand casualties to the death tolls, raise the crisis level throughout the country to unprecedented proportions, and then leave the buildings intact as though nothing had happened, and you begin to get a sense of what may be in store for America should terrorists include biological warfare agents such as anthrax or botulinum toxin in their arsenal of weapons. If they use chemical warfare agents such as satin or VX, the death toll could be in the tens of thousands. And nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists could be catastrophic for metropolitan areas.

The question for U.S. policymakers is how to prepare for an event that, with the exception of the Tokyo subway incident, has never happened before. This uncertainty has left the door wide open for a diverse group of consultants, government agencies and others to try to cash in on the growing interest--and budget--for NBC terrorism. "Experts" laying claim to some aspect of the NBC terrorism issue--crisis forecasting, consequence management, disaster planning, biotechnology research, medical care, high-tech detection devices--can be found throughout the public and private sectors. One therefore has to wonder whether Falkenrath et al's call for $1 billion to be allocated annually to deal with the NBC terrorist and covert attack threat will really help matters or make them worse by pumping more money into an already oversized NBC weapons bureaucracy.

Moreover, there is a real imbalance in the way the U.S. government is preparing for a possible NBC terrorist incident. There has been gradual acknowledgment in Washington that the United States will not be able to prevent every potential act of NBC terrorism. Yet the American public has been left in the dark on this critical issue. Thus far there have not been any civil defense programs involving the public, nor have there been any public information or education campaigns to alert people as to what to expect or what to do in the aftermath of a NBC terrorist attack. If Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York City can build a $15 million emergency control center for his administration that is designed to withstand a nuclear blast and contains a ventilation system that could be closed in case of a terrorist attack with chemical or biological weapons, then surely more can be done to increase the survivability chances for the average citizen. As Falkenrath and his colleagues point out, "the lethality of most biological weapons can be reduced more than a thousandfold if the members of the target population simply put on $5 respiratory masks for the duration of the attack."

In at least one respect, the authors of America's Achilles Heel may have underestimated the difficulties of preparing for an NBC attack. They claim that if NBC weapons "are detected in advance, covert attacks are relatively easy to defend against." The history of counterterrorist operations, however, is filled with cases where the terrorists were able to set off their explosives or fire their weapons before they were captured or killed. These were risks that were deemed worth taking when the counterterrorist mission was launched. But if that happens with NBC weapons, killing the terrorist won't do the rest of us much good. For that reason alone, America's Achilles Heel is a warning well worth heeding.

JEFFREY D. SIMON is president of Political Risk Assessment Co., Inc. in Santa Monica, California, and the author of The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience With Terrorism.