DEP Press Advisory on Deer Hunting Cancellation, October 2, 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Experts Call for Better Assessment of Threats Over the past few years, a growing the globe, making accurate assess­ By WILLIAM J. BROAD number of federal agencies in ment of them all the more crucial. charge of intelligence, agriculture, “Anybody who knows what’s pos- health, emergency preparedness and -sible knows this could get a lot Federal agencies and Congress are rac­ law enforcement have undertaken ing to check the security of everything from their own civil threat assessments. soybeans to municipal water supplies to worse,” Dr. Roberts said. But they often disagree. And how The roots of superterrorism lie in nuclear reactors to whole cities. Last week, fully they share information is un­ the success of modem science in concern rose with the disclosure that the clear. producing lethal armaments. None, suspected jet hijackers had investigated Federal threat assessments are however, are easy to obtain. crop-dusters — and thus, conceivably, the sometimes kept secret to prevent Nuclear weapons require mines, possibility of spreading deadly germs or 'foes from gaining possibly useful in­ reactors and huge factories, putting chemicals. formation from them. So the details their acquisition beyond all but na­ of some remain unknown. But the tions. Chemical and biological arms “Terrorism is a clear and present danger General Accounting Office has re­ to Americans today,” Attorney Genera, are cheaper and easier to build, if the John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary viewed them all, and its assessment raw materials are obtainable. Committee a week ago. On Sunday, Mr. of the assessments offers a window Germ weapons, pound for pound, into this arcane world. are usually the most potent, in some Ashcroft renewed the alert, saying Ameri­ David M. Walker, who as comp­ can retallatorj' strikes might cause the al­ cases surpassing chemical and nu­ troller general heads the General clear arms in terms of killing power. ready sizable risk of terrorism to rise. Accounting Office, testified recently But some private and public experts, in­ But they, too, are difficult to use. before Congress that drawing up a After the end of the cold war, and cluding Congressional investigators who ex­ comprehensive assessment of likely amined secret federal data, say Americar, particularly after the breakup of the terrorist threats “has become an ur­ Soviet Union, many Western security intelligence officials, for example, have at gent imperative.” times exaggerated the risk posed by terror­ experts warned that the means of ists armed with weapons of mass aestruc- Some experts in and out of govern­ mass destruction could fall into ter- ment say the assessments have often rorist hands. tion, which by definition can maim cr Itii. tended to be alarmist. The risk of a Alarms rang loud only after Aum tens of thousands or even millions of peooie terrorist striking with weapons of Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult, attacked They say there are daunting obstacles to mass destruction, they say, is lower making and deploying these germ, chemical than generally perceived and at or radioiogicai weapons. times claimed in departmental ap­ That is not to say they dismiss chances o; serious terrorist attack. Sut they regard praisals. YIt is extremely difficult, they in­ Daunting obstacles more mundane instruments — firearms. sist, to acquire and use the compli­ cated equipment needed to scatter to making weapons car bombs or even hijacked truckloads of hazardous wastes as more credible deadly pathogens, chemicals or ra­ of mass destruction. threats. dioactivity in devastating ways. All .►-ederai officials reject such criticism. too often, these critics say, assess­ Thousi- they say they have no knowledge of ments inaccurately miscast terror­ ists as technical sophisticates. Tokyo subways with sarin nerve gas •.nminent threats from weapons of mass "There is an ocean of difference in 1995, killing 12 people and sicken­ destruction, they say the danger is real and between learning how to steer a jet­ ing hundreds. Investigators found rising. And e.xperts agree that the surprise liner into a building and overcoming the cult had already unsuccessfully attacks on some of the nation’s most impor­ the technical hurdles in the dispersal launched germ attacks meant to kill tant buildings on Sept. 11 show the difficulty of a biological agent to cause mass millions of people. Its chosen banes of anticipating all threats. casualties,” said Dr. Amy E. Smith- included anthrax and botulinum tox­ The dispute is throwing light on an ob­ son, an expert on chemical and bio­ in, the deadliest poison known to sci­ scure speciality of military theorists: threat logical weapons at the Henry L. ence. assessment. Stimson Center, a private group in Congress and the Clinton adminis­ More art than science, the discipline re­ Washington that studies military as­ tration launched an antiterrorism lies on technical knowledge of what is possi­ sessments. push whose annual budget eventual­ ble and inferences about what resources Dr. Brad Roberts, a terrorism ex­ ly hit $10 billion. terrorists have — money, materials and pert at the Institute for Defense As spending rose. Congressional Analyses, a private group in Alexan­ investigators in the General Ac­ expertise — leavened with as many intelli­ counting Office began to question gence clues as possible as to their aims and dria, Va., that advises the Pentagon, said experts were so shaken by the existing agency threat assessments, goals. The field is rife with uncertainties, many of which were not in accord. disagreements and, most basically, the recent attacks that they now tended to see only worst-case scenarios. For instance, the Federal Bureau challenge of disentangling vulnerability of Investigation ignores smallpox as from real danger. ; “It’s mostly ‘The sky is falling,’ ” he said. “I don’t find many people a major danger, possibly because the “You get the best and brightest and de virus was eradicated from human your level best,” Representative Sherwood sketching out the middle ground.” Boehlert, a New York Republican who is . Even so, most experts agree that chairman of the House Science Committee. the risks of serious attack are des­ said in an interview. “It’?**anything but tined to rise slowly over the years anfl decades as science, technology simple.” an8 arms expertise spread around lo-aoi PQQC I of 3 NYC-WTC_000152467