Preparing for The Bio-terrror Threat

The threat of a bio-terror attack on the U.S remains high and may be more likely than you think.

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.

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