Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government must work harder to prepare for the consequences of a nuclear or biological weapon attack, a senior Homeland Security Department official said yesterday (see GSN, June 4).

While preventing a strike involving an unconventional weapon is "absolutely to be preferred, we do have to start thinking very seriously about what we would actually do the day after an attack," Tara O'Toole, the department's undersecretary for science and technology, said during an event at the University of California's Washington campus.

"We could recover from an improvised nuclear device attack but to mitigate the death and suffering and the economic and social consequences we have to ... start equating the American public with the notion we could recover," she told the audience.

Advance preparation "is something that we have to take seriously and is a very difficult point to sell to Congress, particularly in these highly pressured economic times," according to O'Toole.

"God knows these preparations must be affordable," she added.

Today, the government's responses to a nuclear or biological attack contain many similar elements. They call for the federal government to be in charge of the response and include immediate measures like medical attention for the sick and injured and detection of the source of the attack to properly training first responders to operate within a contaminated area. Longer-term issues include decontamination of the impacted zone.

The question of which agencies should foot the bill -- either within the federal government or at the state and local levels -- for transitioning new technologies in general from research and development to actual field use is a "continuing, nagging problem," O'Toole said.

In the nearly nine years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has poured tens of billions of dollars into prevention and response for a potential WMD event -- programs such as Project Bioshield, which received roughly $5.6 billionto purchase medical countermeasures to safeguard U.S. citizens. Established in 2004, the program ostensibly provided biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies with assurances that the federal government would purchase successful products against biological and other WMD agents.

The country's readiness level remains in question.

Earlier this year, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism gave the Obama administration an "F" grade for bioterrorism defense, saying the United States does not have the capability to rapidly recognize, respond to and recover from a disease-based attack (see GSN, Jan. 26). Last week, the Justice Department inspector general reported that the the agency's WMD response efforts are severely lacking.

O'Toole said the government has a "better shot" at preventing a nuclear attack than its disease-spreading counterpart.

"The difficulty of detecting, interdicting and attributing biological attacks is very, very serious and we have to, particularly in the realm of biological weapons, be prepared to respond to these attacks," she said, referring to pursuing the perpetrators of a possible strike.

The Homeland Security Department is helping forge a "National Strategy for Bioforensics" aimed at improving methods for determining the origin of materials used in a biological strike, O'Toole said without saying when the study would be completed.

O'Toole said there are several myths in Washington about biological terrorism, including that it is too hard to prepare for; that an attack would be similar in scope to the 2001 anthrax mailings; and that infection could be countered using the antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

"Not true," O'Toole told the audience, adding that the threat will only grow as living organisms respond and become resistant to existing treatments.

International attitudes toward the possibility of an act of bioterrorism have changed as well, according to the directorate chief. The United Kingdom is "very alive" to the threat, as is France, parts of Asia and the Middle East, O'Toole said.

"The level of interest has changed in the 10 years in which I have been working on bio," she said.