Global Security Newswire

Some proliferation analysts worry that U.S. President Barack Obama's high-profile effort to thwart a nuclear strike by a rogue actor is diverting attention from the more probable threats of chemical and biological terrorism, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 13, 2009).

Despite the devastation a nuclear attack would unleash, the probability of extremists acquiring nuclear-weapon material and then assembling and transporting a nuclear bomb remains relatively low, proliferation specialists said.

A biological attack is more likely than a nuclear strike, the congressionally created Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism asserted in a 2008 report (see GSN, Oct. 22, 2009).

In its final "report card," which gave the United States an "F" for its biological defense efforts, the panel in January commended the Obama administration's "keen understanding" of nuclear dangers while warning that Washington had "no equal sense of urgency displayed towards the threat of a large-scale biological weapons attack" (see GSN, Jan. 26).

A biological strike could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost more than $1 trillion, according to a National Security Council strategy document issued in November.

U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) last year submitted legislation aimed at enhancing U.S. biosecurity (see GSN, Nov. 19, 2009). A corresponding bill is being prepared in the House (see GSN, April 21).

Weapon-usable chemicals would be easier to obtain and release in an attack, but the impact of a chemical strike would be smaller.

"The very next terrorist attack with WMD will be with a chemical weapon," said Paul Walker, security and sustainability chief at the environmental organization Global Green USA.

"People concentrate on what's most terrifying, not on what could really happen," said Eric Javits, a former U.S. ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. To date, Obama has not yet nominated a new U.S. envoy to the organization, which acts as the monitoring agency for the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Another expert contended that launching a nuclear strike remains a key goal for al-Qaeda. "I don't get any sense al-Qaeda is going downscale. ... What's Osama bin Laden's icon? It's a mushroom cloud enveloping a city," said Graham Allison, head of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

The White House defended its anti-WMD record. The Obama administration "has given priority attention to and made significant progress on protecting the American people from a bioterror attack and other public health threats," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said, noting a recent review on chemical strike preparations and a plan for postal carriers to distribute biological agent countermeasures in the aftermath of an attack.

The Homeland Security Department "is actively preparing to detect, respond to, mitigate, and recover from biological and chemical attacks," spokesman Chris Ortman added. The agency's efforts include planned deployment of chemical-agent detectors in cellular telephones and preparation of improved biosensors (Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal, April 22).