Global Security Newswire

The U.S. Energy Department failed to undertake a comprehensive assessment of extremist threats to a new biological defense laboratory at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California before the site was permitted to open, an activist organization asserted in court on Wednesday (see GSN, April 12, 2007).

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 froze operations at the new facility on grounds that a department impact analysis had not explored the potential for attackers to prompt an emission of dangerous biological agents from the site, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The installation was designed to support U.S. surveillance for microbes such as anthrax, plague, brucellosis and Q fever.

A federal court permitted the facility to launch in February 2009, endorsing a follow-up assessment that found no notable extremist threat to the laboratory.

The watchdog organization Tri-Valley CAREs, though, on Wednesday questioned the second report's determination that a potential pathogen release from a planned strike would be no more potentially harmful than an unintentional agent escape resulting from a seismic event or mechanical problem. The organization also took issue with the department's finding that the probability for a deadly agent to be smuggled from the site and then dispersed was too insignificant to merit review.

"They didn't do an impact analysis of (those) credible terrorist events," said Scott Yundt, the group's lawyer.

The assessment conflicts with another Energy Department finding that a deliberate agent release would constitute a threat different from an emission caused in error, Yundt told a panel of three judges from the appeals court.

The Justice Department defended the government's determination that if a strike on the facility took place against great odds, the "very small amounts of pathogens" at the laboratory would still not significantly endanger outsiders.

"A purposeful plane crash would have the same effect as an accidental plane crash," and temperature and light fluctuations would rapidly destroy any pathogens emitted following such an occurrence, Justice Department attorney Barclay Samford said (Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12).

"The standards are 'reasonably foreseeable events.' It doesn't require worst-case scenarios," the Contra Costa Times quoted Samford as saying. "We're looking at highly improbable events. In all cases, the Department of Energy has taken the requisite hard look" (Suzanne Bohan, Contra Costa Times, Jan. 11).

Biological agents are held at more than 1,000 research facilities in the United States, and no indications suggest "a terrorist attack is any more likely in Livermore than anywhere else," he said in remarks reported by the Chronicle.

The watchdog group's attorney responded that extremists might also plot an attack against the Livermore laboratory's neighboring nuclear weapons facilities. In addition, he said the government had not adequately addressed a former laboratory worker's improper 2005 shipment of anthrax through the postal system to two other sites.

Judge Milan Smith said "there was no apparent attempt by the Department of Energy to evade discussion" of the shipment.

"The government did a whole lot of analysis. The question is, at what point is it enough?" (Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle).