Biological Terrorism Dangers Overstated, Expert Says
Global Security Newswire
By David Ruppe
WASHINGTON — U.S. biodefense advocates have been “crying wolf” on the potential for catastrophic bioterrorism, playing up worst-case scenarios and driving billions of dollars into developing questionable defenses against questionable threats, a U.S. military analyst said yesterday (see GSN, March 9).
Prominent exercises and arguments since the Sept. 11 attacks suggesting terrorists could effectively use biological weapons to create catastrophic destruction are backed by few facts and little hard, reliable data, said Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a national security analyst for ABC News.
“I’m not convinced that we have been willing to admit the level of uncertainty, the level of difficulty, and the lack of credible data, particularly on an unclassified level,” he said, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars here.
While Cordesman acknowledged he has no technical background in biological defense, he does have several decades of government national security experience. That includes shutting down U.S. military biological warfare programs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s after the United States signed on to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Before the offensive programs were terminated, he said, little research was done that decisively showed how to effectively weaponize biological agents — which Cordesman described as producing “stable particulates that are disseminated in the air of a very precise size.”
“Frankly, we simply did not know how to analyze the impact of weaponization in biological weapons when we terminated our programs,” he said.
Cordesman also has served as a national security assistant to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as intelligence assessment director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as civilian assistant to the deputy defense secretary.
He said commercial experts have questioned the reliability of data developed by U.S. biological weapons designers on the effectiveness of disseminating such deadly agents.
Cordesman said any future biological terrorism would most likely be on a limited scale, and that the United States should focus more on preparing to respond to such an incident and discouraging panic than on “planning for the end of the world.”
“I think it is much more likely it will be a low-level, very crude attack with physiological, political and economic impacts at least initially,” he said.
Atlantic Storm
Cordesman criticized exercises predicating massive casualties from terrorist attacks such as the much-publicized “Atlantic Storm” conducted by several nongovernmental U.S. organizations in January.
“Where are these lethality data coming from? Have you ever read the footnotes on them?” Cordesman said. “It’s a study done years and years ago that was actually using data derived by somebody else and repeating it again and again.”
The Atlantic Storm scenario had terrorists enlisting expert help to build aerosolized smallpox weapons used in one day to ultimately infect more than 600,000 people in multiple countries, killing 25 percent of victims.
While Cordesman did not participate, he was an “observer” to Atlantic Storm’s predecessor, “Dark Winter,” which in the summer of 2001 was conducted by many of the same people. Experts criticized that exercise for assuming an initial smallpox transmission rate of 10 people for every person infected and a 33-percent fatality rate, killing as many as 1 million people.
“I have almost stopped going to biological war games. I don’t find them credible. I don’t find them parametric. I don’t find people are briefing on the uncertainties involved or creating realistic models for decision makers,” he said.
“Time and again, they’re either valid by focusing on one narrow issue or are simply designed to scare the hell out of everybody and show how important the issue is. The time is over frankly where you should run these models,” he said.
A senior organizer defended the exercises in an e-mail to Global Security Newswire.
“Cordesman buttonholed me during Dark Winter to tell me how great the exercise was; apparently he changed his mind,” said Tara O’Toole, chief executive officer of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“The whole point of both Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm was to increase awareness of bioterrorist threats,” she said. “As a genre, smallpox was supposed to be illustrative of the array of potential bioweapons attacks and the types of problems and decisions leaders would confront. In this regard, both exercises met with some success.”
A program from Cordesman’s own network, ABC News’s “Nightline,” over two nights covered favorably the play-by-play of Atlantic Storm, which included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a French former health minister, a Canadian former foreign minister, and a former prime minister of Norway who was also director general of the World Health Organization.
Cordesman did not spare the program his critique. “I think it was very deterministic. I think it was designed to show how serious the problem could be and that’s what I might expect from a media analysis,” he said. “Did I think it was valid? Could you tell within the limits of uncertainty whether this met a credible case? No.”
Some of Cordesman’s major points echoed a Congressional Research Service report released in May 2004, which concluded that biological terrorism against the United States would be expected to produce mass terror but limited casualties.
“The potential public threat posed by [chemical and biological] terrorism is not accurately assessed through the development of worst-case scenario exercises such as Dark Winter” and others that point to U.S. vulnerabilities but not likely threats, it says.
On Spending
Cordesman said there is poor decision-making on how biological defense money should be spent and poor accounting of the money is used.
“We are spending a hell of a lot of money, on what is in many ways, almost anybody’s guess,” he said.
“What are we spending it for? When will there be deliverables? What will the deliverables be? How well will they deal with terrorism? Find me the report, find me the analysis [that gives the answers],” he said.
The federal government across agencies spends as much as $7 billion a year on biological defense, he said.
On vaccine development and stockpiling programs, which reportedly account for a significant portion of the expenditures, he said, “If you look each of them you can’t figure out the cost and effectiveness.”
“I suspect if nothing else, I could put some of that money into the public health program and stop spending a significant portion of it pretty quickly,” he said.
Commission Report Criticized
Cordesman also criticized a prominent commission’s report on U.S. intelligence capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction, released in March, for disclosing insufficient information to help the public understand any al-Qaeda biological weapons capabilities.
The commission, also known as the Robb-Silberman panel, concluded al-Qaeda had assembled capabilities for producing an unspecified deadly agent, supposedly anthrax.
Cordesman challenged the report’s recommendation to invest more heavily in spies to penetrate the al-Qaeda network. “I’m not sure we can necessarily count on penetrating into these groups.”
Even were U.S. intelligence able to infiltrate such groups, he said, a lack of understanding about effectively weaponizing biological weapons would hamper efforts to understand the capabilities of other states or groups.
While the United States conducted some weapons dissemination tests in the past, the research was not extensive or particularly successful, he said.
“The few tests which were actually effective, and they were chemical not biological, had as much of a mistake rate as a success,” he said.
