WASHINGTON -- The greatest terrorism threat today is that a nuclear weapon would be used against the United States, but there is danger looming from the potential misuse of the life sciences, a senior Defense Department official said yesterday (see GSN, March 6). "There's this question that is usually asked of our leaders, which is, What keeps you up at night, what's your worst nightmare?'" said James Tegnelia, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. "I would second the thought that it's a loose nuclear weapon in a city in the United States. I think that's today's current problem."
"The future [threat] is the advancing of biological sciences and the potential for negatives that is associated with that," he said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
The hearing and the technology presentation that preceded it were half warning of the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction and half reassurance regarding steps taken to counter that threat.
Much of the Dirksen Senate Building's meeting room was filled with displays of anti-WMD devices developed by federal agencies and private firms. Among the items shown were full-body protective outfits, chemical agent detectors, skin decontamination lotions and remote-control devices able to collect nuclear material on the ground or in the air.
Tegnelia and two other speakers also submitted lengthy statements on their agencies' individual and collaborative defense efforts, from the National Nuclear Security Administration's work on security, detection and analysis of nuclear materials to the preparedness initiatives of the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program against the spectrum of unconventional weapons.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency oversees a $2.8 billion annual budget for several operations, including the Nunn-Lugar program that to date has eliminated thousands of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, among other weapons systems, in the former Soviet Union (see related GSN story, today). In his prepared testimony to the panel, Tegnelia touted his agency's ongoing campaigns against unconventional weapons.
One of those campaigns is to eliminate the threat of a loose nuclear weapon that in terrorist hands could cause large numbers of deaths and significant economic damage. Tegnelia expressed confidence in his agency's preparations to prevent such an event but acknowledged that challenges remain for research and development.
"The fundamental element associated with finding loose nuclear weapons today is the fact that we either must have precise intelligence information as to the location of that device or it has to pass through a [detection] portal on a foreign border or in a harbor before the device enters into the United States," he said in his spoken testimony.
A major challenge taken up by the agency is to develop technology able to detect a nuclear weapon from hundreds of meters or kilometers away to eliminate those vulnerabilities, according to Tegnelia. The agency is also researching capabilities for disarming a weapon from a distance and doing so without having detailed information regarding the bomb's makeup.
Research involving several Cabinet-level agencies is beginning to produce products for fielding a nuclear forensics capability key to determining the source of nuclear material discovered in transit or used in a weapon, speakers said. That attribution capability might deter an attack, and if a bomb did detonate could be used to prevent a follow-up strike and to determine a target for retaliation, according to Tegnelia (see GSN, Feb. 20).
"This attribution process assumes that we have a database [of nuclear material] which we can match up. How are we doing on that database?" asked subcommittee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
The United States has a significant amount of data from Cold War-era tests of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, said Jan Cerveny, NNSA assistant deputy administrator for nonproliferation research and development. Information is scarce regarding newer members to the nuclear club, she said. However, the U.S. intelligence community is working to fill those gaps, Tegnelia said.
Under questioning from Reed and ranking Republican Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) the speakers acknowledged the problem posed by the looming loss of expertise in crucial areas such as nuclear forensics as older scientists retire and are replaced by less experienced researchers or simply not replaced at all.
"It's starting to occur. Within five years it probably will have had a serious impact," Cerveny said, adding that U.S. national laboratories are considering fellowships and other strategies to offset the brain drain.
Speakers also made it clear that the threat does not end with nuclear weapons.
Biological sciences are advancing rapidly and -- like any such research sector -- work intended to combat diseases could be put to bad uses, Tegnelia said. Maj. Gen. Stephen Reeves, Pentagon joint program executive officer for chemical and biological defense, noted that in 2002 scientists in New York were able to produce the polio virus from scratch (see GSN, July 12, 2002). A firm in California recently announced that it had created a synthetic bacterium, he told the lawmakers.
"Things that are being done today in high schools and colleges just a few years ago were only done by postdoctorate students," Reeves said. "That's how fast the biological sciences are advancing."
Federal agencies are working to develop a "toolkit" to prepare for misuse of biological sciences, Tegnelia said. That includes Nunn-Lugar support of Central Asian laboratories that collect and categorize rare pathogens to promote development of treatments for those diseases.
History has also shown that terrorists will use materials at hand to carry out a strike, Reeves said: "What is most predominantly available are toxic industrial chemicals." He applauded congressional efforts to increase security at chemical plants and said his office plans additional research the "performance" of toxic materials if released (see related GSN story, today).
"It seems everybody can get in this business of biological or chemicals," Reed said. "It raises the question of even if we're innovative and we improvise very well can we keep up?"
Reed and Dole -- the only subcommittee members to attend the hearing -- asked what the panel could do to support the speaker's respective projects. None of the officials asked specifically for additional money in the next budget -- even after Reed noticed that the proposed NNSA budget for nonproliferation programs was $112 million less than allocated this year -- but they made it clear that extra funds could be used for various programs.
Tegnelia repeatedly mentioned expanding the Nunn-Lugar program to secure WMD materials worldwide, not just in the former Soviet states that the program originally targeted. He also called for funding basic research programs in order to draw university students into nonproliferation fields and for activities against loose nuclear weapons.
Reeves said any extra funds that became available to his office could support capabilities for detecting biological and chemical agents at greater distances and for fielding next-generation protective masks and detectors.