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Special Report
7 Deadly Myths About Weapons of Terror
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By Sandra I. Erwin and Stew Magnuson
Among JFK’s best known maxims is that the great enemy of the truth is not the deliberate lie, but the myth. In the age of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and flu pandemics, there is no shortage of half-truths floating around. But we can’t blame people for being confused. For an overwhelming majority — based on a recent Google search — the biggest myth that comes to mind in the world of weapons of terror is Iraq’s infamous WMDs that were never found. There are other myths, perhaps not nearly as riveting, that pervade in the nation’s collective consciousness and should be dispelled. Following is what we regard as seven noteworthy misconceptions associated with weapons of terror.
Myth #1: U.S. Medical Excellence Extends to Disaster Response
 The U.S. medical system is the best in the world, or so goes the conventional wisdom.
It works great when a patient needs a heart transplant, but in the event of a wide scale disaster or quickly spreading disease, local hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed, a number of reports and congressional hearings have pointed out.
Just-in-time delivery of medicine and supplies means that hospitals don’t find it profitable to stockpile essential items such as vaccines. Because of shortages of nurses and doctors, such institutions may already be understaffed. It can also be assumed that many of these emergency workers will fall victim to the disasters that they are expected to respond to.
The beginnings of the swine flu epidemic in April showed that a pandemic will not immediately overwhelm hospitals. In such cases, there will be time for officials to formulate a response. The Department of Health and Human Services has pre-positioned medical stockpiles throughout the country and claims that it can transport them anywhere within 12 hours. Even so, early media reports said that officials in New York City were advising those who received tamiflu prescriptions not to use them because there was a shortage. And that was in the nation’s largest city.
But any number of the scenarios — anthrax, nerve gas, nuclear detonation or natural disasters such as earthquakes — will most likely result in medical centers that are ill prepared to take on the challenge.
Center for American Progress analysts Andy Grotto and P.J. Crowley, said, “Despite our state-of-the-art medical technology and dedicated health professionals, we do not have sufficient medical infrastructure in many parts of the country to accommodate everyone who might need medical care in a crisis.”
Every December, the Trust for America’s Health releases a report card on states’ readiness in public health emergencies.
Progress has been made, nevertheless, “major gaps remain in many critical areas of preparedness, including surge capacity, rapid disease detection and food safety,” the 2008 report said.
Also, the worsening economy and resulting state budget cuts could mean a rollback in what progress has been made since 9/11, the report said.
“The cuts to state budgets in the next few years could lead to a disaster for the nation’s preparedness,” the report said.
The federal government also cut off supplemental funding for pandemic flu preparedness. After the swine flu scare, that may soon change.
Different disasters will, of course, require different responses. Biological, chemical or radiological attacks will call for a variety of different medicines and decontamination procedures to be in place.
Only a handful of major cities have chemical-biological-nuclear response teams. The Marine Corps and the National Guard have units that can be called upon, but deploying them to a scene can take several hours.
Officials must also be prepared for a populace that may not know what to do in case of a public health emergency. The 1995 sarin gas incident in Japan showed that citizens who are the victims of such attacks may skip triage areas or decontamination tents and make their way to hospitals on their own. Hundreds did so in that case.
A dirty bomb, which is not a nuclear device but may be interpreted as one by the general public, may send thousands of panicked citizens to hospitals with real or imagined symptoms.
HHS since 2002 has administered the Hospital Preparedness Program and sent $3 billion to states and three major cities since then.
Some individual hospitals have improved, a study by the Center of Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center said in March report, “Hospitals Rising to the Challenge.” The nation’s healthcare system still remains “largely unprepared to respond to large-scale catastrophic emergencies.”
A 10-kiloton nuclear detonation or a large-scale anthrax attack in a major city will require a complex and coordinated response.
“Current public and healthcare sector emergency plans will not work during this scale of catastrophe,” the report said.
Myth #2: Big-Budget Technology Is Needed to Counter Biological Terrorism
 Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff stated many times that the threat that worried him most was biological terrorism.
And there is a history of such attacks. Anthrax spores were sent through the mail by a domestic terrorist in early 2001. Five died as a result.
The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction said last year that U.S. laboratories have the strictest guidelines as far as securing dangerous pathogens. But that might not be so overseas.
In the case of biological attacks, the best defense might be a good response.
It would be nearly impossible to detect a pathological agent being smuggled into the United States with sensors. Detecting highly enriched uranium is one thing. Finding a small vial of anthrax in a suitcase is another.
Michael Pantella, associate director for infectious disease at the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory, said that the approach to combating a biological attack should be the same as any infectious disease.
It will fall on the public health system to mitigate the effects of a biological weapon. If antibiotics are stockpiled in sufficient numbers, and federally funded laboratories can quickly identify the pathogen, the public health system should be able to respond, he said.
“The rapid detection of these agents is extremely important and that’s what the preparedness funding should go towards,” he said.
Diseases are going to occur whether there is bioterrorism or not, he added.
Like the flu, these agents don’t kill immediately, and there will be time to react and prevent their spread.
For example, one of the deadliest pathogens to be weaponized is anthrax. A naturally occurring disease that is found in cattle and other bovines, the scenario is that a terrorist may hear of an outbreak, find a carcass, harvest the pathogen, and then make it into a weapon.
Of course, that is easier said than done. That takes a highly skilled individual with special equipment to “mill” the anthrax spores.
But as the case is with many terrorist weapons, acquiring one is only half of the equation. A terrorist must find a way to disperse the agent, which causes its own set of problems.
Even if a terrorist achieves all these difficult goals, a properly functioning and robust public health system should be able to respond, Pentella said.
“If an individual is treated with antibiotics shortly after inhaling anthrax spores, the infection usually can be cured,” the commission report said. Anthrax is not contagious. Two other potential biological weapons, smallpox and plague, are but these can be treated as well.
“A prompt response with effective medical countermeasures, such as antibiotics and vaccination, can potentially blunt the impact of an attack and thwart the terrorists’ objectives,” said the report.
So whether it is a naturally occurring infectious disease, salmonella being spread through tainted salads, or something more nefarious such as a terrorist plot, the nation needs an effective public heath network to respond. “Establishing an effective system to respond to an anthrax attack would also improve the nation’s ability to manage other public health disasters, be they natural or man-made,” the commission report said.
The Trust for America’s Health in its annual “Ready or Not? Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism,” said the United States has made steady progress during the last six years in its ability to responds to these scenarios, but warns that budget cuts may put these efforts at risk.
There are strategic national stockpiles of vaccines and antibiotics, but there are questions as to whether these medicines can be delivered in time.
Chertoff, in a radio interview after he left DHS, questioned the system, which is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.
“The federal government has a particular responsibility for the very high-end consequential types of attacks,” he told Federal News Radio.
Antidotes kept in federal warehouses might not be able to make it to an incident “in a matter of hours.” Since 2005, federal funding for state and local preparedness has been cut by more than 25 percent.
Myth #3: Smuggled Nukes Easily Can Be Detected at U.S. Entry Ports
 In response to threats of nuclear terrorism, U.S. ports are being equipped with high-tech sensors that, according to the Department of Homeland Security, can detect radioactive materials.
Independent experts, however, are skeptical.
Both the number of detectors that are being deployed and their efficacy are “overhyped,” said Charles Blair, director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies in San Jose, Calif.
The agency in charge of intercepting nuclear materials at U.S. ports is the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which was created in 2005 within the Department of Homeland Security to centralize coordination of the federal response to an unconventional nuclear threat.
The presence of detection systems could help dissuade prospective nuclear terrorists by complicating their plans. Nevertheless, detecting nuclear materials is tough under any circumstance, said Evan Montgomery, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.
Neither highly enriched uranium nor plutonium are very radioactive. Radiation detection systems measure gamma rays and neutrons at a maximum distance of about 100 meters. Shielded uranium is “extremely difficult to detect,” he said in a recent CSBA webcast. Only a few millimeters of lead can block its signature.
To build a bomb, terrorists would have to steal and smuggle large quantities of fissile materials, which would be exceedingly problematic to transport.
A crude, gun-type improvised nuclear device would require at least 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium. A more sophisticated implosion-type device would require a minimum of 50 pounds of uranium or 10 to15 pounds of plutonium, according to Montgomery.
To manufacture highly enriched uranium, terrorists would have to mine tens of thousands of tons of uranium ore, use milling facilities to extract uranium concentrate, convert it into a precursor material and enrich that to weapons-grade.
Making plutonium would require terrorists to irradiate nuclear fuel in a reactor, remove and chemically separate the spent fuel. In both cases, said Montgomery, they would have to reduce the material to metal, fabricate it into appropriate size and shape, and then construct a weapon.
“The knowledge, infrastructure and finances required to pursue this path far exceeds what even a well-funded terrorist group could acquire,” he said.
Assuming that terrorists could smuggle 100 pounds of uranium and manage to construct a bomb, that still would be a deadly but still relatively small weapon, says Blair. “You could wipe out several city blocks and our economy would tank, but you wouldn’t see a 10-kiloton bomb like Hiroshima.”
While making a weapon may be out of reach for most terrorist organizations, they could find a way to steal one, said Montgomery. There are 25,000 nuclear warheads in the world and in countries such as Russia and Pakistan, it’s not clear how secure the weapon facilities are. Stealing nukes would be a huge challenge even for the craftiest criminals. Weapons are heavily guarded, said Montgomery. “It would require significant insider assistance.” In Pakistan, fissile cores are kept separate from non-nuclear detonators.
U.S. intelligence agencies have reported that al-Qaida has expressed intent to acquire a nuclear weapon, but its actual capabilities are “difficult to discern,” said Montgomery. “It is unlikely it would have the knowledge, skills, resources and discipline to carry out a nuclear attack on the United States.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented 18 incidents of illicit trafficking in highly enriched uranium or plutonium, most involving only a few grams.
If terrorists acquired fissile materials, they would then have to design and construct a firing system capable of generating a uniform shockwave, said Montgomery. They would have to test the firing system with non-nuclear materials, acquire the large amounts of chemical explosives needed to conduct those tests, and develop a neutron initiator that could start the chain reaction at the appropriate moment.
Myth #4: If the U.S. Were the Victim of a Nuclear Attack, It Would Immediately Retaliate
 Under the nightmare scenario of a nuclear bomb exploding in a U.S. city, the implied assumption is that the nation’s leaders would immediately be able to fire back.
That would be the case under the Cold War rules of nuclear retaliation, but the situation is far more complicated when nuclear attacks are perpetrated by non-state actors such as terrorist organizations. Unless the weapon is delivered by a missile, immediate retaliation is not realistic, experts said. It could take weeks or months to figure out where the nuclear materials came from or how the explosive device was built.
No state or terrorist group would choose to launch a nuclear weapon by missile because we would know the origin, said Evan Montgomery, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The more likely means to execute a nuclear attack would be to smuggle the materials and build the bomb on U.S. soil, or steal a bomb and somehow manage to bring it into the United States. Either way, U.S. nuclear experts may not be able to quickly determine the origin of the weapon once it’s detonated.
Forensics can take weeks or months, said Charles Blair, director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies and co-author of a recently published book titled, “Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
“None of the systems we have now are very quick,” he said. “Government officials and the public would have to be willing to wait a while before we retaliate.”
Nuclear forensics usually is based on fallout and debris. Within hours, U.S.
authorities could determine that it was a nuclear explosion. It would take up to a couple of days to determine if there was uranium, plutonium or a mix of the two in the weapon. It’s known that eight nations have plutonium bombs, and six others have enough plutonium to build a bomb. If there were a nuclear explosion of a plutonium based weapon, it could be traced to one of 14 countries.
With uranium-based weapons, it’s more complicated. There are 40 countries that have enough uranium to build at least one bomb. That would take longer to track, said Blair. “You can take debris samples and compare them against known tests. You can within several weeks trace the design to known designs.”
Nuclear forensics would be far easier if there were a single global database that listed all known methods of creating uranium or plutonium, and catalogued the weapon designs, Blair said. But such a database is unlikely to ever materialize.
States prefer to not reveal information about the fissile materials they use or their methods for constructing a weapon. The world’s largest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, both go to great lengths to protect their top secret data on the isotopic composition of their weapons grade plutonium.
Even for the United States it’s been a challenge to keep track of its own plutonium. Ola Dahlman, a nuclear physicist and advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said there is one cubic meter of plutonium that the United States cannot account for. “Nobody is really concerned,” he told National Defense. “But it shows how hard it is to keep track of things.”
Because plutonium is not a naturally occurring substance, it can only be made in reactors. Identifying the origin in this case would be somewhat easier because reactors have identifiable signatures.
With uranium weapons the situation gets more complex because experts would have to figure out how it was enriched. “It doesn’t leave many traces,” said Blair.
Considering how many nuclear weapons still exist on the planet, it may be shocking to many that nuclear forensics is a vanishing science in the United States. The nation currently has only 40 to 45 scientists who are nuclear forensics experts working at national laboratories, said Blair. “Most are pretty old and will be dying soon.”
Only seven universities in the United States offer graduate degrees in radiochemistry, which is one of the primary drivers of nuclear forensics, says Blair. Of those seven programs, four are staffed by just one faculty member.
“The U.S. doesn’t really have the brainpower right now to really attack this,” said Blair.
It’s also worth noting that no single U.S. government agency is entirely responsible for nuclear attribution. The Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office comes the closest. It operates a nuclear forensic center that coordinates the work of seven agencies. But the lines of responsibility are blurred, Blair said. If an attack occurred, the FBI would probably step in right away to investigate but the national labs would want to preserve the evidence untouched so they could collect debris, Blair said. There would be turf battles within the government, which would complicate the forensics work.
Myth #5: Terrorists Can Download Nuclear Bomb Recipes From the Internet
 The Internet is a fountainhead of information, but terrorists seeking to build a nuclear bomb would need a lot more than open-source blueprints to pull it off, according to experts.
The nuclear bomb recipes that can be found online only would be useful to someone with deep knowledge of metallurgy, physics, mathematics and engineering, said Charles Blair, director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies.
One of the hot-button issues among nuclear weapon insiders these days is not the quality of downloadable blueprints, but what a person looking at the blueprint might think is needed to achieve a deliverable nuclear weapon.
There are widespread misconceptions about what it really takes to achieve a nuclear explosion, said Blair. The main problem is not the design of the weapon but obtaining the necessary fissile material, he said. “It would be akin to having the blueprint for how to make a handgun, but there are no bullets on the face of the Earth and you have no idea how to make them.”
Blair does not believe that there’s enough information for terrorists to carry out a nuclear attack solely from what’s available online. “Some terrorist blueprints are completely comical,” he said.
Gary Ackerman, one of the editors of the recently published book, “Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” said that the accuracy of information concerning weapons of mass destruction that are disseminated over the Internet is “subpar.”
But he cautioned that the rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies by extremist groups makes it more likely that any technical breakthroughs would be quickly shared across the jihadist community.
Evan Montgomery, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the weapon that terrorist would most likely be able to build from Internet blueprints is a low-yield so-called “dirty bomb.”
“That’s one of the big puzzles among nuclear terrorism experts — why haven’t there been attacks considering the large amounts of radioactive material available and the fact that they’re relatively easy to construct,” he said in a CSBA webcast. A dirty bomb could be made with just a few grams of radioactive material.
Myth #6: Liquefied Natural Gas Ships Are Ticking Time Bombs
 When a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal project in Long Island Sound went down in defeat in April, it was a victory for the “not-in-my-backyard” forces who didn’t want to see the scenic area industrialized.
New York officials strongly opposed the Broadwater off-shore terminal on environmental grounds, although the possibility of a terrorist threat factored into the debate as well.
LNG is produced by cooling natural gas to the point where it becomes liquid, thus making it easier to transport in large ocean-going vessels.
Debates over the security of transporting this combustible material, especially near population centers, are growing more frequent as license applications for dozens of new facilities are in the works.
But are these terminals security risks? Can terrorists easily ram a speedboat into the side of a tanker and create a massive explosion that takes thousands of lives?
To enter U.S. waters, LNG tankers must be constructed with double hulls, making penetration more difficult. When they do enter U.S. ports, the Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies provide routine armed escorts.
Stephen Flynn, senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted, “There is no explosion or ‘mushroom cloud’ associated with an LNG fire. Because it is stored at such an incredibly cold temperature, it is difficult to ignite liquefied natural gas. It must first spill out of the hull and turn into a vapor. Once the gas does ignite, it burns very hot but the range of the fire would be contained to under one-half a mile.”
Offshore facilities such as the failed Broadwater proposal, would not cause massive civilian casualties in the event that a terrorist plot did succeed, he concluded. Although it would be an economic threat if a terminal were to be shut down, he added.
“There is no serious risk to public safety as long as the facility and the vessels that transit to them are at least one mile away from a population center,” Flynn said at a congressional field hearing on the Broadwater proposal.
However, that’s not the case at the Everett, Mass., LNG facility where tankers pass by population centers near Boston. The Coast Guard escorts may not be able to thwart a suicide attack that is launched by high-speed boats, he said.
Routine patrols to ferret out and detect possible attacks in advance are necessary, he asserts.
All this security costs taxpayers money, noted Paul W. Parfomak, specialist in energy and infrastructure resources, science and industry at the Congressional Research Service.
There are seven onshore facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico, two off-shore and one export facility in Alaska. That’s not a lot, but there are some 40 other proposals for new facilities in various stages, CRS reports.
“The safety hazards associated with LNG terminals have been debated for decades,” Parfomak said in an October CRS report. And there is still a great deal of discussion within the security community as to how much of a terrorism risk LNG poses. Since the industry has a relatively good safety record, there isn’t definitive data on how much damage an accident or attack would cause.
“No LNG tanker or land-based facility has been attacked by terrorists, and federal, state and local governments have put in place security measures that are intended to safeguard LNG against newly perceived terrorist threats,” he wrote. “These measures are evolving, but a variety of industry and agency representatives suggest that these federal initiatives are reducing the vulnerability of LNG to terrorism.”
Flynn adds: “My overall assessment is that if fashioned correctly, the construction of LNG facilities within U.S. waterways and the growth in the number and frequency of LNG shipments to the United … is both a risk we must and can manage.”
Myth #7: Nerve Gasses Are Terrorists’ Chemical Weapons of Choice
 To say that nerve gasses such as sarin toban, or VX are not threats would be a stretch.
After all, the first acts of “ultra-terrorism” — defined as the use of a weapon of mass destruction in a terrorist attack — employed sarin. The Aum Shinrikyo cult first dispersed the Nazi-era nerve gas on the town of Matsumoto, Japan, in June 1994. Less than a year later, it released the same substance in five Tokyo subway cars during rush hour.
But a study of how the doomsday cult acquired and manufactured sarin, and other chemical and biological weapons, suggests that a similar organization would have a hard time producing such complex weapons in today’s security environment.
Meanwhile, shipments of deadly chlorine gas, a substance which also has been used in terrorist attacks, continues to roll through U.S. rail yards on their way to water treatment plants, with little protection.
Because Japan had laws restricting how far the police could go in investigating religious organizations, Aum Shinrikyo was able to amass millions of dollars to pursue its goals to create an Apocalypse. It used money bilked from followers and legitimate businesses to build complex chemical weapon plants in remote areas and amassed stockpiles of chemicals, as detailed in David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall’s book on the case, “The Cult at the End of the World.”
Aum purposefully recruited alienated chemistry and engineering students from top universities and set them to work creating weapons of mass destruction. They produced a variety of nerve gasses, biological agents such as anthrax and botulism and were even considering the purchase of a nuclear bomb from the former Soviet Union.
Despite the organization’s technical prowess, it was never able to master the art of dispersing chemical and biological agents. It was reduced to poking holes in plastic bags with sharpened umbrella tips in the subway attack.
Could such efforts be duplicated today? It’s hard to see such a large operation flying under the radar of police and intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world and particularly in modern nations such as Japan and the United States. Islamic terrorists in ungoverned territories, given the ability to find technical experts and the funding, could duplicate Aum Shinrikyo’s “success,” but would still have to smuggle the volatile substances in large containers to their intended target.
As many counterterrorism experts have pointed out, the 9/11 masterminds did not have to smuggle any weapons into the United States to carry out their plot. They used what was on hand.
Other experts have warned for years of the threat of toxic industrial chemicals such as chlorine gas. Federal regulations require railroads to transport the substance. Oftentimes, they pass by major cities. The transport of this deadly gas increases their insurance premiums, but laws prohibit them from refusing such cargo.
Rail yards and facilities that use the chemical such as wastewater treatment plants are protected, but there is no way to make the thousands of miles of railroad tracks a so-called “hard target.”
And there is precedence for using chlorine as a terrorist weapon. In early 2007, suicide bombers in Iraq blew up trucks carrying the gas in public areas and caused hundreds of casualties.
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