DHS SETTING TERROR THREAT PRIORITIES

In the months after 9/​11, the gov­ern­ment seemed scared shit­less of just about every­thing. Chemical, bio­log­i­cal, dirty-​​bomb attack it didn’t seem to mat­ter what type of scare was involved. For every threat, the fear dial was cranked up to 11. Even cat­tle poi­son­ing and hacker break-​​ins were sud­denly treated like poten­tial cat­a­clysms.
Thankfully, that’s a trend which seems to be peter­ing out. The Department of Homeland Security is in the process of sketch­ing out plau­si­ble attack sce­nar­ios, and rat­ing them in terms of seri­ous­ness, the New York Times reports. And judg­ing from the pre­lim­i­nary results, DHS seems set on sep­a­rat­ing out the truly scary (and truly likely) strikes from the Hollywood or tin-​​hat vari­ety.
The chart which accom­pa­nies the Times story is par­tic­u­larly use­ful in this sort­ing process. An attack on a chlo­rine chem­i­cal plant could leave 17,500 dead and 100,000 hos­pi­tal­ized. Cyberstrikes on “sev­eral parts of the nation’s finan­cial infra­struc­ture,” on the other hand, would have a total casu­alty count of zero. A delib­er­ate spread of foot-​​and-​​mouth dis­ease to American live­stock would have sim­i­lar results at least among the human pop­u­la­tion. If you were Michael Chertoff, the new home­land secu­rity chief, where would you spend your resources?
Hopefully, this kind of cost-​​benefit analy­sis will also lead to a sec­ond look at how we’re spend­ing bio-​​defense dol­lars. The result of a coor­di­nated, five-​​city aerosolized anthrax attack which would take a minor mir­a­cle of plan­ning and sci­ence for a ter­ror­ist group to pull off could leave 13,000 dead and cause bil­lions of dol­lars in dam­ages, DHS believes. But a new flu pan­demic, emerg­ing from China a not alto­gether unlikely pos­si­bil­ity could kill five times that num­ber, put 300,000 is the hos­pi­tal, and cost up to $160 bil­lion to con­tain. So pre­vent­ing naturally-​​occurring dis­eases, you’d fig­ure, would take prece­dence over these deliberately-​​spread agents, right?
Well, maybe in the future. But for now, as the Times recently noted:

…grants for research on the bac­te­ria that cause anthrax and five other dis­eases that are rare or nonex­is­tent in the United States have increased fif­teen­fold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study [viruses and] bac­te­ria not asso­ci­ated with bioter­ror­ism [think flu ed. ] have decreased 27 percent

March 16th, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.