By Mark Sharoff
In November, 2001, in a briefing with CIA Director George Tenet and NSA Director Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Cheney articulated what in years following would become the “One-Percent Doctrine,” the Bush administration’s approach to threats of “low-probability, high-impact” terrorism. The doctrine holds that if there is, in Ron Suskind’s words, “ a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction…the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” Ten years later, this reasoning may still define the American approach to counterterrorism. In the “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” released in June, the Obama administration identified nuclear terrorism as the “greatest threat to national security,” even though many analysts who have reviewed the intelligence predict that a biological attack on the homeland is more likely. And the administration’s FY2012 budget would give nuclear defense twice as much funding as biodefense. The administration’s rationale may be that a nuclear attack would be more deadly and would have a greater psychological impact, and because nuclear know-how and materials are easier to track and secure, money spent on nuclear defense might be money better spent. Even still, with concern about a biological attack growing, the administration’s counterterrorism priorities deserve greater scrutiny.
Bioterrorism: A Growing Concern
Many officials who have reviewed classified intelligence believe that terrorists are more likely to strike with a biological agent than a nuclear weapon. The Graham/Talent WMD Commission, tasked by the 9/11 Commission with reviewing the nation’s preparedness for a WMD attack, predicted in 2008 that terrorists would strike with a biological or chemical weapon by 2013. A recent article in the The New York Times magazine quotes several former national security officials as saying that bioterrorism represents the greatest threat to the homeland. Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said that “bio was on top of the list… of catastrophic national attacks”; former DNI head Mike McConnell called a potential biological attack his “personal greatest worry”; and McConnell’s successor, Dennis Blair, said in 2009 that the threat of biological terrorism was “growing.”
There are three reasons for the growing concern about a biological attack. First, al-Qaeda has a proven interest in obtaining a bioweapon, dating to a program supervised in 1999 by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who now heads al-Qaeda after the death of bin Laden. Second, we are in the midst of a “life sciences revolution,” and the White House believes that new technologies and methods currently under innovation are making it easier to acquire and weaponize a biological agent. And third, biological weapons have several features that make them attractive to terrorists: they are hard to detect and trace to their source; they are easy to smuggle across borders; they can be developed at relatively low cost and with “graduate school-level” technical expertise; and once terrorists have developed a basic production capability, they can keep producing weaponized material (even though they’d only need a small amount to carry out several attacks).
This is not to suggest, however, that developing a bioweapon would be easy. One of the biggest challenges–aside from acquiring anthrax, smallpox, or tularemia from a laboratory, or deriving it from a natural source—is to transform the agent into the extremely high concentration needed for aerosol delivery, in which state they’re capable of infecting tens of thousands, or potentially hundreds of thousands, of people.
Prevention Versus Resilience: The Case for Increased Resilience
Policies for countering bioterrorism are aimed either at preventing attacks from occurring or enhancing “resilience”—the capacity to respond to attacks in an effort to minimize loss of life. Both approaches have significant drawbacks. Prevention is exceedingly difficult, because bioweapons are difficult to detect. Building resilience can be expensive, requiring research on vaccines, treatments, microbial forensics and detection technologies which may yield few benefits, or benefits that take years to materialize. If the government invests heavily in a vaccine for a particular agent, and terrorists never develop that agent, or develop an alternative strain, the investment would have gone to waste, without improving biosecurity.
The current approach is highly cost averse: It does not devote a lot of resources to the development of expensive countermeasures for specific agents. The “National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats” focuses in large measure on prevention—on educating scientists about “responsible conduct,” on improving intelligence, and on helping other countries secure their biological weapons. Most of the money devoted to resilience goes to the development of “broad-spectrum” antibiotics which would be useful in a biological attack and in the treatment of naturally occurring diseases.
If the threat of bioterrorism is growing, however, the government should abandon this cost-effective approach in an effort to meet the threat with greater urgency. The most important element of this new approach would be increased funding for “Project Bioshield,” a program that was created in 2004 but has been ineffective. Project Bioshield is the federal program responsible for facilitating the development of new medical countermeasures—most importantly an improved vaccine for anthrax and a vaccine for tularemia. The development of these vaccines is extraordinarily expensive, and companies have been unwilling to undertake it, because there isn’t a market for protections against diseases that are largely eradicated from the population. To encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop these vaccines, Project Bioshield allows the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a department within HHS, to award government contracts to pharmaceutical companies, with relaxed FDA approval requirements and a “market guarantee” that the government will buy large quantities of the finished product. Not one vaccine has been developed under this program, largely because the BARDA is poorly funded, and companies are unwilling to accept underfunded contracts. Nonetheless, given the poor likelihood of preventing a biological attack, increased funding for Project Bioshield may be worth it, even if it means diverting money from nuclear terrorism, which in the eyes of some is the less pressing threat.
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.