SubscribeIn the months since the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Madrid and now London attacks the question has been whether, where, and how is there likely to be an attack and within that a chemical or biological attack.
A small subset of the membership of the National Counter-terrorism Task Force has focused on the most likely targets for bio-terror weapon release. In answer to whether, the answer is clearly yes. The where is, frankly, a problem. How is required knowledge for development of countermeasures.
The easiest way to insert a bio-terror weapon is to bring into a port an easily carried sealed parcel and then have someone deploy the pathogen into either the air, the food supply (grain, fruits/vegetables, animals) or water.
Increasingly we focus on ports and port complexes, and we do this for several reasons:
- Ports are designed to be easy to get to and easy to get into and get out of;
- Ports have places to land, to stand, to hide, and to meet people;
- Ports have places where valuable assets are kept – people, craft/vessels, and materiel; as well,
- Ports have disproportionately large symbolic value; and
- Often ports are expensive public works.
Port facilities may require frequent work by outside contractors, have many persons coming and going on a daily basis, and have expensive equipment, such as cranes, warehouses, ships and tugs, and fuel dumps. Most importantly, though, ports are also the focus of international food and water exchanges.
Consider also cruise ship ports and ferry ports. Cruise ships and ferries hold lots of people, lots of fuel, and when in port are tied up alongside a wharf. Most people do not think about this much, but there are many major ports with fuel terminals and bunkering within one statute mile of cruise ship or ferry docking areas. The fueling perspective brings three factors of concerns, volatile fuels, small bunkering boats moving throughout the shipping lane near the piers and docks, and the lack of control/inspection of fueling and bunkering craft even though those small craft move very close to the cruise ships and ferry boats.
I refer to the distraction/decoy nature of a fire – small or large – during fueling operations. Such a distraction can do two things of great importance to us: the roiling clouds of smoke can cover up the distribution of other materials (such as bio-terror agents); the other is that the obscuring nature of the smoke defeats most of the sensors we have deployed or are planning on deploying. Whether the sensors are surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors, optical sensors, or particulate sensors, the smoke defeats or compromises them.
Consider, additionally, a port with foodstuffs and warehousing. Such warehouses are not secured in the same manner as storage units warehousing “high value items,” such as furniture, or automobiles, or cloth! Bio-terror agents of particular importance to foodstuffs include bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. These are the pathogens known to be “easily” inserted into the food chain.
Routinely, one hears about outbreaks of diseases in one or more countries internationally. Some of us are concerned that one or more of these apparently randomly occurring and disconnected events could lead to a purposeful transfer.
Purposeful introduction of one of these elements into the food chain – most easily either at source or at major interactive site such as a port – would be catastrophic. The CDC noted this in 2000, stating: “…tens of millions of food-borne illness cases, including 9,000 deaths, occur each year in the United States. The threat from food-borne illnesses will persist given changing consumption patterns and further globalization of the food supply.”
But it is not only a matter of food-borne illnesses, even though they are easily spread in many cases and large shipments of foodstuffs and water provide a ready opportunity for bio-terrorism.
Diseases such as Cholera, Dengue, Foot and Mouth Disease, Avian Influenza, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and African swine are also a concern.
We have knowledge that persons have attempted, and we expect they will continue to attempt, to spread well-known epidemic/pandemic producing disease.
The really frightening aspect of this is the one usually only whispered: what if someone conspired to create the weapon, infect the food or the water supply, and to at the same time purposefully infect/graft onto/ implant the weapon in a human squad? That is, what if a terrorist successfully established the human vector?
