Biological and Chemical Weapons
Editor's Note
CBW Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 2 (June 2003)
In its October 2000 report Ataxia: the Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response, the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project warned that some of the greatest chemical and biological threats that the United States faces are in our midst everyday. Nature could unleash outbreaks of new diseases (see SARS, page 2). Attacks on facilities that handle hazardous chemicals could unleash poisonous clouds (see Chemical Facility Security Legislation, page 6) like the one that killed almost 4,000 and injured thousands more in Bhopal, India in 1984. This issue of the CBW Chronicle highlights the recent developments in these areas.
What is disheartening is the lack of progress the United States has made in following through on some necessary steps to address such issues. Not for lack of recognition, but for dearth of execution.
In 1999, Congress ordered the Justice Department to conduct a vulnerability assessment of US chemical industry facilities. The report was to include an assessment of whether actions chemical facilities took under the Clean Air Act to prepare for chemical accidents would be relevant to intentional releases. The deadline for an interim report was August of 2000, with the final report due in August 2002.
The Justice Department submitted a classified, twelve-page interim report to Congress in May 2002 that, according to the General Accounting Office, contained observations about eleven chemical manufacturing facilities. These eleven facilities had been visited in 2001 while Justice employees were working on a separate but related project with Sandia National Laboratories to develop a methodology to assess chemical facility vulnerability to terrorism. The Justice Department relied on observations from this small sample in its subsequent interim report to Congress, delivered almost two years late. The Justice Department understandably noted that caution should be exercised in extrapolating its findings across the chemical industry, in part based on the limited sample and in part because only 1,500 of the facilities covered by relevant parts of the Clean Air Act are chemical manufacturing facilities like the eleven visited. The Department of Justice rightly recognized that observations of the 13,500 other types of operations that handle threshold quantities of hazardous chemical substances might yield other conclusions.
The Justice Department characterizes its inability to complete the vulnerability assessment as a victim of the battle of competing budget priorities. The GAO notes that the law originally requiring the report authorized whatever funds were necessary to complete it. While the Justice Department estimated costs could run as high as $7 million, the department waited until its fiscal year 2003 budget request to ask for the $3 million to begin the overdue report.
Congress agreed to the figure, but do not expect to see a report in the near future. The conference report for the Justice Department appropriation transfers that $3 million to the Department of Homeland Security, for the purpose of chemical plant vulnerability assessments. On 5 June 2003, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis Paul Redmond told Congress that he had one staff member working for him. Redmond declined to brief the members in closed session about the bioterrorist threat, stating he lacked access to intelligence information.
Two very different pieces of legislation to address chemical facility vulnerability are pending in the Senate. One bill says chemical industry needs more regulation and monitoring; the other implies that voluntary initiatives are addressing this concern. Perhaps Congress should truly understand the problem prior to legislating additional security measures, an understanding that would no doubt be facilitated by the long overdue report. Horse before the cart, anyone?