[ RadSafe ] Nuclear power plants; radiological bombs not on top of list of attacks

[John Jacobus]

>From today's New York Times

March 16, 2005
U.S. Report Lists Possibilities for Terrorist Attacks
and Likely Toll
By ERIC LIPTON 
 
ASHINGTON, March 15 - The Department of Homeland
Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending
better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible
strikes it views as most plausible or devastating,
including detonation of a nuclear device in a major
city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings
and a truck bombing of a sports arena. 

The document, known simply as the National Planning
Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering
estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage
caused by each type of attack. 

They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing
17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000;
spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an
airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500
and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle
with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing
hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Specific
locations are not named because the events could
unfold in many major metropolitan or rural areas, the
document says. 

The agency's objective is not to scare the public,
officials said, and they have no credible intelligence
that such attacks are planned. The department did not
intend to release the document publicly, but a draft
of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state
government Web site.

By identifying possible attacks and specifying what
government agencies should do to prevent, respond to
and recover from them, Homeland Security is trying for
the first time to define what "prepared" means,
officials said.

That will help decide how billions of federal dollars
are distributed in the future. Cities like New York
that have targets with economic and symbolic value, or
places with hazardous facilities like chemical plants
could get a bigger share of agency money than before,
while less vulnerable communities could receive less. 

"We live in a world of finite resources, whether they
be personnel or funding," said Matt A. Mayer, acting
executive director of the Office of State and Local
Government Coordination and Preparedness at the
Homeland Security Department, which is in charge of
the effort. 

President Bush requested the list of priorities 15
months ago to address a widespread criticism of
Homeland Security from members of Congress and
antiterrorism experts that it was wasting money by
spreading it out instead of focusing on areas or
targets at greatest risk. Critics also have faulted
the agency for not having a detailed plan on how to
eliminate or reduce vulnerabilities.

Michael Chertoff, the new secretary of homeland
security, has made it clear that this risk-based
planning will be a central theme of his tenure, saying
that the nation must do a better job of identifying
the greatest threats and then move aggressively to
deal with them.

"There's risk everywhere; risk is a part of life," Mr.
Chertoff said in testimony before the Senate last
week. "I think one thing I've tried to be clear in
saying is we will not eliminate every risk."

The goal of the document's planners was not to
identify every type of possible terrorist attack. It
does not include an airplane hijacking, for example,
because "there are well developed and tested response
plans" for such an incident. Planners included the
threats they considered the most plausible or
devastating, and that represented a range of the
calamities that communities might need to prepare for,
said Marc Short, a department spokesman. "Each
scenario generally reflects suspected terrorist
capabilities and known tradecraft," the document says.


To ensure that emergency planning is adequate for most
possible hazards, three catastrophic natural events
are included: an influenza pandemic, a magnitude 7.2
earthquake in a major city and a slow-moving Category
5 hurricane hitting a major East Coast city.

The strike possibilities were used to create a
comprehensive list of the capabilities and actions
necessary to prevent attacks or handle incidents once
they happen, like searching for the injured, treating
the surge of victims at hospitals, distributing mass
quantities of medicine and collecting the dead. 

Once the White House approves the plan, which could
happen within the next month, state and local
governments will be asked to identify gaps in
fulfilling the demands placed upon them by the
possible strikes, officials said.

No terrorist groups are identified in the documents.
Instead, those responsible for the various
hypothetical attacks are called Universal Adversary.

The most devastating of the possible attacks - as
measured by loss of life and economic impact - would
be a nuclear bomb, the explosion of a liquid chlorine
tank and an aerosol anthrax attack.

The anthrax attack involves terrorists filling a truck
with an aerosolized version of anthrax and driving
through five cities over two weeks spraying it into
the air. Public health officials, the report predicts,
would probably not know of the initial attack until a
day or two after it started. By the time it was over,
an estimated 350,000 people would be exposed, and
about 13,200 would die, the report predicts.

The emphasis on casualty predictions is a critical
part of the process, because Homeland Security
officials want to establish what kinds of demands
these incidents would place upon the public health and
emergency response system. 

"The public will want to know very quickly if it is
safe to remain in the affected city and surrounding
regions," the anthrax attack summary says. "Many
persons will flee regardless of the public health
guidance that is provided."

Even in some cases where the expected casualties are
relatively small, the document lays out extraordinary
economic consequences, as with a radiological
dispersal device, known as a "dirty bomb." The
planning document predicts 540 initial deaths, but
within 20 minutes, a radioactive plume would spread
across 36 blocks, contaminating businesses, schools,
shopping areas and homes, as well as transit systems
and a sewage treatment plant.

The authors of the reports have tried to make each
possible attack as realistic as possible, providing
details on how terrorists would obtain deadly
chemicals, for example, and what equipment they would
be likely to use to distribute it. But the document
makes clear that "the Federal Bureau of Investigation
is unaware of any credible intelligence that indicates
that such an attack is being planned."

Even so, local and state governments nationwide will
soon be required to collaboratively plan their
responses to these possible catastrophes. Starting
perhaps as early as 2006, most communities would be
expected to share specially trained personnel to
handle certain hazardous materials, for example,
instead of each city or town having its own unit.

To prioritize spending nationwide, communities or
regions will be ranked by population, population
density and an inventory of critical infrastructure in
the region.

The communities in the first tier, the largest
jurisdictions with the highest-value targets, will be
expected to prepare more comprehensively than other
communities, so they would be eligible for more
federal money.

"We can't spend equal amounts of money everywhere,"
said Mr. Mayer, of the Homeland Security Department.

To some, the extraordinarily detailed planning
documents in this effort - like a list of more than
1,500 distinct tasks that might need to be performed
in these calamities - are an example of a Washington
bureaucracy gone wild. 

"The goal has to be to get things down to a manageable
checklist," said Gary C. Scott, chief of the Campbell
County Fire Department in Gillette, Wyo., who has
served on one of the many advisory committees helping
create the reports. "This is not a document you can
decipher when you are on a scene. It scared the living
daylights out of people." But federal officials and
some domestic security experts say they are convinced
that this is a threshold event in the national process
of responding to the 2001 attacks.

"Our country is at risk of spending ourselves to death
without knowing the end site of what it takes to be
prepared," said David Heyman, director of the homeland
security program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a Washington-based research
organization. "We have a great sense of vulnerability,
but no sense of what it takes to be prepared. These
scenarios provide us with an opportunity to address
that."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

+++++++++++++++++++
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy
enough people to make it worth the effort." Herm Albright

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/