The volume's contributors
examine the full range issues involved in assessing and responding to
the potential terrorist BCW threat. The sections on the potential threat
examine a taxonomy of potential terrorist attacks, such as through injection
or direct contact of biological agents, food, pharmaceutical and water
contamination, animal vectors, and airborne BCW releases. This is accompanied
by a discussion about the public health disaster that would occur from
a BCW terrorist attack.
A separate section examines the role of the intelligence community in
countering the threat through assessment and warning, deterrence and protection,
and monitoring arms control regimes. In a highly revealing chapter, John
Gannon, the Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, writes
that the CIA has established a Strategic Estimates Program to bring together
the appropriate experts to ensure that the right issues and analyses drive
the collection efforts against the "correct targets."
These threat assessments are followed by a discussion of what is being
done on the federal, state and local levels to prepare an effective response
by law enforcement, military, medical and other authorities; the options
for preventing, deterring, and mitigating the BCW threat, ranging from
implementing a BCW arms control regime to preemptive and preventive strikes,
or whether nuclear threats should be used against potential perpetrators
as a deterrent, and the major weaknesses that need to be remedied. Some
of the other national security luminaries contributing to the volume include
former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of the Navy Richard
Danzig, and foreign policy advisers Richard Haass, of the Brookings Institution,
and Condoleezza Rice, of Stanford University.
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