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| The Anti-Doomsday Machine |
| 2005-04-25 |
| From the It's Good To Know department. WSJ's Opinionjournal.com -- free but requires registration. Here complete. Government scientists are developing ways to stop the next terror attack. Here in the California sunshine, on as perfect a day as spring has to offer, one's thoughts don't turn naturally to anthrax attacks, dirty bombs and other Armageddon scenarios. Yet thinking about how to combat such threats provides full-time employment for many of the scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A day of briefings adds up to a tutorial in Doomsday 101. Lawrence Livermore Lab opened in 1952 with the mission of designing nuclear weapons. Today its principal responsibility is to certify the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile--a job the lab must do without the benefit of testing, which the U.S. suspended in 1992. Instead, the lab relies on the world's fastest computer, capable of 135 trillion operations a second. It soon will have the benefit of the world's biggest laser, which, when it comes on line in a few years, will be 60 times as powerful as the current holder of that title. With occasional exceptions, the lab doesn't identify its weapons designers. But it's only too happy to make biologists, chemists and physicists from its Homeland Security Organization available on the record to the press. Theirs is an underreported story about how some of the nation's best scientific minds have been enlisted in the war on terror. The lab's deputy director for operations, Wayne Shotts, tells how, in the days and weeks after the 9/11 attacks, his e-mail box was flooded with suggestions from co-workers on how to fight terrorists. The Homeland Security Organization was founded in 2002 to interact with the soon-to-be-created Department of Homeland Security. "We concentrate on WMD," says deputy director Don Prosnitz. And "we try to drive our program based on threats. . . . We can use the science better than the bad guys." Exhibit A is a biodetector that the lab recently licensed to GE Infrastructure Security, a unit of General Electric, which expects to put it on the market next year with a price tag of about $200,000. Its put-you-to-sleep name--the Autonomous Pathogen Detection System--belies its sophisticated capabilities. Using air samples, APDS tests for 95 separate agents, including anthrax and plague. (The full list is classified.) APDS is considerably more advanced than the biodetection system currently deployed in 30 cities under the federal BioWatch program. The earlier model uses filters that must be picked up and hand-carried to a lab for analysis. APDS, which requires servicing just once a week, continuously collects and analyzes air samples and sends a report back to a central monitoring station every 60 minutes. This reduces the time for detecting a bioagent release to an hour or less--time that could mean the difference between life or death for people in a contaminated area. APDS, which is about the size of a refrigerator you'd see in a college dorm room, has been field-tested in the New York subways, the Washington Metro, and at San Francisco and Albuquerque airports. The underlying technology has gone through a million tests without a single false-positive reading--a degree of reliability that is extremely valuable in real-world situations. As Howard Hall, a nuclear chemist whose office is developing radiation detectors, puts it: A detector "doesn't do any good if a cop comes to the conclusion that every alarm is false." Mr. Hall is working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in field-testing sensors that will spot nuclear devices, dirty bombs and conventional explosives carried by suicide bombers. "We're pushing technology into the field and seeing how it works," he says. One of the lessons learned is that mobile detectors are more useful than fixed installations. "It may have been obvious to the law-enforcement community but it wasn't obvious to the tech community." If a detector is installed in a roadside box, a terrorist doesn't have to be a genius to know he should take a different road. Christine Hartmann Siantar, who also works in the area of nuclear and radiation countermeasures, talks about other projects in progress. A "nuclear carwash" would screen every cargo container entering the U.S. for nuclear materials. That likely will be field-tested in 2007 by the Customs Service. Also in development is a personal screening test for radiation exposure akin to a home pregnancy test. In the event of an attack, the aim is to ease the burden on health facilities by encouraging unexposed citizens to stay home. Another area of Lab research is "pathomics" or the study of the molecular basis of infectious disease. The objective is to devise a simple blood test that can tell whether someone has been exposed to a disease-causing pathogen before he has begun to develop symptoms. Faster detection, followed by rapid treatment, could save the lives of those exposed to anthrax or other bioagents. This is especially important when considered in light of last month's Robb-Silverman report, which warns that most of the traditional intelligence-collection tools are "of little or no use in tackling biological weapons." Many of the lab's homeland security projects have real-world partners. The head of the chemical and biological national security program, J. Patrick Fitch, says all but two of his 60-plus projects have partners--in business, law enforcement, health care. Cooperation ramped up after 9/11, he says, when "our sponsors' attitudes changed from 'What can you do in 10 years?' to 'What can you do in three hours?'" Others point out that the lab's objective of getting its products into use as quickly as possible isn't aided by ponderous federal procurement policies that can make companies wary of doing business with the feds. On Sept. 12, 2001, the Secretary of Energy sent a plane to Lawrence Livermore to pick up a hand-held device invented at the lab that could detect minute motions such as heartbeats through many feet of concrete rubble. It was put to work in the rescue effort at the site of the World Trade Center. The lab's role in the war on terror had begun. |
| Posted by: trailing wife |
| #3 I sure hope so, B-A-R. The worry I have is that LLL had state-of-the-art defenses for a Cold War scenario, in which the enemy (i.e. USSR) was somewhat rational. Spetznaz may have been willing to accept a high risk, heavy casualty count, but would they have been willing to accept a 100% guaranteed suicide mission? It's a lot harder to protect against someone who doesn't care about living. The idea that people would deliberately kill themselves to attack us was just not in our planning before 9/11. Maybe they've thought of this, and have superb defenses against just this kind of attack. Obviously, I don't want them to say anything. I'm just afraid of a "No, I thought you were planning for that contingency" scenario. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-04-25 10:19:02 PM |
| #2 I ask you tho, seriously, WHAT GOOD IS THE ANTIDOOMESDAY MACHINE UNLESS IT'S KNOWN? oh.... I see. Carry on. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-04-25 6:29:39 PM |
| #1 What's amusing about this is that recently, a local TV station ran a story on how LLNL is supposedly vulnerable to a terror attack. Somehow, I doubt that the lab is as exposed as some people think it is, and potential terrorists will figure that out pretty quick, possibly paying with their lives in the process. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-04-25 3:11:43 PM |