How has the threat of catastrophic terrorism reshaped the strategic environment? This chapter argues that in fact the threat is not dramatically new; what is new is the salience of this threat to the public in some states, particularly the United States. However, the secretive nature of counter-terrorism actions necessarily means that the public is ill-informed about the potential efficacy of government's activities and so cannot assess if their rhetoric matches their actions. Thus public statements can easily be tailored to what decision-makers think the public wants to hear, rather than to what decision-makers genuinely believe. We consequently rely on an examination of how the United States budgets and exercises for the war on terrorism to illuminate what American decision-makers believe to be the links between domestic counter-terror operations and strategy. Along the way we look at the tools states have to prepare for counter-terrorism, and the challenges of doing so.We find strong evidence that the United States remains strategically focused on relationships between states, and argue this is probably an appropriate focus.

The second edition of this successful textbook has been completely revised and updated in light of 9/11. In the aftermath of the attacks, there has been an increased need to address issues of war and peace, particularly terrorism, irregular warfare, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the revolution in military affairs.

The new edition contains a mature set of reflections on the role of military power in the contemporary world. It analyzes recent conflicts from Afghanistan to the Iraq War and looks at the ongoing debates about the lessons that can be learned from these wars. Particular attention is given to the debates about whether there has been a revolution in military affairs given the phenomenal pace of innovation in electronics and computer systems.

We develop a mathematical model to find the optimal inspection strategy for detecting a nuclear weapon (or nuclear material to make a weapon) from being smuggled into the United States in a shipping container, subject to constraints of port congestion and an overall budget. We consider an 11-layer security system consisting of shipper certification, container seals, and a targeting software system, followed by passive (neutron and gamma), active (gamma radiography), and manual testing at overseas and domestic ports. Currently implemented policies achieve a low detection probability, and improved security requires passive and active testing of trusted containers and manually opening containers that cannot be penetrated by radiography. The annual cost of achieving a high detection probability of a plutonium weapon using existing equipment in traditional ways is roughly several billion dollars if testing is done domestically, and is approximately five times higher if testing is performed overseas. Our results suggest that employing high-energy x-ray radiography and elongating the passive neutron tests at overseas ports may provide significant cost savings, and several developing technologies, radiation sensors inside containers and tamper-resistant electronic seals, should be pursued aggressively. Further effort is critically needed to develop a practical neutron interrogation scheme that reliably detects moderately shielded, highly enriched uranium.

We investigate the impact on effective terrorism response of the viability degradation of biological weapons agents in the environment. We briefly review the scientific understanding and modeling of agent environmental viability degradation. In general, agent susceptibility to viability loss is greatest for vegetative bacteria, intermediate for viruses, and least for bacterial spores. Survival is greatest in soil and progressively decreases in the following environments: textiles, water, hard surfaces, and air. There is little detailed understanding of loss mechanisms. We analyze the time behavior and sensitivity of four mathematical models that are used to represent environmental viability degradation (the exponential, probability, and first- and second-order catastrophic decay models). The models behave similarly at short times (<30 min for our example case) but diverge to significantly different values at intermediate to long times. Hence, for a release event in which the majority of atmospheric exposure or deposition occurs over very short times, the current response models likely provide a good representation of the hazard. For longer time phenomena, including decontamina tion, the current model capabilities are likely insufficient. Finally, we implement each model in a simple numerical integration of anthrax dispersion, viability degradation, and dose response. Decay models spanning the current knowledge of airborne degradation result in vastly different predicted hazard areas. This confounds attempts to determine necessary medical and decontamination measures. Hence, the current level of understanding and representation of environmental viability degradation in response models is inadequate to inform appropriate emergency response measures.

Taken alone, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina does not reveal much about the capacity of the federal government to address the usual disasters that occur each year, but it does point to the limits of the government's current capacity to address catastrophe. Policymakers should use the window of opportunity following Katrina to deliberate about how much responsibility the federal government, and therefore taxpayers, will bear for major disasters. Surely the government must step in when states and localities are overwhelmed by catastrophe. But disaster preparation and response also requires cooperation between states, localities, and the private sector. Strengthening the disaster profession will help provide a common language of preparedness to be shared by the diverse public and private authorities who prepare for and respond to disasters.

We developed a mathematical model of a cows-to-consumers supply chain associated with a single milk-processing facility that is the victim of a deliberate release of botulinum toxin. Because centralized storage and processing lead to substantial dilution of the toxin, a minimum amount of toxin is required for the release to do damage. Irreducible uncertainties regarding the dose-response curve prevent us from quantifying the minimum effective release. However, if terrorists can obtain enough toxin, and this may well be possible, then rapid distribution and consumption result in several hundred thousand poisoned individuals if detection from early symptomatics is not timely. Timely and specific in-process testing has the potential to eliminate the threat of this scenario at a cost of less than 1 cent per gallon and should be pursued aggressively. Investigation of improving the toxin inactivation rate of heat pasteurization without sacrificing taste or nutrition is warranted.

In the late winter of 2003, a number of livestock animals in the Midwest were poisoned due to accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive. Although all the evidence indicates this incident had no malicious or terrorist intent, it is informative as a case study highlighting potential security implications with respect to a terrorist event directed at U.S. agriculture.

In all the discussions of agricultural terrorism, the threat of deliberate and malicious introduction of a contaminant to animal feed has barely warranted a sentence in policy papers and legislation. Yet the historical record shows that individuals from New Zealand to Kenya to the U.S. have seen contamination as an easy method to kill animals.

In the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Animal Science (the leading peer-reviewed, technical animal science journal), this article discusses the poisoning of livestock alpacas (a smaller cousin of the llama) in early 2003. The animals were killed by accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive parts per million (ppm) level. Although the absolute number of animals affected was small, if a similar percentage of beef livestock were poisoned, it would correspond to a loss of over 400,000 cattle in the U.S.

The article provides a brief history of incidents of chemical contamination and the political (failure of re-election bid by the Belgian Premier in 2000) and human effects (documented cases of lymphoma, breast and digestive cancers in Michigan among those who ate fire retardant-tainted meat in 1973.) Also addressed are the relative risks to agriculture by biological agent versus chemical agent and concludes with specific recommendations for bringing feed security into the agricultural terrorism dialogue.

In the last eight years, every significant public policy initiative to address the safety and security of U.S. national information infrastructure has recommended a significant, largely voluntary, role for the private sector, owing in large part to the dominant ownership stake of private entities in the infrastructure. Notably absent from much of the policy discourse and underlying research has been a careful examination of the stakeholder incentives to adopt and to spur the development of security technologies and processes. We believe that the lack of progress to date in achieving a secure and robust cyber infrastructure is in large part the direct result of a failure by public policy to recognize and to address those incentives and the technological, economic, social and legal factors underlying them.

We advocate a new approach for the analysis and development of coherent policy in which the interaction of economic incentives among stakeholders is explicitly considered. By economic incentives, we mean the full array of economic and technological factors that shape infrastructure decision-making, not merely government subsidies or tax credits. We provide an initial framework for understanding the technology dependencies and economic incentives associated with cyber security, along with illustrative examples of the key players and their motivations. We argue that the successful development of a secure cyber infrastructure will require more than improved technology and that it could be accelerated by careful consideration of the evolving economic and legal issues that shape stakeholder incentives.

In the recent past the issue of covert trade in nuclear material gained public prominence when it was erroneously claimed by British intelligence sources that the former Government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. The far reaching consequences of such assessments for society were clearly demonstrated by U.S. President George W. Bush in his speech on January 28, 2003, using this incorrect information as one of the reasons why terrorists and countries belonging to the "Axis of Evil" posed a potential nuclear threat. In view of the occurrence of such significant errors even in the intelligence community, it is not surprising that information in the media on the topic of illicit trafficking of nuclear material is frequently flawed by errors.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of evaluating important security-related decisions from questionable sources of information, this paper discusses only the most reliable currently available data on illicit trafficking of weapons-usable nuclear material, contained in the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft, and Orphan Radiation Sources.

A biological terrorist attack probably would first be detected by doctors or other health-care workers. The speed of a response would then depend on their rapid recognition and communication that certain illnesses appeared out of the ordinary. For this reason, preparing for biological terrorism has more in common with confronting the threat of emerging infectious diseases than with preparing for chemical or nuclear attacks. Defense against bioterrorism, like protection against emerging diseases, must therefore rely on improved national and international public-health surveillance. Too often, thinking about bioterrorism has mimicked thinking about chemical terrorism, a confusion that leads to an emphasis on the wrong approaches in preparing to meet the threat.