WASHINGTON – Despite federal and local efforts to prevent improvised biological, chemical and radiological weapons from being used in the U.S., anyone can get anthrax, plague bacteria and other lethal weapons, several top scientists told a House hearing Thursday.
Rep. William R. Keating, D-Mass., asked Dr. Leonard Cole, director of an anti-terrorism program at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, what kind of biological, chemical and radiological materials “average folks” could procure and how they could be weaponized.
“Can they get their hands on these things and use them in an attack?” he asked Cole.
Cole said it’s easy.
“It is not at all difficult…for anybody with a will and a little bit of understanding of how you can get these materials,” he told the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, which was examining the nation’s readiness to combat chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks.
Cole emphasized that materials like anthrax and plague bacteria occur in —and can be harvested from — nature.
Richard Daddario, deputy commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department, said improvised explosive devices and chemical weapons are a big concern to his agency.
“New York has an outreach to businesses that they sell materials that could be used for an attack—chemicals, gunpowder, certain types of components for bombs,” Daddario said. “We do an outreach so that if somebody goes and buys these materials, we hope that it will trigger a call-in to a law enforcement agency.”
But the system isn’t perfect.
“There’s nothing that requires under the law these calls,” he said.
Daddario cited an investigation of online sales of pyrotechnic materials — ingredients that he said may have been used in the Boston attack — to illustrate the need for preventive outreach to sellers of potentially hazardous materials.
He also criticized references to improvised devices as being “crude,” saying that unregulated materials could be used “to make bombs” that he called “very, very effective.”
“We recognize that you can go online and buy fuses and pyrotechnic powder,” he said. “If you put that, as you saw, in an enclosed container along with BBs and metal, you can cause enormous harm from what is, you know, derogatively called a “crude bomb,’” Daddario said.
Cole spoke similarly of the threat of biological weapon production.
“If you get a highly dangerous strain, with a little knowledge about laboratory techniques, it would not be difficult to create a biological spread that could be harmful to a lot of people,” he said. “I think that would be much less so for certain other kinds of agents.”
Dr. Huban Gowadia, acting director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, said the threat of nuclear material being used as a weapon is low, but radiological weapons are a concern.
“First and foremost, our special nuclear material in this country is secure,” she said,” so the nuclear element, I think, we can rest assured on.”
She said radiological risks exist from seemingly benign radiation sources. She underscored her office’s collaboration with regulatory agencies as “the first line of defense” to make the acquisition of radiation-producing machines used in medical and commercial sectors more difficult.
“We continue to work as hard as possible to make the radiological materials hard to acquire,” Gowadia said.