And You Thought Toxic Assets Were Scary…

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At a time when Americans are more worried about toxic assets than toxins, today's release of the Graham Commission Report puts bioterrorism back on the national worry list. Created by the Congress in response to the 9/11 Commission, the report begins with a stark warning:

The Commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon. The Commission believes that the U.S. government needs to move more aggressively to limit the proliferation of biological weapons and reduce the prospect of a bioterror act.

Commission Chairman Bob Graham, a former senator from Florida, told CNN yesterday that “the consequences of a biological attack are almost beyond comprehension. It would be 9/11 times ten or a hundred in terms of the number of people who would be killed.”

While “proliferation” usually brings to mind images of loose nukes in the former Soviet Union or rogue scientists working in secret labs, Graham and the Commission have something much closer to home in mind: the inadequate policing of the Bush administration’s massive increase in funding for bioterrorism research.

Since 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the U.S. government has spent $50 billion on civilian biodefense. As one scientist described the process to Marcus Stern of ProPublica (published in FLYP), “there was just a frenzy (of government contractors) at the feeding trough,” which has led to an ever-increasing number of labs and scientists working on incredibly dangerous pathogens.

The idea, of course, was to identify and produce vaccines that would protect Americans against attack. The result, however, was what Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University—and a noted expert on chemical biology—described in an email to Marcus Stern as “a dramatic increase in the risk of deliberate or accidental release of bioweapons agents.”

The Graham Commission is a bit more diplomatic, pointing to the increased risk of accidents or “intentional misuse by insiders.”

Ebright put it differently: “The response to the 2001 anthrax attacks has involved increasing the number of U.S. bioweapons agents laboratories more than 20 fold…This does not make sense. No more than increasing the number of flight schools, increasing the number of flight school trainees, and developing advanced, next-generation tactics for air piracy would make sense as a response to the 9/11 attacks.”

As former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig told the Graham Commission, “only a thin wall of terrorist ignorance and inexperience now protects us.”

In light of that judgment, the biggest surprise in the Commission’s report is the failure to recommend a moratorium on new research spending. The mad rush to research has potentially put too much of the nation’s security in the hands of graduate students and researchers at hundreds of sites around the country.

Maybe the best way to do that would be to take a deep breath, consolidate results, and make security the point of the exercise—not an unintended casualty.