Target U.S.A.

• Author: Simon, Jeffrey D.
• Position: Review

AMERICA'S ACHILLES HEEL:

Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack

by Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer

The MIT Press, $22.50

"L.A. BOMBER PLEDGES GAS ATTACK" was the frightening headline that appeared in the Aug. 15, 1974 edition of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. A man known only as the "Alphabet Bomber," who turned out to be a mentally unstable engineer from Yugoslavia, had threatened to unleash the chemical nerve agent sarin over Washington, D.C. unless his demands to end all immigration and naturalization laws were met. He had already proven himself deadly with a bombing at Los Angeles International Airport that killed three people. When police searched his apartment after his arrest, they found all the ingredients except one to make a rudimentary nerve gas bomb.

Almost a quarter-century later, the threat of terrorists, criminals, mentally unbalanced individuals, or rogue states acquiring and using nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons is front and center on the national agenda. What the Alphabet Bomber failed to accomplish in the '70s--commit a major attack with a weapon of mass destruction and thereby usher in a new age of terrorism--the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinryko succeeded in doing in the '90s. Their attack in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995 with sarin was the watershed event in launching a major U.S. government effort to shore up this country's defenses against NBC terrorism.

Three months after the Tokyo incident, President Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39, which made preventing and managing the consequences of a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction "the highest priority" for the United States. Congress has followed suit by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to help train first responders--firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel--and the National Guard to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack involving NBC weapons. And the military has focused on research and development into detection systems that can give early warning when biological, warfare agents, which are invisible and odorless microorganisms, have been released over a particular area.

Yet Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer argue that not enough is being done to prepare the United States for NBC terrorism in their timely, compelling, and ambitious book, America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear...