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GROUND BREAKING FOR THE Pentagon took place in Arlington, Va., on Sept. 11,1941. Sixty years later, terrorists slammed a commercial airliner into one side of the building, injuring and killing hundreds of civilian and military employees. That heinous attack in Virginia and the earlier, more devastating one on the World Trade Center towers in New York City have served as a rude wake-up call to the nation. And they have galvanized scientists of every stripe who, until then, may never have envisioned their expertise as serving the cause of national security and homeland defense. Months before Sept. 11,2001, the National Research Council's Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology (BCST) was busy putting together the study "Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century." It was envisioned as an overview document focused on basic research needs with no mention of national security or homeland defense. That vision, of course, changed quickly The chairmen of the ...

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS ON THE World Trade Center and Pentagon are forcing a reexamination of the security of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants by nuclear's advocates and foes alike. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has begun an evaluation of current federal requirements to protect nuclear power plants from terrorist acts, says NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve. And the threat to these facilities is also included in a government-wide examination of terrorism. The reviews come at a time when nuclear power is at an apex because of better reliability, efficiency, and economics. For the first time in decades, utilities are talking of building new nuclear plants. Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, NRC notified plant operators that they should place power plants on the "highest state of alert," Meserve said in a statement. This included increased patrols, more guards, limited site access, coordination with law enforcement personnel, and other site-specific actions. NRC acknowledges, however, that ...

American troops have been so poorly trained to fight on a battlefield contaminated by chemical or biological warfare agents that if Saddam Hussein had used these agents in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict, U.S. soldiers would have been unable to carry out their designated missions, and casualties probably would have been high. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the ensuing seven years. The Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General recently surveyed 232 military units across the services and found that only 45 unit commanders on Navy surface ships were "fully integrating chemical and biological defense into unit mission training." Starkly translated, this lack of realistic defense training means that most U.S. troops would not be able to survive and continue their assigned missions in a chemical/biological-tainted environment. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen believes that potential adversaries "are more likely to try unconventional or asymmetrical methods such as biological or chemical weapons." ...

The Defense Department proposes a science and technology budget for fiscal 1998 that totals $35.9 billion, down 1.8% from fiscal 1997. But for scientific and technological purists who look only for the new, fundamental knowledge aspects of the defense budget—that is, basic research, applied research, and advanced technology—the relevant figure is actually $7.4 billion, a 5% drop from the current fiscal year. The 1.8% decline in overall research and development funding reflects profound changes in priorities in the post-Cold War years that are reshaping defense doctrine. No longer led by the need to maintain a massive retaliatory nuclear structure, defense science and technology policy is now guided by the necessity to defend against small conflicts that could erupt anywhere in the world and affect U.S. interests. For example, the Defense Department now more than ever seeks technologies that will detect and engage missile launches by small countries and meet the complex challenges of intelligence ...

WHAT STARTED OUT AS A routine study by the National Research Council's Naval Studies Board has morphed into an uncomfortable imbroglio for the National Academy of Sciences. Late in 2000, the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) and the Office of Naval Research asked the board to assess the science and technology of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Program directed by Marine Col. George P. Fenton. The study, now completed, was to be unclassified, but Fenton's office has recently informed the board that the study is to be considered classified until further notice. In February 2001, a board-organized committee began deliberations, which continued until July, explains committee staff officer Charles E. Draper. Committee and staff did the usual data dump, and some 266 unclassified documents were collected and listed in NAS's public access file as required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And there they remained-available to the public-until March 22, 2002. ...

MANY OF THE UNCLASSIFIED documents collected for a study sponsored by the Pentagon on nonlethal weapons and deposited in the National Academy of Sciences' public access file were not initially released to the public as federal law requires. On March 12, Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project—an international watchdog group monitoring the control of biological weapons—asked for 77 documents relating to chemical and biological weapons. These were culled from 266 documents placed on file at least six months prior to his request. Hammond was told by the NAS security officer that a hold had been placed on them for security reasons following Sept. 11,2001, but was not told who placed the hold. The documents underpin a study commissioned by the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program directed by Marine Col. George P. Fenton and the Office of Naval Research. The study was completed last November but has been undergoing security classification ...

Tight funding for defense-related R&D and dwindling numbers of U.S. students attracted to science careers that contribute to defense technology were identified as potential constraints on "far-future" warfare at a meeting of top scientists and military strategists last week in Washington, D.C. The scientists and Pentagon officials who attended "Out of the Box and into the Future: A Dialogue Between Warfighters and Scientists on Far-Future Warfare (2025)" were low-key in their assessments but nonetheless clear: The dazzling array of new technologies discussed at the two-day meeting will not bear fruit without wise R&D investments by policymakers in the Administration and Congress. As for long-term commitment to the kinds of basic research funding that Department of Defense strategists and other experts identify as critical, "We really haven't gotten to that point yet," said Delores Etter, DOD deputy undersecretary for science and technology. Etter outlined some of the changing threats to national ...

The Defense Department learned a painful lesson from the 1991 Persian Gulf War: The need to better monitor and control troop exposures to the many harmful agents found on the modern battlefield. Not quite sure how to execute this lesson, the Pentagon turned to the National Academies for help. And after two years of study, the academies have issued a series of four technical reports on identifying and assessing hazards, reducing the risk of exposure, improving surveillance activities and record keeping, and detecting harmful agents. All are published under the title "Strategies to Protect Deployed U.S. Forces." And all—including the just released fourth report on detecting, characterizing, and documenting exposures to harmful agents—were carried out in "a fairly rare but not unique" fashion, explains National Academies spokesman Bob Ludwig. Because of the technical expertise required, he says, the studies were done not by a committee, the academies' usual mode of operation, but by a principal ...

A military and environmental analysis of the Persian Gulf War has concluded the conflict was not an "orderly, flawlessly fought battle," but one that was "unprecedented in the amount of destruction [it] inflicted . . . in so short a period of time." According to three analysts with the environmental group Greenpeace, the war "left the civil society reeling and completely disrupted and the natural environment unusually scarred." They dub the Gulf War "the most momentous and destructive . . . in modern history." It brought "unprecedented environmental ruin, the most efficient killing campaign ever executed by any military force, one of the largest movements of civilians in the shortest periods of time, the worst oil fires in history, and one of the biggest oil spills." The Pentagon, famous for coining new terms, has called the conflict "hyper war." Analyses of the environmental impacts of the Gulf War tend to be couched in superlatives. For ...

Two international events aimed at halting the spread of chemical and biological weapons occurred last week. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the U.S. signed a bilateral agreement with the Uzbeks to dismantle a former Soviet chemical weapons research facility in the desert city of Nukus. In London, scientists from three national academies met to discuss ways to control biological weapons. The bilateral agreement allots up to $6 million from the U.S.'s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program—informally known as Nunn-Lugar funds—for destruction of the Chemical Research Institute in Nukus. The facility—described by Brian Moran, director of the Pentagon's Office of CTR Policy, "as the size of a couple of football fields"—was used by the Soviets to research and test chemical weapons. Pentagon spokesman Vic Warzinski says the 18-month U.S.-funded destruction project "will eliminate a serious proliferation threat." Among the chemical agents the Soviets tested at Nukus was a new class of lethal nerve agents known as No...

Releasing the Pentagon's annual report on the global spread of weapons of mass destruction, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said, "The threat is here, now, today, and it will only increase in the future." The report, "Proliferation: Threat & Response," fleshes out Cohen's remarks. It notes that more than 25 countries have or may be developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. An even larger number of nations are able to make these weapons, possibly on very short notice, it says. Citing Iraq as an example, he said, "The United Nations believes that Saddam [Hussein] may have produced as much as 200 tons of [the nerve gas] VX," an amount that could theoretically "kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth." But in fact, the UN special commission monitoring Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions has only said that Iraq had acquired ...

If you're old enough to remember the Pentagon's escalating body counts during the Vietnam War, then its now spiraling estimate of U.S. troops possibly exposed to chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War rings familiar. More than 20 years separate the two wars, but the Pentagon's public pronouncements prompt the same question: Coverup or ineptitude? During the brief gulf conflict, alarms on chemical warfare agent detectors went off frequently. False positives, said the Pentagon. A Czech chemical warfare unit—part of the alliance massed by the U.S.—using highly sophisticated Russian equipment, detected chemical agents on two occasions. False readings, poor equipment, said the Pentagon initially. For five years, from 1991 to 1996, Pentagon brass insisted that no U*S. troops had been exposed to chemical weapons. None. Then, in June 1996, the Pentagon reluctantly admitted that after the war, on March 10,1991, U.S. forces had blown up an Iraqi weapons storage depot at Khamisiyah in southern Iraq. ...

It's becoming a perennial exercise. Again this year—for the fourth time—the Pentagon comes to Congress seeking funds to produce binary chemical weapons. In the previous three years, Congress has re...

In reports that have yet to be made public, the General Accounting Office says the Pentagon still has not worked out the technical problems that have plagued development of the binary chemical bomb known as Bigeye. GAO recommends that Congress turn down the Pentagon's fiscal 1986 request for $142 million for Bigeye procurement and production facilities. The Defense Department has declared the bomb ready for production. In a June 24 letter published in the Washington Post, Thomas J. Welch, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for chemical matters, wrote: "The Bigeye bomb recently completed its engineering and developmental phase. It passed 74 of 75 tests." He also said the pressure buildup problems that caused the bomb to explode when it shouldn't had been resolved, and that the lethality of the nerve gas formed in the tests exceeded design goals. However, in a May 21 letter to Congress, Richard L. Wagner, assistant to the Defense ...

At a Senate Armed Services hearing late last month, Administration spokesmen outlined reasons why the Pentagon is asking Congress to end a 16-year moratorium on the production of chemical weapons by voting for funds to build binary chemical shells and bombs. Defense Department witnesses cited the Soviet's superior chemical warfare capability and the perils to civilians from chemical warfare. They also said that the U.S.'s weak capability to use chemical weapons offensively jeopardizes efforts to achieve a verifiable ban on such weapons. The Pentagon's solution to these insufficiences is the production of 115-mm binary artillery shells, which would deliver the nonpersistent nerve gas GB, and the Bigeye bomb, which would deliver the persistent nerve gas VX. To that end, it has asked Congress for $175 million. At the hearing Pentagon spokesman Thomas J. Welch, the Secretary of Defense's deputy assistant for chemical matters, argued that the U.S. does not have a chemical weapon capability ...

If the House holds sway in conference committee, the Defense Department will have no new funds for producing chemical weapons this coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. Because of a backlog of unspent money, a lack of new funds won't affect ongoing production of binary chemical artillery shells. And the Bigeye binary bomb is so mired in developmental problems that the Pentagon has not requested funding for full-scale production. A recent unclassified General Accounting Office study, "Bigeye Bomb: Unresolved Developmental Issues," concluded for the umpteenth time that the Pentagon should halt operational tests of the bomb until serious, major developmental questions are settled. Such questions include pressure buildup in the bomb, purity and lethality of the VX nerve gas produced, and weapons system reliability. The bomb, whose design dates to the 1950s, has had a checkered history. Yet, in February 1988 then- President Reagan certified that the Bigeye was essential to national security. This ...

After a three-year history of turning back the Pentagon's requests for funds to manufacture new binary chemical weapons, the House reversed itself two weeks ago and voted $124.5 million, available in fiscal 1986 if certain conditions are met. The about-face can be traced, in part, to strong lobbying by the Administration. Over a two-month period the Pentagon shuttled influential legislative aides to a damage control school at Philadelphia's naval yards to brief them on chemical weapons. Two days before the House vote, the President, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, and former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. met with 30 freshmen Republican Congressmen. Twenty-eight of the freshmen voted to fund binary weapons production. They were pivotal to the House's reversal. But a report by a Presidential panel recommending the new weapons did no harm to the Administration's efforts, even though opponents of the binary program tried to discredit the panel because they ...

The massive commitment of U.S. scientific and technological resources to the development of new weapons systems that has been building up these past four years will continue unabated. That is an unmistakably clear message contained in Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger's 1985 report to Congress. The 314-page document was submitted earlier this month in support of the Administration's budget for fiscal 1986. That budget pegs the Department of Defense's research, development, testing, and evaluation program at $39.3 billion, up 25% from fiscal 1985 and 45% from fiscal 1984. Why the Pentagon insists it needs such massive increases in R&D funding becomes clear from the details given in Weinberger's report of the massive expense of developing modern weapons systems, particularly strategic systems. For instance, the Trident II is a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). It is scheduled to be deployed in late 1989. It is of longer range and it carries more powerful nuclear ...

An outside panel of experts formed by the Comptroller General at the request of the Pentagon's Inspector General may have sounded the death knell for the Bigeye binary chemical bomb. The panel, whi...

THE DAILY OUTPUT of government news releases in Washington is such that no one could hope to read all of them and still do other things. Yet, as in some types of mining, a lot of time, patience, and boresome effort occasionally turn up a few nuggets of real news. A nine-page release covers an exchange of correspondence between Congressman John E. Moss, chairman, House Government Information Subcommittee, and the Secretary of Defense and his general counsel on restricting information on use of monkeys in research. We've had more than our share of experience with the highly controversial security system used at the Pentagon, both as an editor and as an officer of the Society of Business Magazine Editors. We confess we are somewhat allergic to much of the so-called reasoning behind it. Briefly, apparently some employee of the department had, without authority, disclosed that monkeys were being used in space experiments. This information, according ...