Combating Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Persian Gulf War gave vivid warning of our technology weakness against weapons ofmass destruction. There was no equipment to detect biological weapons, and our chemicalsensors were plagued by false alarms and thus virtually useless; our forces in the Gulfwere essentially blind to biological and chemical attack. We found that our troops alsolacked adequate protective measures and procedures, including sufficient protectiveclothing, vaccinations, and other critical items. We found the threats to civilian populationswere even worse, as nations neighboring the Gulf ran out of gas masks and quicklydiscovered they had no civil defenses effective against biological and chemical attack.Yet nearly nine years after this wake-up call, and after billions of dollars of WMDtechnology expenditures, we see that there has been relatively little progress made in anyof the areas vital to combating WMD proliferation.The Department of Defense’s own technology estimates indicate how serious theshortfalls still are. Here are some examples:• Loudspeaker announcements and shouting (called “voice alerts”) remain ourprincipal means of alert against biological and chemical attacks.• We still can detect only a handful of the thousands of possible chemical and biologicalthreats, and those few that can be detected require the use of many sensors that havelimited range.• Security guards remain at great risk; their only threat detectors have low sensitivity,high false alarm rates, require long inspection times, lack portability, and are intrusive.• Nine years after the Gulf War, only an “interim” biological detection system is availableto our military forces in the field.• Even as the Department places greater reliance on commercial technology forenhancing force capabilities, there has been an erosion of policy guidance, technicalexpertise, and programmatic implementation to assure such technology couldoperate through a nuclear environment.• Our national ballistic, theater, and cruise missile defenses are little better than thePatriot missile that we used in the Gulf War, and the missile threat—fueled byproliferation—is growing faster than our defense improvement programs.• Deeply buried WMD facilities still cannot be effectively detected, characterized, ordefeated, which may affect the credibility of our nuclear deterrent. We also lack theknow-how needed to contain the spread of threat agents that are released bydestroying above ground facilities.25