U.S. installs sensors to detect nonconventional attack

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States, acknowledging the increased prospects of a chemical or biological terrorist attack, is installing sensors around the country to detect nonconventional weapons and accelerate the response of authorities for the evacuatation of victims.

The Energy Department has launched an effort to use advanced sensors and computer networks that can identify and locate biological and chemical weapons within minutes, according to a statement submitted to the Congress. The system would also alert authorities so it could respond to such an attack within minutes.

"Our scientists have estimated that if one can respond within 6 minutes with appropriate actions that over 1,800 lives would be saved in a small-scale sarin nerve gas attack when compared to how we might respond today," Dr. Page Stoutland, an Energy Department official, said. "The reduction in potential casualties could be 10 to 100 times greater in the case of a deadlier biological agent such as anthrax. In either case, mitigating actions depend critically upon prompt detection of the attack."

Stoutland, director of the chemical and biological nonproliferation program of the Office of the Energy Department's Office of Nonproliferation and National Security, submitted a statement to the House Military Research and Development subcommittee on March 11.

Over the last year, Stoutland said, the department has made significant progress in minimizing false alarms and identifying chemical and biological agents and their location.

On Wednesday, Ely Karmon, senior research scholar of Herzliya, Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counter-terrorism (ICT) said a Japanese terrorist group has produced hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilograms of sarin, much of which remains missing.

Karmon said the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo's, responsible for a sarin nerve gas attack in a Tokyo subway station in the early 1990s, abandoned the production of biological weapons when it concluded that it could not disseminate them effectively.

In his testimony, Stoutland said his department has been working with several cities to lay the groundwork for deployment of an integrated network of sensors, linked to computers. Last month, he said, department scientists participated in an exercise in Los Angeles County sponsored by the FBI.

The Energy Department official said his office wants to field a national system by 2002.

"We are now aggressively moving forward both in developing detectors," Stoutland said, "and in improving the computer models and related information systems that are essential to enable the rapid decisions necessary to realize these goals."