188**   Talk to RU Council, CFR  11/29/01


RU Council - with Richard Butler on November 29, 2001.

I suspect he will cover Iraq and I will deal with the terrorist.

1)  State mounted attack could be mega-scale, multi-sites and
    multi-agent.
    In principle, however, perhaps deterrable.

2)  Terrorist threat should not be underestimated.  They can make
    war as well.  Perhaps less robust and only  by chance to give
    mega-casualites... not totally out of reach... not deterrable.

How are we prepared?  Never perfectly, e.g. just as we could still
get a truck bomb or a major arsonism on almost any facility you
care to name.

Good news.  We have had warning by miniscale attack, the threat
letters.  We are mobilizing; and some 6 lives have been saved by
vigilant medical management.  Possibly the five lethal inhalation
cases could  in principle have been managed if they had been
detected earlier.  But who would have guessed Oxford, Ct?

It would be unfortunate if we squander the opportunity, if we take
the miniscale experiment to be the envelope of what's facing us --
and especially what looms if we don't solve the very knotty problem of
Saddam Hussein.

Our public diplomacy in that arena has almost failed.  We have very few
allies sharing our determination to put a halt to his ever
uncontrollable development of biological and other weapons of
mass destruction but I am going to leave that discussion to
Ambassador Butler and adhere more closely to the technical
aspects.

For now, anthrax and smallpox are on the table.  Sufficient unto
the day!

What we face:

What we can do: by way of consequence mitigation.  We can't put
out every fire, we will have to learn to live with some irreducible
baseline,and must not give up.

What we are doing.

The FBI has taken charge of epidemiology.  The DoD has played a
negligible role in homeland security.  It is appropriate for this
scale, but it has meant there has been limited opportunity to
exercise what may be needed in the event of larger scale event.

Let us be more concrete about what is ahead and here comes my
slides.