Taken alone, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina does not reveal much about the capacity of the federal government to address the usual disasters that occur each year, but it does point to the limits of the government's current capacity to address catastrophe. Policymakers should use the window of opportunity following Katrina to deliberate about how much responsibility the federal government, and therefore taxpayers, will bear for major disasters. Surely the government must step in when states and localities are overwhelmed by catastrophe. But disaster preparation and response also requires cooperation between states, localities, and the private sector. Strengthening the disaster profession will help provide a common language of preparedness to be shared by the diverse public and private authorities who prepare for and respond to disasters.

We developed a mathematical model of a cows-to-consumers supply chain associated with a single milk-processing facility that is the victim of a deliberate release of botulinum toxin. Because centralized storage and processing lead to substantial dilution of the toxin, a minimum amount of toxin is required for the release to do damage. Irreducible uncertainties regarding the dose-response curve prevent us from quantifying the minimum effective release. However, if terrorists can obtain enough toxin, and this may well be possible, then rapid distribution and consumption result in several hundred thousand poisoned individuals if detection from early symptomatics is not timely. Timely and specific in-process testing has the potential to eliminate the threat of this scenario at a cost of less than 1 cent per gallon and should be pursued aggressively. Investigation of improving the toxin inactivation rate of heat pasteurization without sacrificing taste or nutrition is warranted.

In the late winter of 2003, a number of livestock animals in the Midwest were poisoned due to accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive. Although all the evidence indicates this incident had no malicious or terrorist intent, it is informative as a case study highlighting potential security implications with respect to a terrorist event directed at U.S. agriculture.

In all the discussions of agricultural terrorism, the threat of deliberate and malicious introduction of a contaminant to animal feed has barely warranted a sentence in policy papers and legislation. Yet the historical record shows that individuals from New Zealand to Kenya to the U.S. have seen contamination as an easy method to kill animals.

In the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Animal Science (the leading peer-reviewed, technical animal science journal), this article discusses the poisoning of livestock alpacas (a smaller cousin of the llama) in early 2003. The animals were killed by accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive parts per million (ppm) level. Although the absolute number of animals affected was small, if a similar percentage of beef livestock were poisoned, it would correspond to a loss of over 400,000 cattle in the U.S.

The article provides a brief history of incidents of chemical contamination and the political (failure of re-election bid by the Belgian Premier in 2000) and human effects (documented cases of lymphoma, breast and digestive cancers in Michigan among those who ate fire retardant-tainted meat in 1973.) Also addressed are the relative risks to agriculture by biological agent versus chemical agent and concludes with specific recommendations for bringing feed security into the agricultural terrorism dialogue.

In the last eight years, every significant public policy initiative to address the safety and security of U.S. national information infrastructure has recommended a significant, largely voluntary, role for the private sector, owing in large part to the dominant ownership stake of private entities in the infrastructure. Notably absent from much of the policy discourse and underlying research has been a careful examination of the stakeholder incentives to adopt and to spur the development of security technologies and processes. We believe that the lack of progress to date in achieving a secure and robust cyber infrastructure is in large part the direct result of a failure by public policy to recognize and to address those incentives and the technological, economic, social and legal factors underlying them.

We advocate a new approach for the analysis and development of coherent policy in which the interaction of economic incentives among stakeholders is explicitly considered. By economic incentives, we mean the full array of economic and technological factors that shape infrastructure decision-making, not merely government subsidies or tax credits. We provide an initial framework for understanding the technology dependencies and economic incentives associated with cyber security, along with illustrative examples of the key players and their motivations. We argue that the successful development of a secure cyber infrastructure will require more than improved technology and that it could be accelerated by careful consideration of the evolving economic and legal issues that shape stakeholder incentives.

In the recent past the issue of covert trade in nuclear material gained public prominence when it was erroneously claimed by British intelligence sources that the former Government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. The far reaching consequences of such assessments for society were clearly demonstrated by U.S. President George W. Bush in his speech on January 28, 2003, using this incorrect information as one of the reasons why terrorists and countries belonging to the "Axis of Evil" posed a potential nuclear threat. In view of the occurrence of such significant errors even in the intelligence community, it is not surprising that information in the media on the topic of illicit trafficking of nuclear material is frequently flawed by errors.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of evaluating important security-related decisions from questionable sources of information, this paper discusses only the most reliable currently available data on illicit trafficking of weapons-usable nuclear material, contained in the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft, and Orphan Radiation Sources.

A biological terrorist attack probably would first be detected by doctors or other health-care workers. The speed of a response would then depend on their rapid recognition and communication that certain illnesses appeared out of the ordinary. For this reason, preparing for biological terrorism has more in common with confronting the threat of emerging infectious diseases than with preparing for chemical or nuclear attacks. Defense against bioterrorism, like protection against emerging diseases, must therefore rely on improved national and international public-health surveillance. Too often, thinking about bioterrorism has mimicked thinking about chemical terrorism, a confusion that leads to an emphasis on the wrong approaches in preparing to meet the threat.

Future regional conflicts will almost certainly involve politically less stable nations or other regional actors using theater ballistic missiles armed with either nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads. The United States Air Force is attempting to deal with this threat by developing the Airborne Laser (ABL) with the goal of shooting down missiles while they are still under power and before they can release submunitions possibly containing highly toxic biological agents. This paper presents the results of an analysis of this system. It is based solely on information found in the open literature and using the basic physics and engineering involved in transmitting intense laser beams through the atmosphere. The ABL's potential capabilities and possible theaters of operation are discussed at a non-technical level.