¶ … United States' Strategy for Dealing with a Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear Non-State Actor Threat One of the major potential threats that has emerged in recent years is a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) threat from a non-state actor. In the "good old days" of the Cold War, nation-states with these capabilities were well-known to the international community and contingency plans were developed by the United States and its allies to counter any eventuality. By very sharp contrast, today, non-state actors, including most especially international terrorist groups, have increasing access to these lethal materials, and the potential for their use as a weapon of mass destruction looms large. To determine the current situation with respect to the United States, this paper provides a review of the relevant publicly available literature to identify this country's current strategy for responding to CBRN threats, a technical description of the equipment and training that is used, and an analysis of the threat in terms of terrorist groups and previous incidents upon which the U.S. government's CBRN preparedness is based. Finally, an analysis concerning whether the CBRN threat is exaggerated or not, is followed by a summary of the research and important findings concerning the U.S.'s current CBRN response strategy in the conclusion.

General summary and overview of the United States government's CBRN strategy

At present, the United States government's CBRN strategy remains a work in progress. For instance, the National Strategy for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives (CBRNE) Standards set forth the overall federal objectives for the coordination, prioritization, establishment, and implementation of relevant equipment standards, but these will not be fully implemented until 2020 (A National Strategy for CBRNE Standards, 2016). The U.S. government's CBRNE strategy was developed by the National Science and Technology Council which has been tasked with this mission by the president and U.S. Congress (National strategy, 2016). The national CBRNE strategy is multifaceted and includes the overarching goals set forth in Table 1 below:

Table 1

Goals for the U.S. National CBRNE Strategy

Goal

Description/Rationale

Goal No. 1: Establish an interagency group for CBRNE standards to promote the coordination of such standards among federal, state, local, and tribal communities

A single interagency group within the federal government must be chartered to coordinate standards for CBRNE equipment to ensure a robust and enduring capability for the development of validated CBRNE tools and response capabilities.

Goal No. 2: Coordinate and facilitate the development and adoption of CBRNE equipment performance standards

Establish an enduring process for the development and dissemination of CBRNE standards to assess current technologies and anticipate new technologies and threats.

Goal No. 3: Coordinate and facilitate the development and adoption of CBRNE equipment interoperability standards

Develop common standards for the capture, processing, and communication of data, as well as the display and reporting of results to end-users and decision makers.

Goal No. 4: Promote enduring CBRNE standard operating procedures

Develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) to enable preparedness and response for CBRNE incidents at all response levels. SOPs are critical in establishing trust and confidence among response organizations during an emergency.

Goal No. 5: Establish voluntary CBRNE training and certification standards and promote policies that foster their adoption

Develop and adopt training and certification at the national level to ensure that all end user disciplines are capable of responding to and recovering from CBRNE incidents. These standards should establish methods to measure capabilities of users, instructors, training centers, and agencies.

Goal No. 6: Establish a comprehensive CBRNE equipment testing and evaluation (T&E) infrastructure and capability to support conformity assessment standards

Establish a testing and evaluation (T&E) infrastructure to provide common test methods, accredited test facilities, and reference materials to assess the performance of CBRNE equipment. The coordinated development and use of standard test methods in T&E across government agencies will enable the sharing of data between agencies and end-users, reduce the cost to each agency establishing its own T&E infrastructure, and promote interoperability between equipment and response capabilities.

Source: Adapted from A National Strategy for CBRNE Standards, 2016, p. 8

Although only the first goal of the national strategy has been fully implemented and achieved to date (on April 15, 2011), there is active work being done to achieve the remaining goals of the national CBRNE strategy (National strategy, 2016). As noted in Table 1 above, providing first responders with improved equipment and training are among the more important goals of the nation's CBRN strategy, and these needs are discussed further below.

Technical description of equipment and training

Congress also passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, otherwise known as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for FY97 (Domestic preparedness, 2015) and there have been numerous executive orders issued in recent years that have been directed at improving the nation's CBRN preparedness (Stanton, 2010). In addition, the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program was first implemented in Fiscal Year 1997 in an effort to train the nation's first responders in 120 of the largest cities in the U.S. (Domestic preparedness, 2015). This initial list of American cities has since been expanded to include a mix of 157 cities and counties across the country, and efforts remain underway to provide all of these major metropolitan centers with appropriate CBRN preparedness training (Domestic preparedness, 2015).
Some of the additional recommendations to improve the nation's CBRN defense that have been advanced in recent years include the following:

Focus on training emergency responders;

Capitalize on the public health structure;

Develop national bioterrorism surveillance capacity;

Stockpile pharmaceuticals;

Prepare a public information campaign; and,

Grant relief from antitrust laws to companies that share information on CBRN threats (Stanton, 2010, p. 138).

Analysis of the threat in terms of terrorist groups and previous incidents upon which the U.S. government's CBRN preparedness is based

One of the more confounding aspects of CBRN preparedness is the varying levels of threats that are represented by the constituent elements of each type of weapon. For instance, Tracey (2008) emphasizes that, "The qualitative and quantitative differences in the range of unconventional CBRN threats packed under the WMD rubric are vast, and each threat presents unique development, deployment, and employment challenges to our adversaries, thus presenting us a range of defensive challenges" (p. 114). Furthermore, these defensive challenges are exacerbated by the nature of each of the weapon types subsumed under the CBRN umbrella, with the anthrax attacks in 2001 that killed a few people and made a country nervous about going to their mailboxes being on fundamentally different level from the devastation that would result from a nuclear strike (Tracey, 2008) by a non-state actors armed with so-called "dirty bombs" or other CBRN materials. As Faria (2014) emphasizes:

The United States [needs] to prepare itself against the risk of terrorist groups having both access and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction which include chemical, biological, radioactive, and nuclear weapons (CBRN) in their attacks. Terrorist organizations seek such weapons for their lethality, since a single attack with WMDs can result in a substantial number of casualties. (p. 286)

Unfortunately, the nebulous nature of the CBRN threat together with the dynamic nature of the environment in which these threats are arrayed has combined to create a situation where many observers argue that the United States is ill-prepared to prevent and respond to CBRN threats today. For instance, Tracey (2008) maintains that, "The United States has a 'genericized' counterproliferation strategy that does not make useful distinctions among the range of threats, the defense of the homeland, and military operations" (p. 115). This lack of distinctions between the range of threats, including most especially those represented by non-state actors, has created a situation in which the CBRN threat appears to be exaggerated, but is it? An analysis of the arguments in favor of the U.S. CBRN strategy and those opposed is provided below to answer this question.

"Is the CBRN threat exaggerated or not, and why?"

On the one hand, it would be reasonable to suggest that the CBRN threat has been exaggerated because there have in fact been no such attacks on the U.S. since the mailed anthrax in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Some security analysts credit the massive amounts of taxpayer resources that have been allocated for the nation's level of CBRN preparedness. For instance, according to Stanton (2010), "In the years since the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway, approximately $10 billion in federal funds have been spent on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) domestic preparedness programs by at least 20 federal agencies and organizations in the United States" (p. 138). In addition, other security analysts argue that the potential for a CBRN attack are remote because non-state actors have several inhibitors, including the following:

They would lose the support of their constituencies;

They would lose fundraising opportunities;

Fear of retribution and reaction from their targets; and,

The technical and security-related barriers faced by a terrorist organizations in obtaining, handling, preparing, and attacking targets with CBRN weapons (Faria, 2014, p. 286).

On the other hand, though, the potential severity of the CBRN threat combined with the proliferation of domestic…