By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, November 6, 2002 (ENS) - Preparation for a biological or chemical attack has become a higher priority for virtually every government over the past year, but there is concern the United States and others are forgetting history as they try to plan for the possibility.

"Lessons are still being ignored," said Jane's Information Group's nuclear, biological and chemical analyst John Eldridge. "We need to be more honest and open about the lessons learned from real events."

A member of a Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team enters a suspected hot zone during an exercise at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in June. Photo by Staff Sgt. Kathleen Rhem (Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense)

The United States and others would be wise to have a closer look at the lessons of the sarin gas attacks in Japan in 1994 and 1995, said Anthony Tu, Colorado State University professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Tu advised the Japanese government in the wake of the sarin gas attacks, which were carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

The first attack came in Matsumoto City on June 27, 1994 and left seven people dead with some 500 injured. This compares with the attack on the Tokyo subway on March 26, 1995 that killed 12 people and injured some 4,000 others.

The contrast, Tu said, is stark because an attack in a subway would be expected to cause a higher rate of fatalities because it is a "closed-air system." The gas used in Matsumoto City had little impurity, but the sarin released in the Tokyo subway was only "20 percent pure," Tu explained.

Japanese soldiers decontaminate subway after a sarin attack. (Photo courtesy Japan Defense Agency)

Now more than seven years after the attacks, there has been "tremendous progress in defense against chemical weapons and biological weapons since the Tokyo attacks," Tu said. But the Japanese, he added, did not become serious about obtaining new equipment or preparing for such attacks until after the anthrax attacks in the United States late last year.

It is also hard to gauge what the United States may have learned from the Japanese experience, Eldridge said. Much of the material on the American response to the anthrax attacks, which killed five people, remains classified as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues its search for those responsible. But other agencies are beginning to share information on the cleanup of anthrax from the U.S. Senate Hart office building, where two letters containing anthrax were received in October 2001.

Major Tony Intrepido of the U.S. Army's Preventive Health and Medicine Division told conference attendees that the initial response to what became the "100 day anthrax war" was chaotic. The effort involved a slew of different agencies, all working within a crime scene investigation led by the FBI.

Anthrax contaminated letter to Senator Tom Daschle that contaminated the Hart Senate Office Building (Photo courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)

"We had no track record with anthrax," Intrepido said.

Thirty buildings, spanning some nine million square feet had to be analyzed and potentially decontaminated. The anthrax delivered in letters to Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, both Democrats, was very pure and it easily re-aerosolized.

A peer review by 20 organizations determined the use of chlorine dioxide was the best means of cleaning the building. The Hart building, which houses the offices of 50 of the 100 senators and their staffs, was returned to service January 22, just a day before the scheduled start of the 2002 congressional session.

"Resources were stretched at all times," said Richard Rupert, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on-scene coordinator for the cleanup effort. "We could not have handled two like this at the same time."

Roosevelt Meriweather and Rob Smith check the operation of the chemical biological mass spectrometer developed partly by Oak Ridge National Lab researchers for use in helping U.S. soldiers detect the presence of biological and chemical weapons. (Photo by Curtis Boles courtesy ORNL)

Improving coordination within the U.S. federal government to respond to terrorist attacks is one reason advanced to justify the proposed Department of Homeland Security, but questions remain about how this new agency might take shape.

According to Steven Caldwell, assistant director of the Defense Capabilities and Management Team in the U.S. General Accounting Office, the theory behind the department is for create a "federally led response for crisis management."

'There is much unclear in the proposal, Caldwell said, including how the federal reorganization might "affect the roles of various federal, state and local authorities."

"But at least in the short run, the Department of Homeland Security will cause confusion," Caldwell told the conference. "There is a lot in limbo."