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Perspectives
Science Mobilizes
One of the things President Bush did not do after the events of Sept. 11 was call on his science adviser for help in protecting America against technological acts of terrorism, getting back at Osama bin Laden, toppling the Taliban, conducting espionage, penetrating the al Qaeda terrorist network, and building Islamic economies. He didn’t do it because he didn’t have one and probably because the furthest thought from his mind, anyway, was science.
Science, and of course advanced technology, may still languish some distance from the President’s thoughts these days, but they may be edging in. He does now have a Senate-confirmed science adviser, John Marburger, most recently director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the swearing-in is imminent. Already, Marburger has been put in charge of coordinating some of the bioterrorism protection work across the agencies.
Meanwhile, the science, engineering, and biomedical communities, led by the three National Academies (Science, Engineering, and Institute of Medicine), have sounded the bugle and announced themselves ready to go.
But where? What can science actually do? A group being formed by physicist Lewis M. Branscomb of the Kennedy School of Government and cell biologist Richard D. Klausner, formerly director of the National Cancer Institute, are beginning a process of finding out. What they do know is that science for this kind of war is likely to prove its worth over the long term. That is an intriguing thought in itself.
The presidents of the three Academies asked Branscomb and Klausner to establish an overall research strategy to help the government win the terrorism war over that longer term. They met for the first time on Sept. 26. Attending were many familiar names in science, engineering, national security, and policy circles. Marburger was there. So was the State Department science adviser, Norman Neureiter. The gears were beginning to creak into motion.
Branscomb and Klausner are now assembling a full panel, and they will be busy. They will first focus on producing by next winter the first draft of an overall research and development strategy based on the needs of this war that involves all sorts of sensors and signals for penetrating everything from caves and computers to spores and stucco walls. Target time for the final report will be September 2002, with an interim version projected for next spring.
The panel will also help oversee production of several separate studies to be done by the many divisions of the Academies’ contract arm, the National Research Council. They will be proposed to the Bush Administration via Marburger and will be accompanied by reports on homeland protection and terrorism that the Academies have prepared over the past few years.
For those eager to know what the Academy has been producing on terrorism, a list of 26 recent reports on many aspects of terrorism has been placed on the Academy’s website www.nas.edu. And the Defense Department only in the last few days has made public a list of 42 types of technology needed now. These include predicting the future behavior of terrorists, locating and identifying faces in video images of crowds, identifying behavior patterns of terrorists and terrorists groups, acoustical and electromagnetic warning devices of terrorists, and various chemical, biological, and nuclear countermeasures. The press did some lampooning of this list but it does paint a portrait of the kind of complicated war being waged.
The arrival of Marburger as science adviser should make interesting watching because he takes his place at a time of high crisis. His task is to ensure that Office of Science and Technology policy, which he directs, is effective in pulling together the needed expertise and getting the research agencies to march to a single beat.
The Homeland Security Office headed by Tom Ridge, obviously needs a lot of scientific advice in its concerns over bioterrorism. The anthrax attack and smallpox scare have done little to assure the public that the Office was ensuring much security among Americans. With Marburger coordinating the bioterrorism campaign, Ridge should get the technical help he needs. Marburger also has going for him the national laboratories with their considerable technical expertise. The Academies will probably play the major role in bringing in the academic community.
It is clear that scientific leadership at the top will be needed. And there is a model. Back in the early days of the Cold War the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, leading President Dwight Eisenhower to decide he needed at his side a science adviser. Back then, nuclear strikes from ballistic missiles were the dominant fear (as they could again become, if, say, the Taliban gains control of Pakistan’s fleet of missiles and warheads) and Eisenhower had few resources with the scientific brainpower to assess and second-guess the firepower-only mentalities of Pentagon war hawks. His first science adviser, James Killian, from MIT gave him the help, followed by the equally useful George Kistiakowsky of Harvard. Behind them they had an effective body known as the President’s Science Advisory Committee that minced no words when it came to frank talk.
This time, scientific expertise abounds throughout the government and even a highly functional OSTP could end up being peripheral to what already is in place. The Defense Department’s research and technology apparatus, especially its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) already has considerable weapons-related work of the most exotic kinds going with the universities. Moreover, the Defense Science Board, made up of civilian scientists and engineers, has long been an influential goad to closing the Pentagon’s technical and consciousness gaps. On its website it has placed a two-volume report, “Protecting the Homeland,” which fingers one inadequacy after another.
For example, it recommends deploying sensor networks to protect U.S. forces, engaging the national laboratories in intelligence, securing nuclear materials from Russia, implementing the Global Information Grid (a vast information network linking everything deemed strategic), bringing in large numbers of information technologists, developing the infrastructure to rapidly detect and identify a bioagent attack. Lists are everywhere, as any internet search will let you know.
Still, war requires a lot of redundancy in the realm of ideas. Much clever thinking will be required to root out the sources of terrorism, sever the communication cords of the terrorist network, and build secure, sustainable societies in the Islamic world. That work will have to be pursued alongside development of technologies needed to predict and detect acts of terrorism.
Lacking any new government money to undertake their call to duty, the Academies are putting up $2 million of their own endowment money to get it all going. Coordinating it all within the Academy itself is Doug Bauer, who has been given the title "director of counter-terrorism coordination." The National Research Council will actually carry out the program through its various divisions, which will be competing for their share of the money pool. They were to have submitted their bids for some of the action by November 5, with the winners scheduled to be announced on November 15. Additional funds will be raised from various agencies and foundations.
The recently-made-visible Technical Support Working Group (www.tswg.gov), an agency co-chaired by the State and Defense Departments, appears to be crucial to the success of the Academies’ effort. That agency helps produce and procure the various technologies and systems needed by the 40-some agencies with anti-terrorism programs. It describes itself as an agency that “rapidly develops technologies and equipment to meet high-priority needs of the combating terrorism community, and addresses joint international operational requirements through cooperative R&D with major allies.” The Academies hadn’t heard of it until its importance was underscored by State Department science adviser Neureiter at the Sep. 26 meeting.
One early plan is to assemble a meeting among universities to discuss the impact of America’s new security state on foreign students and researchers. The government may find it necessary to put the wraps around some areas of critical research in biotechnology, nanotechnology, or information technology. Wraps already have been placed around new student visas. Foreign graduate students, especially those performing research even remotely related to terrorist issues, are being watched. It is no fun being a university post-doc, say, when you come from certain parts of the world.
Branscomb seems eager to begin the new Academy enterprise. “The main thrust of our effort,” he says, “is to try to develop some kind of taxonomy of what the counter-terrorism issues are, including those in the social sciences and of course in the physical and biological sciences. We will then try to identify agendas for research that might be useful in say a four to seven year timeframe. All this is on the assumption that we’re going to have this terrorism problem for the next decade. So what we would do once we have that taxonomy of how to think about terrorism, is try to derive from it further ‘metalevel’ sets of scientific exploration that might be fruitful—things like network security and biological organism detection.”
Where the Academies have considerable catching up to do is in the integration of the social and behavioral sciences into overall future plans for the Middle East and the other Muslim countries. These are important for any longer term merger between science and issues of economic and social development. How much nation-building the U.S. will ultimately attempt in the Middle East and Central Asia is problematical right now, but Academy people feel that any permanent defeat of terrorism will require exactly that.
Nothing much beyond planning is happening now. Indeed a search of the publications and studies list of the social sciences board shows nothing in the way of studies relevant to understanding connections between terrorism, culture, education, or reform.
The Academies’ director of international programs John Boright says groundwork of that sort needs to be laid. One first-step approach Boright says the Academies are taking has to do with a series of dialogues with the Russian Academy of Sciences on relationships between industrial and ethnic societies. The Russians, coming off their tragically destructive quelling of the Chechnya rebellion, initially proposed the discourse. Boright says the Academies had their doubts at first, “but we became convinced that they were absolutely sincere.”
“We had a joint meeting and the Americans got to talk to a lot of Chechnyans,” he says. “We thought we could do more to help the Russians than they us. But the perspective changed in the process in that the Russians have an institutional framework for dealing with these issues and seemed to be well ahead of the Americans dealing with them. So now we’re geographically expanding the focus to explicitly address how ethnic tensions might relate to international security in general.”
For years the Academies have been working with counterpart academies in Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt in forging an equitable water resources plan and policy for that region. At lot of dialogue has been needed, which needs to be stepped up. The agenda has already been expanded into other areas of science and technology—telemedicine, micronutrient deficiencies, and biodiversity. “It’s very hard to work in the Middle East,” says Boright. “The last two or three meetings have had to be called off. Everything is delicate. Right we’re trying to put together a meeting in Washington.”
Boright is also placing high hopes on interactions between the U.S. Academies and those of the developing countries. “We have this club of all the academies of the world called the interacademy panel. The Secretariat is the Third World Academy of Sciences in Trieste. The executive committee consists of representatives from Turkey, Indonesia, and the president of African Academy of Sciences, Mohammed Hassan of the Sudan. “One thing we’re thinking of doing is working with some of the academies within the Islamic countries and focusing on science as a cross cutting need of people.” Another suggestion is that a Pugwash-like conference be planned among scientists of all relevant countries. George Rathjens, Pugwash secretary general, says he plans to raise the matter in the forthcoming Pugwash board meeting in London.
Whatever happens, and it is clear that all options are open as everyone attempts to understand this extradimensional “war.” Branscomb says the Academies will also want to know how it might change the character of science as work progresses. “We’ll also need to think hard and see if we have something to say about how the whole R&D enterprise in this country might be altered by this new circumstance,” he says.
“We all remember that the R&D enterprise was totally altered after
World War II. Now this isn’t World War II, but it will have some effect
in terms of how you do R&D in this kind of national security threat,
such as which agencies have which kinds of roles. We’re not going to try
to lay that out on an agency by agency basis, but we’ll try to identify
some of the principles. But for now, we need to figure out how to get the
university community constructively coupled to those parts of government
that need a new kind of understanding.”
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