Americans are uninformed and ill-prepared for an attack with weapons of mass destruction, largely because the government is afraid of causing a panic by issuing more high-profile, publicly available information on the subject, say experts.
“The lack of any specific program to actively educate the public in matters of NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical)/WMD (weapons of mass destruction) awareness and preparedness is the Achilles heel of the entire national plan,” said Dr. Eric Taylor of the University of Louisiana’s Department of Chemistry, in prepared comments to the 2nd Annual Decontamination/WMD Symposium on Bioterrorism, held Sept. 27-29 at the University of Maryland in Rockville.
“It is not only the fear upon which terrorism thrives, but also the ignorance of the targeted victims. By not implementing an education program in matters of NBC/WMD – especially personal defensive issues – for the public, the government, despite its stated intentions, in effect aids the terrorists in their bloody work,” he said.
A major reason the public has not been given much WMD education are lawmakers and other officials’ fears that such explicit details could create a public panic, Taylor said.
“The disinclination to educate the public is often rationalized as an attempt to avoid public panic,” he said. “Since the public will not be able to understand the technicalities of NBC/WMD weaponry,” the thinking goes, “it is better not to raise the subject with them,” he added.
“Educating the public does not mean offering them a series of crash graduate-level courses in physics, biochemistry or microbiology. It does mean bringing to their collective attention points and issues which they can easily understand but probably do not think about because it isn’t obvious to them in that specific context,” said Taylor.
Worse, some experts believe even emergency professionals are not adequately prepared to handle such attacks either.
“There is no study showing how prepared the American public is,” said Bob Bass, M.D., of the National Association of Emergency Medical Services Physicians. However, he added, “I do know from personal observation that there is great variability in how well [local emergency medical services] are prepared. I also suspect that we have a lot of work to get to where we need to be.”
“I am more concerned about the preparedness of our hospitals and medical/nursing community, which may well be on the front line of a biological event,” said Bass. “Over the past decade, our hospitals have had significant reductions in their capacity and hence ability to handle surges in demand.
“That is not reassuring, but September 11 was a wake up call,” he added.
“The American public may not be a collection of nuclear physicists, but they are not stupid either,” said Taylor. “As far as panic is concerned, how much less likely is panic when a community is hit with a significant NBC terrorist attack and people begin dying by the score, if not by the hundreds, over a few days, if not hours, and government appears incapable of stopping, much less preventing it?”
“Government risks two criticisms and blows to its credibility and assumed responsibility here. One is the less-than-successful interdiction of an NBC assault on the nation, and the second is keeping the public ignorant and defenseless in the face of a known or suspected NBC attack,” said Taylor.
Other experts have also found the public generally unprepared to deal with a rash of terrorist attacks.
Although the public is the ultimate target of any terrorist attack, “average citizens are left ignorant of the fundamentals of preparedness that even the lowest private in the U.S. Army is taught for survival,” said a CATO Institute paper discussing the subject of public readiness for terrorist attacks.
“The lack of any credible public education program in matters of awareness and response violates many entrenched principles of emergency management,” the paper said.
Public unpreparedness could become a major problem, the experts warn, noting that even some lawmakers have said new attacks against U.S. targets here at home could be in the offing following U.S. retaliatory attacks against Afghanistan this week.
The Washington Post quoted an anonymous senator Friday who said U.S. intelligence officials have predicted a 100 percent chance terrorists would attack the U.S. again if America attacked Afghanistan.
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