Candidate Notes on 05-WMD-16

05-WMD-16 on Mar 31, 2005

The threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons proliferation has transformed over the past two decades. The technical expertise required to produce these weapons has become increasingly widespread, while many of the materials needed to make them are widely available on the open market. Meanwhile, terrorists have expressed a growing demand for these weapons and demonstrated their willingness to use them. The Intelligence Community has not kept pace with these events.

Rather than attempt a top-to-bottom assessment of the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons threat, here we focus on relatively new aspects of the threat that present specific intelligence challenges, and that--in our view--require additional Intelligence Community reforms beyond those discussed in our other chapters. We recommend that:

The DNI take several specific measures aimed at better collaboration between the intelligence and biological science communities;

The National Counter Proliferation Center develop and ensure the implementation of a comprehensive biological weapons targeting strategy. This entails gaining real-time access to non-traditional information sources; filtering open source data; and devising specific collection initiatives directed at the resulting targets;

Intelligence Community, along with other relevant government bodies, support a more effective framework to interdict shipments of chemical, biological, and nuclear proliferation concern; and

The Intelligence Community better leverage existing legal and regulatory mechanisms to improve collection and analysis on chemical, biological, and nuclear threats.