Protecting Infrastructure from Attack

U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Andrea Lynn,
Humanities/Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; [email protected]

TERRORISM Protecting infrastructure from attack is subject of graduate seminar

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In a pleasant, bright conference room on the University of Illinois campus, four professors and 13 students come together once a week to consider the unthinkable.

They are participants in a new interdisciplinary graduate seminar on terrorism. The course, "Protection of Critical Infrastructure Against Terrorist Attack," may be the first of its kind on a U.S. campus. The U. of I. Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security (ACDIS) offers the seminar, with funds from the Ford Foundation.

The faculty members, who represent physics, math, civil and environmental engineering, and the military, lead discussions on the effects of high explosives on structures and occupants; use of chemical and biological weapons on humans, agricultural crops and animals; and cyber attacks on control and communication systems. Later, the class will explore terrorist motivation and the role of the media, then evaluate policy strategies for dealing with terrorist threats.

Critical infrastructures include telecommunications, banking and finance, energy, transportation and essential government services.

According to Jeremiah Sullivan, a physics professor and member of the seminar team, the course is "a problem-solving exercise -- an attempt to identify and understand the technologies that terrorists might use, and then ask how attacks might be prevented, and if they do occur, how to mitigate the damage and respond in the most effective way."

The exercise involves reading reams of papers "from the bureaucracy," Sullivan said, including Presidential Decision Directives, white papers and Attorney General Janet Reno's remarks at a workshop on protecting critical national infrastructure. The students also read selections from "The Turner Diaries" and "The Anarchist Cookbook."

One of the problems in this area rife with problems is that there is no "currently coherent national policy" for dealing with large-scale attacks on infrastructure and people, Sullivan said.

"It is a policy-poor subject in the sense that there hasn't been enough time and enough work thinking through what we can do and setting priorities," he said. In addition, "the President's Commission [on Critical Infrastructure Protection] didn't indicate how the government could persuade private industry, which owns most of the critical infrastructure, to cooperate."

As a consequence, "Even though we currently have strong calls for activity and program development from the president, protection of critical infrastructure is not something that any one agency or level of government could carry off alone."

Still, one thing is clear: Dealing with terrorist attacks will require increased cooperation among agencies -- including the Department of Defense and the FBI, Sullivan said, "and it will require cooperation down to the first responders -- local fire and police departments. This is not something that's done overnight or is done easily. Moreover, civil rights and individual freedoms must be protected."

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