Conference responds to terrorist threats

Thursday, 19 June, 2008

The Eurosatory conference on homeland security that took place yesterday and was attended by about 200 security specialists centred on the response to terrorist threats in urban areas. Fourteen speakers from the UK, Canada, France and the US talked about the preparedness (or not, as the case may be) of their respective governments or cities to respond to a major terrorist attack and the lessons learned in the wake of recent incidents.

The speakers all agreed that the response to a nuclear, biological, chemical or radiation attack in an urban sector had yet to be worked out. "We have no integrated plans to think through how we'd deal with difficult scenarios," said Christine Wormuth, a senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

London's deputy mayor Richard Barnes, who is also the author of the report on the 2005 London bombings, said that although many improvements had been made in emergency response to major catastrophes following the London bombings of July 2005, "the great debate is what do we do under the impact of a dirty bomb?"

Dominique Antonini, former chief of aviation security and facilitation, ICAO, Canada, stressed that anti-terrorist measures at airports were focused on the passenger and their luggage and he deplored that little was being done on screening cargo, nothing on the protection of terminal buildings and sensitive installations and nothing to protect the areas surrounding airports from which MANPAD attacks could be launched.