NEPA and Terrorism: Is It Time for a Paradigm Shift?

Most National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents and other similar planning processes have tended to focus almost exclusively on “environmental” issues. Yet, today we find ourselves facing new problems and issues as we combat the war on terrorism. This article illustrates how NEPA and other similar planning processes can provide an essential key in helping to safeguard the nation's homeland from terrorism. As the reader will soon see, NEPA and other similar planning processes provide virtually all the essential elements necessary for performing a comprehensive, rigorous, and scientifically based process for planning for, scoping, and identifying potential terrorist scenarios, evaluating their impacts, and developing alternatives and mitigation measures that can reduce or eliminate potential threats to high-value terrorist targets. In particular, “standard” accident analyses provide a nearly perfect mechanism for performing the analysis of potential terrorist attacks. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.