Current and Improved Biodefense Cost–Benefit Assessment

This chapter makes three essential points: (1) under current conditions of inadequate US biodefenses, a single catastrophic bioterrorist attack can kill more people than any single nuclear attack; (2) catastrophic bioterrorist attacks are difficult to deter or defend against, but their risks of massive potential fatalities can be prevented and mitigated by scientifically feasible, economically affordable, and politically acceptable means; and (3) cost-benefit assessment of improved biodefenses as describes in this chapter show how a dual net benefit of at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in deaths and damages and additional peacetime public health benefit to protect against deadly epidemics for an annual investment of under $10 billion. This paper presented a cost-benefit assessment of defense strategies against biological attacks, using analogies based on defense strategies that were used during the Cold War. The estimates of benefits are inevitably highly speculative, but they demonstrate beyond doubt a high pay-off. The results also imply that the almost obsessive preoccupation with airline and airport security represent a misallocation of scarce resources, because the costs of any kind of terrorist attack in that sector are almost negligible compared with the potential catastrophe from an undefended biological attack..