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In the aftermath of September 11, the National Academies established the Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism to help the government develop a science and technology program plan and research strategy for dealing with terrorism.
A key element of the National Academies'' multifaceted effort to assist the government in its war against terrorism, the new committee is headed by Lewis Branscomb of the Belfer Center and Richard Klausner of the National Academies. It is charged with helping the federal government effectively use the nation''s and the world''s scientific and technical capabilities in a timely response to the threat of catastrophic terrorism. BCSIA board member Ashton Carter also serves on the committee.
The goal is to provide guidance that will assist the government with both its near-term needs for scientific and technical advice and its longer-term needs for creating, through research, needed capabilities the U.S. does not Terrorism in the Spotlight have and strengthening America''s institutional capacity for combating terrorism.
The committee aims to identify top priorities and describe key issues in the application of science and technology to making society safer. The short-term focus is on science and technology applications that are relevant to the most pressing issues and/or that will yield the most generic solutions. Attention will also be paid to ideas that might arise from new science and new inventions, even if they might not emerge for ten years or more.
Overall, the goal of this activity is to convince the U.S. government that the science and technology community can provide important contributions to the war against terrorism in both the short and long term.
A longer version of this article appeared earlier in the NAS newsletter.
"The role of science, technology and medicine in the current national security crisis is critical because terrorists use the tools created by science to attack us. The challenge is very different from any the scientific and technical community has faced before."
--Lewis Branscomb