done. That is one of the spin-offs that we see and that is one of the things that I think is important as we go through this process. The other is some of the military process that we went through. The large detector that you see on your left which says GID-3 is also called a CADNBA, chemical agent detector, nerve and blister agents. It.does it near real-time. If there is a cloud of agent that passes over it, very quickly it will alarm.

Another device called a chemical agent monitor, however, is just that. It is a monitoring device, and the military had two different thoughts in mind. First, if an attack occurred, I need to know as soon as possible so I can take protective measures. Second, if in fact the attack occurred and equipment was contaminated or individuals were contaminated, I need the capability to monitor that

area.

That technology is also one of those technologies that you look as a technology handoff because, as the chairman stated so eloquently at the beginning, what we are looking at with our first responders is that in many cases they have arrived on the scene and the event has already occurred. It is almost in my mind-set a forensics issue that we are looking at now, in which that chemical agent monitor is a type of technology that is extremely important for that, because now it gives you the ability to be able to take a look and find out what occurred at that site rather than having a chemical agent detector which was meant to let you know in ad

vance.

Sort of very briefly, those are some ideas and thoughts on technology transfer that I have seen come from the military and be made available to our first responders.

Mr. PICKETT. More specifically, doesn't the military have specific units that have been trained up to deal with this very issue of detecting and analyzing chemical and biological agents? What have we learned from that, and has it been made available to other organizations, the National Guard, for example?

General DOESBURG. In fact, 70 percent of our chemical units in the Army today are located in the Guard and Reserve. And in fact the training that is provided to our Guard and Reserve is the exact same training provided to our active component with regard to all of our chemical agent detectors and our biological agent detectors. The current biological agent detection company that we have in the Army today is in fact a Reserve company. It in fact has been on alert for Desert Thunder, and it has been on alert on at least two other occasions for possible deployment to in fact provide support to the active component or to our installations as necessary. So currently the training level is there. Also the equipment level is quickly getting there for our Reserve and Guard component, and I think that is important to know because that training for those units and their availability within their states and their local communities is of course of extreme importance to our first responders, to our counties and to our governors in the case of an event occurring.

Mr. PICKETT. So how many states-the Guards in how many states now have this capability?

Secretary CRAGIN. I think we have 127 units that are being trained up in assisting local responders. They are not there yet and

will not be until probably the end of this fiscal year, beginning of the next fiscal year. I can't tell you on a State-by-State basis, but I would be happy to provide it for the record where each of these units are. But please keep in mind that these are chemical and bio units that are designed to do the warfight.

Mr. PICKETT. I understand.

Secretary CRAGIN. And generally speaking if you have a chem/bio situation, you try to get away from it; whereas first responders, they must go into it, and our folks are not trained for that at this juncture either. That is the next challenge that we all face.

Mr. PICKETT. They are trained to identify?

Secretary CRAGIN. They are trained and they have the equipment to identify it if in fact

Mr. PICKETT. The Guard units, I'm speaking of.

Secretary CRAGIN. If in fact they are in the warfight. But what we are trying to do now is to train them to come to assist responders in dealing with decontamination aspects. They are not going to be in a position to be called up to make the detection because they are traditional Reservists. The ones that can assist first responders in detection activities are the rapid assessment and initial detection teams, which are full time personnel specifically dedicated to this mission. And at this juncture we have one in each of the ten FEMA regions, but we are requesting five or six in fiscal year 2000. Mr. PICKETT. You mentioned earlier that you can provide the distribution of the other type units around?

Secretary CRAGIN. Yes.

Mr. PICKETT. I would like to have that for the record. Thank you. [The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page 290.]

Mr. WELDON. If we take the ten RAID teams, I would assume one would be put in Alaska and one in Hawaii?

Secretary CRAGIN. Of the ten that are now positioned, neither are in Alaska or Hawaii.

Mr. WELDON. So they don't have much help?

Secretary CRAGIN. In fiscal year 1999, they don't.

Mr. WELDON. Let's take my district, 30 minutes from Philadelphia and 30 minutes from Wilmington, Delaware. I have an incident. How quickly can I expect a RAID team to be on the site, if I am worried about what I have in my town that might be the target of an incident? How quickly can I expect a response from the RAID team?

Secretary CRAGIN. We have looked at the maximum response time of four hours. But keep in mind we have tried to station these elements where we have airlift capability and things of that nature, so that as soon as the governor picks up the phone, through his emergency management officials they can be on the way. And that is frankly one of the reasons why we placed these critical elements under state control, so that we wouldn't have to jump over Federal hoops in order to immediately get them into

Mr. WELDON. I think that is wise but my concern is, I think we are creating a false sense of security in this country, and I am not criticizing anyone for this. I think we are creating a false sense of security by letting people know that we have RAID teams, and I think four hours is optimistic. If you go to rural areas, it is prob

ably going to take more than four hours. You are going to have so much damage done in those four hours, you could wipe out tens of thousands of people before we even activate the RAID team through the network.

And I have trouble with Justice saying they are going to have a grant program because that grant program cannot meet the needs that are out there. I do not want to not give any money there and create an incident where this Congress has to act to give the support, and force the states to come up with mechanisms to help these emergency responders out.

Six of the states have low-interest loan programs where the emergency responders can take low-interest loans out to buy the equipment. I do not think that the Federal Government should buy it all, but we ought to be doing things to give them the tools to allow them to buy this equipment, and we are not doing that now. We are not doing that now.

Equipping 125 of the largest cities is important, but almost all of those large cities are paid departments and they are all understaffed. They can't even handle the incidents they have. This city here, the EMS units are on the streets 24 hours a day, they never get in the station. My concern is in training the largest cities, they don't even have enough resources to take care of their ongoing needs.

I think we are creating a false sense of security in this country. We need to let the people in America know that we are not taking the first steps to deal with the first few hours of an incident of this type that might occur.

Secretary CRAGIN. I don't disagree with your assessment of where we are, and I don't think that the President disagrees with your assessment. I think everyone recognizes that we have a very, very long road to go, and we have to start.

And I can tell you candidly that the team that was looking at the RAID elements as well as leveraging the resources resident in the Guard and Reserve came in and recommended that we establish one of these RAID elements in every single one of these States and Territories. And Secretary Cohen said, look, we need to walk before we can run. We need to evaluate these units. We need to learn about these units. We need to train them. We need to figure out if in fact we can find and attract and retain nuclear medicine specialists that are resident in these elements. So this is a first step on a journey.

Dr. Hamre has agreed to set up essentially a virtual mall that will list equipment that first responders can identify. But the critical word is resources. Where do we get the resources, and can this country afford to expend dollars in every one of the 32,000 emergency responder units to have these suites available, or do we have to rely on mobility to take these suites where we need them.

Mr. WELDON. This is not meant to be critical of you or your people. We support it and will continue to give you more funding than what the administration asks for in most cases.

My concern is that the approach has been largely a top-down bureaucratic approach, organize the top and work our way down. The greatest threat to loss of life is from the bottom up. They are going to lose their lives. It is not going to be a bureaucrat sitting in the

Pentagon or somebody in Health and Human Services (HHS's) headquarters in the city. It is going to be those people where the rubber meets the road and trying to respond to an impossible situation. We have to think from the bottom up and get the resources to them.

I don't think that should be through DOD's budget, and I don't think that DOJ can think that they can be the cure-all. We need to address this as a country, and in my opinion we are not doing it. Addressing it through the Nunn-Lugar program is wrong. This should not be a DOD issue. We should not be trying to raid the defense budget to make it work, and I only say that because I am concerned that we will not be able to meet the needs that are out there.

Mr. Pickett has a follow-up.

Mr. PICKETT. No, we covered it.

Mr. WELDON. There was one other question on restrictions on biological defense programs, should restrictions be changed on that. Can you get back to us on the record in terms of the biological agent threats? We would appreciate that. And with that we will thank you all, and will convene our next panel. We appreciate your efforts.

[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page 285.]

We are pleased to have you here. Our second panel is other agency research and development support programs for domestic emergency preparedness, and we are very pleased to have Dr. Page Stoutland, director, Chemical and Biological Nonproliferation Program at the Department of Energy; Dr. William Raub, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Science Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services; David G. Boyd, director, Office of Science and Technology, National Institute of Justice, Department of Justice; and Dr. Randall Murch, deputy assistant director, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory, and again I would ask you to get your labs to come to our national technology expose' so we can show the kind of good things that you are doing.

With that, your statements are accepted as part of the record. We will let each of you say your comments. If you would like to in your comments comment on anything that I said or Mr. Pickett has said, we would welcome that. We will start off with Dr. Stoutland and then go to Dr. Raub, and then Mr. Boyd and Dr. Murch.

Dr. Stoutland, the floor is yours.

STATEMENT OF DR. PAGE STOUTLAND, DIRECTOR, CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL NONPROLIFERATION PROGRAM, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Dr. STOUTLAND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, for this opportunity to appear before you and to tell you about the Department of Energy efforts to support domestic emergency preparedness for responding to the terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. I will begin with a brief description of some of the Department of Energy's role in responding to threats of nuclear terrorism, and I will spend the majority of my time

today speaking about our efforts in countering the threats of chemical and biological terrorism.

With respect to nuclear terrorism, the Department of Energy has a comprehensive set of programs to provide a national technical response to any nuclear or radiological emergency within the U.S. These programs draw upon the capabilities and skilled personnel from throughout the nuclear complex. Two of these programs, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team or NEST and the Radiological Assistance Program or RAP, are of specific interest to today's hearing.

Our NEST team provides technical expertise and support in the resolution of nuclear terrorist crises, works in conjunction with the Department of Defense, the FBI, and includes the capability to locate, identify, diagnose, assess and render safe or disable a terrorist nuclear device. A technology integration program is in place to identify emergency response operational needs requiring technology solutions.

Our Radiological Assistance Program operates from eight_regional locations in the U.S., works directly with first responders, and will usually arrive on the scene within two to four hours.

With respect to supporting research and development for these teams, these efforts are an integral part of DOE's program and our commitment to reducing the nuclear threat. I will just give you one important example, in that we are working with the NEST team to deploy radiation detection equipment or a concept along streets and highways in a perimeter defense mode to detect the movement of a nuclear device.

Mr. WELDON. Is this the Area-Wide Tracking System that we saw a couple of years ago?

Dr. STOUTLAND. That is correct.

Mr. WELDON. There is a question about that being funded. Is that fully funded?

Dr. STOUTLAND. I believe at the present time, and I would defer to my nuclear colleagues behind me.

Second, we have touched on coordination today. That obviously is very important, more important than ever before. We work through the other mechanisms that were discussed earlier, but specifically a couple of things have happened in the last year.

The Department of Energy has entered into a formal agreement with the Departments of Treasury and Justice to provide state-ofthe-art solutions for fighting crime and terrorism; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories specifically signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the FBI to provide some of their capabilities to support the FBI in their technical investigative needs. In addition to these programs, several of our national laboratories are partnered with local law enforcement to provide direct support to first responders.

I would now like to turn, however, the remainder of my remarks to the chemical and biological efforts. The Department of Energy's Chemical and Biological Nonproliferation Program was initiated in fiscal year 1997 in response to the Defense of Weapons of Mass Destruction Act.

The mission of this program is to develop, demonstrate and deliver systems and supporting technologies that will lead to major