by Susan Katz Keating

About the author: Susan Katz Keating is a freelance writer.

In retrospect, the warnings of the past seem eerily prescient. For years, experts insisted that although the United States was safe from conventional attack, the nation was highly vulnerable to terrorism. In 1996, then-Sen. Sam Nunn, D- Ga., issued this blunt prediction: “It’s not a matter of if,but when”a terrorist attack would occur on U.S. soil.

Now, in the wake of the unprecedented carnage wreaked upon our nation by terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001, security experts say we must work quickly to shore up defenses against another form of attack that is nothing less than nightmarish.

Biological Terror

“I am convinced that biological terror will strike the United States,” said Dr. Kenneth Alibek, who...