President Bush proposed the creation of a national research center at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dedicated to protecting Americans from biological weapons and other potential methods of terrorist attack in his Homeland Security Act of 2002, released on June 19. The bill will be presented to Congress on June 27.

This is a clarification of an earlier proposal, which suggested that the Office of Homeland Security would assume control of the U.S. nuclear laboratories from the Dept. of Energy, which currently oversees the laboratories. These laboratories include Sandia National Laboratory as well as UC-managed Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos.

Livermore already has anti-terrorism programs and is the primary federal research facility concerned with anthrax and its detection. A portable anthrax-monitoring system designed at Livermore was used at the 2002 Winter Olympics.

-Nexus Staff Report