Today’s National Challenge
Helping Americans maintain their freedom, security, and quality of life in the face of worldwide terrorism and devastating natural disasters has become a national priority — and an intensely difficult challenge.
Sandia National Laboratories is honored to support its sponsors in meeting this challenge by applying capabilities and expertise gained through our longstanding stewardship of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. We also have comprehensive programs to protect our armed forces stationed at home and abroad and to maintain the security of physical assets. Moreover, we actively partner with others — the civilian response community, other laboratories, universities, and industry — to research, develop, and demonstrate advanced systems and technologies.
Applying Our Expertise to Meet Today’s Challenges
Defending against weapons of mass destruction
Sandia creates robust technologies and integrates them into operational strategies to help the nation prevent and respond to attacks involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Our work includes the following:
- Applying decades of expertise to assess risks and understand threats
- Developing technologies that enable rapid and precise detection of radiological, nuclear, chemical, and biological WMD
- Building integrated, networked detection systems for protecting critical facilities and events of national importance
Protecting our borders and securing transportation
Stopping WMD and terrorists before they penetrate our borders is the best way of securing our homeland. However, security measures added at borders must preserve the flow of commerce critical to our nation’s economic health. Sandia’s layered approach includes the following:
- Playing a strong role in international programs to deploy technologies and systems “upstream” to intercept clandestine transport of undesirable people and materials and to monitor shipping containers from point of origin to port of entry
- Conducting research on 3D facial recognition algorithms to help border inspectors perform efficient, nonintrusive surveillance
- Developing comprehensive simulations of border crossing operations to assess new technologies and operating procedures before introducing them into the actual environment
Protecting the nation’s physical and information infrastructures
The critical elements of our infrastructure — electricity, transportation, emergency response, water, and financial systems — are increasingly interdependent. Working primarily through the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), which is operated jointly by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, Sandia helps infrastructure owners and policymakers understand and prevent infrastructure failures in the following ways:
- Creating detailed knowledge of infrastructure disruptions and interdependencies that can be applied to planning, investment, and emergency management
- Advancing cybersecurity tools to counter new online threats
- Performing “red team” assessments that help cybersystem owners strengthen vulnerabilities to resist attacks
Mitigating attacks
Adapting knowledge acquired over decades of protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, Sandia has developed an array of methods and technologies for mitigating attacks on our homeland. Examples include the following:
- Providing simulation-based training tools to help officials better prepare for attacks by understanding how decisions help or hinder a response strategy
- Creating training and vulnerability assessments for local and national organizations — including hosting the training of 1,200 personnel in advanced bomb-disablement technology
- Building teams of expert personnel who can rapidly deploy worldwide to provide technical assistance in the event of a WMD incident
A sampling of Sandia projects in these areas includes the following:
- Sandia has collaborated with other national laboratories on this project, which has placed networks of aerosol sampling units in major U.S. cities to help local officials gain early warning of a biological attack. To extend BioWatch to high-profile facilities, Sandia devised optimal architectures for locating the collectors inside each building and designed systems now used in major transportation hubs.
- We use ultraviolet laser-induced fluorescence to differentiate between bioaerosols and other particles (e.g., dust or diesel fumes) in this project, which is a payload designed for an airborne platform.
- This system was developed for the Department of Homeland Security and is designed to provide swift, yet effective, protection at high-profile events. We tested this system at a series of Oakland A’s games and found that the system would indeed help emergency responders save more lives in the event of a terrorist attack.
- Sandia has developed a handheld microChemLab system that rapidly detects and identifies chemical and biological agents. We are partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the BioBriefcase project, a compact, highly sensitive system for detecting a broad spectrum of biological agents.
- Trace explosives detectors can find tiny amounts of explosive materials on a person, vehicle, or other objects. Sandia is involved in a variety of projects using this technology, one of which is Sentinel, a walk-through portal developed by Sandia and licensed to Smiths Detection. Sentinel portals are appearing in airports across the country.
- Port, transportation, and border officials use information gained from models and simulations developed by Sandia to create security systems that intelligently integrate technology and procedures.
- Sandia has reincarnated its lab-on-a chip technologies developed in the 1990s for detecting biotoxins and chemical agents. These technologies are now used in the form of a five-pound, handheld medical diagnostic device that can analyze bodily fluids such as saliva and blood and detect certain diseases. Through research funded by the National Institutes of Health, Sandia has succeeded in achieving something that could revolutionize medical diagnostics, in addition to providing preliminary screening for systemic diseases and exposure to biological and chemical warfare reagents.
