NEWS OF THE WEEK NATIONAL
SECURITY
PROTECTING THE HOMELAND Presidential aide explains, defends White House strategy
A
TOP OFFICIAL IN THE
W h i t e House Office of Homeland Security (OHS) explained and defended President George W Bush's National Strategy for Homeland Security issuedJuly 16, and his earlier proposal for a Department of Homeland Security at a Brookings Institution forum last week. "There is no perfect template forwhat ahomeland security strategy should look like," said Richard A. Falkenrath, special assistant to the President and senior OHS director for policy and plans. And the strategy document "is not an operational plan," he said. As developed, the document breaks homeland security into 10 basic areas and 84 specific activities. Those 10 areas are intelligence and warning, border and transportation security domestic counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, catastrophic threats, emergency preparedness and response, law, science and technology information sharing, and international cooperation. Falkenrath admits that "this strategy is incomplete, as it does not deal with the international dimensions of homeland security" It doesn't address the war on terrorism, which the Administration defines as a component of national security. Indeed, Philip Zelikow, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and a forum participant, criticized this bifurcation. He believes "homeland security and national security will eventually be treated as indistinguishable." The Administration plans to use the document "to structure HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
the fiscal '04 budget explicitly around the [first] six areas identified for homeland security," Falkenrath said. The document will be used to set priorities among the 84 activities, and "for organizing the interagency process and for setting specific milestones for developing the operational plans we need," he explained. O n June 6 —weeks before OHS released its national strategy— the President sent Congress
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"a very spare and parsimonious bill," just 35 pages long, creating the Department of Homeland Security, Falkenrath said. "We wanted just enough law to create the department and give it tools to succeed." The Administration can work with the bill passed by the House, Falkenrath said, but the Senate bill now being debated "is a different story" That bill, he said, contains "no reorganization authority no transfer authority... and there is a lack of personnel flexibility" The President has asked for authority to move 5% of any budget account to another account to pay for the transition. If thefinalbill does not contain some transfer authority and other management flexibility—especially personnel flexibility—the President will veto it, he said.-L0IS EMBER
Falkenrath
SCIENCE
New Method Reveals Surface Structure Of Complex Crystals easuring just a few angstroms in thickness, the topmost atomic layers of solids hardly take up any space. But don't be fooled by their tiny size. Surface layers often govern the properties of solids such as heterogeneous catalysts and thin-film structures. Yet despite the importance of surfaces to many areas of science and technology, the surface crystal structures of only a few of the simplest materials are known. That list is set to grow now that researchers at Northwestern University have demonstrated a technique for determining the surface structure of complex materials. By coupling atomic resolution transmission electron microscopy methods with quantum mechanical calculations, graduate student Natasha Erdman, materials science professor Laurence D. Marks, chemistry professor Kenneth R. Poeppelmeier, and coworkers have determined the surface crystal
M
structure of strontium titanate, SrTi03 [Nature, 419,55 (2002)]. Unlike SrTi03's bulk structure, which is made up of alternating SrO and Ti02 layers (Sr, gray balls; 0, blue; Ti not shown), the group notes that the crystal's surface is composed of two Ti02 layers in which the relative positions of titanium (red) and oxygen (green) differ significantly from the bulk. "The results suggest that a new era of crystallography is beginning," says Michael O'Keeffe, a chemistry professor at Arizona State University. In a commentary appearing in the same issue of Nature, O'Keeffe points out that SrTi03, which is an archetypical member of the perovskite family of oxides, is often used as a substrate for epitaxial growth for other perovskites, including ferroelectric materials and compounds that exhibit colossal magnetoresistance and superconductivity.-MITCH JAC0BY
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