“On May 8 [2001], [President] Bush asked him [Dick Cheney] to conduct a thorough review of homeland security, an area that had long interested the vice president. His experience with continuity-of-government exercises had convinced Cheney the country was ill-prepared for what he saw was the gathering threat of biological and chemical weapons. It was an issue that animated him like no other. Just days earlier [May 7, 2001], he had told an interviewer [Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker] that the new national security paradigm in the post-Cold War era was ‘the threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction–bugs or gas, biological or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.’ ”
– Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Page 101