10 April 1998
White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry briefed. Following is the White House transcript: (begin transcript) THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary April 10, 1998 PRESS BRIEFING BY MIKE MCCURRY The Briefing Room MCCURRY: All the news of the day having been made, the press secretary arrives to shed no light on anything. .............. Q: Is there a readout of the genetic engineering and biological weapons roundtable? MCCURRY: The readout is very consistent with what I told most of you the session would be about this morning. The President had an excellent review of current capacity with respect to biological weapons, what the threat is and could be of use of biological weapons by either a foreign adversary or here at home. They reviewed procedures that are in place to protect U.S. troops abroad from the threat of biological weapons and also what we can do here if we ever faced any terrorist use of biological weapons. The President heard from a collection of the government's leading experts on the subject and was grateful to have their wisdom about a subject that he has addressed publicly on numerous occasions. It was a good session and will lead to further consideration of the issue. Although this was not designed to be any decisionmaking meeting or implement any specific plan, it clearly reflects the President's desire to keep this issue front and center as we assess threats to our national security in the post-Cold War environment. Q: Though it wasn't designed for decisionmaking, did the President come up with anything that might lead to something specific down the road? MCCURRY: Not necessarily. I mean, just to continue the work that we're doing to both understand the threat, to assess the risk, and then to identify counter-measures that are suggested. And there's a lot of good discussion of that and that will lead to further thinking and further review and work by the interagency group that was represented around the Cabinet table. But I don't want to suggest there's any specific plan that arose from this meeting. I think there's further work to be done on that and the President intends to keep it very high up in the thinking of the National Security Council and the other agencies that were represented. ............ (end transcript)