WASHINGTON – Nearly three decades before the September 11 attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological “dirty bombs” to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents obtained by the Associated Press.

“Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss,” Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.

The group was formed in September 1972 by President Nixon after Palestinian Arab commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. The committee involved people as diverse as Henry Kissinger and a young Rudolph Giuliani, the once-secret documents show.

“It is vital that we take every possible action ourselves and in concert with other nations designed to assure against acts of terrorism,” Mr. Nixon wrote in asking his secretary of state, William Rogers, to oversee the task force.

The full committee met only once, in October 1972, to organize, but its experts did get together twice a month over nearly five years to identify threats and debate solutions, the memos show.

Eventually, the group’s influence waned as competing priorities, a change of presidents ushered in by Watergate, bureaucratic turf battles, and a lack of spectacular domestic attacks took their toll. But before that happened, the panel identified many of the same threats that would confront President Bush at the dawn of the 21st century.

The experts worried that terrorists might gather loose nuclear materials for a “dirty bomb” that could devastate an American city by spreading lethal radioactivity. “This is a real threat, not science fiction,” National Security Council staffer Richard T. Kennedy wrote his boss, Mr. Kissinger, in November 1972.

Committee members identified commercial jets as a particular vulnerability, but raised concerns that airlines would not pay for security improvements such as tighter screening procedures and routine baggage inspections.

“The trouble with the plans is that airlines and airports will have to absorb the costs and so they will scream bloody murder should this be required of them,” according to a White House memo from 1972. “Otherwise, it is a sound plan which will curtail the risk of hijacking substantially.”

Though the CIA routinely updated the committee on potential terrorist threats and plots, task force members learned quickly that intelligence gathering and coordination was a weak spot, just as Mr. Bush would later discover.

Long before he was mayor and helped New York City recover from the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Mr. Giuliani told the committee in May 1976 that he feared legal restrictions were thwarting federal agents from collecting intelligence unless there had been a violation of the law.