The Ulitimate Threat: Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction

 Alex P. Schmid, professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is currently Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations. The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and in no way reflect the positions of the United Nations. This article is based on one which first appeared in Terrorism and Political Violence 11, no. 4, and is reproduced here with permission of the author and Frank Cass Publishers.

The future may see a time when such a [nuclear] weapon may be constructed in secret and used suddenly and effectively with devastating power by a wilful nation or group against an unsuspecting nation or group of much greater size and material power.
                                                               —Henry Stimson to Harry Truman, 25 April 1945 

There are some truisms about terrorism: one is that terrorism is a “weapon of the weak”. Another is that “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead”. Both truisms, if they were true across the board, would indicate that the risk of terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is low. However, since the consequences of the use of WMD are far-reaching—that tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people can be killed in one single incident—one has to be alert to changes. Until now, terrorist acts by non-state actors have usually killed fewer than one hundred people in a single event, with only a few exceptions where a hundred or more were killed. Table 1 illustrates this. If the past predicts the future, it seems that we would not have to fear much from non-state terrorists who, by and large, stick to their proven weapons, the dynamite bomb and the gun. Compared to the fatality figures of contemporary wars and genocide, the losses caused by acts of terrorism, while tragic and traumatic on an individual scale, are modest.

 

 

 

Sources: US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technology against Terrorism: The Federal Effort (Washington, D.C: GPO, July 1991), p. 40; Richard A. Falkenrath, “Confronting Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Terrorism”, Survival 40, no. 3 (autumn 1998), p. 52; Brian M. Jenkins, “Future Trends in International Terrorism”, in Current Perspectives on International Terrorism, ed. Robert O. Slater and Michael Stohl (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 254; Database of PIOOM, the Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Causes of Human Rights Violations. 

 

 

On 20 January 1999, the president of the United States said that he had been persuaded by intelligence reports that it was “highly likely” that a terrorist group would launch or threaten a germ or chemical attack on American soil within the next five years. Bill Clinton said he hoped a major legacy of his presidency would be to stave off such unconventional attacks. He added that he would be delighted if, decades later, Americans looked back on any such threat as “the dog that didn’t bark”.

 

Other governments, basing themselves on roughly the same raw facts for threat assessment as are available to the Central Intelligence Agency, have reacted more cautiously. The recent American attempt to make the fight against WMD terrorist attacks a prominent part of the new NATO strategy has not been embraced by America’s NATO partners. All the American government was able to obtain in April 1999 on the occasion of NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit was a strengthening of NATO’s intelligence-service capabilities to detect plans for terrorist attacks, a larger staff at NATO headquarters to focus on this issue and an effort to educate the public about the growing threat of terrorists resorting to WMD.

Is the Threat Growing?

The terrorist threat is a hidden threat, and to assess the nature and seriousness of such a threat is difficult with, and especially without, access to classified intelligence. One of the changes in the terrorism of the last ten years is that terrorists no longer automatically claim credit (or what they used to call “assume responsibility”) for an attack. Postmodern terrorism’s anonymity feeds on one of the chief characteristics of what is currently called bioterrorism. Craig Venter, an American geneticist, noted in January 1999 that

 

There is no way we can easily distinguish between a bioterrorism event and an emerging pathogen [disease-causing microbe]. Virtually every human pathogen is something that can be used as a bioterrorism tool. We need better diagnostic tools to distinguish them.¹

 

When one tries to address the risks of nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism one deals with an issue where one has to walk a fine line between fear and paranoia on the one hand and prudence and disbelief on the other. This new threat is one that, if consummated, can have grave consequences but is also one that is widely regarded as still being of low probability.

 

In the 1970s, one expert on terrorism, J. Bowyer Bell, could still write about the prospect of nuclear terrorism in these terms:

 

The mix of motive, military and technological skills, resources and perceived vulnerability simply does not exist.²

 

And indeed, if one looks at the type of incidents between the mid-sixties and mid-eighties, one finds mainly ad hoc amateurish attacks against the nuclear power industry with a few cases of theft of nuclear materials, as illustrated in Table 2.

 

TABLE 2
Nuclear-Related Incidents, 1966–85
(by Type of Incident)

 

  

Source: Nuclear Control Institute in Co-operation with SUNY’s Institute for Studies in International Terrorism, 1986; cited in The 1987 World Almanac (New York, World Almanac 1997) p. 35.

 

 

Chemical and bacteriological attacks, however, were rare (mainly food-poisoning) and produced few casualties until one religious group—Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth), a millenarian Zen-Buddhist Japanese sect—had both a motive and the resources to execute chemical and biological terrorist attacks. Fortunately, Aum lacked the military and technological skills to match its evil intent with capability. This sect, responsible for the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway in March 1995, was founded in 1987 by Shoko Asahara, and allegedly had, at its peak, more than forty thousand followers in at least six countries. While Shoko Asahara, its leader, is imprisoned, several key members are still at large and 170 Aum members released from prison returned to Aum.³ The sect’s Japanese membership, down to five hundred after the March 1995 attack, has tripled again and is making money by selling “survival kits” for Armageddon, songs of Shoko Asahara as well as computer merchandise. It continues to have a website. In early April 1998, there was again a series of gas attacks around Tokyo—in one incident fifty people fell ill—whose authors remain unknown. Apart from a series of attempted and usually unsuccessful attacks by Aum, uses of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by terrorists are still rare, with hoaxes far outnumbering actual deployment.

Historical Use of WMD

One does not require sophisticated weapons to kill many people. The Hutu genociders in Rwanda mainly used machetes to kill eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less than three months in 1994. The Indian thugs killed one million innocent people by mere strangling during their 1,200-year history of sacrifices to Kali (Shiva), the Hindu goddess of terror and destruction. It was only in the Second World War that those weapons which we today call weapons of mass destruction were systematically used. Chemical weapons (e.g., Zyklon-B gas) were used by the Nazis against Jews, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners and others; biological weapons were used by the Japanese against the Chinese; and nuclear weapons were used by the Americans against the Japanese.

 

Chemical, biological and nuclear (fission or fusion) weapons are generally labelled weapons of mass destruction. A fourth category is sometimes included under the same label: the still untested radiological weapons. There are considerable differences in lethality. Radiological weapons consist of a combination of conventional high explosives and radioactive materials such as plutonium and can be used to contaminate an area with radioisotopes. Such weapons have a considerable long-term area-denial potential but their short-term lethality is presumably low (so far there are no recorded uses).

 

Chemical weapons demonstrated their lethality in the First World War when they produced one million casualties, of which more than ninety thousand were fatalities.

 

Nuclear fission weapons killed some seventy-five thousand and thirty-five thousand to forty thousand people instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The much more lethal thermonuclear (fusion) weapons have so far never been used against human beings.

 

Bacteriological (i.e., biological germ warfare) weapons killed and injured possibly hundreds of thousands of people in China in the Second World War. The potential of a bacteriological weapon, however, even surpasses a thermonuclear weapon which has a typical yield of 0.5 megatons (five hundred million tons of TNT—about twenty-five times the power of the plutonium bomb dropped on the people of Nagasaki). Both the United States and Russia had many weapons in the nine to twenty megaton range until MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) technology in the 1970s made such high-yield weapons obsolete. (The highest-yield hydrogen bomb ever exploded was a Russian test weapon of fifty-eight megatons—equivalent to almost five thousand Hiroshima-size bombs.)

 

Unlike thermonuclear weapons, biological weapons have been used in warfare. The awesome power of biological agents can be illustrated by three historical cases, of which only two actually illustrate usage as a weapon of war:

 

1. Plague: rat (rodent)–man transmitted disease, emerging from India and causing a first plague epidemic in China around 1330 where traders and Mongol armies spread it westwards.

Military use. In 1346, Mongol Tatars catapulted plague-infested corpses into the beleaguered, Genoa-controlled, city of Caffa (Feodosia in Crimea); pestilence broke out. The few survivors escaped by boat to Genoa where rats from the ship spread the plague in 1347. One quarter of the European population—more than twenty-five million people—had died by 1349 from the “Black Death”.

 

2. Smallpox (cowpox): caused by the highly contagious, person-to-person transmitted variola virus, it kills about 20 per cent of all people contracting it. Wild smallpox has been eradicated worldwide since 1977; laboratory samples still exist and could be reactivated and used against a young generation not inoculated. Ken Alibek, former deputy director of the “Biopreparat” (non–Ministry of Defence portion of the Soviet biological weapons programme), has alleged that the Soviet Union produced large quantities of smallpox virus in violation of a 1972 international treaty forbidding this. Smallpox immunity acquired by inoculation wears off after about twenty years. Today, most people are vulnerable again to smallpox, should it be used as a weapon.

Historical role in conquest of the Americas. In the sixteenth century the (approximately) seventy-five million Native American population had no resistance against European diseases such as measles and smallpox. Within half a century, the population of Mexico was decimated from more than thirty million to fewer than three million Indians.
Military use. In 1754, local traders created a smallpox epidemic among Indians in western Pennsylvania by giving them blankets exposed to the smallpox virus. The Indians were decimated by the disease.

 

3. Influenza: three types (A, B, C) of the flu virus exist, plus variations. Symptoms are inflammation of the respiratory tract, fever and muscular pain.

Post–First World War epidemic. The Spanish flu of 1918–19 killed in a few months an estimated twenty million persons—twice as many victims as had been killed in four years of warfare.

 

Weapons of mass destruction, especially biological and nuclear ones, are terrible no matter who uses them, whether non-state terrorists, state-sponsored or state actors. We have now been living for more than half a century under the threat of nuclear WMD. While there have been some tense moments such as the Cuban missile crisis, the “balance of terror” between the Soviet Union and the West also created stability and predictability, now looked back on with nostalgia in some quarters. The post–Cold War situation in which weapons of mass destruction may be within reach of non-territorial actors who cannot be deterred in the way territorial actors can, creates an instability we have yet to learn to cope with. The superpower “balance of terror”, it is feared in some quarters, will be replaced by super-terrorism. For super-terrorism, one does not need a nuclear weapon. An attack with a conventional weapon on a tanker carrying liquefied gas as it passes near a densely populated area could cause up to fifty thousand fatalities. Roughly the same number could have died if the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York had been collapsed by the bomb placed in the garage underneath the building in 1993. The blasting of a large dam with conventional explosives could, in some parts of the world, kill over two hundred thousand people.

 

Ehud Sprinzak has distinguished between four different types of terrorism:⁴

 

1. Mass-casualty terrorism, such as the failed attempt to down the World Trade Center in New York.

 

2. State-sponsored chemical or biological weapons (CBW) terrorism, whereby a rogue state passes know-how and funds to terrorist groups.

 

3. Small-scale chemical or biological terrorist attacks.

 

4. Super-terrorism—the strategic use of chemical or biological agents to bring about a major disaster with death tolls ranging in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

 

Sprinzak notes that these “four types of terrorism are causally unrelated”.⁵ That may be so. Yet we live in an age of networking, and transnational criminal organisations (TCOs) might be the networker that could tie some of these types together.

Russian Perils

It has been said that the nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union is “supply driven”—that there are more sellers than buyers. That was true in the early years but it is not clear whether it is still true now. Germany saw an increase in cases of nuclear smuggling from forty-one in 1991 to 267 in 1994, followed by a drop in 1995 (see Table 3).⁶ This could mean two things: greater control by the Russian and German authorities over nuclear smuggling, or, more ominously, greater professionalism by smugglers, with a declining detection rate. There are no clear signs that security at the nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union where weapons-useable materials are located has been significantly upgraded in the last few years. The fall in interceptions in Germany might also be due to a re-routing of smuggled materials to Turkey and other gates to the Middle East. An indication of this is the rise in interceptions of substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium in Turkey in recent years.

 

 

TABLE 3
Nuclear Smuggling Cases in Germany

 

 

 

Source: CSIS Global Organized Crime Project; cited in James L. Ford, “Nuclear Smuggling: How Serious a Threat?”, Strategic Forum, no. 59, January 1996 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies) p. 5.

 

 

Why might TCOs be interested in drawing more attention from intelligence services to themselves when they can still make good money with smuggling drugs and trafficking in prostitutes and refugees? One reason may be that they are already in the business of smuggling weapons and that some of the same contacts for conventional weapons from Warsaw Pact arsenals also offer them unconventional weapons. Even if some of these organised crime syndicates cannot sell their nuclear wares, possessing radioactive material might be a kind of insurance policy for them when in trouble—they could use blackmail to extricate themselves from tricky situations if the heat is put on them.

 

Alternatively, possession of advanced biological and chemical weapons could allow a transnational criminal group to blackmail countries offensively. Yet beyond that there is a potential market, not only among rogue states but also among desperate national liberation movements and suppressed ethnic groups. Some TCOs are hybrids, half-criminal, half-political. Some groups such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are involved in arms smuggling and drug and refugee trafficking. Their criminal activities blend into their political ones, with shifting emphasis depending on the exigencies of the moment. The same applies for Chechen groups in Russia.

Non-State Interest in WMD

The PKK has shown an interest in WMD. A former PKK bomb-maker allegedly claimed in 1997 that there had been efforts to prepare sarin, potassium cyanide and mustard gas.⁷ It is not inconceivable that if the PKK really does possess such “exotic” weapons, members might try to blackmail the Turkish government to suspend the death sentence against or to release the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. In desperate situations desperate people can do terrible things. There are some cases in which desperation drove armed movements to the brink of using WMD. In 1999, I talked to a lady who was married to a physicist from Nigeria.⁸ He was an Ibo, involved in the secessionist struggle of Biafra which cost two million lives between 1967 and 1970. This Biafran physicist and his colleagues allegedly managed to obtain enough radioactive material from Europe for a radiological bomb. There were plans to explode a radiological weapon in Lagos, the seat of the Nigerian government. However, on the way from Europe to Nigeria, the material became “lost” in Portugal, never to be heard of again.

 

A radiological bomb is of course not the same thing as a nuclear fission bomb, but it can create panic, though hardly mass casualties unless professional state actors with large quantities of plutonium get involved. Saddam Hussein was working on radiological weapons, but as for non-state actors, we have so far seen only faint beginnings. In March 1993, Chechens were reported to have obtained enriched uranium from Kazakhstan and from Russian Army depots. It was widely reported that the Chechens placed a small container with cesium-137 near the entrance of Moscow’s popular Izmailov Park in November 1995 and notified a news agency, which found the mystery cylinder with C-137 under the snow. It was clearly meant to convey the warning that the next time a more powerful message would be delivered.⁹ The container was probably stolen from a hospital where it was used for cancer therapy. Shamil Basayev and other Chechen commanders also threatened to attack Russian nuclear power plants. Before him, Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev reportedly warned the US government in the summer of 1994 that he had two tactical nuclear weapons and that he would pass them to Libya if the United States did not recognise Chechnya’s independence (the US government did not take this threat seriously).

 

In the future, desperate armed movements such as the Chechens and the Biafrans might possess more know-how, money and determination to have recourse to the “ultimate weapon”. Intelligence circles have reported that the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka used gas attacks against the authorities, though not against civilians. European intelligence sources also assume that the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) has acquired chemical weapons. Perhaps the moral of this is that we should not stare ourselves blind looking at small North American militias, Japanese cults and European right-wing extremist groups when exploring the risk of WMD terrorism. Terrorism with chemical, biological or radiological agents might soon no longer be the exclusive domain of states such as Iraq, which used VX, sarin and tabun against Kurdish villages in the Anfil campaign in 1988.

 

In the Hollywood movie The Peacemaker, a disgruntled Bosnian diplomat acquires a backpack-sized nuclear weapon and brings it to New York to explode outside UN headquarters. Is this so far-fetched? In June 1994, 5.7 kilograms of uranium were found in the apartment of a former member of the Bosnian government in Austria (it was not, however, a miniature backpack bomb as in the movie). The Bosnians were desperate at the time: they were experiencing something bordering on genocide and nobody was giving them the help they needed. Already in November 1993 a “Bosniac Front” had threatened to detonate nuclear explosive devices in European cities unless certain political demands were met. While this was mere bluff, it might not always remain bluff in the future.

 

It might be prudent to focus more on such cases rather than on anarchist militias and religious sects such as Aum Shinrikyo, though it should not be forgotten that an Aum notebook found by the Japanese police contained a cryptic entry with the question “how much would one [nuclear device] cost?”, followed by a price list—an enigmatic hint that an attempt might have been made to acquire nuclear weapons from the Russian Federation. (The cheapest Russian atomic weapon was, according to the notebook of Kiyohide Hayakawa, Aum’s weapon-merchant, $15 million.)

 

Corrupt officials, profit-hungry firms and the mafia of the former Soviet Union are the most likely providers of non-conventional weapons. The Iraqis and Iranians have both attempted to procure nuclear materials from Russia. A tantalising element in this are the eighty-four (or, according to another account, ten) “loose Russian nukes”, KGB suitcase bombs weighing less than seventy-five pounds, which Alexander Lebed first mentioned in 1997. The denials that emerged from Russia about these “loose nukes” are evasive and contradictory. Some sources deny their existence altogether, while others admit that the Soviet Union developed two types of suitcase bomb. Although US government officials do not deny that the Soviet Union developed such weapons, they are generally sceptical about allegations that some got “lost”. However, there might be other categories of Soviet tactical nuclear devices to worry about, including nuclear landmines and artillery shells. Some of these tactical nuclear weapons apparently possess no safeguard system preventing unauthorised use.

 

Besides Russia (which is still reported to have more than twenty thousand nuclear warheads, down from forty-five thousand in the mid-1980s), the following former Soviet republics are said to possess significant quantities of weapons-grade (i.e., weapons-usable) material: Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine (100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium or HEU), Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, according to one estimate, some 100 kilograms of plutonium and 300 kilograms of uranium (reactor-grade HEU in pellet form) are said to exist.¹⁰ According to another account, in Aktau, Kazakshtan, across the Caspian Sea from Iran, there are still three tons of plutonium stored.¹¹

The Soviet Stockpile

There are at least four reasons why we should worry about the Soviet legacy:

 

1. Nobody in Russia knows the exact quantity of nuclear materials produced during the Soviet era. Estimates speak of about fifteen hundred tons of weapons-grade fissile materials and some twenty-five thousand warheads.¹²

 

2. Security at the facilities storing weapons-useable nuclear materials and warheads is clearly deficient. The originally high morale of the well-paid Russian troops guarding the nuclear sites (their number has been brought down from five hundred to a little more than one hundred) might further erode and can then no longer be taken for granted in all cases. This has been highlighted by a series of thefts. In 1993 there were twenty-seven cases of theft by insiders, according to the Russian Interior Ministry, a figure matched also in 1994. In Murmansk, one Russian special investigator remarked with some exaggeration, “Potatoes [are] guarded better than radioactive materials.”¹³ Disgruntled, impoverished guards and insiders can steal and try to sell weapons-grade and other radioactive material, and might be able to steal entire warheads. In 1995, Russian law-enforcement authorities admitted solving twenty-one cases of theft of fissile material since mid-1992, including at military facilities.

 

3. There are Russian criminal organisations which have shown interest in such materials and which might soon access the “closed” cities and other nuclear facilities and buy or steal nuclear materials. In 1994, Ministry of Internal Affairs sources claimed that “some 35 to 40 suspected dealers in nuclear substances were operating around Moscow”.¹⁴ Efforts by directors of Russian nuclear “closed cities” to keep the mafia out might weaken in the future as living conditions in these cities deteriorate further. The United States currently provides grants to nuclear scientists in Russia to stop brain drain to rogue states, but some of these programmes are badly administrated.

 

4. There is much corruption in Russia and border control is weak, especially in the south and the east, which make smuggling such materials out of the country no great task. In 1997, one attempt to smuggle nuclear materials across Russia’s border made use of the immune diplomatic bag.¹⁵

 

Who is interested in Russian NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) weapons? According to former MI5 director Stella Rimington, “Some two dozen governments are currently [1994] trying to obtain such [nuclear] technology. A number of these countries sponsor or even practise terrorism and we cannot rule out the possibility that these weapons could be used for that purpose.”¹⁶

 

Clients are both state and non-state actors. Here are some examples from PIOOM’s Databank:

 

• In 1991, Islamic Jihad purportedly approached one of Russia’s closed cities, Arzamas-16, offering to buy a nuclear weapon.

 

• In 1992, Iran unsuccessfully approached a plant in Kazakhstan with a request for enriched uranium.

 

• In 1993, the director of the nuclear research centre in Arzamas-16 was, according to his own testimony, offered $2 billion for a warhead by Iraqi representatives.

 

Russia is not the only possible supplier—let us think of North Korea, India and Pakistan:

 

• Libya has reportedly offered to pay the entire national debt of India or Pakistan in exchange for nuclear weapons. This could have amounted to $10 billion, if these two countries had not declined the Libyan offer.¹⁷

 

At the beginning of 1999 there were twenty-three ongoing high-intensity conflicts (with more than one thousand fatalities in the last twelve months), sixty-seven low-intensity conflicts (with one hundred to one thousand fatalities) and 127 violent political conflicts (fewer than one hundred fatalities in a year). Table 4 illustrates this.

 

 

TABLE 4
Number of Armed Conflicts between 1995 and 1998

 

 

 Source: PIOOM Databank, 1999.

 

 

These 217 armed conflicts have minimally two and often more conflicting parties, including mercenaries, militias, death squads, terrorist groups and the like. Can we assume that they will all stay away from weapons of mass destruction if they are given a chance to acquire them on the black market? If one only looks at the US State Department’s annual lists of transnational terrorist groups, one finds not more than some fifty active groups. However, such groups identified as being of concern to the United States and some of its allies are but a small part of the total. Twelve years ago Jongman and Schmid listed and described more than two thousand groups and organisations in over one hundred countries and territories in their “World Directory of Terrorist and Other Organizations Associated with Guerrilla Warfare, Political Violence, and Protest”.¹⁸ An update of this global survey could be very helpful in determining which groups are most likely to use WMD for the purpose of creating terror. The share of violent political conflicts, those most often associated with terrorism, has been rising in recent years, as Table 4 makes clear.

Inhibitors and Facilitators

In 1986, an International Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism concluded that due to a confluence of five factors the probability of nuclear terrorism was increasing. These factors are:

 

1. The growing incidence, sophistication and lethality of conventional forms of terrorism, often to increase shock value.

 

2. Evidence of state support, even sponsorship, of terrorist groups.

 

3. The storing and deploying of nuclear weapons in areas of intense terrorist activity.

 

4. An increasing number of potential targets in civil nuclear programmes—in particular facilities and shipments in which plutonium and uranium, in forms suitable for use in weapons, are present.

 

5. Potential black and grey markets in nuclear equipment and material.¹⁹

 

The fourth and the fifth of these facilitating factors have become more pertinent, while there has not been much change in the first and third factors. The second factor has probably even declined. Nevertheless, the balance between inhibitors and facilitators is shifting and the use of weapons of mass destruction by non-state actors can no longer be excluded.

 

As there are more actors and more violent political conflicts in today’s world, the chances of WMD proliferation and the threatened or actual use of such weapons also increases. The number of serious incidents in PIOOM’s database has been slowly growing, but so far there has been no catastrophic terrorism from non-state actors. The one terrorist movement, Aum Shinrikyo, which has succeeded in developing impure sarin, and tried its hand at VX and anthrax (though, significantly, without success), did not manage to produce or disperse these substances in an effective manner. The latter problem has also confronted a number of state actors before the Aum sect.

 

The non- or under-utilisation of WMD for purposes of terrorism until now has been attributed to several factors:

 

1. General reluctance to experiment with unfamiliar weapons.

 

2. Lack of familiar precedents.

 

3. Fear that the weapon would harm the producer or user.

 

4. Fear whether it would work at all, or only too well.

 

5. Fear of alienating relevant constituencies and potential supporters on moral grounds.

 

6. Fear of unprecedented governmental crackdown and retaliation against the group, its constituencies or sponsor states.

 

7. Lack of a perceived need for indiscriminate, high-casualty attacks to further the group’s goals.

 

8. Lack of money to buy nuclear material on the black market.

 

These are indeed formidable inhibitors, but will they actually hold? Some are certainly weakening. The Aum sect has to a certain extent created a precedent, opening, as it were, a Pandora’s box. Lack of money is no longer a major obstacle for movements making many millions in the drugs trade. And there are even more facilitators:

 

1. Some of the current conflict zones (e.g., in the Caucasus) contain civilian nuclear facilities or research institutes that can be used for the theft or fabrication of WMD.

 

2. The civilian nuclear industry produces huge amounts of plutonium, which, if reprocessed, is no longer inaccessible to thieves. With regard to chemical weapons, plenty of precursor substances are available from civilian sources.

 

3. The information revolution (Internet) in combination with the large number of physicists, chemical engineers and biologists has increased the likelihood of people getting access to critical information about how to produce not only explosives but also poisons.

 

4. Organised crime has, in at least one case, already assisted in the procurement and transport of nuclear materials. Chemical weapons materials have also reached terrorist actors.

 

5. Concealment and transport of some of these weapons is, due to their small size, relatively easy. Thermos flasks, wine bottles and other ordinary objects can serve as containers for chemical and biological agents. Delivery of WMD is greatly facilitated by public access to the Global Positioning System, which can guide small manned planes or unmanned drones with the deadly freight to target areas. However, mundane delivery systems such as express global parcel delivery services should not be excluded.

 

6. Urbanisation has increased the chance of mass fatalities in the case of an attack.

 

7. Detection of the presence of some chemical and biological weapons—and there are many types—is often difficult and in many cases there are no known counter-agents.

 

8. Great advances in genetic biotechnology have increased the chance of ethnic targeting whereby only another “race” is affected by a biological weapon.

 

The last point opens a whole new dimension to biological warfare. A panel of the British Medical Association has recently concluded that weapons that can distinguish between ethnic groups by exploiting tiny genetic or cellular differences between them could be a reality within ten years. Rapid advances in genetics could create biological weapons as tools for carefully targeted terrorism. Such a development could remove one of the chief obstacles that has so far inhibited the widespread use of biological weapons—the risk of infecting oneself and members of one’s own group.

 

The Human Genome Project, an international effort to locate every element of the human genetic blueprint by the year 2003, could provide scientists with the genetic imprint of different ethnic groups, giving them a handle on how to attack one specific group only. The panel convened by the British Medical Association held that viruses and other micro-organisms tailored to detect differences in the DNA of races could offer warmakers and terrorists of the future a new means to carry out “ethnic cleansing”.²⁰

 

It is known that the Soviet Union did produce a genetically enhanced version of the anthrax bacterium in the 1980s. The hearings of the South African Truth Commission also revealed that there was a South African biological weapons programme, in which scientists were asked to develop an “ethnic weapon”. The background to this was that many white people in South Africa were, in the last years of apartheid before the Cold War was over, feeling desperate, even though they were a privileged minority. There are other endangered ruling elites who are ethnically or religion-wise different from the majority of the population. There are probably even more under-privileged, desperate minorities who are determined and, in some cases, also resourceful enough to try to acquire and use WMD. The Biafrans, the Bosnians and the Chechens have tried to acquire nuclear materials. The Tamil Tigers and the GIA have shown an interest in gas weapons, while Iraq, Iran, Libya and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan (until stopped by the United States) have tried hard to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities. Desperate people and their leaders might indeed do desperate things. Desperation is certainly an issue towards which we must look above all else when trying to assess from where the threat of WMD use is most likely to come.

Defence against WMD Terrorism

Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of non-state actors pose several problems. The smallness of some of these weapons (especially the biological ones) makes detection en route to the target very difficult. The anonymity of such an attack can make retaliation blind and prior deterrence difficult. Target-hardening is difficult, except for specific high-security areas. Improving intelligence capabilities is an obvious requirement, but this faces the new challenges of nearly unbreakable encryption and instant satellite communication. Control over precursor materials and better guarding of storage sites are called for, but the former is made difficult by the dual-use nature of many of these precursor materials. Technical and tactical solutions go only some way towards dealing with the threat of WMD in the hands of people not bound by interests of state or fear of massive retaliation. The main emphasis of counter-terrorism against WMD must lie elsewhere.

 

The best defence is not to give offence. Continuous constructive dialogue and pragmatic compromise with actual and potential political opponents at home and abroad must be sought in order to prevent the unilateral or mutual demonisation and dehumanisation which is one of the preconditions for mass murder with a “clean” conscience. With the given limitations of physical deterrence, there is no effective substitute for conflict prevention. Once conflict has been escalated, compromise is often less sought than victory or, if that is not achievable, desperate but glorious defeat, slamming the door of history, as it were, with a bang. Wherever there are desperate groups, peoples and states in the world, they must be offered alternatives to suicidal gambles. A broad but soft psychological conflict-resolution approach rather than a hard, high-tech counter-insurgency approach is more likely to succeed. In the meantime there are some measures that should be considered:

 

1. Intelligence-gathering priorities ought to focus more strongly on proliferation issues and on desperate actors (declining liberation movements, millenarian religious sects, paranoid racist groups and chauvinist nationalists) likely to be tempted to acquire WMD.

 

2. The trade in (precursor) materials for chemical, biological and nuclear substances must be subjected to better monitoring and greater control.

 

3. Existing conventions in the field of NBC weapons, terrorism and organised crime must be strengthened by adding (better) monitoring, implementation and sanctions mechanisms.

 

4. International co-operation to counter proliferation and terrorism must be enhanced. Bureaucratic red tape and turf-fighting have to be dealt with by creating more flexible and intelligent organisations.

 

5. Existing government stockpiles of NBC weapons must be better guarded and accounted for, and gradually phased out and destroyed. A credible, multilateral NBC disarmament programme by governments might (after some time) put moral pressure on non-state actors to refrain from the acquisition of such weapons.

 

These are time-consuming measures and not quick technical fixes like some of the measures currently proposed (mass inoculations, filters in water and air-ventilation systems). The temptation to look for merely technical solutions and protection systems will undoubtedly be great and one must be aware that the current exaggeration of the WMD terrorism threat is apparently being fuelled by an industrial–advisory complex in this area. An over-estimation of the threat posed by WMD terrorism will only increase the incentive to acquire such weapons among crazies and crusaders who thrive on attention and, in some cases, prefer to be wanted for mass murder rather than not be wanted at all.

 

Any use of WMD is terrorising, whether by state or non-state actors. Therefore, policies to stem the proliferation of such weapons should preferably be applied across the board. Pleas for addressing the root causes are often dismissed as unworkable as there are supposedly too many causes. However, if we take desperation as an important root cause why certain actors—state and non-state—might resort to WMD, this considerably narrows the field. Desperation is, however, a late signal on the conflict escalation ladder. What we need is a better reading of “early warning” signals of situations that might induce some groups of people—and some states—to reach for the “ultimate weapon”. 

Endnotes

1. “Calls to Stockpile Vaccines against Rise of Bioterrorism”, Independent (London), 25 January 1999.

 

2. J. Bowyer Bell, “A Time of Terror”, cited in Augustus R. Norton, “The Threat of Nuclear Terrorism”, National Defense, 19 December 1980, p. 12–F.

 

3. The cult had most of its following in Russia. One of the Russian members was working at the Kurchatov Institute, a nuclear physics laboratory. See The Nuclear Black Market, Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, D.C.: CSIS, 1996), p. 16.

 

4. Ehud Sprinzak, “The Great Superterrorism Scare”, Foreign Policy, no. 112 (fall 1998), p. 116.

 

5. Ibid., p. 117.

 

6. The Nuclear Black Market, p. 4.

 

7. Ali M. Koknar, “The Trade in Materials for Weapons of Mass Destruction”, International Police Review, no. 134 (March–April 1999), p. 25. The veracity of the PKK claim is questionable.

 

8. I have known the source of this story for some years and trust it.

 

9. Roger Medd and Frank Goldstein, “International Terrorism on the Eve of a New Millennium”, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 20 (1997), p. 293. It should be noted that the veracity of the Izmailov incident is not uncontested.

 

10. The Nuclear Black Market, p. 11.

 

11. William Potter, director of the Center for Non-proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, cited in Thalif Deen, “Disarmament: UN Moves to Curb Nuclear Terrorism”, Inter Press Service, World News, 1 February 1998, p. 2.

 

12. The Nuclear Black Market, p. 1, n. 20.

 

13. See Colonel Guy B. Roberts, “Nuclear Weapons–Grade Fissile Materials: The Most Serious Threat to US National Security Today?”, Airpower Journal (special edition 96), p. 2.

 

14. See Rensselaer Lee, “Post-Soviet Nuclear Trafficking: Myths, Half-truths, and the Reality”, Current History 94, no. 86 (October 1995). p. 17.

 

15. According to Valery Draganov, chief of the Russian State Customs Committee, Itar Tass, 26 January 1998.

 

16. See Joseph W. Foxwell, Jr., “The Prospect of Nuclear and Biological Terrorism”, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 5, no. 2 (June 1997), p. 99.

 

17. Oleg Bukharin, The Threat of Nuclear Terrorism and the Physical Security of Nuclear Installations and Materials in the Former Soviet Union, Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Monterey, August 1992, p. 16.

 

18. A. P. Schmid and A. J. Jongman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1988).

 

19. Nuclear Control Institute, Report of the International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism (Washington, D.C.), 25 June 1986, p. 1.

 

20. Aisling Irwin, “Genetic Science ‘Could Be Used for Ethnic Cleansing’”, ISSUE, 22 January 1999.