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February 2005                                                                            Volume 8 - Number 1

Perspectives...

Remembering Disasters

By Rachel Tardiff

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, “If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.” The best indicator of the future is what has gone before. I firmly believe we should review terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past as our starting point to determine the risk of what may happen in the future.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard, “It’s not if, but when?” Now, it’s “Not when, but what?” It appears that most commentators believe that the next terrorist attack is not just a possibility, but a certainty – a certainty that will occur in the mainland United States. If this is the case, what can we expect? What weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are available to terrorist and how might they be used? What form will the next attack take?

The use of a biological agent was instrumental in the assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London by the Bulgarian Secret Service in 1978. The assassin used an umbrella with a sharpened tip, loaded in the tip was a tiny metal ball filled with ricin and sealed with wax. The assassin used the umbrella to prod his victim, which resulted in the ball being released under the victim’s skin. The victim’s body heat melted the wax, releasing the ricin into the blood, resulting in death a few days later.

Subject to how you interpret “terrorist,” the 1988 attack on unprotected Kurdish civilians by Saddam Hussein’s armed forces may also be considered a terrorist attack. Over a two day period, chemical gas attacks were made on nine different villages – a total of 5,000 unprotected civilians died and an estimated 7,000 were injured. In 1994 however, a Human Rights Watch study concluded that this campaign included as many as 40 gas attacks and resulted in as many as 50,000 to 100,000 deaths.

The most infamous WMD terrorist attack was the Aum Shinrikyo cult chemical attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The result of this attack was 12 fatalities, thousands hospitalized and a world exposed to chemical terrorism for the first time.

And most recently, we have all seen the recent headlines that focused attention on the threat posed to commercial airliners by terrorists with shoulder fired surface-to-air missiles (SAMS), also known as MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems), developed in the 1950’s to provide military ground forces protection from enemy aircraft. Many believe that no single solution exist to mitigate this threat.

With everything that we know, what is the most likely next attack? According to the FBI, the most likely weapon of choice for a terrorist still remains high explosives. The threat of high explosives used on transportation such as aircraft or trains – as seen in Madrid, Spain in March 2004. Another option is the use of high explosives along with WMDs, or a toxic industrial chemical such as chlorine.

In my opinion, there is an ever growing risk of a terrorist attack looming over us, an attack that would have the most dramatic and terrorizing effect would be the large-scale release of a chemical or biological warfare agent or the detonation of a nuclear device. Although these are perhaps the least likely types of attack there is clear evidence that various terrorist groups are willing to commit the time and effort to acquire these types of weapons. Unfortunately, with so many options and with the target rich environment that is the free world, the question is “what?” not “when?”

For additional information contact the author @ joanietr@gwu.edu.