ABSTRACT
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 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 less 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 due to acts of terrorism, while tragic and traumatic on an individual scale, are modest.
