ABSTRACT
It is difficult to find anyone who takes a close interest in such things who does not believe that a terrorist group will sooner or later use weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological) in pursuit of casualties on a par with those of ‘9/11’. So far this has not quite happened, but there are straws in the wind. In 1995 the Japanese Aum group used a few kilograms of a very sophisticated poison gas (sarin) in a very amateurish way to produce only a handful of deaths. In 2007 one of the Iraqi insurgent groups exploded a road tanker carrying ten tonnes of chlorine – a very crude gas – and again produced only a handful of deaths. In both instances, however, there were hundreds of injuries – casualties involving persons who may or may not have been exposed to sub-lethal doses of the gas. So it is possible that the actual psychological impact of the two identified uses on their intended targets may have been much greater than the simple death totals imply. But sooner or later, it is widely believed, a terrorist group will be able to match its competence in acquiring the weapon of mass destruction with competence in its employment, pushing death totals into the hundreds or thousands and creating numbers of casualties perhaps fiftyfold greater than that.
