Superterrorism: Assassins, Mobsters, and Weapons of Mass Destruction

  • Glenn E. Schweitzer &
  • Carole C. Dorsch
Kluwer Academic/Plenum: 1998. 363 pp. $28.95

America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack

  • Richard A. Falkenrath,
  • Robert D. Newman &
  • Bradley A. Thayer
MIT Press: 1998. 353pp $22.50, £17.95, (pbk)
Lethal handful: US defence secretary William Cohen shows how little anthrax could kill a population. Credit: AP/TERRY ASHE

Next month a national symposium on bioterrorism is to be held in Arlington, Virginia. It will be opened by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and by D. A. Henderson, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and formerly leader of the World Health Organization's Smallpox Eradication Programme. The symposium is also backed by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Society for Microbiology. The threat of large-scale terrorist use of biological weapons in the United States is clearly being taken very seriously at high levels in political, medical and scientific circles.

The reasons for this widespread concern are set out cogently in these two books by US authors. Richard Falkenrath and his co-authors focus solely on covert use of weapons of mass destruction against US targets; Glenn Schweitzer and Carole Dorsch have a broader sweep which includes attempts to destroy major information technology systems and which explores the links between terrorists and organized crime.

Both books, however, envisage a growing threat from terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, and both argue that the current national and international policies of leading democratic states are inadequate to deal with the problem. Although neither book results from an official study, the authors have evidently consulted many experts in the field in developing and assessing their arguments. Both books contain a set of policy recommendations for better handling of the problem.

Biological weapons present by far the greatest threat. The use of nuclear weapons would be devastating, but it is still technically very difficult to produce fissile material, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime has limited the availability of such weapons. Chemical weapons are relatively easy to produce, but proliferation is constrained by the tough new Chemical Weapons Convention and, even for nerve gases, very large quantities would be required to produce mass casualties equivalent to those that could be caused by a small nuclear weapon. Biological weapons, unfortunately, appear relatively easy to produce, are constrained only by the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention which at present lacks any effective verification mechanism, and could easily cause casualties on a scale comparable to a nuclear weapon. A well-known calculation by the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment in 1993 suggested that 100 kilograms of anthrax spores spread effectively on the wind and allowed to drift over Washington DC could, in the right conditions, cause 3 million fatalities.

Unlike nuclear weapons, there are many very different types of biological weapon. Each agent must be well characterized before appropriate protective measures can be taken against it. On the other hand, unlike a nuclear attack, there are sensible civil defence measures that could be effective against a biological weapons attack.

Although both books obviously went to press before the recent bomb attacks on US embassies in Africa, incidents such as the bombings at the World Trade Center and in Oklahoma City have inevitably driven the problem of terrorist attacks up the US political agenda. The use of sarin nerve gas by the Aum Shinrikyo sect against commuters on the Tokyo underground in 1995 clearly also raised the question of whether other groups might resort to using such weapons. Both books describe the Tokyo attack, which killed 12 people and injured 5,000, as a last-minute, relatively ineffective attempt at mass killing, since the sarin was impure and the means of its distribution primitive. So despite the fact that the sect had large amounts of money, and its members were not caught early enough, they were technically inefficient terrorists. This is very fortunate because they also appear to have attempted to kill people with anthrax; had they been successful, there could have been casualties on an unprecedented scale.

Neither book, however, should be seen as apocalyptic. Both argue that it is not easy to use biological agents. In America's Achilles' Heel, the authors point out that: “... turning [biological agents] into potent military instruments — which requires both a reasonable shelf-life for storage and transport, and efficient dispersal in a stable, respirable aerosol — is substantially more difficult ...”

The authors argue that terrorist use of biological weapons poses a low-probability — but high-consequence — threat and recommend a set of responses to reduce the probability of attack further and to enhance the effectiveness of the response if an attack does occur. Nevertheless, they insist that the threat is growing — a widely held opinion among specialists concerned with terrorism that should be taken seriously.

Considerable attention is paid in both books to the biological weapons programmes of Iraq and the former Soviet Union, our best indicators of the nature of recent efforts to produce biological weapons. Pragmatic proposals for dealing with the potential use of such weapons, at least in the shorter term, are spelt out in considerable detail, particularly in America's Achilles' Heel. Yet I wish both books had given greater emphasis to the crucial importance of strengthening the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention with a Verification Protocol. Negotiations to do this are being worked on by the Ad Hoc Group of the States Parties of the Convention in Geneva. A protocol requiring tough national legislation, of the kind recently enacted in the United States, would considerably assist in preventing bioterrorism.

For the longer term, the final paragraphs of Superterrorism raise the crucial question facing the developed world of whether it can tackle the injustice that is the fundamental cause of much terrorism: “... we have no choice but to invest resources in raising the legitimateexpectations of deprived populations that are increasingly turning to violence as their only route of escape from lives of subjugation, misery and unfulfilled expectations ...” As the author stresses, dealing with these root causes will not end terrorism, but could considerably reduce it.

America's Achilles' Heel, written by three academics, is the longer, more systematic, analysis; Superterrorism, by the director for Central Europe and Eurasia of the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by Dorsch, is clearly intended for a wide audience. Both books, however, are excellent, well referenced and balanced contributions to an important debate that requires much wider participation outside the United States.