It’s also important to realize that a 9/11-style attack is probably impossible now. We all know that the old rule of hijackings—stay calm and cooperate—is out, and without that, small numbers of lightly armed terrorists cannot commandeer passenger jets. Many experts even doubt the capacity of terrorists to mount assaults of this scale by any means. “While another attack on the scale of 9/11 cannot be ruled out entirely,” writes the dean of terrorism analysts, Brian Michael Jenkins, in Unconquerable Nation, “there is growing consensus among analysts that such an attack on the United States is not likely.”
The standard response to all these points is that they miss the real danger. The statistics that show terrorism isn’t a major killer are irrelevant. The decline in terrorist attacks in most of the world is irrelevant. The fact that 9/11 was unlikely to succeed and almost certainly wouldn’t if it were attempted again is irrelevant. If terrorists get their hands on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), they could inflict the sort of devastation it took armies to accomplish in the past. This is new, and it makes terrorism a risk that vastly exceeds all others. “Inexorably, terrorism, like war itself, is moving beyond the conventional to the apocalyptic,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, then a professor at Harvard, now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal Party.
We have only to look at Israel to doubt this line. International terrorism in modern form essentially dates from the late 1960s, and in all that time Israel has suffered most. For the world’s worst terrorists—those who do not hesitate to strap explosives to children—Israel is an object of obsessive, burning hate. Their keenest desire is to wipe the tiny country off the map, and these terrorists have often enjoyed the sponsorship of Middle Eastern states that share the dream of destroying the “Zionist entity” but don’t dare attack directly. And yet Israel has never suffered an attack by terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. This is a pretty strong indication that getting and using such weapons isn’t quite as easy as some would have us think.
In theory, terrorists could obtain viruses, nukes, and the like from black markets, but these seem to be confined to James Bond movies and newspaper articles trafficking in rumor and speculation. They could also obtain weapons of mass destruction from one of the very few states that have such weapons and would like to see Israel or the United States suffer, but any leader pondering such a move has to consider that if his role in an attack were uncovered, his country would quickly be reduced to rubble. That’s a significant deterrent: Osama bin Laden and his followers may desire martyrdom, but Kim Jong Il and other dictators do not. States also have to consider that they may not be able to control when or how terrorists use the weapons they provide. And they have to worry that “the surrogate cannot be trusted, even to the point of using the weapon against its sponsor,” noted the 1999 report of the Gilmore Committee, a congressional advisory committee named for its chair, Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia. These considerations have kept states from supplying terrorists with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons for decades. There’s no reason to think they will not continue to be persuasive.
That leaves DIY. Many media reports make it sound as if weapons of mass destruction can be manufactured with nothing more than an Internet recipe and some test tubes. Fortunately, “the hurdles faced by terrorists seeking to develop true weapons of mass casualties and mass destruction are more formidable than is often imagined,” the Gilmore Committee wrote. “This report does not argue that terrorists cannot produce and disseminate biological or chemical agents capable of injuring or indeed killing relatively small numbers of persons . . . or perhaps inflicting serious casualties even in the hundreds. The point is that creating truly mass-casualty weapons— capable of killing in tens of thousands, much less in the thousands—requires advanced university training in appropriate scientific and technical disciplines, significant financial resources, obtainable but nonetheless sophisticated equipment and facilities, the ability to carry out rigorous testing to ensure a weapon’s effectiveness, and the development and employment of effective means of dissemination.” The demands are so high that they “appear, at least for now, to be beyond the reach not only of the vast majority of existent terrorist organizations but also of many established nation-states.” A Library of Congress report issued the same year similarly concluded, “Weapons of mass destruction are significantly harder to produce or obtain than what is commonly depicted in the press and today they probably remain beyond the reach of most terrorist groups.”
It’s also important to remember that despite Osama bin Laden’s wealth, his bases in Afghanistan, and the relatively free hand he had in the 1990s when the United States paid little attention to the man who grandiosely “declared war” in 1996, he failed. “While there can be little doubt that some members of al-Qaeda displayed a keen interest in acquiring chemical weapons, ” writes Louise Richardson, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard and a leading expert on terrorism, “there is no evidence that they succeeded in doing so.” Desire and capability are not interchangeable.
Bin Laden was not the first to learn that lesson. Focused as the world is on murderous Islamists, it’s easy to forget that the first religious zealots to obtain and deploy weapons of mass destruction in terrorism belonged to the Japanese cult of Aum Shinrikyo. Led by Shoko Asahara, Aum was fixated on the idea of inflicting mass-casualty terrorist attacks in hopes of sparking an apocalyptic war. Aum’s resources were formidable. At its peak, the cult had a membership of around 60,000. Outside Japan, it had offices in Australia, Germany, Russia, and even New York City. It had at least several hundred million dollars in cash and perhaps as much as $1 billion. And it had highly skilled members. Aum went to the best universities in Japan and aggressively courted graduate students in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering, giving them the finest equipment and facilities money could by. One Aum scientist later confessed he joined simply because Aum’s laboratories were so superior to those of his university. At one point, Aum had twenty scientists working on biological weapons. Another eighty investigated chemical weapons.
Naturally, Aum also sought nuclear weapons, going so far as to purchase a 500,000-acre sheep station in a remote part of Australia with plans to mine uranium and ship it to Japan “where scientists using laser enrichment technology would convert it into weapons-grade nuclear material,” according to the Gilmore Committee. Aum also tried very hard to buy off-the-shelf. In Russia, the group bought large quantities of small arms “and is known to have been in the market for advanced weaponry, such as tanks, jet fighters, surface-to-surface rocket launchers and even a tactical nuclear weapon.”
No opportunity was overlooked. When Ebola broke out in central Africa in October 1992, Shoko Asahara personally led forty of his followers to the region on what was billed as a humanitarian mission. Officials now believe Aum was attempting to collect samples of the virus so it could be mass-produced in Japan. They failed.