Experts Assess Risk of ‘New Terrorism’ Threat

They called it the “new terrorism:” a virulent strain of anti-American aggression in which enemies without scruples would use germs and toxic gases, not guns and bombs, to kill tens of thousands of civilians at a stroke.

Yet two years after the Clinton administration made this threat a top priority and the fastest-growing major category of defense spending, many experts are questioning whether the risk of such mass-casualty attacks has been overstated and whether the dire warnings could prove counterproductive to U.S. security.

Although terrorist groups are numerous and in some cases technically proficient, these experts say, it remains a daunting task to acquire and fashion biological and chemical weapons that can inflict mass casualties. And despite fears about the emergence of terrorists who seem to lack traditional compunctions about mass slaughter, these researchers say, the record suggests that those who would commit such crimes are rare.

The administration’s strident warnings, they say, may be giving bad actors frightening new ideas and directing government resources to the wrong places.

The perception of this threat “has begun to outpace the facts,” said John V. Parachini, an analyst with the Monterey Institute for International Studies in Monterey, Calif. The government should be “acting and spending smart and not just spending and talking big.”

Administration aides insisted that they have not exaggerated the perils and that they need to prepare for a full range of civil defense threats.

The threat is, “if anything, greater” than it was just two years ago, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told a group of reporters last month.

Concerns about germ and chemical weapons have been aroused in recent years because of several developments. Rogue nations, such as Iran and Iraq, have shown an interest in increasing their arsenals, and intelligence agencies have reported that they believe the technology is spreading.

The most powerful catalyst came in 1995, when an apocalyptic Japanese cult, Aum Supreme Truth, a group that since has changed its name to Aleph, attacked a Tokyo subway with sarin poison gas. The attack, which killed 12 and sickened thousands, overnight became the foremost example of the “new terrorism.”

President Clinton, after reading a science fiction thriller on a devastating germ attack, declared last year that unspecified enemies of America were preparing “new forms of assault.” In a television appearance in 1997, Defense Secretary Cohen held up a 5-pound sugar bag that he said was big enough, if filled with anthrax spores, to wipe out half the population of Washington, D.C.

A group of government experts later wrote in a scholarly journal, the Archives of Internal Medicine, that Cohen’s estimate had overshot the mark by 100 times.

The public, however, seems to have gotten the intended message: Two-thirds of Americans believe that a germ or chemical attack on the country is probable, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center.

Yet while the government’s biological and chemical defense program has grown, spawning a lucrative industry among consultants, it also has “begun to generate a backlash from those who believe the threat has been exaggerated,” noted a report from a scholarly conference conducted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute.

The critics point out that germ agents are especially tough to put into a form that makes them lethal in weapons. For example, to spray deadly doses of anthrax from a plane, one often-discussed scenario, terrorists would need highly specialized equipment capable of dispensing particles from 1 to 5 microns in size. Smaller than that, the particles would not float in the air properly. Larger particles would not be properly absorbed into the lungs.

Aum counted several graduate chemists among its members. Yet, with $1 billion in assets and four years of trying, it could not make germ weapons work, so it turned to sarin gas for its subway attack.

In the United States, no one has died from a germ attack. Only one person has been killed by what could be loosely termed a chemical warfare attack: an Oakland school superintendent who was hit in 1973 by a cyanide-coated bullet fired by a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the small terrorist cult that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.

The most significant germ-warfare attack in U.S. history came in 1984, when members of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon sprayed a salad bar with salmonella to try to keep people from voting in a local election. The attack gave diarrhea to 751 people.

Some analysts forecast that the arrival of the new century could give rise to apocalyptic cults bearing chemical and germ weapons. But so far, none has appeared.

What clearly have increased are hoaxes and threats involving chemical and germ weapons, which have risen along with public anxiety about the dangers.

In the late 1980s, the FBI investigated about a dozen bogus germ or chemical attacks a year. But the numbers have increased steadily and for the first 11 months of 1999, the number of cases surged to 256. More than 72% involved germ weapons, and all were hoaxes, according to an FBI spokesman.

Despite worries about the weapon programs of some rogue nations, including Iraq, these countries probably would hesitate to use such weapons against the United States because of “the prospect of significant reprisals,” an official advisory panel called the Gilmore Commission wrote in a report to the government two months ago.

Rogue regimes routinely provide money and conventional weapons to terrorist groups. But the Gilmore report asserted that they probably would hesitate to entrust unconventional weapons to terrorists because of the likelihood that they could not be trusted, “even to the point of using the weapon against its sponsor.”

Another widely discussed concern has been the spread of weapon technology from the then-Soviet Union’s huge biowar program, Biopreparat, which once employed 30,000 people. Reports have suggested that Iran has been interested in luring penniless Russian scientists who worked in the program.

So far, however, there is nothing on the public record to suggest that scientists from national weapon programs of this kind have gone to work for rogue regimes or terrorist groups, experts said.

Most terrorism experts, including those at the FBI, contend that the preferred tool of the terrorism trade will continue to be what it has been all along: explosives. They are easier to use, produce dramatic effects and continue to kill and injure far more civilians than the new weapons.

The actual threat posed by germs and chemicals is not likely to produce cinematic, mass-casualty disasters but smaller-scale, low-tech incidents such as the Rajneeshees’ food poisonings, attacks involving caustic industrial chemicals or germs used on livestock or crops, many experts said.

The government warns that tens of thousands are likely to be injured or killed each year from unintentional food poisonings, noted Milton Leitenberg, a biochemist at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies.

Many experts contend that the government has not conducted the research needed to assess chances that terrorists actually will use these weapons for mass-scale attacks.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative unit of Congress, repeatedly has urged the government to conduct a systematic evaluation of the threat.

Meanwhile, some analysts say the government’s warnings, while helping build political support for increased spending, may be sowing the seeds of fear that would magnify the terror produced by any attack.

“We could actually be really undermining ourselves,” said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.S. arms control official now with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.