successful chemical terrorist attack and accordingly may conceivably have raised the stakes for terrorists
everywhere. Accordingly, terrorist groups in the future may well feel driven to emulate or surpass the Tokyo
incident either in death and destruction or in the use of a non-conventional weapon of mass destruction
(WMD) in order to ensure the same media coverage and public attention as the nerve gas attack generated.
The Tokyo incident also highlights another troubling trend in terrorism: significantly, groups today claim credit
for attacks less frequently than in the past. They tend not to take responsibility much less issue communiqu?s
explaining why they carried out an attack as the stereotypical, “traditional” terrorist group of the past did. For
example, in contrast to the 1970s and early 1980s, some of the most serious terrorist incidents of the past
decade–including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing–have never been credibly claimed–much less explained
or justified as terrorist attacks once almost always were–by the group responsible for the attack.36
The implication of this trend is perhaps that violence for some terrorist groups is becoming less a means to an
end (that therefore has to be calibrated and tailored and therefore “explained” and “justified” to the public) than
an end in itself that does not require any wider explanation or justification beyond the groups’ members
themselves and perhaps their specific followers. Such a trait would conform not only to the motivations of
religious terrorists (discussed above) but also to terrorist “spoilers”–groups bent on disrupting or sabotaging
multi-lateral negotiations or the peaceful settlement of ethnic conflicts or other such violent disputes. That
terrorists are less frequently claiming credit for their attacks may suggest an inevitable loosening of
constraints–self-imposed or otherwise–on their violence: in turn leading to higher levels of lethality as well.37
Another key factor contributing to the rising terrorist threat is the ease of terrorist adaptations across the
technological spectrum.38 For example, on the low-end of the technological spectrum one sees terrorists’
continuing to rely on fertiliser bombs whose devastating effect has been demonstrated by the PIRA at St Mary
Axe and Bishop’s Gate in 1991 and 1992; at Canary Wharf and in Manchester in 1996; by the
aforementioned World Trade Center bombers and the persons responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Fertiliser is perhaps the most cost-effective of weapons: costing on average one percent of a comparable
amount of plastic explosive. Its cost-effectiveness is demonstrated by the facts that the Bishop Gate blast is
estimated to have caused $1.5 billion and the Baltic Exchange blast at St Mary Axe $1.25 billion. The World
Trade Center bomb, as previously noted, cost only $400 to construct but caused $550 million in both damages
and lost revenue to the business housed there.39 Moreover, unlike plastic explosives and other military
ordnance, fertiliser and its two favourite bomb-making components–diesel fuel and icing sugar–are readily
and easily available commercially, completely legal to purchase and store and thus highly attractive “weapons
components” to terrorists and others.
On the high-end of the conflict spectrum one must contend not only with the efforts of groups like the Aum to
develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities, but with the proliferation of fissile materials from
the former-Soviet Union and the emergent illicit market in nuclear materials that is surfacing in Eastern and
Central Europe.40 Admittedly, while much of the material seen on offer as part of this “black market” cannot be
classified as SNM (strategic nuclear material, that is suitable in the construction a fissionable explosive device),
such highly-toxic radioactive agents can potentially be easily paired with conventional explosives and turned
into a crude, non-fissionable atomic bomb (e.g., “dirty” bomb). Such a device would therefore not only
physically destroy a target, but contaminate the surrounding area for decades to come.41
Finally, at the middle-end of the spectrum one sees a world awash in plastic explosives, hand-held
precision-guided-munitions (i.e., surface-to-air missiles for use against civilian and/or military aircraft),
automatic weapons, etc. that readily facilitate all types of terrorist operations. During the 1980s,
Czechoslovakia, for example, sold 1,000 tonnes of Semtex-H (the explosive of which eight ounces was
sufficient to bring down Pan Am 103) to Libya and another 40,000 tonnes to Syria, North Korea, Iran, and
Iraq–countries long cited by the U.S. Department of State as sponsors of international terrorist activity. In
sum, terrorists therefore have relatively easy access to a range of sophisticated, “off-the-shelf” weapons
technology that can be readily adopted to their operational needs.
Concluding Observations and Implications for Aviation Security
Terrorism today has arguably become more complex, amorphous transnational. The distinction between
domestic and international terrorism is also evaporating as evidence by the Aum’s sects activities in Russia and
Australia as well as in Japan, the alleged links between the Oklahoma City bombers and neo-Nazis in Britain
and Europe, and the network of Algerian Islamic extremists operating in France, Great Britain, Sweden,
Belgium and other countries as well as in Algeria itself. Accordingly, as these threats are both domestic and
international, the response must therefore be both national as well as multinational in construct and dimensions.
National cohesiveness and organisational preparation will necessarily remain the essential foundation for any
hope of building the effective multinational approach appropriate to these new threats. Without internal
(national or domestic) consistency, clarity, planning and organisation, it will be impossible for similarly diffuse
multinational efforts to succeed. This is all the more critical today, and will remain so in the future, given the
changing nature of the terrorist threat, the identity of its perpetrators and the resources at their disposal.
One final point is in order given the focus of this conference on aviation security. Serious and considerable
though the above trends are, their implications for–much less direct effect on–commercial aviation are by no
means clear. Despite media impressions to the contrary and the popular mis-perception fostered by those
impressions, terrorist attacks on civil aviation–particularly inflight bombings or attempted bombings–are in fact
relatively rare. Indeed, they account for only 15 of the 2,537 international terrorist incidents recorded between
1970 and 1979 (or .006 percent) and just 12 of 3,943 recorded between 1980 and 1989 (an even lower .003
percent). This trend, moreover, has continued throughout the first half of the current decade. There have been a
total of just six inflight bombings since 1990 out of a total of 1,859 international terrorist incidents. In other
words, inflight bombings of commercial aviation currently account for an infinitesimal–.003–percent of
international terrorist attacks.42 At the same time, the dramatic loss of life and attendant intense media coverage
have turned those few tragic events into terrorist “spectaculars”: etched indelibly on the psyches of commercial
air travellers and security officers everywhere despite their infrequent occurrence.43
Nonetheless, those charged with ensuring the security of airports and aviation from terrorist threats doubtless
face a Herculean task. In the first place, a defence that would preclude every possible attack by every possible
terrorist group for every possible motive is not even theoretically conceivable. Accordingly, security measures
should accurately and closely reflect both the threat and the difficulties inherent in countering it: and should
therefore be based on realistic expectations that embrace realistic cost-benefit. Indeed, there is a point beyond
which security measures may not only be inappropriate to the presumed threat, but risk becoming more
bureaucratic than genuinely effective.
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