By Sir Timothy Garden
Terrorism is not new. Virtually all governments have had to develop policies to protect their citizens from unpredictable acts of violence by terrorists. Nor did the tragic events of 11 September 2001 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania change the risk. What changed was the public perception of the threat. It is now real and immediate, particularly for the American public. As this report shows, the USA had been uniquely unaffected by international terrorism in recent years. Yet the warning signals had been there before. The World Trade Centre had already been the target of a failed bombing attack. In Europe, many governments have grown used to the need to counter their own local terrorist problems. A combination of intelligence work and police activity was used to keep the level of violence to a tolerable level until some solution to the underlying problem could be found.
However the terror attacks by the al-Qaeda trained team were on a different scale. Their aim was to provide a spectacular event in which the symbols of western power were brought down, and as many people as possible were killed. The murder of thousands of people was bad enough, but the numbers might have been ten times greater given the concentration of humanity in a single building. Over the years the developed world has produced steadily more attractive targets for the fanatical mass killer. Urbanisation has brought people into the cities, where they travel on vulnerable mass transport systems to work in vulnerable high rise buildings, while being supported by complex vulnerable utility systems. The threat of weapons of mass destruction being used in the densely populated centres of commerce is of great concern. But, as the World Trade Centre attack showed, a Stanley knife can turn a fully fuelled aircraft into an instrument of mass destruction.
What are the policy priorities for governments? Their first duty is the protection of their citizens. This protection will be both active and passive. Good intelligence is essential both for preventing terrorist attacks, and also detecting and removing the terrorists. To combat the international terrorist, the intelligence must be international. Since there is a common threat to many nations, the urgent need is for the real sharing of data between countries.
The passive protection aspect is also important. Enhanced airport security measures introduced over a quarter of a century ago, following a rash of terrorist hijackings, reduced the incidence of such events greatly. Defensive measures do deflect terrorists to easier targets. They need therefore to be applied to those targets which would cause the greatest problem if successfully attacked. Just as high buildings provide opportunities for mass deaths, so nuclear related sites have special dangers, which are explored in this report. Nuclear power stations, nuclear reprocessing plants, nuclear weapon stores, and transport of nuclear material, all carry particular risks. A successful attack on any of these by a terrorist could contaminate large areas for decades as well as causing mass casualties. Protection from the land, sea and air needs to be responsive and certain. This gives rise to many difficult policy issues.
If, as Dr Barnaby suggests, we can also expect future terrorist weapons to have a nuclear, biological or chemical dimension, then the difficulties are even greater. While we can protect, at some cost, our own vulnerable installations, it is much more difficult to protect against every possible delivery system of a terrorist manufactured weapon of mass destruction. If intelligence and police work fails to stop such an attack, the third line of government response, disaster management, must meet the challenge.
Emergency planning for major civil disasters varies between and within countries. Civil defence organisations structured for survival after a nuclear exchange in the Cold War have been closed down. Their efficacy was always debateable, but at least a large number of people had trained, planned and practised for what to do in a disaster with thousands of deaths. That expertise has largely disappeared. Nor in most western countries is there much spare capacity in the health area, the police or the fire services. The equipment for dealing with nuclear, biological or chemical contamination is not widely available outside of the military. The public have little knowledge of what to do under such circumstances. The spread of disease among livestock in Europe has demonstrated how much difficulty governments have in controlling the spread of infection, even when they can take very severe measures.
There is also a policy problem for a democracy in terms of how much the lives of individual citizens should be constrained by the introduction of precautionary measures. There is no single solution to prevent a terrorist attack. All successful counter-terrorist campaigns have required years of patience, while the underlying causes are addressed and protective measures are implemented. Addressing the risk from terrorists hell bent on mass killing will be no different. New attacks will happen from time to time however good the defences. The public has grown used to the security measures introduced at airports and public buildings. The closing of roads to provide area security for sensitive buildings such as embassies is less well understood. The full decontamination of an area with suspected biological or chemical is an intimidating process. As has been seen recently following the delivery by mail of a small amount of anthrax in the USA, hoaxes and false alarms follow in much greater number. Disaster teams in protective clothing do little to calm a nervous public.
Dr Barnaby analyses the trends across the range of terrorist activities. His conclusions give little comfort. The most extreme terrorists are on the increase, and there are real dangers of further mass casualties, including contamination with nuclear material, infection from biological agents and the terror use of chemical weapons. Given the difficulties of directly protecting citizens from such threats, governments will have to improve markedly the effectiveness of their intelligence gathering agencies. This improvement needs to be undertaken urgently, and will require much greater co-operation between national intelligence organisations both internally and externally. We may be re-entering a period of widespread fear which parallels the dark days of the Cold War.