Concern over terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons increased after the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the discovery in 2001 of anthrax spores mailed in the United States. Chemical weapons consist of toxic chemical compounds, such as nerve gas or dioxin, whereas biological weapons are living organisms or their toxins, such as anthrax spores.

Chemical weapons can be divided into five main classes: incapacitating, choking, blistering, blood, and nerve agents. Incapacitating agents are the only deliberately nonlethal chemical weapon. They include the tear gases and pepper sprays typically used by police and other law enforcement agencies for crowd control or to subdue a person temporarily. Choking agents attack the victim's respiratory system and hamper breathing, leading to death by suffocation. Blister agents produce large blisters on exposed skin that do not heal readily and therefore easily become infected. Blood agents, which victims absorb through breathing, enter the bloodstream and lead to convulsions, respiratory failure, and death as they shut down the body's functioning. Nerve agents are especially effective. They can be either inhaled or absorbed through the skin and quickly attack the central nervous system, obstructing breathing.

Biological agents are disease-carrying organisms that infect people through inhalation, contaminated food or water, or contact with the skin. They include bacterial toxins, such as anthrax, Clostridium botulinum (botulism), and salmonella; plant toxins such as ricin; and viruses, such as tularemia, yellow fever, and smallpox.

D Demands of Terrorism

The demands of terrorist groups have ranged from such grand schemes as the total remaking of society along ideological lines to far narrower goals such as the release of hostages for money or the publication of a tract stating the terrorists' goals. During the 1970s and 1980s Marxist-Leninist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (later renamed the Red Army Faction) in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy waged campaigns to remake society along communist lines (see Communism). Radical Islamic groups have pursued the creation of devoutly religious theocracies (governments under divine guidance). These groups include Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. Other groups seek narrower goals, such as the reestablishment of a national homeland within an existing country, as does the Basque separatist movement active in Spain, or the unification of a divided nation, as do Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland.

E Impact of Terrorism

Although most terrorist groups have failed to achieve their long-term, strategic aims through terrorism, terrorism has on occasion brought about significant political changes that might otherwise have been impossible. Moreover, despite the claims of governments to the contrary, terrorism has sometimes also proven successful on a short-term, tactical level: winning the release of prisoners, wresting political concessions from otherwise resistant governments, or ensuring that causes and grievances that might otherwise have been ignored or neglected were addressed.

Terrorism was used by some nationalist movements in the anticolonial era just after World War II, when British and French empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East dissolved. Countries as diverse as Israel, Cyprus, Kenya, and Algeria owe their independence to these movements.

Evidence of terrorist success has come more recently in the examples of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in Northern Ireland and Yasir Arafat in the Middle East. Adams, president of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, and his deputy McGuinness both won election to the British Parliament in 1997. Arafat, as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), won international recognition for the PLO. Through tactical victories and political achievements, each of their organizations demonstrated how a series of terrorist acts can propel to world attention long-standing causes and grievances.

At the same time, for every terrorist success, there are the countless failures. Most terrorist groups never achieve any of their aims—either short-term or long-term. The life span of most modern terrorist groups underscores this failure. According to one estimate, the life expectancy of at least 90 percent of terrorist organizations is less than a year, and nearly half of the organizations that make it that far cease to exist within a decade of their founding.

Terrorism is designed to threaten the personal safety of its target audience. It can tear apart the social fabric of a country by destroying business and cultural life and the mutual trust upon which society is based. Uncertainty about where and when the next terrorist attack will occur generates a fear that terrorism experts call “vicarious victimization.” A common response to this fear is the refusal to visit shopping malls; attend sporting events; go to the theater, movies, or concerts; or travel, either abroad or within one's own country.

The public's perception of personal risk, however, often does not dovetail with the observable dimensions of the terrorist threat. Even though the United States was the country most frequently targeted by terrorists from 1968 to 2000, fewer than 1,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, either in the United States or abroad, during that 32-year period, according to figures tabulated by the U.S. State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although more than three times that number were killed on September 11, 2001, the fact remains that the perception of the terrorist threat far outweighs the likelihood of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, terrorism's ability to engender so acute a sense of fear and unease is a measure of its impact on our daily life.

According to official Canadian government sources, no reliable list of terrorist incidents in Canada exists. An unofficial estimate, however, puts the number of Canadians killed by terrorists both in Canada and overseas since 1968 at roughly 294 persons. This figure includes 279 Canadian citizens among a total of 329 persons killed in 1985 when a bomb exploded aboard an Air India flight en route from Montréal, Québec, to London, England.

VI Counterterrorism