The Terror of Bio – and Chemical Weapons: Will They Be Used Again? – How Dangerous Are They?

By Joseph Mazur

– Friedrich Frischknecht,
Department of Infectious Diseases,
Heidelberg University.¹

The world has changed since the two world wars and the other awful wars of the twentieth century. We no longer worry about bio- or chemical-weapon attacks in military conflicts that, thanks to the two protective treaties, control (as best they can) escapes of pathogens and intentional chemical attacks. Two landmark achievements are the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC), distinct treaties that, in the last century, brought hope to a world that could have destroyed itself almost as easily with a few nuclear bomb attacks. Our understanding of what could happen was outdated ever since ISIS and al-Qaeda were whacked, because terrorist states and organizations have found new ways to skirt laws, so a bio- or chemical weapon in the hands of a terrorist could someday be a threat or a bargaining chip that could become uncontrollable. In this article, I review facts of future concern for accidents of bio- and chemical materials and how they potentially could be used in terrorist attacks but not likely in future wars, thanks to two sharply worded treaties.

Disputed historical evidence suggests that the Black Death epidemic in Europe did not begin from communally transmitted natural germs.² According to Gabriel De Mussis, an Italian notary who in 1348 chronicled a vivid account of Black Death origins, inhabitants of the walled city of Caffa, a Genoese colony at the eastern edge of the Crimean Peninsula, were suffering from a Black Death plague epidemic when attacked by the Golden Horde Mongols.³ He wrote that the attackers catapulted plague-infected live soldiers and cadavers over the city walls to infect defenders. That narrative is a plausible explanation of how the plague devastated the city of Caffa, because the Mongol army was heavily infected. The spread of the plague through Europe by catapulting cadavers is an unlikely stretch, but who knows?⁴ Caffa was a port town with heavy trade by ships and overland caravans that might have carried plague infestations along their way to Europe.⁵ In any case, unless other unhygienic conditions were the cause, it was one of the earliest documented cases of biological warfare.⁶

There is, however, vague cuneiform testimony of biological warfare going as far back as the fourteenth century BC, when epidemics caused the dissemination of Francisella tularensis, an aerobic bacterium causing disease in wars, deliberately contaminated soldiers in Asia Minor.⁸ And legendary accounts suggest that the Mongol war with Caffa was not the first biological attack in history and that biological warfare has been with us since 600 BC, when Assyrian armies fighting the Medes (ancestors of modern Kurds), dumped fungi into the Medes’ wells that created Ergot, which is a biological poison that can cause seizures, cardiovascular problems, and possibly death. 

Toxic agents of war

For the six centuries after the siege of Caffa, there were a few known cases of catapulting cadavers (table 1). Then came World War I, with the initiation of sulfur mustard gas, a completely new mass-destruction warfare agent. Mustard gas is more harmful than its being a mere carcinogen. When inhaled, bleeding and skin blistering damage the mucous membranes, causing excessive fluid accumulation in the lungs – heavy contamination can also cause first- or second-degree burns. A field hospital nurse wrote:⁹

The poor boys were helpless, and the nurses had to take off these uniforms, all soaked with gas, and do the best they could for the boys. Next day all the nurses had chest trouble and streaming eyes from the gassing. They were yellow and dazed. Even their hair turned yellow, and they were nearly as bad as the men, just from the fumes from their clothing.¹⁰ 

Another nurse wrote:

Gas cases are terrible. They cannot breathe lying down or sitting up. They just struggle for breath, but nothing can be done. Their lungs are gone – literally burnt out. Some have their eyes and faces entirely eaten away by gas and their bodies covered with first-degree burns.¹¹

Table 1. Known cases of biological warfare.

Year	Event
1155	Emperor Barbarossa poisons water wells with human bodies, Tortona, Italy.12
1346	Mongols catapult bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Caffa, Crimean Peninsula.13
1422	Holy Roman Empire attack on the Karlštejn Castle in Czech territory. Biological warfare and catapulting of cadavers were conducted by attackers and defenders.
1495	Spanish mix wine with blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French foes, Naples, Italy.14
1650	Polish troops fire saliva from rabid dogs towards their enemies.15
1710	Battle between Russian and Swedish forces in Reval (present day Estonia). Plague-infected cadavers were thrown toward enemies.
1763	British distribute blankets from smallpox patients to native Americans.16
1797	Napoleon floods the plains around Mantua, Italy, to enhance the spread of malaria.17
1863	Confederates sell clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients to Union troops, USA.18
1914	Sulfur agents were used in the First World War.
1927	The Spanish army indiscriminately used phosgene, diphosgene, chloropicrin, and mustard gas.
1936	Italian armed forces used sulfur mustard against Ethiopian forces.
1944	Japanese military poison wells and reservoirs in China.19
1967	Egypt’s armed forces employed bombs and artillery shells filled with phosgene and mustard agents in northern Yemen.
1980	Sulfur agents were used in the Iran-Iraq War.
2017	Syria’s military airstrikes drop chemical poisons on civilian population.20

Gases are uncontrollable in war and often unanticipated by one side of the conflict. The British, fighting in WWI, were lucky that protective clothing and gas masks were quickly manufactured and sent to the battlefields. Through a stunning industrial defense mobilization, 300,000 were produced and shipped in the first week of the first gas attack, with 27 million coming off the production lines as gas attacks continued. Luck must have had something to do with the balance between the early twentieth-century basic knowledge of gas chemistry and wartime anticipation of all possible vulnerabilities. In the first few weeks of the gas war, soldiers used nose clips and breathed through their teeth or covered their mouths with handkerchiefs soaked in their urine because gases can permeate through dry cotton.

Over half a billion people have died from infectious diseases in the twentieth century. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), many thousands of these deaths were due to the deliberate release of pathogens or toxins; for example, sulfur gas suffocated enemy troops in large numbers. With enormous numbers of scary virus families and new killer pathogens floating around from host to host, grabbing cells to replicate and harm humans, animals, and plants, one wonders when the next pandemic will hit. Since viruses exist in high numbers, are easy to capture, and are difficult to manage once released, there is a danger that an escape from control could be catastrophic to human health.

Though international treaties prohibit the use of biological weapons in warfare, bioweapons research and production continue. At the end of the nineteenth century and again in later treaties, international declarations prohibited the use of poison weapons but without enforcement powers. Aside from terrorists, who may or may not have labs for biological weapon experimentations, there is the fright that containment of transmissible pathogens could be insecure. The COVID-19 coronavirus killed more than 7 million people, havocked the world economy, and created enough social damage to set back a generation of political trust and hyped fear.²¹ Nathan Levine, Advisor at the Asia Society Policy Institute, and Chris Li, Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy

School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, tell us, “The toll from a virus genetically engineered to increase transmissibility and lethality as a bioweapon could be almost inconceivable.” ²² To put these future threats into perspective, I discuss in this article the history of biological and chemical warfare and terrorism.

After WWII, the U.S. military released bacteria in Virginia and San Francisco for pathogenic and non‐pathogenic microbe infection research on roughly 800,000 human volunteers and unsuspecting civilians at more than 200 sites, including bus stations and airports.²³ In 1966, the military conducted a study on the effects of an innocuous pathogen that simulates the release of anthrax.^{24, 25} In 1966, the U.S. military contaminated the New York subway system to learn how pathogens spread in a big city. By the 1970s, the CIA had been covertly mixing psychoactive drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans to research mind reactions. To study cholera and typhus during the Second World War, the Japanese poisoned over a thousand water wells in China by air-dropping plague-infested fleas.^{26, 27, 28} While it is odd that, during the seven years of WWII, Germany never considered using biological weapons, its concentration camp furnaces were as evil as, or worse than, any of the biological weapons that could have been.²⁹

Testing bio- or chemical weapons is neither heinous nor criminal. In some cases, though, it is morally wrong. In 1928, the Soviet Ministry of Defense facilities were researching pathogenic microorganisms secretly for use as antipersonnel biological weapons, not just microbial agents aimed at livestock and plants. Later, while the Vietnam War was heating up, other attempts in U.S. military biological weapons research were expanding. Agent Orange, a tactical chemical herbicide, was used to defoliate enemy cover, but it exposed U.S. veterans to long-term health problems.

The big ban

In 1972, while peace settlement negotiations for the Vietnam War were finally taking place, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC) was introduced. Signed in 1975, it banned the use of biological and toxin weapons and prohibited research on biological weapons.

Table 2 marks seven intentional biowarfare events. History, though, is filled with accusations of biological warfare with no clear definition of what that means. Catapulting plague-infected cadavers fits a deserving definition, and so does anthrax (used in two world wars of the twentieth century). Other biological warfare accounts refer to unintended spreads of diseases, such as the smallpox epidemic that infected Native Americans from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. ³⁰ That scourge, which killed almost 90 per cent of the pre-Columbian Native American population, was likely caused by contact with settlers.

Table 2. Crucial biological agents (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA).

Bioweapon abuses in wars
Anthrax	Bacillus anthracis (bacterium)	First World War Second World War Soviet Union, 1979 Japan, 1995 USA, 2001
Hemorrhagic fever virus	Marburg virus Ebola virus Arenavirus	Soviet bioweapons program
Plague	Yersinia pestis (bacterium)	Fourteenth‐century Europe Second World War
Tularemia	Francisella tularensis (bacterium)	Second World War

Scientific Experimentation and Production

On January 25, 2025, a CIA intelligence report was declassified and released. John Ratcliffe, the newly appointed Director, said “[The CIA] has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan. And so we will continue to investigate that moving forward.’’ ^[1] The report, however, says with “low confidence of the outcome of its investigation, that “the available body of reporting” admits a possibility that the widely held theory that the virus emerged naturally.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 around the globe was not intentional; it killed without regard for states. Yet, we learned a great deal from the COVID pandemic. Thanks to a 2023 U.S. Department of Defense Biodefense Posture Review, strategic guidelines are in place to connect world partners and to ensure deterrence against bio and chemical threats and mishandlings. ³¹ Nature, though, has its way of indiscriminately throwing random curveballs at the animal kingdom, but bioweapons have ways of escaping from labs to cause pandemics. The risk of accidental or intentional release of biochemical agents, viruses, or bacteria could be catastrophic to urban populations. Fortunately, we have another landmark humanitarian achievement, the BTWC, that prohibits any development, stockpiling, obtaining, or retaining “microbial or other biological agents that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.” ³²

Table 3. Chemical weapons that have been used in wars.

Public health endemics
Disease	Pathogen
Cholera	Vibrio cholerae (bacterium)
Encephalitis	Alphaviruses (virus)
Food poisoning	Salmonella, Shigella (bacterium)
Glanders	Burkholderia mallei (bacterium)
Typhus	Rickettsia prowazekii (bacterium)
Various toxic syndromes	Various (bacterium)
COVID-19	SARS-CoV-2 (virus)
Influenza (flu)	Virus
Respiratory Syncytial Infection (RSV)	Virus
Avian influenza (Bird Flu)	Virus

With 69 biolabs researching biochemical advances under the highest level of risk (BSL4), and with 51 of them in urban areas, we get a key message from Global BioLabs, an organization in King’s College London that tracks maximum containment of biolabs around the world: ³³ can human cell-attacking pathogens escape by a saboteur’s release? Prisoners escape from maximum security prisons, and even classified military documents slip away from their well-guarded files. The question is answered in “The Urgent Need for an Overhaul of Global Biorisk Management,” an article in the April 2022 West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) Sentinel by Filippa Lentzos, Gregory D. Koblentz, and Joseph Rodgers.³⁴

The biological risk landscape is rapidly evolving and presents significant new challenges to preventing the accidental, reckless, or malicious misuse of biology. At the same time, oversight systems to ensure that life sciences research is conducted safely, securely, and responsibly are falling behind. An urgent overhaul to realign bio-risk management with contemporary risks is needed.³⁵

Table 4: Biosafety levels.

Biosafety level	Characteristics	Pathogens / Disease
BSL-4	Infection aerosol transmission that may cause serious or lethal infections with no treatment available	Ebola virus, Variola virus (smallpox), Marburg virus
BSL-3	Infection aerosol transmission that may cause serious or lethal infections	Coronavirus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Yersinia pestis (plague), malaria
BSL-2	Infectious agents of moderate risk with injection or mucous membrane transmission	Influenza, Lyme disease, salmonella, measles, mumps
BSL-1	Low-risk agents that are not known to cause human diseases	E. coli

Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Public Domain

With the number of BSL4 labs rapidly increasing, security is a concern, especially in urban areas. A bio-risk management system, ISO 35001:2019, gauges laboratories with inherent risks of humanitarian catastrophe. It follows the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in identifying, assessing, controlling, and monitoring the risks associated with hazardous biological materials. The overall intention is to reduce the risk of unintentional exposure or release of biological materials.

Twelve BSL4 labs are being built in India, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, and Singapore to study the effects of natural and bio-made biological outbreaks such as SARS-CoV-2.

Table 5. BSL-4 Lab construction.

BSL-4 Labs
Region	Per region	Operational	Planned / in construction
Europe	26	24	2
Asia	20	9	11
Africa	3	2	1
North America	15	12	3
Oceania	4	4	0
South America	1	0	1
Total	69	51	18

Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevension
Public Domain

The Global BioLabs system for scoring biosafety ensures pandemic preparedness. Out of 27 high scores, 21 BSL-4 labs scored highly. Table 6 shows that two countries scored medium and four scored low. To score high, a BSL-4 biolab must have “legislation, laws, regulations, administrative requirements, policies, or other government instruments in place for biosafety and a dedicated entity responsible for the enforcement of biosafety legislation and a national list of dangerous pathogens.” ³⁶ Those with high scores (22 countries) must also follow the measures of occupational health and transportation safety. Low scores from two countries show problems with governance measures related to DNA screening, and 11 other countries show issues with information and cybersecurity protections. In 12 countries, there were signs of biosecurity risk assessment.

Table 6. Safety score (out of 20).

Country	Score	Medium score
Czechia	11
Philippines	7
India	5	Low score
Ivory Coast	3
Gabon	3
Saudi Arabia	1

Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Public Domain

Should we fear? There is a potential for one of four countries that have low-score BSL-4 labs to have an accidental leak or possibly a break-in from rogue groups stealing pathogens that they could use for a terror attack. And there will be pandemics beyond those that escape from their biolab sanctuaries. We will continue to be unready but smart enough to jump ahead in the science of immunology that knows how to destroy invading pathogens and build immunities. Let’s hope our governing bodies do not ruin our medical protections by surrendering to the anti-vax movement that has gained momentum since the mid-nineteenth century and is now threatening, by elevating antivaxers to powerful government department positions, to block vaccinations reported to have saved 154 million lives since the 1970s.³⁷

The next big ban

If we go back far enough, we find that Thucydides recounted in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars that the Peloponnesians had tried to reduce the town of Plataea with sulfur fumes by tossing incendiaries, so-called Greek Fire weapons with sulfur and pitch, in the fifth century BC. “The consequence,” he writes, “was a fire greater than anyone had ever yet seen produced by human agency, though it could not of course be compared to the spontaneous conflagrations sometimes known to occur through the wind rubbing the branches of a mountain forest together.”³⁸ In my guess of truth, chemical warfare goes much further back than the Third Peloponnesian War (413-404 BC), possibly back to when humans knew how to fight others and control fire, one or two million years ago. As for the future, we cannot know if our treaties and conventions will hold power to prohibit chemical weapons in future wars; however, in another guess of truth, there will always be combatants who will try to skirt military laws, treaties, and conventions.

From the end of WWI to 1997, when the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (CWC) was in force, there were plenty of intentional chemical attacks in international conflicts if we count napalm, an incendiary weapon that causes burns and deoxygenates to asphyxiate the enemy. Napalm has been used in the Second Sino – Japanese, Indochina, Algerian, Rhodesian Bush, Spanish Rif, Italo-Ethiopian, and South Africa Border wars, and Turkey’s operation against the Kurds. Most recently, the Syrian Civil War blatantly violated Article 1 of the CWC.³⁹

We now have an international arms control treaty (the BTWC) administered by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global watchdog on chemical weapons that prohibits the use, stockpiling, and transferring of chemical weapons. ⁴⁰ All signatories to the BTWC are obliged to destroy all their chemical weapons with verification. With more than 98 per cent of the world represented by 193 member states, almost all stockpiles, except those of Egypt, North Korea, Syria, and South Sudan, were destroyed. Article 1 (of 24) calls for each state party never, under any circumstances:

1. To develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone.
2. To use chemical weapons.
3. To engage in any military preparations to use chemical weapons.
4. To assist, encourage or induce, in any way, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a state party under this convention.

               Fermentation units                                      Refrigeration units

Today, there are almost no known chemical warfare stockpiles in 183 of the 193 states that have signed the CWC, according to the OPCW; however, some states have secret stockpiles under the control of nongovernmental forces.⁴² It is not fair to accuse Syria of using chemical weapons in war by bringing up the fact that it had done so in 256 BC during the Roman siege of Dura Europos, attacking the Persian army in the geographical boundaries of modern Syria. That siege was likely the first battle using chemical weapons other than Greek Fire. The Persians mixed sulfur and pitch to make sulfur dioxide, a lethal gas. In this century, though, we know that Syria used chemical weapons on its people and that there has been no surveillance on the matter in the last 10 years. In an emergency meeting on December 12, 2024, in the Hague, Fernando Arias González, Director-General of the OPCW, said, “Chemical weapons have been used in Syria on multiple occasions and victims deserve that perpetrators that we identified be brought to justice and held accountable for what they did and that investigations continue.” With the toppling of Assad, there is hope that all chemical weapons in possession of the new Syrian government will be permanently destroyed.

Figure 1. Chemical attacks on 21 August 2013 in Ghouta, Damascus, Syria.

In 1988, Saddam Hussein used a weapon of mass destruction against the Kurds. According to Jim Muir, a Baghdad correspondent for BBC News, the weapon used was “a lethal cocktail of sulfur mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin, and venomous agent X.” ⁴³ Muir reported at that time that Iraqi citizens suffered over 5,000 deaths and 7,000 injuries from that attack when Iraqi jets sprayed and dropped canisters of the cocktail for five hours over Halabja, a Kurdish town at the eastern border dividing Iraq from Iran. Sarin is the deadliest of all nerve agents. It is a colorless and odorless weapon of mass destruction. Other than for warfare, it has almost no other purpose. Exposure is lethal even under very low concentrations. From respiratory paralysis, death can happen in just a few minutes. And for those who inhale Sarin gas and escape death, there is a better than even chance of suffering permanent neurological damage.

A quarter-century after the Halabja massacre, Syrian government military forces under the Assad regime launched rockets loaded with chlorine gas, a deadly nerve agent, into the Ghouta district of Damascus. That attack killed more than 1,400 and injured roughly 3,500 Syrian citizens. Chlorine gas is heavier than air, so it passes from high altitude to low, and roofs to basements in housing where families shelter from bombings. There was no escape without protection from gas masks, which most victims did not have.

Four years later, Syrian military forces launched another chemical poison attack on Khan Shaykhun, a town in northwest Syria, killing 89 citizens. A year later, again, the rebelcontrolled southeastern town Douma was attacked with chlorine gas dropped from a Syrian military helicopter that killed citizens.⁴⁴ Although the Assad regime signed an agreement, under the supervision of the OPCW, to destroy all existing chemical weapons, new evidence supports a continued possession of chemical weapons.

Figure 2. Incidents of chemical weapon attacks in Syria.

Continued breaks from the signed agreement to abolish all chemical weapons suggest that Syria was not to be trusted with any signings. The Global Public Policy Institute claims that approximately 90 per cent of the chemical attacks in Syria took place after the Assad regime agreed to give up its chemical weapons arsenal. International monitors claim 345 credible instances where the Syrian military had attacked its citizens with chlorine gas, Sarin, Tabun, venomous agent X, and cocktails of unknowns.⁴⁵

Syria, an incredibly fragile country, is now under a new government, so we have hope that inspectors will be permitted to investigate Syria’s chemical weapon stockpiles, if there are any. I say this because what goes into Syria does not stay in Syria, so many of these weapons are already in the hands of rogue states that have few avenues of advancement other than terror. A terrorist organization is not necessarily one of the 193 states that have signed the CWC. Iran signed and North Korea did not. Therefore, we know next to nothing about how many terrorist organizations have chemical weapons or are planning terror by sabotaging chemical labs to leak biomaterial that could spread to become global catastrophes.

And now, we have reports from Amnesty International accusing the Sudanese government of over 30 chemical weapons attacks in its civil war that have killed 250 civilians, including many children, with sulfur mustard, lewisite, or nitrogen mustard. Of course, Sudan denies the allegation, though we suspect that South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan in 2011, does have stockpiles and has not permitted the UN to access the region.

Chemistry, before the seventeenth century, was a theory of alchemy, a mix of religion, astrology, folklore, mythology, magic, philosophy, and mysticism, aimed at producing the elixir of life and the material world of precious metals, not an understanding of combustion. The late seventeenth century brought forward modern chemistry, though oxygen, the critical element needed for combustion, was discovered in the late eighteenth century. Oddly, the first intentional chemical weapon attack came in the twentieth century. Chemical weapons are human-constructed or discovered, but bioweapons come from nature, as far as we know, and without any terrorist biochemical engineering.

The next stage of illicit weaponry

It is not easy to create a bio- or chemical weapon that could have good aim and controlled spreading. Winds are unpredictable, even in these modern times of sophisticated atmospheric science intelligence. Meteorologists can accurately forecast wind speeds under 3 mph but, at slightly higher speeds, forecasting gusts is challenging. In the nineteenth century, chemistry was well understood. Yet in all the wars after the siege of Caffa and before the twentieth century, few military leaders risked the challenge of using bio- or chemical weapons, because unpredictable wind directions were nature’s deterrent.

Modern terrorism ignores that deterrent. Some terrorists tend to believe in their cause and will stop at nothing, including their death, to advance their method of getting a seat at a peace table, a table that rarely exists. Given a chance, some would see glory in concocting and releasing to the atmosphere a chemical brew that would be extraordinarily dangerous to themselves (in unpredictable wind gusts directions) if a few thousand civilians were to feel terror. Terrorist organizations outsource operations to non-state semi-independent groups of skilled fighters who keep their distance while performing dangerously nasty work that ignores international war laws. 

Most wars are internal, not international. Methods of combat in war are not the same for all wars. Car-bombing is generally a civil war means of battle, rarely an attack scheme for state-to-state wars unless one state decides to assassinate an enemy. On Tuesday morning, December 17, 2024, a bomb in an electric scooter exploded outside Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov’s apartment in Moscow. Kirillov was Russia’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons chief. Ukrainian state prosecutors charged him with the alleged use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine, particularly the toxic choking agent chloropicrin. Imagine what could happen and what could be at this moment in terrorist plans of mass destruction. Car bombs are lethal, but they cover a relatively small area and kill a few people unlucky enough to be close to explosions. Canisters carrying bio- or chemical material can quietly kill and harm thousands near and relatively far from where they spread into the atmosphere. The fright alone gives terrorists what they want, a negotiating advance that builds on shock.

The attacks of 9/11 had that purpose, but the U.S. is no longer a power to play with, at least not in terms of negotiating world political order. With significant fear build-up – created by an event in which a thousand innocent people suffer – a terrorist organization will gain a negotiation advantage, especially if a second attack is planned and imminent. Just imagine the catastrophe that could come from a few, say four, scooters autonomously navigating by AI to not one but a few of the most touristy areas in London – say, Soho, the West End, Notting Hill, and Kensington. They stop to send information back to the terrorist cell in control. Soon after, at a signal from a cell, all four quietly release Sarin gas from their canisters. What then? Please, don’t continue to imagine. On March 20, 1995, members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released Sarin in the Tokyo subway during rush hour. The attack killed 12, hospitalized 5,511, and injured 1,039.⁴⁶ That was a mild case of domestic terror performed by a group of five members that carried 11 Sarin-filled plastic bags onto five different subway trains in Tokyo. Members of the group boarded trains, punctured the bags to release 159 ounces of Sarin gas, and fled. Aum was a callow group. What could a proficient group do with chemical weapons? 

My point is this: the old methods of terrorist activities, other than hijacking commercial airliners and ramming them into tall buildings, no longer bring states to negotiate concessions. Car bombs or suicide terrorists strapped to hand grenade explosive vests might kill 10 people or, in rare cases, significantly more. (For the last 42 years, the average number of deaths by a suicide terrorism attack, excluding 9/11, is 8.6.)⁴⁷ Chemical weapons can kill hundreds or deliver lifetime injuries and health problems to thousands. Every day that passes is another flash of time when shaky experimenters of chemical technology progress with their plans to create mayhem, asphyxiation, and death to those seen as enemies. Will, then, bio- or chemical weapons sometime in the future be used with a gas-blast yield of unstable power on par with the explosion potential of nuclear weapons? I do not know the answer and, likely, neither does anyone else. Will a well-designed chemical weapon ever be produced with the potential to wipe out whole cities? Que será, será. Are we ready?

So, … what guidance do we have to prepare ourselves for possible bio or chemical weapons accidents and attacks? Not in a war zone, we tend to sympathize with combatants and vulnerable citizens while discounting any likelihood of being drawn in. So far, weapons involving biological and chemical ingredients are well under control, thanks to a very positive humanitarian treaty achievement that deserves applause. The CWC has, for half a century, guarded well against iniquitous mass chemical attacks.

Applied to international warfare, that is a celebrated extensive stretch of obedience. That treaty has had enormous success as a deterrent and a moral code. Rational, moderate governments tend to hope that their war machines obey the treaties they sign and ratify as they look forward to honest, untainted victories showing that their wars are just.

Terrorism, however, is still with us. For the first few years after 9/11, fear of another attack was part of the American public discomfort. It was a natural consequence of shock, along with grief and limited anxiety. However, recollections of disasters not far from our personal GPS coordinates tend to wane and heal naturally. ISIS is going through a dozing stage, not fully asleep and surely not dead.

The October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel was, by definition, terrorism. Now, threats directed by terrorist organizations are elevated and galvanized by the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas conflicts. There are government-sponsored civilian assassins, inspired and radicalized home-grown individuals caught in extremist ideology without direct terrorist group affiliations, ready to massacre; witness the recent truck mauling in New Orleans, the attacks in Russia, Iran, and Germany, and hundreds of attacks in West Africa. The more established, closely watched groups now operate in smaller cells dispersed to diverse locations. As Brett Holmgren, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on November 12th, 2024, “Groups like ISIS have found ways to exploit the circumstances, especially in the Middle East and Africa, to slowly and quietly rebuild. As a result, today we are in yet another transformational phase of the global terrorism landscape, a threat that is more diverse, more complex, and more decentralized.”⁴⁸ Who knows what will happen in Syria, with almost 10,000 ISIS fighters in that fragile country’s prisons?

Terror will surface again, not with guns, bombs, and trucks killing pedestrians celebrating the New Year, but rather with lethal gases that could get into the hands of a fanatical leader who cares less about humanity and more about aspiring to master-of the-world power. Will the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions protect us against terror? No! The International Criminal Court (ICC) could imprison perpetrators of shocking illegal offenses. States could spend their intelligence budgets on surveillance and online chatter and sweep a few cells on the verge of violent attack movements. But the sine qua non, the only way forward, is for sensible leaders and policymakers to agree that terrorism is a world issue that cannot be curtailed without understanding that there are, and will always be, large and small groups rightly or wrongly perceiving oppression, opposing political or social styles, or religious beliefs. The challenge endures.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Follow his World Financial Review column at https://worldfinancialreview.com/category/columns/understanding-war/. More information about him is at https://www.josephmazur.com/

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11. Denis Winter, Death’s Men (New York: Penguin, 1985) p. 123.
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21. According to the World Health Organization, the number of deaths from January 2020 to January 2025 is 7,079,925.https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-03-16/pathogens-haveworlds-attention
22. Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom. The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare
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31. https://media.defense.gov/2023/Aug/17/2003282337/-1/- 1/1/2023_biodefense_posture_review.pdf
32. https://disarmament.unoda.org/biological-weapons/
33. Europe has 26, Asia 20, North America 15, Oceania 4, Africa 3, and South America 1.
34. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/CTC-SENTINEL-042022.pdf
35. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-urgent-need-for-an-overhaul-of-global-bioriskmanagement/
36. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/global-biolabs-report-2023.pdf
37. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-how-many-lives-vaccines-have-savedaround-the world/#:~:text=A%20May%20study%20in%20the,of%20six%20lives%20every%20minute.
38. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/-460_400,_Thucydides,_History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War,_EN.pdf.
39. https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/CWC/CWC_en.pdf
40. BTWC, though, was not the first international arms control treaty. The first against the use of chemical weapons was the Strasbourg Agreement, honored by France and the Holy Roman Empire in 1675.
41. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NunnLugar/2015/49. per cent201999-06-00 per cent20Former%20Soviet%20Biological%20Weapons%20Facilities%20in%20Kazakhsta n.Past%20Present%20and%20Future%20(from%20Web).pdf
42. https://www.opcw.org/
43. https://www.bbc.com/news/1/hi/world/middle_east/8479115.stm
44. https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/S_series/2018/en/s-16452018_e_.pdf
45. https://gppi.net/media/GPPi_Schneider_Luetkefend_2019_Nowhere_to_Hide_Web.pd f
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