ARS

Government officials and academics have been predicting terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) since well before 9/11 (Koblentz 2011). The forecasts tend to take two forms. Some authors will vaguely argue that it is not a question of if, but when a terrorist organization will carry out an attack using WMDs. For instance, in 2011 an FBI official declared there was a 100...

There is a small, but interesting literature developing about the relative dearth of major terrorist attacks in the past ten years. Boyd, Dunn, and Scouras (2009) examined several hypotheses about why terrorists have not successfully mounted another major attack against the United States since 9/11. The first explanation they identified was that U.S. policies to thwart such an attack have been...

A major theme of this book is that defending against weapons of mass destruction is an incredibly complex challenge for governments. Many factors contribute to the complexity of this policy area:

Compared to other forms of WMDs, the relative probability of a chemical attack is certainly higher than for a nuclear detonation. Comparisons to biological or radiological weapons are less straightforward given varying availability of agents and precursors, production challenges, and hurdles to effective dispersal. As is the case with all WMDs, there is a debate in the literature about the...

Of the weapons frequently included among WMDs, biological threats are the most unique in their nature, potential impacts, and defensive and response activities. Biological agents are diseases used intentionally to sicken, incapacitate, or kill the target. The agents can be carried in the air, water, or food. They vary dramatically in their contagiousness, the severity of illness they can cause,...

Radiological weapons have regularly been identified as a potential WMD threat (Carus 2012). They have very unique characteristics in relation to the other categories, because of which, some argue, the impact of a radiological weapon will be largely economic and psychological, with limited physical destruction or loss of life (Medalia 2011; Ferguson and Smith 2009; Zimmerman and Loeb 2004). In...

In 1967, the Nth country experimentThree people with PhDs in nuclear physics but no background in nuclear weaponry created successful weapons designs and identified sources for the requisite materials using only publicly available information sources. They did not build the weapons, but experts reviewing their explanations of...

The phrase weapon of mass destruction has a huge amount of cachet with politicians, the media, and the general public. It can be used to generate fear and mobilize public opinion. It summarizes and obscures the vast complexity of the weapons it typically includes and the potential impacts they could have. Governments that are working to deny WMD capacities to others and to improve response...

Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS), 1 , 2 , 3

Alethia H. Cook earned a PhD in public policy, with a focus on American foreign and defense policies, from Kent State University in 2006. She is an associate professor and chair of the Political Science Department at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Her current research
interests include the unique challenges posed by different categories of weapons of mass...

Series Editors: Joseph M. Siracusa and Aiden Warren