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Speaker: terrorism's new goal is infliction of mass casualties

Christopher Chyba, co-director for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, speaks to a full house at the Physics Building Auditorium on Tuesday. He spoke about bioterrorism, saying that the overall philosophy of terrorism has shifted since the mid-1970s when it was generally thought that terrorists were not specifically interested in mass casualties or bio-weapons. Even after the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo attempted to spread anthrax in Tokyo there we're still two distinct schools of thought on the issue. "One side held that because the Aum Shinrikyo attacks failed, largely because the cult had cultivated a strain of anthrax that was not lethal, and they had not mastered aerosolization techniques, that the threat from bioterror was exaggerated," Chyba said. "The other side argued that the threat was real because the attempt showed that terrorist groups were very interested in mass casualties." More bad news came in the mid 1990s when Iraq disclosed its extensive bioweapons program and defectors from the former Soviet Union began to report that the former communist state had a massive bioweapons program. The most startling news, according to Chyba, was that the Soviets had weaponized smallpox. "This was a surprise," he said, "because smallpox is a contagious disease and most bioweaopons are infectious in nature; there's a real danger of a boomerang effect in using a contagious disease in a weapon, it can turn back on your military and civilian population." Photo by Kevin N. Roark, Public Affairs

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