Viewpoint : Terrorism and Wmd : Some Preliminary Hypotheses

Dr. Bruce Hoffman is Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and Chairman of the Department of International Relations, St. Andrews University, Scotland. The face of terrorism is changing. New adversaries, new motivations, and new rationales have surfaced in recent years to challenge the conventional wisdom on both terrorists and terrorism. More critically, perhaps, many of our old preconceptions—as well as government policies—date from terrorism’s emergence as a global security problem more than a quarter century ago. They originated and took hold during the Cold War: when radical left-wing terrorist groups then active throughout the world were widely regarded as posing the most serious threat to Western security. What modifications or “finetuning” have been undertaken in Western responses since then are no less dated, having been implemented a decade ago in response to the series of suicide bombings against U.S. diplomatic and military targets in the Middle East that underscored the rising threat of state-sponsored terrorism. The potential irrelevance of much of this thinking is perhaps clearest with regard to potential terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD, e.g., nuclear, chemical or biological weapons). The difficulties in assessing both actual and potential threats in this particular area of terrorism studies are compounded by the academic community’s historical lack of attention to terrorism linked to WMD.