Chemical security

The Evolving Chemical/Biological Terrorism Threat

On 1 January 2017, British Minister of State for Security Ben Wallace warned that the Islamic State group (IS) has no moral qualms about carrying out a mass casualty attack with chemical weapons in Britain, and pointed to a December 2016 Europol report warning that IS may use chemical and biological (CB) weapons against European targets. The threat is growing.

As stated in the U.S. Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2017 President’s Budget Submission, CB threats are constantly expanding; the rapid advancement of CB capabilities, as well as their global proliferation, “greatly extends the spectrum of plausible actors, agents, concepts of use, and targets.” In the past, many counterterrorism experts discounted the likelihood of CB attacks against Western targets by terrorist groups because many of these armaments tended to be expensive, hard to acquire, and difficult to weaponize and deploy. All this has changed. This article addresses a number of recent developments that have broadened the range of CB terrorism threats and made it easier for terrorists to obtain CB weapons. These developments suggest that the terrorist CB threat against the West – including both Europe and the U.S. homeland – is growing.