What Is Chemical Terrorism?

Chemical terrorism may be defined as the intentional or threatened dissemination of a toxic chemical against a civilian population for the purpose of causing death, incapacitation, economic damage, and/or fear. Chemical weapons may be agents developed expressly as weapons of mass destruction or simply common agricultural or industrial chemicals that are also both highly toxic and readily available for intentional release.

Chemical terrorism differs from bioterrorism in several important ways. Aside from the obvious difference that chemical weapons tend to be man-made, whereas biological weapons are, or come from, living organisms, there is a much more important difference: Biological weapons, for the most part, are much more a biological insidious in their onset. Once released, days or even weeks may pass before the signs of attack begin to manifest and victims become ill, presenting to their healthcare providers, urgent care centers, and emergency rooms. Most chemical weapons, on the other hand, usually produce nearly instant and dramatic effects.

Exceptions to this difference exist in the biological toxins ricin, abrin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B, and trichothecene (T-2) mycotoxins, which act more like chemical weapons in their rapid onset and presenting symptoms. Mustard would be an example of a chemical agent that does not have a rapid onset. It requires 2–48 hours following exposure to manifest itself, but this is still a much shorter time than most biological weapons.

The fundamental purpose of using chemical weapons also differs from that of biological weapons. Because of the delay in the onset of illness, just the threat of having released biological weapons can produce profound fear and confusion in the general population and stretch medical resources to their breaking point, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to claim the release of a chemical weapon in the absence of victims demonstrating appropriate symptoms. It is only the actual use of chemical weapons that achieves the desired result, which is always death or incapacitation, as well as fear.

The first recorded use of chemical weapons dates to 423 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War, when allies of Sparta used the smoke from burning sulfur and pitch to overpower an Athenian-held fortress. But it was not until the birth of modern organic chemistry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that chemical warfare truly came into its own. The real age of chemical warfare was ushered in by Germany in 1915 with the release of 150 tons of chlorine gas against the Allied forces at Ypres, Belgium. This attack produced no more than 800 deaths, but it initiated the hasty retreat of 15,000 panicked Allied troops. By the end World War I, both sides were employing chlorine, phosgene, sulfur mustard, and chloropicrin gases.

Since World War I, numerous devastating chemical weapons have been developed and used against both military and civilian populations. Probably one of the most terrifying and well-known chemical weapons today is the nerve agent, sarin. Often and mistakenly called a nerve gas, it is, in reality, generally released as a liquid or aerosol, and not as a gas. Sarin is so well known because of its use by Iraq against its own people and against Iran in the 1980s, and because of its release by the Aum Shinrikyo cult into the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 12 and injuring more than 5500 victims. Sarin and other chemical weapons are believed to be in the hands of several terrorist groups around the world.