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Terror Risk from WMD Exaggerated, Experts Say

Posted on: Tuesday, 7 February 2006, 03:35 CST

CANBERRA -- The threat that militants could develop and use weapons of mass destruction was exaggerated, international experts said on Tuesday as Australia and the United States warned the risk was real and disturbing.

Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at London's Kings College, and the Australian National University's (ANU) Robert Ayson, both played down the likelihood that militants could use weapons of mass destruction in an attack.

Speaking in Canberra at a one-day conference on the threat of weapons of mass destruction, they said while chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could not be ruled out, terror groups were more likely to use conventional bombs and weapons.

"The most likely terrorist threat is likely to be more ordinary and familiar, but still deadly in its own way," Freedman told the conference.

He said it would be difficult for militants to develop weapons of mass destruction as they would require more people with extensive expertise, making it difficult to maintain security and increasing the risk they would be detected.

Ayson, director of studies at the ANU's Strategic and Defense Studies Center, said governments should be doing more to ease public fears about weapons of mass destruction.

"We should be disarming our nightmares," he said, adding that governments should separate the debate about terror threats from debate about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

"In 10 years' time, we will look back and see the threat as exaggerated."

But Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and U.S. Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Threat Reduction Donald A Mahley both said they treated the threats seriously.

"Unhappily, the threat of terrorists attempting such attacks is not a hypothetical problem. There is more than enough evidence of both intent and attempts to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction," Downer told the conference.

He said Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was developing a biological weapons program in Afghanistan in 2001, while the Jordanian government foiled a 2004 plot by a group linked to the Al Zarqawi network to launch a toxic-chemical attack in Amman.

He said a rudimentary chemical and biological manual was also discovered in 2003 in a safehouse in the Philippines used by the Southeast Asian militant network, Jemaah Islamiah.

Mahley said the United States was increasingly concerned about threats of biological weapons, saying his country would continue to do all it could to deter and prevent their development and use.

He said weapons of mass destruction could be described as weapons of mass psychology, and said the anthrax attacks in the United States in late 2001 had a major impact on the population, although only five people were killed.

Source: REUTERS

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