Scientific Skills Can Be Used For and Against Terrorism, Former Top British Official Says

By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire

BARCELONA, Spain — Science can be an important tool in the fight against terrorism, but it must also be viewed as a potential complement to the arsenal of the extremists themselves, a former high-level British official said Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 22, 2006).

The major acts of terrorism of this decade — including the Sept. 11 attacks and bombings in London and Madrid — involved conventional means that did not require scientific expertise.  That does not exclude the possibility of more sophisticated strikes, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction, according to Richard Mottram, a career British civil servant who served as permanent secretary for intelligence, security and resilience from 2005 to 2007.

“We should worry about low-probability, high-consequence actions that are plausible,” Mottram said during a press briefing at the 2008 Euroscience Open Forum here.  “The fact that a low-probability incident hasn’t happened yet doesn’t tell you anything about its likelihood of it happening in the future.”

Talking to reporters and in a keynote address to the conference, Mottram addressed what he called the “awkward fact” of the involvement in terrorism of highly educated people in certain fields. 

“People find this very difficult to understand.  But when you look at the sociology of terrorists, a lot of them are scientists, engineers and doctors,” Mottram said.  “This may because these are elite professionals, and terrorists disproportionately tend to be drawn from the well-educated rather than the disadvantaged and dispossessed.”

The Aum Shinrikyo organization in Japan had a wealth of human resources and made determined efforts to recruit graduate-level biological, chemical, physics and engineering students, Mottram said.  The doomsday cult would become infamous worldwide for killing 19 people and injuring thousands in two separate attacks involving the nerve agent sarin, most famously the 1995 strike on the Tokyo subway system. 

Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top al-Qaeda operative linked to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, is a physician with an interest in developing biological and chemical weapons.  A Malaysian businessman with a U.S.-supplied chemistry degree has also reportedly sought to produce anthrax or other biological weapons on behalf of the terrorist group. Mottram said.

Expertise does not lead directly to success when it comes to unconventional weapons, he noted.  Aum Shinrikyo failed in its attempts at biological terrorism using anthrax and botulinum toxin and its sarin stockpile would have been enough to kill 4.2 million people had it been fully deployed.  There is no indication that al-Qaeda has been able to weaponize a biological agent.

While it is obvious why terrorist organizations would want to employ trained professionals with expertise that could be turned against their enemies, it is less clear why people in those sectors would want to become terrorists, Mottram said.  “It could be something in the certainties of science that attracts people who also have certainties in their political ideologies,” he said.  “I don’t know.”

There is a significant risk in nations such as the United Kingdom for recruitment of university students by extremist groups, Mottram said.  One component of the global antiterrorism strategy should be to understand why people become radicalized and then striving to prevent that, he said.

Even scientists working well within the scientific establishment face the risk that their work could be put to bad purposes, Mottram said (see GSN, June 14, 2005).  Research into genetic engineering has shown how pathogens can be made more lethal or be reproduced synthetically, he said. 

Safeguards at facilities that work with live disease material are another issue, according to Mottram, who highlighted the accidental 2007 release of foot-and-mouth disease from a British facility (see GSN, June 25).

“Inadequately regulated scientific activity and the unconstrained dissemination of scientific knowledge may significantly enhance the terrorist threat,” Mottram said.  “So we can’t have an open society with open science in the rather traditional way without running into some very, very serious risks.”

The scientific and security communities must consider several issues, including the extent to which potentially dangerous research should be disseminated, whether there is need for a code of ethics and self-regulation among researchers, and whether certain biodefense activities risk violating the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention.

The value of science in antiterrorism efforts is undeniable but could be a double-edged sword if governments use the technology to intrude in major ways into the lives of their citizens, Mottram said.

He offered several examples of the benefits:  sensor technology and data-mining capabilities can aid in the collection of intelligence that could interrupt a terrorist plot; scientists and engineers could produce materials resistant to explosions in order to strengthen infrastructure that might become a target; social scientists can offer insight into how individuals become radicalized in hopes of staving off the process.

“There are very sophisticated capabilities being developed to monitor, identify and respond to various forms of attack, whether nuclear or biological, and they are all quite clearly very, very important,” Mottram said.

However, “there is the risk that scientific and technological solutions, particularly around the use of sensors and the application of information systems, could actually undermine the very free society that we’re all working to try to protect,” he added.

Mottram referred to James Martin’s book The Meaning of the 21st Century, which postulated the widespread deployment of security sensors for counterterrorism and other purposes.  In such a world, 95 percent of a nation’s citizens might receive automatic security clearances that would leave them essentially free from adverse government scrutiny.  Mottram said he feared what would happen to the remaining 5 percent, roughly 3 million people in the United Kingdom.

“I, for one, am not keen on the concept of either so-called necessary or unnecessary harassment by officials,” he said in his prepared statement for the conference.

To prevent an outcome that makes life worse for blameless individuals, there must be a proportionate assessment of the risks to a nation and their solutions, Mottram said.

Terrorism is not alone among national security threats or more general dangers to the well-being of a country and its people, he said.  Nor are unconventional weapons the sure tactic of the future — the use of conventional weapons in terrorism has proven effective of achieving the goal of “revenge, renown and reaction” and is sure to continue.

Terrorists have not yet proven capable of conducting a large-scale attack involving a biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological weapon.  The interest, though, remains and a major incident — or even a series of limited strikes — could be devastating symbolically or in terms of lives lost and damage done, according to Mottram.

The Sept. 11 attacks focused international counterterrorism attention on al-Qaeda, but extremism is not inherently anti-Western, he said.  Consideration of the international terrorism threat would likely be considerably different had Aum Shinrikyo fulfilled its goal of killing thousands or more people using biological or chemical agents.

The main threat might not even be an organization, but rather one disturbed individual with the ability to create a lethal unconventional weapon.  Policy-makers should also not assume that a nuclear-armed nation would not supply terrorists with a nuclear weapon for fear of being discovered; the potential for a strategic miscalculation is always there, Mottram said.

“If you’re thinking about low-probability, high-consequence risks, it’s not at all clear that they will come from an organization such as al-Qaeda and so you shouldn’t focus too much on al-Qaeda as though it were the only issue,” Mottram said.

Pandemic flu is likely to be a far greater threat to human life than an act of bioterrorism, he said.  Between 400,000 and 700,000 people could die in the United Kingdom alone during an outbreak.

In the numbers game, the number of U.S. motorcycle deaths in 2003 nearly equated the total numbers of people killed in terrorist incidents in North America between 1968 and 2007.

The policy emphasis must be on real dangers rather than perceived threats, Mottram said.  He acknowledged that he did not have all the answers for ensuring that outcome, but indicated that a realistic strategy would encompass anything from better security of nuclear materials to focused rather than broad-ranging intelligence efforts.

“I don’t have any magical solution to these problems.  You have to balance this.  Blanket solutions are not going to work,” Mottram said.  “We need to open up a much a deeper debate about risk and … science and scientists have an important contribution to make in thinking about relative risk.”

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