By Greg Seigle

Global Security Newswire

Widely held definitions for weapons of mass destruction are subject to change in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent indictments against a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, a variety of national security analysts have told Global Security Newswire.

The use of hijacked, fuel-laden commercial airliners to crash into prominent buildings packed with people—a tactic that killed about 3,000 people and prodded U.S. federal prosecutors to charge the lone suspect in custody, Zacarias Moussaoui, with “conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction”—has sparked a debate among U.S. analysts about what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction.

Until now the commonly accepted definition of weapons of mass destruction has included nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, plus missiles that could deliver them.  Today, however, this long-held definition is swelling or shrinking, depending on whom you ask.

While no one disputes that both nuclear and biological armaments are the most lethal weapons on earth, recent interviews by GSN reveal considerable disagreement over whether chemical agents or radiological bombs—or the use of other high profile devices or tactics—should be defined as true weapons of mass destruction.

“We ought to be broadening the category so to include not only weapons of mass destruction but also weapons of mass disruption,” said Dan Goure, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute.

“While insidious and horrific as they are, chemical or radiological weapons do not meet the definition,” countered retired British Col. Terry Taylor, president of the U.S. branch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“The classic definition has always been troublesome,” added Taylor, who from 1992 to 1997 served as the chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission scouring Iraq for nuclear, biological or chemical evidence.  “Including [other criteria] is all right as long as people remember that nuclear and biological are much worse.

“Many analysts feel chemical weapons do not meet this definition because they will not cause as many casualties,” Taylor continued. “In my view, weapons of mass destruction involves tens of thousands of deaths and a very wide scale of destruction of cities.”

Should Chemical Weapons Count?

Chemical agents, several analysts argued, are not genuine weapons of mass destruction because they are difficult to disperse over large areas, thereby making them less likely to cause mass casualties. As terrifying as chemical attacks may be, they do not fall under a true definition of weapons of mass destruction, they said.

Analysts cite the 1995 Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which was intended wipe out thousands of people but instead killed 12 and wounded about 500, as an example of how difficult it is to use chemicals as weapons of mass destruction.

“You’d have to work pretty hard to use chemical weapons to create a lot of casualties,” said Gordon Oehler, former CIA deputy director for nonproliferation who is now a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute and an executive with Science Application International Corporation.

“It seems to me that it will be a fear factor and an economic factor,” he added. “Fear in that it will create widespread panic and economic in the fact it disrupts business and no one wants to return” to the site of the attack.

“If you’re looking at it from a body count perspective, chemical weapons do not qualify,” said Patrick Garrett, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. “Chemical weapons are very easy to defend against [with gas masks and chemical protection suits]. But it’s much more difficult to defend against biological or nuclear weapons.”

“Bioweapons and nukes are in a class unto themselves, chemical weapons don’t even come close,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. “You cannot deploy enough chemical weapons, even a powerful nerve gas to kill tens of thousands of people. It is just very impractical. They are not weapons of mass lethality or mass destruction—bioweapons are.”

Other analysts, however, say that the threats posed by chemical weapons should not be dismissed. They note that the Sarin gas used in the Tokyo subway attack was not very pure, therefore not as lethal as it could have been. Now, in the wake of extremely pure, weapon-grade anthrax being mailed in the United States, the use of purified chemical such as Sarin or VX nerve gas should not be ruled out, they said.

“I would classify them as weapons of mass destruction because they can still kill a lot of people,” said Cheryl Loeb, a research analyst with the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Loeb said chemicals have been considered mass-casualty weapons since 1899, the first meeting of international experts that ultimately lead to the 1925 Geneva Convention—and to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention—that outlaws their use.

“Anything that causes indiscriminate loss of life is a weapon of mass destruction,” said David Phillips, who as a relief worker twice visited Halabja, the Kurdish village in northern Iraq that was gassed by Iraqi troops in 1988.

“The immediate impact caused several thousand deaths,” said Phillips, now the deputy director for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action. “The ongoing toll can be measured in terms of cancer, impotence and other medical side effects that are ongoing today.

“Those are just the physical effects, that doesn’t include the psychological impact—the fear, the loss of a sense of security,” he added.

Simply put, some analysts believe chemicals could still wipe out thousands of people if an agent is purified and released in the confines of large groups of people, such as a crowded sports stadium or a skyscraper. 

“The potential is certainly there,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to look at the consequences—not just the physical characteristics of the physical device, but the damage it is capable of doing.”

Radiological Weapons

Fewer analysts believe radiological weapons—a conventional explosive that releases deadly doses of radiation—should count as weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Dec. 11).

“I don’t buy it,” Oehler, the former CIA official, said of radiological weapons being included in the definition.

“They don’t pose a lot of danger, but cause a lot of terror,” said health physicist John Poston, a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University. “The health hazard is almost zero … The risk of someone getting cancer [without being exposed to a radiological weapon] is one in three. About one person out of every seven or eight I think is going to die from cancer.”

The radiation would be contained “within the [limited] range of the explosive device,” added Taylor, the former UNSCOM inspector. “The area of effect would still be quite limited, unlike chemicals, which could [at least] spread with the wind.”

Others, however, said that radiological weapons possess the potential to create tremendous death tolls.

There is a rare grade of a radiological weapon that some governments planned to make and experimented with that are “extremely dangerous,” according to David Albright, president for the Institute for Science and International Security. “They used a certain type of radioactive material that doesn’t last a long time. You spread it out over an area and you can contaminate many square kilometers. And if people wander in there, they’re probably going to get enough radiation to get very sick or die. Those are very dangerous in the hands of terrorists but are very hard to make.”

One senior nuclear engineer from Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico raised his eyebrows when it was suggested that radiological bombs might not count as true weapons of mass destruction.

“There is one isotope, one I can’t name, that could make radiological bombs very lethal, almost as deadly as nuclear bombs,” said the nuclear engineer, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Even a crude radiological bomb could take out the whole Capitol complex—I’d call that a weapon of mass destruction,” said U.S. Representative Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a leading lawmaker on national security issues privy to classified information.

Variety of WMD Scenarios

The indictments against Moussaoui and 23 other co-conspirators—including Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers who died Sept. 11—employ a vaguely worded U.S. law (see related GSN story, today) intended to cover any attacks that kill large amounts of people by using unconventional means, according to U.S. officials.

Under the wording of the law, it is possible that a whole variety of devices could be considered mass casualty weapons—and lead U.S. federal prosecutors to charge an individual, terrorist group or nation with using weapons of mass destruction, analysts said.

Possible scenarios envisioned by analysts include conventional munitions used to topple bridges or buildings full of people; hand grenades or other explosives used to crack open nuclear reactors; or the opening or rupturing of loaded hazardous material trucks in densely populated areas.

The Sept. 11 attacks themselves—in which terrorists essentially used the hijacked airliners as guided cruise missiles—has stirred some controversy over whether fuel-laden aircraft that slam into buildings brimming with people should be categorized as weapons of mass destruction, as the U.S. Justice Department alleges in its recent indictments.

“It certainly is intellectually appropriate to describe [the aircraft attacks] as weapons of mass destruction,” said Baker Spring, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “When terrorists are going after innocent civilians and slaughtering them, it does put things in a different category… It falls outside the category of a common crime.

“As unusual an approach as [the attacks were], militarily we categorize it as a fuel-air weapon,” Spring continued. “A powerful fuel-air weapon is at the very high end of conventional armament capabilities, and somebody could argue that it is at the very low end of a weapons of mass destruction.”

“I think there’s a difference here between the instrument and intention,” said Phillips, the Council on Foreign Relations analyst. “There’s a realignment of terminology that allows us to emphasize the intent behind the act with the instrument that causes harm.”

“The intent is mass but the weapon is conventional, and we ought to be counting that in,” remarked Goure of the Lexington Institute. “Rather than rooting things out we need to read more things in.”

Redefinition Should Be Deferred

While many analysts believe the criteria for weapons of mass destruction should be expanded or decreased, most agree that the early stages of the war on terrorism is not an ideal time to be tinkering with the classification.

“In the present climate, I don’t think it will help to rule out chemicals,” said Taylor. “I think it’s all right to let it remain for now.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with the definition,” said Oehler. “[But] what about that bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93? Had that been placed in a more strategic position it might have brought the building down and been much worse. Does that make it a weapon of mass destruction?”

In short, analysts believe the most grave threats to humankind comes from nuclear and biological weapons, both of which can kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of people. The other weapons—particularly chemical and radiological weapons—are left open to debate.

“Anything that could kill thousands of people within several square kilometers—that’s anybody’s definition of [weapons of mass destruction],” said Cirincione, echoing the comments of most analysts.

What’s the Point?

A small, but vocal, minority of analysts does not understand all the fuss over the definition of weapons of mass destruction.

“It’s a pointless debate,” said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow for strategic assessment for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The fact is that any system that kills thousands of people [in a singular attack] is a weapon of mass destruction,” he continued. “I think we need to avoid getting into almost medieval, scholarly debates on theories which in practice make no difference at all.”

Cordesman went on to borrow a well-known quote from Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who in a 1970s ruling on pornography cited a definition Cordesman likened to that of weapons of mass destruction: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”

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