Secretary of Defense William Cohen, April 1997: “An emerging and significant threat is represented by improvised biological, chemical and nuclear devices that exploit technologies that were once the sole preserve of world and regional powers. The potential to decimate large population centers and wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale has devolved from nation states to groups and even individuals”1.

FBI Director Louis Freeh, May 1997: “The acquisition, proliferation, threatened or actual use of weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group or individuals constitutes one of the gravest threats to the United States. The government’s policy recognizes that there is no higher priority than preventing the acquisition of this capability or removing this capability from terrorist groups potentially opposed to the United Stated”2.

Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé, March 1997: “Alas, America’s future enemies may not fight according to these Marquess of Queensberry rules. They might use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, not only on the ‘regional’ battlefield that Pentagon planners assign to them, but also in that unanticipated region of warfare-the United States itself3.

Former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye, June 1997: “We should not wait for another Pearl Harbor to awaken us to the fact that there is no greater threat to our security than terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction”4.

Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, May 1996: “The proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and their potential use by states or terrorists is the most urgent challenge facing the national security, and therefore the intelligence community, in the post-Cold War world”5.

Senator Sam Nun, in 1995 and after the Tokyo incident (March 20, 1995), came to the belief that “this attack signals the world has entered a new era”6.

The US Senate: for more quotations that show the Senate’s awareness of the reality and magnitude of the danger of NBC weapons to American national security, see also the Senate Hearings leading to the Senate’s unanimous decision (a vote of 97-0) to pass The Nunn-Lugar-Dominici Amendment of July 1996. For information on this Amendment, see AAH, pp.262-263. For relevant source material, see Congressional Record, vol. 142, No.114, Part I (July 30, 1996), pp. H9073-H9078.

“As the new millennium approaches, we face the very real and increasing prospect that regional aggressors, third-rate armies, terrorist groups, and even religious cults will seek to wield disproportionate power by acquiring and using ‘weapons of mass destruction’7 (secretary of defense William Cohen).

“George Tenet, Acting Director of the CIA, warned in 1997 that ‘fanatical’ terrorists posed an ‘unprecedented threat’ to the US, and that a growing number of groups are investigating the feasibility of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons”8. Colin Powell, former US Chief of Staff, said in 1993: “The one that frightens me to death, perhaps even more so than tactical nuclear weapons, and the one we have the least capability against, is biological weapons”9.

1. Falkenrath, page 3.

2. Falkenrath, page 4.

3.Falkenrath, page 4.

4. Falkenrath, page 4.

5.Falkenrath, page 168.

6.Falkenrath, page 167.

7.Stern, page 69.

8.Stern, page 829.

9.Laqueur, page 63, 65.