Unconventional Weapons and International Terrorism: Challenges and New Approaches

by Ranstorp; Magnus

• ISBN13: 9780415484398
• ISBN10: 0415484391
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In recent years, senior policy officials have highlighted increased signs of convergence between terrorism and unconventional (CBRN) weapons. Terrorism now involves technologies available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, deployed through innovative solutions. This indicates a new and more complex global security environment with increasing risks of terrorists trying to acquire and deploy a CBRN (Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear) attack. This book addresses the critical importance of understanding innovation and decision-making between terrorist groups and unconventional weapons, and the difficulty in pinpointing what factors may drive violence escalation. It also underscores the necessity to understand the complex interaction between terrorist group dynamics and decision-making behaviour in relation to old and new technologies. Unconventional Weapons and International Terrorismseeks to identify a set of early warnings and critical indicators for possible future terrorist efforts to acquire and utilize unconventional CBRN weapons as a means to pursue their goals. It also discusses the challenge for intelligence analysis in handling threat convergence in the context of globalisation. The book will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies, counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, security studies and IR in general.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Biographies	p. xi
Introduction: detecting CBRN terrorism signatures - challenges and new approaches	p. 1
The status of CBRN terrorism research	p. 11
Defining knowledge gaps within CBRN terrorism research	p. 13
Al-Qaeda motivations/incentives for CBRN terrorism	p. 27
WMD and the four dimensions of al-Qaeda	p. 29
Al-Qaeda's thinking on CBRN: a case study	p. 50
CBRN, capacity-building and proliferation	p. 65
Indicators of chemical terrorism	p. 67
Capacity-building and proliferation: biological terrorism	p. 95
Terrorism and potential biological warfare agents	p. 109
Influence diagram analysis of nuclear and radiological terrorism	p. 122
CRBN and terrorism: dilemmas of prediction?	p. 139
Approaching threat convergence from an intelligence perspective	p. 141
Terrifying landscapes: understanding motivations of non-state actors to acquire and/or use weapons of mass destruction	p. 163
Conclusion	p. 195
Index	p. 205
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