Summary
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. It seeks 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.
Contents
1. Defining knowledge gaps within CBRN terrorism research / Gary Ackerman. -- 2. WMD and the four dimensions of al-Qaeda / Brian Fishman & James J. F. Forest. -- 3. Al-Qaeda's thinking on CBRN: a case study / Anne Stenersen. -- 4. Indicators of chemical terrorism / Amy E. Smithson. -- 5. Capacity-building and proliferation: biological terrorism / Gabriele Kraatz-Wadsack. -- 6. Terrorism and potential biological warfare agents / Walter Biederbick. -- 7. Influence diagram analysis of nuclear and radiological terrorism / Charles D. Ferguson. -- 8. Approaching threat convergence from an intelligence perspective / Gregory F. Treverton. -- 9. Terrifying landscapes: understanding motivations of non-state actors to acquire and/or use weapons of mass destruction / Nancy K Hayden. -- 10. Conclusions / Magnus Ranstorp & Magnus Normark.