Super terrorism after Osama bin Laden

A high panel 1977 study developed for the Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress asserted that,

"The historical record shows that in no single incident in the past 50 years have terrorists killed more than 150 people, and incidents involving more than 20 deaths are rare. This is not because of lack of capability. Terrorist groups could have acquired the means to kill many more people than they have, even by using only conventional explosives."

The dichotomy between what terrorists were capable of and what they had actually wrought was seized upon by those less exercised by the prospect of nuclear terrorism. Brian Jenkins, a leading terrorism analyst from the RAND Corporation, was the standard bearer for those who based their position on nuclear terrorism with reference to this gap. As he observed in 1975 the dichotomy between capability and outcome can be readily explained for "terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." Nuclear terrorism is highly unlikely because "drawing attention to themselves and their causes, creating alarm, and thereby gaining some political leverage – which have been typical objectives of terrorists – may be achieved by undertaking relatively unsophisticated actions."

Rational terrorist groups animated by political objectives are able to achieve their operational objectives, not to be confused with ideological or strategic objectives, either in whole or in part, at low levels of violence. Ratcheting up the level of violence would be counter-productive for that is the road to isolation and ruin.

For politically motivated terrorists the very nature of their objectives, in being political, creates a certain band or spectrum of tolerable violence. Such groups can only go "thus far and no further" without jeopardising their raison d etre. For terrorists there exists an "event horizon" beyond which there can be no turning back. Because most, if not all, terrorist groups that had arisen after 1968 were political we should no more expect an act of mass destruction from the terrorist than we should from the corporation, even though many of the latter are quite capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

How did the third, current wave, of concern about nuclear terrorism arise? To be sure concerns about nuclear security played an important role in the rise of the third wave. The interesting feature of the third wave is the discernment of an evolution in the character and scope of terrorism itself.

It is quite clear that the consensus position that emerged during the second wave does not sit well with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but nor does it sit well with terrorist attacks, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo nerve gas attack and al-Qaeda attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, that had, or potentially could have, inflicted hundreds of casualties.

For advocates of "super" or "catastrophic" terrorism the trends in terrorist violence prior to 9/11 demonstrated that the observation made by Jenkins in the 1970s during the first wave, which had become orthodoxy amongst political analysts of terrorism, no longer applied. As Walter Laquer put it, "there has been a radical transformation, if not a revolution, in the character of terrorism, a fact we are all still reluctant to accept." After 9/11 that reluctance all but disappeared.

For Bruce Hoffman, the most sophisticated political analyst of terrorism that subscribes to the new wave school, it is the sacramental aspect to religious based terrorism that makes it conducive to large scale violent acts. Because the practitioners of religious terrorism see their activities as reflecting a "divine duty" the modes of legitimisation or justification differ from that of the secular, more political, terrorist.

Religious terrorists assume "a transcendental dimension" which leads to their violence being directed towards the elimination of "broadly defined categories of enemy." Given this, it is easy to imagine that terrorists motivated by a divinely inspired duty might contemplate large scale acts of violence for the target itself is not a central political authority, an occupying military or police and the like but an entire category of people.

Such transcendental terrorists appeal to no constituency and they do not seek to influence the constituency of the enemy, in the manner that political terrorists do. For such terrorists the gravitational force that limits the violence of traditional terrorism does not apply.

It is often argued that the evolution in the ideological conception of jihad fits this pattern. The salafi jihadi movement, not to be confused with the salafi movement more broadly, had initially seen jihad has been focused on the secular or otherwise apostate regimes of the Arab world. Osama bin Laden, in contrast with widespread popular conception, did not arise from that Islamist current. Bin Laden was a devotee of Abdullah Azzam, killed by a car bomb attack in 1989, who sought to shift the jihadi emphasis back on defence of Muslim territory from external aggression.