The term “international terrorism” acquired its modern meaning as the world globalized, new information technologies emerged, and vast populations migrated. The main goals of international terrorism are: disrupting government services and public order; causing political, economic, and psychological damage to the authorities and the public; destabilizing the situation in a particular country or region; creating a general atmosphere of chaos and fear; and provoking armed conflicts and clashes between groups of people on ethnic, religious or other grounds. Terrorists often don’t hide the fact that they thereby seek changes in the external and internal policies of individual states or the international community as a whole. The defining characteristics of international terrorism currently are: powerful financial support coming from sponsors of terrorism; the popularity of extremist ideology, mainly a politicized Islam in a radical sense; and the use of the latest high-tech devices in their criminal activities. Other characteristics are their highly secretive and scattered world-wide agent networks and individual, non-interconnected terrorist cells (Al-Qaeda); the increasing use of suicide bombers, car bombs, hijacked aircraft, and large groups of hostages; and their attempts to steal and then threaten to use nuclear, chemical, biological or other weapons of mass destruction.
Acts of international terrorism increasingly affect the interests of several countries at the same time and extensive cross-border cooperation is required to prevent or suppress them. Despite the best efforts of the international organizations and individual nations, unfortunately, the fact is that not only has international terrorism remained undefeated, but terrorist groups continue to scale up their activities and are growing across the planet. Following the unprecedented bloody terrorist attack in the United States on September 11, 2001, which truly shocked the world and made people take a fresh look at the issue of terrorism and security, a wave of bombings swept through many other countries. A number of countries have experienced long-term chaos due to terrorism (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia); others have sporadically undergone powerful international terrorist attacks (India, Pakistan, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Mali, Nigeria, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and others). The territory over which terrorists act is increasing every year. More and more often they are found in Europe, the USA, and the countries of the CIS. The total number of terrorist acts and their victims globally is steadily increasing.
Today, no country can guarantee its citizens that it will avert every large-scale terrorist attack. Moreover, many politicians and experts no longer argue about whether terrorists will have access to weapons of mass destruction, or so-called “dual use” technologies, but more often debate specific time frames for such an event to occur. Will it happen in 3-5 or 10-15 years? So far, the equation has too many unknowns. Accelerating technological breakthroughs, the emergence of new types of weapons, and the rapid proliferation of potentially dangerous facilities (nuclear power plants, nuclear research centers, reactors and laboratories) all dramatically increase the likelihood that weapons of mass destruction could be stolen or these facilities could be sabotaged.
“Strategic balance” is an old, familiar term that denoted the nuclear parity achieved by the superpowers that ensured their mutual security. However this word has lost much of its original meaning with the growing threat of international terrorism and is beginning to sound more like a vestige of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks in the United States have shown that the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers offer little defense against internal turmoil and large-scale terrorist attacks. It is clear that the leaders of world politics and the global community need to start searching for a fundamentally new approach to international and national security. Already, the U.S., Russia, and the UK are beefing up the security around their nuclear arsenals. As these countries continue to gradually reduce their nuclear missile forces, there are more and more politicians and scientists calling for complete nuclear disarmament. Indeed, the situation appears at first sight to be paradoxical: the more nuclear and similar military facilities a country has on its territory, the more difficult it is to guarantee the security of that country and its neighbors, because these facilities themselves are potential targets for terrorists. And then it is really not so important how such a facility could be infiltrated or attacked (suicide bombers, recruited staff, a plane or drone aimed at it, radiation, laser, cyber weapons, attack during transportation, etc.). In any case, the consequences of such an attack are unpredictable whether the facility is military or civilian (the so-called “peaceful atom”). The events of April 1986 are still too fresh in the memories of Russians and the world community, when the negligence of several nuclear power plant employees led to the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl nuclear station. As a result, tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands were injured, and a vast swath of land across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus was contaminated with radiation for years to come.
Unfortunately, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are all very actively pursuing nuclear arms and have remained outside the nuclear disarmament process. They are in no hurry to implement unified standards for nuclear safety in the civilian sector. And it is in these countries and regions where the terrorist threat level remains the highest. If we consider plans to build new nuclear power plants and research reactors in areas where terrorist activity has been traditionally high (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Morocco), the number of potential targets for international terrorists seems likely to steadily increase. Terrorists have not ignored the emergence of fundamentally new developments in dual purpose technologies. Research is being conducted in laboratories to create psychophysical, geophysical, climatic, genetic, radiation, ultra-high frequency, and many other weapons of the 21st century. This research and development is not yet subject to conventions banning them as weapons of mass destruction and terrorists can gain a relatively easy access to them even before the global community will be able to assess their destructive power and the possible consequences of their military applications.
Stanislav Ivanov, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Security of the Institute for World Economics and International Relations, an expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
