Homemade and improvised biological weapons, such as ricin, pose a slimmer risk to national security than the mind-set needed to carry out such attacks, security and bioterrorism experts say.
Despite the interest in ricin that was amplified by the recent letters sent to President Obama and other government officials, it is a more specialized and targeted weapon, said Joel Selanikio, a Georgetown University epidemiologist.
“Ricin is more easily produced but more difficult to distribute to large numbers of people than, say, botulinum toxin or tetanus,” Selanikio said in an e-mail. “So it has really been more of an assassin’s weapon than a mass-attack weapon.”
Greg Moran, a clinical professor at UCLA Emergency Medicine who specializes in infectious diseases and bioterrorism, agreed.
“Most biological agents thankfully are not really very well adapted to be used in a mass-casualty event,” Moran said in an interview.
Over the weekend, J. Everett Dutschke of Tupelo, Miss., was arrested and accused of manufacturing the ricin in the letters sent earlier this month.
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The assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 via ricin poisoning and the salmonella poisoning of salad bars by an Oregon cult in 1985 were both cited as more accurate examples of the kinds of attacks domestic terrorists might be able to achieve, Selanikio and Moran said.
Danger and difficulty accessing the poisons limit the scale of possible attacks, said Dennis Maki, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health’s Division of Infectious Diseases.
“Growing up plague bacillus, you’d be more likely to do yourself in than you are to hurt anybody,” Maki said.
Potent materials, such as the castor plants used to make ricin, could be siphoned and processed from nature with basic microbiology kills, said Leonard Cole, director of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s Program on Terror Medicine and Security.
But others, such as Maki, argued that complex scientific knowledge and access to more sophisticated laboratory environments with built-in safety precautions would be necessary to carry out an attack of worrisome scale.
Cole said biological materials can also make for less-attractive weapons because their effectiveness can be a gamble. He used the possibility of accidentally choosing the wrong, weaker strain of a pathogen as an example.
Experts say the biggest danger to national security is the development of a terrorist mind-set by would-be attackers.
It’s harder for a person to become motivated to commit a terrorist attack than to actually build a mechanism for carrying it out, said Robert Pape, a political science professor and terrorism expert at the University of Chicago.
“What matters is not the hypothetical possibility of individual/s making homemade explosives of various sorts — but the deep motivation to do so — without which the months of determined effort and trial and error are not likely,” Pape said in an e-mail.
“As we see in the Boston bombers, London July 2005 bombers, the Unabomber and abortion clinic attackers — that motivation is usually political-rooted issues that fester for years — in the Boston bombers’ case, deep anger over the perceived injustices happening to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he wrote. “We cannot rule out others being similarly motivated, but can reasonably see such homegrown attacks as rare and isolated.”
The Boston attacks are part of a “lone wolf” trend, Harvard terrorism expert Graham Allison said.
“Experts inside the U.S. government, as well as outside, recognize what is now called the threat of the lone wolf,” he said. “An individual or small group can on their own terrorize a city, as the Tsarnaev brothers during the Boston Marathon and ensuing manhunt.”
But Yale terrorism expert Charles Hill says these lone wolves are becoming less isolated because social networking gives them a platform for making connections, sharing ideas and coordinating violence.
“All you have to do is look at any Internet blog system and look at the comments,” Hill said “There’s just a sizable population out there who seem to have nothing to do but express themselves in semi-violent or obscene ways about anything that comes along and they have a far greater reach now than they had before.”
Though Hill said that the United States “is not going to be brought down by homemade weapons,” he said that the regular use of such weapons could “have very far-reaching psychological effects.”
Repeated events like the marathon bombings could weaken Americans’ faith in their government, said Peter Katona, an infectious-diseases lecturer at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“The psychological ramifications are hard to measure and they could be pronounced,” he said. “If you had, you know, an event and then another event, another event on a small scale… that would be more of a psychological issue – you know, loss of faith in how things are done by government, that kind of thing.”
In this sense, said Moran, terrorists achieve a sort of victory.
“That’s what the terrorists’ goal is – is just to create fear in the population and make people worried and make people change what they do,” Moran said.