The announcement that the Government, acting on the recommendation of bio-terrorism experts, plans to establish this country's first National Bio-terrorism Unit to deal with victims of any future chemical or biological terror attack brings the spectre of the contemporary terrorist challenge into sharp relief, writes Dr Rory DM Miller
Our proximity to Britain, a major potential target, and our position as a home to many biotech companies that deal with hazardous materials makes us a possible acquisition, transit, storage or logistical base for any such attack within the EU.
Though the CIA and British intelligence's credibility has taken a serious battering over Iraq's WMD capability, there is little reason to doubt their claims that, in the words of MI5 head Eliza Manninham-Buller, "it is only a matter of time before a Western city is hit by chemical, biological or radiological attack" .
This view was given credence by the discovery of a small amount of a much larger, still unaccounted for, batch of ricin in London in January 2003 and a similar find in France the following March, not to mention the April 2004 recommendation by the British security services that a glass screen be installed in the House of Commons chamber to neutralise such a risk.
"There is no doubt that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network is the primary reason for such precautions and indeed since 1998 Bin Laden has publicly stated on several occasions that the acquisition of a non-conventional capability is a 'religious duty'."
Moreover, Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested in December 1999 while smuggling weapons from Canada into the US as part of a plot to blow up Los Angeles Airport on the eve of the Millennium, admitted at his trial that al-Qaeda recruits underwent training with poisonous substances.
However, one would be mistaken to believe that only Islamist extremists are interested in acquiring a chemical or biological capability. During the mid-1800s anarchists like German emigre Karl Heinzen theorised that poisonous gases could be used to overthrow the existing order. So too did our home-grown revolutionaries who considered spraying poison gas into the House of Commons in the 1870s.
More recently, leftist groups such as the Red Army Faction, which stored samples of botulinum toxin in a Paris safe house, and the Baader-Meinhof gang, which stole mustard gas, have attempted to acquire a capability.
So have a number of right wing extremist groups in the US, including the Minnesota Patriots Council, which was caught stockpiling ricin, and the Idaho-based Aryan Nation, which ordered bubonic plague bacteria through the post from a Maryland chemical supplier.
Most notably, Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth), a Japanese doomsday cult, whose teachings are based on tenets borrowed from Hinduism and Buddhism, engaged in a systematic programme during the 1990s to develop biological weapons and used lethal pestilential microbes and germ toxins on a number of high profile targets, including the Japanese Diet (parliament), the imperial palace and the US navy's seventh fleet's headquarters.
This culminated in Aum's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 12 and poisoned thousands of commuters.
As the above cases show, not only Islamic fundamentalism but apocalyptic prophecy, supremacist ideology and leftist revolution have been motives for the acquisition of a biological or chemical capability.
However, al-Qaeda's September 11th attacks on the US were a catalyst because they put paid to the conventional wisdom that terrorists would not resort to the use of biological or chemical weapons due to the fact that, as Brian Jenkins has argued, "terrorists want a lot of people watching and listening and not a lot of people dead".
Indeed, increasingly it appears that the determining factor in whether groups employ such weapons is not self-imposed moral restraint but the capacity to acquire and deploy such weapons.
A 1993 US Office of Technology Assessment report estimated that a terrorist would have to deliver a full ton of sarin nerve gas perfectly under absolutely ideal conditions over a heavily populated area, with simultaneous detonation of numerous weapons, to cause between 3,000 to 8,000 deaths.
If the climatic conditions were not ideal (moderate wind, or bright sunlight) it was estimated that the death rate would only be one-tenth as great.
Nevertheless, though a chemical or biological weapon is hard to deploy effectively, as Aum Shinrikyo's multiple failed attempts highlighted, such operations could cause hundreds of casualties, not to mention widespread panic.
As such, it is to be hoped that the creation of a National Bio-terrorism Unit is a prelude to both the introduction of wide-ranging bio-security programmes capable of protecting dangerous biological materials that are used in legitimate research facilities from theft and sabotage as well as the passing of bio-security legislation which exists in very few countries at the moment.
"We're thinking about the unthinkable" explained New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly in a recent interview on his department's efforts to prepare for a biological or chemical attack.
Now, thanks to the decision to establish a National Bio-terrorism Unit, so are we.
Dr Rory D.M. Miller is a lecturer in Mediterranean Studies in King's College, London