2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
The technologies now available to dissidents are awesome in potential - including nuclear weapons and germ warfare - and, again, the removal of super-power pressures, following the end of the Cold War, has given them new havens around the world. As a result, Marvin Cetron predicts that the next 15 years may well be the age of superterrorism. This prediction was made before the nerve-gas attack in Japan showed just how easy it was to acquire such weapons. We have to hope that the organisation which is necessary to use these weapons on a global scale remains missing; and that 'criminal terrorists' do not start to use this form of blackmail against large corporations and government.
Most important, globalisation will enable dissident groups - including terrorists and guerrillas - to gain support, and operational resources, almost anywhere on the globe. This will, of course, make such groups harder to track, and control; and their actions may become that much more theatrical - and correspondingly destructive of human life. As a reaction, there is likely to be an effective global anti-terrorist police network within the next decade - and the power this obtains may cause disquiet in some more liberal quarters, perhaps even in turn reinforcing the legitimacy of the terrorist groups.
Global terrorists and guerrillas will have awesome technologies at their disposal, and will be harder to find and to fight. As a result global anti-terrorist measures may be introduced, which may become oppressive in nature.
It is worth noting that this remarkably accurate prediction was written several years before 9/11!
Marvin Cetron predicts that "The next 15 years may well be the age of superterrorism, when they gain access to weapons of mass destruction and show more willingness to use them. Tomorrow's most dangerous terrorists will be motivated not by political ideology, but by fierce ethnic and religious hatreds. Their goal will not be political control but the utter destruction of their chosen enemies. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons are ideal for their purpose." He goes on to illustrate the point "...if the World Trade center bombers had packed their van with cobalt-60 or iodine-131 (both commonly available in medical and industrial laboratories) they might have rendered New York's financial district uninhabitable for decades." In the more specific context of nuclear weapons, Wolfgang Panofsky reports "Almost a 1,000 tons of R-Pu [Reactor Grade Plutonium] has accumulated since the beginning of the nuclear age." He adds, more optimistically in this context, "Most of it is in the form of spent fuel...Such fuel rods are, for the time being, 'self-protected', in that they are extremely radioactive, which makes it unlikely that they will be stolen or otherwise diverted [unless it is by fanatics?]. But about 70 tons of R-Pu has been separated or 'reprocessed' from spent fuel rods." This can be added to the more than 100 tons of weapons grade plutonium he estimates being released by the arms reduction treaties - so there is still plenty of material around, even for less fanatical terrorists, to make quite a few weapons (where just four kilograms may be enough for a crude bomb!).
Davidson & Rees-Mogg suggest "A terrorist is unlikely to be deterred from employing weapons of mass destruction by the threat of massive retaliation." It was such a counter-threat which maintained the balance, and the peace, during the time of the Cold War - but this logic does not impress the isolated terrorist to the same extent!
16 May 2003
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