Terrorism Analysis Project
The Federation of American Scientists created their Terrorism Analysis Project (TAP) in June 2010 to investigate the nexus between violent non-state actors and the diversification, diffusion, and adoption of disruptive lethal technologies. TAP's purpose is to strengthen existing national and international counterterrorist and intelligence-gathering measures that predominantly focus on weapon and technology availability, target vulnerabilities, and consequence management, and frequently overlook ideological motivations in their threat-assessment calculations. Mindful that national and international efforts to address the growing risk of mass-casualty and mass-disruption terrorism are limited by resources, TAP seeks to better inform policy by illuminating why specific non-state actors seek specific technologies. Moreover, TAP conducts in-depth empirical research and innovative analyses on how technologies are perceived, adopted, controlled, and employed by various terrorist groups and political and religious extremists. Read more...
Featured
Anatomizing Non-State Threats to Pakistan's Nuclear Infrastructure: The Pakistani Neo-Taliban
The revelation of Usama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound raises several troubling questions about Pakistan’s patronage of extremists. The subsequent terrorist assault on Naval Station Mehran in Karachi, however, again demonstrates that Pakistan is both sponsor to and victim of jihadists. This paper, the first in a series addressing nuclear weapon and fissile material security in South Asia, details the evolution and characteristics of Pakistan’s most dangerous jihadists—the Pakistani Neo-Taliban.
Norway’s Anders Brevik: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Politics of Cultural Despair
July 27, 2011
Ten years after the events of 9/11, it is often forgotten that high fatality terrorist incidents remain a rarity. Indeed, prior to 9/11 the single deadliest terrorist attack was the 1978 Iranian theatre firebombing perpetrated by Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK: People’s Majahedin of Iran) with 470 fatalities. Since 1970, only 118 incidents of terrorism have killed more than 100 people—0.12 percent of the 98,000 terrorist events encompassing that four decade span. As the death toll of the July 22 attacks in Norway approaches 100, it is useful to appreciate this fact. In addition to recognizing their uncommonly deadly outcomes, two other features related to the attack are salient. First, significant elements of Anders Breivik’s treatise—the 1500 page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence (click here for PDF link)—address the acquisition, weaponization, and use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents or devices against Breivik’s perceived enemies. Second, his ideological platform, said by Breivik to represent his role as “Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement,” is largely informed by European racist ideology that first emerged in the nineteenth century and continues to this day. This report principally evaluates the CBRN elements of Breivik’s treatise.
Current Research
View our report on Non-State Actor Nuclear Command & Control (PDF).
