PerspectiveHow to Keep the New Coronavirus from Being Used as a Terrorist Weapon
The possibility that extremist groups may attempt to deliberately spread SARS-CoV-2—the virus causing the current pandemic—should not be ignored. In fact, one of the primary limiting factors to such an attack—recruiting humans willing to infect themselves—does not apply in this case; potential perpetrators would come from the ranks of those already infected with the virus. We are faced, therefore, with a genuinely challenging task: preemption.
On 26 March, CNN reported that U.S. agencies now consider the intentional spread by extremist groups of the coronavirus causing the current pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, to be a growing threat in the United States. Richard Pilch writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the referenced agency documents have not been made public; however, one such Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document is quoted as saying: “Members of extremist groups are encouraging one another to spread the virus, if contracted, to targeted groups through bodily fluids and personal interactions.”
Pilch adds:
The CNN report seems to contemplate the possibility of U.S. domestic terrorism and “the threat from white supremacist and other extremist groups related to the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Last year, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies completed a detailed assessment of the risk that Islamist terrorists might use infected humans to spread a contagious disease. Our experts found that Islamist terrorists, and extremist groups more generally, are not bound by ideological or psychosocial norms that prohibit such behavior. In addition, the use of infected humans to spread a contagious disease requires comparatively limited technical know-how. Our experts concluded that such an attack “could prove to be highly lethal to the targeted population(s), provide a low cost weapon, have a traumatic psychological shock value … undermine a country’s public health and medical infrastructure’s ability to respond, and erode faith in the government’s ability to protect the public.”
In view of this assessment, I believe the possibility that extremist groups may attempt to deliberately spread SARS-CoV-2—the virus causing the current pandemic—should not be ignored. In fact, one of the primary limiting factors to such an attack—recruiting humans willing to infect themselves—does not apply in this case; potential perpetrators would come from the ranks of those already infected with the virus. So we are faced with a genuinely challenging task: preemption.
