Guns, Drones and Poison: The New Age of Assassination
Baghdad in January 2020, the US took the radical step of eliminating a key state actor it considered to be a terrorist. The killing was deemed unlawful by the United Nations.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has also been ruthless, particularly when it comes to eliminating political foes. The attempted murder, by nerve agent, of former intelligence officer and British spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, south-west England, in 2018 and the successful murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko by polonium-210 slipped into a cup of tea in a London hotel in 2006 are merely the most high-profile killings in a chain of assassinations during Putin’s presidency. Among his victims have been opposition politicians and journalists, as well as veteran fighters from the bitter war in Chechnya who had been designated as terrorists by Moscow.
Preventing Proliferation
Since the 1940s, the world’s leading powers have tried to prevent their enemies from developing weapons of mass destruction. Assassination to prevent the development of these technologies was pioneered by Britain in the second world war. One night in August 1943 the Royal Air Force bombed the German missile development and testing site at Peenemünde, on the Baltic. The RAF targeted the living quarters of the scientists, engineers and technicians with the aim of killing as many as possible. Approximately 130 German scientific workers were killed in the attack.
Britain and the US also feared that Nazi Germany might be developing an atomic bomb. In 1944 an American agent was dispatched to Switzerland to attend a lecture by Germany’s leading nuclear physicist, the Nobel Prize-winning Werner Heisenberg.
The agent was armed and had orders to assassinate Heisenberg if anything the physicist said indicated that Nazi Germany was close to developing an atomic bomb. In the event Heisenberg’s lecture gave no hint of this, which is why he survived his visit to Switzerland.
Israel has also used assassination to try to prevent its neighbors from developing missiles and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s, it tried to obstruct Egypt’s missile development project by murdering German engineers working on it. In 1980-1981 scientists and engineers working on Iraq’s nuclear weapons project were murdered while outside Iraq.
In 1990 the Israelis killed Canadian scientist Dr Gerald Bull, who was manufacturing for Saddam Hussein a “supergun”, the largest cannon ever assembled, which would have fired rocket-assisted projectiles thousands of kilometers. Bull’s murder ended the project.
Since 2007 Israel has tried to kill Iranian nuclear scientists: four have been assassinated, and an attempt made on the life of a fifth. Israel has never accepted responsibility for the assassinations but is universally thought to be behind them. Killing a small number of scientists won’t stop the project.
Assassination is as old as politics itself. But the increase in terrorism and the spread of the technology and know-how for the development of weapons of mass destruction are increasing its use. For the foreseeable future states will continue to assassinate terrorists and scientific workers employed on WMD projects because they regard them as dangerous.
Paul Maddrell is Lecturer in International History and International Relations, Loughborough University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
