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WMD and the US policies on terrorism

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(1) How have worries over WMD terror attacks distorted a balanced approach to policy on terrorism?

(2) How do the current trends in terrorism affect the United States?

Must follow the Chicago Style guidelines with at least 5 references. Short essay.

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Weapons on Mass Destruction (WMD) and its impact on the US policies on terrorism. it includes excerpts from the documented report on how this current trend on terrorism affect the United States.

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Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) & the US Terrorism Policy

"A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large numbers of humans (and other life forms) and/or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains), or the biosphere in general."...Other documents expand the definition of WMD to also include radiological or conventional weapons. The U.S. military refers to WMD as:Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capable of a high order of destruction or causing mass casualties and exclude the means of transporting or propelling the weapon where such means is a separable and divisible part from the weapon..." (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)

In the past, familiar ideological and ethno-nationalist/separatist groups have dominated international terrorism. Terrorist groups were recognizable mostly as a collection of individuals belonging to an organization with a well-defined command and control apparatus, who had previous training (however rudimentary) in the techniques and tactics of terrorism. The strategies and war weapons were chosen within a theoretical framework of Brian Jenkins, who said, "Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead."... "simply killing a lot of people has seldom been one terrorist objective.... Terrorists operate on the principle of the minimum force necessary. They find it unnecessary to kill many, as long as killing a few suffices for their purposes."-Brian Jenkins (Hoffman Bruce, VIEWPOINT:TERRORISM AND WMD:SOME PRELIMINARY HYPOTHESES)

In the most recent years, however, these long-standing assumptions have increasingly been called into question by terrorist attacks that involved either a weapon of mass destruction(WMD) or caused large numbers of fatalities. Three unrelated incidents in particular have generated heightened concern that terrorism may be entering a period of increased violence and bloodshed:

1. the 1993 bombing of New York City's World Trade Center by Islamic radicals, who deliberately
attempted to topple one of the twin towers onto the other while simultaneously releasing a deadly
cloud of poisonous gas;
2. the March 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, perpetrated by an apocalyptic Japanese religious cult that killed a dozen persons and wounded 3,796 others, and the reports that the group also planned to carry out identical attacks in the United States1; and
3. the bombing a month later, in April 1995, of an Oklahoma City federal office building, where 168
persons perished, allegedly by two anti-government, Christian white supremacists hoping to foment a nationwide revolution.
The connecting thread in each (although not necessarily the sole motivating factor for the attack) of the above is religion. Indeed, in addition to these incidents, some of the most serious terrorist ...

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