Brad Roberts is a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., where he also serves as Editor of The Washington Quarterly. His recent publications include Biological Weapons: Weapons of the Future? and Ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention. An earlier version of this article was presented to a symposium of the American Bar Association's Committee ...

Background The repeated use of prohibited chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict poses serious health, humanitarian, and security threats to civilians, healthcare personnel, and first responders. Moreover, the use of chemical weapons constitutes a clear and egregious violation of international law-likely amounting to a war crime-for which continued impunity is setting a dangerous precedent in ...

Radiological terrorism (radioterrorism) is the deliberate use of radiological weapons. These weapons use radioactive materials to disperse and emit ionizing radiation. There are two classes of radiological weapons - radiological dispersal devices (RDD) and radiation emission devices (RED). These weapons would no cause massive numbers of dead. In most radiological attack scenarios, only few peop...

Recent terrorist attacks demonstrated that even sophisticated terrorists capable of planning and executing multiple, coordinated attacks continue to rely on traditional weapons rather than risk the uncertainty of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons. While some terrorist organizations have the motivations and capabilities to conduct large attacks worldwide, we have not y...

1. DU and the evolution of hard target weapons 73 2. Properties, advantages and hazards of DU for military use 74 3. New weapons technology known and suspected DU applications 76 4. DU armour-piercing ammunition and missiles 81 5. Smart or guided bombs 84 6. Hard target cruise missiles 86 Figure 1 Hard Target Guided Weapons in 2001 with dense metal warheads 89 7. Other suspected weapons systems...