A- Conventional attacks on NBC targets

One knows these targets are quite weak, even if their security has been significantly reinforced.

We remember Sevezo in the 70's. In 1984, the Bhopal catastrophe induced 2 500 dead following a problem in a pesticide factory. This same year in Mexico City, the explosion of liquid gas tanks induced 4 248 dead.

Everyone has in mind the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 that demonstrated the structural vulnerability of some reactors.
Terrorism was not the cause but these events show that our societies have many vulnerable targets.

What occurred by accident could happen voluntarily tomorrow. Let us remember that one hundred years ago, it was necessary to enter each house to plunge a village in the darkness. Nowadays, destroying a single electric generator is enough. Becoming more complex and more sophisticated, our world is also more vulnerable to sabotage.

To date, terrorists’ modus operandi has utilized predominantly conventional weapons.

Theses weapons, as explosives, could be used against plants, nuclear for instance, according to Bruce Hoffmann , to create hostage situations, blackmail, stealing of nuclear material, or to destroy the facility and why not to blow it out to create a Chernobyl-like situation.

Oklahoma-City bombing illustrates what a truck bomb attack could do to a concrete building.

9/11 illustrates what a plane could do to a building…

As one notes that today suicide operations are generalized with Muslim fundamentalists, involving not only poor and desperate people but also educated ones, accustomed to western way of life, this type of attack is even more conceivable, with the huge effects one can guess.

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