No bioterror impact.

The threat of terrorists using biological agents exists but is very limited. The fear of nonstate actors using biological agents rose with Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 failed efforts to spread botulinum and anthrax in Japan. Fears of bioterror reached its most recent crescendo with the 2001 anthrax letter mailings, coming as they did within weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The threat of further bioterror attacks, however, never materialized.

Despite the fact that terrorist biological weapons attacks have not materialized since the Amerithrax scare, some continue to argue that the supposed ease and lower cost of biological weapons development, production, and use along with the societal disruption of COVID-19 has incentivized bad actors to adopt biological weapons. These concerns have been echoed by others who assume that misuse is inevitable and following the COVID-19 example will result in mass casualties and crippling political, societal, and economic repercussions.

However, the bioterror threat seems to have diminished — not grown — since the 2001 Amerithrax letter mailings. The core al-Qaeda biological weapons efforts were first envisioned in the late 1990s and began in earnest shortly afterward. Yet the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 effectively disrupted al-Qaeda’s biological weapons work which largely centered on anthrax. Left without a suitable safe haven, al-Qaeda was never able to reconstitute its biological weapons efforts. The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, however, may result in a reemergence of al-Qaeda and its biological weapons ambitions. Time will tell whether the Taliban now will grant safe haven to al-Qaeda that could be used for biological weapons work. What is undoubted is that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have a shared history and have continued to work closely together. Without a presence in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence will have a more difficult time detecting any resurgent al-Qaeda biological weapons efforts.

The threat of a biological weapons effort by the Islamic State in Iraq never materialized, although the group did manage to produce and use chemical weapons agents until that program was effectively disrupted. Other terrorist groups’ interest in biological weapons has been rudimentary with a focus predominately on toxins such as ricin and botulinum. U.S. domestic extremists, self-radicalized individuals, and lone actors also have gravitated toward ricin, but no known casualties have resulted from the decades-long interest in ricin.

Some analysts, however, argue that the life science revolution and global proliferation of related scientific and technical capabilities has opened a Pandora’s Box of biothreats. The argument goes that the rapid revolution in genetic engineering — including synthetic biology — the DIY bio movement, and the advent of technologies like CRISPR (acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) makes their misuse likely. However, as noted in the 2018 National Academies of Science report, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology, the large-scale production and delivery of biological weapons agents is inherently difficult, with biological weapons use favoring small-scale, highly targeted attacks.