These were used most frequently and more recent years particularly in Afghanistan,
Algeria, Palestinian territories and in Turkey.
In some cases, they are also planted in packages and
detonated in strategic locations.
Attacks involving chemical agents range from letters containing wrath poison for
attempts to contaminate water supplies.
Ten of the 32 biological weapons recorded in the GTD were the anthrax attacks that
took place in the United States in 2001, in which seven people lost their lives.
Ten of the 13 cases involving radiological materials were part of a series of
attacks in Tokyo, Japan.
In which an individual sent envelopes containing trace amounts of monazite
to government officials.
And it turns out monazite is a reddish, brown mineral which can be radioactive.
While in these cases, it caused no injuries.
The letters threatened to smuggle uranium into North Korea
which raised alarms about the potential for a nuclear attack.
Even though, thankfully that never happened.
The fact that most weapons used in terrorist attacks are readily available
and not very sophisticated is not surprising when we consider that
a fundamental characteristic of terrorism is that the groups employing it often
times do not have access to military grade weaponry.
Still, if you look at how terrorism is portrayed in the media, you often
think instead that terrorists are going to have access to very sophisticated weapons.
In general that's for
the most part, terrorists rely on weapons that are relatively easy to obtain.
I wanted to put weapons into context, I wanted to go now into two other sections.
One, to look at how the use of weapons by terrorists
varies across regions of the world.
And then to conclude this lecture I'll talk a little bit about how weapons use
has changed over time.
The next figure shows how the four most common terrorist weapons and
these are explosives, firearms, incendiary devices and
melee have been used across 13 regions of the world.
And according to this figure explosives were the most common type of weapon used
in most regions but there are some exceptions to this, Central America,
the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa,
all more frequently, relied on firearms than on explosives.
The figure also shows that terrorist attacks in three regions
disproportionately relied on incendiary devices.
Recall that among all of the known weapons used in GTD attacks,
only about 8% were based on incendiaries.
So, these regions are interesting in terms of relying much more than other parts of
the world on incendiaries.
So a tax in East Asia, North America, and Western Europe relied
much more on incendiary devices than other parts of the world.
It turns out that melee related weapons were used disproportionately in
East Asia compared to other regions.
In fact, in East Asia, melee is a more important type of weapon than firearms.
We think this probably reflects the fact that firearms are much more difficult
to obtain in East Asia than in other regions of the world.
And finally, let me say just a little bit about how weapon-use
has evolved over time.
In the next figure we see how the use of these four most common types of weapons
changed over time.
Unsurprisingly, explosives and firearms,
we already know that they are the most common and they are consistently the most
frequently used weapons over the more than four decades included in the database.
We can also see in this figure that trends in the use of firearms and
explosives are mostly similar through the series with explosives use slightly more
than firearms.
In fact, firearms were used more often than explosives in only
eight of the past 43 years.
The gap between the use of explosives and
firearms is especially wide in the early 1980s and from 2006 to 2012.
The 1980s saw explosive attacks greatly increasing by extremely active
terrorist campaigns, particularly in South America.
Including Chile and Peru, where they were very common.