Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons

This solid volume, produced by an editor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the staff of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, takes an unusual approach. It focuses on what terrorists have actually done with weapons of mass destruction, rather than what they might do. The authors conclude that these efforts have actually achieved rather little, all things considered.

That proves nothing about the future, but it is worth asking (as the editor does, in a concluding essay) why that has indeed been the case.