State terrorism refers to acts of terrorism which a state conducts against another state or against its own citizens.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. The terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" originated during the French Revolution of the late 18th century but became widely used internationally and gained worldwide attention in the 1970s during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque conflict, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The increased use of suicide attacks from the 1980s onwards was typified by the 2001 September 11 attacks in the United States.
Nuclear terrorism refers to any person or persons detonating a nuclear weapon as an act of terrorism. Some definitions of nuclear terrorism include the sabotage of a nuclear facility and/or the detonation of a radiological device, colloquially termed a dirty bomb, but consensus is lacking. In legal terms, nuclear terrorism is an offense committed if a person unlawfully and intentionally "uses in any way radioactive material … with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury; or with the intent to cause substantial damage to property or to the environment; or with the intent to compel a natural or legal person, an international organization or a State to do or refrain from doing an act", according to the 2005 United Nations International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.
Martin Levi van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist.
Religious terrorism is a type of religious violence where terrorism is used as a strategy to achieve certain religious goals or which are influenced by religious beliefs and/or identity.
The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 — and America's Response is a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and former law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.
Yossi Melman is an Israeli writer and journalist. He was an intelligence and strategic affairs correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, and in 2013 he joined The Jerusalem Post and its Hebrew sister paper Maariv in a similar, more analytical role covering also military issues. In 2019 he returned to Haaretz.
Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves as a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Michael A. Levi was a Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Economic Policy in the Obama White House. He was previously the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan foreign-policy think tank and membership organization, and director of its Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. He is an expert on energy and climate, highly regulated technology, and defense and security policy.
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger is a 2007 book by Jonathan Schell. It is described as a provocative book which explores the threat posed by some new nuclear policies of the United States.
Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe is a 2004 book by Harvard scholar Graham Allison. Allison explains that terrorists have been striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against the United States. During the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry featured the issue of terrorism in their foreign policy platforms, and both said it is the nation's foremost security challenge. Nuclear Terrorism is described as a well-written report for general readers on the terrorist threat and what is needed to reduce it.
The Soviet Union and some communist states have sponsored international terrorism on numerous occasions, especially during the Cold War. NATO and also the Italian, German and British governments saw violence in the form of "communist fighting organizations" as a serious threat.
The RAND Corporation is a non-partisan American nonprofit global policy think tank and research institute that conducts research and development (R&D) in multiple fields and industries.
Jessica Eve Stern is an American scholar and academic on terrorism. Stern serves as a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Earlier she had been a lecturer at Harvard University. She serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. In 2001, she was featured in Time magazine's series on Innovators. In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on trauma and violence. Her book ISIS: The State of Terror (2015), was co-authored with J.M. Berger.
Jerome Robert Corsi is an American conspiracy theorist and author. His two New York Times best-selling books, Unfit for Command (2004) and The Obama Nation (2008), attacked Democratic presidential candidates and have been criticized by opposition.
The vulnerability of nuclear plants to deliberate attack is of concern in the area of nuclear safety and security. Nuclear power plants, civilian research reactors, certain naval fuel facilities, uranium enrichment plants, fuel fabrication plants, and even potentially uranium mines are vulnerable to attacks which could lead to widespread radioactive contamination. The attack threat is of several general types: commando-like ground-based attacks on equipment which if disabled could lead to a reactor core meltdown or widespread dispersal of radioactivity; external attacks such as an aircraft crash into a reactor complex, or cyber attacks.
The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003–2014 is a nonfiction book about the Iraqi insurgency, written by U.S. Navy retired cryptology analyst Malcolm Nance. It was published by CRC Press in 2014. The book discusses the terrorist evolution of the Iraqi insurgency which led to the formation of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Nance cites the 2003 Iraq war by the Bush Administration for causing regional instability. He criticizes Coalition Provisional Authority leader Paul Bremer. The book emphasizes lessons the U.S. neglected to learn from the Vietnam War, the Iraqi revolt against the British, and the South Lebanon conflict. Nance writes in favor of the Iran nuclear deal framework by the Obama Administration, saying it is in the interests of all parties involved.
