Terrorists could acquire more dangerous conventional arms and even biological-weapon agents by 2025, creating the potential for more lethal attacks, U.S. Deputy National Intelligence Director Thomas Fingar said yesterday (see GSN, March 26).
"I can imagine that the aggregate threat diminishes but the specific instances (of attacks) being much more deadly," he said, basing his comments on a National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025, which is set for release tomorrow.
Fingar said the report suggests that the Middle East's burgeoning youth population would give al-Qaeda more prospective operatives while the terrorist organization's attacks on Islamic populations would hurt its ability to find new members, the Associated Press reported.
"The percentage of recruitable (people) is very small, but it's a very small percentage of a much larger number," he said (Pamela Hess, Associated Press/Google News, Nov. 18).
Fingar said that future tensions in the Middle East would involve nuclear weapons, Agence France-Presse reported.
"Whether this is a nuclear arms race in the region, which could be triggered by what happens in Iran, by 2025 the issues of today will in one way or another will be resolved," Fingar said.
"It clearly makes a difference how it is resolved," he said, suggesting that nuclear-weapon concerns could increase outside nations' interests in the region (Jim Mannion, Agence France-Presse/Google News, Nov. 18).
A working draft of the report states: ""We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025 and assess the peninsula will probably be denuclearized, either via ongoing diplomacy or as a necessary condition for international acceptance of and cooperation with a needy new Korea," the Washington Times reported today.
However, Fingar warned that the report "should not be viewed as a prediction."
"It's a stimulative document," he said, noting that its publication was timed to target the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama before its members are "consumed by events" (Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, Nov. 19).