Tokyo Subway attacks – A Security Case Study According to Crime Museum’s website http://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/tokyo-subway-attack/, retrieved on 2/14/2017, ‘in 1995, a religious group called Aum Shinrikyo devised a plot to kill commuters on the Tokyo subway system. The group was led by Shoko Asahara, who founded this religious faction and referred to himself as the “Sacred Emperor of Japan”. This paper will examine how Tokyo Subway Attacks are considered a security case and what both counterterrorism and crisis communication lenses can learn us, to tackle this kind of security challenge in the future through a three-step approach: explore, understand and do. Explore On March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult orchestrated a coordinated sarin gas attack on subway trains in Tokyo, Japan. The sarin gas killed a dozen people, injured thousands more, and is still considered the worst terrorist attack in Japan About.com, "Sarin Gas Attack in Tokyo Subway", http://history1900s.about.com/od/1990s/qt/Sarin-Gas-Tokyo.htm . Robyn Pangi introduces Aum Shinrikyo - the cult of which the perpetrators were members - as follows: 'In the early to mid-1990s, a group known as Aum Shinrikyo amassed, and used against innocent civilians, an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.' He adds: 'Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth, based its teachings on the belief of impending armageddon. Led by Shoko Asahara, a partially blind man whose given name was Chizuo Matsumoto, cult members believed that only devout followers of Asahara (“the guru”) would be saved at the end of the world. The cult was well financed and diverse: by 1995 it had a worldwide membership of 40,000 people and assets estimated at one billion dollars. Cult members represented many different segments of society, but a characteristic that set Aum apart from other groups was that many members had a relatively high level of education and wealth. In fact, Aum recruited at universities, focusing particularly on physics, engineering, and computer departments Robyn Pangi. “Consequence Management in the 1995 Sarin Attacks on the Japanese Subway System.” BCSIA Discussion Paper 2002-4, ESDP Discussion Paper ESDP-2002-01, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, February 2002. .' In the same document, he also mentions a timeline of events: **March 20th 1995, between 7:30 and 7:45 AM: Five Aum members boarded subway trains of 3 different subway lines (Hibiya, Chiyoda and Maronouchi); **From 7:48 AM onwards, each of the 5 cult members pierced one or more sarin-filled bags and then fled the subway, before going back to their handout and reporting back to Aum's guru. Before going forward, it might be useful to add a bit of information about sarin gas. Pubchem's website learns us that it's a 'colorless, odorless liquid. Almost no odor in pure state. Used as a quick-acting military chemical nerve agent. Chemical warfare agent.' Pubchem: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/sarin Furthermore, the organisation for the prohibition on chemical weapons (OPCW, for short) adds that 'among lethal CW agents, the nerve agents have had an entirely dominant role since the Second World War. Nerve agents acquired their name because they affect the transmission of nerve impulses in the nervous system. All nerve agents belong chemically to the group of organo-phosphorus compounds. They are stable and easily dispersed, highly toxic and have rapid effects both when absorbed through the skin and via respiration. Nerve agents can be manufactured by means of fairly simple chemical techniques. The raw materials are inexpensive and generally readily available.' Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, page about nerve agents: https://www.opcw.org/about-chemical-weapons/types-of-chemical-agent/nerve-agents/ Now what were the levels of governance and who were the actors involved ? Pangi interestingly mentions that 'in any large-scale disaster, response personnel from multiple agencies and various levels of government must work together. This includes public, private, and volunteer agencies from the local, regional, and national levels. The first trained personnel to arrive on the scene are almost always from local or state emergency services, with state and national resources following. After the sarin attack, for example, the response involved fire, police, emergency medical services, and medical professionals from the municipal, prefectural, and national governments (Pangi, 2002). Their action will be more thoroughly developed later in this paper. Understand In order to improve our understanding of any safety or security event occuring somewhere on the planet, we usually adopt disciplinary lenses which bring us different points of view regarding a same event. Here, we selected counter-terrorism and crisis communication perspectives. COUNTERTERRORISM PERSPECTIVE: Many sources, among them Alain Bauer (a French criminology professor, who gives a MOOC in French about terrorism), agree in that the sarin attacks which occurred in Tokyo subway system is a noticeable example of what we call chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism (CBRN terrorism for short) Bauer, A., MOOC "Terrorismes": https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/CNAM/01019S02/session02/about . He adds that 'CBRN is clearly what governments are most scared of'. In addition, Radicalisation Research website points out the following: 'One question widely asked after the attack was why did the police not intervene earlier in Aum, especially since there had been signs that the movement was becoming increasingly militant and that it had probably committed earlier acts of violence.' Moreover, 'another key question that dominated discussions in Japan was why did its disciples become so committed to a belief system that was deeply paranoid and violent? The puzzle appeared greater because Aum devotees included many (including doctors, lawyers and other professionals) who had attended Japan’s leading universities and who, in the minds of society at large, ought to have been able to avoid becoming obsessed with such ways of thinking.' Radicalisation Research, 'In the aftermath of Aum Shinrikyo: lessons learned from the Japanese response' (2012): http://www.radicalisationresearch.org/debate/reader-2012-aftermath-2/ CRISIS COMMUNICATION PERSPECTIVE: In Japan, the governor of the affected prefecture is in charge during an emergency. Local government must request assistance from the appropriate national agency in order to secure assistance from that agency. For instance, a request to the Japanese Self Defense Force (part of the Defense Agency) must originate from the local government. Moreover, because the legal head of the SDF is the Prime Minister, the subsidiary of the Defense Agency cannot act without the Prime Minister’s consent (Pangi, 2002). And another contribution is that of Prof. dr. Bakker, who seems to agree. He says: 'When looking at crisis communication in general, and meaning making in particular, there are roles and responsibilities for political leaders and public figures. And of course, the media are also an important actor, but the same holds for citizens spreading messages, pictures and videos through social media', and specifies that 'political leaders are the most important actors, regarding meaning making.' Bakker, E., 'Safety and Security Challenges in a Globalized World', week 4 video about 'Boston Marathon Bombings' So in our particular case, as stated by Ben Sheppard, Japan's political system reacted more in a legislative manner to the attacks by 'enacting three sets of laws: rightening the Religious Corporations Law (which provided tax incentives), legislating to tighten up controls on sarin gas manufacturing, and finally enacting a law that gradually increased the pressure on Aum, to make the cult impotent.' Ben Sheppard, 'The Psychology of Strategic Terrorism: Public and Government Responses to Attack', Chapter 5 (2009) Another interesting point is mentioned by St Andrews 'Journal of Terrorism Research', which reads: 'The after-action reporting following the Tokyo Sarin attack noted serious deficiencies in the identification of the threat, and the escalating confusion about why so many obviously sick people were coming out of the subway station. First responders arrived on the scene quickly – but, because Sarin is an invisible gas, fire and EMS units were unaware that the scene was hot and did not know the nature of the threat they were facing. Although they did an effective job evacuating and getting people out of the subway station, their failure to take precautionary measures specific to a CBRNE attack caused the unnecessary contamination of hundreds of first responders themselves as well as innocent bystanders. Hospitals became a primary decontamination area by default, putting emergency room doctors and other hospital workers and patients also at risk for contamination.' Nelms, J., (2011). The Need for Situational Awareness in a CBRNE Attack. Journal of Terrorism Research. 2(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.176 Do Given what has been developed earlier (in the 'Crisis communication perspective' part of this essay), St Andrews' Journal of Terrorism Research seems to have a relevant suggestion: protect the first responders. Indeed, 'An important responsibility of an emergency manager is to protect the safety and health of first responders. Increasing the emergency managers' ability to make informed decisions in the face of a CBRNE attack not only has a critical impact on the first responders' ability to save the lives of attack victims, but also protects them from personally becoming February 21, 2017victims: the fact is that, as in many other homeland security initiatives, federal funding does not match the realistic cost of capability implementation. Nor can these high technology programs be paid for from the subway operators' general funds'. (Nelms, 2011) 4 4