Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 21, 1995                   TAG: 9503210109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From The Associated Press, Knight-Ridder/Tribune and The Washington
DATELINE: TOKYO                                LENGTH: Medium

POISON IS NEW THREAT

Police in protective gear seized five packages of nerve gas that spread death Monday through Tokyo's crowded subway system, hunting for clues in a chilling new chapter in urban terrorism: the use of chemical weapons.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, which by this morning killed eight people and sickened nearly 4,700 others. It paralyzed one of the world's busiest subway systems and stunned the Japanese, who consider their country among the world's safest.

The terrorists could have killed hundreds or thousands if they had wanted to, experts said Monday.

``I think they were just trying to say, `We have it and are prepared to use it,''' said Kathleen Bailey, a senior fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

``Either it's a wacko who wants to scare the hell out of everybody, or it's someone getting ready to deliver a very heavy blackmail threat,'' said Bailey, a biological and chemical weapons specialist who testified last week before the House National Security subcommittee on procurement.

Her theory is that terrorists worldwide are stepping up the deadliness of their weaponry, and biological and chemical weapons are ``the coming thing.''

``They used to want to deliver a message and not harm a lot of people,'' Bailey continued. ``Now they're turning to weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that we have very little protection against them is helping to entice terrorists in that direction.''

Terrorists are ``beginning to breach the unwritten bond they had with their victims that they would not go to weapons of mass destruction,'' concurred Robert Kupperman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Both experts cited the New York World Trade Center bombing by Islamic fundamentalists in February 1993 as the first effort to cause widespread mayhem and the Japanese subway attack as the second.

The Tokyo attack drew new attention to earlier, unsolved cases of chemical poisoning, including the deaths of seven people in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto in June. As in the subway attack, authorities blamed sarin, a nerve gas developed by the Nazis in World War II.

The United States and other developed nations are ill-equipped to prevent the criminal or terrorist use of lethal chemical agents, U.S. officials and independent experts said Monday. Such gases are relatively easy to produce and virtually impossible to detect in advance, the officials said.

While it is fairly easy to obtain the ingredients to produce sarin, the chemical process is difficult to perform. A little as a drop of sarin - inhaled or on the skin - can kill a person almost instantly.

The gas attacks a key enzyme needed by the nervous system, causing difficulty in breathing, a fall in blood pressure and contraction of the pupils in the eye. The gas was used by Iraq against Iran in the 1980s.