Twenty years on from 7/7, we have learned nothing

Telegraph

a day ago

As our thoughts turn to the terror attacks which rocked London 20 years ago tomorrow, the Russian Federation is – according to the Dutch government – now responsible for thousands of chemical weapon attacks in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine is now heartbreakingly similar to the trench warfare of WW1. The casualty rate is similar and now the Russians are trying to break the stalemate with gas as the Germans did at the second battle of Ypres in April 1915. As then, the lack of respirators initially was decisive: but the delivery of protective equipment to the frontline in WW1 nullified this dreadful weapon, as it should in Ukraine once British masks arrive in the coming weeks.
Twenty years ago, at the time of 7/7, I was commanding the UK's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) defence force and we were on operations in Iraq. We were dealing with a potential Al Qaeda biological weapon attack against British troops in southern Iraq. Though much about that episode is still confidential, the basic detail is in my memoir Chemical Warrior.
That situation ultimately turned out to be a false alarm, but it brought conventional operations to a halt for 48 hours as my team and I dealt with the threat. This is when I began to think that if you had no morals or scruples you would use chemical weapons all the time. In his brilliant autobiography Nine Lives, Aimen Dean, a jihadist turned MI6 agent working within Al Qaeda, details how the terror organisation was planning to use and develop chemical and biological weapons. This is undoubtedly still an aspiration of ISIS and other jihadist groups.
What has vexed me for some time is the thought that had 7/7 been a CBRN attack, God only knows what the death toll might have been. I saw at close hand the vile Assad regime killing thousands of Syrian civilians with the deadly nerve agent Sarin, but also with much more readily available chlorine. When I was fighting with the Peshmerga against ISIS, in 2015-17, the terrorists frequently fired mortars at us full of mustard agent aka mustard gas. ISIS also tried to obtain highly enriched uranium to make an improvised nuclear device which could have devastated whole towns and villages.
The successors of the 7/7 jihadists have tried and, so far, failed to devastate the hated West with some form of CBRN attack. Long may this continue, but we must not drop our guard.
It is not just the terrorists who view this type of attack as the gold standard, but also tyrants and rogue states. The dictator of North Korea had his stepbrother assassinated with the nerve agent VX, and my hometown of Salisbury was attacked by Russian hitmen on the orders of Putin himself, with Novichok, the deadliest chemical man has ever produced. There was enough Novichok used in the attack to kill half the population of Salsibury.
Nonetheless there are countermeasures for every threat. It is the one that is ignored or put in the too difficult bracket that will cause us serious harm. The routine use of readily available toxic industrial chemicals like chlorine in Syria, and of 'non lethal' CS gas in Ukraine, has drawn very little comment from the international community. Tyrants like Putin may become emboldened to use more toxic and lethal substances or pathogens against us.
The awful events of 7/7 showed us long ago that it's a dangerous world, full of people who wish us harm, and it is much more dangerous today. But for too long we have allowed evil to flourish without action or even protest. Worse, we have failed to strengthen our defences: we have used creative accounting to pretend spending was adequate, rather than actually finding more money for the armed services, the intelligence agencies, the special forces and all the others who guard us while we sleep.
Going forward we need to remember that stark lesson we should have learned 20 years ago. It won't matter how good (or not) our other public services or our welfare system may be if our defences are inadequate.