Conclusion

Since operationally the condemnations that both Type I and Type II terrorism have received so far have generally been ineffective, there is no reason to think that Type I terrorists will continue to limit themselves to paleotechnic means and to essentially unsuccessful missions.  On the contrary, the same dynamic that escalated the technological sophistication of state terrorism is bound to act also within individual and group terrorism of Type III.  Therefore three developments may be expected.  One is the attempt by one or more states to disseminate, not directly but through hired gangs, both the technology and also the cultural ground for successful terror, i.e., to secure the marriage of advanced technology and the intent to traumatize through cataclysmic disaster.  The second is that gangs, not necessarily or openly associated with states but motivated by a fervid ideology (analogous to the case of the Bolsheviks), will perform that same sinister marriage on their own.

Third, a nation targeted for the new terrorism will not have open to it the conventional response — i.e., a balance of terror against an identifiable Type II threat.  Therefore it will have to devise new measures, both for making terror acts unacceptably costly to each or all probable instigators, and for initiating policies that might defuse the conditions likely to be animating the potential terrorists.

There is a final point.  As Type III terrorists scale up the levels of activity, chances are that some terrorists may experience technical failures, particularly in their early preparations.  Any attempt to produce damage on a very large scale requires a certain amount of technical mastery that may not be easy to transmit locally to what previously would have been merely a band of Type I terrorists.  The distance in competence between the supplier of the new weapon on the one hand and the operator on the other hand can be very large, even in the cases where such weapons are used by advanced states in warfare. [12]

However, even "failures" of weapons (nuclear, chemical, or biological) on the scale of Type II agents but in the hands of Type III agents could be attended by enormous deleterious effects, devastating to life in unintended areas.  It may well be that precisely such a catastrophic "failure" could serve to mark the full extent of the discontinuity in world history.