THE PRICE OF FANATICISM

The image is at once ordinary and sinister. Amid the bustle of Kasumigaseki subway station, in downtown Tokyo, three attacha cases stand unattended by the ticket barrier. Suddenly, gas begins hissing ominously out of one of them. When police eventually examine the cases, they discover that each holds containers of clear liquid, a powerful battery-operated vaporizer and a fan to blow the resulting vapor through vents. The cases are rigged to operate as automatic dispensers. But dispensers of what?

They represent the ultimate urban horror. Anonymous, malevolent packages planted by any of the thousands of subway riders and set to kill huge numbers of passersby indiscriminately. The prospective victims are temporarily captives in a subterranean steel and concrete execution chamber, and they could have died by simply by drawing a breath. The dead would have been selected by sheer chance, depending on petty details like which commuter was on schedule and who had dawdled over breakfast and taken a later train.

Those mysterious attache cases, perhaps testing devices for a subsequent attack, were found only five days before thousands of riders on the Tokyo subway were felled by nerve gas last week. The liquid inside turned out to be water.

The events in Tokyo were a clear warning to the world. Terrorism has taken a step across a threshold that security experts have been anticipating with dread for decades. It has been known that there are groups out there that are willing to kill at random. There is proof that they are able to use chemical weapons, and possibly biological and radioactive ones as well, that can destroy far more people than conventional bombs and bullets. Now that nerve gas has been used on ordinary citizens, it may possibly happen again: the fact that terrorists are copycats and hungry for publicity makes it a near certainty. With one act, the spectrum of danger has broadened into a threat more terrifying than ever before--and one far more difficult for governments to forestall.

It used to be known who the "terrorists" were: a handful of Middle Eastern or leftist political movements, sponsored and protected by governments, bent on achieving their well-advertised ideological goals through death and intimidation. The next generation of terrorists is more obscure, an assemblage of disparate fanatics pursuing unique or mysterious agendas, with only the capacity for random violence in common. While governments have them under fairly good control and international terrorist incidents are relatively few (321 last year, down from 432 in 1933), it looks to the experts as if the 1990s rise of apocalyptic sects and Islamic extremism has merged with the increasingly easy availability of chemical and biological weapons that can kill thousands in an attack. The potential for random murder and catastrophic governmental disruption lies within reach of small, unsophisticated and irresponsible groups of true believers. "Nightmares are coming true,'' says Robert Kupperman, a terrorism expert at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think we're in for deep trouble.''