"I'm as concerned about global warming and its long term effects" as about the immediate threat of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, said Blix, a former Swedish diplomat who was charged with searching for such weapons ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"Support and coordination from states would be needed for terrorists to produce WMDs," he insisted, speaking at a conference here entitled "WMD terrorism: how scared should we be?".

Blix acknowledged however that "there is a small but not zero risk" of terrorists laying their hands on weapons of mass destruction, and called for more preventive measures.

"Material and technology are now widespread and an ability to create WMDs is also greater," he said.

John Parachini, a political analyst with the California-based Rand Corporation, agreed that the current threat of terrorists gaining access to such weapons had perhaps been exaggerated.

"WMDs are not easy to produce," he said, adding that "the mix of terrorism and WMDs becomes really dangerous if a group or groups form a sort of connection with a state and get knowledge from states how to produce WMDs".

"WMDs used by Al-Qaeda is much further off than we think," agreed Thomas Sanderson of the Strategic and International Studies' Transnational Threats Project.

He cautioned however that the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 showed that "the intention of terrorist groups to cause major damage is there".

"You don't need to kill thousands of people in order to cause a terrible effect on a country, as anthrax showed," he added, referring to a scare soon after the 2001 attacks.

According to Parachini, there have been only four known cases in recent history of non-state actors using non-conventional weapons to wreak havoc:

the Rajneeshee sect's salmonella poisoning of an Oregon town in 1984, the chlorine attack on the Sri Lankan air force carried out by the Tamil Tigers in 1990, the Aum sect's release of deadly sarin gas on a Tokyo subway train in 1995 and finally the deadly anthrax letters, believed to be of domestic origin, that terrorized the United States in 2001.

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