A Japanese doomsday cult organization, Aum Shinrikyo, plants sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 and injuring some 5,700. A similar attack occurs nearly simultaneously in the Yokohama subway system.
President Clinton would later paint a bleak future if nations did not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear [yellow]cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Effectively dealing with proliferation and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands”, he said, was “fundamentally what is stake in the standoff we’re having in Iraq …”
He asked Americans to “think about … the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”
The Aum Shirikyo attack will forever solidify President Bill Clinton’s view of the WMD threat of terrorism. Less than a month later, Ayman Al-Zawahiri would write to al Qaeda operational chief Mohammed Atef: “We only became aware of them [biological and chemical weapons] when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials. …” (Quoted in Alan Cullison, “Inside al Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 294, No. 2, 2004.)