CBRN Activity and Attacks by Insurgent Organizations

To examine the factors that make an organization more likely to pursue a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapon or use a CBRN device, we conducted an analysis using the Big Allied and Dangerous Version 2.0 - Insurgent (BAAD2-I) dataset (Asal et al. 2015). BAAD2-I includes information on all “code-able” organizations (that is, entities that are clearly distinct, bounded in terms of their membership, and persistent across time) that appear for at least one year in the Uppsala Conflict Database Program (UCDP) dataset (Themnér and Wallensteen 2011) during the period 1998-2012. UCDP includes only those insurgent organizations that (1) engaged in battle with a government that (2) resulted in at least 25 battle deaths (3) during at least one year between 1998 and 2012. The BAAD2-I data was then married to variables (1) on terrorist incidents and fatalities drawn from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), (2) on pursuit and use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear capabilities and weapons drawn from the Profiles of Incidents involving CBRN by Non-state Actors (POICN) dataset, and (3) on the nature and the “homebase” country of the state from the Quality of Government (QoG) dataset.