This report highlights some core themes and insights drawn from the data speaking to VSNA (Violent Non-State Actors) and CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) threats and trends. The CBRN Date Suite is broken down into multiple component datasets. The VSNA CBRN Event Database records 593 distinct events across 106 variables covering the period 1990 to 2024 to breakdown events by country, motivating ideology, and year. The VSNA CBRN Actor Database is an actor (individual)-level database that brings together available open- source data on the demographic, educational, and experiential backgrounds of all identifiable individual non-state users and attempted users of CBRN weapons or devices. The Criminal CBRN Database documents events perpetrated by criminal (not terrorist) threat actors often employing the same agents as ideological threat actors, frequently with little or no regard for the potential to harm the public, or on occasion with the active intent to causing general harm, that would have otherwise been excluded from CBRN databases because of their lack of a criminal element.
Publication Information
Binder, Markus K. 2025. "Global Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Data Suite." College Park, MD: START (April).