Conflicted: A History Podcast
Untangling history’s greatest controversies. Every month, we take a hard look at the historical conflicts that raise difficult questions, stoke controversy, and send our moral compasses spinning.
The Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks 1995 – Part 1
On March 20th, 1995, the Tokyo subway system was flooded with sarin nerve gas in a coordinated terrorist attack by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō. Led by the charismatic new-age guru, Shoko Asahara, the well-funded and technologically ambitious Aum organization manufactured and deployed chemical weapons in an attempt to bring about the end of the world. In the chaos that followed, 13 people were killed, thousands were injured, and the international community shuddered at the possibility of future attacks by fringe political groups.
SOURCES:
Amarasingam, A. (2017, April 5). A history of sarin as a weapon. The Atlantic.
Cotton, Simon. “Nerve Agents: What Are They and How Do They Work?” American Scientist, vol. 106, no. 3, 2018, pp. 138–40.
Danzig, Richard; Sageman, Marc; Leighton, Terrance; Hough, Lloyd; Yuki, Hidemi; Kotani, Rui; Hosford, Zachary M.. Aum Shinrikyo: Insights Into How Terrorists Develop Biological and Chemical Weapons . Center for a New American Security. 2011.
Gunaratna, Rohan. “Aum Shinrikyo’s Rise, Fall and Revival.” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses, vol. 10, no. 8, 2018, pp. 1–6.
Harmon, Christopher C. “How Terrorist Groups End: Studies of the Twentieth Century.” Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3, 2010, pp. 43–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26269787.
“IHT: A Safe and Sure System — Until Now.” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1995.
Jones, Seth G., and Martin C. Libicki. “Policing and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo.” How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida, RAND Corporation, 2008, pp. 45–62.
Kaplan, David E. (1996) “Aum’s Shoko Asahara and the Cult at the End of the World”. WIRED.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. 1999.
Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel. 2001.
Murphy, P. (2014, June 21). Matsumoto: Aum’s sarin guinea pig. The Japan Times.
Reader, Ian. Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo. 2000.
Tucker, Jonathan B. “Chemical/Biological Terrorism: Coping with a New Threat.” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 15, no. 2, 1996, pp. 167–83.
Ushiyama, Rin. “Shock and Anger: Societal Responses to the Tokyo Subway Attack.” Aum Shinrikyō and Religious Terrorism in Japanese Collective Memory., The British Academy, 2023, pp. 52–80.
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