Six Years Ago in TIME

By Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland and Sora Song

Despite the terrible threat of chemical and biological terrorism, it has never been very effectively accomplished. One exception was a horrifying event in Tokyo, when a nerve gas called SARIN, an agent originally used by the Nazis, was placed in five subway cars during rush hour, killing 12 and sickening thousands.

The subway poisoning seems to represent an aggressive, outward-reaching insanity...It suggests a new type of evil, a terrorism whose demands are so personal and obscure that no one can understand them, let alone satisfy them...

By Saturday most of the patients who survived the subway gassing had left St. Luke's Hospital in central Tokyo and were improving steadily. But new cases keep streaming in. These patients' ailments are not physical but psychosomatic. Yet they come by the hundreds, and they truly believe they have been poisoned.

In a way, they have. They represent the damage done not to an individual nervous system but to a city's--perhaps a nation's--sense of security and self. As the Asahi Shimbun editorialized, "While it is hard to build a safe society, it is very easy to destroy it." One senior security official looked a reporter in the eye on Thursday and said, "Yes, I am very worried about another attack, a revenge attack."

--TIME, April 3, 1995