Apocalyptic prophets are figures of fun because they're always wrong. Armageddon fails to arrive when they say it will. In Shoko Asahara's case, however, the prophet apparently made plans to ensure that his predictions would come true. They almost did.
Since Japanese police arrested the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on May 16, frightening facts have emerged indicating that Asahara had the money, the means and the intention to wreak his version of Armageddon on Japan. The March 20 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which killed 12 people and sickened 5,500, and the thwarted attempt to spread deadly hydrogen cyanide gas in the Shinjuku station on May 5 were intended as preludes to worse disasters, police sources are suggesting in leaks to the Japanese press. The big show was apparently set for November, when plans called for cult attacks on government buildings, the Diet and the Imperial Palace to spark what Asahara saw as a world war.
It could have been horrific. To triumph in that war, the cult built a series of munitions factories within its complex at the foot of Mount Fuji. Aum researchers were trying to develop germ weapons -- including the Ebola virus -- and an assembly line was about to produce automatic rifles. Behind one building's false walls was a $700,000 lab able to turn out 60 to 80 kg a month of the nerve gas sarin -- enough to kill 6 million to 8 million people. One plan called for releasing the sarin over Tokyo from 1.65-m-long remote-controlled helicopters. Asahara would follow up the attack by overpowering the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and taking control of Japan with his own tanks and fighter jets. "It sounds incredible," says a former cult member who goes by the name of Akio Kawaguchi for fear of being found out by the cult, "but Aum is capable of anything."
Capable of planning anything, perhaps. But the police accounts include details that challenge the group's technical proficiencies, portraying it as a cult that couldn't shoot straight. The remote-controlled helicopters, purchased from a dealer in northern Japan for $20,000 each in 1993, crashed during the first two practice sessions. The germ-warfare team, despite experiments with botulism, never produced a working weapon. During one of its experiments, a chemical vaporized into a foul-smelling gas, escaped into the outside air and precipitated, coating nearby cars with brown ooze.