Book Description

Insider knowledge about a complex technical system, coupled with access to its elements, has the potential to be used for triggering the most disastrous of terrorist attacks. Technological terrorism is the unauthorized impact on a complex technical system with the intention of breaking down its protection and initiating secondary catastrophic processes to cause damage and loss outside the facility. Intelligent terrorism, on the other hand, is the unauthorized purposeful interference in the processes of design, construction or maintenance of a complex technical system, and is either aimed at increasing existing vulnerabilities or creating new ones. This book is based on the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on ‘Comparative Analysis of Technological and Intelligence Terrorism Impacts on Complex Technical Systems’. It lays the foundation for a risk-informed approach to modeling, analyzing, managing and controlling complex technical systems in the face of terrorist attacks. To formulate such an approach, it is necessary to combine the insights of a spectrum of disciplines across engineering, human and social sciences, and economics. The book explains how an understanding of the vulnerabilities of complex technical systems to terrorist attack can reduce these vulnerabilities and contain or limit the impact of terrorism, and also the way in which such an understanding is crucial to the development of a set of design criteria and codes which will take such vulnerabilities into account. The book also identifies areas of further research and opportunities for future exchange and collaboration.