On reducing terrorism power: a hint from physics

The September 11 attack on the US has revealed an unprecedented terrorism worldwide range of destruction. Recently, it has been related to the percolation of worldwide spread passive supporters. This scheme puts the suppression of the percolation effect as the major strategic issue in the fight against terrorism. Accordingly the world density of passive supporters should be reduced below the percolation threshold. In terms of solid policy, it means to neutralize millions of random passive supporters, which is contrary to ethics and out of any sound practical scheme. Given this impossibility we suggest instead a new strategic scheme to act directly on the value of the terrorism percolation threshold itself without harming the passive supporters. Accordingly we identify the space hosting the percolation phenomenon to be a multi-dimensional virtual social space which extends the ground earth surface to include the various independent terrorist-fighting goals. The associated percolating cluster is then found to create long-range ground connections to terrorism activity. We are thus able to modify the percolation threshold pc in the virtual space to reach p < pc by decreasing the social space dimension, leaving the density p unchanged. At once that would break down the associated world terrorism network to a family of unconnected finite-size clusters. The current world terrorism threat would thus shrink immediately and spontaneously to a local geographic problem. There, military action would become limited and efficient. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.