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REFLECTIONS ON MODERN TERRORISM By Gerald Holton [2.4.02] There has been an historic transition in which Type I terrorism and Type II terrorism are being combined. Type I terrorism consists of acts by individuals or small groups that aim to impose terror on other individuals and groups, and through them indirectly on their governments. Type II terrorism is the imposition by a government on groups of local or foreign populations. The new type of terrorism — Type III — is carried out by a substantially larger group of individuals, is aimed directly at a national population, and has all the components for success. The article deals with how this new terrorism, at very little psychic cost on the perpetrators, disrupts personal and historic memory through large-scale catastrophe organized for that purpose. Type III terrorism is made easier by the ready availability of high-level technology. Target nations will not have open to them the conventional responses, and will have to devise new, preventive measures.
GERALD HOLTON is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard as a student of P. W. Bridgman. His chief interests are in the history and philosophy of science, in the physics of matter at high pressure, and in the study of career paths of young scientists. Among his recent books are Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought ; Science and Anti-Science; Einstein, History, and Other Passions; The Advancement of Science, and its Burdens; Scientific Imagination; two books with Gerhard Sonnert: Gender Differences in Science Careers: The Project Access Study, and Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension; Physics, The Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond (with S.G.Brush). Professor Holton is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Life Honorary Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of several Learned Societies in Europe. Founding editor of the quarterly journal Daedalus,and founder of Science, Society, & Human Values, he is also on the editorial committee of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton University Press). Among the honors he has received are the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, and the selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the Jefferson Lecturer.
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John Brockman,
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