Impact of Terrorism on Engineering Developments - Essay Example

The number of educated and unemployed youth roaming in the corridors of the cities of many nations has brought much havoc to the social sectors. Activities like terrorism have thrived in these circumstances, where unemployed and highly educated youth, are hired by organizations that are having some deep rooted cause for going against the common accepted ways in the society. They represent a particular group of belief which makes their action more vulnerable to the group of other people or all other people who are in the society.

The accepted method for them is to unrest the activities of the civilized society by make destructions to the life and developmental activities of the government. World has faced such major social disasters, and the attack and the destruction of World Trade Center in America was the very commonly known example for this. The impact of such violent activity leads to economic crisis in banking and industrial sectors, engineering and developmental set backs in the areas of communication and information sectors, social imbalances like unemployment, poverty, post terror trauma among women and children, etc.

The term "terrorism" comes from the Latin word terrere, "to frighten" via the French word terrorisme[1]. Terrorism expert Walter liqueur in 1999 has counted over 100 definitions and concludes that the only general characteristic generally agreed upon is that terrorism involves violence and the threat of violence [1]. Though United Nations has not yet accepted any definition of terrorism[1, 2], the UN "academic consensus definition," written by terrorism expert Alex P.Schmid and widely used social scientists, says terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby-in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets[1].

In the history there were many terrorist attack carried out by individuals, groups, states and even the governments against the key persons or groups in the same country or other countries. There were assassinations of world leaders or ministers, public officials or even the leaders of one terrorist group by the other terrorist groups. While individual loses causes major emotional and leadership problems in some groups and countries, the attack on buildings, bridges and other infrastructures and the projects, causing national crisis in developmental process in some countries.

There are different kinds of terrorist attacks which are mainly targeting people and the developmental structures in a state or country. While guns, bombs, etc. are used as common tools, biological weapons can cause massive outbreak of diseases and health problems in the society and cyber terrorism can hamper the communication and banking systems. The effect of any major terrorist attack is severe, causing the community in to despair. Lose of businesses, jobs, and life and health trauma to the close victims of incidents.

Financial lose, banking and communication system crash, lose of documents and property and further psychological crisis for survival, etc. are severe. Out of all the terrorist attacks in the history, the attack on World Trade Center in U.S. on September 11, 2001, has caused severe shock in the