The Science and Technology of Counterterrorism

Chapter 12

Physical Access Restriction, Incident Detection, and Scenario Monitoring

12.1 Introduction

Restricting physical access to higher-risk areas is essential to any counterterrorism strategy. Like many other security-related controls, restricting physical access is intended to address the risk factor of unauthorized physical access. Physical arguments presented in Chapters 4 to 7 reinforce intuition that physical proximity to a facility and/or its occupants enhances the vulnerability to various terrorism attack vectors. Moreover, physical models first presented in Chapter 4 make it possible to quantitatively estimate the vulnerability component of risk for some of these attack vectors.

Since a “No Trespassing” sign might only deter the most ...