The 2012 London Olympics will last only 17 days yet already the bill for maintaining law and order and  preventing a terrorist spectacular is estimated to be £1 billion. 12,500 military personnel, 12,000 police officers, the largest two Royal Navy ships HMS Ocean and HMS Bulwark, rapier air-defence missiles, air force jets and Lynx army helicopters are amongst the assets being deployed to protect London from harm.
All told the bill comes to about £58 million per day. And this at a time when the UK is apparently heading back into recession and still has burgeoning government debts to pay off.
Will it all work?
The real problem is, even at this massive cost, are the Olympic games, the tourists and surrounding population still safe?
Has this money guaranteed a peaceful and trouble free Olympic festival?
 We shall not know of course until the whole thing is over, but I am prepared to bet that there are a number of people at the top of the security apparatus, senior police officers, politicians and civil servants who will be getting some pretty sleepless nights over this nebulous threat in the coming months.
So, due respect should be given to the people in charge for taking the threat of terrorism seriously. But they really have overlooked a far cheaper and far more effective solution. With the safety of ten million citizens at potential risk, those responsible should have taken the trouble to read the research. Basic rules of project planning dictate that before you start spending money on a solution to a problem you check out what alternative solutions there are.
Somebody somewhere has not done their home work here.
Read the research
The fact is that there are new means to prevent violent outbursts and terrorist activity and this is amply backed up by credible social research studies published in peer reviewed scientific journals. There are over 40 different research projects monitoring the effect of groups of meditators on crime levels, terrorism and even international conflict.
Two studies are of immediate interest here. The first, published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, shows that there was a worldwide reduction of 72% in terrorism during three globally based meditation projects.
The second study, published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1988 and 1990, showed a dramatic  reduction in war deaths during the Lebanese civil war when a large group of meditators met in Jerusalem. The research showed a strong correlation between the number of meditators participating in the group and changes in a composite index of quality of life variables including war deaths, fires, car accidents and so on.
Follow up studies published in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality in 2005 confirmed these results and demonstrated that the probability that the effect was due to random chance was less than one part in 10 to the power of 19. This degree of probability makes meditation and its effect on the wider society the most rigorously established phenomenon in the history of the social sciences.
As one researcher points out, there is more evidence to suggest that meditation creates a peaceful effect on the surrounding environment than there is that Aspirin cures headaches.
This rigorous research has been carried out systematically over the last thirty-five years on a specific type of meditation called Transcendental Meditation (T.M.) and its advanced form the TM-Sidhi meditation programme. Results have been so consistent that we can predict that if as little as the square root of 1% of a population practice the TM Sidhi programme together as a group and all at the same time, there is an immediate phase transition to a more orderly and peaceful social state.
What does this mean for the London Olympics?
The easiest, cheapest and least disruptive way for the Olympic organisers to achieve a trouble-free games is to assemble a group of about 1,000 of these specialist meditators (TM-Sidhas) at a disctrete location somewhere near London for about a month around the duration of the games.
If Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary or Crime or Security Minister James Brokenshire, would contact The Natural Health Research Trust, we will explain exactly how we can guarantee the event is totally free from a 9/11 or Mumbai style attack for a price that is about 0.6% of the current cost of their current security arrangements. We await your call.
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