Goodies jumped off retailers' shelves into shoppers' carts last weekend, but not to worry: They were instantly replenished by a global supply chain reaching to China. There's only one little problem: The U.S. government worries that this same conveyor belt could deliver a terrorist nuclear bomb. And until these fears are under control, the trade system that undergirds the world's economic survival will be at risk.
This poses just the kind of no-win dilemma that out-of-power political parties love to flog incumbents with. In all three presidential debates and in his convention speech, John Kerry accused the Bush administration of failing adequately to police the six million cargo containers flowing into the country each year. Bill Clinton made it a centerpiece of his speech too, saying a $5,000 tax on each of the country's millionaires would be enough to double the number of cargo inspections. But leave it to John Edwards to transcend the mongering of legitimate fear and claim that because only 5% of containers are physically examined, al Qaeda has 95% chance of successfully delivering a nuclear bomb to a U.S. city.
This absurdity, in fact, conceals one of the great, low-budget successes of the war on terrorism. A rule was instituted overnight requiring shippers to deliver an electronic manifest of every container to U.S. Customs 24 hours before it's loaded aboard a ship in a foreign port. The info is fed through a classified, rule-based screening program to identify "high-risk" cargos, shippers or handlers, with the targeted containers undergoing X-ray or physical search before loading.
Because there's no obvious way to assess the effectiveness of Customs' screening strategy, there's no way to make a precise estimate of risk, but the odds are certainly much lower than 95% -- quite possibly low enough to deter an attempt.
All this was done on the fly after Sept. 11, 2001, and for about $500 million compared to the $11 billion poorly spent on trying to make the airlines safer. But everyone agrees it was a "first step." What comes next is the budget-busting, trade-wrecking problem that Congress and whoever replaces Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge will face in the coming year.
Bills are already bouncing around to mandate inspection of every container, requiring billions of man-hours and slowing trade to a crawl. Others want the world's 11 million shipping containers to be equipped with monitors to detect tampering, radiation, chemical or biological contamination, or the presence of stowaways. Indeed, millions of private dollars have already been invested in developing such devices and trying to sell them to the U.S. government. But shippers say the likely consequence would be an unmanageable number of false positives, bringing trade to a halt. In a typical large ship, containers are stacked seven high and 10 across, with a few inches of space in between. What happens if halfway to the U.S. an alarm goes off at the bottom of a stack?
Yet champions as diverse as Republican Senators John McCain and Susan Collins and Democrats Barbara Boxer and Joe Lieberman want a crackdown on container shipping. Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander, has testified repeatedly about gaping holes in maritime security, while credible alarmists like Graham Allison, formerly of the Clinton Pentagon, lay 50-50 odds that a terrorist nuke will go off in the next 10 years (a bet we might be willing to take if allowed to exclude the chance of a Chechen bomb vaporizing Moscow).
But maybe it's not too soon to question the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom that container shipping is our primary point of vulnerability. An amazing system created spontaneously by industry since the 1960s, its very loosey-gooseyness might seem a pretty good deterrent to a nuclear terrorist.
After all, the average shipment involves 17 different parties, changing hands over and over, exposing cargo to the risks of pilfering, damage and accidental discovery. One U.S. test tracked a container of light bulbs from Slovakia to New Hampshire and found that on the final truck leg from Montreal, the driver took 12 hours for what should have been a 3.5-hour trip, making several "unauthorized" stops along the way. Is this really a system to which a terrorist would entrust his precious nuke?
By history and temperament, al Qaeda seems much more inclined to keep its plots under tight control and on a shorter fuse. Consider the group's proven investment and expertise in using suicide operatives in small boats to deliver attacks. Couple this with its suspected ownership of a dozen ocean-going vessels, not to mention terrorism's growing coalescence with an already thriving business of sea piracy in and around Southeast Asia. Don't these factors suggest a more pressing source of risk than the container system? Yet no real-time system for tracking and identifying even larger ships in the world's waters exists, let alone millions of smaller craft (four million ply the Great Lakes alone).
Still, port security is undeniably a hot topic on Capitol Hill, with legislators positioning themselves to say "I told you so." And nuclear dread being what it is, even a smallish incident might prompt a nervous public to demand a cessation of trade until safety can be 100% assured.
What to do? Deploy reliable radiation detectors as fast as possible so we can wave off panic-mongers and keep the ports open. Worthwhile too is encouraging Wal-Mart and others in existing plans to radio-tag containers with shipping information, giving Customs a rich new stream of data to help it understand what normal trade looks like, the better to recognize abnormal patterns.
But true security will only come from mopping up the world's unsecured fissile material while stopping untrustworthy states from making more. Attempts to protect ourselves by gumming up trade likely would only deliver terrorists a much greater victory than any they could achieve on their own.
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