[Mb-civic] Open ports, loose nukes - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

  Open ports, loose nukes

February 28, 2006

THE REAL threat to the security of US ports comes not from Arab 
ownership of the terminals' managing company but from the failure of the 
United States to better monitor what comes through our harbors, big and 
small. Each day, about 25,000 cargo containers enter the country. The 
Coast Guard has estimated it would cost about $7 billion to equip US 
ports with the scanners and other equipment needed to meet high 
standards of surveillance. But since 9/11, the United States has spent 
about $1.6 billion.

As a result, just a small percentage of cargo is machine-scanned or 
manually inspected for a dirty bomb or other nuclear device, either in 
the port from which the cargo originates or in the US port where it 
arrives. Officials have also failed to establish a secure system of 
identification documents for port workers that would include background 
security checks.

Perhaps the most effective initiative for protecting the United States 
from dangerous contraband cargo is the program established by Senators 
Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in 1991 to secure the nuclear-weapons 
materials and facilities of Russia and other former Soviet republics. 
Funds from Nunn-Lugar have helped to deactivate about 7,000 nuclear 
warheads and destroy more than 1,000 ballistic missiles.

But because of lack of support from Congress, the program's goals will 
not be met for years, with fissile material and thousands of former 
Soviet warheads still available for diversion to terrorists. Democratic 
Representative Adam Schiff of California, a member of the International 
Relations Committee, said yesterday that an Al Qaeda nuclear weapon is 
more likely to arrive in this country in a crate than on a missile. 
Graham Allison, the former Clinton administration official who is now 
the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs 
at the Kennedy School of Government, wrote in his book ''Nuclear 
Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" that ''if we continue 
along our present course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable."

Our present course is to give half-hearted support to the Nunn-Lugar 
program and to treat the security gaps at the nation's ports as if they 
were a problem the nation had decades to solve. Republicans often say 
the administration's terrorism-based abridgements of civil liberties are 
opposed by critics with a pre-9/11 mentality about national security. 
But both Congress and the administration have approached the danger of 
terrorists smuggling loose nukes into this country with the same lack of 
imagination that the 9/11 commission said blinded US officials to the 
threat of hijacked airliners used as weapons.

Whoever has the port management contract, the United States will be 
responsible for security. Congress should focus better on that task. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/02/28/open_ports_loose_nukes/
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