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'What if' the port bomb had been real?
Seattle gets a little nervous, but doesn't draw the appropriate conclusions. Still waiting for that one magic law that will fix terrorism with a wave of a cop's hand. And it's an election year ....
Can you imagine seeing a mushroom cloud while driving along Interstate 5?
“ What if a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded at the Port of Seattle's Terminal 18 on Harbor Island? ”


That scenario is worth thinking about in light of last week's incident when the port was evacuated after a bomb-sniffing dog implied an explosive device was hidden in a cargo container. We were lucky. This incident turned out to be nothing.

But do we think enough about the "what if"?

"What if" is exactly what scenario planning and analysis are all about. Last week (on the same day as the port evacuation), The RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management Policy released its study about the Port of Long Beach, "Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack."

"We chose to analyze a terrorist nuclear explosion in a shipping port because it seemed quite plausible, although the actual probability of such an event is impossible to calculate," the study said. "We chose a 10-kiloton explosion because it is possible to obtain such a yield with a relatively crude unboosted design."

RAND figured that within 72 hours, about 60,000 people would have died from the blast or from radiation poisoning; 150,000 more people would have been exposed to hazardous radiation; 6 million people would try to evacuate the Los Angeles area; and 2 million to 3 million people would become refugees requiring relocation because of fallout.

Seattle's narrow traffic patterns would make escape from such an attack even more deadly. It would be hard for us to escape -- especially if we were all trying to evacuate at once.

"There has been a growing effort to limit the opportunities for terrorists to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States," RAND said. "Specifically, new initiatives to improve the security of the container shipping network have been proposed, but the challenges are large. ” Each day, 20,000 shipping containers from ports all over the world are unloaded in the United States. Given that there are 361 operational seaports in the country, it will be difficult to implement comprehensive in-port security programs."
Which is why the maligned Bush administration effort actually is better. We can't inspect every single container (and the Dhimmis know it), but we can screen shippers, ships and operators. And we can whack terrorists abroad.
The study said recent security efforts are better -- but untested. What's more, the scale of an attack at the Long Beach port would be significantly greater than 9/11 with direct economic costs exceeding $1 trillion.

"There has been a growing effort to limit the opportunities for terrorists to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States," RAND said.
Consider the conflict between security and trade. If there were an attack (at any port), there would be an immediate call to shut down all U.S. ports until security could somehow be improved. "In contrast, parts of the business community might advocate an early opening of the ports. However, financial and real estate interests may require financial risk protection before shipping could resume, and this would be almost impossible to acquire following the Long Beach explosion," RAND said. "At the same time, there could be a large-scale exodus from U.S. port cities by local populations fearing a second attack. Taken together, these results suggest there are reasonable prospects for extended closures of all U.S. ports ... at least for periods of substantially reduced operations."

And what if people wanted to leave Seattle because it is a port city, too? Gasoline will be in short supply throughout the region because seven refineries in the Long Beach area would be closed -- about a quarter of the region's gas and 18 percent of the jet fuel supply.

RAND predicts the nation's port system -- even if it were able to reopen -- would be unable to pick up the balance of Long Beach's cargo. Ports in the L.A. area account for 70 percent of the West Coast container traffic, and it would require double shifts in Seattle, Tacoma and Oakland to make up just 80 percent of that lost capacity. That is, if the government even allowed the ports to operate beyond enhanced security.

"We know we're vulnerable," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in the Senate last month when she called for that body to move forward the GreenLane Maritime Cargo Security Act. "Terrorists have many opportunities to introduce deadly cargo into a container. It could be tampered with any time it leaves a foreign factory overseas to when it arrives at a consolidation warehouse and moves to a foreign port. It could be tampered with while it's en route to the U.S."

The GreenLane bill would set standards for port security and provide new funding for ports to ramp up efforts. More important: The bill is a clear message to the Department of Homeland Security to make port security a top priority.

The incident in Seattle last week and the new RAND study ought to compel the Senate to move this legislation quickly. Before the view from I-5 is a mushroom cloud.
Posted by: lotp 2006-08-20
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=163489