DHS on track to use radiation detectors at most U.S. ports

The Homeland Security Department will complete the deployment of radiation detection devices at virtually all U.S. ports by the end of next year, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Ralph Basham said Thursday.

"By then, we will screen 98 percent of all incoming container cargo for radiation," Basham said in a speech at his agency's annual trade symposium for port and other trade industry groups. "We have the money and we have the equipment," he later told reporters.

Basham stressed in the speech that the deployment would actually exceed the mandate of the recently approved $400 million Safe Port Act. It required the radiation scanning of 100 percent of the cargo entering through the nation's 22 largest ports by Dec. 31, 2007. Basham also briefed the conference on his agency's plan to install radiation screening equipment at foreign ports through which large volumes of U.S.-bound cargo flow.

The plan calls for scanning all of these containers at Port Qasim, Pakistan; Port Cortes, Honduras, and Southampton in the United Kingdom, and for limited screening at Salalah, Oman; Busan, South Korea; Singapore, and possibly Hong Kong. The commissioner said "real time" images recorded by the scanning devices would be immediately "streamed" into a yet-to-be-developed "fusion center" and then sent to the existing homeland security data analysis facility here for risk assessment.

To highlight the "sensitivity" of the issue, Dave Huizenga, the Energy Department's international materials chief, explained that it would take only a "grapefruit-sized" piece of material to make a nuclear weapon.

Huizenga also explained that as the "first line of defense" against the threat, his agency was pressing forward with its program to locate and secure nuclear weapons material overseas, especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union. He said that although Energy Department officials believed they had neutralized about 80 percent of foreign nuclear material, "the bad news is that we are still working on the remaining 20 percent" and could not guarantee that some of it might have fallen into the hands of terrorists.

Allen Gina, the director of the Homeland Security container security initiative, said it will be a "heavy lift" to achieve his agency's goal of screening much of the incoming cargo for radiation at its foreign departure points, but that the effort had to be attempted. Before Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, all "enforcement" was concentrated at "the place of importation, where it is too late," Gina noted.

Basham also pledged to continue his agency's development of a plan for prompt resumption of normal trade business in the aftermath of a major disruption.

"It doesn't matter whether the incident is a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or pandemic flu," he said in his speech. "Hope is not a strategy." And at another point he added, "If we shut down trade, they win."