What Good IS Technology If Effective Nuclear Policy Is Not In Line With Homeland Security?

U.S. Weighs How Best to Defend Against Nuclear Threats

Once again, we are wasting our money--hard-earned tax dollars paid mostly by the middle classes--on technology when we haven't managed to put other aspects of our national security in order. Our failure to have a well-reasoned international nuclear policy that pressures nuclear-capable countries to conform to standards and practices that assure international safety undermines any and all efforts to produce technologies that would screen for trafficking of nuclear materials and weapons. While we are all focused on Iran and their recent nuclear improvements, we have failed to see that the ramping up of the nuclear threat by Iran is a response to the recent deals made with India regarding military and civilian nuclear technologies.

Quite frankly, I am surprised we have not seen a similar ramping up within other regional nations, especially Pakistan and North Korea. While we are busy calling certain nations evil, we are also busy creating an unstable region because we are engaging in unstable international policies and practicies.

It makes little sense to build detection technologies if we are going to create an environment where the real threat will come from creating international instabilities.

Beset by delays, cost overruns and technical problems, the U.S. government's quest to defend the nation against a smuggled nuclear weapon or radiological "dirty" bomb is approaching a crossroads.

In coming weeks, the Bush administration will award or initiate contracts worth $3 billion to develop a new generation of rugged and precise radiation monitors and imaging scanners designed to sniff out radioactive material at the nation's borders.

Authorities must choose in part between older, reliable technology of limited effectiveness and new, more costly, less proven devices that promise greater accuracy.

The stakes could hardly be higher: securing U.S. cities from a catastrophic attack with a weapon of mass destruction -- "the biggest threat we face today," as Vice President Cheney said often during the 2004 campaign.

The government has stumbled repeatedly with similar choices, costing taxpayers billions. In the nearly five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration and Congress have poured more than $5 billion into homeland security detection systems, radiological and otherwise, only to find that the best available equipment at the time was often of limited use. It has spent $300 million on an early class of radiation monitors that couldn't tell uranium from cat litter and invested $1.2 billion in airport baggage screening systems that initially were no more effective than the equipment screeners used before.

"A lot of the money we threw out there was wasted because the technology was not so good," said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow for national and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.

Last month congressional investigators reported that the United States is "unlikely" to meet its goal of installing 3,000 next-generation detectors by September 2009 and projected it will be about $342 million above its anticipated $1.2 billion cost. At the same time, initial testing of new technology produced "mixed" results, while costing more.

The struggle to complete what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls a "mini-Manhattan Project" provides a case study of America's challenges in dealing with the 21st-century perils of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

To skeptics, even some close to the administration, the focus on stopping a nuclear bomb hidden in a container at the border is a costly fixation on a scenario that -- while nightmarish -- is not supported by intelligence and is overshadowed by other threats.

"This is the equivalent of a comet hitting the planet. Of all the things that are in the world, why are we fixated on this one thing?" Carafano asked. "Scanning containers full of sneakers for a 'nuke in a box' is not a really thoughtful thing."