Congress and homeland security legislation: A different view // Ben Frankel

revived the idea by launching Star Wars (to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”). In that time period — the past forty-five years — the United States spent nearly $150 billion on developing ballistic missile technology. Some of Reagan’s (really, Edward Teller’s) more audacious ideas — chemical lasers stationed in space, or chemical laser engines on the ground shooting beams to orbiting mirrors in space — were found to be impractical. Other ideas — “dense pack,” “pebble curtain,” and others — never left the drawing board.

What we have now is a so-so ground- or ship-based system that may, just may, be able to intercept a handful of missiles being launched at the United States (these are the systems we want to place in central Europe). These systems may — may — be able to handle the few missiles Iran or North Korea may fire at the United States — when they develop missiles that can reach the United States, that is. Iran currently has no such missiles.

The North Korean case is more complicated. The Taepodong-2 long-range missile is estimated to have a range of between 4,000km and 10,000km. In July 2006, North Korea test-fired the Taepodong-2, but the missile failed shortly after launch. The three-stage Taepodong-2 was used in a failed attempt to launch a satellite in April 2009.

If Russia decided to attack the united States, these defensive systems will be useless: They will be easily overwhelmed by two or three dozen war heads accompanied by hundreds of decoys (this is why the Bush and Obama administrations told the Russians that they do not have to worry about the defensive systems we want to place in Europe).

Now, if you were a North Korean or Iranian fanatic determined to kill millions of Americans and inflict a major blow on the U.S. economy, what would you rather do:

• Wait until you have developed and tested long-range ballistic missiles that can reliably reach the United States, and then invest more money and time to miniaturize your bombs so they fit on top of a missile, and then launch the missiles from your home territory so it can be easily identified and located by U.S. satellites, thus inviting a guaranteed retaliation by the United States that would wipe your country off the map (to say nothing about the rudimentary U.S. ballistic missiles defense system which might luck out and shoot down the few North Korean or Iranian missiles on their way to the United States)?
• Or would you rather take the crude nuclear devices you have created, put them in containers (no need for exquisite machining to miniaturize them), put the containers on Liberian- or Panamanian-flagged ships, and sail one ship to New York Harbor, the other to the Los Angeles-Long Beach Port, and a third to Boston harbor — and detonate them?

What if you are an al-Qaeda cell, and your operatives have just received two or three crude bombs from North Korea, or Iran, or a corrupt general in Russia — or, much more likely, from an al-Qaeda sympathizer in the Pakistani security-scientific establishment? You do not even have missiles to launch, but you do have access to money and can bribe a port employee — perhaps there is no need for a bribe because the employee is an al-Qaeda sympathizer, too — in a Third World country to look the other way while you load a nuclear bomb-carrying container onto a ship.

Forget ships — they can attack only coastal cities. How about loading a crude nuclear device on a cargo plane or into the belly of a passenger plane — and explode it while the plane is over, say, Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.

Now, with all this in mind — and the above is the abbreviated version of the argument — if you were a U.S. security planner, which WMD-delivery scenario would you be more worried about: a missile attack on the United States or a bomb carried on a ship or a cargo or passenger plane?

We are not saying that research should not be continued into more effective ballistic missile defense. We are saying that it is curious that some of those who consistently advocate spending billions on developing a more effective ballistic missile defense also object to investing similar amounts of money in developing more effective cargo screening technologies — and, until such technological improvements are made, object to the deployment of current cargo screening technologies in ports.

It makes no sense to support spending billions on developing technologies to protect us from a more remote and less likely risk, and spend international political capital trying to deploy such systems that we have, while objecting to spending similar amounts of money on developing technologies to protect us from an immediate and more likely risk — and until such technologies mature, object to deploying what we have in ports.

Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security News Wire