A new security system for U.S.-bound cargo is necessary to prevent seaborne shipping containers being used by terrorists to deploy weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner warned Thursday.
Bonner called for cargo to be screened before it leaves exporting countries instead of waiting until it arrives in the United States.
“The stakes are high, and the system is vulnerable,” he said. “We must do everything in our power to establish a means to protect the global sea-container trade, and we must do it now–before some devastating event occurs.”
Speaking to national and homeland security experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Bonner said the 18 million containers entering the country by ship, rail or truck annually provide a tempting means for terrorists to get a “nuke in a box” or biological or chemical weapons into a major U.S. city.
He noted that Italian authorities inspecting a shipping container last October found an Al Qaeda operative along with materials for gaining access to U.S. airports hidden inside.
“Of ever greater concern are the possibilities that international terrorists such as Al Qaeda could smuggle a crude nuclear device in one of the more than 50,000 containers that arrive in the U.S. each day,” he said. “One can only imagine the devastation of a small nuclear explosion at one of our seaports.”
`Horrific’ effect on trade
Though this would cause “horrific” damage to the port and affected people, the act of using a shipping container for terrorism would have a devastating effect on world trade and the U.S. economy, he said.
“Simply put, the shipping of sea containers would stop,” he said. “The American people, for one, would not likely permit one more sea container to enter the United States until there was a significantly greater assurance–such as 100 percent inspections–that no additional terrorist weapons would be smuggled into the country.
“Governments in other major industrial countries would no doubt adopt a similar policy, thus bringing the global economy to its knees,” Bonner said.
The Customs commissioner explained that the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks caused all commercial air traffic in the United States to cease for almost a week and remain diminished for months afterward. This has produced billions of dollars in losses and an economic downturn from which the airline industry has yet to recover, he said.
Seaborne containers account for 46 percent of the value of imported goods brought into the country annually, he said, noting that nearly 100 percent of South Korea’s imported goods reach the U.S. on container ships.
Searching every container entering this country would cause horrendous delays, Bonner said, citing the experience of automakers when U.S. borders were closed following the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler, all of whom are dependent on a regular flow of auto parts from Canada and Mexico, could not get critical materials in time due to border backups, threatening a vital part of our economy,” he said. “The fate of several major plants and thousands of jobs hinged on the delays caused by just two days of increased wait times.”
A halt in container shipping would have an even more far-reaching effect, he said.
“Even a two-week shutdown of global sea-container traffic would be devastating, costing billions,” Bonner said. “But the shutdown would, in all likelihood, be much longer, as governments struggled to figure out how to build a security system that could find the other deadly needles in the massive haystack of global trade.”
Measures to avert attacks
More Top Picks Best Platform Beds For Small Bedrooms
Technology exists to screen containers effectively for terrorist weapons, including X-ray and Gamma ray devices, he said. Some 4,000 U.S. Customs agents now carry radiation sensors.
In addition to using more of this equipment and working to improve the technology, the U.S. and its trading partners need to shift the focus of their customs inspections, Bonner said.
Proposing a Container Security Initiative, he called for agreements between the U.S. and its major trading partners in which customs inspection and screening of containers would be carried out before they were shipped. “Electronic seals” and satellite tracking devices could be used to assure that the containers were not later tampered with or diverted.
Bonner urged that such a program be instituted as soon as possible at 10 “megaports” that ship about half the imported goods sent to the U.S. each year. The ports are China’s Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yantian; Singapore; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Pusan, South Korea; Bremerhaven, Germany; Tokyo; and Genoa, Italy.