Our Unnecessary Insecurity

02/22/2005

Paul Krugman, NY Times

“Sept. 11 changed everything,” the saying goes. It is striking, however,
how much has not changed in the three and a half years since nearly
3,000 people were killed on American soil. The nation’s chemical plants
are still a horrific accident waiting to happen. Nuclear material that
could be made into a “dirty bomb,” or even a nuclear device, and set off
in an American city remains too accessible to terrorists. Critical
tasks, from inspecting shipping containers to upgrading defenses against
biological weapons, are being done poorly or not at all.

Costly as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were in lives, the death toll from
a chemical, biological or nuclear attack could be far, far greater. A
nation as open and complex as ours can never be totally safe from such
dangers. But there is a great deal that can be done, without
compromising our basic liberties, to eliminate obvious openings for
terrorist attacks.

The biggest obstacles to making the nation safer have been lack of
political will and failure to carry out the most effective policies. The
Bush administration and Congress have been reluctant to provide the
necessary money - even while they are furiously reducing revenue with
tax cuts. The funds that are available are often misdirected. And
Washington has caved to pressure from interest groups, like the chemical
industry, that have fought increased security measures.

Most of all, the government has failed to lay out a broad strategy for
making the nation more secure. Among the most troubling vulnerabilities
that have yet to be seriously addressed:

Chemical Plants After Sept. 11, the Environmental Protection Agency
identified 123 chemical plants that could, in a worst-case attack,
endanger one million or more people. There is an urgent need for greater
action to protect them. But the chemical industry, a major Bush-Cheney
campaign contributor, has bitterly fought needed safeguards. In her
recent book “It’s My Party Too,” the former administrator of the E.P.A.,
Christie Whitman, said that chemical industry lobbyists thwarted the
reasonable safety rules that she and the Department of Homeland Security
tried to impose.

Nuclear Materials A nuclear attack in an American city is the ultimate
nightmare. The desire, on the part of the terrorists, is there: Osama
bin Laden has declared acquisition of nuclear weapons to be a religious
duty. Fortunately, there are considerable logistical and technological
hurdles to terrorists’ setting off a nuclear device. But it is far from
impossible, and a so-called dirty bomb, which disperses radioactive
material without a nuclear explosion, could be less of a challenge to
make. The key to prevention is identifying and securing nuclear weapons
and materials, especially in the former Soviet Union.

Nuclear Power Plants There are more than 100 nuclear reactors producing
energy in the United States. Many of them are in heavily populated
areas. Some may be vulnerable to a suicide attack from the air,
particularly if a plane managed to crack the wall around the pool of
spent fuel, causing a fire that would send clouds of toxic gas into the
atmosphere. Setting off a truck bomb could also have a devastating
effect. While the plants are protected by armed guards, not all of those
teams are of the highest quality. If the government can federalize
airport luggage checkers, it should be able to provide the same
consistency to security around nuclear power plants.

Port Security One of the greatest threats to national security is the
possibility that a weapon of mass destruction could be smuggled in on
one of the millions of shipping containers that arrive from overseas
every year. The government is doing more than it once did to inspect
these containers, but there is still far too little money and manpower
devoted to this crucial task.

Hazardous Waste Transport Millions of tons of highly toxic chemicals and
nuclear waste are shipped by railroad and truck, much of it through or
near densely populated areas. The District of Columbia Council recently
adopted a temporary ban on such shipments after a Naval Research
Laboratory scientist warned that if a 90-ton tanker car carrying
chlorine crashed during a Fourth of July celebration at the National
Mall, it could kill 100,000 people in 30 minutes. But it makes no sense
that one municipality is protecting itself against a worst-case
situation while in other parts of the country, regulation of the
transport of hazardous materials remains woefully inadequate.

Bioterrorism The anthrax attacks of the fall of 2001 only began to
suggest the devastating power of biological weapons. While officials are
all too aware of the mortality rate that would follow an attack with
weapons-grade anthrax, smallpox or plague, controls are still spotty.
Lethal pathogens are too often stored in insecure laboratories.

Given these serious gaps, it is disturbing to see limited resources used
as inefficiently as they have been. Fighting the last war, the Bush
administration is devoting far too great a proportion of domestic
security spending to preventing the hijacking of commercial aircraft.
For a long time, it engaged in a draconian crackdown on academic visas,
while the nation’s borders - the likeliest entry points for future
terrorists - remained as porous as ever. And with the stakes literally
life or death, the pork-barrel politics that have controlled domestic
security funds - giving Wyoming more per capita than New Jersey - are
simply unconscionable.

While the administration does too little on one hand, it overreacts on
the other, and seems oblivious to how its excesses are actually making
America less safe. The abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the
refusal to abide by either international law or basic constitutional
principles do little to protect the nation, but make it harder for us to
enlist much-needed allies, and provide powerful talking points for
terrorist recruiting drives.

Many Americans have a false sense of security because there has not been
a terrorist assault in the United States since the World Trade Center
towers and the Pentagon were attacked. But that may have less to do with
terrorists’ intents than their timeline. Eight years went by between the
1993 attack that failed to bring down the World Trade Center and the one
that finally did.

Looking back, we feel a natural frustration at all the warning signs
that were ignored before Sept. 11. There is now a wide array of
government reports, private studies and even best-selling books alerting
us to remaining vulnerabilities. If the United States is hit by another
attack at one of those points, we will have only ourselves to blame.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company