Securing cities no easy task

The test sweep, which followed a secret, concerted search for radioactive materials in Manhattan by hundreds of local, state and federal officers before the city’s New Year’s Eve celebration, underscores the government’s determination to prove this year that it can detect and disrupt nuclear threats to major cities.

At an estimated cost of $90 million, the Securing the Cities programme absorbs a small fraction of the Bush administration’s overall national security and counter-proliferation expenditures. But critics have raised questions about its value, noting its rapid growth in the absence of a specific threat of urban nuclear terrorism, as well as the program’s technical challenges and operational limitations.

Its aims, Senate appropriators warned in a report last year, may be technologically unfeasible. The attempt to create a detection system in New York as a model for other cities is based on assumptions “that run counter to current intelligence in this threat arena, and has no measure of success, nor an end point,” they said.

To New York leaders, the dirty bomb threat is real. Before New Year’s Day in 2004, the US government dispatched scores of nuclear scientists with covert detection gear to scour five major cities, including New York for radiation, based on intelligence intercepts of al-Qaeda operatives discussing an unspecified new attack. On August 10, New York authorities briefly increased their detection efforts after a Web site that monitors jihadist Internet sites reported a dirty-bomb threat, which was subsequently discredited.

Although a dirty bomb spewing nuclear materials would kill far fewer people than an improvised nuclear explosive, the materials could fuse with asphalt and concrete and prevent access to critical urban areas such as buildings, train stations or tunnels for years, causing a catastrophic economic impact, he said.

Half a dozen advanced, $500,000 trucks with detectors capable of distinguishing different radioactive materials are also in use in Manhattan, along with classified vehicles, and more are on the way. Additional funds have been designated for training, field exercises, security improvements at hospitals and other high-risk sites where radioactive materials are present, and research into the effectiveness of using scanners at fixed points such as transportation nodes, Oxford said.

City officials last month also quietly activated some of the newest generation of early warning sensors to detect a biological attack, turning on a limited number of filing-cabinet-size air filters in sensitive, high-volume areas of Manhattan.

“I think the federal government could do a better job,” New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, referring to officials’ desire for more detectors and enhanced capabilities under a federal government programme known as BioWatch, under which air samplers were installed in 2003 in more than 30 major US cities to detect the airborne release of biological warfare agents such as anthrax, plague and smallpox.

The older samplers catch airborne particles in filters that are manually collected once a day and taken to a lab, requiring up to 30 hours to detect a pathogen. They may not preserve live organisms that scientists use to select treatment options. And the process is cost- and labour-intensive, leading to false alarms, quality-control problems and limits on the system’s size, despite a $85 million annual budget.

New York officials say they prefer the newer model activated last month, known as Autonomous Pathogen Detection Systems and developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with federal support. They automatically sniff the air hourly for a week unattended, identify up to 100 harmful species by using two types of genetic and biochemical reaction tests, preserve live specimens and transmit results immediately to headquarters.
-Spencer S. Hsu (The Washington Post)