DHS scraps nukes-in-cargo-containers scan plan

For f*ck's sake

Have these guys been watching too many TV shows or what?

I worked for a container shipping company for 16 years...

Let me tell you, conditions at a port are NOT happy places for highly technical, delicate equipment. It's hard enough to get RFID readers at gate portals to reliably function.

Given that anybody with enough resources to build one of these things could probably figure out how to suppress the radiation the detectors are looking, for this was doomed from the beginning.

Time to move to Idaho.

Although A Hand Carried...

...device, eg. suitcase would not allow much shielding, a nuke in cargo container could be well concealed given the weight and size capacity of a cargo container.

And, as an episode of NCIS-LA pointed out, the radiation signature of bananas or ice melting salt would mask plutonium emissions.

I believe intelligence gathering is our best hope here.

A bit late at the Port of Entry, isn't it?

Unless the container port is 100 miles out of town, what's the point exactly?

Bananas

Rumor has it that the detectors worked exceedingly well, well enough, in fact, that they would detect a cargo of bananas in shipping containers (Bananas are naturally radioactive, due to a high concentration of naturally radioactive Potassium 40; look up Banana Equivalent Dose.). But, that's where the problems began. It seems that, when such a shipment of bananas was identified, the trained monkeys operating the scanners would immediately forget all about scanning other cargo containers and start eating the bananas. ;-)

Dave

P.S. Oh, don't even mention those shipments of Brazil Nuts!

Yeah right

the detectors don't work. So all you terrorists, don't worry about it, just keep on trying to ship dirty bombs in. We won't be able to detect it at all. This is not a smokescreen. No, really, the detectors don't work. Honest...

Thing is nukes don't have to get past the scanners.

Thing is nukes don't have to get past the scanners, say the Terrorists wanted to blow up a port city we would still be in trouble if the weapon was detonated as it was coming into a port. All it takes is for some one to be dockside with a trigger device from that group and the name of a ship waits till the ship has docked and then detonates.

But having said that, nukes are kinda hard to obtain or we would have seen it done by now, I know there must be some nation states like Iran, North Korea etc who would like to give one to group X but they also know if they did the next nuclear detonation would be over there Capital City, and if one came up for sale on the black market the news would get back to some very serious agencies who I doubt would ask for it nicely.

So I am not all that worried, besides if it did happen and I was in the target city I probably wouldn’t have the time to say "Bugger" before I was turned into a over cooked human donna stick by the heat wave.

Why the ports?

Do they scan every container lorry entering the US from Canada?

Wow, they finally cancelled an expensive, pointless and impossible project?

Pointless for many reasons - not least that if a terrorist organisation actually did manage to get hold of a viable nuclear weapon, it wouldn't matter whether they set it off in a major port city or a major city.

Sail it into a busy harbour somewhere and make it go boom. If you've got the cash to arrange for a nuclear weapon, then a seagoing motor vessel is small change.

Impossible - well, the experts already knew it and said so. The reasons are pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain - significant shielding is easy to put inside a shipping container. More if you disguise it as a shipment of large metal objects!

And finally, again pointless, because the only way to protect against this kind of attack is via intelligence!

There's not very much weapons-grade nuclear material in the world, there aren't many people who know how to make one, and there aren't very many pre-assembled nuclear weapons.

I'm pretty sure that the various intelligence agencies do already know where all the above are and I'm certain that they keep very close tabs on them. As somebody mentioned before, the only sources would be Iran, North Korea, and maybe parts of the former USSR.

Even if they didn't, a terrorist would need a *lot* of hard cash and a very extensive organisation to carry that out - thus impossible to keep secret for long enough.

Bizarre intelligince to say the least...

... I would have thought that profiling a terrorist organisation that can obtain a fully working nuke in the first place they would also consider that the terrorist organisation that can achieve that would also have the ability to pull off a different form of delivery. I would suggest a small automated submarine (drug cartels can do it) shadowing a container ship coming into port, or better still a bit of wielding and install it in the ship itself and say maybe pack some extra standard explosives in a few cargo containers wait till it's in range (doesn't even need to get to the point of docking with that much explosives in, as you're going for Area of Effect).

Well this is a first!

What, a "terror" project dumped because it doesn't work and it's over budget? Since when has that ever been a factor? What happened - did the bean-counters at Raytheon cut back on the political donations, or was the project concentrated in too few congressional districts? Perhaps they don't have the right former Director of Homeland Security on the board. I think we should be told.