Closing gaping cargo security holes prohibitively expensive

its use of PETN plastic explosives in the last year, posing severe detection problems, particularly in locations where shipping companies and airlines use older equipment to scan cargo.

Some next-generation machines can pick up traces of chemical explosives, but the costs are extremely high. Swabbing packages individually for explosives is considered the most effective way to scan, but this is not a practical option for the millions of packages that crisscross the globe every day.

A comprehensive switch to these swabbing devices would create massive delays of everything from clothing to iPods. Relatively inexpensive cargo transport would become a thing of the past, with draconian implications for world trade.

The cost of these machines would likely be in the billions of dollars, and would be economically impossible for some countries.

“The technology exists,” said aviation-systems expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes. “It’s horrendously expensive and will take many years to install at all the various cargo depots and freight-forwarding places. If you add up all the places cargo can access the airside at airports, there are many thousands of places, and to put screening units in all those places is very complicated.”

He said that to put up-to-date screening equipment in every location would not be possible in the next two years even if money was available.

Butterworth-Hayes said governments — not airlines or shippers — should pay for the new equipment since national security is at stake.

European airport operators have cautiously endorsed more screening measures but are urging that national governments shoulder at least a portion of the rapidly expanding costs of aviation security, which in Europe are borne by the airport companies.

“The economics of security is definitely an angle we’ve been concerned with for some time,” said Robert O’Meara, spokesman for the European branch of Airport Council International.

Katz writes that statistics show that security currently accounts for 35 percent of airport operating costs in Europe, in contrast to just 5 to 8 percent before the 9/11 attacks. Forty percent of all airport employees at the continent’s 313 airports are now security-related staff.

Any additional requirements for the closer screening of air cargo will likely drive up those costs still further.

Magnus Ranstorp, a specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said it would be too expensive to try to establish a foolproof system because of the constantly changing tactics used by terrorist groups. Instead, he said, efforts should be made to keep cargo off passenger planes — a change that in itself would prove extremely costly for airlines, which derive substantial revenue from cargo.