Defending cities against dirty bombs is difficult

Published 7 February 2008

DHS efforts to develop technologies for detecting dirty bombs run into criticism of the feasibility of the technology and questions about the cost-benefit analysis used to justify the deployment of the systems

Few New Yorkers noticed the a New York City Police Department helicopter, equipped with sensitive radiation detector, which flew through a wintry sky over Lower Manhattan last month, hunting block by block through the concrete canyons of Wall Street for a black SUV carrying components of a homemade radiological dirty bomb. The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu writes that the thirty-minute training exercise failed to detect a deliberately planted chunk of radioactive cesium-137, a material which — if dispersed by an explosive — could paralyze the U.S. financial nerve center. With time running short, police operators blamed technical glitches, and the pilot turned back to a West Side landing pad. 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, highlights 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 program receives but a small fraction of the Bush administration’s overall national security and counter-proliferation expenditures, but critics still 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. Indeed, last year Senate appropriators warned that its goal 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,” the enate report said. Michael Levi, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar and the author of the recently published book “On Nuclear Terrorism,” said the Securing the Cities program may be useful but that its backers should be more open about its goals and limits. He also worries that too much is being spent on technology and not enough on coordination. Supporters say that however slight the odds, the risks of a nuclear-related attack on New York or another U.S. city are not zero. Such an attack’s consequences on the nation’s economy, society, and psyche would be too extreme to neglect a goal-line defense, they say.

Securing the Cities may not be perfect, but it will evolve, “and the only way to evolve it over time