Defending cities against dirty bombs is difficult

is to test it,” said Jonah Czerwinski, an IBM homeland security consultant who pushed for its creation, told Hsu. The United States spends $11 billion on missile defense each year, so “it seems lopsided to … not spend $40 million on programs like this.” Vayl Oxford, director of DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which directs the program, said that his office hopes to complete in the next year a cost-benefit analysis of the New York effort to determine whether it can offer lessons to other cities based on resources, operational needs “and the likelihood of success.” He adds: “We don’t want to wait until someone has attacked a city with a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb and wait to figure that out. Together with the high risk New York always faces, we feel this is a prudent step to help secure that city, as well as to determine, ‘Does this model work?’ ”

To New York leaders, the dirty bomb threat is real. “We have to take it seriously — because New York is at the top of al-Qaeda’s target list, and we are the last line of defense,” said Richard Falkenrath, NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and a former Bush White House homeland security aide. 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. The DHS, New York police, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and officials from three states and 91 localities have responded by forging a partnership that participants and outside experts have praised. More than 1,400 local officers have been trained in radiation detection operations, and basic, hand-held radiation detectors have been distributed to thousands of police officers and others whose daily work has them crisscrossing the region. 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. New Year revelers would be reassured to