

What's in the Box?

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Remember how it felt on the morning of September 11? One plane hit one World Trade Center tower; possibly an accident. A second plane struck the second tower; the odds of that happening by accident were well beyond belief. Then a third plane hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.

How many more hijacked planes were up there?

Fear. That's what we remember feeling on September 11. That fear was the hijackers' biggest victory.

How will we react when the next shoe drops, when terrorists make some other frightful attack on the American economy, as Osama bin Laden has urged them to do in videos broadcast round the world?

Consider Commander Stephen Flynn's nightmare: One morning, an assortment of shipping containers blow up at strategic locations in the nation's rail and highway networks. Or the containers release poison gas, or some other horribly dangerous substance.

Look at an aerial photo of the industrial area just south of the city of Newark, New Jersey, Flynn suggests. There is an airport, a major highway, an important rail line, and just beyond the New Jersey Turnpike and the railroad there is a seaport where ships unload tens of thousands of containers every year.

Or you might look at a map of Chicago, or Long Beach, California, or New Orleans, or Houston, or Baltimore, or Philadelphia, or Boston, or Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or any of dozens of other ports of entry, where shipping containers enter the United States.

Then whole trains of containers on flat cars ride the rails through U.S. cities, past key industries such as oil refineries, over and under highways, through tunnels and across bridges, some of which are potential bottlenecks in the national freight-transportation system.

Poor man's missile

It would be a simple matter -- simpler at least than hijacking four airliners simultaneously -- to equip a container with a satellite navigation system and a communications device to let a controller know the container's precise location. The communications device -- a cell phone, for example -- could also trigger something dangerous in the container's cargo.

The common freight container could be as accurate as a ballistic missile, carry anything a missile could carry and more, and it would be anonymous to boot. It's simple for survivors to track a missile back to its launching point and hold some enemy responsible, but containers are a different matter. Who knows where that box came from, or who loaded it? Defending against exploding containers could be more difficult than building a missile-defense system.

Flynn, a commander in the United States Coast Guard and a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, would like to remind us -- if we ever knew -- that many of the containers riding the rails and highways all over the country were loaded overseas, and that 98% of them were not inspected at the port of entry. The Coast Guard and the Customs Service, worried though they are by the chance that something frightful might arrive on these shores in a container, only manage immediate inspections of 2% of the one million containers landing here each month.

It would be almost impossible to do much better at most ports of entry. There aren't the inspectors; there isn't the room; there isn't the time. It takes five inspectors three hours to conduct a thorough security inspection of one 40-foot container, Flynn reports in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Customs inspections, if they occur at all, take place when the recipient opens the box in the normal course of business, at the recipient's place of business, up to 30 days after the container enters the country.

"Our aviation security system is like Fort Knox compared to our maritime security," says Flynn.

On September 11, when nobody knew how many more hijackers might be in flight, nine other airliners out of 5,102 in the air were not communicating correctly or had deviations from their flight plans. It took several hours to get them all landed and four days to gain reasonable certainty that no more hijackings of the same type would happen right away.

Flynn guesses it would take months to gain such control of the freight containers moving in the U.S. on a typical day. If it could be done at all.

The first question is whether the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Surface Transportation Board, the Federal Highway Administration, and dozens of other agencies and hundreds of state agencies -- to say nothing of the private shipping railroad and trucking companies -- could pull together to halt container shipments and inspect every box, or even just the boxes originating overseas.

The second question is whether the country could afford that kind of security effort. We can be sure the result would be economic pandemonium.

Stopping trade in its tracks

Imagine the lost production if parts reach factories weeks late. Imagine the delays and the damage and the losses if goods shipments to wholesale distribution centers and warehouses suddenly stopped. "Just-in-time" inventory systems are saving manufacturers billions of dollars every year, on the now-questionable theory that everything can always get where it has to go without interruption. Factories are not ready to reassume the costs of holding large inventories.

As the managerial breakdown in the Union Pacific railroad demonstrated a few years ago, it's not that hard to jam up the freight system accidentally, and the economic losses can be substantial. If malefactors jam it up on purpose they might be able to create enormous economic losses. Flynn concludes that the biggest threat in his nightmare may not be the immediate destruction from exploding containers; the biggest threat may be the loss of economic output resulting from dealing with the threat of exploding containers by shutting down the container freight system.

Should Flynn be talking about this? Should Barron's be talking about it? If an attack using containers happens next week or next year, will it be his fault and our fault for giving the bad guys the clue to our vulnerability?

"It's only the good guys who don't know," answers Flynn. He notes that shipping companies controlled by Osama bin Laden have owned 20 freighters that the Coast Guard knows about, and he adds that smugglers, drug-runners and pirates already prey on the lack of security in the ocean freight system.

Flynn also has a good reason for talking about it: Solutions are possible.

"We must not allow mystery boxes to enter our country," Flynn declares, explaining that the border or the port of entry is not the place to solve every mystery. That would be like trying to catch minnows at the base of Niagara Falls. Sensible fisherman go upstream, to the shallows and calmer pools.

Flynn says most shipments are honest and innocuous, but shippers must verify contents. Also, since containers are now too structurally weak to resist unauthorized entry, shipping companies must provide more secure containers, complete with tamper-proof locks. And, since most cargo that moves by sea moves through one of a few megaports such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Rotterdam, Flynn says those ports must also become centers of security enforcement.

Chain of approval

Flynn urges that any cargo would have to be loaded into approved containers on an approved factory loading dock, or subjected to a thorough search in a megaport, or be refused entrance to the United States.

Many technical details need to be worked out, and no person, agency, trade association, port authority or international conference currently has the power to order the changes that will be needed. Nor is there a ready source of funds to cover the costs, other than higher freight rates.

But Flynn's nightmare attack of container missiles would be far more costly than any increase in freight rates aimed at covering better security. A Congress and administration willing to protect the nation from nuclear missiles would be wise to accept the costs of container security immediately, rather than in a panic after an attack.

The American people woke up on September 11 to find that life was riskier than they had imagined, and that security would be more costly than they hoped. But they believed the leaders who told them that the attack was unexpected, unimaginable, and would never happen again. They should not have to wake up on some future morning to find that risk was in fact greater than ever, and that the government they trusted had taken no action to contain it.
