Posted on 01/06/2003 9:22:49 AM PST by Heartlander2
The threat of terrorist acts against North America has not diminished since it was made real on Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. authorities have warned al-Qaeda may be planning "spectacular attacks," and Osama bin Laden has threatened that Canada will pay for supporting the United States. How ready are we to respond to an act of terrorism on our soil? Today, in the conclusion of a series exploring the state of Canada's preparedness, the National Post examines the potential for mayhem should a nuclear bomb be smuggled into the Port of Halifax.
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It is an early winter morning in 2003. The pair of suspension bridges that span the deepest, and one of the largest, ice-free harbours in the world are laden with traffic heading from the Halifax peninsula across the water to Dartmouth. During a normal morning rush hour, these bridges would be teeming with vehicles going the other way, carrying commuters from Dartmouth's suburbs into the office towers and workplaces of downtown Halifax. But this is no normal morning.
A nuclear device, in a package about the size of a small car, has been discovered inside one of the hundreds of steel freight containers awaiting shipment this day at the city's two marine-container terminals. The horrifying cargo was found by sheer luck. Canadian and U.S. Customs agents stumbled upon the bomb while doing random container spot checks with their mobile gamma-ray scanners.
Half-a-million containers pass through the Port of Halifax each year, the majority destined for the United States. Of the 3% that are physically inspected, this was one. The discovery has set off a chain of events.
Nuclear experts from Washington, D.C., and Ottawa are in helicopters bound for Halifax to join the handful of local scientists here -- from the Department of National Defence naval base and Dalhousie University -- now examining the bomb. It is too soon to know whether the device is a crude, radiation-spreading "dirty bomb" or a true atomic explosive. It is also not clear when the bomb might detonate, or if Halifax is its intended target. The container itself, which originated four weeks ago in Turkey and was shipped via Rotterdam, arrived in Halifax two nights ago. It passed through the city on one of the giant cargo ships that slip into the harbour each day. From here it was destined to travel by CN Rail to Chicago. Its false manifest claims the container is filled with Persian carpets.
Authorities wonder whether any other nuclear devices might be hidden in similar containers now making their way across North America. As a result, all transportation infrastructure in Canada and the United States, including ports, railway yards, trucking operations and airports, has been ordered to a standstill, as massive inspections get underway.
Despite the uncertainties surrounding the bomb, authorities in Halifax have decided to evacuate the city. An hour-long debate ensued after the device was discovered. Some officials recommended that the bomb be kept secret from the public, in order to preserve calm. Others feared that if terrorists learned their bomb had been discovered, they might decide to detonate it immediately, using a satellite-tracking device and a cellphone trigger.
Yet there was enough concern about potentially massive local casualties -- and about word of the bomb leaking out and creating panic anyway -- that residents of the Halifax Regional Municipality, as well as a dozen outlying communities, were ordered to leave their homes, schools and offices and converge at pre-selected evacuation sites in small towns throughout Nova Scotia.
About 500,000 people are now on the move. The three major highways leading into the city have been turned into one-way arteries. Buses filled with children from schools and daycare centres, as well as patients from hospitals, were the first to be evacuated. The rest of the city is following, according to the strict guidelines of the municipality's emergency-measures plan.
Police officers are prowling neighbourhoods with bullhorns, ordering residents to leave their homes. Radio announcers read prepared statements from the mayor and the premier. Armed soldiers in military and Coast Guard helicopters patrol the skies and observe the evacuation from the air.
As residents move out, aided by thousands of police, fire and Red Cross officials, a critical team of scientists, emergency-measures experts, intelligence, police and military officials -- from the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Halifax police and fire departments, the city, the province, the Department of National Defence and the Halifax Port Authority -- are hunkered down in the portlands, assigned the burden of managing the crisis and defusing the bomb.
Large parts of Halifax were destroyed once before, in 1917, when two ships, one loaded with munitions, collided in the harbour, creating the largest-ever man-made explosion prior to Hiroshima.
The Halifax Explosion is only a distant memory now, but authorities hope and pray an even bigger disaster can be averted.
Such is one of the nightmare scenarios haunting security officials and emergency planners in Halifax today. The city's waterfront was not included on a U.S. government list of 22 potential Canadian terrorist targets. Yet the Port of Halifax is arguably the most prominent military and infrastructure target in Atlantic Canada. It could be used by terrorists as a trans-shipment route for sending concealed bombs or other weapons into U.S. cities, or it could become a target itself.
The harbour is an immense, sweeping body of water that cuts through the twin cities of Halifax and Dartmouth and surrounds the downtown peninsula on three sides. It includes two commercial container terminals, a cruise-ship facility and an offshore petroleum energy base where oil rigs and other vessels are outfitted for work at sea. There is also a commercial shipyard and drydock; a sprawling naval dockyard that is home to the 18 warships of Canada's East Coast navy and a military munitions dump holding supplies of shells, missiles and other explosives for the naval fleet.
Halifax is Canada's third-busiest commercial port, after Vancouver and Montreal. In 2002, the Port of Halifax handled 14-million metric tons of cargo, as well as 87 cruise ship visits.
Port officials say they began planning about two years ago, just months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for a potential terrorist strike in the harbour. Through the 1980s and 1990s, cruise ships in the Mediterranean had been hijacked or stormed by terrorists and sprayed with machine-gun fire. As the cruise-ship industry grew in Halifax, so did fears about the vulnerability of passenger vessels here being attacked by small groups approaching either by truck from land, or by fast Zodiac-type boats from the water.
Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, and remote fears turned real. Suddenly, port security became a priority for planners in Halifax.
"Nine/eleven enhanced the sense of urgency, and highlighted the vulnerability of our infrastructure," says George Malec, vice-president of operations and security for the Halifax Port Authority, a federal Crown agency.
Mr. Malec says the cruise vessels, packed as they are with human beings, would be the most likely target of any terrorist hit in Halifax. The ships dock just south of the downtown core, at a popular city pier. Two years ago, anyone could walk right up to one of the ships and place their hand on the hull. No longer. "We have restricted access to the cruise vessels while in port," Mr. Malec says. "There's an exclusion zone for pedestrians, and a security zone around the vessel, so no vehicles can get close to it unless they're stopped and checked by Halifax police officers on duty. Those officers look at the papers, the drivers' ID, and check the loads before the vehicles are allowed to enter the exclusion zone. All sorts of things do need access -- garbage trucks, cleaning vans, laundry vans. You'd be surprised at how much infrastructure there is associated with running a major cruise ship."
The sea side is harder to control. Anyone can sail a private craft through the harbour unmolested. But Mr. Malec says it would be difficult for an unauthorized vessel to approach the side of a cruise ship. Harbour traffic is monitored around the clock by Coast Guard radar scanners. Armed Halifax police officers are also contracted to patrol not only the federal portlands, but also the harbour, on Port Authority boats.
Although the naval base is fully fenced in and its gates guarded by armed soldiers, its sea-side perimeter appears exposed and vulnerable. There are no apparent physical barriers preventing an attacker from wheeling a boat up to a ship. Nor are there checks on pedestrians who walk directly above the base on the walkway across one of the harbour bridges.
Aside from its warships, the base employs 5,500 regular military members, 550 reservists and 2,900 National Defence civilian workers. It is the largest military base in Canada in terms of personnel.
These are the military workers who helped Canada launch Operation Apollo, the country's contribution to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the Arabian Sea. It would seem only sensible to at least consider their base a prime target for terrorists seeking to inflict direct harm on Canada.
Military police do patrol the sea side of the base in inflatable boats. They have, however, only one hard-topped patrol boat with which to do their work. Lookouts are also always on duty on each of the ships stationed at the base.
Lieutenant-Commander Denise Laviolette, a base spokeswoman, says the military is prepared for an attack, but she will not say precisely how. She says no extra, specific anti-terrorist measures have been introduced in the wake of September, 2001.
"It's not like we've just realized after Sept. 11 that we have to get ready for this. We've always been ready," she says.
At the Port Authority, however, the pace of planning and the awareness of unchecked threats has intensified. What is yet unclear is how serious officials and politicians in Ottawa are about such threats, and how committed to putting up the money needed to guard against them.
Cargo containers remain the trickiest security problem. Canada Customs has been proactive, welcoming U.S. Customs counterparts into the port to help with the container-inspection process. Two trials are now underway in Halifax to check containers using radiation scanners and the VACIS -- Vehicle, Cargo Inspection System.
A suite of new Customs equipment coming here next year will also include such tools as a mobile X-Ray scan trailer and an ion mobility spectrometer.
In addition to the efforts at Canada Customs, Mr. Malec says, the Port Authority "spent between five and six times more on port security [in 2002] than we have in the preceding five years, although I'm not at liberty to give figures."
Mr. Malec says the best way to make containers safe, however, is through supply-chain management, tracing the cargo from its source. He says the U.S. government is working hard with foreign ports overseas to establish tougher security rules for any container traffic coming to North America. Canada is not yet participating in that initiative, but he hopes we will in 2003.
Mr. Malec also hopes Ottawa will put forward new resources to help implement an international maritime security agreement Canada signed on Dec. 13.
Asked bluntly whether the Port of Halifax is safe from a terrorist attack, Mr. Malec says he can offer no guarantees, but adds: "There's no specific intelligence we've received, subsequent to 9/11, that ever indicated the marine industry in Canada was subject to any kind of heightened threat."
Is Canada doing enough to make its ports secure from potential threats?
"Ask me that question in January," he says. "We're all keenly anticipating a federal statement on port security very early in the new year. That should tell us really where the government is going and what new funding measures there are."
Stay Safe !
One, nuclear retaliation would be sure to follow. It may not be the right people that did it but SOMEONE gets nuked.
2) If it's tracked to islamic terrorists, open season on Islam in North America
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Interesting that it was a neutron detector, NOT a geiger counter that detected that radiation. BIG honking difference there.
Wonder what European nuclear power plant those tiles came from. Must have been the French, they're always re-decorating... [/sarcasm] :-)
Read it again, just a way station on the road to Chicago.
The only reason to detonate it in Halifax is "salvage fusing". That is to salvage some destruction from a bomb gone astray. Also complicates the job of tracing the source...
Better not at this time, my daughter is leaving for 6 months at Oxford next Wednesday. {/sarcasm}
Being from Nova Scotia, I take cold comfort from the consequences of mere "salvage fusing," to wit:
The loss of Canada's major Atlantic port;
The loss of the Canadian Navy's Atlantic fleet and the largest military complex in Canada;
Significant damage to Nova Scotia's electricity grid with the destruction of the Tufts Cove generating plant;
Further economic depression in Atlantic Canada with the loss of the region's economic centre; etc., etc.
Being from Nova Scotia, I take cold comfort from the consequences of mere "salvage fusing," to wit:
The loss of Canada's major Atlantic port;
The loss of the Canadian Navy's Atlantic fleet and the largest military complex in Canada;
Significant damage to Nova Scotia's electricity grid with the destruction of the Tufts Cove generating plant;
Further economic depression in Atlantic Canada with the loss of the region's economic centre; etc., etc.
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