Open ports, loose nukes

THE REAL threat to the security of US ports comes not from Arab ownership of the terminals' managing company but from the failure of the United States to better monitor what comes through our harbors, big and small. Each day, about 25,000 cargo containers enter the country. The Coast Guard has estimated it would cost about $7 billion to equip US ports with the scanners and other equipment needed to meet high standards of surveillance. But since 9/11, the United States has spent about $1.6 billion.

As a result, just a small percentage of cargo is machine-scanned or manually inspected for a dirty bomb or other nuclear device, either in the port from which the cargo originates or in the US port where it arrives. Officials have also failed to establish a secure system of identification documents for port workers that would include background security checks.

Perhaps the most effective initiative for protecting the United States from dangerous contraband cargo is the program established by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in 1991 to secure the nuclear-weapons materials and facilities of Russia and other former Soviet republics. Funds from Nunn-Lugar have helped to deactivate about 7,000 nuclear warheads and destroy more than 1,000 ballistic missiles.

But because of lack of support from Congress, the program's goals will not be met for years, with fissile material and thousands of former Soviet warheads still available for diversion to terrorists. Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, a member of the International Relations Committee, said yesterday that an Al Qaeda nuclear weapon is more likely to arrive in this country in a crate than on a missile. Graham Allison, the former Clinton administration official who is now the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, wrote in his book ''Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" that ''if we continue along our present course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable."

Our present course is to give half-hearted support to the Nunn-Lugar program and to treat the security gaps at the nation's ports as if they were a problem the nation had decades to solve. Republicans often say the administration's terrorism-based abridgements of civil liberties are opposed by critics with a pre-9/11 mentality about national security. But both Congress and the administration have approached the danger of terrorists smuggling loose nukes into this country with the same lack of imagination that the 9/11 commission said blinded US officials to the threat of hijacked airliners used as weapons.

Whoever has the port management contract, the United States will be responsible for security. Congress should focus better on that task.