Welcome the wacky world of nuclear bomb detection, as practiced by U.S. border guards protecting The Land of the Free from terrorist infiltration via our neighbors to the north. The Vancouver Sun reports the reassuring news that “every car, truck and passenger entering the United States by land from Canada is now searched for nuclear weapons.”
And how do they do that? Not so well, it seems. The feds have installed polyvinyl toluene or PVT monitors alongside the car lane approaches to customs’ booth inspections, with larger monitors for transport trucks in cargo inspection areas. “Each detects certain types of energy within a limited area but not the exact radioactive source. For that a suspect vehicle is sent for a secondary inspection that includes a scan with a hand-held detection device to identify the source and whether it constitutes a threat. Benign emissions from lingering medical isotopes in people’s bodies, scrap metal, natural sources of radiation and even Kitty Litter trigger frequent false alarms . . .
What’s more, PVT monitors can only detect unshielded or lightly shielded sources, which seems unrealistic, considering the sophisticated smuggling tactics determined nuclear terrorists would likely employ.” The solution? More technology of course.
The U.S. is instead debating the cost-effectiveness of replacing PVT technology with “advanced spectroscopic portals” or ASP, a new type of portal monitor designed to both detect radiation and identify the source.
The U.S. Government Accounting Office reports that ASP monitors use more sophisticated software, and have a more extensive library of radiation signatures that may provide more consistent and rapid screening and may increase the likelihood of correct identification. But they’re also almost three times more expensive than PVT monitors.
Still, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.
So now we are looking for terrorists that wear fur hats, wear check shirts and sing “I’m a lumber jack and I’m ok…….”
see i don’t get the point of this
does canada actually constitute a ‘clear and present danger’? what is the threat? invasion of moose, maple syrup and politeness?
sounds like another case of being seen to be doing something rather than actually being effective
Wanna be terrorists enter the US from Canada (and Mexico). Read up on the Millenium Bomber—Ahmed Ressan who plotted to blow up LAX on New Year’s Eve 1999. He entered the U.S. from Victoria, BC, with a car trunk full of high explosives. He entered Canada with a forged French passport.
Sometimes, being too cynical can be detrimental to your health.
Misplaced priorities. Those precautions are only good for a nuclear bomb that’s been smuggled into Canada *first* and *then* trucked into the US. If you wanted to deal a blow to the US, then what better way than with a nuke hidden in one of the thousands of containers carried by a single Panamax container ship, and blowing it while moored in a large harbour like New York or LA?
I don’t know, it seems silly to upgrade this system since, as chanman correctly pointed out, there are other low hanging fruit to pick security wise. Leave this one up, continue searching cement bags and cancer patients by hand for the time being, and spend the extra money on port security.
OTOH, Canada is so large and sparsely populated that it effectively dosen’t have a border in much of it’s territory (anyone else gone camping up there?). There also isn’t a major conflict occuring on it’s US side, unlike Mexico, so it could well be that they have good reason to suspect it would be the smuggling route of choice for the smart bad guys.
Good luck. The Canadian border is huge, porous (there are towns that are bisected by it) and effectively unenforceable. It’s marginally easier on the eastern side, where at least you have the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, but past that I can’t imagine any way to enforce it without spending vast amounts of money.
What could work, though, is spending said vast amounts of money on social improvements in the Middle East. As has been proven over and over again (most recently in Ireland), fat, happy people don’t become terrorists
Seems prudent and not too intrusive. Face it, to top 9/11 you’re gonna have to go big, and levelling a 1 mile diameter swath of some major American city is probably high on some terrorists punch list. Upgrading sensor technology to match the threat seems intelligent.
Also, if these are on the borders, you can bet they’re on the truck exit portals to every container facility in the U.S., methinks.
Well, of course everyone knows that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US from Canada. Oh, wait a minute. They didn’t.
Jeff’s point about the “millenium bomber” is correct. Funnily enough, I went on a week long motorcycle trip in WA, OR and CA this past summer and I entered the US in Port Angeles, the very entry point where Ressan was caught. The three bikers ahead of me and I were all pulled aside after going through the detectors. All of us (none of whom were traveling together) had apparently caused the detectors to go off.
They came to each of us with handheld geiger counters (or so it appeared) and ran it over the bike, luggage and our bodies. They seemed visibly flustered to have so many apparent alarms in a row. It took about 15 minutes to finally get cleared (to the chagrin of my gf who did not get stopped and was stuck waiting). The irony is that they were so worked up about the false alarm they didn’t ask me any questions! I could have been smuggling all kinds of stuff and they wouldn’t have noticed, as long as it didn’t set off their handheld sniffers.
My aunt and a carload of friends were delayed at the border and sat in a room for about an hour before one of the interrogators finally asked “which one of you had chemotherapy not too long ago. ” My aunt had undergone chemotherapy about 2 months before. So those detectors are really sensitive.