Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Paul M . Longsworth
Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
National Nuclear Security Administration
Department of Energy

Introduction By: Dr. Dale Klein

Paul M . Longsworth: I'd like to follow up on something Dr. Klein said. It’s not only hard being right before happy hour and right after lunch, and on a Friday, but it’s hard being last, I think, in some ways. The one thing that’s working is it’s not necessarily a good day out there. Otherwise, I think some people’s Fridays might have started earlier.

Thank you for coming in today. I don’t have a PowerPoint presentation. We’re a little more low tech at the Department of Energy these days since we keep losing disks and they’ve shut down all of our computer systems. [Laughter] So we have to go the old-fashioned way.

Anyway, I am really delighted to be here. I wanted to thank all of our hosts, NORTHCOM, and OSD, and the Fletcher School, and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and I'd also like to thank Dr. Pfaltzgraff. We’ve worked on a number of meetings and projects together, and this looks like a very fruitful event.

As you already heard in previous sessions of the conference, we are facing a challenging world now, and it’s particularly challenging when you look at defending our homeland. The changing threat environment has spawned a different and growing number of proliferators and rogue states and terrorist networks that threaten the United States and international security. We’re living in a world where terrorists’ ability to kill is limited only by their access to technology, and you need look no farther than September 11 or the Beslan school incident to realize that what most of these terrorist organizations that would use terror to further their political means is their willingness to kill larger numbers of people and kill women and children. I mean children, that school incident, I think, is a wake-up call for vigilance on our part.

We have a unique responsibility, as President Bush said, to stop those threats before they get to our borders. At the National Nuclear Security Administration, my office, our objective is to stop those threats, and we do it through cooperative work in over 70 countries, but principally we account for, secure and, where possible, eliminate the tools that terrorists would use, the ever-increasing destructive tools -- nuclear weapons, fissionable material, radiological dispersal devices. We’re working to not only secure an account for those materials, but our primary objective is to eliminate them where we can.

We view our programs in kind of three phases. Our first line of defense is exactly what I've said, is to eliminate the materials that a terrorist would use. We do that through programs primarily in Russia where we’re securing over 600 metric tons of fissionable material. We’re building plants that can process plutonium and permanently eliminate surplus weapons plutonium in Russia and in the United States. We’re blending down highly enriched uranium. We’re actually burning it in US reactors here. In fact, half of the uranium used in all nuclear power plants in the US comes from a dismantled Russian warhead. So one out of ten lights in this room is powered by uranium that used to be in a Russian warhead.

So these are very successful efforts. That’s our first line of defense, is to make sure that material doesn’t exist so that terrorists can’t use it.

The second line of defense is to detect whether those efforts have failed. We do that through putting in radiation detectors at airports, seaports and land border crossings. We do it through space-based assets, ground-based assets and airborne assets. But we want to detect whether people are trafficking nuclear material, and we want to do it with increasing fidelity and in a real time mode. Most of our R&D efforts, which I’ll get a little bit more in detail in a minute, are focused on this effort.

The third line of defense is really at the US border, and that’s the last place you want to have to confront these threats. It’s comparable to putting your entire football team on the one-yard line; you want to try to stop these threats before they get to the US.

I want to talk a little about some of the technology, since that is the purpose of this panel, and some of the emerging technologies, and some of the challenges I think we are trying to focus on at the NNSA. We spend about $200 million a year to develop new technologies. Many of these technologies get deployed on space-based assets and we build and deliver to other agencies in the federal government, detection capabilities; we do it for treaty monitoring. But we also spend a fair amount of money on improving trafficking detectors, detectors that can be used at seaports, principally, and land border crossings.

We are trying to develop better remote sensing technology, such as synthetic aperture radar, which we hope can be used in attribution efforts by giving us a before and an after picture of an incident that might occur.

We have also developed Palm Pilot and cell phone-based equipment to improve standoff detection for shielded nuclear materials. This provides a greater security for inspectors who might be working at border crossings, and establishes a larger buffer zone for those environments. Many of these high resolution radio detection designs are being finalized now and tested, and we’re hopeful they will be commercialized in the very near future. That’s our objective.

In advanced radiation detection technologies, we’re making very good progress there. Current detectors for trucks or trains, or other vehicles, or cargo containers use a gross count system. This detects whether radiation is present, but it doesn’t tell you the isotope. Under our current approaches, if we detect radiation in a container, we have to divert the container and do a handheld inspection. If any of you have worked with any of these large port operators, the economic costs of that and the disruption to the facilities is immense, and they don’t typically want to do it. You also get a fatigue factor if you continually false alarm and have to divert containers; that fatigue factor causes the operational effectiveness of those systems to diminish, because inspectors will, again fatigue, and probably let certain containers go through when you might not want them to go through.

We’re working on real time isotope identification methods, and we’re doing that primarily through Sandia National Laboratories. They’ve developed a sodium iodine smart detector that can be used to detect radiation and to identify the isotope. In the vast majority of applications, this voids the need for secondary inspection.

Real time isotope identification systems like the smart detector will be able to handle high volume, multilane traffic in outdoor and high shock environments with minimal impact on the port operations, which again, as I said, is a key. It also minimizes the amount of training for operators and minimizes the amount of maintenance that we have to provide. So we think it will dramatically improve the effectiveness. Our current systems have a false-positive or false alarm rate of something in the order of 1-2%. We hope to get that down to .1%, or even lower, perhaps even .100% false alarm rate, using these new sodium iodine systems.

In addition, these more specific alarms address the observed problem of, as I said, complacency among inspectors. If we can reduce the number of handheld inspections, we think it increases the overall operational effectiveness of the system.

There are several drawbacks in these real time detectors that we are trying to look at. It’s cost, it’s limited commercial availability, as I've said. We’ve been working with commercial vendors to begin building and demonstrating and marketing these real time systems. Sandia has signed an agreement with Thermal Electron to commercialize one of these detectors, very similar to the smart system, and we hope that it will be in market soon.

Moreover, we’re working on trying to get the cost of these systems done, and I think we’re working with industry to try to do that as well.

Finally, we’re working to improve the handheld detection equipment. Again, it’s secondary inspection and other applications. One of the biggest problems we have is we currently have detectors in foreign ports under a program that we call the Megaports Initiative. We’re equipping the 20 largest ports in the world that ship to the United States, and we will equip them with radiation detectors. The port of Rotterdam is the only one I think we’re going to talk about publicly, but that port is fully operational, all the containers that come through the terminal there that ships to the US, go through our screening process, go through our radiation detection processes.

We’re trying to advance our capabilities. One of the biggest problems is trans-shipment. We only take readings on cargo that come from Europe and get loaded at Rotterdam, but many containers are trans-shipped through Rotterdam. So we’re trying to develop a crane-mounted radiation detection system. There are a lot of challenges there; one is geometry, one is equipment survival, and the other is cost. The way the cranes work now, the spreader bars will only see about half the containers, so if you put a radiation detector on the container bar, it would see about half of the container, and then it would only see the first top half of the container. So you’d see a very small percentage of what’s in the container.

The equipment survival, I don’t have to tell you, crane operators don’t treat these containers gingerly. The systems would have to be exceptionally robust to withstand the application there.

And then the cost. We think that putting a detector on every spreader bar would dramatically increase the cost. If you add in the percentage of detectors that would be damaged and the ones you would have to keep as spares, the cost is very high.

So we’re looking at even better ways to do these, and in spite of these limiting factors, we think we have a system that will be in application very soon. It is, we think, going to be cost effective when we finalize that.

I want to close by talking a little bit about the need for interagency cooperation. We do have a lot of cooperation with OSD and other federal agencies. We do this primarily through the National Security Council. Many of my colleagues in the room today participate in the Proliferation strategy working group. That’s where we discuss the programs where we can interdict materials overseas and the technologies that we need to detect them. We also work very closely with Dr. Klein on several counterterrorism groups where we share technology and we share operational experience.

We work with the Department of Homeland Security through the Container Security Initiative. Our Megaports Initiative is actually part of the Container Security Initiative. So we are fully integrated with DHS and Customs’ overall efforts to stop trafficking.

In addition to that, we do provide training for homeland security for Customs agents on how to identify and respond to threats, not only nuclear materials, but dual-use items as well. And we provide that assistance training for governments overseas as well.

think I’ll turn over to the industry now, but I want to thank you for inviting me to be here today, and I want to thank Dr. Klein for your good work. [Applause]