With all due respect to all you fine people, just guessing is the operative word. My thinking has it that there are a whole raft of holes in our security, this being one of them.
With all due respect to you, you don’t know any better than we do. When the fine folks that provide high level security start broadcasting their defense and security measures, let me know.
Sounds good, but I’m far from convinced. Homeland defense has repeatedly been criticized for not plugging the holes. Live in a dream world, if you like, I prefer reality, even if it’s not all that reassuring.
With all due respect to all you fine people, just guessing is the operative word. My thinking has it that there are a whole raft of holes in our security, this being one of them.
With all due respect to you, you don’t know any better than we do. When the fine folks that provide high level security start broadcasting their defense and security measures, let me know.
Sounds good, but I’m far from convinced. Homeland defense has repeatedly been criticized for not plugging the holes. Live in a dream world, if you like, I prefer reality, even if it’s not all that reassuring.
Nuclear transport containers will never be 100% safe against everything. It’s the law of diminishing returns; you plan for 99.99% of probabilities, but it’s too impractical and actually counterproductive to plan for 99.9999999999% of all probabilities. The point is there are soooooo many other things far more likely to kill you, me, and us than a worst case scenario for a nuclear transport container.
Nuclear transport containers will never be 100% safe against everything. It’s the law of diminishing returns; you plan for 99.99% of probabilities, but it’s too impractical and actually counterproductive to plan for 99.9999999999% of all probabilities. The point is there are soooooo many other things far more likely to kill you, me, and us than a worst case scenario for a nuclear transport container.
The point is, Bush’s national security adviser never considered the possibility of a hijacked airliner crashing into a building let alone 4 of them in the same short time period. If I may, this thread is about transporting nuclear waste, the question was, is it safe? I’m suggesting no, it is not, not as safe as we would like. That being the case my answer to the question is NO, we should not transport such material through urban areas and we should not build power plants on fault lines and if we do, by happenstance, then they should be decommissioned.
If I may, yes many more people die on the highways each year than the paltry 3000 who died on 9/11. In fact many more people died seeking vengeance for those 3000. Strange arithmetic, is it not? But, this is not about how either of us might meet our demise, it’s about what could prove to be the worst disaster in recorded history. Much talk about terrorists obtaining a nuclear weapon when failure to properly protect our nuclear plants or transporting large amounts of nuclear material through urban areas provides such a weapon as do the myriad of chemical plants in New Jersey in the heart of one of the most densely populated areas of this nation.
The bottom line is this, if we do not show a little imagination, believe me, al Qaeda will do just that, find the holes in our defenses. Check out the movie “Traitor”. Scary, but I would venture to say that creative artists often are way ahead of the general populace or the experts in imagining potential scenarios.
The point is, Bush’s national security adviser never considered the possibility of a hijacked airliner crashing into a building let alone 4 of them in the same short time period.
I’d bet they probably had a gameplan for something like it somewhere in their massive bank of scenarios. It’s part of the job of the Defense Department to plan for all manner of wacky things and come up with actions to respond to it. I bet there’s millions of scenarios they’ve got rough outlines for. And there’s reason to believe that they’d planned for this: remember when that dude flew his plane into the White House? It’s only different in terms of scale. I’m sure there was some kind of plan, but I seriously doubt it was followed since it was almost certainly a Clinton-era plan written with Clinton-era policies and staff in mind.
Bush’s team was also completely unprepared for anything unusual—they didn’t even seem to know the basics of international terrorism—much less being prepared for something as extraordinary as 9/11. Clinton, on the other hand, was obsessed with Bin Laden and had him more-or-less on the run.
[I’d bet they probably had a gameplan for something like it somewhere in their massive bank of scenarios. It’s part of the job of the Defense Department to plan for all manner of wacky things and come up with actions to respond to it. I bet there’s millions of scenarios they’ve got rough outlines for.
Which is the very problem of which I speak. If there are too many scenarios, and the result is nobody remembers them, or resources are spread too thin as a result, the results are divergent from the intent.
The point is, Bush’s national security adviser never considered the possibility of a hijacked airliner crashing into a building let alone 4 of them in the same short time period.
That’s right, they dropped the ball on that one despite some forewarning, they were probably too focused on moving their agenda forward to see what needed to be seen. But guess what, a smart terrorist will always find the scenario we weren’t paying attention to, they will always find our weak spots, and there is nothing we can do about that unless you want to live in a locked down police state (and even that would not be foolproof). The reality is that there is no way to prevent the attack of a determined smart terrorist, believing there is is a delusion; an opiate for the masses.
Nuclear transport containers are probably as safe as can reasonably be expected, so I have no problem with them.
4tees: You may well be right. I don’t know much at all about defense planning. I know that they have scenarios and big teams of people planning for any disaster they can think up, but not much more. And most of what Bush’s team could have done to prevent 9/11 would have been in recognizing the threat in advance. It’s easy to look back and see the flaws now, and it’s very easy to see the Bush team’s general failure in responding after the event, but even the most detailed set of plans won’t prepare the country for every eventuality. I gather they’re more like guidelines.
A larger point: People can fly planes into buildings, but we still have planes. Same thing with nuclear power.
That said, we have nuclear reactors now, and we’re not all walking around with radiation burns and bleeding gums. No one has managed to take one over and cause a meltdown yet. (I imagine that would be hard to do, actually, given the specific set of knowledge and skills you’d need.) It could happen—it may happen one day—but even if it does, that doesn’t mean nuclear power shouldn’t be an option.
Let’s look at a real disaster: Chernobyl. Epic meltdown, with 600,000 people exposed to levels of radiation far greater than those in Hiroshima. Deaths? 56 for certain, perhaps as many as 4,000 more from later cases of cancer. That’s bad, sure, but it’s not Armageddon. And that’s the likely worst-case scenario with the technology of the 1970s. I’d imagine that today’s reactors are created with many more fail-safes and disaster plans in mind.
