Homeland security policies overlook essential issues, says shipping executive.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: UPFRONT

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Security industry soothsayers for years have been sounding alarms about the prospect of a nuclear or biological weapon reaching U.S. shores in a shipping container.

"A terrorist attack involving shipping could severely disrupt the global supply chain and cripple the economy," says a report by the Reform Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

The admonitions have been heard. Congress recently mandated that, within the next five years, all U.S.-bound maritime cargo loaded at foreign seaports be screened for radiation.

The security-measures may be well intentioned, but are unlikely to create a foolproof system, especially in the unwieldy global shipping business, says an industry executive. The legislation does not take into account that con tainer ships are only a small percentage of the many thousands of vessels traveling the world's oceans, nor does it consider that many of the containers, once they are loaded on ships, are not accessible by radiation detectors, says Stephen M. Carmel, senior vice president of maritime services at Maersk Line Ltd.

Maersk, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, operates in 125 countries and runs the world's largest container ships, which are bigger than Navy aircraft carriers. It runs a U.S.-flagged shipping line and operates 30 vessels for the Navy's Military Sealift Command.

The company on any given day has 1,000 ships at sea, 550 of which are cargo ships carrying up to 11,000 containers, Carmel says. Speaking at a recent maritime strategy conference in Washington, D.C., Carmel says the latest wave of U.S. security measures ignores some fundamental realities of the shipping world. One is that container ships are so big that no detector would be able to scan every box unless the containers were removed from the ship, which may not be feasible in every case.

Another flaw in the new security mandates is that they ignore the existence of other vessels that don't carry containers. "The world is fixated on container ships, for whatever reason," Carmel says. "Nobody talks about a weapon of mass destruction coming underneath a couple of thousand tons of oil on a tanker," he adds. "Container ships are a small percentage of ships. In places like Africa, there are more tankers than container ships."

Carmel also chastises the Department of Homeland Security for pursuing piecemeal efforts instead of taking a broader view of the threats.

The U.S. government's so-called "maritime domain awareness"...