Pirates: scourge of the modern seas: crews have been kidnapped and murdered, passengers robbed and raped, and oil shipments stolen for resale on the black market, but the real danger may be the possibility of suicide bombers destroying one of the world's major port cities.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: The World Today - Cover story

IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO: Pirates come alongside a natural gas-carrying cargo ship in the Strait of Malacca in the middle of the night. They are carrying various small arms including AK-47s. They throw a hook up over the railing and crawl up the side and onto the deck. They capture first one crew member, then another. Soon, they have rounded up all of the crew and lock them together in a small space. They begin pulling up containers of explosives from several small boats below while the ship continues on toward Singapore. Suppose these pirates are suicide bombers and that their explosives, added to the natural gas the ship is carrying, can wipe out the entire port and halt oil and gas-beating traffic in the Strait for years.

This scenario is not far-fetched. The Washington Post reported in June 2004 that Singapore already was preparing for such an attack with commando training and equipment purchases. The government had discovered plans in a Jemaah Islamiah operative's house for a potential strike in the Malacca Strait, possibly a collision like the one that hit the USS Cole in 2000. Singapore does not like to be surprised. Jemaah Islamiah is a radical Islamic group located in Southeast Asia but loosely connected to Al Qaeda.

Sea-going pirates regularly attack or attempt to board oil "tankers, along with a great variety of ships, in the Malacca Strait and South China Sea, off the east coast of Brazil, and along the east coast of Africa, especially Somalia. Reports of other attacks include locations on the coasts of India, Bangladesh, West Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, and in the Gulf of Aden. Of greater concern is the report that, in at least one case, the pirates forced the captain and crew to show them how to run the ship, before climbing off the vessel and disappearing into the night.

Add to this the event portrayed by William Langewiesche in The Outlaw Sea, where a conventional munitions ship sitting in Canada's Halifax Harbor exploded in 1917 and created a cubic mile of fire, killing 1,900 people and reportedly emptying the bay of water momentarily. Put these historical incidents together with the potential overlay of piracy and terrorism and the concern about a calculated attack using a stolen ship becomes a more immediate security problem in many regions of the world.

In fact, the merging interests of piracy and terrorism are causing changes in the insurance industry that covers sea piracy and terrorist attacks on businesses. Lloyd's of London, which has been coveting ships against the possibility of pirate attacks since 1799, decided in 2005 to treat the threat of piracy as a war risk (one form of political risk insurance) rather than as a part of ships' hull insurance. The probabilities of such attacks have changed and the risk is escalating.

Add one mote level of threat: In the December 2005 report by the 9/11 Commission, a grade of "D" was assigned to the U.S. government's effort to track down and secure nuclear material that was produced during the Cold War. Given the many plausible scenarios about where this material may have gone, great concern justly is merited about the possibility that some of this material could show up on a pirated ship in one of the world's critical sea lanes.

The pirate attack on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit off the coast of Somalia in November 2005 serves as a reminder that ships of any size are vulnerable. The episode was eye-opening in many regards. It was the first attack in modern times against a ship with 300 passengers and put a new type of concern before the navies that attempt to control pirates. These pirates also apparently attacked from a "mother ship" that was located outside of territorial waters and beyond the reach of the usual coastal controls. In other words, it was out...