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July 8, 2002
A Maginot
Line of defense
Jonathan Kay
Unless and until terrorists acquire
nuclear weapons, blowing up airplanes will be their most effective
strategy for creating mass casualties. Timothy McVeigh needed two
tons of explosives to kill 168 persons. By leveraging the deadly
power of gravity, a terrorist who attacks a commercial airliner can
kill the same number with a charge one- thousandth the size.
In response to the threat,
governments have taken measures to prevent suicide terrorists from
sneaking on board airplanes with bombs and knives. But that's just
one way to bring down a plane. As usual, the West is building a
Maginot defense against yesterday's terror attacks, but ignoring
tomorrow's.
In May, a Saudi
security patrol found a tube from an SA-7 shoulder-mounted missile
launcher — a Russian version of the heat-seeking, U.S.-supplied
"Stingers" the Afghan mujahideen used to shoot down more than 200
Soviet aircraft in the 1980s — near the U.S. Air Force's Prince
Sultan base. A May 22 FBI intelligence bulletin concluded "the
discovery is likely related to al Qaeda targeting efforts against
U.S.-led forces on the Arabian peninsula." Nine days later, The
Washington Times reported that Stinger-armed Islamic terrorists may
already be on U.S. soil. I have no special insight as to whether
these reports are accurate, but it would surprise me if they
weren't. There are thousands of Stinger-type missiles in worldwide
circulation, and the black-market price is reportedly in the
mid-five figures.
Although the
number of deaths from a Stinger strike would be low by the standards
set by the World Trade Center disaster, the psychological effect
would be devastating. After September 11, our leaders convinced us
they could keep us safe by beefing up airport security. And we
believed them. But such self-deception would not survive a missile
attack: All the bomb-sniffing dogs and racial profiling in the world
won't stop a Stinger.
Since the
tiny missiles can hit targets up to 10,000 feet up in the air
(13,000 feet in the case of the Russian version), an al Qaeda
Stinger team wouldn't even have to come near an airport. An
abandoned industrial park a few miles away would do
fine.
You might think we're
powerless against such a threat. But, thanks to the much reviled
American military-industrial complex, we're not. Northrop Grumman is
now in limited production of a plane-mounted, anti-missile system
that, in live-fire tests, has blocked a variety of infrared-guided
missile types with virtually 100 percent reliability.
Competing systems typically rely
on flare decoys, which distract heat-guided missiles but also pose a
fire hazard to nearby buildings. But the new system works on an
entirely different principle. It works like this: When a Stinger is
launched, the heat signature of its plume is detected by a
plane-mounted sensor. An infrared emitter housed in a small turret
mounted on the hull then automatically directs a stream of radiation
at the missile, blinding its guidance system and sending it
off-course. The whole package weighs about 260 kg and takes up about
as much space as a few large suitcases.
Northrop Grumman has already sold
its system — code-named "Nemesis" — to the U.S. military, which
means that in the next war, U.S. planes may be able to safely fly
missions at whatever altitude they choose. By installing the Nemesis
on passenger airliners, we could safeguard domestic skies against
Stingers too. But according to Northrop Grumman, not a single
commercial airline has committed to the system. Nor is there any
interest in Washington. Congress' Electronic Warfare Working Group
has promoted the Nemesis in recent years but only for combat
applications.
Are economic factors
holding the technology back? I doubt it. Sources at Northrop Grumman
told me that installing Nemesis on a single plane would cost about
$5 million. But according to Philip J. Klass, who has written about
the Nemesis system for Aviation Week & Space Technology, that
figure would apply only to a one-off job. Outfitting a substantial
fleet with the Nemesis system, he estimates, would cost only about
$2 million to $3 million per plane — or about 2 percent of the cost
of a Boeing 747-400. The airlines already spend similar sums
outfitting their cabins with personal Nintendo, phone and movie
systems.
My guess is that no one
will make a serious push to put Nemesis on commercial airliners
until a plane actually gets shot down. (Some say that one already
has been: TWA Flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in 1996. But
that's a minority view.) That fits in with the traditional pattern:
On the terrorism file, the West's game over the past two decades has
been strictly reactive. In fact, the polite-but-uninterested
response I got when I interviewed Electronic Warfare Working Group
staff earlier this week was roughly what I would have heard if I'd
called the FAA on Sept. 10 asking about cockpit security.
Remember that no one thought much
about protecting U.S. military installations overseas until a truck
loaded with explosives blew up a building full of sleeping Marines
in 1983. Ditto the security situation at U.S. embassies until the
1998 bombings. September 11 was supposed to mark the beginning of a
"war" against terrorism. Yet the old peacetime pattern remains: We
give the terrorists one free hit before we start defending ourselves
in any serious
way.
Jonathan
Kay is editorials editor of the National Post in Ontario, Canada.
jkay@nationalpost.com
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