Security Blanket

If you want a notion of how easy it would be for terrorists to slip a dirty nuke, a canister of nerve gas or a bundt cake of C4 through a container port, consider this statistic from the Brookings Institution in Washington: If the newly renamed U.S. Customs & Border Protection agency were to inspect all incoming containers, it would need to spend $50 billion a year. The Customs inspection budget is $2.3 billion. Currently, American authorities physically search only 2% of them. There's no reason to think things are too different elsewhere. "You ought to be damn afraid," says Thomas Sheets, chairman of the National Cargo Security Council trade group in the U.S. and director of corporate security services at Palo Alto, California-based CNF, a logistics company.