Post-Holiday Blogging II
Meanwhile, someone recently expressed the wish that I do some blogging here, on my actual blog, now and then. So, sure!
- Now and then some defender of the Bush White House makes the argument that, "Gosh we’re all so safer now!" But measurement issues and correlation and causation problems aside, one keeps stumbling across the massive social and fiscal costs of the many facets of the GWOT, like our increasingly absurd visa requirements, and, you know, peace, freedom and non-intervention just seem cheaper and less embarrassing ways to be safe.
- Along that line, can we all agree that the Washington Monthly’s conviction that we needed to spend untold billions of dollars "securing the nation’s chemical plants" was batshit insane? If we could ensure our only terrorist enemies were people stupid enough to think that trying to sneak entire convoys of hazmat trucks out of factories closed for the night was a productive use of their time, we could all sleep soundly every night. See also.
- Has Tom Knapp been hanging out with Wayne Allyn Root too much?
- Pan-seared steak rolls, yum!
- Blog-post-update sentence of the day: "Some have taken issue of my characterization of Buchenwald as "merely a slave labor camp." Is Transterrestrial Musings still run by Rand Simberg? There’s no author name on the blog entry, and Simberg was never quite this much of a tool back in, like, 2001. Unless I’m misremembering. Via Balloon Juice. Has anyone argued yet that Obama’s uncle liberated the special sub-camp for self-hating Jews (anyone to the left of Daniel Pipes) so it doesn’t even count?
Now THAT’S blogging!
Comment by Avram —
May 28, 2008 @ 11:51 pm
Who said anything about stealing hazmat trucks? One of the articles you link to talks about sneaking explosives into a chemical plant to blow shit up and make a huge toxic cloud. The other doesn’t specify any method at all.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 29, 2008 @ 12:04 am
Avram, it talks about trucks with “enough chlorine gas to kill 100,000 people,” which certainly seems to suggest trucking gas away from the place. Blowing up a chem plant to make a toxic cloud seems like, at best, a way to blow up a chem plant. The usual problems with militarizing chemical weapons in the lab multiply when you’re militarizing them on the fly.
As to the argument that one article doesn’t even specify how such plants could be a threat, this is supposed to make me more impressed with its argument?
Look, it’s the same cost-benefit business Schneier and, um, the other guy, whose name I can’t remember. Wrote for The Skeptic? have been propounding for years. We could spend infinite dollars locking down every conceivable bad thing that could happen. But we would ruin the country doing it. I see nothing to indicate that there’s a genuine threat of terrorists achieving such a spectacular attack relying on lax security at American chemical plants that it’s worth the cost of turning every one of them into a hardened site. It’s just a really stupid idea if you step back for a minute.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 29, 2008 @ 12:13 am
Robert Mueller.
Comment by KCinDC —
May 29, 2008 @ 2:01 am
Jim, does the name Bhopal ring a bell? And I don’t think Schneier agrees with you.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 29, 2008 @ 7:31 am
Of course Bhopal rings a bell. It’s also not a particularly compelling argument to say that, a couple times (add in the Soviet anthrax disaster), there have been big plant disasters. It’s still: what are the odds? If the bad thing happens, how bad might it be? How much CERTAIN expense is worth incurring to reduce the odds how much?
Comment by John Quiggin —
May 29, 2008 @ 8:31 am
Definitely Rand Simberg. I have no past knowledge of this guy, but “tool” is massively charitable. “Human pond scum” would be getting closer to the mark judging by this post.
Comment by Doug T —
May 29, 2008 @ 9:05 am
I remember reading a Washington Post article around 2003 or so that talked about how, prior to 9-11, they used to store large quantities of chlorine at the sewage treatment plant down at the intersection of 295 and the Beltway.
According to the various experts they quoted, if someone had managed to bomb that site (or, say, crashed an airplane into it), a large gas of lethal chlorine (I think that was the chimical) gasa would have been released, likely killing thousands, without requiring any weaponization.
This stuck with me since I used to work right next door at NRL and likely would have been one of the victims. After 9/11 but before the article was published, they’d changed their procedures and now only store a small amount of chlorine on site and simply have to bring more in as needed, instead of having a big reservoir sitting around in the middle of a densely populated area.
This was a long story digression to get to my point that, I don’t think it’s possible to make sweeping generalizations about chemical plants and their security, that either we *need* to put in place big security systems or we absolutely shouldn’t since it would be a big waste of money.
Rather, there’s a continuum where, for many sites, it probably makes sense to take some additional security or safety precautions, if you can eliminate a large threat without a huge overhead cost. For other sites or threats, you’re probably right that a defensive system would end up costing a lot more than would be worth paying.
Comment by Steven Taylor —
May 29, 2008 @ 9:17 am
Who are you? I though this was Thoreau’s blog.
Comment by Monte Davis —
May 29, 2008 @ 9:45 am
Gotta disagree here, Jim. Look at it from a Thoreauvian physics PoV:
The ingenuity of 9/11 was to exploit 4 pre-existing high-energy sources (big fast heavy planes full of fuel) among many hundreds flying every day in the US. It worked really well, because two of the targets then gave up 110 stories of gravitational potential energy as well.
If I were Master Waziristan Cave Strategist, I’d follow up on success. I wouldn’t bother seeking a ready-made WMD. I’d think about highly reactive chemicals stored upwind of large populations — in facilities designed heavily against human error, only moderately against casual sabotage, and not at all against attack.
You’re right about the challenges of gases as weapons. OTOH, battlefield use rarely disposes of the quantity in a tank car, let alone a tank farm. One, two, many Bhopals.
Is it a run-around-and-scream threat? No. Is it greater than some threats we are spending billions on? Yes.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 29, 2008 @ 11:46 am
I think Jim’s point was that some of the security measures have been poorly executed and hence a waste because they focused on things like, say, terrorists taking the chemicals, putting them on trucks, and driving out.
In general, I think terrorism is a really bad lens through which to view industrial security. Theft, vandalism, and accidents are far more likely than jihadists, but it just so happens that a lot of measures that would stop or at least mitigate theft, vandalism, and accidents would also make it harder for terrorists to use chemical plants as bombs. Moreover, the Homeland Security people tend to have a bedwetter mentality and craving for absolute security, which means that they’ll craft a security plan allegedly aimed at achieving (the illusion of) security against whatever wild-ass threat they concocted in their minds.
I don’t want to sound like a vulgar libertarian who utters “market incentives” and then assumes that the companies will make their facilities secure. However, I’d rather see chemical plant security focused on preventing or mitigating accidents, theft, and vandalism, because (1) such things are more likely, (2) appropriate measures will also help prevent or mitigate terrorist attacks, (3) such measures are generally compatible with the interests of the plant owners and hence are more likely to get compliance and elicit useful information from owners (see, I am a libertarian!) and (4) such measures are less likely to be the domain of bedwetters.
Look at it this way: Remember a year or two ago, when some alleged terrorists were arrested in New Jersey and accused of trying to blow up an airport fuel tank by lighting a match at one end of a pipeline and letting the fire propagate? That accusation was made by the counter-terrorism people. Do you really want such ignoramuses making decisions about chemical plants? I think that letting the ignorant make the decisions would be a recipe for disaster.
Comment by Barry —
May 29, 2008 @ 1:01 pm
Re: Rand Simberg; please remember that he’s probably writing for the sort of audience who doesn’t see anything wrong with a large slave labor camp, in and of itself. Heck, probably the sort of audience who doesn’t *really* have a problem with the Third Reich, and might occasionally opine that it’s a shame that the US, UK and Germany couldn’t have worked together, to destroy Stalin.
Comment by KCinDC —
May 29, 2008 @ 1:39 pm
Thoreau, Schneier isn’t a bedwetter, and he talks in the article I linked to about why market incentives don’t solve the problem. I’m still not seeing where Jim got the idea that the concern is about “trying to sneak entire convoys of hazmat trucks out of factories closed for the night”. I’m with Doug T in thinking that the elimination of giant tanks of chlorine at the Blue Plains treatment plant was a good thing for the thousands of people living and working near it.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 29, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
I read Schneir’s article and I get his point about the insufficiency of market incentives. Still, even if the market doesn’t incentivize adequate attention to terrorism or disasters (due to failure to price externalities) at least the market incentives to address theft, vandalism, and accidents are stronger than the market incentives to address terrorism (because terrorism is so rare, despite bedwetting). I’d rather focus on problems where there’s already at least a partial (even if inadequate) incentive, because there will be a closer alignment of interests.
If you minimize the amount of chemicals present for release in an accident, you minimize the amount of chemicals present for release by terrorists. If you have multiple safeguards that have to be breached before release in an accident, you have multiple safeguards that have to be breached for terrorists to release the chemicals. If it’s hard for a thief or vandal to enter the facility in the first place, it’s hard for a terrorist to enter the facility.
They may not give as much attention to these factors as they should (due to the fact that some of the costs fall on others) but at least it’s an issue on their minds. I’d rather up the attention paid to issues already on their minds, and keep the “Homeland Security” people as far away from the chemical plants as possible.
Put it this way: The Department of Homeland Security is focusing tremendous resources on highly implausible liquid bombs on airplanes. Are these the people you want to trust to make decisions relating to chemical plants? I’d rather ask the people already interested in industrial security to pay even more attention to it, and incentivize it with some mixture of regulations or subsidies or something, because it’s generally better to encourage informed people to do more of what they’re doing than to bring in dumbass bedwetters.
Comment by Jon Hendry —
May 29, 2008 @ 9:36 pm
“It’s still: what are the odds? ”
A lot better if the perps are trying to find a chemical plant that is well-located: in an urban area, say, in a valley or other geological depression. Maybe during one of them inversion thingies that traps smog.
Really bad accidents have been few and far between, because they’re accidents, and not designed for effect.
Most accidental aircraft collisions with large buildings have been fairly minor, after all. The baseball player in NY, the suicidal kid in Florida, even the B-25 that ran into the Empire State Building.
That said, the “stealing trucks” scenario is pretty silly, and if pursued, the terrorists would probably just have to hang out at rest areas on the Jersey Turnpike, and pick up whatever came along.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 29, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
Jon: Can we agree that: there are measures America might have taken to secure airplanes against hijacking that WOULD have prevented the atrocities of September 11, 2001; that would have been ruinously expensive and not worth doing regardless?
Comment by Jon Hendry —
May 29, 2008 @ 10:02 pm
Yes, we can agree on that.
I think we can also agree that some affordable, reasonable measures, like locking cockpit doors, would have been a good idea before 9/11.