Antwerp Port equips Terminals with Nuclear Detectors

By request and In cooperation with the US Goverment, the Belgian Port of Antwerp will equip all of its Container Terminals with High tech Nuclear detectors and will hire over a 100 extra customs officers, specialized and trained in Nuclear detection and handling of Nuclear materials.



The source I posted is in Dutch because I haven't found any english sources for it yet.
If anyone knows of a source in a US or otherwise English language newssource, please let me know and I'll ad it to the article.


This technology upgrade in Antwerp is an initiative initiated by the US Department of Energy, for now, the largest undertaking of this kind.

The US Department of Energy will pay for the hard and software of these systems (both measurement systems and computer systems) and the Belgian customs services will hire over a 100 new people trained and specialized in detection and handling of nuclear and other types of hazardous materials.

These new systems and the previously installed MRI like container scanners should make the transport of illegal goods and persons another degree harder.

Now lets hope that the next step in these systems upgrades will include more advanced ways of detecting drugs hidden in containers. Imho, drugs is still the biggest problem and type of illegal goods hidden in containers.

Just last year they found 100 kilo's of pure Cocaine which has a street value in the 100's of millions if not billions.

I also have to say that this method of battling the War on Terror and against worldwide illegal transportation of hazardous and illegal materials does much more good then blowing up a country or 2.

If you halt the ability to get these materials around the world, the only thing terrorists can do is blow themselves up in the leisure of their own homes instead of deliberatly or accidentaly doing it in our countries.

Here are the results of an online automatic translation:

Link
Against July 2007 are the ten container terminals in the harbor of Antwerp equipped with 54 nuclear mark gates.

All containers, that get by in the harbor of Antwerp, can thanks to the gates checked become on the presence of radioactive or nuclear material. "These gates mean an important addition in the fight against mass destructions weapon", says Noël Colpin, administrator of customs and excise taxes.

"Container transportation is an easy target for terrorism. Annual there go is a world-wide problem 100 million containers the world around thus that. Only with this initiative, we can take the danger", according to Colpin.

The mark gates its an initiative of the American Department or Energy. The project in Antwerp is for the Americas the largest that they until now closed made. The U.S. see to for the purchase and the installation of all the material, as mark porches harden and all computer and software.

I think that given the fact the port is the 2nd largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, selecting it was a move in the right direction.

Now the question is will it stop possible WMDS from getting through to other countries?

i love being a belgian !!! See how our gov looks 2 keep us safe for BELGIUM

Agreed, this is a wise move, by Belgium on behalf of the rest of the world.

But.

Why are the powers that be so convinced that terrorists will even bother to remove their nuke from the ship it came in on?

Almost every country in the world, at least every country that would be of interest as a target for some terrorist group or another, has at least one port. The fewer ports a country has, the more vital those ports are to the nation's economic existence; the more desireable those ports become as targets for terrorist activity.

For a terrorist, killing citizens is not the end in itself, but merely An Effective Means to the terrorists actual desired end; the government and/or policy the terrorist seeks to change.

Bearing in mind that the terrorist's goals are, at their heart, political in nature, and that in today's world, politics and economics are virtually synonymous, it makes no sense for a terrorist to risk losing control of an exceedingly valuable weapon, such as a nuke, by excessively transporting it from a economicly high-value target (a port, for example) to a target of lower economic/political value.

Even if a target (likely, a so-called "soft" target) benefits from a high emotional impact, resulting from mass civilian casualties, the resulting incentive for change upon the governing body is likely to be less effective than if the impact had greater economic repercussions.

No terrorist is so far removed from the military mind-set that he would willing seek a mere tatcical assult when a strategic assult affords itself, with a higher likelyhood of success to boot!