Curious that they choose a name which suggests San Francisco Police Department to most people. For those who have not taken flights to the USA recently, this is the latest stage in the Department of Homeland Security’s campaign to convince US citizens that it has everything under control.
The Redress Number, of course, relates to the appallingly messy state of the US no-fly lists. Vast numbers of people got inadvertently banned from flying because their names were confused with those the USA, in its profound wisdom, thought might be terrorists (but probably weren’t). Eventually such people got issued with Redress Numbers. Presumably smart terrorists have got that figured out too.
Just to recap. In the UK, the grand total of actual deaths + estimated deaths if the Heroic Boys (and Girls) in SIS, MI5, Met etc had not thwarted all those terrible terrorist plots, is substantially less than the number of people killed by over-enthusiastic police drivers responding to 999 calls and killing the innocent on the way there. In other words the actual terrorist problem is apparently trivial.
Well, not entirely, there is one genuine, serious terrorist threat: nuclear weapons. Not the silly “dirty bombs” (conventional explosives which scatter a bit of radioactive material about), but fission weapons, like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyone who doubts how horrible fission weapons are should glance through
The death toll was around 100k in each case. It is extremely unlikely that terrorists could manage such a blast. Both bombs went off at a considerable height (over fifteen hundred feet), thus worsening the effect, whereas a terrorist weapon would almost certainly have to be detonated at ground level (or at worst on the top floor of a building). Moreover both were relatively large weapons. Hiroshima was about 13 kT (ie equivalent to about thirteen thousand tonnes of conventional explosive), and Nagasaki was about 21 kT. In contrast a terrorist weapon would probably be sub-kilotonne or at most a few kilotonnes. Nonetheless, it would be both more effective than the Twin Towers explosions and a good deal more scary.
Fission weapons are easy to make. The only real difficulty is getting hold of the necessary lab equipment. The West tends to monitor such things as ultra-centrifuge purchases, so a terrorist group would be likely to attract the interest of Western intelligence services fairly quickly.
A more remote, but seriously scary, threat is fusion weapons (aka Hydrogen bombs). They are typically in the megatonne upwards range. In other words a small terrorist fusion weapon would be a thousand times as powerful as a terrorist fission weapon.
Just ponder that for a moment. Set one off in or above central London and you would not just kill 10 million people, you would essentially vaporize most of London.
The USA lives in Cloud Cuckoo Land. It believes that the “induction” process (whereby people who are inducted into the secrets of how to make fusion weapons have their lives made a misery by extensive security measures) ensures that the secrets do not leak out. It is wrong. Any (sufficiently) smart mathematician who has read Stan Ulam’s autobiography can soon figure it out. In any case, whereas photon pressure was an abstruse idea back in the 1950s, it is simply routine today for any cosmologist.
For some evocative photos of what these nasty gadgets can do, see:
There is just one little error in the above. Most scenarios envisage terrorists carrying nuclear weapons into city centres, or driving them. But, of course, they could fly them. A private plane would do fine. The weapons need not be at all heavy. Of course, a commercial flight would do fine, and you would not even need to break into the cockpit. Which brings us back to SFPD.
Maybe it deters some terrorists. But the gaping hole in airport security is not a failure to inspect passengers and their luggage. It is the failure to secure airside. In most UK airports it is all too easy for a terrorist to get employed airside and to bring in a nuclear weapon. Maybe with the food, or maybe on a maintenance trip.
There is no good answer to such threats – as far as I can see – so they are almost never mentioned. Instead the politicians rabbit on about chemical and biological weapons. Chemical weapons are well-known to be less threatening than bullets and bombs, whilst biological weapons are notoriously tricky to use. Nine times out of ten they fail to “go off”, and when they do the wind is usually blowing the wrong way.
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