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Denial and Penny-Pinching Put Us in Danger
By Charles Keil, Lakeville
Half a dozen intelligence agencies from outside the U.S. were telling our CIA and George W. Bush what they needed to know months ahead of 9/11. FBI bureaus were saying the same thing way in advance of 9/11. The intelligence agencies of the world didn't fail completely, and some FBI people who were on to what was being planned were told to "slow up" or "don't go further" with their suspicions and investigations.
Our leaders failed us. They saw just enough pattern, connected just enough dots to take care of themselves, but were too cheap to look out for the rest of us. Ashcroft stopped using domestic airlines before September 11. Bush and Company knew enough to stay out of Washington as much as possible. They could have tightened security at airports a little or a lot, but they didn't do anything to prevent 9/11 because they wanted business to hum along as usual.
Hiring more security personnel and more competent security personnel both cost money; inspecting more passengers delays flights and costs money; asking people to show up earlier at airports annoys voters; reinforcing the barriers and doors to cockpits costs money; and really looking for potential hijackers would cost the airlines millions in profits … and, anyway, maybe nothing will happen. Reasoning—or the unreasoning called "denial"—went something like that: maybe the pattern of information is not a pattern, maybe it won't happen; and if we try to stop it from happening, it will be bad for the airlines, bad for travel, bad for business, bad for growth, bad for the stock market.
I'm writing now because the same denial and short-term penny-pinching keeps us from closing and fortifying all the nuclear power plants before another 9/11 happens. Only it will be much worse. There are over 100 nuke plants at last count. Many are long in use, and show signs of aging and potential malfunction; some have long histories of little accidents. But despite the disaster at Chernobyl and the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, Americans are in deep denial about the threat to us from nuclear power plant accidents. We are also in deep denial about the numbers of Americans who are depressed, suicidal, angry and/or crazy enough to open up a so-called "spent fuel pool" with an old-fashioned mortar.
We are in deep denial about the ability of just one terrorist, domestic or foreign, to trigger a meltdown at one power plant. And if Millstone in Connecticut goes, that could be the end of Rhode Island as a state, or most of Long Island might be radioactive for centuries. If Indian Point on the Hudson goes, that could put a deadly cloud over Connecticut and/or the New York City area. If just one power plant melts down, I'm told that the effect could be many times greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It would probably melt the stock market, the American economy, and put a big dent in global prosperity.
So why not close down and fortify the nuclear power plants, secure them with multiple shields and tighter security? It costs money: a few million dollars to better secure each power plant quickly; more millions to build barriers; another million or so each year in security personnel as spent fuel cools; and more money for dry casking. Even all this, however, is only pennies compared to the tens of billions of dollars any meltdown will cost for containment, never mind an impossible "cleanup." But profits are sacred and our lives are cheap. Bush and Company are thinking that real and honest homeland security will be bad for business, bad for growth, bad for the dollar, bad for the stock market … and, maybe, it won't happen.
Personally, I'd bet on human error over terror, I'd bet on a domestic terrorist over a foreigner, but it is a triple threat and, who knows, maybe there's another "trifecta" for Bush (I can't believe he made that joke) in there someplace—some foreign engineer now a U.S. citizen goes crazy or makes the error that causes terror.
I don't want to end on a speculative and blame-the-scientists-and-engineers note. The threat is, in fact, quadruple. Forget error plus two kinds of terror. What will kill a lot of us is just plain penny-pinching—the good, lean cost-cutting companies, not the corrupt ones—just business as usual, and cheap leadership. If the barriers between pilots and passengers had been reinforced, box cutters wouldn't have worked. If we paid security people better …
Multiply the examples of choices made to increase profits that put citizens in harm’s way. Who makes those choices? We do. We elect people who consistently put corporate greed above citizen health, security, well-being. For example, our elected reps voted for the Price-Anderson legislation, which makes taxpayers the insurers of last resort if anything goes seriously wrong at a nuclear power plant. (In a free market no nuke power plant has ever been insurable.)
It seems to me that if our nuclear power plants were closed and secured we would all sleep better at night and learn to conserve energy, cutting costs the right way with appropriate technology.
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