isnt this a joke! people illegally smuggle tons of drugs into the USA and the feds are pretending they can prevent somebody from smuggling in a nuke. what rubbish! Original Article US is at crossroads on nuclear defense By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post | April 17, 2006 WASHINGTON -- Beset by delays, cost overruns, and technical problems, the US government's quest to defend the nation against a smuggled nuclear weapon or radiological ''dirty" bomb is approaching a crossroads. Aministration will award or initiate contracts worth $3 billion to develop a new generation of rugged and precise radiation monitors and imaging scanners designed to sniff out radioactive material at the nation's borders. Authorities must choose in part between older, reliable technology of limited effectiveness and new, more costly, less-proven devices that promise greater accuracy. The stakes could hardly be higher: securing US cities from a catastrophic attack by a weapon of mass destruction -- ''the biggest threat we face today," as Vice President Cheney said often during the 2004 campaign. The government has stumbled repeatedly with similar choices, costing taxpayers billions. In the nearly five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration and Congress have poured more than $5 billion into homeland security detection systems, radiological and otherwise, only to find that the best available equipment at the time was often of limited use. It has spent $300 million on an early class of radiation monitors that could not tell uranium from cat litter and invested $1.2 billion in airport baggage screening systems that initially were no more effective than the equipment screeners used before. ''A lot of the money we threw out there was wasted because the technology was not so good," said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow for national and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation. Last month congressional investigators reported that the United States is ''unlikely" to meet its goal of installing 3,000 next-generation detectors by September 2009 and projected it will be about $342 million above its anticipated $1.2 billion cost. At the same time, initial testing of new technology produced ''mixed" results, while costing more. The struggle to complete what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls a ''mini-Manhattan Project" provides a case study of America's challenges in dealing with the 21st-century perils of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To skeptics, even some close to the administration, the focus on stopping a nuclear bomb hidden in a container at the border is a costly fixation on a scenario that -- while nightmarish -- is not supported by intelligence and is overshadowed by other threats. ''This is the equivalent of a comet hitting the planet. Of all the things that are in the world, why are we fixated on this one thing?" Carafano asked. ''Scanning containers full of sneakers for a 'nuke in a box' is not a really thoughtful thing." Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.