Screening maritime shipping containers for weapons of mass destruction

Tens of millions of shipping containers enter U.S. seaports every year carrying commerce surpassing 1.5 trillion dollars in value. As a result, the maritime shipping industry offers an attractive channel for terrorist organizations to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the U.S., or to cripple the U.S. economy by directly attacking major ports and maritime infrastructure. In order to prevent such an event from occurring, the Department of Homeland Security has initiated the SAFECON and TRUST programs aimed at improving security measures to detect anomalous goods such as these threats in container air. These programs are working to develop aggressive solutions that minimize any disruption to the flow of commerce by identifying or developing air-sample based sensors that can be installed on port gantry cranes or housed within shipping containers themselves. This paper describes the DHS Container Security Test Bed that is being established at the Transportation Security Laboratory to enable realistic evaluation of technologies against real operational challenges. Information highlighting many of these challenges including the concentrations and movement of threat simulants inside containers, background clutter, operational environment, and air sampling capabilities will be presented. This information and the additional data that is being collected at the test bed will allow us to derive sensor and operational requirements and enable the intelligent design and selection of critical technologies.