Safety Perimeter Way Too Small, Experts Say

The massive 5,000-pound truck bomb that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday could have had deadly impact as far as three-fourths of a mile away--a far greater range than the 100 feet that U.S. officials allowed as a security barrier.

“The security measures in place were not adequate to protect against casualties in this bombing,” said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the international security firm Kroll & Associates. Now, the government will be “obliged to review whether security should have been increased and whether that was feasible,” he said.

A high-velocity blast from a big truck bomb can hurl debris at the speed of 20,000 feet per second, turning glass shards into bullets and requiring fortifications similar to World War II pillboxes for survival at close range.

The bomb that leveled the complex in Dhahran left a crater 85 feet wide and 35 feet deep--similar to the effect of the most powerful nonnuclear U.S. weapons.

The vulnerability of Americans at home and abroad has become increasingly clear in the last decade as bombings--now the favored tactic of extremists worldwide--have grown in scale and frequency.

There have been about 1,000 car or truck bombings around the world since 1980, though few received the attention of the massive blasts at New York City’s World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building. As the risk of terrorist bombings rises, the solutions so far appear inadequate.

In an effort to increase security around the White House, President Clinton ordered Pennsylvania Avenue closed last year. But even that extreme measure leaves the executive mansion with far less than ideal protection.

Terry Hawkins, an intelligence expert and deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, estimated that large truck bombs can be effective at ranges of up to three-fourths of a mile.

“It is an intractable problem,” Hawkins said. “How can you [protect] normal commercial life with trucks all over the highways from the one-in-a-billion terrorist that might be driving a truck bomb on any given day?”

With increasing urgency, security experts and the U.S. scientific establishment are rushing to find solutions to the problem of truck bombs--as well as the looming issue of biological and chemical terrorism, which have the potential to be far more deadly.

At Los Alamos, researchers are working on sensors that would detect minute quantities of explosive materials, using sensors that would look for the presence of nitrogen, a common element in explosives.

Ultimately, government installations might be ringed by networks of such sensors, which would be capable of instantly detecting the presence of large quantities of explosives. Highways in major cities might also be equipped with such sensors, and police could be ready to take action if explosives were detected.

Engineers are developing new formulations of blast-resistant concrete and looking for ways to allow office buildings to better absorb the impact of bombs.

While such measures might seem farfetched today, many security precautions now widely accepted were considered equally unlikely in the past.

“The idea of having 100% passenger and baggage screening with armed guards at every airport in the world was a radical idea in 1972 and now is part of the landscape,” Jenkins said. “The idea of having every fire department in the U.S. equipped with instruments to detect nerve gas was considered radical in 1994, and we are now trying to figure out how to do it.”

Meanwhile, as investigators sifted through the wreckage of the compound in Dhahran, terrorism experts in the United States questioned why greater efforts were not made to protect U.S. troops. The vehicle was parked outside a weak fence and detonated 35 yards from the nearest building.

Emilio Viano, a terrorism scholar at American University, said Wednesday that U.S. officials have been naive and complacent in not recognizing sooner the warning signs that Saudi Arabia is unstable.

“Americans have been lulled into believing this is a stable country,” Viano said. “The country is unstable. The monarch is corrupt.”

The success of truck bombs has clearly had an impact on U.S. society.

“It is changing the nature and character of American life,” Viano said. “We took pride in our open society, not only in terms of expression but our physical access to courts and government buildings. It is creating a distance, a suspicion between the people and government.”

* SAUDI TERRORISM: Attack reflects dissent in kingdom, experts believe. A6

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