NEWSLETTER

TEXT AND PICTURES BY JON FOX


The Homeland Security Department wants to spend more than $1 billion to install next-generation radiation detectors at the nation’s ports, and I was essentially asking if he thought it was worth the expenditure given the perceived threat.

The scientist in Miami dutifully failed to answer my question, and I sat back down.

Apparently I made a mistake in even asking the question. Reporters weren’t supposed to speak. Who’d have known? I mean, that’s what they pay us to do. Yet here it was, mid morning, day one, and I had apparently already angered the FBI organizers and come close to losing my credentials, according to a conversation I later had with a special agent. He looked like some 1950s cartoon drawing of an archetypal American—all blond, straight nosed, and square jawed. Johnny Unitas with Special Ops training, basically. Hadn’t I been “briefed” on the protocol, he asked?

We were both in the elevator, me on my way up to my room on the 34th floor of the hotel.

No, no briefing, I said. All I got was my picture on an orange press badge and an agenda.

“Well, if it was up to me,” he said, “I would have pulled your credentials.” It was hard to tell if he was joking.

Later that afternoon, I wandered around the vendor area outside the conference room. There were people eagerly trying to sell radiation detectors, software that tracks internet usage, and radiation-exposure triage kits. More than one booth was hawking some sort of fancy overhead projector. Exactly what these projectors had to do with terrorism remains unclear to me, but it was at this point it that I began to see one of the true purposes of this conference: selling all kinds of crap to local law-enforcement authorities so that they can feel like they’re going to be ready if terrorists somehow get radiological on their hometowns. It’s pretty much the present-day equivalent of 1950s duck-and-cover drills in grade schools and backyard bomb shelters.

In one stall, a man was trying to drum up interest in a $15,000 remote-control truck capable of pulling a trailer to set a charge near a suspected improvised explosive device. The idea was that the truck could blow up a homemade landmine before it blows up an army Humvee. Again, exactly what this had to do with nuclear terrorism is not entirely clear. As far as I know, insurgents in Iraq haven’t got any plutonium to pack into their IEDs. I’m also not entirely sure why it cost $15,000 considering it looked like pretty run-of-the-mill hobby store fare, except it was painted stealth black and had a swiveling camera stuck on it.

It seems the conventioneers were less than impressed as well. As I was checking my email that afternoon at some computers set up next to the conference room, the remote-control truck crept by my feet. In its miniature pick-up bed was a handwritten sign in ballpoint pen that said, “Follow me to booth 35.”

The truck rolled past me and toward the doors of a conference hall that vendors were prohibited from entering. An FBI guy in a suit began to chastise the truck as if it were a person.

“You can’t go in there. You have to stay in the vendor area,” he said, slightly stooped over, directing his admonishments to the tiny camera on the front of the truck.

A man with a huge remote control panel strapped around his neck turned a nearby corner, apologized, and drove the little truck away.

At another stall, I talked to a young vendor who was selling anti-chemical weapon medical supplies. On the round table in front of him was an array of plastic tubes about the size of magic markers. They were atropine self-injectors minus the atropine and the syringe. They were self-injection training cartridges. Good if you get dosed with simulation nerve gas, I guess.

He let me have one.

“Step 1: Pull off gray safety release.”

“Step 2: Swing and firmly push green tip against outer thigh so it ‘clicks.’ Hold against thigh approximately ten seconds.”

I did this until my technique became exceptional. The next time I’m dosed with nerve gas, I’m going to be on it so fast the terrorists’ heads will spin.

TO BE CONTINUED:
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