NUCLEAR THREATS AND TERRORIST PROBES
Some security experst are worried that there is potential for a terrorist nuclear attack using oil tankers.
While a recent Congressional Research Service report focuses on the threat posed by tankers being used to smuggle in a nuclear device, tankers themselves are a target for attack.
The attack on the tanker Limburg in Yemen in October 2002 showed how vulnerable tankers are to suicide attacks by small boats.
Since then, we have seen evidence of terrorist probing of the vulnerabilities of the Washington State Ferries system.
In an interview with the Associated Press in December 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller said "there have been any number of attacks on ships that have been thwarted."
Some observers see a link between the growing number of piracy incidents and international terror.
Writing in The Journal of International Security Affairs, Dr. Gal Luft and Anne Korin of IAGS (the Institute for the Assessment of Global Security, quote International Maritime Bureau statistics on the growing number of piracy incidents and make the point that while most pirates have no ideological tilt, "they are petty criminals who would do almost anything for a handful of dollars. Those who create anarchy at sea in so many parts of the globe are the most likely to befriend the successors of Mohammad Atta and lend their hand on the next mega terror assault against the west."
"There is growing evidence that terrorists find the unpoliced sea to be their preferred domain of operation," say Luft and Korin. "Today, over 60% of the world's oil is shipped on 3,500 tankers through a small number of chokepoints .... Most of those critical chokepoints are located in areas where Islamic fundamentalism is prevalent. The Strait of Hormuz and its three tiny islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb Island and Lesser Tunb Island are controlled by Iran; Bab el-Mandab is controlled by Yemen, the ancestral home of bin Laden. Part of the 500-mile long Strait of Malacca courses through Indonesia's oil rich province Aceh, inhabited by one of the world's most radical Muslim populations."
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