Should commercial airplanes be equipped to deflect shoulder-launched rockets? What would be the financial fallout of a radioactive attack on Southern California ports? Which bridges deserve the most money to bolster protections against Al Qaeda assaults?
Questions like those are being pondered at a federally funded think tank at USC, the first of its kind in the country. Formally named the Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, it is better known as CREATE, an acronym at odds with its mission to evaluate potential destruction.
CREATE was the first of six university-based research units, titled Centers of Excellence, established around the nation since 2004 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. And it is expected this summer to be the first test case of whether taxpayers should keep paying for such research.
The other centers investigate issues more specifically related to terrorism, such as psychological tolls and protecting food supplies. The USC center was given $12 million over three years to help evaluate the most likely threats -- and to determine the most efficient ways to deter and prepare for them.
The research involves engineering, economics, political science, computer science and psychology, and it traffics in non-classified data so students can participate.
The center operates on the notion that funds to fight terror aren't limitless. "We can spend ourselves into bankruptcy by making things more and more secure, or we can do it in a smart way," said CREATE's director, USC professor Detlof von Winterfeldt. And the smart way, he said, is to examine the risk and determine "where you get the largest risk reduction for the money."
A German-born mathematical psychologist who is an expert in risk analysis and nuclear energy, Von Winterfeldt concedes that sober academic inquiry does not always affect the real world, where politicians control the purse.
For example, a remote Alaskan fishing village with 2,400 residents last year received $202,000 in Homeland Security funds for 80 surveillance cameras, provoking jokes about Osama bin Laden hiding in the snow. With the series of grants announced in May, Homeland Security contended it had used more objective methodology to choose sites at most risk -- only to provoke protests from New York and Washington that they lost out to other cities' political muscle.
