NEW YORK, Dec 10: Several American officials have questioned the workability of a programme which seeks to establish a nuclear fuel scanner system from next year at three ports – Karachi, Southampton (England) and Honduras – at a cost of $60 million, media reports said here on Sunday.

The programme, called Secure Freight Initiative, will require United States-bound containers before departure to pass through both a radiation detection machine and an X-ray device -- a combination intended to find bomb-making materials that are intentionally shielded.

However, the New York Times said in a report on Sunday that some anti-terrorism experts were openly asking if the new effort made sense. Some noted that the screening would take place only on container ships, not on ships that carry millions of tons of other cargo, including cars, fuel or goods placed on pallets.

The machines to be used are prone to triggering false alarms and are unable to see through many items that might be inside a container, including frozen food. And if the detectors are installed in only a small number of ports, terrorists could simply choose to send a bomb by container from somewhere else, they said.

“The good news is we will only waste $60 million,” said James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. The newspaper said Mr Chertoff and other department officials acknowledged that they did not know how well the system would work, or whether it would cause unacceptable bottlenecks.

The radiation scan and X-ray image of each container will be transmitted electronically to the United States or to customs officials elsewhere, who will then be able to ask foreign officials at the ports to do more comprehensive searches. But officials said not all of the X-ray images would be checked — meaning that a shielded bomb could still get through.

Already at about 50 ports worldwide, at the request of the United States, governments are doing limited checks of suspicious containers before they are loaded onto ships bound for the United States. Also, as containers arrive in the United States, about 80 per cent of them are screened for radioactive substances once they are offloaded. But this will be the first time, at the request of the United States government, that all cargo headed to the United State is sent through both an X-ray machine and a radiation detection monitor.

Democrats in Congress want to mandate that all cargo be screened for radioactive material overseas before departing. Ultimately, Congress ordered that the program be tested at a small number of ports.

Homeland Security Department officials told the Times they wanted to expand the program beyond the six ports, eventually covering about 30 per cent of United States-bound cargo, compared with the approximately seven per cent that will now be screened. But Mr Chertoff said he did not think it was realistic to mandate it globally. “If somebody says you have to make it 100 per cent, and the foreign county does not agree, that is not a mandate that can be carried out,” he said.