Los Angeles - Long Beach

    LOS ANGELES, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Experts said that future terrorist attacks could involve strikes on several U.S. port complexes, including Los Angeles-Long Beach, and claim hundreds of thousands of casualties, a newspaper report said Thursday.

    Local experts told a conference Wednesday at the University of Southern California (USC) here that there would be another terror strike and, in the words of one of them, it would make the September 11 attacks ``look like peanuts,'' according to the Daily News.

    The conference was hosted by the USC-based Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

    A likely scenario involves separate or simultaneous attacks on the nation's largest ports -- Los Angeles/Long Beach, New York City/New Jersey and Houston-- which could cripple the nation's economy, according to the experts quoted by the report.

    "Instead of talking 3,000 casualties, we are going to be talking about hundreds of thousands, or millions of casualties,'' said Mike Intriligator, a professor of economics, political science and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

    Jim Moore II, a USC professor of industrial and systems engineering, said research on the impact of a ``dirty bomb'' or other weapon of mass destruction at the three largest U.S. port complexes found it would cost the economy tens of billions of dollars.

    A large attack on the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach alonewould have a 23-billion-dollar-a-month impact on the local economy, according to the newspaper. Enditem