LOS ANGELES - A future terrorist attack could involve strikes on several port complexes - including Los Angeles-Long Beach - and claim hundreds of thousands of casualties, according to terrorism experts. The grim prediction came out of a conference of terrorism experts yesterday at the University of Southern California. It 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.

Local experts at the conference predicted there would be another terror strike and, in the words of one of them, it would make 9/11 "look like peanuts," the Daily News reported.

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 Daily News.

"Instead of talking 3,000 casualties, we are going to be talking about hundreds of thousands, or millions of casualties," Mike Intriligator, one of the nation's leading economists and a professor of economics, political science and public policy at UCLA, said in remarks reported by the newspaper.

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 nation's three largest port complexes found it would cost the economy tens of billions of dollars a month, the Daily Nws reported. A large attack on the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach alone would have a $23 billion-a-month impact on the local economy, according to the newspaper.