Art, isn't it?
Wouldn't surprise me that they have a couple of nukes
ready to detonate right here in the U.S...
Can you spell A R M A G E D D O N
The U.S. has been planning for such an attack...
By Kade Hawkins
Aug 24, 2005
Pentagon Drills For Nuke Terror
The following scenario was at the center of a nuclear terrorism drill, completed this week, one involving thousands of civilians, military personnel and local and federal officials: When authorities tried to arrest a terrorist discovered unloading an improvised nuclear weapon in the port of Charleston, S.C., the bomb was detonated, killing 10,000, injuring 30,000 and exposing as many as 100,000 to high levels of radiation.
"Sudden Respond 05" was led by Virginia's Fort Monroe-based Joint Task Force-Civil Support and was designed to simulate a nuclear terrorist attack that the highest U.S. officials, including President Bush, have said is the No. 1 threat facing the nation.
The drill, one of many like it scheduled around the country, was not designed to stop a nuclear terrorist attack but to deal with its devastating aftermath. Drills in other parts of the country will focus on 15 other scenarios involving the detonation of terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
In this case, the device was a 10-kiloton bomb, said Tom Sobieski, deputy for training and exercises at the task force.
For two weeks prior to the drill, the task force, which spearheads the Defense Department's support for civil authorities leading the response, conducted "in-depth computer modeling" analysis to predict the damage to the southern port, including its infrastructure, facilities, communications as well as how the radioactive plume might move through the atmosphere.
Organizers say the nuclear drills should not frighten civilians but instead encourage them to learn how to protect themselves if such an attack – which some officials have referred to as inevitable – should occur.
"What we're doing is validating what we call our 'nuclear playbook' – our operating procedures for how we would respond to a nuclear scenario," Sobieski told Inside Missile Defense.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale in an interview last month said the Pentagon, in partnership with other federal departments, is contemplating "truly catastrophic" scenarios that go well beyond recent exercises designed to test the reaction of civilian and military forces to biological and chemical weapons attacks.
"With an unflinching eye, we are taking a realistic look at worse-case scenarios," he told Inside Missile Defense. "We have begun to consider in a very focused way not only mid-range consequence management requirements of the type that could be met by a combination of existing and military and civilian capabilities, but also truly catastrophic events that would go beyond the normal range of challenges reflected in our more recent exercises."
Sudden Response 05 did not, however, attempt to deal with multiple coordinated attacks like those plotted by al-Qaida in its decade-long "American Hiroshima" scenario. Earlier this year, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz approved an "execute order" that directs the military to be prepared to respond to more than a single domestic attack involving chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon.
Sobieski said that before the task force tackles multiple, simultaneous attacks it needs to iron out its procedures for dealing with a single attack.
"We need to make sure we have a playbook in place for responding to a singular event until we moved on to a much more complex problem," he said.
The scenario for the attack was drawn from an approved list of disaster situations maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, Sobieski said.
It is strikingly similar to a scenario detailed by Graham Allison, former Pentagon assistant secretary for plans and policy and current Harvard professor, in his book, "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe."
A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Allison wrote, the Central Intelligence Agency presented Bush with a report that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb into New York City. The president, according to the book, dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers to New York to search for the weapon, which was never found.
Allison described the devastation that a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb would visit on Manhattan, were it detonated in the middle of historic Times Square, killing near 1 million people in a few moments.
"The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district, the New York Times building, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within a third of a mile to the point of detonation," he wrote. "The ensuring firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving a landscape resembling the World Trade Center site. From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City Bombing."
As WND has reported, for more than 10 years, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida has planned to use nuclear weapons in a terrorist attack on the U.S. The plan is dubbed "American Hiroshima." In fact, as first reported in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, captured al-Qaida operatives and documents suggest the weapons have already been smuggled into the country.
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