MILNET: Nuclear Emergency Search Team

"Official" description of the Safeguard Division of DoE.
Principles of Nuclear Security and Safety from the The Energy Archive at Envirolink.

The existence of the Nuclear Emergency Search Teams have been acknowledged since 1975, their mission to search out and where necessary de-fuse or as safely as possible destroy nuclear material or nuclear weapons.

An Elite group, NEST has hidden primarily behind the cloak of nuclear secrecy. So much so that while the organization's existence has been public, the activities have only been visible to those intimately involved (albeit tangentently) with their operations. Police, fire and other public safety officials (the term "first responder" is being seen more and more in the public view of late) concerned with HAZMETT or in the last decade concerned with NBC readiness, most likely have had pretty close knowledge of the NEST capabilities. Agencies in larger metropolitan areas such as San Francico, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and others may have worked side by side in training exercises. And in the last few years, all sorts of agencies have been banding together to train for the frightening event where a terrorist does field an NBC weapon in the U.S. The Defense Department office of public information released an article discussing the DoD involvement in the train-the-trainer exercises for anti-terrorist activities in the NBC area.

However, despite the focus of government attention in the area of NBC Emergency Prepardness, the general public has been given little information about NEST or for that matter other intersecting topic areas.

Indeed, little has been heard about the missios NEST crews have been called out upon or been involved in. Not that the public knows much about any nuclear events or incidents without kicking, screaming, and prying it out of the government.

In the last few years, however, NEST has come to light in some extremely interesting ways. For instance, take fictional settings such as the movie The Peacemakers starring Nicole Kidman and George Clooney, which depicted a Bosnian Terrorist carting a small nuclear primary through the streets of New York intent to destroy the United Nations (and of course a good sized chunk of the city) with what has been coined a "suitcase nuke". The heros of the movie are joined by NEST team members in helicopters scanning the streets scarcely feet off the tops of the buildings in downtown New York -- their goal to detect the man carried bomb as it moves closer and closer to the United Nations.

Factual information about NEST is now available and in an interview with the NEST public information officer, Dan Stober of the San Jose Mercury News 1 was able to pry out some interesting facts about NEST "callouts" since 1975. While the list is by no means complete, it makes for good reading (see table below).

According to Stober, Nest has an interesting set of tools to help them in their job, not the least of are the laptops and infamous missing disk drives that turned up missing near the end of May, 2000 at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. The disks were reported to contain information about materials, design, and other physical parameters of nuclear weapons, both domestic and foreign. These are used by NEST teams to:

• How to detect a weapon
• Help figure out how to de-fuse a nuclear bomb rendering it fairly inert (high explosives are very difficult to render 100% inert and all nuclear weapons have high explosives around the nuclear material)
• How to determine source of the weapon from design or materials used in the construction of the weapon.

The tools include:

• Powerful (presumably portable) "XRAY machines"
• "A high pressure water cutting tool" (non magnetic -- a theme heard over and over again in discussions around nuclear weapons maintenance)
• Robotic carts with arms, video cameras, etc. used to eliminate some level of risk from human exposure to explosions
• Sensitive passive heat detectors (decaying nuclear material gives off more heat than detectable high energy particles)
• The more sophisticated Active sensors such as devices that "bombard a suspected weapon with neutrons and gamma rays."

Again, according to what Strober tells us from his interview, results from sensors as well as other physical measurements and observations are fed into the NEST laptops and expert software makes a best attempt to generate procedures and advice on disarming the devices.

And while military fiction written by authors in the genre like Tom Clancey have been replete with all kinds of terrorist nuclear activity, Strober says NEST told him that the NEST crews have never found a real bomb.

MILNET might believe that, however, folklore says there was at least one incident where a college professor and students created a nuclear weapon to demonstrate how easy it is to do -- this device being real enough that arming it in the final stages of construction with weapons grade material was all that kept it from being "real".

Further Reading:

Also used for this MILNET page was material from the Los Alamos Non Proliferation and Security web site at: http://ext.lanl.gov/orgs/nis/. The NEST team and detection instruments are mentioned briefly on the pages:

• http://ext.lanl.gov/orgs/nis/nis6/nis6_res.html
• http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/nis/nis9/nis9_caps.html
• Defenselink
• DefenseLink: DoD Drill Tests Response to Terrorist Attack
• EPA Counter-Terrorism Mission
• LANL's TA-18 Facility and NEST

1Missing nuclear data is vital to bomb sleuths, ©Copyright 2000, San Jose Mercury News, Thursday, June 15, 2000, pgs 1A, 11A.