NNSA
In an aircraft hangar at Joint Base Andrews, just outside of Washington, DC, one of the government’s most secretive groups gathered recently to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Though there were drinks, cake and speeches, right from the start, it was clear this was not an ordinary birthday party.
“Please note that this is an unclassified event, so please understand that there is a lot that our people are not going to be able to discuss,” Rick Christensen, the director of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s office of nuclear incident response told the small crowd sitting in folding chairs.
The group is known as the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). It’s made primarily of people who work elsewhere in the government—scientists, federal law enforcement personnel, and regulators—who all take time out of their day jobs to prepare for a nuclear incident. Think of it as a volunteer fire department – except the volunteers have high-level security clearances and they respond to nuclear threats.
NEST has always kept a low profile because almost everything it does related to nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism is classified, and because it doesn’t want to alarm people.
But in an era when the Pentagon says the world is facing new nuclear threats and challenges, the group is trying to be slightly more open about its mission.
“We are always ready, 24-7, and always prepared to deploy,” says Wendin Smith, the Deputy Under Secretary for Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation at the Department of Energy, which runs NEST. She hopes talking more openly about the mission might help people feel more assured, as well as deter adversaries who may be out to cause nuclear mayhem.
Cold War origin story
The history of the team sounds like it belongs in a spy thriller.
It all began in 1974, when a person going by the name “Captain Midnight” threatened to set off a nuclear bomb somewhere in Boston unless they were paid $200,000.
Government scientists from the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories rushed to an airbase near Boston, but missed flights and problems with their equipment meant they never actually entered the city. The crisis ended when the FBI left a bag containing phony bills at the ransom spot, but nobody came. The incident was deemed a hoax, according to the 2009 book Defusing Armageddon, which details the history of the NEST group.
Then-president Gerald Ford was appalled, and six months later the government created NEST to aid in the response to, “lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials, nuclear bomb threats, and radiation dispersal threats,” according to the secret memorandum that set up the team.
It quickly found work. In 1978, NEST deployed in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories to recover debris from a crashed Soviet reconnaissance satellite that was powered by uranium. A year later, NEST helicopters circled over the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, after one of the plant’s reactors partially melted down. At the time, little was known about how much radiation had leaked from the plant, and it was NEST who helped collect the necessary data to guide evacuation orders.
In 2011, NEST experts and equipment flew to Fukushima, Japan, after a nuclear power plant there melted down and spewed a plume of radioactivity across the countryside.
The mission was “to help the Japanese government understand what is being released from the damaged reactors, and where is that plume going, where is it deposited on the ground,” says Jay Tilden, the DOE’s head of intelligence and counterintelligence who until recently ran NEST.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-5119933/meet-americas-secret-team-of-nuclear-first-responders