Meet America’s secret team of nuclear first responders

In an aircraft hangar at Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington, DC, one of the government’s most secretive groups recently gathered to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Although there were drinks, cake and speeches, it was clear from the start that this was no ordinary birthday party.

“Please keep in mind that this is an unclassified event, so please understand that there is a lot that our people will not be able to discuss,” Rick Christensen, the director of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Nuclear Incident Response, told the small organization. crowd sitting on folding chairs.

The group is known as the Nuclear emergency response team (NEST). It consists mainly of people who work elsewhere in the government – ​​scientists, federal law enforcement personnel and regulators – all of whom take time away from their day jobs to prepare for a nuclear incident. Think of it like a volunteer fire department – ​​only the volunteers have high security clearances and respond to nuclear threats.

NEST has always kept a low profile because almost everything it does regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism is secret, and because it doesn’t want to alarm people..

But in an age when the Pentagon says: The world is facing new nuclear threats and challenges, the group tries to be a little more open about its mission.

“We are always ready, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and always ready to deploy,” said Wendin Smith, deputy undersecretary for counterterrorism and counterproliferation at the Department of Energy, which leads NEST. She hopes that talking more openly about the mission can make people feel more confident and deter adversaries bent on causing nuclear chaos.

Cold War origin story

The history of the team Sounds like it belongs in a spy thriller.

It all started in 1974, when a person named “Captain Midnight” threatened to detonate an atomic bomb somewhere in Boston unless he or she was paid $200,000.

Government scientists from the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories rushed to an air base near Boston, but missed flights and problems with their equipment never actually entered the city. The crisis ended when the FBI left a bag of counterfeit bills at the ransom site, but no one came. According to the 2009 book, the incident was deemed a hoax Defuse Armageddondescribing the history of the NEST group.

Then-President Gerald Ford was shocked, and six months later the administration created NEST to help respond to “lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials, nuclear bomb threats, and radiation spread threats,” according to the National Security Memorandum who founded the team.

It found work quickly. In 1978, NEST was deployed to Canada’s remote Northwest Territories to recover debris from a crashed Soviet reconnaissance satellite powered by uranium. A year later, NEST helicopters circled above the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant after one of the plant’s reactors partially melted. At the time, little was known about the amount of radiation leaked from the plant, and it was NEST that 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, sending a plume of radioactivity across the countryside.

The mission was “to help the Japanese government understand what’s being released from the damaged reactors, and where is that plume going, where is it being deposited on the ground,” said Jay Tilden, the DOE’s chief of intelligence and counterintelligence who until recently led NEST.

NEST does more than just investigate areas for radioactivity. Teams also train to search for and disarm lost or damaged nuclear weapons. And they learn how to evaluate other terrorist threats, for example using nuclear material to make a so-called “dirty bomb.”

There’s less to talk about these missions openly, but, Tilden says, NEST doesn’t want to be seen as a shadowy government agency flying around in black helicopters. When the group bought new helicopters a few years ago, it even explicitly avoided the color.

“We didn’t even want them dark gray because they look military,” he says. “We wanted to be very distinctive. We are a civilian agency and when those aircraft fly, they fly largely for a public health and safety mission.”

The planes have a two-tone blue and gray color scheme, and the government agents flying them aren’t exactly men in black either. They’re people like Jacqueline Brandon, a physical chemist who works as a mission manager for NEST.

“When I found out that as a scientist I could fly a helicopter and fly real national security missions, I thought, ‘sign me up right away!’ Brandon remembers.

Her job is to sit in the back of the helicopter and scan for signs of radioactivity as the helicopter flies low to the ground.

“For me it’s like a rollercoaster ride, I love it,” she says.

Constantly watching

She’s in the air a lot. This year alone, NEST planes have flown over the Super Bowl, the Boston Marathon, and both Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Part of their job is to monitor major events like this, even when there is no specific threat.

And then there are the calls they didn’t expect.

“They happen periodically,” she says. If they do, “we’ll pack up all our stuff and be in the air in four hours, flying over whatever we want to fly over.”

Brandon didn’t want to give too many details about what might spur a NEST team into action, but Smith, the current head of NEST, was willing to talk in broad terms.

“We don’t give the details, but I would say that every week there is an unknown event that prompts the deployment of a NEST team or a request from a local responder,” she says.

Smith says nuclear materials are more part of everyday life than most people might realize. They are used in oil and gas drilling and in many medical applications. Sometimes people are even injected with radioactive dye to aid in medical imaging.

In fact, someone with radioactive dye in their body caused a recent NEST reaction. A team was called in after local police found a radioactive puddle in a fast food parking lot somewhere in America.

Smith says they quickly identified the source. “If someone isn’t using a public restroom and happens to relieve themselves in a parking lot, that could create a troubling signature if there is indeed an isotope, a medical isotope, involved,” she says.

Of course, NEST is preparing for much worse. Smith is less open about those dark scenarios, but she says, “The fact that people understand that NEST exists… is important in helping people sleep at night.”

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