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May 20, 2007

Mark Bennett: While emergency teams prepare for nuclear disaster, Doomsday Clock watchers hope

By Mark Bennett

TERRE HAUTE — Thank goodness, hundreds of courageous Hoosiers and fellow Midwesterners now better understand how to respond to the unthinkable.

God help us if they have to.

Last week, more than 2,000 National Guard troops and nearly 1,000 civilian emergency workers completed an 11-day joint training exercise called “Vigilant Guard,” which launched in Terre Haute and then shifted to Muscatatuck in southern Indiana. A similar disaster preparedness exercise in Alaska this month is labeled “Northern Edge,” while another in New England, “Hurrex,” wrapped up last week too. Together, the three sessions comprise “Ardent Sentry,” a nationwide response test — the largest in Guard history — by the U.S. Northern Command.

There are no inspiring words to describe the premise for all of these difficult and necessary drills.

The simulated catastrophe in Vigilant Guard was the detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb near Indianapolis.

In the fictional scenario, as explained by National Guard Bureau spokesman Emanuel Pacheco, a “nondescript terrorist” drove a “vehicle-borne explosive” on Interstate 465 bound for downtown Indianapolis. But as he neared the junction with I-69, an Indiana State Police trooper noticed that vehicle (either a truck or a van) was weaving erratically. The trooper began tailing it. When the terrorist saw the cop, he detonated the bomb while driving.

The story line “was that he was headed to downtown Indianapolis,” Pacheco said by telephone from the command center at Muscatatuck, “and he just didn’t get that far.”

Despite being miles from his target, the heart of the city, the death toll in this imaginary interstate explosion was 14,000, with an additional 21,000 injuries and 300,000 refugees fleeing ravaged Indy. The responders heard reports of similar attacks in California, Alaska and Canada. The two real tragedies that prompted this month’s national training exercise — 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina — claimed a combined 4,800 lives. The scope of a nuclear strike such as this would surpass those two calamities in many horrific ways, from the radioactive fallout and related illnesses to the psychological trauma of its bleak aftermath.

The intent of the exercise was to intentionally push these response teams to their limits by throwing them multiple worst-case scenario curveballs.

To keep our sanity in the post-Hiroshima age, most of us consider the “worst-case” to also be the “least likely” possibility. But the leader of a group of scientists who monitor and assess global security through its well-known Doomsday Clock sees a nuclear attack becoming less and less unthinkable.

“These risks are hard to judge,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organization that has updated its Doomsday Clock every other month since 1947. “But many in the field who are military, former government officials and intelligence types say it’s not a matter of if, but when.”

Apparently, the danger is real enough to inspire the largest response training exercise in history.

Still poised to strike

The Doomsday Clock uses midnight as the moment when mass global destruction happens. In 1991, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the clock at 17 minutes till midnight, its most relaxed position ever. Since then, the big hand has ominously crept toward 12. In January, it moved closer, from 7 minutes till midnight to 5 minutes from the Doomsday hour. It’s been closer only a few times, at 4 and 3 minutes till in 1981 and ’84, and 3 and 2 till in 1949 and ’53.

The nuclear pursuits of rogue governments in North Korea and Iran may seem to be the prime reason for the clock’s shift forward. And, indeed, the threats posed by those two countries added momentum, Benedict said. But an array of more clandestine potential sources for nuclear assaults are more plausible than hostile launches by Pyongyang or Tehran.

Even after years of dismantling their stashes, the two Cold War superpowers — the United States and Russia — still have a combined 26,000 nuclear weapons, according to The Bulletin. The rest of the world holds about 1,000 such weapons, and none of them are strike-ready, she said. By contrast, the U.S. and Russia have about 1,000 nukes apiece that are poised to launch toward each other at a moment’s notice, Benedict added, even though, in theory, the Cold War animosity disappeared when the Soviet Union crumbled in the 1980s.

The security of those primed weapons, as well as the uncertainty of Russia’s changing political intentions, present some of the gravest 21st-century concerns to the Doomsday Clock watchers. A terrorist group, for example, could tap into computers securing Russian nuclear weapons, without the Russians’ knowledge, sending ICBMs toward America.

“They are worried about somebody hacking into their system and launching intercontinental ballistic missiles,” Benedict said by phone from her office at the University of Chicago.

And what about the made-up plot in Vigilant Guard about the guy with a bomb in his van driving on I-465 toward Indy?

Suicidal terrorists linked to no particular nation have altered traditional efforts to prevent nuclear annihilation. Launch capability isn’t necessary. A “dirty bomb” — a weapon carrying radioactive material mixed with conventional explosives — could be delivered by a suicide bomber in an SUV. The materials needed could reach the U.S. through our porous shipping ports.

“We do think we are on the brink of a new nuclear age,” Benedict said.

‘Totally irrational’

Amid the flurry of sweat, effort and discovery by emergency responders trying to deal with such a diabolical nuclear strike, organizers of Vigilant Guard and Ardent Sentry also pondered ways to prevent that kind of attack. Their 11-day event included “a variety of tabletop exercises to basically go through a series of what-if scenarios,” said Pacheco, who came to Muscatatuck from the Guard’s Washington, D.C., base. “And all these lessons learned are incorporated into preventing this from happening.”

During the Cold War, the tit-for-tat buildup of nukes by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. (40,000 total) ironically became a deterrent for their use. That “mutually assured destruction” thing had a nasty ring to it in both Russian and English. The nuclear threat is no longer as simple as Us vs. Them, because “them” is a group that could be anywhere.

This is not a hopeless situation, though, Benedict insists. In 1984, when the Doomsday Clock stood at 3 minutes till nuclear midnight, few would’ve believed that by the end of that decade the Berlin Wall would fall and the Soviet Union would collapse.

“The world is full of surprises, and there are possibilities that could result in some pleasant surprises,” Benedict said. “Things can change. That’s the message here.”

Earlier this year, four veteran politicians from the most hawkish days of the Cold War called for the United States to aggressively reinvigorate and lead the drive toward “a world free of nuclear weapons.”

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece co-written by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, that foursome acknowledged the evolving nuclear playing field. Yet they also outlined eight steps to address those changes, including changing the status of those 1,000 armed-and-ready nukes held by the U.S. and Russia, which are vulnerable to terrorist tampering and accidental launches, and better international control of weapons-grade materials.

They quoted John Kennedy saying, “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution,” and Ronald Reagan calling for the abolishment of all nuclear weapons because they are “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”

We can argue about the nuclear track records of Kennedy, Reagan, Kissinger and the rest. But their conclusions are undeniably true, and it would be refreshing to see President Bush and other leaders speak and act as passionately about disarming the world as they do about waging war. When it comes to worst-case scenarios and the Doomsday Clock, it’s past time for a little peace.

Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

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