IT MIGHT BE HARD TO PICTURE AT THIS juncture in American history, but there are times, even now, when working for the government can be exciting. Consider a secret Department of Energy training exercise--code name: Mirage Gold--that was staged in New Orleans in October 1994. Hundreds of normally lab-bound nuclear scientists fanned out through the French Quarter carrying briefcases with hidden radiation detectors, while rental vans packed with high-tech electronics roamed the streets and planes fitted with spy cameras swooped overhead. After three days, they found what they were hunting for: a simulated nuclear weapon hidden on a nearby naval base.
There is more to these games than merely giving government employees the chance to play James Bond. The point is to test the preparedness of a secretive task force organized to combat the possibility--eventuality, some would say--of nuclear terrorism in the U.S. Welcome to Fail Safe, the post-cold war edition.
Until now, and hopefully for a long time to come, the spectacle of the U.S. government being blackmailed by nuclear terrorists has been the province of books, movies (including a forthcoming John Travolta film) and a recent series of scary, attention-getting commercials by attention-needing presidential candidate Richard Lugar. Of course, the appeal of nuclear weapons to terrorists is obvious: if destabilizing society or drawing attention to one's cause is the goal, a mushroom cloud outranks truck bombs and sarin attacks.
The danger is real. Making a nuclear weapon is a complex business, but in essence all anyone would need to lay waste to a medium-size city like New Orleans are two things. The first is an understanding of the technology involved, the easy availability of which has been demonstrated by innumerable high school science whiz kids. The second component is actual fissionable material--55 lbs. of enriched uranium, say, which would be enough to turn the heart of New Orleans into radioactive dust. With the increasing use of nuclear technology around the world and the destabilization of Russia, the once stringent global controls on uranium and plutonium are increasingly being subverted. U.S. intelligence officials admit that a terrorist would have no more difficulty slipping a nuclear device into the U.S. than a drug trafficker has bringing in bulk loads of cocaine.
This, however, is a good-news story--in the sense that the public is largely unaware of the lengths to which the U.S. government has already gone to combat the potential of nuclear terror. The cia and fbi work at stopping threats before they happen, while the Energy Department focuses on responding to actual emergencies. Though the department has had its funding cut more than 9% over the past four years, it has almost doubled its budget for responding to nuclear emergencies, now at $70 million annually. The core of the effort is the Nuclear Emergency Search Team--NEST. These are the people America will call on if and when someone claims to have hidden an atom bomb in the Mall of America.