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NEST was formed in 1975 after an extortionist threatened to blow up Boston with a nuclear device unless he was paid $200,000. Since then, NEST has evaluated 110 threats, and mobilized itself to deal with about 30 of them; like the Boston incident, all have been hoaxes. Yet NEST is more than a high-tech SWAT team. At the remote Pajarito site in the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory complex in New Mexico, 17 scientists are using technology found on the shelves of Radio Shack and the type of nuclear fuel sold on the black market to construct homemade bombs. To dismantle a makeshift device, scientists first must know the various ways in which it might be constructed; so far, the team has assembled more than a dozen.
Over the past few months, TIME has been permitted to take an inside look at the operations of nest, which employs more than 1,000 men and women. Many are scientists who helped build America's nuclear arsenal. Others are volunteers from Energy Department offices around the country. All must be ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.
The first line of defense is made up of people like Lewis Newby, a former Navy pilot who heads a team of NEST scientists at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Newby travels everywhere with a cellular phone and call-out roster for other team members; at home, a special beeper sits on his nightstand. When a nuclear threat is received, Newby and his colleagues must assess it. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, nest has a computer filled with thousands of pages of everything publicly written about making a nuclear weapon: newspaper clips, magazine articles, reports in scientific journals, even passages from spy novels. The computer can quickly run a cross-check to see if the extortionist knows what he is talking about or has merely lifted his blackmail note from a Tom Clancy book.
Assuming the threat sounds genuine, the team's first crucial task is to locate the bomb, which is presumably hidden. After flying in from around the country on military transport, NEST searchers divide the threatened city--the cia and fbi assume terrorists will target an urban area in order to incur maximum casualties--into search grids. Energy Department aircraft, specially fitted with photographic equipment, are sent aloft to take shots of the city for detailed maps that can be used if intelligence sources narrow the search to a particular area or type of structure. Helicopters equipped with radiation detectors can sweep over the city as well, but a nuclear weapon gives off little telltale radiation and is nearly impossible to find from above a dense, urban area.
Most of the search must be conducted on the ground. Minivans are rented at the local airport, the backseats removed and replaced with electronic detectors that can sniff the neutrons and gamma radiation a nuclear device might emit. The vans, however, are only good for use in large open areas like parking lots and highways. To search narrow streets and buildings, as many as 100 two-person teams, dressed as inconspicuously as possible, are sent on foot patrols. One team member carries a special radiation detector designed to be hidden in briefcases, student backpacks, laptop computer bags--even beer coolers, in the case of a threat to vaporize the Super Bowl.