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The disabling team has a number of ways to cripple a bomb. Working with Army demolition experts, they might decide to place their own bombs around the device and blow it up in such a way that the terrorist bomb's conventional explosives wouldn't set off its nuclear component (nuclear weapons always have both a conventional and a nuclear element). nest also has a 30-mm cannon designed to blast a terrorist bomb into harmless pieces. Another option is to pour liquid nitrogen over the device to freeze its electronics.
If the bomb is a radiological dispersion device (that is, a conventional bomb larded with deadly radioactive shrapnel that will be scattered across a wide area) a special NEST team can quickly erect a nylon tent 35 ft. high and 50 ft. in diameter. Thirty thousand cubic feet of thick foam is then pumped into this "containment cone." When the terrorist's explosive is detonated, the tent is shredded, but the foam theoretically traps the radiological debris.
In various game-playing scenarios, NEST has imagined itself presenting the President of the U.S. with the worst choices of his life, choices he may have only minutes to make. In one apparently plausible scenario, there is a 10% chance that if nest tries to defuse a bomb it will accidentally detonate with its full 10-kiloton yield, killing 100,000 Americans. But there's another choice: the bomb could be blown up in such a way that it would produce only a 1-kiloton yield, which would vaporize a mere 10,000 citizens. It will be cold comfort for survivors to know that the government has a special emergency room for just this eventuality at the Methodist Medical Center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Called the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center (REAC), it is the only E.R. in the country dedicated solely to treating nuclear-radiation patients.
Currently NEST doesn't operate overseas, where much of the nuclear danger lies. Russia and the other states with nuclear weapons still guard their atom bomb secrets closely. But scientists at the U.S. nuclear-weapons labs maintain back-channel contacts with their counterparts from the other nuclear countries, and Washington has begun selling Moscow special equipment for recovering and handling stolen weapons.
Some nuclear scientists like John Nuckolls, associate director at the DOE's Livermore lab, believe that America's nuclear preparedness team will eventually have to join others overseas in an international nest force. "The destruction of any city in the world by nuclear terrorists would threaten all cities and nations," he insists. If so, we are all potential hostages. And the men and women of NEST may be the only ones who can come to the rescue.