Defense Dept. to hold second anti-terror drill. From WND:
The Defense Department has scheduled a second major, three-day exercise to combat nuclear terrorism in the Charleston, S.C. area.
The goal is not prevention, but coping with the catastrophic results of a terrorist nuclear attack on a major U.S. port city.
The military’s Joint Task Force-Civil Support, headquartered at Ft. Monroe, Va., will host the three-day drill for commanders and representatives of other federal agencies that would be involved in managing the consequences of a 10-megaton nuclear blast, enough to inflict mass causalities and devastation on an American city.
Like last summer’s exercise, the Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 drill is centered around a hypothetical blast that affects nearly half a million people across a 900-square mile section of tidewater South Carolina. The scenario assumes 10,000 fatalities and more than 30,000 injuries…
The drill is strikingly similar to a scenario detailed by Graham Allison, former Pentagon assistant secretary for plans and policy and current Harvard professor, in his book, “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.”
A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Allison wrote, the Central Intelligence Agency presented Bush with a report that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb into New York City. The president, according to the book, dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers to New York to search for the weapon, which was never found…