Surviving Disaster – How To Survive A Nuclear Attack

This week on Surviving Disaster, host Cade Courtley demonstrates the steps you can take to survive a nuclear attack by terrorists on a major U.S. city.

I had the opportunity to assist in the research for this episode and while it’s incredibly difficult to capture all of the information one would need to survive such a scenario in a short/concise format, the writers and producers of Surviving Disaster did an amazing job.

A 10 kiloton nuclear device detonating in a major U.S.city is a catastrophe on a scale that few can even comprehend.

Surviving Disaster strikes an excellent balance between reality and entertainment while providing a level of detail and accuracy that few others have been able to achieve.

The full episode of Surviving Disaster – Nuclear Attack is available online this week.

Each full episode of this show is available for on week after its on-air premiere. Episodes are added immediately following their premiere date. After one full week of online availability each episode is taken down for one month. After the month has gone by the episode returns and is available for you to watch indefinitely.

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Nuclear Scientist Admits Plotting Al Qaeda Attacks

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that nuclear scientist, Dr Adlene Hicheur, who admitted pinpointing targets for Al Qaeda was yesterday charged with ‘criminal activities related to a terrorist group’. It’s reports of this nature that remind us why so many experts have said, it’s not a question of “if” terrorists get their hands on nuclear weapons, but rather, “when”.

During a brief court appearance at the Palais de Justice in Paris, anti-terrorist judge Christophe Teissier heard how the French authorities had been working with MI5 and the CIA to track Hicheur’s movements around the world.

There were growing fears he was planning a nuclear attack.

He has admitted planning at least one attack with terrorists from Algeria.

The confession in a high-security jail near Paris came before his brother Zitouni, 25, was released without charge after three days of questioning.

U.S. monitors picked up the internet exchange between Hicheur and his North African contacts.

A British security source said: ‘It appears that Al Qaeda are now recruiting extremely intelligent people who have both the knowledge and the resources to potentially create a nuclear bomb or identify nuclear targets.

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Nuclear Attack: Terrorists vs U.S., Are We At Risk

Few people want to think about the possibility of being successfully attacked by terrorists and/or terror sponsoring nations using nuclear weapons. Many would like to think that the United States government is on top of things and watching all avenues of approach. But, the sad truth is that it isn’t looking everywhere it should be looking. The reality of the situation is that the Department of Homeland Security is grossly overwhelmed. From Customs to the Coast Guard the United States suffers from poor technology, low personnel & equipment numbers, brutal budget restrictions, and poor training programs. The obvious avenues of approach are covered well more to provide the citizenry with a false sense of security than anything else.

Confidential discussions with leaders throughout the Homeland Security Network of agencies reveal that the prevention of an atomic attack is not thorough in the United States. In fact, they indicate that nontraditional infiltration and detonation avenues are barely known and those that are known are barely covered. The entire East Coast of the United States is at risk of a nuclear attack, ranging through New York, D.C., Atlanta, and Orlando. With the Secretary of Homeland Security declaring that America is safe from any such attack one is left with asking, “How national security professionals think that it could happen?”

A briefing before national security professionals has revealed a particularly spooky scenario. One that is sure to run chills up the spine of anyone who learns of it and how unprepared the United States remains. It is an attack scenario that could occur at any moment and without any warning whatsoever. Naturally, those who know of it within the government are highly reluctant to allow themselves to be named.

Let’s go into an imaginary world for a moment. Imagine that a nuclear warhead built in Tehran, Iran and developed jointly by Iran, North Korea, and Russia becomes a multi-megaton reality. With the United States and its allies out of Iraq, Iran has an established transport pipe-line to Syria, a close political and religious ally. Imagine that a Gulfstream or Hawker long-range executive jet is modified internally to carry the warhead on a one way trip to the United States.

The aircraft departs Tehran, with its cargo, and lands at a Syrian Air Base located near Damascus for re-fueling and final checks of its deadly cargo. From Damascus, Syria the aircraft flies to an airport inside Bosnia. There, sympathetic officials who have been well compensated pencil-whip a non-existent customs inspection and allow refueling. It is then off again.

Traveling across Europe at near sound speeds, the aircraft follows a properly filed and normal flight plan. Its pilots maintain radio contact with various centers and draw no unusual attention to it as it continues on. There are no established radiologic detection mechanisms for aircraft traveling at high or low speeds. Thus, the aircraft and its cargo continue on without detection. Many long range executive aircraft are capable of traveling from countries such as Bosnia or Hungary through to New York and many East Coast Cities, such as Charleston or even Atlanta, without having to refuel. There would be no need to stop in advanced technology capable airports or U.S. allied countries.

The aircraft flies normally across Europe, over Greenland, and over Iceland as it moves towards the final destination. Again, it continues to fly without its cargo being detected as U.S. airspace begins to get nearer. According to anonymous sources, there are no aircraft in the skies with super sensitive detectors in U.S. airspace searching for radiological signatures. It is an assumption that has not been directly inferred but hasn’t been squashed or corrected by the DHS, either. People just assume that U.S. technology exists to detect this rather simply approach by enemy force. The reality is that such an approach would happen without hindrance or detection. That is what makes this scenario so worrisome to national security experts, military strategists, and the public in general.

When the aircraft enters American Airspace it continues on to whatever city airport, most likely an international airport, it has listed on its flight plan. As it approaches the airport, the co-pilot walks to the back of the plane and performs the final arming processes following the controlled decompression of the cabin. Decompressing the cabin allows a barometric pressure sensitive detonator to have a more accurate reading of altitude. It will detonate the bomb at a given altitude which is detected by air pressure. Altitude is key in maximizing the effect of a nuclear explosion.

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Homeland Security Launches Pilot to Counter Small-Vessel Attacks

The U.S. Homeland Security Department is undertaking a pilot program aimed at countering the threat of a small-vessel attack on the nation’s ports, an official told Global Security Newswire last week (see GSN, July 24).

Boats docked at a marina in San Diego, Calif. The United States has launched a new effort to protect its ports from small vessel attacks, an official said last week (Don Emmert/Getty Images).

The agency’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office has launched a “West Coast Maritime Pilot” effort, based in San Diego and Washington state’s Puget Sound region.

The program is slated to deploy and evaluate radiation and nuclear detection equipment, to include human-portable and mobile, or boat-mounted, systems, according to Chris Inman, the detection office director for the San Diego portion of the effort.

Program officials will develop a regional maritime concept of operations and provide naval-specific training on nuclear detection equipment, he said. It also will “identify any gaps that may still be remaining in that maritime architecture,” Inman said.

National concern about the threats posed by small naval vessels appears to be on the rise.

Bethann Rooney, manager of port security for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, sees a small-vessel attack as the greatest security risk facing the nation’s ports today.

“For us, we’ve essentially got a single choke point that all deep draft vessels need to pass,” she said during a July 10 panel discussion at the Center for National Policy. “If that choke point is compromised by a small vessel attack … it will essentially shut down the entire port of New York and New Jersey.”

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Homeland Security Council Urges Nuclear Attack Response Planning

The recently released Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation, developed by the White House Homeland Security Council, stresses that it’s “incumbent upon all levels of government” to prepare “through focused nuclear attack response planning.” Mayors, governors, emergency managers and first responders will be the first to deal with the consequences, and according to that same guidance, “local and state community preparedness to respond to a nuclear detonation could result in life-saving on the order of tens of thousands of lives.”

Ready or Not?, a yearly analysis of preparedness for health emergencies that’s released by the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health, found that “surge capacity remains the largest threat to the nation’s ability to respond to a major catastrophe.” Local, and specifically, regional abilities to care for the wounded will be vital just after a nuclear terrorist attack. Unfortunately many communities haven’t gotten the point.

Two assumptions prevail at the local level: 1.) Any nuclear explosion will completely destroy a major city; and 2.) The military is the only organization capable of responding.

These ideas are fueled by Cold War-era memories in which the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union meant thousands of bombs would fall on U.S. cities. However, scenarios involving a nuclear terrorist attack, though horrible beyond comprehension, are not in the same league.

Undoubtedly the federal government would eventually take charge of response efforts and military aid would be required. Yet as overwhelming as it would be for local and state resources, they would be all that’s available in the first hours and days following an explosion.

So what should local officials do?

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North Korea Threatens to Wipe U.S. Off The Globe

North Korea threatened Wednesday to wipe the United States off the map as Washington and its allies watched for signs the regime will launch a series of missiles in the coming days.

Off China’s coast, a U.S. destroyer was tailing a North Korean ship suspected of transporting illicit weapons to Myanmar in what could be the first test of U.N. sanctions passed to punish the nation for an underground nuclear test last month.

The Kang Nam left the North Korean port of Nampo a week ago with the USS John S. McCain close behind. The ship, accused of transporting banned goods in the past, is believed bound for Myanmar, according to South Korean and U.S. officials.

The new U.N. Security Council resolution requires member states to seek permission to inspect suspicious cargo. North Korea has said it would consider interception a declaration of war and on Wednesday accused the U.S. of seeking to provoke another Korean War.

“If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will … wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all,” the official Korean Central News Agency said.

The warning came on the eve of the 59th anniversary of the start of the three-year Korean War, which ended in a truce in 1953, not a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula in state of war.

Source

Nuclear Terror Would Strain Bomb Sleuths

If the unthinkable happened, would we be left on the day after, as radioactive dust settled, with the unknowable?

If a terrorist nuclear bomb destroyed the heart of a great city, how would we know who did it, with what? Mideast fanatics with a device improvised from stolen uranium? A weapon smuggled in by a rogue regime? A hijacked U.S. bomb?

Where do you strike back?  How do you head off another attack?

President Barack Obama calls nuclear terrorism “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It’s an unthinkable that’s being thought about daily in classified corners of world capitals.

But knowledgeable scientists and the investigators behind a new U.S. government report say the American nuclear establishment needs more specialists and more background data on possible bomb sources to do the detective job that awaits on that day after.

“I don’t believe the intelligence community is ready for the challenge,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who worked for years as a U.S. intelligence leader on weapons of mass destruction.

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Defusing Armageddon – Doomsday Detectives Battle Nuclear Terror

The U.S. government has developed a suite of technologies that would enable it to determine the origin of a nuclear weapon used in an attack against the United States, according to a forthcoming book on America’s nuclear detectives.

In the event of such an attack, U.S. officials believe they could determine where the fissile material used in the nuclear weapon originated, as well as who carried out the assault, intelligence historian Jeffrey T. Richelson writes in “Defusing Armageddon.”

“Not only can intelligence help prevent a nuclear terrorist attack, but also in the event one occurs, it may be able to identify the entity responsible and those who contributed, particularly by providing a bomb or components,” Richelson claims in the first book-length treatment of these counter-nuclear efforts, including the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), America’s bomb hunters.

This is important, Richelson argues, because U.S. officials believe the most likely nuclear attack would involve an established nuclear power providing either a nuclear device or components to a terrorist group. Finding out which nuclear power provided these items to the terrorists would be key in crafting an appropriate U.S. response.

Source – msnbc.com.

Nuclear Terror Attack Number One Threat – ElBaradei

The likelihood that terrorists will detonate a nuclear weapon poses the greatest risk to world security, surpassing proliferation threats from Iran and North Korea, United Nations atomic chief Mohamed ElBaradei said.

“There is a lot of interest on the part of extremist groups to obtain nuclear material,” ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a scientific forum today in Vienna during the annual conference of the 145 nations in the IAEA. “It’s the No. 1 security threat right now.”

The IAEA, established in 1956 under the slogan “Atoms for Peace,” said it’s becoming easier for groups and countries to access nuclear secrets because detailed bomb-making plans have been circulated electronically. Nuclear-armed terrorists are more dangerous than governments with atomic weapons because they don’t have the same decision-making restraints, according to ElBaradei.

“The rules of deterrence don’t apply to them,” said the Egyptian diplomat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. “If they get it, they will use it.”

The IAEA has recorded 18 attempts to sell bomb-grade uranium and plutonium to black-market intermediaries since 1993. During the same period, the agency has tracked more than 1,300 incidents involving less-potent nuclear material that may be used to spread radioactive contamination.

“There is a possibility that the seized material was only a sample of larger quantities available,” IAEA officials who maintain the agency’s Illicit Trafficking Database said Sept. 26 in a statement. “These materials continue to pose potential security risks.”

Radiological Attack

A radiological attack on Washington could inflict economic damage of as much as $107 billion.

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NYC Hearing On Nuclear Terror Threat

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, testifying a few blocks from where terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, warned Wednesday that the city needs help as the “last line of defense” against a potentially far more devastating attack.

Kelly, Los Angeles police Chief William Bratton and FBI Deputy Director John Pistole were among several witnesses called by a congressional committee studying the threat posed by nuclear, chemical and biological attacks. Read more

Detecting Nuclear Terrorism

The visible security presence for the Democratic convention is pervasive. But undercover agents are also working to contain a potentially greater threat: nuclear terrorism. Bob Orr reports.

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