Nuclear Detection Devices Said In Place Around Capital
NewsMax Wires
Monday, Mar. 4, 2002
In the wake of the arrest by Pakistan of two of its former nuclear scientists and the failure by one in a polygraph test about his recent activities, the Washington Post has reported that yet a third Pakistani nuclear scientist tried to arrange the sale of an atomic weapon design to Libya.
Such unsettling reports have spurred the Bush administration to deploy hundreds of nuclear material sensors since November to the nation’s borders, foreign outposts and routes into the nation’s capital.
The detection devices are called gamma ray and neutron flux detectors and before September 11 they were utilized only by civilian, non-combat mobile Nuclear Emergency Search Teams (NEST).
According to the Post, Delta Force has been assigned the mission of killing or disabling anyone detected with a suspected nuclear device and turning it over to the scientists to be disarmed.
Radiation sensors were reportedly in use at last month's Olympic Games in Utah.
In the meantime, the Bush administration has ordered a crash program to develop and build even more sophisticated generation devices at the national nuclear laboratories.
According to the Post report, the national security team has been designing scenarios: tough choices for the President if sensors, for instance, picked up a radiation signature on a vessel headed up the Potomac River.
Some of the difficult questions outlined by the Post: Would the president delegate on-scene commanders to make a decision that might result in nuclear detonation? Which officials, meanwhile, should be evacuated? Would government inform the public of the threat, a step that would wreak panic without precedent in any country and complicate the job of finding the weapon?
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Al-Qaeda
DNC
Homeland/Civil Defense
War on Terrorism
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