The Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST)

In 1974, a physicist with the U.S. government assembled a group of scientists and technicians for a secret mission to Boston. William Chambers, a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, was charged with searching for a hidden device – a nuclear bomb that would allegedly be detonated if $200,000 were not delivered to the sender of a threatening letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The impromptu "nuclear bomb squad" that Chambers convened disproved the threat, but led to the creation of a permanent Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST).

From 1974 to 1996, NEST evaluated more than 100 threats of nuclear extortion and other incidents, including accidents involving U.S. military aircraft armed with nuclear weapons. Fortunately, only a dozen of these incidents required NEST deployments, according to Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of a new book called Defusing Armageddon. Richelson, a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, has also posted the declassified documents obtained during his research.

The 24 declassified documents cover incidents ranging from NEST's efforts to help locate the remains of a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite that crashed in Canada in 1978, to the controversial MIRAGE GOLD exercise in New Orleans in 1994. Not all of the facts are flattering. As Stephen I. Schwartz notes in Atomic Audit, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) excoriated NEST following the Louisiana test exercise, which involved a fictitious domestic terrorist group. "It is a drastic mistake to assume that NEST technology and procedures will always succeed, resulting in zero nuclear yield," the DOE wrote in a heavily-redacted report.

A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Senate confirmed that NEST was better at disproving nuclear hoaxes than running test exercises. During an investigation into U.S. capabilities to address nuclear terrorism, the Senate concluded that NEST exercises had been conducted "in a manner to 'stack the deck' in favor of unrealistic success". They were also alleged to have allowed "significantly more time to resolve the situation than would be available under realistic conditions". Moreover, "some information was inappropriately leaked" to exercise participants, such as "device location (and) type of source". Finally, "pre-deployment of communications capabilities created optimistic and unrealistic results".