The National Nuclear Security of Administration’s Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation coordinated a multi-laboratory nuclear forensics capabilities exercise, the agency said recently.

The Epic Shadow exercise is held twice a year by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to demonstrate the NNSA’s Nuclear Forensics Material Analysis Program (NF-MAP). With NF-MAP, NNSA says decision-makers will be able to quickly determine who is responsible for a nuclear threat if the United States intercepts nuclear material.

“NF-MAP is a vital element of U.S. national security,” Rick Christensen, acting director of the NNSA’s Office of Nuclear Forensics, said in the press release.

This most recent exercise involved local law enforcement intercepting nuclear material by a fictitious perpetrator, and NF-MAP laboratories performing forensic analyses on the nuclear samples and then comparing them to similar material found in their records.

Participating in Epic Shadow were such facilities as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Y-12 National Security Complex.