Pentagon, NNSA and FBI do presidential nuclear exercise

The National Nuclear Security Administration partnered with other government agencies to conduct an exercise on how a team would gather evidence to support the president make decisions in a nuclear attack scenario.

The Prominent Hunt exercise series, which the recent exercise was part of, took place Jan. 26 to 31 around Schenectady, N.Y., the Pentagon announced March 5. It featured the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the FBI and the Defense Department’s Army 20th CBRNE Command and Air Force Technical Application Center, all of which make up the National Technical Nuclear Forensics Ground Collection Task Force.

The Ground Collection Task Force is responsible, in the event of a nuclear detonation, of collecting nuclear debris samples near the detonation site and transporting the samples to DoD labs for analysis. 

The agencies and intelligence community would then aim to provide analysis to the U.S. government to discover the responsible party, the press release said.

“These technical skills and tools deny potential perpetrators — including state sponsors of terrorism — anonymity and ensure they will be held fully accountable,” Wendin Smith, NNSA associate administrator and deputy undersecretary for counterterrorism and counterproliferation, said in the release. “Prominent Hunt exercises are key to demonstrating these capabilities.”