WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. Defense Department and a team of inter-agency partners led by the FBI carried out an exercise to validate the team's ability to gather evidence to support presidential decision-making during a nuclear attack scenario.
'The Prominent Hunt exercise series not only tests the U.S. government's technical capabilities, it also serves as a mechanism to reinforce the soft skills of collaboration and teamwork among federal, state and local partners,' said Susan Ferensic, assistant director of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
In addition to professionals from the Defense Department, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and FBI took part in the exercises. Together these agencies make up the National Technical Nuclear Forensics Ground Collection Task Force.
Prominent Hunt took place during January 26-31 in the vicinity of Schenectady, New York, and in the surrounding counties of Albany and Saratoga, the Pentagon said in a press release.
In the event of a nuclear detonation, the ground collection task force is responsible for collecting nuclear ground debris samples near the site of the detonation and transporting them to DOD laboratories for analysis, said Brian Kohler, the director of Nuclear Forensics, Energy and Survivability within DOD's Office of Nuclear Matters.
The results of that analysis, coupled with input from the intelligence community, allows the U.S. government to discover who the responsible party for a detonation is.
'These technical skills and tools deny potential perpetrators - including state sponsors of terrorism - anonymity and ensure they will be held fully accountable. Prominent Hunt exercises are key to demonstrating these capabilities,' said Wendin Smith, NNSA associate administrator and deputy undersecretary for counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation.
Nuclear forensics was mandated by Congress in the early 2000s as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One of the goals was to enhance the ability to use forensic evidence from the nuclear debris to discover who was responsible for a nuclear detonation inside the U.S. But those explosions that Prominent Hunt focuses on are not from nuclear missiles like those that might come from a nuclear-armed adversary nation.
Timothy Jacomb-Hood, the senior scientific advisor for the Office of Nuclear Matters, said nuclear forensics is focused on deterring attacks by terrorists using an improvised nuclear device or by states who plan to deny responsibility for an attack. These types of attacks won't be traceable from a launch within a nation.
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