Doomsday detectives battle nuclear terrorism (MSNBC)

[jpak]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28301954/

NEW YORK — The U.S. government has developed a suite of technologies that would enable it to determine the origin of a nuclear weapon used in an attack against the United States, according to a forthcoming book on America’s nuclear detectives.

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An attack on the United States would trigger a series of reactions among those responsible for determining the weapon’s origin. These efforts would be coordinated by the National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center, a little-known, three-year-old operation, which works closely with an Energy Department team tasked with ferreting out nuclear explosives before they go off and developing “nuclear forensics” to unearth the origin of a weapon.

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To gather nuclear debris — the key evidence in the detective story — a specially equipped Air Force WC-135 aircraft called “Constant Phoenix” would be deployed. The plane is a modified Boeing 707 that carries debris sampling and air-sampling equipment as well as devices to track radioactive clouds. One problem with this part of the plan, Richelson and others note, is that there is only one WC-135 left, down from a Cold War total of ten. Energy Department officials have called for development of Predator-like drones to fill the gap.

The debris would be analyzed and compared against a database of nuclear signatures, which the United States has been gathering as part of its intelligence efforts on foreign powers. With this information, the United States should be able to determine, at the very least, which country originally produced the highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

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