http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48454
Monday, January 23, 2006 _____ _____ HOMELAND INSECURITY Another nuke exercise in Charleston Defense Dept. to hold second anti-terror drill _____ Posted: January 23, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern _____ C 2006 WorldNetDaily.com The Defense Department has scheduled a second major, three-day exercise to combat nuclear terrorism in the Charleston, S.C. area. The goal is not prevention, but coping with the catastrophic results of a terrorist nuclear attack on a major U.S. port city. The military's Joint Task Force-Civil Support, headquartered at Ft. Monroe, Va., will host the three-day drill for commanders and representatives of other federal agencies that would be involved in managing the consequences of a 10-megaton nuclear blast, enough to inflict mass causalities and devastation on an American city. Like last summer's exercise, the Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 drill is centered around a hypothetical blast that affects nearly half a million people across a 900-square mile section of tidewater South Carolina. The scenario assumes 10,000 fatalities and more than 30,000 injuries. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and senior Coast Guard brass will be on hand. Though the target of the attack is Charleston, no part of the exercise will actually take place there. Maj. Gen. Bruce Davis, the task force's commander, will oversee the exercise from Fort Monroe. Joint Task Force-Civil Support - part of U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the Defense Department's domestic military activity - is a standing joint task force composed of active, reserve and National Guard members from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, as well as civilian personnel. Last summer, a similar exercise, "Sudden Respond '05," was led by Virginia's Fort Monroe-based Joint Task Force-Civil Support. It, too, was designed to simulate a nuclear terrorist attack that the highest U.S. officials, including President Bush, have said is the No. 1 threat facing the nation. Organizers say the nuclear drills should not frighten civilians but instead encourage them to learn how to protect themselves if such an attack - which some officials have referred to as inevitable - should occur. The drill is strikingly similar to a scenario detailed by Graham Allison, former Pentagon assistant secretary for plans and policy and current Harvard professor, in his book, "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe." A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Allison wrote, the Central Intelligence Agency presented Bush with a report that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb into New York City. The president, according to the book, dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers to New York to search for the weapon, which was never found. Allison described the devastation that a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb would visit on Manhattan, were it detonated in the middle of historic Times Square: some 1 million people would die almost immediately. "The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district, the New York Times building, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within a third of a mile to the point of detonation," he wrote. "The ensuring firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving a landscape resembling the World Trade Center site. From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City Bombing." As WND has reported, for more than 10 years, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida has planned to use nuclear weapons in a terrorist attack on the U.S. The plan is dubbed "American Hiroshima." In fact, as first reported in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, captured al-Qaida operatives and documents suggest the weapons have already been smuggled into the country. For continuing and complete coverage of Osama bin Laden's "American Hiroshima" plans, subscribe to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin <http://www.g2bulletin.com/> , the premium, online, intelligence newsletter published by the founder of WND. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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