Those of us of a certain age — older than 65 — remember being taught to “duck and cover” in the event that nuclear bombs began to fall from the sky. Once you saw the bright light in the sky, you were supposed to duck your body and cover your head to protect yourself from the couple of hundred tons of concrete that were falling on you.
It was strictly for morale, of course. As we know now, even a “limited” nuclear exchange would be “catastrophic,” according to Scientific American.
But how about a scenario involving terrorists possessing a couple of nuclear devices and holed up in an American city? The Department of Energy conducted one of the largest domestic exercises in history involving that scenario, and no one was any the wiser.
A dozen U.S. agencies and departments involving hundreds of people took part in a simulation of an attack on Indianapolis, including a fake news broadcast that caught the moment the nuke went off.
The exercise was called “Mighty Derringer” and was headed up by the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST (now known as the Nuclear Emergency Support Team). They tried to make the exercise as realistic as possible, going so far as to hide small amounts of nuclear material around Indianapolis.
While the Mighty Derringer exercise was focused on downtown Indianapolis, the two main planning stations for the drills were just outside the city in Camp Atterbury and in Nevada at Area A-25, a Department of Energy test site, as Richelson explained in a blog post from 2012. A national security expert, he obtained fascinating documents about the Mighty Derringer exercises before he died, though they paint an incomplete picture. You can read them at the National Security Archive. He never did get his hands on this fake newscast used to simulate the nuclear explosion in Indianapolis, though. Or, if he ever did, he never shared it with anyone online.
The Mighty Derringer exercise was a success, based on documents Richelson was able to obtain through FOIA requests. But the documents he did receive still only give us a limited view of the drills all these decades later. There were also plenty of difficulties with coordinating such a large number of government agencies and the “hundreds and hundreds” of people who took part, according to Richelson’s book which quotes former NEST official Alan Mode.
You can imagine many of the agencies that took part in Mighty Derringer dusting off their contingency plans over the past few weeks to deal with the possibility of a nuclear attack.
Given Joe Biden’s “Armageddon gaffes,” you can never be too careful — or too prepared.
