Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005 | 11:13 a.m.
The scenario: An Air Force plane carrying seven airmen and two nuclear weapons crashes at Nellis Air Force Base, exploding on impact.
The crew is killed instantly. Among the wreckage, recovery teams find one of the bombs intact, but the other has been split apart and could be leaking deadly radioactive particles.
Now the crucial questions: How well would civilian agencies and the military respond if such an event occurred? Do local, county and state officials have the know-how to keep area residents safe?
Those questions are at the heart of a four-day military exercise under way at Nellis. A national defense agency is testing about 150 Air Force, federal, state, county and local emergency personnel to see how well they can work together during the ultra-realistic drill.
There is no actual crash site and certainly no radioactivity, but everything else was planned to be as authentic as possible, right down to a tour of the site by an actor posing as Gov. Kenny Guinn and phony reporters asking military leaders tough questions about the accident.
"We simulate this as if it was real," said Don Kerr, public affairs specialist for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is sponsoring the exercise.
Air Force Maj. William Hare, deputy exercise director for the agency, said he has been planning the drill at Nellis for about a year. A federal directive known as the National Response Plan dictates that such emergency response tests be conducted regularly throughout the country.
"It's highly unlikely, highly improbable" that such a disaster would occur, Hare said, "but we need to be prepared"
The military has been known to store nuclear weapons at Area 2, a heavily guarded part of Nellis at the foot of Sunrise Mountain.
The Air Force maintains most of the country's nuclear forces, including a fleet of strategic bombers that carry nuclear weapons. The weapons are designed not to detonate upon impact unless they are armed, but they contain radioactive particles that can cause contamination if accidentally released.
Preparations for the elaborate drill began long before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, he added, but the true-life catastrophe does add to the gravity of such an exercise.
"There is a sense of urgency," Hare said. "There is a sense of seriousness."
The exercise began Monday, when the plane crash scenario was sprung on the 99th Air Base Wing at Nellis to test its ability to assess and contain the potential damage.
Tuesday and Wednesday, test administrators monitored the military's ability to coordinate with emergency teams outside the base, including Nevada's National Guard and the Clark County Emergency Operations Center.
The participants had to determine the contamination threat level and issue appropriate instructions to the surrounding community. The decision was to tell residents to remain in their homes until further notice.
Upon conclusion of the exercise today, military leaders will go over the results with participants and zero in on areas where they can improve.
Deborah Monette, the National Nuclear Security Administration's assistant manager for national security, said they will be looking at factors such as how well the agencies worked together, the duration of response times by each agency, and the accuracy and reliability of equipment.
"It's one thing to use it in a laboratory," Monette said about technology used in the drill. "It's another thing to use it in a real environment."
Hare said the last time military personnel encountered a real nuclear emergency similar to the one simulated was 25 years ago.
On Sept. 19, 1980, an Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile silo in Damascus, Ark., dropped a wrench socket, which fell to the bottom of the silo, striking the missile on its way down.
A pressurized fuel tank on the Titan sprung a leak. Hours later, the fuel vapors ignited, causing an explosion that killed one airman and injured 21 others.
It also blew off the steel silo door and blasted the nuclear warhead 200 yards into the air. Luckily, no contamination leaked when the warhead hit the ground.
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