Planning for Terrible Situations
http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2014/10/13/planning-for-terrible-situations/
Planning for Terrible Situations
Published in El País (Spain) on 5 October 2014 by Soledad Gallego-Díaz [link to original]
Translated from Spanish by Courtney Cadenhead. Edited by Helaine Schweitzer.
Posted on October 13, 2014.
For many years, various world leaders, including Barack Obama and several Europeans, have participated in joint exercises designed to test their responsiveness and coordination in the face of a hypothetical emergency in which a terrorist group creates a dirty bomb a nuclear bomb and threatens to detonate it within an international financial center.
The latest exercise took place last March at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, Netherlands. World leaders gathered with their senior advisers, made decisions in person, contacting and coordinating with each other according to the increasingly threatening and catastrophic situations prepared by a group of international military experts that played out on the virtual stage.
The final result of these presidential exercises is unknown. However, one of the consequences of the summit called for Japan, Italy and Belgium to send some 500 tons of nuclear waste material to the United States, where it would supposedly be better controlled. The experts say, however, that Japan still has access to too much plutonium, which it has been recycling as fuel for its civil nuclear reactors, which it stores in its own territory, and which many experts would like to see maintained elsewhere.
The question is not whether or not these exercises are necessary. There is little doubt in that regard.
What is striking, though, is that these world leaders readily agree to participate in this type of exercise of a military nature, but they do not hold similar exercises with respect to how they would react in the face of a possible crisis provoked not by a terrorist attack on an international financial center, but by an economic storm born from those same centers, or by a political bomb that spins out of control and causes similar consequences.