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Defenders  DEFUSING ARMAGEDDON: Inside NEST, America’s Secret
Nuclear Bomb Squad. Jeffrey T. Richelson. xvi + 318 pp. W. W.
Norton, 2009. $27.95.  The large-area imagerClick to Enlarge
ImageWhat would the U.S. government do if it were informed that
terrorists had planted nuclear explosives in one or more major
U.S. cities? This question may sound hypothetical, but it is
not. As Jeffrey T. Richelson reports in Defusing Armageddon,
officials were confronted with such warnings more than 100 times
between 1970 and 1993, and many times since. Fortunately, all
were hoaxes.  In about 10 percent of the cases, this was not
obvious, however, and the government—usually the FBI—called on
the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) to search for and
defuse a possible nuclear explosive. NEST, formed in the
mid-1970s, is a group of technical experts (mostly from Lawrence
Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories) who have
equipment to detect radiation fro