America’s Network of Secret Bomb Detectors Could Be Growing
North America at night, 2012.
Kaveh Waddell By Kaveh Waddell The Atlantic Read bio
July 19, 2016
Can a mysterious device help the government protect Northern Virginia from a nuclear attack?
Stop on the sidewalk on a downtown street in any large American city, and take a look around. Check out the utility poles nearby, the metal boxes planted at the street corners, the cameras dangling from awnings and eaves. Urban infrastructure is made up of thousands upon thousands of moving parts, and many of the gizmos that make a city run are designed to do their jobs without attracting too much attention.
Now, a mysterious new device may be coming to Arlington County, the wealthy part of Northern Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C. that’s home to the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA. According to the Defense Department, the new device is for bomb detection—but that’s about as much as they’d like anybody to know about it.
Earlier this year, a branch of the Defense Department called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) approached Arlington County with a request to install the bomb detector somewhere on county property. (The county owns a lot of land and all sorts of structures: schools, post offices, libraries, recycling centers, and so forth.) But the request came with a stipulation that the nature of the device and its location be kept secret. The county board will vote on the request later today.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/americas-network-secret-bomb-detectors-could-be-growing/130020/?oref=d-dontmiss
