Nuclear Explosion Detection Equipment Located In Arlington To Get New Operator

ARLINGTON, VA — The Arlington County Board is scheduled to vote Saturday on whether to approve an amendment that will let the operations and maintenance of nuclear explosion detection equipment located on county property be transferred to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC).

The U.S. military maintains explosion detection equipment in Arlington County that is designed to help identify the perpetrators if a nuclear bomb is ever detonated in the Washington, D.C., area. The equipment was installed at an unidentified location in Arlington by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in 2016 after an agreement was reached between the military agency and Arlington County.

County staff recommended that the board approve the proposed amendment, which will transfer control of the explosion detection equipment located on county property from the DTRA, based at Fort Belvoir, to AFTAC, a military agency based in Florida.

In their board report for the April 22 meeting agenda item, county staff attached a letter from the DTRA and a letter from the AFTAC requesting that information about the equipment be exempt from public disclosure.

In its April 3 letter to Arlington County, AFTAC noted that a section of Virginia's Freedom of Information Act allows information related to the prevention or response to terrorist activity or cyber-attacks to be exempt from disclosure.

Both AFTAC and DTRA have responsibilities related to nuclear deterrence and monitoring, ARLnow reported Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock forward, largely because of the mounting hostilities between the U.S. and Russia over the war in Ukraine. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

In its April 3 letter, AFTAC stated that the system located in Arlington is designed “to characterize nuclear explosions in urban environments.”

Information gathered by the system “is critical for the federal government’s efforts to determine who was responsible for and how to respond to the event,” Brian Hoybach, director of system development for AFTAC, wrote in the letter.

The information will be used to support law enforcement’s efforts to find the perpetrators and "will be shared with the consequence management community" to help with damage assessments, the letter states.

Disclosure of the location of the equipment in Arlington and information about its operations “would jeopardize the ability for the system to provide valuable information in a timely fashion to the law enforcement and consequence management communities, by giving insight into the system’s design and coverage, and possibly how to defeat the system,” Hoybach wrote in the letter.

AFTAC will replace the DTRA as the licensee under the original agreement negotiated with Arlington County.

County staff, in the board report prepared for the April 22 county board meeting, said no public engagement was conducted on the amendment due to the exemption from disclosure included in the original 2016 agreement.