Success Stories

ORAU Helps Plan First-Ever National Nuclear Weapons, Emergency Response Exercise

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU)—recognized for its national security and emergency exercise planning expertise—served as the principal planners for Diablo Bravo 2008 (DB08), a full-scale, emergency response exercise sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) / National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), that took place in Kitsap County, Wash., in late July 2008.

ORAU planned and organized the five-day exercise by facilitating planning conferences, coordinating asset participation and collecting lessons learned.

Due to the successful execution of this national-level exercise, a number of inaugural milestones were made as a result. DB08 was:

• the first national-level exercise to test the response activities to a terrorist attack on nuclear weapons
• the first real-time deployment of response assets
• the first exercise in which the weapons were in DOE custody under the National Response Framework
• the first nuclear weapons exercise in which the U.S. Department of Defense was a supporting agency to a DOE event in the public domain

Admiral Joseph J. Krol, Jr., DOE’s NNSA associate administrator for the Office of Emergency Operations, made the following statement about ORAU’s work on DB08: “The attitude and professionalism demonstrated by [ORAU] contributed significantly to the success of the exercise, and by extension, enhanced the nation’s ability to respond to a terrorist incident involving nuclear weapons.”