What do first responders do after a nuclear strike on Naval Magazine Indian Island? Who can’t be saved? How do you help in the shadow of a bomb that just fell on your community?
These are not hypothetical questions. They were the subject of a classified federal training exercise conducted at Indian Island — a facility handling ordnance for the surface fleet including missile destroyers and carrier groups out of Everett. The exercise happened. First responders attended. And its contents remain hidden from the public those first responders would be trying to save.
Jefferson County’s emergency director confirmed the classified nature of that training to me directly. Her words: “Why terrify the people?”
Fear without information is paralysis. Fear with information is democracy. It is how federal policy gets changed — not by the few who hold clearances, but by the many who hold votes.
Northwest Washington is one of the most significant concentrations of nuclear strike infrastructure on Earth. Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor houses the largest deployed stockpile of nuclear weapons in the United States. The incoming Columbia-class submarines will carry weapons capable of destroying hardened command-and-control targets anywhere on the planet before a full retaliatory launch can be ordered. That is not deterrence in the traditional sense. That is first strike capability. And it is based here, among us, in the waters of Hood Canal.
Naval Radio Station Jim Creek is the communications nerve that would order those launches. In 2019, The Seattle Times reported that Russian state television named Jim Creek alongside the Pentagon and Camp David as first-strike targets. The strategic logic is sound regardless of the messenger: destroy the command-and-control link and you blind the submarine fleet. Which means Jim Creek is on the list. Which means we are on the list.
The United States is currently spending on nuclear weapons modernization at a scale that matches or exceeds the combined military expenditure of every other nation on Earth. We are not maintaining a deterrent. We are leading a race — and the destination of that race is not security. It is the progressive elimination of the margin between crisis and catastrophe.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists currently places its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest to catastrophe in the Clock’s history.
Those of us who live here carry this reality. We live approximately 10 minutes from annihilation by submarine-launched ballistic missile. Our first responders have trained for what comes after. Our hospitals may or may not have survived.
I disagree. And I think you should too.
The Navy is currently accepting public comments on its environmental assessment for Columbia-class submarine facilities at Bangor. The comment period closes June 25. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action — whose founder Glen Milner won a landmark Supreme Court FOIA case against the Navy — has called for a full Environmental Impact Statement and a 90-day extension. They are right.
But beyond this comment period, what Northwest Washington needs is a reckoning. Give us the data. Show us the exercise. Let us see the whole picture of what it means to live here — the logical, analytical, human data about what has been built in our name, at our doorstep, pointed at the world.
The Navy is not a sovereign. It serves the public whose taxes built every submarine, every pier, every warehouse at Indian Island. When the public says 30 days is not enough to comment on a 50-year commitment, that is not obstruction. That is citizenship.
If this strikes you as important, submit a comment before 11:59 p.m. today at st.news/sub. Use your voice. Use your power. The Navy is listening — but only if we speak.
We are not outside observers commenting on policy. We are the people who would not survive the first exchange.
We deserve to know.
