Found: U.S. Government’s Fake Newscast for 1986 Nuclear Training Session


Gizmodo has uncovered a fake news broadcast created for Mighty Derringer, a large-scale Department of Energy nuclear terrorism training session held in Indianapolis in 1986. It’s pretty good and, yes, pretty scary.

In December of 1986, the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, the Department of Energy, and just about every other federal agency you can think of came together in Indianapolis for an enormous training exercise code-named Mighty Derringer. The plan was to simulate a nuclear terrorist incident and explore how every agency would react and whether they would cooperate. To enhance the verisimilitude of the war games, the U.S. government went so far as to record a fake news broadcast about a nuclear bomb exploding in Indianapolis.

Watch it here.