Operation Dark Winter was a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. The timing of Dark Winter, just a few months before the 911 attack, was eerily prescient.
About Operation Dark Winter in brief
Operation Dark Winter was a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. The exercise was intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons. Dark Winter revealed that a catastrophic biowarfare event in the U.S. would lead to considerably reduced U. S. strategic flexibility abroad. The timing of Dark Winter, just a few months before the 911 attack, was eerily prescient, as if the organizers had foreseen how the threat of terrorism, including bioterrorism, would come to consume the government and public in the years to come. It revealed that major fault lines exist between different levels of government, between government and the private sector, among different institutions and agencies, and within the public and private sector.
It also revealed that the lack of sufficient vaccine or drugs to prevent the spread of disease severely limited management options to the institution of the healthcare system, which quickly became overwhelmed and effectively inoperable by the sudden influx of patients with common illnesses who feared they might have smallpox. In the absence of sufficient preparation, Dark Winter showed that the health care system was severely limited to the limited options to correct the disease. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control, with the National Security Council struggling to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus.
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This page is based on the article Operation Dark Winter published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 25, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
