Aaron Bank - Biography - Later Years

Later Years

Aaron Bank retired from the Army in 1958, and remained a vigorous man well into his eighties, swimming several miles a day in the Pacific Ocean near his home in San Clemente, California.

In the early 1970s, Colonel Bank began a personal investigation of the lack of security at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is a few miles south of San Clemente. Bank determined that the San Onofre plant was protected by one private security guard with a sidearm, as if the only concern was civilian theft. Bank concluded that a single special forces soldier could overcome this guard, seize the plant and destroy it with a small quantity of explosives. The consequence could be a Chernobyl-type accident, whereby the damaged plant would spew radioactivity into the atmosphere and contaminate thousands of square miles, including the nearby Los Angeles basin.

Colonel Bank became alarmed at the recklessness of the civilian operators of San Onofre, and actively lobbied, then testified before a closed session of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, warning of the dangers of terrorist sabotage at San Onofre. As one of the world's leading experts on the sabotage of electric generating facilities, Bank spoke with great authority—but the AEC ignored him and did nothing.

Bank then shared his concerns with an investigative journalist, who wrote an exposé of poor security at San Onofre for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1974. This led to a Congressional investigation and further secret testimony by Colonel Bank before a Congressional committee. This time, Bank's testimony was heeded, and Congressional pressure forced the AEC and its successor, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to act. The U.S. nuclear power industry was ordered to spend billions of dollars implementing anti-terrorist security measures at commercial nuclear reactors nationwide, including on-site security squads with automatic weapons, remote scram capabilities (to take control of the plant from a distance and shut it down in the event of an attack) and the use of "red teams" to probe defenses and thereby eliminate vulnerabilities.