They were talking less about disaster response and more about the ability to mobilize and utilize resources in response to an urgent need.

While the cracking dome is an issue that should be of high priority, calling it critical or urgent is a disservice to those words and to critical or urgent disasters.

Where as the dome issue in the south Pacific can still be neglected or ignored for years, possible decades, without dramatic impact, the Chernobyl disaster required a response on the order of days or weeks to prevent massive negative consequences to the surrounding environment. By trying to draw parallels to the Chernobyl disaster you're minimizing the immediacy and criticality of Chernobyl level disasters.

If such parallels go unchallenged, when we have another Chernobyl level disaster, the "we ignored the dome for 60 years" argument becomes valid.

Except the US doesn't need a response like this to the correct the dome, the dangers aren't even remotely comparable.

And of course the US can respond like this when needed. The WWII move from a pacifist nation to building more war materials than every other nation combined, happened in months.

They're events of different classes and wholly different magnitudes. What's happening in the Pacific relative to what happened in Chernobyl is like a fender bender is related to a major airline disaster.