Posted on 10/07/2015 8:44:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of suitcase nuclear weapons. Hollywood has made television shows and movies about them. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency has alerted Americans to a threat — information the White House includes on its website.
But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.
Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not think the threat remains.
"The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to movies," said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. "No one has been able to truly identify the existence of these devices."
Majidi and other government officials say the real threat is from a terrorist who does not care about the size of his nuclear detonation and is willing to improvise, using a less deadly and sophisticated device assembled from stolen or black-market nuclear material.
Yet Hollywood has seized on the threat. For example, the Fox thriller 24 devoted its entire last season to Jack Bauer's hunt for suitcase nukes in Los Angeles.
Government officials have played up the threat, too.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., once said at a hearing that he thought the least likely threat was from an intercontinental ballistic missile. "Perhaps the most likely threat is from a suitcase nuclear weapon in a rusty car on a dock in New York City," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. Army Special Forces had SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) Teams that parachuted with, SCUBA/submarine locked out with, skied with, cross country rucksack marched with, and trained to deploy these devices in all types of terrain and weather. The only thing that these SADM Teams were forbidden to discuss with outsiders were the device’s size, shape, weight, yield, and special tactics.
The U.S. Army wanted the Soviets to know we had these weapons and intended to use them in a Nuclear War as a follow up to our B-52 Bomber and ICBM attacks. These SADM Teams were to follow the B-52s in separate aircraft and parachute into remote areas where they were to survive the nuclear winter to come out and eliminate any of the Soviet population that had survived our main nuclear attack.
These SADM Teams provided the “Assured” part of our Mutual Assured Destruction” of the Soviet Union, and unsurprisingly U.S. Army SADM Teams were one of the first things the Soviets wanted to discuss during the opening stages of the SALT negotiations.
Are will still looking for the suitcase bombs the Russian smuggled into the US. They were all the rage on 9/12.
We are more a risk from someone taking hospital grade uranium and blowing it up with dynamite. That would set off all of the alarms and cause panic.
As if I would put credence into the emanations of Anything But Conservative, or is it the All Bullshit Company?
“Is there really a nuclear hand grenade?”
No. And a quick look at the amount of fuel needed to go critical will tell you why.
You need a fuse/timer long enough to allow you to get upwind and behind a major terrain feature.
“where they were to survive the nuclear winter to come out and eliminate any of the Soviet population that had survived our main nuclear attack.”
Pure James Bond silliness. No such thing was the goal. Try high value point targets like equipment depots, rail depots, airfields, transit routes into Germany, communications nodes, etc. And it wasn’t waiting out a “nuclear winter” which was pure fiction from Sagan anyway, and then striking back months later.
It was to be used very early, in the very beginning of a conventional European land war.
It was most assuredly NOT a silly plan for hunting down and nuking isolated bands of civilians who survived an all out nuclear war.
More than likely it won’t be nuclear dirty bomb it will be a bio attacks.
Much easier to get into the country and much easier to hide once here.
A jar the size of a baby food jar could hold enough anthrax to contaminate every major city in the US.
According to a friend of mine in the air force the top brass tried to get Obama to bomb Saddam Hussein’s bunker where the bio weapons were believed to kept and seal it permanently before ISIS could get into it but Obama wouldn’t allow it and ISIS made a bee line to the bunker.
Did you ever serve on one of those SADM Teams?
And the beauty of bio and dirty bombs is that the psychological value is so high that the weapon effectiveness can be nearly nil.
It simply has to be good enough to set off the radiation detectors. The panic and 24 hour news cycle will do the rest.
“We are more a risk from someone taking hospital grade uranium and blowing it up with dynamite. That would set off all of the alarms and cause panic.”
Exactly, and a much more simple problem.
Just like the Cuban Missile crisis.
Soviets had no intention of actually firing the weapons just set them up to create mass panic in the US as people fled the area which could be hit.
Completely overwhelm the system to take care of the refugees.
Same with dirty bombs. You would have a 100 million or more fleeing the cities.
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