I understand the point you are making. Let me ask you this:
Is it going to break the bank to rebuild New York City when, not if, terrorists smuggle a nuke across our southern border? (North Korea, Pakistan and very soon Iran will all have nukes and are either openly hostile to us or are just a coup away from being so.)
Cost? How much is this country worth? Can we put a dollar figure on it?
How are 50,000+ dead US citizens going to play on CNN?
As to the other points you made, there is nothing to be argued with on my part.
Poohbah, I know you know history well enough to know what happens to countries that cannot secure thier borders. I do not think you want it to happen to this country.
We have some hard choices to make, because niether alternative is very pretty.
Actually, it probably would cost far less to rebuild NYC than it would cost to keep the nuke from getting into the country with a high level of confidence.
You have also set your standard of performance for border security: it now must achieve a 100% success rate. Any illegal alien getting through holds the prospect of catastrophic failure.
Now, for the next question: will border security be any less of a failure if the nuke is smuggled across our border with Canada, or over the beach? Most border security efforts are along the US-Mexican border: the rest of the border is almost completely unsecured.
If the threat is foreign terrorists coming in illegally, then shutting the US-Mexican border is a woefully inadequate response. You now have six times as much frontier to secure, plus many ports of entry located within the US heartland. You've just multiplied an unreasonably high price tag even higher.
"Our border is unprotected; our first line of defense is not manned," Mr. Stein said. "After the attacks of September 11, there are no excuses. They want to pretend that we have a line of defense, even though we could secure the border if we wanted to. But we choose not to."