[SevenMinusOne]

I don't have time (at the moment) for a full reply back to you (with some points that shouldn't be made on a public forum) - But here is a quick and accurate snap-shot from a fellow FR'er (SouthTrack) dealing with this same subject on another thread -

Again this is from FR'er SouthTrack -

Suitcase nukes are SMALLER than ordinary nukes. The smaller the nuke, the shorter the shelf life.

The less shielding that you have, the sooner that your electronics and conventional explosives deteriorate from the radiation.

The less fissionable material that you have, the faster you generally need your atomic trigger isotopes to emit neutrons. The faster you emit neutrons, the shorter your half-life. The shorter your half-life, the less time that you have before the nuke simply fizzles instead of booms. Beryllium trigger isotopes can have as little as a 53 day half-life, for instance. Polonium 210, a Man-made isotope that can *only* be created in nuclear reactors or cyclotrons, has a 140 day half-life.

This is simple physics. Moreover, heavy metals like uranium and plutonium are among the most brittle materials known to man, and the slightest bit of humidity turns them into uranium oxide or plutonium oxide (i.e. worthless rust).

So a "suitcase nuke" from 1991 (the fall of the CCCP) is likely little more than a rusted, shattered, fragmented collection of wiring and explosives today.

They *require* a constant, highly professional level of maintenance that needs to be performed in very, very highly advanced clean room labs.

No maintenance means no Boom.

[SauronOfMordor]

The assumption here is that AlQ will go for a suitcase-type, rather than just brute-forcing it with a WW-2 design

The purpose of the suitcase nuke is to enable a small group of SF-types to transport it to the target on their backs. If you take away that requirement, a lot of complexity goes out the window. The Little-Boy design used on Hiroshima was dirt-simple, a gun-type device where the two sub-critical parts were essentially placed in the barrel of a large gun and one part shot toward the other. Due to quirks of plutonium, it was easier to use uranium for the gun-type design, and the plutonium Hiroshima bomb was the more complicated implosion type. A plutonium gun-bomb would have been to heavy for the B-29. But it would not be too heavy to transport by one or more trucks, and assembled in a vacant apartment

And there's always the "dirty bomb" approach, which doesn't need plutonium. You just expose cobalt or zinc to a strong neutron source for a while