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To: Mad Mammoth
It may mean nothing more than Michael Chertoff subscribing to Joe Farh's "G2 Intel Bulletin".

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your are being sarcastic with this statement.
23 posted on 08/01/2005 5:13:04 AM PDT by Man50D
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To: Man50D
It may mean nothing more than Michael Chertoff subscribing to Joe Farah's "G2 Intel Bulletin".
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are being sarcastic with this statement.


Actually, I'm wondering if Chertoff got the special discount rate for government subscriptions to WorldNutDaily and other Farah-fearmongering publications...heh.

Seriously now, there is no doubt a threat of future terrorist events taking place, and they may involve chemical, biological or radiological devices.

That does not mean that a chemical attack will be anything greater than the anthrax letters we saw post-9/11, biological threats are (IMHO) the greatest threat because once unleashed, the viruses have to run their course and that can mean hundreds of thousands, even millions of victims.

But an actual nuclear weapon? While it is within the realm of possibility, it is the most remote of all threats due to:

a. if terrorists attempt to utilize a so-called "suitcase nuke" from decades ago (as other posters far smarter than I am have already pointed out), those devices are very likely inert by this time.

b. a home-brewed device is going to be shaky at best, with no guarantees that it will even detonate. al Qaeda cannot risk a major failure of that magnitude, their own concerns over their dwindling credibility will probably steer them away from trying to assemble their own weapon.

c. a new weapon, provided to terrorists by North Korea or Iran is the most likely, although North Korea is more prone to be the supplier because once Iran gets itself a nuke, they're going to keep it for their own use. But getting a nuke, any nuke, into the U.S. is not going to be as easy as it might seem on 2-hour TV dramas.

If a radiological attack takes place, it will more likely be a "dirty" bomb, i.e., conventional explosives with radioactive material jacketing the device, probably obtained from the industrial sector, or perhaps colleges with small reactors. The damage will not be based on the actual explosive yield, but on the psychological effect such an attack would have on the public.

Ironically, Bob Just over at WorldNutDaily must have had anchovies on his pizza before turning in to bed the other night, because he's got a scary scenario about terrorists attacking the U.S. with 'black' smallpox, and other nefarious schemes, and his only defense to this seems to be to "encourage" the public not to lose their nerve if and when such an attack takes place.

Now as for Chertoff, he is correct to point out the possible threats that we are facing, but remember that even at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets had thousands of nukes aimed right at us, had a big bolt from the blue taken place, America would have responded in kind, with massive retaliation, and the Soviets would have ceased to exist as a society. If Islamic terrorists somehow defied the odds and managed to detonate a nuke anywhere on U.S. soil, the whole of the Islamic world would soon be glowing green glass, because if the U.S. did NOT respond that way, we might as well run up the white flag and surrender. That's what Yomama bin Crawdaddin thought we would do after 9/11.

He thought wrong. Just ask the Taliban and/or Saddam, and ask the Afghan and Iraqi people who are now breathing free air.
27 posted on 08/01/2005 5:35:11 AM PDT by Mad Mammoth (Some folks just need killin' = Clint Eastwood as 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'...)
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