If there was such a thing as suitcase nukes, Al Qaida would have already used them.
The WSJ is completely accurate about that.
You can't bet your life (and a lot of others) on that proposition.
The article you quoted by Richard Miniter (which I hadn't seen before) is a good article, but it essentially, in several points, argues from absence of evidence: but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. He is trying to prove a negative, for which the best argument, that Al-Q'aeda is not able to produce a nuclear weapon, would be to produce Osama Bin Laden's and Ayman Al-Zawahri's heads on pikes.
Miniter assumes a certain liability or burden, in writing his article, of being right. He is, after all, inviting the public to rely on the truth of his article; and if he turns out to have been disastrously wrong, people can reasonably say that, like the people in WTC Tower 2 who went back to their offices after the PA announcment of the "all clear", they predicated actions affecting their own safety on his statement.
Right, Ollie North said after 9/11 that was their biggest hit if they had anything bigger they would have used it instead.
who really believes a jihadist can sit on a suitcase and not use it. They would drive right to israel with it in a truck.