Posted on 11/10/2007 1:01:10 PM PST by zencat
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 Web site. 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Even if someone did manage to take possession of an old soviet nuke, regardless of the size, don’t these devices have a limited shelf life? Isn’t there alot of maintenance that needs to be performed? And, aren’t there components that need to be replaced over time?
How much would you have to tip the skycap for that one!?
Oh good...It CAN’T fit in a suitcase, but it CAN fit in one of the thousands of containers that enter our ports everyday. I feel better.
“They can drive a huge truck in from Mexico.”
Yeah but that truck doesn’t have brakes and will probably have an accident way before it gets here. Bad for the family in the minivan that burns to death but at least no nuclear explosion.
It also came as a special demolition device in a backpack form.
There might have been no official 'suitcase' nukes per se, but warheads small enough to fit in large suitcases do exist.
Small warheads do require more maintenance than large ones.
The max range of one of those was only slightly outside the wounding range of the bomb. A bad shot would probably take out the launcher.
It was supposedly a ‘last stand’ weapon. Hence the name Davy Crockett.
Oh God, Joe Farah must be having heart palpitations, he just lost 1/3 of his income!
And that “Russian Colonel” that Farah developed into a media talking head, that guy is totally screwed out of a job now!
Yes, that is what concerns me.
Not a suitcase nuke or an iPod nuke but a container nuke in an American port city or along a railroad track in middle America.
The last I heard Joe Farah was out hunting pterodactyls.
That Morgan Freedman movie had it right. The thing had to be shipped in in a packing crate. It’s the shielding. Hard enough to reduce it to the size of an artillery shell.
"And we don't torture people. Now, listen to me. Now, listen to me. I want you to listen to me," Tenet says. "The context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know – I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know."
Like him or not, the CIA was worried about them post 9/11 leads me to believe they are a real threat. It's the leftist line to put on this faux bravado that the "threat is overblown, " just like the Soviet threat supposedly was in the cold war.
Again I fear that if a Nuke does come in it will be packaged in a shipping container on since NYC is a port city it could arrive there.
Are these the same government experts that are trying to convince us of the dangers of second hand smoke and global warming?
Read the article — it specifically discusses how off the mark Weldon’s “suitcase nuke” is.
“a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.”
Exactly the kind of thing the KGB was good at...
Kurt Weldon showed a mockup of a suitcase nuke during a hearing on Russian espionage chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), on 24 January 2000.
Not a lot is known about these things, but the Russians were scared shiiteless in the mid-90’s that the Chechens may have gotten ahold of one.
Alexander Lebed, a former Soviet General, tried to account for them all, but no one really has any idea how many were produced. Estimates run from 85-500.
The Center for Nonproliferation Studies states that no alive really has an idea of how many of these were produced, if any, and what condition they may be in...
In short, don’t dismiss them out of hand, but don’t hit the panic switch yet, either...
Now that’s funny.
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