In anything goes war, they simply put one in a large oil tanker full of oil. No one is the wiser until it is too late. 50’ of oil probably makes a pretty good radiation shield.
Or...
Fly a chartered plane into Any City, Western World and never land - an air detonation at the optimum altitude without all the technical complications of a missile... And no customs to deal with...
I’m just a security/military ignorant guy sitting behind a computer. But it seems pretty obvious that it wouldn’t be that difficult to a nuke to virtually any city USA with a little knowledge and resources. All by far cheaper than a missile and much more difficult to track. If LA suddenly went up in a flash of light, it is pretty difficult to respond affectively if you don’t know who did it, especially considering how many lives are on the line.
What was that old sick DU-type joke about "Q. You have Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Reagan standing in front of you, but you only have two bullets. What do you do? A. Shoot Reagan twice" ?
We could apply similar logic in that situation.
Or do the Arnaud-Armaury approach.
On a somewhat related topic, is there any way we could convince Hillary to start dating Ted Kennedy for a romantic moonlight swim drive?
Cheers!
I don’t have specific knowledge of this, but several things I have seen indicate that we can identify the source of the nuclear material by way of isotope analysis of the residue of a nuclear explosion. Should we ever suffer such an attack, that source ought to glow in the dark for the next millenium - and we ought to be advertising that intention, far and wide.
Your theory is perfectly plausible. And in the age of the suicide bomber, a chartered plane could make it to Western Europe, Canada and to a US target easily.
But the nightmare doesn’t get them off the hood entirely. There’s a nuclear signature that would be traced to the weapon’s fuel point of creation.
That would of course do us little good. Sending North Korea to the Stone Age would hardly solve the problem of another attack.