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In no way am I suggesting that we should not be vigilant, I’m just saying that the nuke explosion in DC scenario is the least likely of all possiblities involving the use of nuke material by terrorists.

A nuke warhead can’t just be rigged up to blow up like a time-bomb; so far, no one has shown me (or for that matter, anyone else) a triggering mechanism that could even approach being able to do what you seem to be contemplating. It just won’t work that easily—it takes teams of physicists and engineers billions of dollars and years of trying to come up with the technology to develop nuke warheads that detonate at, say, specific altitudes. I seriously don’t think that you can just hook up a PC and reprogram that so easily, if at all.

Mind you, I am not ruling out nuclear-tipped projectiles such as the W54, but I don’t think those are the types of weapons people have in mind when they think of nuclear terrorism. With that weapon, you’re talking a few blocks, down, at best at I believe a 1kt yield. Now something like that wouldn’t create havoc, but it’s not something that would cause a “decapitation”, which is what the Terrorists would want to do in DC or Tel Aviv. Likewise, SADMs are also not of sufficient yield for what, I think, most people think of when they think of a terrorist nuke. Plus, I think it’d be damn near impossible for terrorists to get one or figure out how to use one. Lebed said that 100 or so 1kt soviet “suitcase” bombs disappeared by 1997, but you have to believe that they would have used one by now if that were true.

I am not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a ridiculously expensive and inefficient way to start armageddon when they could easily put a nuke warhead, bought in North Korea or smuggled out of the Commonwealth, on a modified scud and hit tel aviv from just outside Teheran. That’s all i’m saying.

At any rate, miniaturization of nukes is a sophisticated process that only the US and Soviets are known to have accomplished. Iran is decades away from that. Now, it’s possible that some soviet stuff got into terrorist hands, but again these don’t have sufficient yield, if you ask me. Nearly all nuke experts agree that if there were such a thing in the hands of terrorists, it would have already been used. It’s not something they’re going to keep lying around.