[Riley]

Indeed.

I do remember however, hearing about pre-placed caches of weapons, munitions and communications equipment in Western countries that’d been placed by the Soviets. Has any information come to light of exactly what was in them? I think that the Swiss disarmed one of them after it’d been identified by Mitrokhin.

[Sender]

There were reports of small nuclear demolition devices being placed by both sides. Who knows how much of that is true? Anyway, any such device that has been buried for many years would likely be in no condition to be used, though the nuclear materials inside could certainly be reused by terrorists.

[unkus]

Spatnitz (sp) teams.

[ExSoldier]

Manpads, so called suitcase nuclear bombs are quite real but they give a nominal yield of only about .2 KT. Small, tiny in terms of destruction. Of course the EMP might be significant to the region. On the plus side, while the manpads do exist (at least in our inventory) they do require a lot of maintenance and it's extremely doubtful that any secreted on US soil during the cold war would still be viable. How can I be so certain? My recently deceased father in law held a SC.D in nuclear physics. Never heard of an SC.D? Neither had I. But as I did the research for the eulogy, I discovered that it is actually an order of magnitude higher than a Ph.d. The Ph.d degree requires a certain number of hours in the humanities like philosophy, while the SC.D is pure science and this old guy was the top of the heap, having been the head honcho of a nuke plant during his time with a major power company before retirement. So when he spoke to me of nominal yield and maintenance I knew he knew what he was speaking of. I stopped worrying about those things a good many years ago. Which is not to say that a real device like a warhead might not have been smuggled across the Mexican border into our country by Iranian agents in pursuit of a future "SUM OF ALL FEARS" terrorist scenario!

[GOPJ]

I do remember however, hearing about pre-placed caches of weapons...I think that the Swiss disarmed one of them after it’d been identified by Mitrokhin.

Do you have a link ??

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

I do remember however, hearing about pre-placed caches of weapons, munitions and communications equipment in Western countries that’d been placed by the Soviets. Has any information come to light of exactly what was in them? I think that the Swiss disarmed one of them after it’d been identified by Mitrokhin.

Here's some information on Vasili Mitrokhin and the Mitrokhin Archive ...