Intelligence worry is that although the stolen suitcase / backpack nukes may not detonate due to age component age, the fissible radioactive material could readily be used as an effective “dirty bomb”.
A coordinated dirty bomb attack at financial centers would crash and cripple the economy like no other event to date.
Affected downtown areas would be evacuated and off limits for a very long time.
The litigous US public is very sensitive and wary of being exposed to anything approaching EPA radiological health limits.
Anything more than 500 CPM will make for a ghost town.
Bank and stock market brokerage outages due to interruption of operations would result in cascading financial and supply chain failure.
It’s a miracle that our adversaries haven’t carried out this type of attack,
Yet.
RE: “Yeah, I remember those too. Saw that even if they did exist from way back in the cold war era that they would be not usable even back around 9/11.”
Yeah, true.