[ChicagoRepublican]

Good God! I have a feeling, just this gut feeling, that Bin Laden doesn't possess one. I can't quite describe it.

[DBrow]

There's a video available on the DOE declassification site (iirc) of a guy with a parachute and a bomb half the size of a medicine ball jumping out of a plane (a dummy bomb). It was pretty big and heavy. Interesting film and if I get to a faster connection I'll get the exact url.

Interesting that now the gummint is chatting about the possibility of nuke attacks, when we spent the last 16 years eliminating our civil defense capability. Look at the civil defense radiation meters on ebay and other places, search on CDV-717. We just got rid of about 100,000 units, and cities don't have the equipment. If someone popped a pit in a city, nobody whould know for days where the fallout plume was going.

Trust the Feds to keep you safe!

[DBrow]

Link to SADM deployment

It even has a quicktime button.

[lizma]

This is icky but wouldn't they attack Isreal first. I really don't know who they hate more.

It's time to tell Sadam you have 10 minutes to let the inspectors in or else.

The Americans that attacked you before are not the same Americans that will attack you now. We grew teeth. Long ones. Very long ones.

[RayChuang88]

Be VERY glad that Osama bin Laden has not yet been able to get access to a backpack nuclear bomb.

Imagine what would have happened if an al-Qaeda terrorist detonated a 1 kT nuclear bomb at the foot of the World Trade Center towers instead of crashing two planes into the towers. Instead of circa 6,000 dead we may be talking 80,000 to 100,000 dead immediately from the blast and heat effects of the bomb and another 50,000 to 70,000 dead with three days from the remains of collapsed buildings and radiation poisoning. The lethal fallout--if it spreads eastwards over the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens boroughs--would kill another 20,000 people directly exposed to the fallout within 10 days. Very likely, just about every building in the World Trade Center complex would razed to the ground, and the remains would be major radiation hazard for at least 25 years. We're talking a casualty figure of 300,000+ people given the density of Manhattan and the fallout path over eastern NYC boroughs.

[PA Engineer]

I have always been troubled by B.N.s, however I have had lingering doubts about the efficaciousness of them. My reservations are based on the age of the device that we are describing. If they were produced in the last couple of years I would be greatly alarmed, but from what I understand it has been quite some time since the former Soviet Union produced them for their SF arsenal. If indeed they are over 20 years of age then I would assume that the basic core decay would render these devices less effective. Can any Freepers add to this? Are these old devices? If old, how effective would they be after natural core decay?