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"When nuclear bombs explode in our cities, they will not be delivered in a classic way, by missile or aircraft. They will have been smuggled in, and they will do real damage."

Although it is remotely feasible to smuggle a nuke in once, it isn't very easy.

Contrary to common wisdom, nukes actually require an enormous amount of maintenance. The radioactivity is very destructive to the electronics, which require frequent replacing, and the radioactive decay in the trigger and booster elements requires frequent re-injections of new fissionable material (not something that one can do in the back of a bus or in the belly of a smelly oil tanker).

But not only is the half-life of the trigger and booster isotopes an enormous logistical hurdle, but so too is the decay of the slower-deforming core fissionable materials.

The precise, size, shape, and purity level is critical, yet when one is dealing with metals that decay over time, all of those prerequisites vary.

There have been a couple of threads posted here on FR about this subject, although I don't readily see them today. One of them showed the math that pretty much limits "smuggled" nukes to being weapons-ready for a little less than 90 days without having access to a full-size, modern nuclear support laboratory (something that fewer than a dozen nations manage to keep active on their own soil with no restrictions being imposed upon said labs to be "clandestine" or mobile).

So what does all of this mean?

It means that the control of military timing becomes an issue. A nuclear adversary can't simply bury a few smuggled nukes in various American cities and expect them to be ready later (at least, to be anything other than dirty bombs as time passes).

Moreover, the U.S. has equipped all of our customs agents, Coast Guard, and many of our police departments with extremely sensitive radiation detectors. One of those detectors picked up a suitcase in the North-East that merely had a few Mexican Floor tiles and bananas inside (both emit radiation), causing a bomb squad to investigate said suitcase on the spot.

Bringing in even larger amounts of radioactive materials would be even easier for our equipment to spot, and the level of shielding required to slip by our detection systems would rule out ground transportation of any kind (though cargo ships are still an option).

Thus, if America is hit with a nuke, rest assured that it will be in a port city, and that cargo traffic will be forever checked and routed after such an attack so that no more seaboard hits are feasible.

Now, with that understood, what are the military implications? Clearly our navy would still exist after a port was destroyed. Certainly we would still have our air force and our army as well as our strategic nuclear forces; thus, retaliation on a scale never before seen would be unleashed (up to and perhaps including depopulating the rest of the entire planet), and since only 15% of the U.S. annual GDP is dependent upon imports and exports, our core economy would still be viable.

Ergo, it would be a pretty bad idea on the part of any of our adversaries. Such an attack would have little military value, no more than 15% economic value, yet would open up the possibility of planet-wide depopulation outside of the U.S.

Yeah sure, throw us in that briar patch...

I certainly hope your facts are correct.

Even so, your assumptions about what is, and is not, a rational course of enemy action are rendered irrelevant if you discount the idea that a significant number of our foes actually WANT to die. Furthermore, a swift and fierce retaliation by the great Satan, America, would only be a futher benefit to their cause.

America, even if wounded by an anonymous nuclear detonation, is hardly going to go about nuking innocents that just happen to live in Islamic countries, let along the rest of the world. We are, if nothing else, a fundamentally just country that at least tries to do the right thing. Too often that has meant bearing the brunt of smaller nation's insults, but I do NOT see America surrendering our decency and indiscriminantly nuking all of Islam in spite of calls for the same from many on these threads.

With proliferation going on at greater rates than ever before, you'll forgive me if I find scant comfort in the mathematics of why we won't sustain a nuclear hit. I hope like hell you are correct and that I'm whistling in the wind, but I can't discount the powder-keg of fanaticism around the world and the evil forces that foment and aid its ignition.

It means that the control of military timing becomes an issue.

Agreed...although, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to envision several detonations in port cities nearly simultaneously.

Ergo, it would be a pretty bad idea on the part of any of our adversaries. Such an attack would have little military value, no more than 15% economic value, yet would open up the possibility of planet-wide depopulation outside of the U.S.

An anonymous attack would be difficult to reply to militarily. Yes, we could just nuke the likely suspects, but I wonder if we would really do that. And I suspect the economic effect might be larger than 15%. A comparatively insignificant attack in NY on 9/11 had an economic effect wildly out of proportion to the scale of the attack. Economics are based in very large part on human mentality. Can you imagine the hysteria? IMHO, economic activity would be curtailed far beyond the effect of the physical damage. People's priorities would change, populations shifts might occur...the concept that a piece of paper with a $ on it is actually worth something might come into question.

Hegel spoke of historical dialectics...I know the Marxists have corrupted the concept, but I think the concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis taps into something fundamentally true. America is the current thesis, and simply because of that, there are our enemies, the antithesis, be they the Chinese, the Islamics, (the French??:-) ). They despise what we are with an irrational but passionate fervor. They simply want us to be hurt and brought down, whether it be with stones or with nukes.