[WorkingClassFilth]

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.

[Southack]

"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."

Yawn...

The "powder keg of fanaticism" can't even carry out the fatwah to kill Rushdie over his book. Ooooh, a little book got them all upset. The Satanic Verses isn't even that good.

That "powder keg" can't defeat the vastly outnumbered Israel or Taiwan, either (much less the world's only economic and military super-power).

You'll forgive me if I don't shake in my steel-toed boots with fear at the powder keg of fanaticism.

Look around. There are very few regions on this planet that innovate (at least in the last 1,000 years or so). About a dozen countries have finally managed, in peace-time, to duplicate the nuclear feat that the U.S. achieved over half a century ago in wartime. The list gets even smaller when you look at how few nations have managed to put a man into Earth-orbit, a feat that the U.S. and Russia managed to do over 40 years ago (and no one else has done it since then).

The vast majority of nations can't even machine parts to aircraft tolerances, much less work with the vastly more brittle and dangerous fissionable metals like uranium and plutonium, so again, forgive me if I'm not living in fear from the "great" minds of the rest of the world.

Who knows, over time several other nations and perhaps even a rogue terrorist group or two will figure out our World War 2 technology, but what's missing is how they are going to catch up to our level today (much less tomorrow), and fighting the U.S. military today with World war 2 technology is hardly a recipe for military victory.

No, the answer for the next half century or more is for every adversary of the U.S. to either self-impale itself upon our might or else channel all conflicts away from our economic and military strong suits.

Anything else is just fanciful ranting.