The Economist: If Terrorists Got Hold Of A Nuclear Weapon
The stuff of nightmares
TO SEE a nuclear horror story unfold, look no further than YouTube. In “My Nuclear Nightmare”, a five-minute graphic film, Bill Perry, a former American defence secretary, describes how a breakaway faction of a rogue state’s security forces enriches 40 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium in a secret facility and then constructs what appears to be a crude bomb, similar in design and yield to the kind that obliterated Hiroshima. It then transports the bomb in a box labelled “agricultural equipment” by civilian cargo aircraft to Dubai and on to Washington, DC. It is soon loaded onto a delivery truck and driven to Pennsylvania Avenue, where it is detonated at the halfway point between the White House and the Capitol building.
What follows is excruciating. More than 80,000 people are instantly killed, including the president, the vice-president and every member of Congress present. Another 100,000 are severely injured. Phones are down. A little later, it gets even worse: TV news stations have received a message that there are five more such bombs hidden in five more American cities. One bomb will be triggered each week unless all American troops serving abroad are immediately sent home. Panic ensues as people stream out of cities, and with the administration wiped out by the blast there is a constitutional crisis. Martial law is declared as looting and rioting spread; military detention centres spring up across the country.
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WNU Editor: A nightmare scenario in every-way.
4 comments:
It is just a matter of time.
If they don't end up pushing things too far with the Russians or Chinese first....
Or if the Russians or the Chinese don't push things to far first... These things don't happen in a vacuum. With that said Russia and China are probably the most powerful nations on earth and, as such, it would behoove American, "western", and other leaders to try and refrain from anything that would obviously anger them and there certainly seems to be nothing in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or the South China Sea that is worth doing this.
There may be a time and a place to go to war with them but none of this seems to be it. If it should come to war with either of them or both of them, the best that can probably be hoped for is to make their inevitable victory pyric enough that they would not consider the attack in the first place. A proper deployment of military forces along with more conciliatory policies may be enough to get this done.
Regardless of who would actually "win" which probably could not be "known" without the fight actually taking place they can definitely hurt us very badly and we might even be able to hurt them very badly. As such, all sides especially the "west" and America need to be very circumspect in dealing with them.
"It's just a matter of time." Frankly I'm shocked that it already hasn't happened. If it did happen, I'd expect not just one bomb but dozens of them detonated simultaneously across multiple metropolitan areas and the yields would be far greater than those of Hiroshima.
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