Iran attacking Israel

I don’t worry too much about what we’d call a suitcase nuke. Maybe I’m naive, but making stuff really small is expensive and complicated and since they won’t have a supply for testing I think it more likely that their first efforts will be large and simple. Maybe too large for even short-range missile delivery. I expect it’ll be in a cargo container and target a couple major ports. At the same time, use traditional methods to bring down some critical bridges. Panic will ensue, tens of thousands of deaths.

They get the desired result (chaos in the world economy) probably a decade sooner than if they insist on miniaturization.

Even if that happens, I suspect the response is not nuclear.
 
RetiredUSNChief said:
These people aren't going to be using a megaton range nuke, not for the foreseeable future anyway. But then, they don't have to be megaton yield to destroy cities. We proved that with Nagasaki and Hiroshima nearly 8 decades ago.

What these people want is a nuclear device they can easily slip into the country to a chosen target.

And keep in mind that they DON'T need a long range missile, if the use of a missile is desired. Nor even one that's all that accurate. Park a ship off the coast somewhere in international waters (just over 12 nautical miles from land) and launch from there. Any number of the POS missiles we've seen being lobbed around in the Middle East would qualify as a viable missile. The Scud missiles used in the early '90s had a range of 185 miles. Unless we had a heads up on such a ship, there's NOTHING we have in place that would intercept such a missile between the time it was detected and the time it reached its target scant minutes later.

And what targets would be desirable? Well, obviously high value targets like those we've mentioned would be top of the list of Grade-A Prime targets...but the fact is that ANY successful nuclear attack on the United States would be an absolute win for these people.

And these guys have proven more than two decades ago in 2001 that they CAN make a very successful, well coordinated attack of several targets, simultaneously.

Imagine what we would call a "low yield" nuke being detonated from aboard a small boat parked in the shipping harbors of, say, NYC, Galveston, and Los Angeles while at the same time a small handful of boats launched some low yield nukes at random targets within 200 miles of the coastline. Coastline, mind you, of which we have TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MILES worth. Maybe toss in the odd aircraft or two, as well.

Their goal isn't "defeat"...it's "terror". Terrorism being the use of violence and intimidation, especially against noncombatants, to affect some sort of political change/benefit to the terrorist organizations.

To that end, "success" could be the successful detonation of a nuke in the middle of an unoccupied desert in the United States because of the psychological terror effect it would have.
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Remember the suicide bomber possibility of such an attack. A small ship/submarine with a slightly larger yield because it was just a waterborne "truck bomb". for the pure terror aspect, I would pick Port Canaveral. Take out 3 or 4 cruise ships full of people from all over the country. Hundreds of small communities running stories about how somebody local died from the attack.
 
GymB said:
I don’t worry too much about what we’d call a suitcase nuke. Maybe I’m naive, but making stuff really small is expensive and complicated and since they won’t have a supply for testing I think it more likely that their first efforts will be large and simple.
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I don't sweat the suitcase nuke issue because it's simply not an issue. It gets very difficult to get a nuclear yield the smaller you get.

This isn't to say that countries which promote terrorism (like Iran as one example) can't develop the capability to create these weapons. North Korea has certainly demonstrated the ability to start from essentially nothing in the 80s to its first nuclear yield in 2006. They currently have an estimated three dozen or so nuclear weapons with the capacity to produce enough fissile material for half a dozen ore so more each year.

The plain fact of the matter, which has long been recognized from the very beginning between the United States and the Soviet Union, is that the REAL danger with nuclear weapons is associated with their security and control. This is the root of the NPT (Non-proliferation Treaty), which seeks to minimize the circumstances wherein a terrorist organization (which does not have the capacity to develop a nuclear weapons program) may get its hands on nuclear material/weapons. Unlike nations, terrorist organizations have nothing that others can hold over them in order to control/mitigate their actions.

The danger, therefore, is that either a terrorist organization will somehow steal nuclear devices OR a nation that the terrorist organizations are aligned with may provide nuclear devices to them.


This means that terrorist organizations have a huge problem with actually obtaining nuclear devices...and the ones they might be able to obtain at some point aren't likely to be state of the art, suitcase nukes, nor are they likely to be thermonuclear devices. Even boosted fission warheads would be way out there.


NOW...should such a device ever actually be used, the international backlash worldwide would be HUGE and the counter-attack that would arise would not likely be a nuclear counter strike.

Why not a nuclear counterstrike? Simple. Because we don't have to resort to this with the organizations/countries that would pull such an act. There isn't a single one of the countries which would pull such an act that we couldn't just stomp the $#!+ out of and completely take over in a matter of days with conventional military assets. It would end so fast their political heads would be spinning.


But COULD a terrorist organization conduct a nuclear attack?

If they could get ahold of a nuclear device, you betcha they could.
 
I'm not techie enough to pull the video out of this article, but it is priceless to watch. A satire on how stupid these "college educated" kids are today.

www.jpost.com

Eretz Nehederet sketch of woke US college students goes viral – again

The X account for Eretz Nehederet re-posted the clip this weekend, saying, "It’s honestly difficult to differentiate between satire and reality these days."
www.jpost.com www.jpost.com
 
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