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As it turns out, nuclear blowback evidently has been discussed by US authorities as one possible retaliation mode in the event of the hypothetical---now real---capture or killing of OBL.I don't claim any particular knowledge of international security issues, but it does seem farfetched to me that AQ, even with sympathizers in high places, could have a nuclear weapon deployed in Europe, let alone America. I can imagine no coherent "conspiracy theory" that would have US national security personnel turning a blind eye to this sort of infiltration even given the bale of unanswered questions and unresolved contradictions that linger a decade after September 11 itself. Many, many of those questions seem to plausibly address some kind of heinous untold story about that day. (You'd have to read the book to know what I refer to.) The idea of a foreign nuclear weapon being deployed on US soil doesn't remotely have the same ring of plausibility, conspiracywise. The same goes for Europe, I think, because their secret security agencies have been working the terrorism beat for decades.
Nevertheless, that leaves a lot of real estate in the world to cover. Anyone who thinks about it could come up with scenarios that involve, say, a corrupt Pakistan (with either an internal target or with India in the crosshairs); Iran (located in quite a target-rich region with a lot of US interests); and The Desert Kingdom itself (where it's apparently an open secret that radical members of the royal family have been financing AQ for a decade or more).
Sensational and speculative? Yes. But a nihilistic force with a sense of moral infallibility and no fear of death (i.e., insane by a reasonable person's standards) could concoct dozens of justifications for a paramilitary nuclear attack that would shred the global status quo.
All things considered, I think these idle speculations at least provide one more good reason why we should avoid celebrating the assassination of OBL with a Super Bowl party.
delivering a nuke to the US? no harder than loading it on a plane dressed up to look like any other commercial plane and fly it into the country via a couple benign stops. Once landed anywhere (or even not landed) it can be detonated. Even easier done in Europe.
ReplyDeleteHow about shipping containers? Delivery is probably the easy part. Getting a functional weapon must be the hard part or this would have been done already. Hopefully the information collected in the obl raid will quickly expose and cut off the muckety mucks in Pakistan responsible for hosting obl for so many years.
OCH: I don't really disagree with your observations, but I also think that there is a very powerful and diverse cadre with lots of resources invested in preserving the status quo, including the state monopoly on nuclear weapons. In particular, I think there is probably much invested in making sure that any "whoopsies" with nuclear weapons occur far, far away from North America, Europe, Russia, and China---probably Saudi Arabia, too. Mushroom clouds are bad for bankers and traders.
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