Close your italics tag man, it's hurting my neck to read the slog.

Sorry. Done.

Damn it! I agree with Ahmadinejad again!

Eh. Nuclear weapons are over-rated. As an American I'm supposed to have a totally irrational response to even the vaguest threat of someone naughty getting the bomb. Whatever, there are far more real threats to worry about.

There is a huge gap between enriching uranium and successfully making a bomb. Given Iran's experience with shaped charges, it's a good bet they could make an implosion-style bomb (ala Nagasaki.) Plutonium, from a reactor, rather than uranium would be easier to work with.

Even with a workable bomb, there is a HUGE jump to package it into something useful. Delivering something the size and weight of two buses is non-trivial, particularly when it is extremely delicate.

Once you have it, beyond testing it, what do you do with it? Mutually assured destruction still exists. To use a bomb is suicide.

Atomic bombs have become political tropes, a way to drum up totally irrational fear.

Sure, golob. And what country was responsible for 9/11? None? What do you do about nukes "falling" into the hands of nutjob terrorists that have no qualms about sending a bomb in a container ship and blowing up a port? The type of people who either (a) aren't afraid of dying and having their countrymen die, or (b) don't reside in one country, so don't really care if, say, Iran is blown up. ICBM's are sooo 1980s.

Well, if I was concerned about that, him, I'd be paying attention to the global underground plutonium trade, and the global underground bomb-plans trade. But Bush hasn't been doing that. He's allowed the former to spread unchecked out of Russia, and he's actually abetted the latter by playing all palsy-walsy with the guy who's doing it: Musharraf of Pakistan.

Mr. Khan, Musharraf's bomb master and the man who has placed bomb plans and equipment in the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists, is under a uniquely Pakistani form of "house arrest", in which he lives a life of luxury and is not allowed to be interrogated or questioned in any way.

"We'll handle it", they say, and Bush says, as he always does when confronted with military strongmen, "ah kin see inta yer soul, yer a good main".

But Iran, who are indeed a threat, but not of the kind you're talking about -- Ahmadinejad is not going to put a bomb on a container -- they don't resonate with our psychic president, so we're going to go to war with them. Pointless and damaging as per usual.

Are we SURE Bush isn't an Al Qaeda agent? If not, why does he do their every bidding?

Saudi Arabia and the Taleban were responsible for 9/11.

What Fnarf said about controlling the ingredients and expertise!

Do you know how large of a bomb bay of the Enola Gay had? To make an atomic bomb small enough to fit in a standard cargo container is far more difficult than just making a bomb.

Further any atomic weapon is by definition radioactive. The constantly emitted high energy neutrons are nearly impossible to completely shield AND easy to detect. You can make a pretty decent detector out of aluminum foil and string -- good enough to detect an atomic bomb in a cargo container with ease.

The so-called "dirty bombs" are even easier to detect by virtue of the large amounts of radiation they spew off. As an added bonus, dirty bombs have a very short shelf life. They have to be made and used very quickly.

For diffuse organizations like Al Queda bioweapons are a far FAR better choice. The biggest difficulty is delivery. If you have people willing to die for the cause, swab some cheeks and hand 'em plane tickets. Far cheaper and more effective way to kill large numbers of Westerners than the massive infrastructure and expertise required to produce and distribute a nuclear weapon.

No, bioweapons (and chemical weapons) are worthless. The stuff is almost impossible to weaponize, and almost as difficult to control afterwards. Bioweapons have NEVER successfully been used on large numbers of people; the biggest attempted attack was a dry run by Aum Shinrikyo, who managed to kill a whopping four people with sarin gas, and who never successfully got off an anthrax attack. The bozo (almost certainly an American nutjob) who sent anthrax to the Senate and the National Enquirer did about as good a job as could possibly be expected, and killed ONE person.

Any number of idiots has proven over and over again that you can do far, far more damage than bio or chem with much less trouble with a frigging handgun. If you want to do some serious damage, make a bomb. Oklahoma City, Madrid, London, or every damn day in Baghdad: plain old bomb bombs.

If you want to bring up the Germans gassing my grandpa in WWI, or Saddam gassing the Kurds, realize that those were both unsuccessful in the long run -- as they required far more men and money to implement than traditional warfare. Saddam could have (and did) killed a lot more Kurds with bombs dropped from planes. As a model for terror attacks, they are meaningless. I don't think the German Army is going to be an easy thing to smuggle into Manhattan without anyone noticing.

There is only one WMD: nukes.

I can agree with you regarding chemical weapons, and that conventional bombs still being the most effective.

I'm just not convinced about bioweapons. You are absolutely right about the Anthrax attacks being pretty pathetic. Howerver, the Japanese army did some terrifyingly successful tests in Nanjing using bioweapons. The Soviets were also quite good with bioweapons, and many of those scientists were left unemployed and destitute after the collapse.

A serious bioweapon -- weaponized hemorrhagic fever for example -- is a doomsday device. States don't like using them because they are difficult to control. If the real goal of these groups is to kill the largest number of people possible (rather than just destroy property or create spectacle), I still think a bioweapon would be the best and easiest choice.

My point I wanted to make was that nukes can't be totally disregarded. Especially since terrorists like Al Qaeda like to make spectacular statements (ie, flying "United", "American" into WTC, Pentagon, White House(??)), I think using a nuke would be big on their list of dramatic images. Granted, chance of success may be low.

But Ahmedenijad is worrisome because he is more nutty than the average nutjob dictator. While "he" wouldn't send a nuke our way, material might be "stolen" from their facilities and end up over here. But I agree 100% that war with Iran is dumb, dumb, dumb. The most lasting changes come from within a country, not imposed from without by the barrel of a gun. I think the Iranian population will make regime changes on their own if given the chance.

Am I the only one who when initially
seeing the picture, thought it was
George Bush?

--Jensen

no jensen, i actually checked the comments for this post just to make sure _i_ wasn't the only one.

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