Lawrence: The suitcase nuke threat has never
been conclusively proved false, but more and more
times goes by without the explosions; so more and
more comfort is taken in Powell's argument. You
do take comfort in this, don't you Eric?
Eric: As someone living close to the center of the
most likely target city for any terrorist strike,
the only thing I take comfort in is that the more
time goes by, the better the chances that the
weapons material may degrade and become useless.
As a follow up to Friedman, I had read that
attempts to "game" scenarios where a known
al-Qaeda nuke was being smuggled into NYC or the
Jersey docks--we lost! In almost all games, the US
was unable to prevent the importation and
detonation of the nuke package. Further, these
game scenarios helped influence Bush's policy of
taking the war overseas, since securing the US
would take / is taking years and the nuke threat
was considered imminent.
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