Or gas. Or bugs. Bugs are actually quite a lot nastier than nukes in a lot of ways. Easier to make too in many ways.



Have you ever heard of this thing called a coast guard? They stop boats who don't have clearances and papers. The ocean is like the air, covered with radar and the like. Why do you think cocaine smugglers were building suicidal mini subs out of South America? Regular boats weren't making it.

A smuggled nuke is certainly a scary thing, but they aren't as easy to smuggle as you think. They're big (low tech ones are anyway and that's all North Korea has) and they give off some rad signature.

In order to smuggle out a nuke, they'd have to take it out to sea, transfer it to another boat somehow and then smuggle it in. No, it's not impossible - but keep in mind that someone needs to go with it or meet it and that person has to be both determined and trusted.

Impossible, no. Easy? Definitely not.

Also - someone would pay for blowing up a US city. There are limited numbers of folks with nukes and residue can be analyzed. The payback would still be a bitch, it would just take a little longer before it happened.



You realize that what you just described IS the Cold War mindset, right? 'The fear that they can hurt us.' That's what it was about right from the beginning.

Honestly, it hasn't really changed much save that it's become much harder to generate that fear as it's much harder to do.