At a conference on the future of al Qaeda sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory last month, I posed a dark question to 60 or so nuclear weapons scientists and specialists on terrorism and radical Islam: How many of them believed that the probability of a nuclear fission bomb attack on U.S. soil during the next several decades was negligible — say, less than 5 percent?

At issue was the Big One — a Hiroshima-or-larger explosion that could claim hundreds of thousands of American lives, as opposed to an easier-to-mount but less lethal radiological attack. Amid somber silence, three or four meek, iconoclastic hands went up. (More later on the minority optimists. They, too, deserve a hearing.)

This grim view, echoed in other quarters of the national security bureaucracy in recent months, can’t be dismissed as Bush administration scaremongering. “There has been increasing interest by terrorists in acquiring nuclear weapons,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s chief nuclear watchdog, said in a recent interview, excerpts of which were published in Outlook last Sunday. “I cannot say 100 percent that it hasn’t happened” already, he added, almost as an afterthought.

Worried yet? Then you might agree that there is too little specific, rigorous, apolitical discussion of this threat available to the public. In an era when Americans know they have reason to be afraid — yet seem at times to know more fear than reason — even the unthinkable requires transparent debate. Here’s a provocation, in service of the cause of inspiring such debate: In focusing all-out on nuclear aspirants such as Iran and North Korea, the United States may be distracting itself from an even graver problem. ...

A startling number of U.S. nuclear and terrorism specialists I have talked with during the last year believe that the threat of a jihadi nuclear attack in the medium term is very serious. They recognize that as a technical and scientific matter, such an attack can be very difficult for private groups to pull off. They fear it anyway. They may have professional incentives to conjure the worst case, but I believe this to be their honest assessment.

...

Since the late 1980s and certainly since 1991, bin Laden has seen the United States as the principal invader of the Muslim world because of its support for the Saudi royal family, Israel and other Middle Eastern governments he labels apostate. In often tedious debates with comrades during the 1990s, he has argued that only by attacking distant America could al Qaeda hope to mortally wound the Middle East’s frontline authoritarian governments.

His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan’s fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy.

Listening to him on tape after tape, it is difficult to doubt bin Laden’s intent. There is evidence that he and his allies have experimented with chemical and biological weapons, typically low-level toxins. But in public, bin Laden talks mainly about nuclear bombs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Feb5.html

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

But the larger issue is that, as the article pointed out, it would incredibly difficult for any terror network to get a bomb or make a bomb. It's not easy. (That's why only 7 countries in the world are known to have them!)That does not mean we discount the possibility or fail to follow any leads in that area, but I know I will not lose too much sleep over the possibility. I think the possiblity is just too remote. Not impossible mind you, but nothing to sweat about.

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.