I started this because some people don't seem to have really thought through nuclear defence in this age.

First someone was talking about port screenings. This would work against a dirty bomb. Because of the small blast radius. With a nuke however once the relevant contianer ship/etc reaches



It's already too late. Say nothing of the port itself.


Next the idea of safety through mutually assured destruction. This worked (sort of) alright in the cold war, because if anything happened we'd nuke Russia. However there are a number of ways around it these days.

1. Oooops. Armed me seized one of our nuclear weapons! We assure the world we are doing everything in our power to aprehend these criminals!
(Little while later, boom)

2. Subs. If a nuclear missile just shows up in the middle of the ocean, who do we nuke? Do we just nuke Russia, China, Iran and N Korea just to be safe? This is at least a little risky because we might catch the sub. But remember it doesn't really matter if we do or not. If they thought they could get away with it and tried it's already too late.

3. Other attacks that are hard to credit. For example a nuke launch out of somewhere in Africa.

4. The fact that destruction is NOT assured. Lets say that Iran gets the nuke. And fires one at a carrier group out in the Persian gulf somewhere. Maybe they claim we went into their waters or something. Do you think Obama is then going to nuke a few million Iranians? I doubt it. And since I doubt it they probably do too.


Finally just the threat of a nuke can let a country get away with a whole lot out of other countries fears they'd use it. For example if Iran decided to officially fund terror attacks. But they threaten to use a bunch of nukes if we intervine.


And all these problems get worse the more crazies there are with nukes, because not only is someone more likely to use one but it becomes harder to assign the blame.