Quote:
Me: So it is likely they will have ICBM technology long before they can make suitcased sized nukes. Of course, that doesnt mean they could not buy it. But they wont be able to manufacture it themselves.
I dont really buy it...
|
You're allowed to disagree. But I am far from the only one who holds this opinion.
Remember: NMD is not something that is specific to the Bush administration. Numerous Democrat administrations and Congresses have had the opportunity to kill it and chose not to. This program has had bipartisan support for a very long time.
Quote:
|
can you back it up with sources that helped you form that conclusion?
|
The sources that helped me form that conclusion are not online. But Wikipedia seems to support my conclusion:
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Only a nation with an extremely advanced nuclear program could manufacture warheads small enough to fit into a suitcase. Both the United States and the Soviet Union manufactured nuclear weapons small enough to fit into large backpacks during the Cold War, but neither have ever made public the existence or development of weapons small enough to fit into a suitcase.
The smallest nuclear warhead manufactured by the USA was the W54, used for the Davy Crockett warhead which could be fired from a 120 mm recoilless rifle, and a backpack version called the Mk-54 SADM (Small Atomic Demolition Munition). While this warhead, with a weight of only 51 lb (23 kg), could potentially fit into a large suitcase, it would be a very tight fit. While the explosive power of the W54 — up to an equivalent of 1 kiloton of TNT — is not much by the normal standards of a nuclear weapon (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were around 13 to 15 kilotons each), it could still do tremendous physical damage to a structure (it would be many, many times more powerful than the explosive attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1995, for example, with a yield of 0.002 kiloton).
The technology required to manufacture a nuclear warhead miniaturized to such an extent that it could fit into a suitcase restricts the independent development of "suitcase nukes" to only nations with highly advanced nuclear weapons programs which have performed many nuclear tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_bomb
|
It is my opinion that other nations (such as Japan or China or France) could probably develop them quickly as well.
Quote:
|
The fact is that they already exist, and it's just a matter of them getting a hold of at least one.
|
The fact that they exist does not mean they are easy to get. Getting ahold of ANY nuke would be extremely difficult. Getting ahold of a nuke as advanced as a suitcase bomb would be exponentially
more difficult.
Getting ahold of ICBM technology would be far easier. And would not require an outside source.
06-04-2007, 12:50 PM
...
Linear Mode
