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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (10207)1/28/2006 4:33:45 PM
From: Dale Baker  Read Replies (2) of 541652
 
If we want to complicate the discussion further with more facts from the pesky realm of international security studies, the dynamics of fitting a nuclear warhead to a missile and delivering it on target are not quite like buying a DIY kit at Home Depot, setting up the launcher in your backyard and plugging in the coordinates for The Great Satan.

Long-range missiles require silos or launchers that are very visible to satellites, and mostly owned by governments who don't just hand them out. They have to be staffed and maintained by crews of people who know what they are doing. And oh yeah, rocket fuel is apparently very unstable, short-lived stuff that you can't just siphon out of a tanker somewhere and pour into the missile's gas tank with a 5-gallon drum.

And you have to do all this someplace within the missile's limited range, so that you hit a vital target in the US. Assuming a missile with a range under 1000 miles, that leaves Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and maybe a few stretches of far eastern Siberia close to Alaska (I'm too lazy to get out an atlas and draw a circle for myself).

So a missile can be purchased from someone who can sell, but actually delivering (as you noted) and using the damn things effectively is a much different, larger issue.

But it just complicates the "terrorists can fire nuclear missiles at us" straw man.

We won't even get into how one missile can't put more than a dent in important US assets. There is no conceivable scenario where terrorists actually manage to occupy and threaten a chunk of US territory.
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