Nuclear terrorism

NY Times:

The top secret National Intelligence Estimate did not mince words. The United States faced an enemy with “no scruples about employing any weapon or tactic,” it said, and nuclear weapons smuggled across porous borders threatened to devastate American cities. Sleeper cells, the document warned, might already be inside the country.

Or so the Central Intelligence Agency told President Harry S. Truman. The year was 1951.

It has become conventional wisdom, repeated by President Obama at the nuclear summit meeting this week, that the cold war danger of huge strikes by thousands of nuclear missiles has given way to a new threat: terrorists killing tens of thousands of Americans with a stolen or homemade nuclear device. A broad range of security experts agree that nuclear terrorism may well be the most serious danger the United States faces today.

But it is not new. In fact, almost from the invention of the atomic bomb, government officials were alarmed by the threat that compact nukes would be smuggled into the United States by Soviet agents and detonated.

“Officials regard the possibility of atomic sabotage as the gravest threat of subversion that this country, with its virtually unpatrolled borders, has ever faced,” The New York Times reported in 1953, telling readers that the Eisenhower administration was preparing to alert the public to the danger from “valise bombs.”

Hundreds of pages of declassified documents from the 1950s, obtained by The New York Times from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, lay out a strikingly familiar story, in which Communist agents played the role of today’s Al Qaeda.

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There is a huge difference between the current threat and that of the early 1950's. Back then there was little ambiguity as to the return address of those responsible for a strike. Today's terrorist are generally non state actors operating from various locations among innocent populations. To the extent they may have a state sponsor such as Iran, it is a state ruled by religious bigots who think they are on a mission from God and that a nuclear exchange will speed the return of the Mahdi. In other words they are not rational human beings with concerns about retaliation.

The communist were atheist who did not believe in Paradise or an after life. When they were dead that was it. That alone gave them pause in triggering a nuclear exchange.