Similar to the wheelbarrow, I've always wondered why a new nuclear country would need ballistic missiles to deliver a threat - a parcel service, or a Volkswagen driving across the border would be slower but who's in a hurry?
Extreme pre-emptive strikes like that have bad optics. One of the elements of modern international diplomacy for non-superpowers is making it look like you're the defender/victim, which is hard to do when all the enemy's bases get nuked simultaneously by smuggled cargo containers.
For superpowers, it's easier to disguise a few warheads as spy sats and leave them in convenient orbits than go through the trouble of smuggling shit through land borders
Absolutely, and on a totally unrelated note, in case anyone asks, the reason that spy satellite happens to contain a nuclear warhead is for self destruction purposes only. Consider it a safety feature ;)
Then there is purely practical problem with staging various stuff (regardless on what exactly on the scale ffrom kinetic penetrator to thermonuclear warhead it exactly is) in orbit with the purpose of using it as raining hell some significant time later is that you (a) have to get it there, which is more expensivevthan launching ICBM and (b) the whatever vehicle has to have enough delta-V to be able to maneuver to stay there, probably also change it's orbital plane to reach different targets and mainly to initiate the re-entry itself. (This is the reason why GI Joe-style raining tungsten rods is complete nonsense, but even with warheads it is not viable strategy)
A space-based nuke doesn't need to deorbit to be effective; starfish prime detonated at 400km, which is at the upper limit for a regular US keyhole satellite apogee and well in EMP range. Spy satellites also usually have really low perigrees and lots of delta-v to chase navies, so deorbiting isn't that big a deal for the things given a large enough lead time. In fact for the first part of their history spy satellites had to deorbit film in multiple return capsules, often even being caught in mid-air!
I will agree "Rods of God" type kinetic bombardment is stupid, though for different reasons
If soviet union would have done that to west Germany, they would have had full load of US made ICBM's raining on Moscow about one hour after first detonation.
Nuclear weapons (like almost all military weapons) are about A. threatening B. revenging. These are commonly called first strike and second strike.
U.S. currently builds B21 stealth bombers that can carry nuclear weapons, because the B2 has proved to be useful type of threatening tool. Such planes fly undetected in various airspaces and drop conventional bombs to countries who don't have nukes. The message is "we could nuke you and you would not know until it hit you, keep in line peasants". If you didn't want to send that message, you could use either non-nuclear rated stealth bomber or you could use non-stealth bomber.
The second strike is hardened ICBM's in hardened bunkers. Idea is that when the infrared signature of enemy ICBM booster-phase is detected, you have about one hour time to pray and have sex and whatnot. So you use that time to launch your own ICBM's to revenge the impending doom. Because each side knows this revenge is coming, you are not very likely to see nuclear exchange between ICBM sporting states. You are quite unlikely to see any kind of exchange to be accurate.
In case you just spot detonation, you can assume that enemy bomber has gotten through, so you might just as well again launch your ICBM's. The suspects of a launch are usually well known because enriching arms grade nuclear matter is very hard to do undetected.
So Wolkswagen is not suitable because the enemy does not have time to feel threatened. And if you start your wolkswagen engine when nukes are raining, you are already several days late from your revenge mission.
Substantially harder to trace, too. A missile leaves a pretty obvious trail; a container on a ship carrying thousands of them in NYC's harbor is going to be harder to attribute to an attacker.
ICBMs have the distinct advantage of being able to provide a wide scale attack with high precision and short preparation/response time. This makes it a perfect deterrent.
But between the long preparation time, the chances of being discovered ahead of time, and the low relative impact/reach, even when placed strategically a few car-nukes would probably deliver more of a "terror strike" type of attack. You can cripple a few weak points but nothing "terminal".
We have had aircraft and ground stations collecting the residual isotopes of every nuclear test since the nuclear age began. We can forensically track these back to the origin reactor/enrichment facility. These facilities also "leak" so we can figure it out. If black market, we and the original source nation (unless they want to be nuked) would probably be able to track down who it went to.
Having a covert facility and deploying a weapon w/o any testing would be beyond the capacity of all but a handful of states.
The port of New York and New Jersey is the third busiest United States port, and the busiest on the east coast. The United States economy basically lives on import and export of goods through sea freight. Bombing the NYC harbor also is an attack on US prestige in a way that bombing other harbors such as Los Angeles and Long Beach wouldn't be.
The US has a lot of busy ports, so maybe blockading one isn't too disruptive, but it still has strategic value. Of course, it also depends on the effectiveness of the bomb.
It didn't. It killed a lot of indians and firemen who got sick and created a pretext to destroy Iraq and Afghanistan (the Taliban destroyed this one first). The attack on the WTC was just stupid. It only fuelled more destruction and death, probably got Dick Cheney's pals richer, annoyed a lot of people with tightened airport security, created some extra jobs for security personnel and generally made air travel shittier for everyone.
A nuke in a random container on a ship filled with thousands of them, owned by a bunch of shell companies, combined with the fact that the evidence gets blown up in the process...
Quite a bit harder to track to a source than "hey look a rocket launched from Iran".
Not really. It’s a fairly short list of organizations with the means and the motivation. If you’re already spying on them it’s not hard to pick up on changes in communication, movements or even catch them red handed on a recorded line.
An attack like that would also be carte blanche to nuke whoever the hell you wanted — that wasn’t themselves a nuclear power that could survive the volley — in retaliation.
Do you have any references for this? Because it doesn't make any sense to me.
Considering that chemotherapy is chemical, I'm not sure what it would have to do with radiation at all. Presuming you meant radiation treatments, those do not leave the patient radioactive at all.
In general, to the best of my knowledge, detecting items with radioactivity levels mildly above background inside a moving vehicle from the street is not practical, even theoretically, based on the probable lack of difference in radiation level outside the vehicle.
Aside, google has gotten worse than useless. In a first ever I had to scroll through a full page of cancer treatment ads. Zero organic results on the first page. Even then it needed careful tweaking to get Google off the “treatments for cancer” train of thought.
Was not able to find the dog story I remembered. Google wants to show me either national security or cancer treatment but not the intersection.
Other kinds of treatment can leave the patient significantly radioactive, for example brachytherapy, which involves direct implantation of radiation sources in tissue.
Now that's interesting - I hadn't heard of cancer radiation treatments being performed with proton and fast-neutron beams, which can indeed cause activation of the subject material. I was mostly guessing at cancer treatments, given the weird reference in the GP post to Chemotherapy. Certainly there are other treatments that do result in increased radioactivity of the patient after treatment.
Nevertheless, I would still find it pretty surprising if any of these sources could be reliably detected from inside a moving vehicle by a stationary sensor. Or that cases of these medical treatments would not be overwhelmed by other incidental sources of radiation being slightly higher or lower than usual.
Regarding background sources, the fact that the target of interest is moving could actually be a great benefit for background rejection. Place two detectors on the path separated by some distance, knowing how long it takes for a typical vehicle to travel between them, and you can filter out simultaneous spikes as background fluctuation. Modern photon counting detectors are pretty amazing, and it would take only a small number of temporally correlated discrete events at each detector to reach the probability threshold of alarm.
I don't work on these systems, obviously - those who do aren't talking - and this is just idle speculation. But I do know that lots of DHS money is shoveled into R&D on this kind of thing every year and I would not be surprised if some of the tech does work.
