Don't worry, be happy. The suitcase nukes story has been around for awhile (at least since 1997). It gets trotted out every once in awhile to make people nervous but the Russians, along the way, have already spilled the beans on the reality of these weapons. They are highly complicated pieces of machinery that needed highly specialized and difficult maintenance done to them each year or they became inert and each of them has a remarkably small amount of fissionable material in them. The only people who could maintain them were the old USSR military and the US, (and only maybe the US).
What Al Queda did was pay far beyond the going price for fissionable material for a worthless system. They would have spent their money better by buying up a medical waste firm and diverting nuclear material from there for radiological bombs because that's all they have if there is any truth to the piece at all.
Posted by TMLutas at February 9, 2004 09:43 AM