When things look bad, get one your journalistic mouthpieces to reveal your "Imaginary Deterrent".

Yea, we got some Nukes too al-Zawahri, please, Prove you do too, Lets Dance.

You have nukes? What a coincidence! SO kids, we ready to kick this lil skirmish up to the next level? Lay out our members on the table and start the measurements? or we ready to skip ahead to the 'final' 'inevitable' step. If they would be so kind as to pop that lil briefcase sized party favor off in new york..or L.A or Austin or maybe they are just going to be freaks and let it loose in Italy. Im quite anxious to see how tempered our response would be.

Utter unmitigated Associated Press bullshti.

From the AP article:

"It was not clear when the interview between
Mir and al-Zawahri took place.


From the source article AP refers to:

"Pakistani journalist Hamad Mir said bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, made the claim following an interview by Mr Mir with bin
Laden in November 2001."



Since the timeframe of the original interview was within the first few paragraphs of the referenced article, this is clearly not a case of mistaken reporting, instead it is clearly an attempt to drag up an old, already discredited interview and present it as "news".

Well past time for the Associated Press to follow the BBC into the garbage can, and for precisely the same reasons.

No coincidence that such a "mistake" would occur at a critical time when Al Qaeda's top leadership is surrounded and soon to be annihilated. If aiding and abetting terrorism isn't a capital crime, it should be.

Pakistan may or may not have "leadership figures" surrounded. However, their Generals work very well when we use the carrot and stick approach. We have some really big sticks offshore and they know it.

It really wouldn't surprise me if they have nukes.

Not in the least.


Which begs the question; why haven't they used it?


A nuke is an odd sort of deterrent weapon. It only works as long as you don't use it.

If a nuke wen't off in NYC, we'd have to sterilize the mountains where they are hiding. Seriously.
If they set off a nuke and kill millions of people, and NYC does have the population density for that, then all bets are off. You can't take any more chances.


It's like...
If you have wolves coming down from the hills and killing your sheep, you go after them with guns, traps, poison, etc.
If they come down and start killing your children, you set fire to the forest.

I dont think they have one yet. But a regime change here, might give them the space they need to acquire one.

Its inevitable the day will come, in our lifetime, that we will have to respond to Nuclear attack, without knowing the correct coordinates to return fire. Its gonna be a hell of a decision to have to make. But failure to respond will leave OUR survival in jeopardy.

Focus, people.

Eye on the ball.

The bad guys, about 4,000 of them are surrounded by almost 200,000 troops.

They have tried bombing in Iraq and Pakistan, bombing in Spain, failed attacks in Kashmir, and outright lies about how much fun Al Zero and Bin-Loser are having sipping umbrella drinks in a safehouse in sunny Afghanistan.

Three Card Monty only works when you allow the scam artist to distract you.

Al Qaeda is a network. A clearing house between charity front financing, organizations and facilities that train terrorists, planning and operational support for terrorist attacks, and a global steering committee for terrorist operational goals. "The Base" is a network, and the core routers are within our grasp.

Wave away the smoke, ignore the mirrors, and let's get this done.

Core routers ????

Doesn't sound like the networks that I am familiar with.

The ones I know of have hundreds of routers.

I have no doubt that for $30 million somebody will be willing to sell you an old Soviet suitcase nuke.

These nukes were abandoned because they were expensive to maintain, and required maintenance every 12-18 months or they would cease to work. The suitcase nuke inventory went a little loose in the mid-90s.

These bombs are all long past their expiration dates. You could get more nuclear material for less money using other, easier means (and no, I'm not going to share how) so if Al Queda has any of these things, they aren't a threat but rather a pretty elaborate russian joke.

The only thing such bombs are currently good for is extracting their nuclear material and using it for a dirty bomb. And a 30M dirty bomb is incredibly expensive for what you get.

TM Lutas - Do you honestly believe that the remnants of Al-Q or more recent recruits to terrorism would not spend $30M ito set off a dirty bomb in LA or NYC or Dallas or Atlanta??????

or Washington DC????

Core routers connect backbones. You find them at places like UUNet, Quest and TWTelecom. They live in the core of the nodes.

Working out from there, you have you firewalls and outside of those you have periphery routers.

In large datacenters, the core is essentially that part of the network inside the innermost firewall.

Different companies may call them different names. The terms I used above are the ones we used at the airline on my last job. Cisco literature also uses these terms. I won't say they are industry standard terms, but the concepts they refer to are.

In this metaphor, we can roll up the entire central node with indirect fire and air support, but if we want the adjacent nodes and possibly others, we have to catch as many as possible alive.

What crap! the worlds smallest nuclear weapon is the SADM (Special Atomic Demolition munition) It is feature at the FAS site. Look it up. It goes 70 some kilos WITHOUT sheilding. Strap that on your back and you'll be dead within minutes. Which hand will they use to pick up this 150 lb. briefcase. My third wife's purse didn't even weigh 70 kilos. You know anyone that does 150 pound curls? one handed? I wonder why the Media doesn't just look on the airplane ticket they paid for to discover where the raghead was interviewed. The city will do, as long as we are going nuclear you don't need that precise an address. Missing by a few kilometers isn't that big a deal once you get up in the kiloton range. The Reporter neeeds to join his Editor and Publisher in Jail, until they figure out where the interview was or until the nonesistant nuke goes off.

ableiter - hopefully then if they really have them, they are in the same caves that binL and alZ are in

My understand of the Cold War application of the suitcase nuke was that it was shipped somewhere and stored as in "we've already got nukes in DC, LA, NY, and we're going to set off one. Think you can find it in the next 5 minutes?" They weren't actually supposed to be carried around.

My dad worked with nuclear ordinance -- for some pretty scary info, Google on the Davy Crockett missile program. During the Cuban crisis, my dad was going to land on the beach and start blasting with those things. 40+ years ago, they were already small enough that 3 guys could get one out of the crate, climb up into the back of a jeep or a track, mount it like the devil's own RPG, and fire the sucker off. Don't freak -- declassified in 96 or 97.

And when people start cooking off nukes, suitcase, "tactical" or otherwise, the people deployting them have no delusions of dying of old age. Get some "true believers" who think they're going to an eternity of wine, virgins and song, and they won't care about dying of internal hemmorage..

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