A Poor Man's Nuclear War

• The Mongol hordes routinely wiped out population centers (every living thing including pets) in order to terrorize enemy peoples and to dry up war supplies.
• US Gen. Sherman engaged in a "scorched earth" warfare against the Confederate states.
• US Army routinely destroyed Indian villages (including the inhabitants)
• The Allied conducted "carpet bombing" raids on German cities during WW2.
• UN forces bombed virtually every village and town of N Korea.
• US nuked Nakasaki and Hiroshima and "fire-bombed" Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
• US engaged in extensive chemical warfare ("defoliants") in Viet Nam.

The US Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), headed by Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, keeps 1,000 specialists on 24-hour standby, to disarm a nuclear terrorist bomb planted in the US. The NEST's mission is to respond to a nuclear threat anywhere in the US within 4 hours. The NEST members are trained on building and dismantling homemade nuclear bombs. It is alarming that to date, the NEST has been put on alert over 100 times, and mobilized 30 times against threats believed to be credible. It is believed that nucl ear terrorism will happen sooner or later.

Nuclear terrorism represents a far greater threat to our society than that by any traditional military assets such as missiles or bombers or submarine launched cruise missiles - which can be detected and destroyed with a high degree of certainty.

In these days, anyone can find fairly accurate diagrams of nuclear bombs on the Internet. The Soviet KGB published the Hiroshima bomb design drawings in a public journal and various insiders have been peddling nuke designs for many years. The nuke weapo ns technology is no longer a secret held by the Big Powers alone. Indeed, our fear is that ex-Soviet nukes may become available on the market - to the highest bidders; or how about a Dr. Strangelove scenario in which a nuke commander turns a rogue and nukes an enemy city or a friendly city for a ransom?

Nuclear, biological and chemical terrorism is the present and future mode of warfare. A nation or a group or indeed a person can wage a warfare against an enemy nation using covert suicide teams of terrorists and go unmolested. A nuclear device can be a ssembled in an apartment or a hotel room. A crude nuclear device can be floated in on a barge, or delivered, days in advance, in any one of hundreds of ways. AND there is no effective defense against such an act.

Nuclear devices need not be sophisticated. A small research reactor on a college campus can easily be exploded with well-placed dynamites and make a large city radio-active for many hundred, if not thousands, years. Radio-active dusts or biochemical may be poured into water sources and contaminate river basins and their inhabitants undetected until it is too late for many of our citizens.

The best way - perhaps the only way - to prevent a poor man's nuclear war is to end the Gunboat Diplomacy. For example:

Threatening a preemptive strike against N Korea is an open invitation for a poor man's nuclear war on America. Is it a coincidence that Mexico and Cuba have large groups of N Koreans - fishermen, residents, advisors, diplomats, etc.?

Is US waging a secret against Cuba? Would Castro retaliate covertly?

Yeltsin's brutal war on Chechnya may result in the first poor man's nuclear war.

US Navy ships parading in the Taiwan Straits do not bode well for Sino-US relationship. Is US willing to lose Los Angeles and other US cities for Taiwan?

Kadafy, Sadam and Iran should not be pushed too far.

Irish Republican Army has surface-to-air missiles and other modern means of terrorism

India/Pakistan hostility may erupt in a poor man nuke war.

Will Hamas find more advanced "engineers"?

Drug cartels, religious zealots and other radicals will acquire nukes sooner or later.