[Rick Lee]

Matt, I don't believe a nuke or even a dirty bomb could be detonated here without being pretty traceable back to the source. I don't know if this is true or if it is, whether it's public knowledge. Maybe Red-Beard can chime in here, but I think we have samples or fingerprint-like traces on radioactive material from most places in the world that produce it. I'm sure we have it from our own labs and we probably have it from other countries' clandestine labs too. IIRC, in Clancy's book they had the bomb traced back to Lawrence Livermore or Savannah River within hours of the blast. Wouldn't be too hard to see where the terrosrists got their stuff if it happened here. And then there'd be real hell to pay. Even the state sponsors of terrorism know we know this stuff. Sure, the U.S. suffers hugely from a rational-man complex, but I think some of the nuts are rational when it comes to regime survival.