Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser (washingtonpost.com)

Eugene Leitl Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Wed Jul 25 09:12:50 PDT 2001


On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Steve Schear wrote:

> Or reduce the effectiveness of the detection system by clandestinely
> "salting" vessels entering our ports with radio active dust with the
> same energy signatures.  Sort of a radio active chaff.

The point of a clandestine WOMD attack is that there is no forewarning.
Salting random vehicles will make some people way more paranoid that they
already are.

As to nukes, according to anecdotal evidence (a single former employee),
UPS doesn't screen for fissible signatures. I very much doubt they screen
for vanilla HE (which, unless well packaged, emanate telltale volatiles,
and contain a high nitrogen concentration, which you could probably detect
with proper activation spectrocopy, unless *very* well shielded, or packed
with a shipment of nitrate fertilizer). Screening devices are expensive,
and have a limited processvity -- but technology marches on, of course.

If a country would want to nuke a country with few 10..100 devices, it
will get them into the country, and there's jack you can do about that.
The probability of detection would be very, very low.

The reason it's not being done is 1) no point 2) basic milk of human
kindness.

Sooner or later some random ijit or random group of ijits is going to
fry/poison/infect a few people, which will have some serious impact on
security policy, and the style of living where people concentrate.

I hope I'm not there when it happens.





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