Friday, October 27, 2006

Terrorists with Nukes

An ESSENTIAL read: this is the end of the nation-state, as we know it.

A Frontpage Magazine symposium on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Not to states such as North-Korea or Iran. But to terrorist groups: such as al-Qaeda.

Paul Williams at FrontPage:"there is empirical proof that al-Qaeda possesses nukes. In 2000, British agents posed as recruits from a London mosque to infiltrate al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. In Herat, they saw nuclear weapons being manufactured. Similarly, an al-Qaeda operative was arrested while crossing the Allenby Bridge toward the checkpoint at Ramallah in Israel in a rusty old Volkswagen van. Within the van, Mossad discovered a bomb which turned out to be a highly sophisticated plutonium-implosion device with an explosive yield of 10 kilotons (equivalent to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima)."

AND

Hamid Mir at FrontPage: "In the next few years, I came to know that Al Qaeda had a big brigade of nuclear and chemical experts who conducted a dirty bomb test in the mountains of Kunar in 2000."

Al-Queda has a group of nuclear scientists from Pakistan's nuclear establishement, working on development and maintainance of nuclear weapons. They are part of Dr. Khan's network of nuclear technologists.

The origin of the weapons is unsupervised Soviet stocks. Supervision of these weapons stocks was interrupted in the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1990. Germany has wisely funded a program to prevent these weapons and technologies from falling in the wrong hands, but this has clearly not been enough.

Apart from the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear weapons have never been used in war. The USA could bomb Japan without fear for retaliation or what is called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

A transsnational network like al-Queda is not a target. This makes the threat from Al-Quada a VERY serious threat, unlike the threat from North-Korea or Iran, which are sitting ducks, just like the Nation States of Europe and North America.

Al-Queda can attack, but being so dispersed and invisible hidden in the cultural fabric of Middle Eastern societies and it colonies elsewhere, it cannot be counter-attacked. Think about that.

Read the whole article on nuclear weapons prolifirating to networked transnational organisations HERE.

1 comment:

JK said...

I think the Western world better prepare itself for a traumatic shockwave, especially the USA.

Once the USA has been brought down on its knees and it has ceased to be a worldpower, where does that leave us in Europe, where does that leave Israel?
The future does not look very bright.