[Citizen of the Savage Nation]

China isn't liking things right about now. The shipping container with the W-88's is a red herring, it wouldn't take long to figure out who did it, and neither China nor Russia could withstand a US first strike, in all probability, so that would be a very, very bad move on their part.

[spycatcher]

You may be right about not using a W88 since we would know who did it. But there's no substitute for small pre-positioned nukes for an anonymous attack on D.C. The USSR did it during the cold war when we didn't have ABM technology and it would have still been obvious it was them.

In this case our first reaction would be that Russian backpack or Pakistani nukes got into the hands of Al Quada. We're using geiger counters in all our ports, and all around DC but we don't have enough to cover everywhere.

As far as striking China, I think they assume correctly we would never wipe them out with nukes unless they lauched all their missiles. I think official policy is even that we would just absorb a single ICBM without retaliating. China learned a lot about Bush's resolve to confront them when they forced our surveillance plane down -- that may have been a psychological probe more than anything. And we may in fact know they supported bin Laden's attack, but we'll never hear that anytime soon because we don't want to fight that big a war. At least not right now with Clinton's depleted military.

[backhoe]

W-88 and more here:

Nuclear News you *can* use--

[UWhusky]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a W-88 ?