Smugglers regularly bring products measured in the twenty-ton range into the US. They use minisubs, drones, aircraft, and humans walking across the border. (The smallest tactical nuke, nineteen sixties version, weighs in at about fifty pounds.) The fact that we haven’t been blackmailed with remotely detonatable nukes is simply due to the fact that the people who would do such a thing are more concerned about Feud next door than they are with the Evil Satan. Rhetoric notwithstanding. I mean, have you seen Feud? Eleven-inch knife.
Honestly, we could stop ninety percent of the smuggling if the government and Americans were willing to simply shoot them and leave the corpses. Nobody would come across the border if they had even a fifty percent chance of being dead. There are more problems than just that. My host in Mexico picked up what appeared to be a comic book that was free next to the cash register in a gas station. He explained, “This tells me how to cross the border, how to claim persecution or torture, what to pack, everything I need to know how to stay in America.” We could even stop that. Just close the border until the Mexicans agree to police their side of it to our advantage. They have no compunction about using bullets as a deterrent.
There’s no will to do anything and there won’t be until we lose Chicago, New York and LA. No, that isn’t my dream target list. But I know a few people who would dance in the street if it happened.
“remotely detonatable nukes”
That’s not a good idea no matter who does it. The security for communicating with such a device would be a target for enemy hackers and once hacked they could detonate these weapons at will.