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A dirty bomb provides nearly the same costs to us because of the transgenerational "area-deniability" from highly mobile, bargain, conveniently small amounts of common radioactive material. Many, many thousands of sources of this stuff exists in addition to the USSR's agricultural crap left laying around.

Al Qaeda showed on 9/11 that they don't intend to do anything peacemeal when attacking the US on our own soil. The investigation of the 1993 WTC bombing revealed that their objective was to bring down at least one of the towers in that attack and likely hoped that if one came down, that it might topple into the adjoining tower or several other smaller buildings. 9/11 was the ultimate example of their zeal for increasingly more devistating attacks.

I don't think that a radiological bomb would be "big enough" for them next time around. Their margain of success would be too dependant on the weather for an optimal dispersal of the radioactive material.

IMO, the next likely AQ move will be another coordinated, multiple event type of attack, like chem/bio weapons used in densly populated places like shopping malls and/or sporting events, or a full-fledged nuclear bomb. The bomb would likely be targeted at one of our shipping ports (probably New York again) since they wouldn't have to risk getting caught moving it inside the country.

Trust the research, a few kilos of even Cesium 137 air bust from any home-made mortar or RPG is enough to spread terror and a flood of American refugees to be interviewed by Perky Katie.

Area deniability will cost us for generations or centuries many square miles = billion$ of prime real estate, or D.C., Manhatten, San Fran, etc, etc, etc. even if we don't waste billions more trying to decontaminate, with endless co$t overrun$.

We don't need to have our own Hiroshimas, but that would be replayed on All Jazz Era for generations. Dirty bombs would not likely motivate our boomers' launches, but actual nukes would.

Try to think like smart terrorists, because our mortal enemies' leaders, private enterprise proxies and their government sponsors are smart.

They will attack us to cost us more hundreds of billion$/year. They will probe each of our defenses. Anthrax? SARS may have been an accidental leak from a red Chinese bio-weapons lab, IMO.

Crippling our econpomy is their goal, with our dead amusing them to celebration, but not for the camera. They learned from our reaction viewing their WTC dances in the streets.

We are on the front lines as we hold hands with our wives and children. Qaeda wants us as off balance as Israelis struggling with their daily lives. If this war gets really hot as we did in 1942, Texas awel will be the spoken language of the New Christianity from the Suez Canal across the Arabian penninsula and Iran to India, after natural half-life decontamination of centuries.

We will face simultaneous attacks no matter the payload as that is a demonstrated dust monkey trick. If bio, we won't even know that we have been hit, until we are staggered. Prepare for it.

I expect an islamist version of the Nazis' "Night of the Long Knives". That is when assassins in the night to kill a large number of our political, business, and brain trust leadership before our morning papers even hit the porches. We will face simultaneous attacks no matter the payload as that is a demonstrated dust monkey trick.