by David Furritus

Created on: June 21, 2008

I'm a little confused by the title of this article. Is it supposed to mean that the U.S. is destined to be attacked or will they commit to an attack? The answer to both questions is 'no' - or at least no time soon.

First, let's address the possibility of the United States actually employing our nuclear deterrent upon another nation. The odds of this are rather low. Although, the U.S. has agreed to use their weapons in only self-defense, they still reserve the right to use it pro-actively against other nations that we feel would unleash nuclear weapons upon us. There was a time when our policy against chemical weapons was that if we found your nation had used any of these weapons against us, we would retaliate with the logical escalated force of nukes. However, that policy has changed since a few past administrations do not want to go down in history as the first one to actually use nuclear weapons on another nation (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actually atomic bombs).

As for being the recipient of a nuclear attack, the odds are even smaller. The former Soviet Union is too busy trying to keep their people fed and what's left of their country intact to worry about annihilating their old enemy, and China wouldn't want to nuke us because we're one of their biggest customers. It would not only be tactically suicidal, but also financially crippling - and again, any sovereign nation that nukes another will get in serious trouble with the rest of the world. Other countries have nukes, but none of them have the capabilities of actually reaching us with them due to restrictions of deployment systems.

Of course, this brings us to the other theory of whether terrorist organizations could get a hold of them. Sure, there are a lot of organizations that would just love to get their hands on them, throw them in the back of a truck and drive them into the U.S. to make an entire city turn into a mushroom cloud. The problem with that is that actual fissionable materials are extremely hard to come by and any nation with the capability to produce these materials are carefully monitored.

Another problem that anyone that tries to use a nuke on us would face is that we can actually trace where the weapons come from based upon the isotopes left behind. This means that if some nation decided to sell some plutonium to a terror group and the terrorist succeed, somehow, in employing the weapon we would find out where it came from and would respond in kind. This makes the concept of selling nukes to enemies of the U.S. pretty stupid.

Now, there are some doomsayers that almost sound like they want it to happen to help fulfill some dark prophecies, and then there are those that feel that the U.S. is just not being paranoid enough these days, but they're a minority that spends a little too much time watching the news (usually during sweeps) and science fiction programs.

The days of duck-and-cover drills are over.

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