The War of the Incompetents

I love the Arms Control Wonk blog. Lots of thought-provoking posts with a healthy dose of WTF?! included. A case in point is the post that goes with the above pic, where Dr. Lewis recounts the tale of the woman who refurbishes recoilless rifles for fun and connects the ease with which civilians can get their hands on such toys with the ease of building a gun-type simple atom bomb once you have one. Couple it with an earlier post speculating, from the facts, on how easy it would be to procure enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb from the badly-safeguarded stockpiles of the former Soviet Union and the utter porousness of every method of crossing the U.S. border except the scare-worthy favorite of air travel and you have a very scary scenario indeed.

Which begs the question - why hasn't a terrorist nuke gone off in the U.S. already, if Al-Qaeda are so interested in doing so - as we are constantly assured by the fear-factories of the Bush military/industrial complex?

We can be sure that it isn't inability to get the materials - those Soviet-era stockpiles could be obtained via ideological fellow travellers or via unscrupulous Russian criminal "businessmen". The other end, the method, is as easy as a refurbished artillery piece like the one above. The middle part, connecting the two, is a matter of getting a couple of bricks of metal, each about the size of a milk carton, through one of hundreds of ports that don't have radiation detectors or simply don't have the personnel to scan every single bit of cargo. It should have happened by now.

So, since it hasn't, we're looking at one of three pretty simple explanations. Either Al Qaeda (and every other U.S.-hating terror group on earth) simply isn't as insanely bloodthirsty as the P.R. makes them out to be. Or these groups are incredibly incompetent - about on a par with the Bush administration's competence as evidenced by just about everything they have touched. Or Al Qaeda is perfectly capable of carrying out such an attack but has decided not to since it, like the Bush administration which has forgotten Osama so thoroughly, is quite happy with the mutually helpful levels of fear both have managed to generate.

Which do you think it is?

Postscript - it occurs to me as I read this that some uber-right idiot who thinks reading comprehension is a "lib'rul elite" plot to educate people will accuse me of wanting Al Qaeda to nuke America. Of course not. I'm very happy that there have been none of Condi's promised mushroom clouds over American cities...but I am simply wondering, out loud as it were, why not. It certainly isn't because of Bush regime competence in meeting the threat.