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Kamog said:
With so many nuclear weapons that have been built, it's a scary possibility that some of them will fall into the wrong hands. Making an atomic bomb, I read somewhere, isn't very difficult, if you have fissionable materials available.
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I share your fear that someday someone may get their hands on a nuclear weapon or even enough radioactive material to make a substantial "dirty bomb"; but even if that happens, that won't be "nuclear war" and I think it unlikely that there will be a nuclear exchange as envisioned in the first post here like the scenario of T3. Even if a weapon was stolen, they are designed to be as tamper-proof as technology allows. I'm not saying it would be totally impossible, but the very smart minds that created those things also ensured to the best of their ability that they could not be set off by someone who stole one. Let's hope that the unseen forces with the "white hats" who are trying to prevent this on a daily basis don't let us down.
Regarding building a bomb: It is extremely difficult; indeed impossible without some very-expensive-and-extremely-difficult-to-come-by equipment, the production and sale of which is closely monitored by the nuclear-capable countries. IMPO it is impractical. [As an aside, I would recommend reading Tom Clancy's "The Sum of all Fears" for some insight into this task - and remember, it is fiction]
As we saw in OK City, a truck with some fertilizer and fuel oil is pretty much a "precision weapon" because it can be driven anywhere and set off manually. You don't need any special skills, equipment or money to make one of those truck bombs to kill hundreds. As far as damage/kill potential, there are much easier ways to get to people or places. Drinking water reservoirs, shopping malls, stadiums, for example are all much easier targets - a relatively easier-to-get biological agent could infect thousands of people via any of these or countless other places. Infected people would then spread the biological agent to thousands of others before they showed any symptoms.
There are, of course, more of these targets than any country could guard continuously against all possible threats. So, yes, the "white hats" would have to be successful 100% of the time whereas the bad guys only need to be successful on a very small percentage of attempts - the odds of a successful catastrophic attack
eventually lies with the terrorists. Any of these isolated terroristic attacks, however many thousand people are affected or killed, won't endanger the whole planet. I say again that I think a large scale WMD exchange between countries is highly unlikely and a worldwide exchange is even more unlikely.