If on January 1, 2010 Osama Bin Laden was given the one time ability to drop a single 20 kiloton nuclear weapon anywhere in the world (air or surface burst) which target do you think he would choose and why?
Would he choose a target based on its symbolic value, the number of potential casualties or both?
Assuming afterwards he takes credit for the attack how would the world respond?
How would this affect the war on terror?
The number of directly affected people, hence a major metropolitan area. And probably not “drop”. Detonate at ground level. It’s what I started worrying somebody was going to successfully do, dating back to the Symbionese Liberation Army era, and that the immediate response would be Instant Police State. So in a way we got off lucky, getting a vaccine-sized dose instead of the far scarier “today a nuclear weapon vaporized a substantial portion of London” sort of event.
I have long said that I can prove for positive that no non-state terrorist org has a nuke. How an I do this? NYC still exists. That’s how.
OBL would have totally tried to smuggle that thing into NYC & set it off near Wall Street. Any other target was totally off his radar. Whether the smuggling would succeed or fail is a separate question you did not ask. There is of course security. But security, of whatever & wherever nature, must succeed every time, while the baddies need to succeed but once.
The successful detonation of a terrorist nuke would result in the general genocide of the terrorist’s host / refuge country and of the country which provided them the nuke. If the US wasn’t quite sure who those countries were, they’d simply kill their best guess and any close runners up. It would be a very bloody affair.
The Council of the European Union would conceivably be a better target for a nuke than NYC.
The September 11th attacks were more of a big “fuck you” to the USA than having a great strategic advantage. They immediately got the war-hawks in US government into Iraq and Afghanistan. Argueably chaos was what was sought, and Mr. bin Laden acheived that, alongside growing support, but only for a limited time.
The EU is far more fragile (In my admittedly naive view) without the over-reach that the US Federal Govt. has.
So a “head-kill” on the sitting Council could be a greater threat to international stability, especially as it would also simultaneously remove the heads of the majority of NATO countries.
Again, I would assume the aim would be chaos, leading to the weakening or destruction of the EU, rather than a specific military goal.
Bomb NY in Wall St? A couple million die; the Nikkei becomes the main stock exchange. Life goes on. USA destroys another country.
Bomb the sitting Council? A couple million die, Europe is thrown into total chaos and is unable to regroup and react, leading to global instability.
I’m not sure if this scenario fitted Mr. bin Laden’s agenda, though. He really did not like the USA.
It’s hard to see how Washington DC wouldn’t be the prime choice, especially the Capitol-White House area.
In all matters of Middle East based terrorism, Israel, as a potential target, must be considered.
One nuke there, destroys the nation.
It’s too small to survive even a Hiroshima-scale device, given fallout.
Some thriller novel suggests that analysis of the fallout would identify where the nuclear material came from, providing a method of determining where it was made.
He would have hit the same place he actually hit. NYC.
Surface detonation. Put it in a small freighter and blow it off Liberty Island. You aren’t going for blast damage (although that’s a nice secondary effect) so much as massive, pervasive fallout all over NYC, New Jersey and points afar depending on the wind. Radioactive water raining down (sorry!) all over.
Had Osama Bin Laden been smart, which he clearly was not, he would have nuked the Kaaba.
DoD / DoE certainly have various sampling efforts to sniff those signatures out. That’s real, not spy novel stuff.
Pretend for a minute Putin never invaded Ukraine. Just want to get that awful background off the table for my scenario. Now let’s say a nuke goes off someplace and sampling suggests with high confidence it was of Soviet origin.
So we ask & Russia says:
Not ours.
Might’ve been one of a couple dozen that have disappeared over the years from one warehouse or another or might have been one of the the bunch that disappeared from Ukraine when the USSR collapsed. Who knows how many hands those have passed through since 20-30 years ago? Not us.
We know we didn’t give a fresh one to anyone any time recently, that’s for sure.
Now what?
Heightened security measures may be a deterrent. You have to take into account the difficulty of delivering the payload to its destination.
I’d expect an attack in either Pakistan or India sooner. High population density cities, warheads on both sides, etc. Not from Al-Queda though, mind you. [/off-topic]
~Max
If you are going for maximum disruption, nuke Rome during a conclave, Mecca during the Hajj, or Jerusalem anytime. Make sure the source and motive is ambiguous so that various sides can blame each other.
It would make more sense to use it as an EMP over New York City. The financial damage it would cause to the East Coast is incalculable. the resources to fix the damage doesn’t exist. I would imagine it would involve an alignment with Iran for their missile technology.
Put another way, it’s asymmetric financial warfare.
If I was OBM and I had an atomic weapon, I would consider nuking the Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, take out the complete Saudi Royal family with one blast, time it with an event where all the ranking members are present…
but I am not OBM and I do not have an atomic weapon
Sure, but as I understand the OP, he is assuming bin Laden is given the guaranteed option to do it and it’s only a question of where, not how - in other words, which target would be best.
I would go further and say WTC (Freedom Tower in the OPs timelime) as ground zero.
So who is “OBM” if it’s not you?
My dyslectic abbreviation of Osama bin Laden
I think he would pick D.C. on the evening of the State of the Union address. He liked making a big splash, and I can’t imagine one a whole lot bigger than that. He would completely take out two branches of the government while destroying many of the symbols of our democracy such as the capital, the white house, and the entire city itself.