I wonder if some white supremacists will assist them to assassinate him.
I believe Al Qaeda might pull off something small. But I believe that they as a group are under too much scrutiny from government agencies (I believe our intelligence agents are mostly good at what they do) to pull off an attack on the scale of WTC ever again.
And while I’ve considered the series of smaller attacks idea, it doesn’t seem their style. I’d expect that kind of attack more from 24 or an Arnold movie than in real life.
Dude, it happened less than 2 months ago in India. Sure, “only” a hundred-something people died; doesn’t mean they can’t spice it up a notch next time.
I hope I’m not giving them ideas, but an atomic bomb of any size detonated in any city would be a giant coup. Worry-warts have been talking about this for a long time, and I don’t know who to believe.
Still, if almost every country in the world now has a nuclear arsenal, why not some pseudo-governments?
But that wasn’t Al Qaeda. That’s what I’m trying to say. Al Qaeda as an organization won’t be able to pull off anything like the WTC ever again.
Sadly, I’m sure other organizations that aren’t under that kind of watchful eye, will be able to.
A trifle. I don’t think anybody really knows who or what, exactly, Al Qaeda is, and I accept the term to mean “Islamic terrorist group.”
Al Qaeda are quite happy blowing up a nightclub with 200 people in it… doesn’t have to be another attack on the scale of 9/11.
I’d expect coordinated mall bombings or similar - 5 x 200 people dead is still plenty.
edit
and I’d echo the point that Al Qaeda are not a group like the IRA; it’s more of a franchise system so even if it’s not Osama bin Laden it will still fall under the AQ banner.
IANAE but my understanding about nuclear weapons (even the small ones) is that they are very detectable by remote sensing, and even if the component parts could be smuggled into an urban location, any bomb would be unlikely to escape notice for long…
For long, sure. How about for short?
I think you’d be surprised. It doesn’t take a police state to track known ‘materials of interest’. There is a small number of things that can be used in an explosive release of energy. Each time something like that happens, the good guys get better at dealing with it. Go buy 5 100 lb bags of Ammonium Nitrate, then let me know if you get a phonecall. 
There will be terrorist attacks, they WON’T be 9/11 scale attacks, if only because the passengers of the planes are smarter. Knowing what happened to the other planes in the past, I doubt folks would sheepishly let the terrorists do anything they want.
It’s an arms race, and I’ll not deny the possibility of a nuclear or dirty bomb event, but it’s not something you can wander down to the local Costco and pick up…then get anywhere important.
Huh? Is the list much beyond the ~7 or so countries last time I checked a few years ago?
Well to be fair, a lot more countries have the technical know how to build a device within a certain time frame if they wanted to.
Declan
In this day and age I’m sure you could get the plans for a nuke off Wikipedia.
Hah , would you trust it tho.
Its not like you can call up level three customer support at los alamos or the sandia labs and ask em.
Besides Nukes will be all but obsolete within 50 years , except as engineering devices, ala harbor makers.
Declan
Knowing how is undergrad-level science these days, but actually getting the materials and building one is a very different story.
What? The idea was tested and abandoned back in the '60s by the Americans (Project Plowshare) and the Soviets. It turned out to be a dumb idea. What makes you think it will be revisited? And why would nukes as weapons be “obsolete”?
How so?
Because America has been doing what they wanted, better than they could do themselves; hurting itself, helping them, and destroying their enemies ( like Saddam, and secularism, and any movement towards democracy in the ME ). They had no reason to spend limited resources attacking us as long as that was true. Especially when doing so might risk us changing what we were doing.
It’s one thing to dream about it, another to get hold of one. I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. And before someone brings it up; no, even if Iran builds nukes, the chance of them giving one to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group is essentially zero.
Bio, though.
Unpleasant possibilities.
Let me clarify for a moment , archery and black powder muzzle loaders are obsolete, but they can still kill obviously. Now with regards to nuclear weapons the payload on most warheads is around 50 kilotons due to the fact that the accuracy of most of the delivery systems is good enough that you dont need the larger megaton warheads.
Conventional weapons may never achieve the same level of destruction of a Nuke, but the trend is going that way, the last project that I was aware of, was non nuclear penatrators that can take out missile silos.
We have not used a weapon in anger since 45 , and since then, they have become political rather than military weapons. So other than keeping a certain amount in the inventory , the same as is done for Chem/bio weapons ( if nothing more than seed stock at Ft Detrick) they are effectively obsolete. The current inventory of minuteman/ D5 missiles is aging and while it might be classified , nothing seems to be coming down the pike to replace them.
What your going to be left with is swap out warheads for the cruise missile and gravity bombs. Unfortunately due to the lack of heavy lifters and I would imagine a good re-entry shroud, we should have already had orbital kinetic weapons by now.
As for the engineering aspect of nukes , I would probably guess that the engineering and excavating aspects of nukes was fine , it was the fallout both physical and politcal that made it a non starter, but I can live with being educated if that was not the case.
Space or rather lunar/asteroid mining , if there is anything to mine will be the domain of the engineering device for large scale holes.
Declan
2150’s Style Death Ray. Duh.