Chemical and biological WMDs rely on dispersal and human ingestion of the deadly substance used in the attack -- these are time-dependent processes. Human travel away from the bio-agent's initial release place, and further inter-personal infection, are needed to fuel a severe epidemic. Travel restrictions and medical quarantines can be effective countermeasures, as with SARS. Transport on air currents is key to any chemo-toxin producing major casualties, and this spreading to wide areas soon dilutes the toxin below a lethal dose -- plus many chemical weapons are non-persistent; they break down on exposure to sunlight or oxygen.

In stark contrast, the detonation of a nuclear weapon occurs in a tiny fraction of a second. Set off in the open atmosphere (as opposed to deep underground), against a city nothing can halt the A-bomb's awful effects. Searing heat and gamma rays spread far and wide at the speed of light -- instantaneously. Fierce doses of alpha and beta rays (actually atomic particles) follow very close behind. A burst of penetrating neutrons kills living cells in unspeakable quantities, and the same neutron bombardment turns harmless substances in brick and cement and metal into viciously radioactive isotopes. The blast force of the explosion moves out at the speed of sound -- an overpressure tidal wave that reduces structures to rubble before it finally dwindles thousands of meters from ground zero. The fireball vaporizes everything, and sucks debris up into the sky through the mushroom cloud's pillar. Fallout starts to propagate along high-altitude winds, obeying no human travel restrictions or quarantines. Fresh fallout causes death in days by acute radiation sickness. Stale fallout if ingested triggers cancer years down the road.

Clearly, the terrorist or rogue-state attack we can least afford to face is a New Age Nuke. The nominal yield from a critical mass of uranium or plutonium in a fission bomb is fifteen or twenty kilotons. (Ironically, this Hiroshima-sized weapon is simpler to build than one with a much smaller yield.) Set off at an optimum height of maybe 1,600 feet in the air -- atop a skyscraper or tourist needle or TV broadcast antenna or in a small aircraft -- the ultimate death toll could easily be in the hundreds of thousands in Moscow or Paris, Toronto or London, Tokyo or New York. A ground-level burst, though less destructive because of the physics involved, would be bad enough.

And yet, when the United States asked Russia last week to stop its aid to Iran's reactor construction, Russia's response was to play a frighteningly childish tit-for-tat: They demanded an accounting of Israel's atomic weapons program first. The Kremlin's crude sophistry is at best a confuse-and-delay tactic, since Israel never signed a non-proliferation treaty and Iraq and Iran and North Korea did. Tehran's heavy-water reactor design, the one that Moscow is making loads of money from, is suspiciously weapons-oriented: The design produces better bomb-grade isotopes of plutonium, and faster, compared to the much safer pressurized light-water reactors used in all American nuclear power plants. And remember, it was the Soviet Union who gave the world the Chernobyl disaster and tried to cover it up -- that gigantic reactor was just about the most dangerous design imaginable, intended to generate civilian electric power and military plutonium at the same time, and it didn't even have a containment dome in case of trouble! It seems the Russian government's entire culture and value system on the nuclear threat remains irreconcilable to America's needs and concerns.

Several unpleasant realities are thus becoming evident:

1. United Nations strictures on atomic weapons proliferation have lost their impact. Inspectors on the ground in-country, though well meaning, can't be counted on to identify all facilities or activities that stand in violation of signed agreements. Enforcement proceedings by the International Atomic Energy Agency are so endlessly dragged-out and defanged that they border on nearly useless -- they may in fact add danger, by creating false security for those too-willing believers in "giving disarmament a chance."

2. Some other nations, themselves nuclear powers, such as Russia and France, seem more interested in playing politics against the United States than they are in keeping a doomsday weapon out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. Time is of the essence now; we do not have months and years to dawdle and nit-pick.

3. We have crossed a threshold where both North Korea and Iran are no longer dependent on assistance by foreign governments to develop working fission bombs. North Korea has openly said so. Iran has uranium mines, and owns centrifuge plants to process that ore into fissile metal for weapons.

4. North Korea has threatened to sell atom bombs to terrorists outright, and Iran might now be harboring senior al Qaeda people. Iran may already be fragmented into several separate political, religious, and geographic/tribal entities who detest each other, collapsing any hope of regime-reform or moderate central control.

5. Some CIA signals intercepts were recently declassified, presumably as part of efforts to try to put to rest accusations of fudged reports about Iraqi WMD capabilities. These intercepted conversations make it clear that al Qaeda does not function on pure ideology after all. Al Qaeda has cooperated on financing and planning attacks with other extremist Islamist groups holding sharply different religious interpretive beliefs, and with sub-factions in secular (non-religious) Muslim states.

6. Diplomacy alone is not a winning tool in the War on Terror. The UN Security Council has deteriorated into a grandiose filibuster chamber; NATO may have become the same thing on a lesser scale. Economic sanctions primarily hurt only struggling peasants, while aid to a hostile foreign regime tends to strengthen dictatorial power. Words voiced by high-level envoys and heads of state, and more words on signed sheets of paper, will no longer solve the problem of the spread of nuclear weapons in this asymmetric New Age post-post-Cold War world. The above six-point line of reasoning leads to distasteful but unavoidable conclusions:

1. Non-proliferation in the conventional, historic sense is a has-been. We must discard such outdated thinking immediately.

2. The War on Terror must be seen for what it is, an ongoing military operation, and the ready use of armed force must back all our efforts at diplomacy.

3. Our ex-friends in "Old Europe," and our outright opponents, view time as on their side. We must change the rules of the game by enabling continued pre-emption as needed, to regain the strategic global initiative ourselves. Israeli warplanes destroyed the French-built Iraqi reactor at Osiraq in 1981; the only significant consequence was enhanced Israeli protection from Arab atomic attack. The long string of al Qaeda atrocities against America, after we helped drive Saddam from Kuwait under UN auspices, proves those fanatics hated us as deeply as they possibly could before Afghanistan and Gulf War II -- the risk of provoking them further is a myth. It's a fight to the finish, and a bad guy's endless patience does him no good if he's dead.

4. While cultivating new friends assertively, and trying to heal new wounds with ex-friends in the Group of 8 or elsewhere, we and our few true lasting friends must not hobble ourselves by craving other countries' affection or approval or support. We must be prepared if necessary to stand together in a small group and act alone, and act decisively, exactly as we did in Iraq this year.

The next question confronting us is what "deterrence" means in the context of New Age Nukes. In the U.S.-versus-USSR standoff, deterrence meant having enough H-bombs in survivable reserve so that you could obliterate your opponent even if he struck at you first by surprise. In an era of a) homicide bombers eager for violent self-immolation, b) dictators with Stalin-like disregard for the welfare and survival of their own citizens, and c) hardened underground bunkers in rogue nations that are immune to existing high-explosive ground penetrator rounds, we need to rethink the concept of deterrence.

Suggested new definition: Deterrence is the unstoppable ability, coupled with the iron will, to destroy that which an enemy regime or organization's leaders hold most dear.

One thing Afghanistan and Iraq seem to prove is that while the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are glad to send huge numbers of their people to martyrdom in Paradise or to early graves as traitors, they value their own lives very highly indeed. The same applies to Kim Jong Il and his top Pyongyang advisors, who can hide in deep mountain bastions while millions of common North Koreans slowly starve to death.

The solution for true deterrence against first-use of WMDs by terrorist organizations or rogue states is already under discussion between the Pentagon and Congress: As part of the total real-time connectivity of battlefield ground-truth-based intell and weapons platform smart-bomb delivery known collectively as network-centric warfare, America needs the ultimate in bunker busters -- ground-penetrator nukes. The deep underground explosion of a tactical atomic weapon, say with a yield of less than four kilotons, would create some local fallout, as material blasts up out of the "chimney" the weapon's entry path made. Proper choice of local wind and weather at the time of this pre-emptive or retaliatory strike would help to minimize such damage, and American experts could aid with the clean-up afterward. Actually using such a weapon is not the least bit appetizing. But lacking such small-yield self-limiting tools of absolute retribution, our New Age arsenal is incomplete and we are vulnerable. With them, our deterrent strength against the worst threats in the War on Terror is vigorously restored.

That the use of such atomic devices, even without other nations' concurrence, would escalate to thermonuclear holocaust seems most unlikely. The key threshold is not the one often cited, between high-explosive bombs and nuclear bombs.

The crucial barrier and distinction today is between fission bombs and fusion (hydrogen) bombs. The construction of a working H-bomb is a vastly more difficult task for a Third World rogue group to ever pull off; there is no sign whatsoever that Iran or North Korea are moving toward self-sufficiency in that arena now. And if we hold H-bomb "plenty" and "monopoly" against a force who suffers fission-bomb "scarcity," the scenario breaks the mold of anything real that our National Command Authorities ever faced before. While we do not want to have to be first to use a New Age fission weapon in a military op, we certainly don't want to be the first country since 1945 to suffer attack by atom bombs. (The possibility of such an attack is precisely the hideous wild card that defines the New Age Nuke imperative to begin with.)

Nuclear blackmail by some rogue entity is not an acceptable outcome for American interests, either. The best solution there is also the harshest for both sides: "Just say no" from the start as our national policy. One way to say no, in extremis, is to drop a New Age Nuke down the blackmailer's throat. Knowledge in advance that we can turn to this alternative will give us greater confidence, and will give our adversaries serious pause.

Developing ground-penetrator tactical nukes will probably not improve our popularity on the world stage. But if America is the sole remaining superpower, or as some pundits argue a new phenomenon, a "megapower," it certainly isn't something we owe the rest of the globe an apology for. To quote Machiavelli, "It is preferable to be feared than loved." As to the local ecological and collateral damage of somebody using a New Age Nuke in combat, I would simply urge this: "Better there than here."

To be continued ...

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com