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Via Jeffrey Lewis, Katherine Shrader has an excellent article on the legendary "suitcase nuke." Long story short, such a weapon may never have existed, and because of technical limitations would have had a very short shelf life in any case.
Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of suitcase nuclear weapons. Hollywood has made television shows and movies about them. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency has alerted Americans to a threat -- information the White House includes on its Web site.But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune. Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not think the threat remains.Even though they don't exist, I'd still rate the chance that a U.S. city will be destroyed by a suitcase nuke as substantially higher than that of a terrorist group or rogue state firing a ballistic missile at the U.S. And we've only spent millions fending off imaginary suitcase nukes, as opposed to billions and billions fending off imaginary ballistic missiles...--Robert Farley
