P asked the ugly question:

>I do not know the right answer here, but if AQ ever
>succeeds in buying old Soviet nukes, smuggling them
>in via the Mexican border, and detonating them over
>US cities.... what does the US govt do about those
>countries who funded AQ?

At that point the United States would have officially LOST the War on Terror. Refer to Wretchard's Three Conjectures:

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html

My guess is that martial law would be established in the United States. An American analog of Lucius Cornellius Sulla (google him) would crawl out of the wood work and make himself America's Lord Protector (think: Oliver Cromwell). The United States would then adopt a Roman Imperial managment style towards the Islamic world, (think: Carthage, Corinth and bar Kochba). Unlike the Romans, we would make liberal use of nukes instead of the short sword. What took the Romans decades to do, we would do in weeks. The people of the world would be less concerned about green house gases / global warming and more concerned about plutonium dust / background radiation. "Fortunately", world over-population and resource depletion would be less of a worry. If I survived, I'd move my family to some obscure town in Australia or New Zealand and try to lose my American accent.

Gary