For decades many nations had many nuclear weapons, including the Soviet Union and China, two nations demonstrably hostile to us. Yet no one lobbed a bomb on us.

The main reason for this is that they knew they would be a lake of molten glass by the end of the day. Their bombs stayed on the shelf.

Now, if Saddam sneaks a nuke in here and sets it off, then what? A single nuke on a city will not wreck the U.S. Or even two. Does he just sit there and snicker to himself? That's pretty much all he can do. He sure as hell isn't going to make any demands, or take credit for this. Hell, who would? Even after arms reduction, the U.S. will have almost 2,000 warheads just sitting there waiting. Every hostile nation on the planet is going to be falling all over itself trying to avoid the blame, and Saddam, if he has any brains, will be no exception. The Axis of Evil is not going to be wearing dry pants the day an American city center goes up in a mushroom cloud.

Eventually, the target site will cool down to the point where we will be able to examine it, and eventually figure out just how the bomb got in there. Such things leave fingerprints on many levels, and a lot fewer things get vaporized in a nuclear explosion than you might think. And we will take all the time it needs to finger the culprit.

Saddam will know this. He knows that whatever operation shipped the bomb to its target will involve a large number of people, not all of who will be killed even in a suicide operation. People who might talk.

Is Saddam the kind of lunatic that would attack us in this way knowing that his own destruction would be inevitably forthcoming? There are suicidal loonies like this in the Mideast, but I don't figure Saddam, who likes luxury a lot, is one of them. Of course, I could be tragically wrong about this.

Saddam is working on weapons of mass destruction. What does he really think he will do with them? Are they for terrorist purposes, or just to blast armies trying to overrun his nation by conventional means? Or are they just one of those things that every tyrant has to have in his arsenal just to make him feel like one of the Big Boys?

I know I have not covered all the scenarios here. Comments?