SUITCASE FROM HELL

John Kerry keeps labeling President Bush's references to the terrorist's attacks on 9/11 as fear-mongering. If the global terrorists are ever successful in adding a nuclear suitcase bomb to their arsenal, the horror of 9/11 will pale in comparison.

I agree with President Bush. The rules of the game changed on 9/11. We have an enemy who is not interested in negotiating with us like Kerry seems to think. Islamofascism doesn't want our stuff. They want us to either convert to their madness or die. And they are determined to use whatever means they have to bring the battle to our cities. Airplanes, suicide bombers, tanker trucks, boats, and nuclear suitcase bombs. That is why the Axis of Evil must be confronted and disarmed.

An excerpt from Paul William's book Osama’s Revenge in a recent column at Townhall.com, gives us a pretty good idea of what it would mean for a nuclear suitcase bomb to go off in one of our cities:

[A] nuclear explosion is much more than a simple bomb blast. It consists of four deadly components: an air pressure shock wave, both thermal and nuclear radiation, and radioactive fallout. The effects of such a disaster in a city such as New York, Los Angeles, or D.C. would be cataclysmic. The air pressure wave from [one] suitcase bomb would destroy everything in its path, even heavily reinforced steel-and-concrete buildings.

Such an explosion would also emit intense thermal radiation, creating a fireball with a diameter that would expand to 460 feet. The core fireball would reach a maximum temperature of 10 million degrees Celsius. The enormity of this heat can only be realized when one notes that the heat within the World Trade Center towers never exceeded 5,000 degrees Celsius. Metallic objects within 450 feet of ground zero would vaporize. 1,400 feet from the blast, rubber and plastic objects would ignite and melt, and wooden structures would erupt into flames.

The bomb would expend 35 percent of its energy in the form of radiated heat. An additional 50 percent would be absorbed into the atmosphere to become a juggernaut blast -- a wave ripping through the city at 670 miles per hour. The buildings that survived the melting heat would be twisted like pretzels by the force of the incredible wind. No one within 740 feet of the blast could hope to survive; within minutes everything within three square miles would be destroyed. Over 300 thousand people would die instantly. Half a million or more would suffer severe burns and permanent blindness. Two to three hundred thousand people would be killed or injured by the deadly hail of debris and shattered glass.

The survivors of the initial blast would be exposed to intense bursts of ionizing radiation that would devastate their immune system. Those exposed would die in a matter of days. Then comes the fallout … the contaminants … which would then expose those in the area to deadly radiation poisoning, with 50 percent dying in the subsequent weeks and months. If this happened in a place like New York City, it would be an uninhabitable wasteland for hundreds of years. Then comes the other stuff such as the end of our culture, the crippling of our economy, the loss of millions of jobs, and an unprecedented health care crisis. Within days, Americans and much of the world would be tossed into a depression from which it would take hundreds of years to recover.

The terrorist threat to America is real, imminent, and must be defeated. I have two grandboys under three years old and I take my responsibility VERY seriously to protect them from future terrorism. I want it defeated on my watch.