http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=822822D7-F5E9-428C-B68C-D084D885DA64 (http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=822822D7-F5E9-428C-B68C-D084D885DA64)
Obama: Romney still wrong on Russia
By: Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein
March 25, 2014 11:58 AM EDT
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — President Barack Obama dismissed the notion here Tuesday that his one-time rival Mitt Romney was correct in characterizing Russia as the United States’s “number one geopolitical foe,” as he also weighed in on his administration’s plans to modify its surveillance programs.
“The truth of the matter is that America has got a whole lot of challenges,” Obama said during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of The Netherlands. “I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security about the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan,” he later added.
Russia is just yet another issue about which the United States is concerned, but is not the dominant one, Obama said in a slight at Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness. Ukraine has been a country in which Russia had enormous influence for decades, since the breakup of the Soviet Union,” he said. By contrast, the United States has “considerable influence on neighbors” but “we generally don’t need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them.”
Obama’s comments come amid efforts by the United States and others in the international community to isolate Russia and pressure Putin into backing down from his aggressive approach to Ukraine. If Putin doesn’t, “there will be additional costs, and those will have some disruptive effect to the global economy, but they’ll have the greatest impact on Russia, so I think that will be a bad choice for President Putin to make,” Obama said. “But ultimately he is the president of Russia and he’s the one who’s going to be making that decision. He just has to understand there’s a choice to be made here.”
Asked if he’s misread Putin’s motivations, Obama sidestepped the question. “I’m less interested in motivation and more interested in the facts,” he said.
Obama also used the press conference to offer his first public comments on his administration’s proposal to end the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk data on U.S. phone calls.
“Overall, I’m confident that it allows us to do what is necessary in order to deal with the dangers of a nefarious attack and addresses the dangers that people have raised,” he said. The proposal is “workable,” Obama added, and he believes it addresses the “core concerns” that Americans have about the program.
His comments came after administration officials confirmed details of the administration’s proposal to address Americans’ concerns about the NSA’s surveillance program. Any changes would have to be approved by Congress, and Obama said he is “looking forward to working with Congress to make sure we go ahead and pass the enabling legislation quickly so that we can get on with the business of effective law enforcement.”
Obama started his remarks by making his first comments on the mudslide that took dozens of lives in Washington State over the weekend. “We hope for the best, but we recognize this is a tough situation,” he said, noting that he’s signed an emergency declaration and spoken to Gov. Jay Inslee.
Obama started his remarks by making his first comments on the mudslide that took dozens of lives in Washington State over the weekend. “We hope for the best, but we recognize this is a tough situation,” he said, noting that he’s signed an emergency declaration and spoken to Gov. Jay Inslee.
Transporting a 500lb cargo containing a live nuclear device into the US and into Manhattan would be quite a chore. Not impossible, but I'm pretty sure that even the CIA and the FBI would figure it out before it got to US soil.
You don't need to. Land it in upstate New York, a small fishing boat will do, and set it off in Water Tunnel 2, which provides most of the water and is pretty much unguarded. Manhattan would be uninhabitable within 2 hours, not to mention the poor sods who happened to be on the loo when several billion gallons of water get vaporized.
The simple fact of the matter is that IF a nuke does go off in Manhattan (or anyplace else in the US) The blame should rest solely on Obama's shoulders. He will not be able to blame Bush, the GOP or even his dog.
Oh, but they would indeed try!
Landing in upstate NY, with a 500lb nuclear cargo, is not an easy feat.
If one were to pursue your suggestion, dynamite would be sufficient.
Nope. You don't want to stop the water. The essence of a terror attack - as you know from experience - is the fear. Can you imagine the entire island suddenly finding out it's water is very radioactive? People already get wound up about radiation - in the water that they shower in and drink would kick it to a whole new level.
As for getting it up state - boats go up and down the Hudson all the time, and there are more private landings than public ones. It's possibly the second most used river in the world. Can't check all of them. Want to shift a bomb without being detected? Drogue it under your boat. 20 feet down, even a sensitive detector won't find it.
It's not an original idea. Been posited several times before (Spider Robinson probably does it best - read "The Lady Slings the Blues.") Doesn't mean it's unworkable. Set off a nuke in New York Harbor, and that would work, but it would be less effective. You don't want to kill people. You want to overload them.
BS he wouldn't care a bit if a nuke went of in Manhattan.
He'd only care if a golf course was destroyed. :chairbang:
That it hasn't happened to-date is the best evidence to-date that doing it is simply too difficult logistically, and will remain that way until/unless something substantial changes. The biggest stumbling block being the acquisition of a working device.
In terms of getting something up the Hudson river: assuming that one managed to get a device onto a ship undetected and managed to get that ship into NY harbor with the weapon undetected, getting it up the Hudson from there is going to be problematic. If the ship is a normal international freighter, it's going to have to unload some of its cargo before it can go up the Hudson; right now there are some restrictions due to the level of water flow. Second, you're not going to be able to just stop the ship at some point on the trip up to drop off a 500lb plus package. That would certainly draw attention. That means you have to go up to Albany, unload there, and then move your cargo.
Can it be done? Technically, yes, but then again, as per quantum physics there's a small but not zero chance that all of the atoms in my body could suddenly "jump" to an orbit around Jupiter while still retaining their positions relative to each other. The practical odds of getting a working nuke up the Hudson river are rather small.
Don't use the freighter. What is the one invariable for every single ship entering New York Harbor? They are met 3 miles out by a pilot boat or a tug to be brought in. Those are light, small, so ubiquitous that you'd not notice one, and perfectly capable of taking a nuke up river, especially since they get shifted around all the time.
Sorry - I like to play with scenarios. Personally, I'd go dirty bomb. Conventional explosive with a nice coating of long half life isotopes.