> the threat of global conflict in this day and age has dimished but the cold war mentality has persisted
This is the problem at the bottom of the whole thing, Why do we have a Cold War sized NSA, or bigger, when we can look out decades or even centuries and see no totalitarian threat on the scale of the Soviet Union, and today not within three orders of magnitude of the Soviet Union? Nobody is occupying half a continent. No columns of thousands tanks are poised to invade. No multi-megaton hydrogen bombs are aimed at our cities.
The only threat this weapon is aimed at is the people.
I would check on that. As far as I know, the US no longer stocks any "high yield" nukes, and the same for Russia, or at least a very small fraction of their previous arsenal. Not that a "small" nuke would be any picnic.
There's good reasons for that, unless you're trying to hit a particularly hard target, like the Cheyenne Mountain bunker that's now on "warm standby", really large nukes don't gain you anything, you get diminishing returns as additional heat liberated just radiates back into space.
Hitting a modern city with 3 low-centi-ton yield airbursts will do a lot more damage than one megaton class one.
“Right.” Rachel sat. She made a steeple of her fingers, then sighed. “How sure are you that this is genuine?”
“The first thing anyone knew about it was when the building’s passive neutron sniffer jumped off the wall. At first the block manager thought it was malf-ing, but it turns out yon Idiot was tickling the dragon’s tail. He’d got a cheap-ass assembler blueprint from some anarchist phile vault, and he’s been buying beryllium feedstock for his kitchen assembler over the past six months.”
“Shit. Beryllium. And nobody noticed?”
“Hey.” MacDougal spread her hands. “Nobody here is paying us for sparrow-fart coverage. Private enterprise doesn’t stretch to ubiquitous hand-holding. We go poking our noses in uninvited, we get sued till we bleed. It’s a free market, isn’t it?”
“Huh.” Rachel nodded. It was an old, familiar picture. With nine hundred permanent seats on the UN Security SIG, the only miracle was that anything ever got done at all. Still, if anything could stimulate cooperation, it was the lethal combination of household nanofactories and cheap black-market weapons-grade fissiles. The right to self-defense did not, it was generally held, extend as far as mutually assured destruction — at least, not in built-up areas.
Don't be joking that way. I would not be surprised if some consulting futurist convinced some general that, unless everyone is under constant surveillance, some anarchist is going to turn his precious bodily fluids into self-replicating gray goo.
This is the problem at the bottom of the whole thing, Why do we have a Cold War sized NSA, or bigger, when we can look out decades or even centuries and see no totalitarian threat on the scale of the Soviet Union, and today not within three orders of magnitude of the Soviet Union? Nobody is occupying half a continent. No columns of thousands tanks are poised to invade. No multi-megaton hydrogen bombs are aimed at our cities.
The only threat this weapon is aimed at is the people.