Detecting terrorist nukes coming into the country is basically a side-effect of a sane defense policy against other nuclear states, and other nuclear states are quite a large threat.
You are confusing the result of the thing with the thing.
Terrorism is not a big problem because we work so hard to fight against it. You've confused that with not being a big problem in the first place. (It's like Y2K - it wasn't a big problem because we made such a big deal out of it and everything got fixed.)
And detecting a hidden nuke coming into the country is not the same thing as looking for nukes from other countries.
In one case you watch the country, in the other you watch your borders.
>Terrorism is not a big problem because we work so hard to fight against it.
Citation needed. The government has yet to stop a single terrorist plot. The only ones they claim they've stopped are very clear entrapment cases that never would have amounted to anything without the government supplying the motivations and the supplies.
Every time a terrorist has actually tried an attack they've either succeed or screwed up all by themselves. The reason terrorism is not a big problem for the US is because terrorists nearly never attack the US.
> The government has yet to stop a single terrorist plot.
The world isn't an action movie where the hero stops the terrorist by cutting the wire on the bomb at the last minute.
An attack is stopped way way earlier in the process, where there is much less drama.
It gives a perverse incentive actually: Wait till the attack gets really big and obvious before stopping it, just so you can get some good press. I hope they never give in to this.
I'm not confusing anything. Please read what I'm saying rather than relying on your projection of what you think I think.
I'm well aware of the possibility that terrorism is rare because it's so heavily fought. I just don't see any reason to think that's actually the case.
Yes, terrorism could be like Y2K, in that it's a big problem that's averted through lots of hard work. It just doesn't look that way to me. Instead, it looks like a small problem that has tremendous resources devoted to it for no good reason.
Consider the following facts:
1. Terrorist attacks are pretty easy to carry out. Any motivated HNer could easily plan and execute an attack, on a programmer's salary, that would outshine the Boston bombings. (Something like 9/11 is obviously harder. But there's plenty of low-hanging fruit.)
2. Doing the above without getting caught is still pretty easy. There's essentially nothing in place to catch the "lone wolf".
3. Despite #1 and #2, terrorist attacks remain extremely rare.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that there are very few people who are actually motivated to carry out attacks. It's nothing to do with enforcement, it's simply that most people don't actually want to go out and kill a bunch of innocents.
As for detecting nukes, why do you think that smuggling a warhead into the US is a technique reserved for terrorists? There's nothing that says Russia or China or North Korea couldn't do it. They probably won't, but it's enough of a threat to be worth guarding against.
You setup a strawman: "Small attacks are easy, and we don't (can't) defend against them, therefor no one wants to do small attacks."
Conclusion: Don't defend against large attacks.
But your strawman ignores that people do actually want to carry out large attacks, but they are harder to do, and get caught easier, so they happen less. That doesn't mean we should not defend against them.
(And obviously "most" people don't want to kill innocents. There are those that do however.)
> There's nothing that says Russia or China or North Korea couldn't do it. They probably won't, but it's enough of a threat to be worth guarding against.
Of course they "could". But why? It wouldn't gain them anything, so they won't bother. Like I said: For attacks by a country watch that country, not the border. i.e. look for the motivations.
(I suppose Iran might bother, if they could. But they'd probably do it by proxy, i.e. terrorist.)