NBC's Meet the Press: Stopping Nuclear Terrorism

There are some things the MSM usually does right, and one of them is Tim Russert and Meet the Press. Today's topic "[T]he threat and prevention of nuclear terrorism." (Transcript )

Chairman Kean, are you convinced that al-Qaeda is single-minded about obtaining nuclear weapons?

FMR. GOV. THOMAS KEAN, (R-NJ): I don't think there's any question about it. They've talked about this, as you've said, for 10 years. He talks about a Hiroshima. He's studied it. He feels that when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, that it psychologically ended the war because the Japanese couldn't continue anymore. He believes that if he did the same thing to an American city, that we would get out of the Middle East, and therefore, it's his goal, and he's doing everything he can--they have been doing everything they can to acquire the means of both the methods and the materials in order to do this to an American city....
...MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe it's a huge threat?

MR. KEAN: Absolutely, and it requires a whole new mind-set. We went through all the Cold War and the idea is mutual destruction. We wouldn't throw it at them because we'd get it right back. They wouldn't throw it at us because they would be destroyed if they did, and we got through, 50 years or so, thinking about that. This is entirely different. These are small bands of people in uncontrolled parts of the world who don't care about that anymore. They simply want to destroy us. If some of them get destroyed themselves in the process, it doesn't matter any different--anymore. It's a whole new way of thinking. We got to understand that. If we understand that, then we've got whole new approaches on how to deal with that, and I'm not sure we have those approaches the way we should as yet...
..MR. THOMPSON: It's amazing sometimes how much we have to hear in order for it to sink in in this country. We were--Osama bin Laden declared war on us in 1985; we kind of let that slide. We were aware of our intelligence deficiencies; we kind of let that slide for a long while. And now we're hearing this, and we still are not prioritizing perhaps as much as we should. And what has happened here, of course, is that the threat has been there for a long, long time. These loose nukes and so forth have been around. The destruction they could do to an American city--that threat has been there for a while. What has changed now is the number of people who are willing to carry out an operation to use those weapons. So you have the addition of the suicidal terrorists, plus the new nation-states, rogue nations, if you will, that are clearly developing the similar capabilities.

So it's--we're just in the very, very beginning, in terms of attention, in terms of need for leadership, in terms of money in this nation in addressing this problem, which surpasses all the other problems that we think we have in this country.

Chilling. Read it.