Speaking of the world not standing long, Allahpundit at Hot Air is looking at angles on a story in WorldNetDaily that says Muslims are being warned to leave New York and Washington, in advance of a possible nuclear attack by al-Qaeda sleeper agents. Just a lot of, um, hot air? Or not? You decide. Read the various stories and you may find more to it than you would prefer to find. Still, there remains no reason to buy into it wholesale either.

A question does occur to me in this context, however. What would the U.S. response be to such an attack, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans? No one knows, of-course. Why is that the case? In the interests of having at least some kind of deterrent factor against this most horrifying of possible scenarios, shouldn’t there be some kind of public understanding that the U.S. would use its own nuclear weapons against targets that this enemy would value? I think we all could come up with a couple of examples. Without an at least potentially deterrent threat on the table, what’s the point in having these weapons and this vast nuclear superiority?

A question for the next “9/11 Commission,” or its equivalent, I guess.

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Addendum : Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo did take a stab at addressing this scenario about a year ago. After the fact, the notion of punishing uninvolved people for the attacks of a terrorist organization would provide a serious moral dilemma. Many would argue that there is no point in unleashing vast destruction on innocent people — albeit that many of them would have cheered the destruction in the U.S. — even after so many Americans were killed.

Yet, the issue, as I’ve said, is one of deterrence — which is by definition having an effect before the fact. People have already argued that there is no such thing as deterrence against terrorists who are of no particular nation. In the absence of any real deterrent threat, however, that has not been fully proved, has it?

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Addendum II: I realize that the above involves some very hard thoughts — but the thought of the city that I and millions of others live in being attacked with a nuclear weapon is also quite a hard thought — and it’s one that we know fills the minds and hearts of some people out there with lust and anticipatory glee. To avoid the unthinkable, I would suggest, it helps to think about it at least a little bit.

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