Hersh On The Specter Of Nuclear Terrorism

I've been reading Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh. It has tons of amazing stuff in it. One particularly frightening section examines Al Qaeda's thinking about how to eject the US from the mideast. And guess what? It involves nuclear terrorism:

... if the Americans could be persuaded that the Al Qaeda threat was credible, they might decide that there was no Middle East war worth fighting... when Al Qaeda developed its first bomb in a suit case, Washington would be told -- and reminded that there was no way to stop Al Qaeda from smuggling a nuclear weapon across the border by automobile or into an American port by boat.

But that's not the most terrifying part.

The most terrifying part is that I was lying. I've actually been reading another book by Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. It does contain the above paragraph, but with just a few different words:

Moshe Dayan's mission in late 1967 and early 1968 was to convince his fellow cabinet members that if the Soviets could be persuaded that the Israeli threat was credible, they might decide that there was no Middle East war worth fighting... when Israel developed its first bomb in a suit case, Moscow would be told -- and reminded that there was no way to stop Mossad from smuggling a nuclear weapon across the border by automobile or into a Soviet port by boat.