Let’s say Iran has a nuclear warhead–which some highly esteemed experts outside of The Establishment think is the case–what would they do with it? Could they effectively use it against us?
Well, in brief, yes.
There is a chance that they have long range ICBMs. We simply don’t know everything about Iran’s capabilities. If they shot it at us, maybe we would hit it down, maybe we wouldn’t.
But there are other possibilities, less often talked about, but maybe all more likely.
Firstly, they could smuggle it into America through the Canadian or Mexican border. We know this is plausible based on historical precedent. The Russian defector Lunev said that Russia easily smuggled many nuclear warheads over the Mexican border into America. Such testimony has to be taken with skepticism, but it meshes with other known Russian tactics, further, it is consistent with the science, as there simply is no known science or technology for us to magically know when nuclear warheads enter American territory. Once in America, the nuke could either be detonated in a city, or put in a hot weather balloon, floated into the atmosphere, and detonated to cause an EMP.
Another possibility is that Iran makes use of North Korea nuclear warheads. Iran is enmeshed in a network of Iranian/NK/Russian/Chinese activities which could conceivably lead to some type of joint action whereby Iran is able to use NK nuclear warheads like the one potentially, and likely IMO, in their satellite orbiting above us.
Maybe the most likely way they’d use it is by bringing some type of anonymous looking boat off our shore where they could launch a nuclear armed missile right from the boat, again, either into a city, or into our atmosphere. By approaching our coast they no longer need sophisticated ICBMs but could use a more rudimentary type of missile available to them, and also bypass our missile defense. There is precedent for this as well as a few years ago a North Korean freighter successfully parked itself near our coast carrying, beneath sacks of sugar, nuclear capable missiles.
Will this happen? I don’t know. I guess probably not. However, all these possibilities are an order of magnitude higher than people realize. The result of any of these scenarios is so awful that our failure to come to grips with it is a catastrophic failure of imagination.