Instapundit and Homeland Security

Glenn Reynolds has a post up about people transporting a replica nuclear bomb cross country without a hint of interest from homeland security. He thinks this is a bad thing.

My take on this is: IT'S A REPLICA. It is made of steel and wood. It does darned good job of looking like Little Boy, but the similarity to the real thing is completely superficial.

Now if it was transported on the back of a flatbed, I'd still expect it to raise eyebrows. But the people that built it were not stupid, so they loaded it into the back of a yellow Penske moving truck. So the only similarity to the real thing was superficial and no one could see it. Some security at the Boeing Wichita plant may have inspected it but they had already been notified that it was just a steel and wood replica.

For the benefit of those that don't know, most attempts to track nuclear weapons by the US government actually track nuclear materials like plutonium and uranium. Of which this "bomb" has none. This is because nuclear bombs can take multiple shapes and sizes, but they all have to contain a critical mass of nuclear material to work. Plus nuclear material is radioactive so it is the easiest component to track at a distance.

Nuclear bombs also must contain goodly amount of conventional explosives to trigger the detonation. Those can set off warning bells too. But the replica didn't have any of these either. Again, there is no surprise that it didn't raise heads.

So if you loaded N pounds of plutonium in the back of your Penske truck and drove it around, the government might take an interest. Similarly I would hope a truck loaded with fertilizer would raise eyebrows somewhere. But without that, this is much ado about nothing.