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Two manufactured events took place this week that lend credence to the notion that we live in very dangerous times. The first, the detonation of a "suitcase nuke" nuclear device on American soil by Islamist terrorists, as portrayed on the FOX series "24," was fiction. (web site) The second, the updating of the "Doomsday Clock" to five minutes to midnight, though based in scientific reasoning, is also artificial. (web site) But when viewed through the terroristic chaos in which the world is embroiled only the naive and those in denial can afford the luxury of discounting the probability of an "American Hiroshima" taking place in the near future.

I doubt that my wife and I were the only people who sat speechless as the season premiere of "24" concluded. The cutting edge fictional accounting of the war against Islamist terrorists set on our own soil "went there"; they depicted a nuclear attack in a suburb of Los Angeles. As the vision of a nuclear mushroom cloud emanating from an American city loomed on the television screen my wife captured the moment with "Oh my God, Frank."

Oh my God indeed.

I started thinking about the casualties. In a city like Los Angeles one would have to assume that the dead would be in the hundreds of thousands almost immediately. Perhaps another couple hundred thousand would die the slow torturous death that radiation poisoning affords in the days that followed. The aftermath of a nuclear detonation in an American city would be carnage.

Then I thought about the chaos that would envelop the country should a terrorist detonate a nuclear device within the United States. It would cripple the country for a good period of time -- the World to a lesser extent -- as our leaders and emergency personnel decided how to handle the situation. Would our leaders then be able to set aside political opportunism to confront the problem of radical Islamist terrorism in earnest? Would the political power-plays then be abandoned for effective, cohesive government? Would our nation set aside the absurdity that is the notion of fighting a politically correct war to stand as one and set out to kill the bastards that attacked us, that killed hundreds of thousands of us? Judging from where we are five years on from September of 2001, the prospects don't look too good.

Then again, this was only a television show...a FOX television show. In the minds of many -- and especially among those who comprise the Progressive-Left -- this was just a fictitious Armageddon, scare tactics delivered to the American people from the mouthpiece of the Bush Administration. Domestically, we have a handle on radical Islamist terrorism and for that matter there is no concrete evidence that Osama bin Laden or Hassan Nasrallah or any of the lunatics who prefer the 7th Century over the 21st have ever possessed nuclear capabilities, even in the most elementary sense. Right? Now, back to American Idol.

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