And Starring Dick Cheney as Dr. Strangelove...

Just in case showing up at the inauguration in a wheelchair wasn't enough, former VP Dick Cheney has completed the transformation into Dr. Strangelove (and if you haven't seen the movie, shame on you) with his latest fear-fueled rant.

Not even a month into the tenure of Pres. Barack Obama, Cheney is making noise about the threat posted to America by terrorists, specifically terrorists packing nuclear bombs, chemical or bioweapons, and then warning about how Obama isn't taking the threat (well, his threat) seriously enough.

Of course the idea of a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is, well, terrifying. But it’s also something a lot more suited to the Tom Clancy’s and Jack Bauer's of the world than to reality. The simple fact is that of all the mass casualty terror attacks this decade - from 9/11 through London, Madrid, Moscow, Beslan (the school massacre in Southern Russia), Bali, right up to Mumbai late last year, none have involved anything more sophisticated than knives, AK-47's and home-made bombs. Why? Because we have seen that those simple things, when wielded by dedicated attackers, can bring a country to its knees.

So in the terrorists’ grisly cost-benefit analysis, WMDs just aren't worth it. Why spend millions of dollars and years of intense effort trying to acquire an a-bomb or a bioweapon when a box cutter will do just nicely? And there's the small matter that WMDs are damn finicky things. North Korea spent years and billions of dollars, turning itself into a pariah state in the process only to produce a nuclear dud (a "fizzle" in technical jargon). Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult, unleashed a Sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway (Sarin is one of the deadliest nerve gases out there), yet only killed 6 people.

WMDs are tricky, expensive things that in the hands of a novice are more likely to kill the attacker than the attackee. But this doesn't stop us from scaring ourselves silly over the idea of terrorists using them.

And that gets back to Cheney. With the Bush Administration legacy in tatters, why not try to scare people about the new guy? Comments like this coming from Cheney though are about as believable as Dr. Strangelove warning about the mineshaft gap with the Soviets (go see the movie, you'll get the reference).