Can This Be True?

We
almost spilled our coffee this morning upon reading the following paragraph,
buried near the end of a long
story in the Boston Globe titled "Nuclear threat expected to
pose a major challenge.":

At least twice since the Sept. 11 attacks, US intelligence officials
believed, terrorists had smuggled a nuclear device into the United
States, once in New York City and later along the Potomac River near
Washington, D.C. A senior Bush administration official who asked not
to be identified said that before the information was determined to
be unfounded, he considered calling his wife and telling her to take
the children and head for the Virginia mountains.

Can this be true? US officials were convinced that terrorists
had possession of a functional nuclear device INSIDE THE UNITED STATES
and they didn’t say anything to anyone??!! That it got to the point that
officials were contacting family members and telling them to get out
of Dodge? Shouldn’t we be paying a bit more attention? Where was the
mainstream media on this one?

Here is a previous
Dowbrigade posting on the inevitability
of a nuclear incident

from the Boston
Globe