Similar to the wheelbarrow, I've always wondered why a new nuclear country would need ballistic missiles to deliver a threat - a parcel service, or a Volkswagen driving across the border would be slower but who's in a hurry?
For superpowers, it's easier to disguise a few warheads as spy sats and leave them in convenient orbits than go through the trouble of smuggling shit through land borders
I will agree "Rods of God" type kinetic bombardment is stupid, though for different reasons
Nuclear weapons (like almost all military weapons) are about A. threatening B. revenging. These are commonly called first strike and second strike.
U.S. currently builds B21 stealth bombers that can carry nuclear weapons, because the B2 has proved to be useful type of threatening tool. Such planes fly undetected in various airspaces and drop conventional bombs to countries who don't have nukes. The message is "we could nuke you and you would not know until it hit you, keep in line peasants". If you didn't want to send that message, you could use either non-nuclear rated stealth bomber or you could use non-stealth bomber.
The second strike is hardened ICBM's in hardened bunkers. Idea is that when the infrared signature of enemy ICBM booster-phase is detected, you have about one hour time to pray and have sex and whatnot. So you use that time to launch your own ICBM's to revenge the impending doom. Because each side knows this revenge is coming, you are not very likely to see nuclear exchange between ICBM sporting states. You are quite unlikely to see any kind of exchange to be accurate.
In case you just spot detonation, you can assume that enemy bomber has gotten through, so you might just as well again launch your ICBM's. The suspects of a launch are usually well known because enriching arms grade nuclear matter is very hard to do undetected.
So Wolkswagen is not suitable because the enemy does not have time to feel threatened. And if you start your wolkswagen engine when nukes are raining, you are already several days late from your revenge mission.
A nuke in a random container on a ship filled with thousands of them, owned by a bunch of shell companies, combined with the fact that the evidence gets blown up in the process...
Quite a bit harder to track to a source than "hey look a rocket launched from Iran".
The US has a lot of busy ports, so maybe blockading one isn't too disruptive, but it still has strategic value. Of course, it also depends on the effectiveness of the bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-GDP_ratio
But between the long preparation time, the chances of being discovered ahead of time, and the low relative impact/reach, even when placed strategically a few car-nukes would probably deliver more of a "terror strike" type of attack. You can cripple a few weak points but nothing "terminal".
Having a covert facility and deploying a weapon w/o any testing would be beyond the capacity of all but a handful of states.
There have been people pulled over in the DC area after undogoing chemotherapy. In one case it was a small dog.
Considering that chemotherapy is chemical, I'm not sure what it would have to do with radiation at all. Presuming you meant radiation treatments, those do not leave the patient radioactive at all.
In general, to the best of my knowledge, detecting items with radioactivity levels mildly above background inside a moving vehicle from the street is not practical, even theoretically, based on the probable lack of difference in radiation level outside the vehicle.
Aside, google has gotten worse than useless. In a first ever I had to scroll through a full page of cancer treatment ads. Zero organic results on the first page. Even then it needed careful tweaking to get Google off the “treatments for cancer” train of thought.
Was not able to find the dog story I remembered. Google wants to show me either national security or cancer treatment but not the intersection.
Not categorically true, even with external beam radiation therapy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25271934
Other kinds of treatment can leave the patient significantly radioactive, for example brachytherapy, which involves direct implantation of radiation sources in tissue.
Nevertheless, I would still find it pretty surprising if any of these sources could be reliably detected from inside a moving vehicle by a stationary sensor. Or that cases of these medical treatments would not be overwhelmed by other incidental sources of radiation being slightly higher or lower than usual.
I don't work on these systems, obviously - those who do aren't talking - and this is just idle speculation. But I do know that lots of DHS money is shoveled into R&D on this kind of thing every year and I would not be surprised if some of the tech does work.
If someone were smuggling a radioactive weapon into DC, couldn't they just shield it with a lot of lead?
I'm guessing that your small-dog example would have been different if it were in a thick lead crate.
It's really not hard to hide both neutron and gamma emissions, especially if you have a large enough container, like a ship's hold.
I would absolutely expect any nuclear exchange to start with ground-based stealth attacks.
It is a form of radiotherapy.