That's fascinating. It makes the "Jericho" scenario look a lot more frightening.
For those who may have missed it,
Jericho was a sadly short-lived TV series in the US wherein 23 twenty-five kiloton nuclear weapons, tagged for orderly disposal were shipped in secret into 25 major US cities:
here is a comprehensive list of target cities, plus two that survived. The bomb intended for NYC was intercepted before detonation, and the bomb intended for Columbus, OH, was stolen by a CIA loyalist who kept it as evidence of the conspiracy to destroy the US. The whole plot was started by a private security firm whose CEO would step in to fill the power vacuum plus suppress any dissident groups under the banner of patriotism, thus rebuilding the US as the perfect police state (ala
V for Vendetta).
But the point is, the meta-plot of using the bombs to break the country into disconnected, chaotic regions came from the security contracting company's studies (at the behest of the government) in the 1990s of just exactly what would happen to the US in the event of a very limited, surgical nuclear attack, one that was neither counterforce
nor counter-value. Once the company (Jennings & Rall / Ravenwood) realized what they could do by gutting the emergency response system with the 23 bomb attacks, they infiltrated an operation titled "Red Bell" which was initiated to acquire, by any means necessary, nuclear weapons from ex-Soviet client states to keep said weapons out of the hands of foreign terrorist groups. Unfortunately, the J&R group set up sleeper cells in the CIA to route the bombs into the hands of domestic terror groups, tying them together in an unaffiliated but coordinated network, triggering the bombs simultaneously across the US. Chilling stuff.