Ownership of most securitized assets in the US capital market depends upon the reliability of inter-related electronic records maintained by broker-dealers and custodians.

	Without Cooperation, Markets Are a Babel

The technology supporting securities record keeping is complex and sophisticated. Billions of securities efficiently change ownership each month, effecting property rights of tens of millions of investors.

Under ordinary circumstances, these transfers are done with a high level of safety at low cost. What is involved is the electronic posting of accounts maintained on computer hard drives.

Properly organized with off-site backups, emergency energy sources, and dual operational centers, a modern capital market should be able to operate, virtually uninterrupted, even in the event of an atomic attack.

However, the resilience of the system in a severe crisis, depends upon cooperation between broker-dealers and custodians, the seriousness of their prior commitment to disaster recovery, and on each playing a part to achieve recovery without loss.

No institution can survive alone should the records of all others be irretrievably lost.

How safe these securities are in the event of an actual atomic attack on New York City is anyone’s guess.

Unfortunately, Congress and the SEC have been lax is looking out for investors’ interests in this regard.

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The United States is engaged in war with radical Islam that aims to expel Westerners from the Mid-East and re-establish a caliphate modeled after the Ottoman Empire,   with hundreds of millions of people under subjugation.

The presence of the United States in the Mid-East, with ties to Israel and oil interests in Saudi Arabia,  is seen by the militants as a situation that must be reversed, even at the cost of millions of Muslim lives.

Osama bin Laden   and other radical leaders have decreed that Muslims are at war with Americans and are sanctioned to kill American men, women, and children wherever they can be found.

	Is This How The War Will End?

As the war has evolved, Iran   and Syria   are now open sponsors of Al Queda’s   goals.

Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and has already declared that once this goal is achieved, it will use atomic weapons against Israel and, presumably, the United States — the Great Satan.

Iran, emboldened when it took American diplomats hostage in the 1970s, a blatant act of war that was allowed to pass without reprisal by the weak Carter administration, has its own reasons to believe that the United States is a paper tiger.

A Tragic Misinterpretation of History

The use of atomic weapons against cities of the United States has been the goal of Osama bin Laden since the 1990s. He sees this tactic — in a fatal misinterpretation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as the decisive move in the final battle that will drive the infidel from Muslim countries.

Osama bin Laden’s tragic misunderstanding of World War II and American history has led to a belief that the atomic destruction of New York City will not result in retaliation, but instead surrender.

To those poorly educated in history, the evidence seems to point to this:

Half of the US population, the press, the universities, and leading politicians seem to be whining cowards, clamoring for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and subordination of American sovereignty to the United Nations.

Under the ‘rule of law’, there seems to be no country against which the US could retaliate in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack, especially if half of the US population would require that prior approval be obtained from the United Nations.

However, like Hitler and Stalin, Osama bin Laden has misinterpreted history.

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