Vice President Dick Cheney: Threat of nuclear attack in U.S. city 'very real'

Vice President Dick Cheney, often called upon to deliver the administration's toughest talk about the wars abroad, now says this about the threat of terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in an American city: "It's a very real threat. ... Something that we have to worry about and defeat every single day." Cheney's warning about what's at stake for the U.S. in withdrawing from Iraq, delivered in a TV interview recently and coupled with a speech in Chicago on April 13 and a war statement that President Bush plans to make on April 23, is part of an escalating chorus of pressure that the White House hopes to exert on Democrats to approve a new war-spending bill. "The fact is that the threat to the United States now of a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities, is the greatest threat we face," he said. The administration has confronted questions about Bush's warnings about terrorists "following us home" if not defeated in Iraq, despite his assertion that security tactics have made the nation safer. Asked about that, the president downplayed a specific threat. "I'm not going to predict to you the methodology they'll use," Bush said. "Just you need to know they want to hit us again.