FBI Searching Trucks, Ships For Nuclear Devices: Terrorists Could Use To Unleash Destruction Worse Than 9/11

In New York, cops armed with Geiger counters pull over trucks for random inspections. Robotic underwater cameras crawl along the hulls of cruise ships looking for explosives and traces of radioactivity. And from the air, sensors snoop for radiation hot spots. It is the last line of defense against an unthinkable threat. "Terrorists — al Qaeda, bin Laden — have sought nuclear materials for a number of years now," FBI Director Robert Mueller told CBS News correspondent Bob Orr in an exclusive interview. Mueller says terrorists would like nothing better than to hit the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. "When we saw 9/11, everyone I think pretty much looking at those pictures thought this is about as bad as it could get," Mueller said. "Its not as bad as it could get. A nuclear device — if a nuclear device went off, you're talking about devastation that is far, far beyond what we saw on September 11th." That kind of devastation was portrayed in the film "The Sum of All Fears," when a nuclear bomb leveled much of Baltimore. That was just a movie, but officials warn the threat is real, and the bomb wouldn't have to be that big. A small nuclear device packed inside a case and left in the heart of Washington could take out the White House and everything else within a square mile. "It could kill tens of thousands of people, and that's why it is a tremendously serious matter for us to address," Mueller said.