I was taking a shower when this hit me:

The emergence of drones/remote-driven vehicles effectively bypass conventional nuclear deterrents. Say I'm the US, and I want to hit Russia before they could hit back. What do I do? Build self-driven SUVs with Russian license plates, darken the windows, and fit the biggest nuclear warhead in the back that is practically possible. Maybe put a dummy in the driver's seat so it's not that apparent that my car is remote-driven. Drive up to a big city/nuclear launch site, and boom.
I don't even know how could a nation protect itself from something like that.

Thoughts on this?

Well, intelligence agencies usually have this thing covered. It might happen, it might not. I wouldn't go mad with worry about it, if I were you.

edit: I also think that if the US got into a tiff with Russia (WW3), we'd see worse bombs than your typical nuclear bomb. Thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs would be the go-to. I don't think we could even imagine how horrible it would be.

They can eliminate life in a city while keeping most of the infrastructure intact. Unlike a Nuke, which has too many downsides to it to practically use and invad a country for resources.

Hydrogen bombs are still 'technically' nukes. WW3 aside, I think that (if we're going to worry), we should worry about non-state actors when it comes to the use of nukes. States are very reluctant to use nukes, since they're able to rationalise that if they use one, it's going to come back to bite them. For states to use them, they'd have to be in some existential crisis, with no other resorts. Even then, nobody wins.

Non-state actors, on the other hand, don't have this problem. Their actions are guided by ideaology, rather than rationality. This is why them having nuclear (or biological....) weapons is a much bigger problem. Mutually assured destruction doesn't deter terrorists.

but you have to remember that Russia and the USA is held by the Geneva conventions which prohibit any sort of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon of mass destruction from being used. If you do happen to use one you could have the whole word against you in a single week (if not less), all aiming their nukes at you. Basically with this, the original target will be demolished from the prohibited weapons that were used against them (assuming they were used effectively which the USA nor Russia have any problem doing) and the original attacker will be demolished by a hail of nukes, ultimately destroying all life in the area. the only winners are those that abide by the Geneva Conventions which is why I think there hasn't been a nuclear fall out yet.

Looking at history. It's obvious someone isn't going to follow the rules and something is going to slip. As soon as that happens, a nuclear war is possible. Now, as to the actual topic. You'd need a pretty good SUV to carry a nuclear warhead that could do some damage.

I said why before. They're violent, extremist non-state actors who don't play by da rulz. They're operating on a death-oriented ideology, rather than self-preservation and logic. That's why we worry about terrorists with nuclear capabilities.

States, on the other hand, are the ones that wrote the playbook. If country A drops a nuke on country B, then everybody else turns on B and A and B end up dead. Mutually assured destruction.

tldr; it's the crazy people with nukes that you should worry about, not other countries.

well put i hadn't considered that at all, i guess there is no way of stopping it if a group were to get the necessary supplies

If you think it's scary now, think how scary it'll be in 20 years. I heard some guy on a podcast somewhere say that right now, the internet is the size of a golf ball - in 20 years, he said, it'll be the size of the sun. The number of devices connected to the internet will increase similarly. Every device (i.e. cars, planes, drones) is hackable. The terrorists will take advantage of this. We need to upgrade our security architecture. We're all so fucked right now, cyber-defense wise.

You speak of bombs, nuclear or not, as if that is the worst weapon mankind possesses atm...

If damage is the goal of a attack today, it's quite obvious that the game has stepped up since the World war, as we have once again developed the experiments from the Great war into real abominations; Toxins, viruses, generally speaking biological warfare. Infecting a major airport in the US with smallpox, or one in Europe would not only send that country back decades or so years, also the whole continent would take a timeless of at least five decades years back in time.

Blowing up a dirty bomb is probably not the weapon of choice today as seen of the superpowers, economic warfare is the new "legal warfare". Starving citizens seems to be the no 1 play of the US and western collision when it comes to handling Russia and the middle east, striking the labouring man so that change can be brought from inside the country...

Political warfare today is the same as during the cold war without the population being indoctrinated that it's the US against Soviet, where for some reason the Soviet were the bad guys while the US kept torturing its own citizens and killing innocents in Vietnam and Korea while the Soviet tried holding the US interference in check in those regions alongside their allies. (And for a very brief period of time the opposite in Afghanistan.) And reading the first post I take it you still believe it will come to nukes being fire like rounds at the other...

The answer to your question is the only thing holding people back is that they have something left to protect. As long as you don't push people to their limits so that they welcome the afterlife by doing something like flying a airplane into a high building or something else you have nothing to fear. Then again the US has proven that it can't seem to not cross that bride as history has showed us not once, but twice.