03.23.10
Cult of EMP Crazy: Congress should make an EMP Memorial Day
Paul Krugman once mocked the Heritage Foundation’s quality of research in a post lampooning one of the right wing agency’s many choice recommendations: “Pentagon should battle pirates and terrorists with lasers.”
But the Heritage Foundation always finds a way to raise the bar.
And the latest Heritage feat of intellectual heavy lifting is to recommend that Congress establish an official Electromagnetic Pulse Recognition Day today.
I hear you thinking: “Ah, DD, now I know you’re really bullsh—— me!”
No way. I’m not clever enough to make up crap like that.
While more than half of Congress basks in the afterglow of a most momentous piece of legislation, Heritage has not been letting the grass grow under its feet — setting two of its always busy experts to writing an ‘analysis’ calling for an EMP Recognition Day because:
The likelihood of an EMP attack is disconcerting.
And because it makes anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s SDI — the original missile defense initiative.
To get in the right mood on EMP Recognition Day, the Congress could, according to the Heritage Foundation:
1. Close all cafeterias.
2. Walk to work.
3. Turn off Members’ Blackberries.
4. Shut off the lights.
That’s because after an electromagnetic pulse attack American technologic civilization will have ended, so these steps are a soft way of mimicking that.
As for the part where “within one year of such an attack, 70 percent to 90 percent of Americans would be dead” — that, quite obviously — can’t really be adequately duplicated.
DD thinks maybe Roscoe Bartlett could lay silently under a shroud on the floor of the House for the entire day, though. But that’s about it for the 70-90 percent dead thing.
“March 23 should be designated as EMP Recognition Day on the Hill,” Heritage insists.
If only they could have waited until April 1 — next Thursday.
Because the Cult of EMP Crazy is such a vigorous lobby, it has achieved a set of unusual consequences.
Jason at Armchair Generalist discusses the recent Joint Operating Environment report from the US military, one which contains a couple of surprising paragraphs on the always coming but never arriving menace of non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons, a development which some in the military actually seem to think might be likely.
By way of context, here is a ‘predictive analysis’ from the Air Force in 2005, on presumed electromagnetic pulse weapon threats in 2010. That went well.
Sigger includes some rumination from a deputy secretary of defense on wild German plans to launch V2’s at New York after towing across the Atlantic on submersible barges.