09.20.10

Cult of EMP Crazy: To Blighty

Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 12:06 pm by George Smith

Again stymied in the US, the Cult of EMP Crazy has moved some of its lobbying effort to the United Kingdom.

Electromagnetic pulse doom stories don’t damage the US president as much as middle class unemployment. In the US even the EMP Crazy lobby understands this.

And this partly explains why standard EMP crazies like Newt Gingrich and Frank Gaffney are now flogging Islam-o-phobia. Gaffney is taken care of today over at Armchair Generalist in Conservative Group Proposes Holy War.

Gaffney is an EMP kook, a birther — in other words, he’s notorious.

I’ve dealt with him before here. He represents the core of the cult which is the property of GOP kookery, also sharing double membership with Islam-o-phobes.

Here’s Gaffney — quoted from some newspaper over at AG:

“What if it turns out that some of the people the Obama administration has been embracing are actually promoting the same totalitarian ideology and seditious agenda as al Qaeda, only they’re doing it from White House Iftar dinners?” said Mr. Gaffney, referring to the daily meal eaten by Muslims to break their fast during Ramadan.

With the cult stymied in the US, its big generals sent off to push for total war against Islam, one of the lesser EMP crazies — Avi Schnurr — has been up to devilment in Britain.

At el Reg, Lewis Page writes:

New UK defence minister Liam Fox has fallen into the clutches of fearmongering armsbiz lobbyists, according to reports.

The Telegraph reports on a behind-closed-doors speech by Dr Fox at an event today organised by Avi Schnurr, a lobbyist known for pushing the idea that various expensive defence technologies should be developed by Western governments to ward off hostile ballistic missiles and Bond-villain* style electromagnetic pulse strikes. Schnurr is a leading light of both the Israel Missile Defence Association and the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, which hosts Dr Fox today.

“As the nature of our technology becomes more complex, so the threat becomes more widespread,??? the defence secretary’s speech reads, according to the Telegraph.

Page continues:

“There are certain lunatic-fringe analysts who consider that an EMP can be generated easily using conventional explosives and simple equipment easily fabricated in a back-alley bombmaking shop, but in fact even the mighty US military has never succeeded in building a useful conventional EMP weapon, either explosives-pumped or of the electrically-powered High Power Microwave (HPM) type.

Despite all this Mr Schnurr and his like have had a certain amount of success in bigging-up the pulse strike threat in the USA, and lately have crossed the pond. One of Schnurr’s earliest converts here was the Right Honourable James Arbuthnot, Tory chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Committee and relentless arms-industry point man inside the government. Arbuthnot is nowadays a board member of Schnurr’s EIS organisation, and is chairing today’s EIS Summit.

It would seem that Dr Fox has now in turn been recruited by Arbuthnot, at least to the extent of being willing to boost the EMP threat in a speech.

In the piece, Page neatly encompasses the entire world view of the cult — leaving out its kook far right GOP constituency, which — for the sake of the story — has less meaning in the UK. Another component missing in the UK is the bright line of apocalypse mania, this in which the Christian far right’s interest in electromagnetic pulse attack is not so much on avoiding it, but anticipating it because it will, according to them, signal the beginning of the final battle, the return of Jesus, and the eternal damnation of everyone else but them.

The flip side of the EMP crazy coin is also delivered. While Iran or North Korea are menacing us with a civilization-ending electromagnetic attack, we are always alleged to be working on non-nuclear electromagnetic bombs and rays. These are the weapons that have been coming for the last two decades — but never quite arriving.

In fact, the mythology is so entrenched in parts of the big media, you can routinely read made-up rubbish like this, recently published by The Economist:

These days, the idea of detonating a nuclear EMP weapon to disable the radar defences of some rogue dictatorship is politically unthinkable. Defence laboratories have therefore turned their attention instead to producing large electromagnetic pulses by conventional explosives and other means.

One such weapon uses a small charge of explosive to ram an armature down the axis of a current-carrying coil, squeezing its magnetic field so violently in the process that it emits a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy over distances of several hundred metres. Another type employs a Marx generator (a machine used for simulating lightning strikes) to dump a large electrical charge stored in a bank of capacitors into a specially shaped antenna.

American defence forces have converted a number of cruise missiles to function as non-nuclear EMP generators. Apparently, cars parked up to 300 metres away have had their alternators, ignition coils and engine controls disabled this way. Such e-weapons are said to have been used in Kosovo, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan. Yeah, we attacked the infrastructure of the Taliban in Marja with electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs. That’s why things are going so good.


Big hat tip to loyal reader JM.

3 Comments

  1. AnotherOption said,

    September 23, 2010 at 9:01 pm

    I guess you would consider the ‘sun’ a kook too?

    what ya gonna when the sun hurls a gigantic CME at us – which has happended about every 100 years… and we’re way overdue…no Bond-Villains necessary.. just good ole mother nature..

    the last CME was in 1865 i believe… go google it… i don’t want to spoil your curiostity if you don’t know what a CME is…

  2. George Smith said,

    September 24, 2010 at 6:42 am

    Don’t fear. You’re the first person who’s told me about that … today. So, sorry to spoil it, already read about it 100 times or more.

    If you’d dug into the “crazy weapons” tab, you’d have seen it.

    See here, here and here.

    You can run along now. Have you purchased your timeshare in the survival bunker business yet?

  3. Dick Destiny » Nugent as Jack Ripper, endorses Team B said,

    September 24, 2010 at 8:18 am

    […] B is the work of Frank Gaffney. Earlier this week, I wrote about him in connection with a post on the Cult of EMP Crazy, of which he is a charter […]