The Cult of EMP Crazy can’t let a week go by without getting into print.
Anything will do — stories in major newspapers and magazines, opinion pieces or long letters. Even when a journalist writes a weakly critical piece for something like Foreign Policy, as Sharon Weinberger did about a month ago (see here), the Cult uses it as an opportunity to thunder back with an article just as long.
So Foreign Policy lays out the red carpet for Peter Pry, one of the original floggers of electromagnetic pulse doom.
Pry is mad as hell and won’t abide it. “The Boogeyman Bomb” article wounds him deeply. So he goes through the usual arguments, delivering the standard claims of which the Cult has grown so fond.
Say such things often enough, or turn up the volume sufficiently, and that will do it. This works partly under the assumption that Americans judge the rightness of something by the number of people who can be convinced to chant it in unison.
“Weinberger accuses the EMP Commission of deliberately ‘exaggerating the capabilities of a potential EMP attack,’” complains Pry. “This is a serious allegation, as deliberately misrepresenting the facts about the EMP threat would constitute an ethical and legal violation.”
Perish forbid anyone would have done such a thing from the Cult of EMP Crazy.
Now let’s count the number of scripts Pry delivers.
One scenario of particular concern is a nuclear-armed Iran transferring a short- or medium-range nuclear missile to terrorist groups that could perform a ship-launched “anonymous” EMP attack against the United States. Iranian military strategists have written about EMP attacks against the United States, and Iran has successfully practiced launching a ballistic missile off a ship and flight-tested its Shahab-3 medium-range missile to detonate at high altitude, as if practicing an EMP attack.
The Bomb Iran script, beloved by the missile defense lobby, the Heritage Foundation, and anyone in the GOP far right who wants to, well, just bomb Iran.
There will always be individuals who disagree with any commission’s findings — no matter that the methodology, research, and analysis are excellent — just as there are those who disagree with the 9/11 Commission, the weapons-of-mass-destruction commission, the Warren Commission, or any other commission.
This is a uniquely new script, one exhibiting a bit of megalomania. It compares the EMP Commission, which few Americans have heard of or give a shit about, to the Warren Commission – set up to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the 9/11 Commission, which many, many, many Americans did know of and give shits about, for obvious reasons. So much so that books issued by both were best-sellers.
How’s that EMP Commission book doing, by the way?
Weinberger alleges that the EMP Commission and concern about the EMP threat is strictly partisan. But the EMP Commission’s bipartisan credentials are impeccable. It was established by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2001 and re-established by a Democrat-dominated Congress in 2006. Commissioners were appointed on a bipartisan basis. The EMP threat, and the necessity to do something about it, is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together.
The ‘bipartisan’ script. This one omits that the Cult of EMP Crazy has always been the exclusive property of the GOP far right. From ex-Congressman Curt Weldon, to EMP doom eminence grise Newt Gingrich, to hawk/birther Frank Gaffney, to birther Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, to Fox News star Mike Huckabee, to everyone at the Heritage Foundation ever, to the old white guys club listed down the side of the EMPAct America booster page here.
This only proves that Foreign Policy editors are weak, being unable to make Pry tell the entire story in favor of just the sole item that, yes, occasionally the Cult of EMP Crazy gets to appear before Congressional meetings which are attended by both Democrats and Republicans. And that sometimes Democrats make polite noises and nod their heads at these things.
As to Weinberger’s complaints that Newt Gingrich and others concerned about the EMP threat sometimes recommend to popular audiences the novel One Second After, which describes a hypothetical EMP attack on the United States: Since Uncle Tom’s Cabin there has been a venerable tradition in U.S. democracy of educating and building popular support for causes through novels.
Script which must mention William Forstchen’s not really famous novel. This time accompanied by implied comparison, in terms of importance, to famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. See megalomania reference, above.
An EMP attack is the only option for a single nuclear weapon that offers terrorists or rogue states any realistic chance of defeating the United States, perhaps eliminating the United States as an actor from the world stage, permanently.
The total destruction of American civilization script. In this case, not accompanied by the standard statistics in which almost the entire population starves or passes away in the year following attack due to absence of all basic amenities.
And here — right on time — another dose of stock Cult of EMP Crazy from Heritage Foundation central casting at Fox News Video.
Update:
A reader writes: “A (non-nuclear) EMP device was employed by terrorists at the end of this week’s episode of 24 — which no sensible person watches anymore.”
This marks the second time an EMP bomb was used in the series, at least. One was deployed in Los Angeles a couple seasons back.
Yup, everything was coming up roses for the good-until-proven-otherwise guys. That is, until Kayla unknowingly drove an electromagnetic pulse bomb into the office and short-circuited CTU. This looks like a job for Absurd-o-Meter.
In an only slightly related note, the 24 character, the snivelling Dana, could prove crippling to Katee Sackhoff’s career.
Sadly, Sackhoff has been in a number of roles ranging from dreadful to merely bummerish, including that of a publc sex-crazed anethesiologist in Nip/Tuck, since Battlestar Galactica.
Tech doomsday scenario No. 2: Wall Street gets e-bombed News flash: In what authorities suspect was the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse weapon, a rogue attacker took down much of lower Manhattan today — causing equipment failures and power outages on a massive scale and shutting down financial markets across the country.
Though most commonly associated with nuclear explosions, you don’t need a nuke to create an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to do serious damage. EMP devices emit extremely high-frequency signals that fry electronics to a crisp, rendering them useless. An EMP will also wipe out or corrupt any data not stored on magnetic or optical devices. Worse, EMPs are largely untraceable, because the weapon itself destroys any evidence of its use.
A van with an EMP device in the back could effectively shut down big chunks of the U.S. economy simply by driving down Wall Street with the signal turned up, says Gale Nordling, CEO of Emprimus, a (US) company that helps enterprises protect against threats from non-nuclear EMP.
Nordling was last referenced on this blog as a guest at right-wing crazy radio here.
In the Nineties your host edited the electronic Crypt Newsletter. It was a publication that explored the world of computer virus writers and apocryphal wonder technology. It was sort of an anti-Wired, all e-mail and web postings, no glossy pages or advertising. And it new the subject of EMP Crazy well, even in those distant mists of the past.
Around 1998, the House Joint Economic Committee held a long series of hearings on the dread coming menace of electromagnetic pulse weapons.
At once a reader sees how long this sort of rubbish has been regularly bubbling and percolating.
Anyway, a good twelve years ago a retired Army general by the name of Robert L. Schweitzer testified before Congress on how an electromagnetic pulse ray could take down Wall Street. At one time he also made news for a sunken treasure hunt with John Singlaub off the Philippines.
A few years later, he died.
However, electromagnetic pulse rays still have not impinged upon Goldman Sachs, although we all might now wish it.
During the June [Congressional] hearing, Schweitzer made seemingly contradictory claims during the course of his presentation. At different times, Schweitzer claimed that electromagnetic pulse guns could be made for $800, that they could be made for $35, that they had been used against London banks although he was informed this was a hoax, and such weapons were now capable of disrupting Wall Street.
” . . . the cost is about $800 to do this,” Schweitzer said at one point.
As for knocking out Wall Street, Schweitzer later commented to Congressman Saxton, “[It] can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components . . . And the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components and do a number on Wall Street.” Schweitzer also alluded to, but did not mention by name, a generic hacker tech catalog that claimed to sell parts and schematics for such a weapon.
Further, Schweitzer testified that London banks were attacked by radio-frequency weapons, a myth that has been touched on in Crypt Newsletter.
“I was told that was a hoax,” Schweitzer said to Saxton. “. . . and it’s disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think, frankly, and having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened.”
Schweitzer added later: “I validated [this]. It isn’t just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I’m giving you.”
These hearings were notorious for the amount of frank lies and trash delivered. While the web was still far too young for authorities to blame all Internet evil happening in the US on the Chinese, the Yellow Peril meme raised its head in another way.
At the time, the Chinese were said to be sending in sleeper agents to contaminate southern California public schools.
Why? To make our kids feel bad.
As an independent example, consider from the same sessions, other testimony — presented by author Dr. Peter Leitner on alleged Communist Chinese “yellow peril”-like subterfuge: “I’ve heard rumors . . . One I found particularly disturbing . . . [and] I haven’t seen any recorded documentation of these incidents . . . where very young-looking Chinese students were going to the United States and placed in high schools in the U.S. except their ages were 24 – 25 years old . . . They were brilliant students . . . Well, it turns out it’s an example of a sleeper agent, somebody who is put in position. He already has advanced degrees before coming in, then is put into the position as a seed and then is allowed to flourish in a totally unfair competition with U.S. student counterparts.”
The Cult of EMP Crazy is ridiculous for many reasons.
One of the more noticeable of these is the practice of spitting out the exact same scripts and stories, sometimes more than a couple times every month. EMP Crazies are such crappy opinion writers they pretend to not notice that every single one of them always emits the exact same lines, like a chorus of trained parrots.
“Ever heard of Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP? Probably not, unless you’re a nuclear weapons expert.”
No, wrong. Ding! Ding! For the love of Pete, have mercy! Only for the second or third time this week.
“What if the electricity suddenly went out?” asks KT McFarland.
Who is KT McFarland? Someone who tried to run against Hillary Clinton. Oh, this really does not look good.
“Kathleen Troia ‘K.T.’ McFarland served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations,” it reads. “She wrote Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s November 1984 ‘Principles of War Speech’ which laid out the Weinberger Doctrine. She is a senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a frequent contributor to the Fox Forum.”
“What if the electricity suddenly went out?” KT writes, a second time. In case you, like, didn’t see it in the lede.
“Nothing would work – not the phone system, or water pumping stations, or planes, trains or automobiles. Your toilet wouldn’t flush and the TV wouldn’t turn on. Planes would stop in mid-air. (That’s a helluva trick of physics, aerodynamics and internal combustion! — DD) The only way to communicate would be face to face. Credit cards would be useless.
“Tens of millions would die of disease and starvation.”
So club the Obama administration over the head again for not doing anything to stop it — like bombing Iran.
KT McFarland, Tea Partier: ‘Throw the bums out!’ and Yellow Peril shtick.
“It is always easy to find people who will pontificate about these matters and blow smoke in everyone’s ears … It’s a fancy idea lab, but the ideas are not that good.” — Me
“Electromagnetic pulse guns, genetically designed killer diseases and swarms of miniature self-guided missiles — if these sound like the products of a mad scientist, they should,” reports the Washington Times here. “They are among the threats predicted during the U.S. Army’s 11th annual Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar (no, really) in Newport News, Va.”
“It is only a matter of time before there is a significant high-tech surprise awaiting U.S. military forces” … is this bullshitters paradise’s motto, reads the newspaper.
Refreshingly, DD was asked to deliver a dash of ice-water to the face.
“The summary lists five ’significant findings’ of the seminar, concluding that ‘emerging biological technology … especially in the hands of non-state actors, has the greatest potential to catch the Army unprepared in the short term’ by allowing the creation and delivery of new diseases for which there is no cure,” continues the Times. “The summary states that this capability likely will be available to U.S. adversaries ‘as early as 2015.’”
“The seminar concluded that ‘EMP weapons will become available to potential adversaries in mortar and artillery rounds soon … blending technologies necessary to generate an EMP with advances in miniaturization could produce a hand-held EMP gun before 2020.”
EMP guns lagging behind custom-made plagues? You don’t say, Misters Science Fiction Men! How about turning people into living shrapnel bombs, like they did in an episode of Fringe last year?
George Smith, a defense technology analyst and a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said in an interview that he was skeptical about the value of such exercises … They have been predicting some of these things for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said about some of the advanced threats discussed in the summary.
That’s just a fact. Electromagnetic ray guns have been promised for as long as DD has been in cyberspace. It’s the weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving, despite much hoping and wishing.
And a few times a month DD gets querulous mail from people wishing to show me their EMP guns or impugn my character for writing stuff like this here.
What’s changed most, however, is the need for the Army’s ‘mad scientist’ picnic.
There isn’t any.
Anyone who follows national security affairs knows there’s no shortage of predictive analysis rank bullshitting about the many enemies the US is likely to face. Potential foes and their fancy weapons and plans lurk everywhere! MacGyver-like terrorists will make Facebook and bags of high-tech dirt into existential threats.
“[Adversaries] are likely to try to bypass the military, shifting ‘toward a focus on disrupting transportation, banking, and government infrastructure within the United States’ by exploiting malicious use of the Internet and other computer networks, ‘generating greater stress in an increasingly vulnerable U.S. homeland,” says some alleged director of Army intelligence analysis named Tom Pappas.
It is fashionable amongst the commentariat to ignore any information larger than a tweet, but this should frighten you out of your wits: a major, very recent report on the very high probability of total economic destruction of any (yes, any) advanced country by a single nuke-tipped SCUD from a lightly modified freighter offshore.
It’s a big report, but you can just read the preface and crap your pants. 7 mb pdf
(Link to report read thousands of times deleted.)
To respond to your dismissal with any more science that is already placed in front of your unseeing and apparently evidence-canceling eyes is a waste of time. You don’t believe in Compton electrons, SCUDs, or nanosecond pulses. I guess I wasted my time at Florida State working on the linear accelerator, and at Navy A school in electronics.
You know it all. Every opinion is biased, anything scary is just someone working for a lobby.
The CEO of one company that sells electromagnetic pulse doom protection, Emprimus, goes on Michael Savage to tell listeners EMP bombs and ray guns are everywhere. You only have to listen to the first minute or so to get the gist.
And everything you need to know about Michael Savage is here and here.
The link here takes you to YouTube (embedding disabled) for a Coast to Coast interview with William Forschten.
Coast to Coast is the most famous, perhaps only radio station to corner the market in the US on the great conspiracy to hide the truth about “UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death and other unexplained phenomena.”
After 90 percent of the electronics are knocked out in the US, what about the 2 million people in (or around) prisons, Forstchen asks.
It’s something few have considered. Especially if the attack comes during winter.
“In the end, advocates for EMP preparation could end up being their own worst enemy,” Sharon Weinberger, writing for Foreign Policy this week, so wisely said.
Many just can’t come to grips with the actual ‘cult-like’ behavior of various parts of the Cult of EMP Crazy.
Like Foreign Policy magazine.
To point it out is just … too … well, disrespectful by dint of being true.
Others are not always so inhibited.
“At least one speaker [at the 2009 EMP conference] acknowledged that people who are passionate about the EMP issue are sometimes viewed as being a little off-kilter, but he said the good turnout at the conference shows that they are not alone,” one local newspaper commented.
Another culty element of the GOP Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — uh — cult, is the involvement of the Christian far right, those who believe in and welcome the end of all things for us while they go to heaven.
And some electromagnetic pulse doom-related video from them is here.
It’s a scene fit for a Hollywood movie: A terrorist group launches a nuclear weapon from a ship off the coast of the United States. But instead of directly hitting a city or military installation, it detonates miles above the ground, seemingly causing no damage. Almost instantaneously, the lights darken over a large portion of the United States, cars stop in the middle of the road, and computers go dead. Panic ensues and the nation is soon economically and militarily crippled, sent back to the pre-modern era.
This from Sharon Weinberger at Foreign Policy here on electromagnetic pulse doom in “The Boogeyman Bomb.”
As a lede, really third rate.
Let’s take the DD wayback machine through 2009 to find out how other reporters have used the same type of structure.
“It sounded like the story of a blockbuster Hollywood movie or the topic of a History Channel disaster documentary … ‘The bad actors who want to attempt this are out there,’ said Dr. Fritz Ermarth, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. ‘There is very little evidence they are losing interest (in an EMP attack).’ “ — Niagara Gazette, Tonowanda News, Sept. 10
“It sounds like something straight out of a movie — a science fiction movie, really. A terrorist attack on the U.S. involving a nuclear bomb detonated in the sky above us with the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) shutting down all electronic devices.” – Niagara Gazette, Sept. 9
“It sounds like a science-fiction disaster: A nuclear weapon is detonated miles above the Earth’s atmosphere and knocks out power from New York City to Chicago for weeks, maybe months. Experts and lawmakers are increasingly warning that terrorists or enemy states could wage that exact type of attack, idling electricity grids and disrupting everything from communications networks to military defenses.” — USA Today, Sept. 16
How novel. Get the idea?
From a review of The Day the Earth Stood Still:
This film should get an award for the most lazily incorporated product placement, ever. For some reason, whenever a computer needed to be used to explain things to people, they used one of Microsoft’s Surface machines. Surface is a pretty cool idea – it’s a tabletop computer on which one can combine interactions of the computer and physical objects resting on the screen – but why include it in a movie that ends with a massive electromagnetic pulse that disables every bit of technology on Earth, presumably including the Surface computer?
From start to finish, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is easily one of the worst movies of 2008.
So you’ve already guessed we’re giving this FP article a — bad review.
It repeats everything you’ve already read if you’ve been a follower of Armchair Generalist or this blog over the past couple years.
Without including these ingredients, the cake is not fully baked. Without the full panoply of wild animals, the zoo is only for enjoyment by children.
“But unlike some of the other national security threats on the horizon, the ‘e-bomb’ has emerged as a partisan issue, with a core group of conservative supporters,” writes Weinberger, understating things just a smidge.
“In the end, advocates for EMP preparation could end up being their own worst enemy,” she adds. “The unlikely scenarios they peddle lend themselves to caricature. And though there are certainly some intellectual heavyweights among those who have warned about the effects of EMP — like Johnny Foster, the former head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — critics have derided EMP defense supporters for relying on the likes of science fiction writer William R. Forstchen to help bolster their case.”
Ya think?
Anyway, we can’t make them caricatures when they are already such.
Weinberger wrote a book called Imaginary Weapons a few years ago. I liked it.
Aviation Week and David Fulghum have been pushing electromagnetic pulse bombs or EMP rays for … it seems like always.
As long as DD has been on-line and paying attention, EMP bombs and rays have been the transformative miracle weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving. And that seems to have been since at least the early Nineties.
Electronic and computer attack—the futuristic segment of the Pentagon’s arsenal—will benefit from the proposed 2011 military spending plan, but identifying all the key pieces is difficult without close scrutiny.
Electronic attack (EA) includes invading networks and releasing beams of energy against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These blasts of energy are sometimes generated by U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowlers and Air Force EC-130 Compass Call aircraft to prematurely detonate or disable bombs. In addition, an EA-6B Prowler—and its EA-18G Growler successor— can drop a “cone of silence” on emitters within a given tactical area to prevent enemy communications.
“Other weapons — including a new line of bombs being developed at the Eglin AFB Armaments Center — will generate an electromagnetic pulse that damages electronics,” it says.
As it has at least once a year for the last fifteen or so.
Now the magical electromagnetic pulse ray, or pulse bomb, will be used to miraculously solve the problem of improvised roadside munitions and mines.
So that’s why the Marines are using all those big mine-clearing tanks in the Afghanistan push! Because all the electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays still aren’t quite here yet. Just wait. We’ll show them with American technical no how know-how. Rays and cones of silence! They’ll just give right up at the power and supremacy!
[Obsession, delusion and military applications welfare projects] die hard and a recent article from the journal IEEE Spectrum is a showcase for scientists trying to keep their electromagnetic pulse bomb projects alive for the Dept. of Defense.
A week or two ago DD revisited the phenomenon of US electromagnetic pulse crazies in two posts. The second of the two — here — dealt with the social crowd plagued with an Ahab-like obsession for deployable electromagnetic pulse bombs (not dependent on a multi-megaton fusion blast) and hand-held ray guns.
They regularly pop up in news announcing fantastic weapons are about to arrive, or have arrived and been secretly used, or are about to be tested. This has been a regular occurrence, if not obvious to everyone, since around 1994 when the EMP lobby boffins began giving it the hard sell.
Readers will note the top listing from the Google link is a reprint of a cover story published in Popular Mechanics in 2001, an article predicting electromagnetic pulse bombs were about to show, possibly capable of throwing civilization back hundreds of years. If they found their way into terrorist hands. One also notes the piece is accompanied with a harsh critique from various punters.
“Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts,” read a very recent piece of EMP crazy emission at the New Scientist a couple weeks ago.
“Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts! [Like] like man-made lightning bolts!” read a couple newspaper articles just before the second war with Iraq.
In every such article, a blizzard of jargon and promises.
“Hey wz up listen im just 12 but im realy interested in tech stuff and science so im a nerd,” writes one commenter from that original post on DD blog. “im not too smat just about enough to understand most of this. what i want to ask u is can you help me make a mini empg because i realy want to try one out. im just realy curious on the matter. so yeah thats it. oh yeah can you also send me some more info on the matter.”
John Pike, a defence analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “[Bob Gates] seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometres, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometres were not militarily interesting,” he said.
The [Missile Defence Agency] statement did not specify what the range was during the test.
Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programmes at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.
Occasionally one comes across an editorial in a US newspaper that almost knocks you out of your chair.
Not often does one see an editorial-like thing condemning the usual imprecations to bomb Iran because that country will eventually launch an electromagnetic pulse attack against the United States.
How did the sane person get a permissions slip to opine?
Barry Kissin of the Frederick News Post writes:
I just read “How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran” by Daniel Pipes, visiting fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution of Stanford University. When I first read the title, I was certain this had to be satirical. It’s not! His first point: “[Obama's]counterterrorism record barely passes the laugh test.
It continues:
Pipes then points out that the way for Obama to consolidate popular support is to act tough, you know, start another war. Pipes follows with the polls (Zogby, Pew, Los Angeles Times, Fox News) that all show that a definite majority of Americans favor “using the [U.S.] military to attack and destroy the facilities in Iran which are necessary to produce a nuclear weapon.”
How about this from Pipes: “Eventually, [Iran] could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country.” And: “Taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities … would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable.” And: “Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year … ” And the clincher: “[T]he chance to do good and do well is fleeting. As the Iranians improve their defenses and approach weaponization, the window of opportunity is closing. The time to act is now … “
However, Kissin’s final line is most surprising. It is something most editors simply would not allow into a newspaper in 2010.
This is subhuman idiocy. It is also part of a long-standing pattern of criminal manipulation of the frightened and very misinformed.
By contrast, Pipes’ material immediately gets wide duplication around the country, also immediately flying into the Jerusalem Post.
“I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear and whose policies I work against,” he writes. “But here is a way for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the US and its allies.”
When the electromagnetic pulse crazy/bomb Iran lobby launches a sally — which is does once every few months, the last one petering out in September at the Values Voter summit — it always does so with perniciously admirable efficiency.
Everyone gets on the same page and makes a push into the opinion sections of US and foreign newspapers. And it always works.
In addition, the Cult of EMP Crazy lobby always comes up with a new catastrophic meme to sell the story of Iranian-launched electromagnetic pulse doom.
Usually, it has been the story that the US will be hurled back to the time of horse and buggy transportation, water drawn from the creek and shitting in out houses or trenches filled with lime.
Now, however, there’s a new flavor of Gotterdammerung.
“EMP attack, our version of Haiti quake,” trumpeted Clifford May for the Scripps Howard News Service very recently.
He writes, and this isn’t satire:
President Obama has pledged $100 million to help Haiti recover from its recent earthquake. By coincidence, that’s precisely the amount that the [mumble] recommends be spent on measures it estimates would limit the damage resulting from an EMP event by 60 to 70 percent.
This is delivered in an essay which, as must be the case, brings up the Bomb Iran lobby’s favorite story:
Think of a blackout, but one of indefinite duration — because we have no plan for recovery and could expect little or no help from abroad.
The EMP commission also reported that Iran — which is feverishly working to acquire nuclear weapons — has conducted tests in which it launched missiles and exploded warheads at high altitudes. And the CIA has translated Iranian military journals in which EMP attacks against the U.S. are explicitly discussed.
Might Iran’s rulers orchestrate such an attack if and when they acquire a nuclear capability?
For regular readers of DD blog and longtime observers of the the Washington DC Doom Club, May was warning about anthrax just in November.
“A scenario perhaps even more frightening: terrorists using biological weapons, setting off epidemics of smallpox, Ebola virus or other hemorrhagic fevers; a crop duster spreading 10 pounds of anthrax causing more deaths than in World War II.”
Alert readers will notice May always resorts to writing that potential enemy strikes will cause more casualties than America suffered in World War II.
On electromagnetic pulse attack by Iran, our equivalent of the Haiti quake , May writes:
When you consider that such an event — whether naturally occurring or a “man-caused disaster” — could cause trillions of dollars in damage and claim more lives than were lost in World War II …
Readers will have also noted that it’s not really a coincidence that Dan Pipes’ Bomb Iran/EMP doom essay also ran in the National Review.
It’s what’s called a rigging. And one can’t help but applaud the EMP Crazy lobby’s talent for it. They’re really good.
