[extropy-chat] EMP Attack?

[Dirk Bruere]

Olga Bourlin wrote:

>
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57774-2005Apr15.html?nav=mo 
>
>
> washingtonpost.com
> Unready For This Attack
>
> By Jon Kyl
>
> Saturday, April 16, 2005; Page A19
>
> Recently a Senate Judiciary subcommittee of which I am chairman held a 
> hearing on a major threat to the American people, one that could come 
> not only from terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda but from rogue 
> nations such as Iran and North Korea.
>
> An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said 
> one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is 
> one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its 
> enemies - terrorist or otherwise. And it is probably the easiest. A 
> single Scud  missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at 
> the appropriate  altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, 
> producing an  electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at 
> the speed of light.  Depending on the location and size of the blast, 
> the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and 
> other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental 
> United States, for months if not years.
>
> Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would 
> have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication 
> would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food 
> rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as 
> those vehicles still
> working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The 
> inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public
> health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the 
> inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in 
> areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result 
> in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.
>
> American society has grown so dependent on computer and other 
> electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles' heel of 
> vulnerability, ironically much greater than those of other, less 
> developed nations. When deprived of power, we are in many ways 
> helpless, as the New York City blackout made clear. In that case, 
> power was restored quickly because adjacent areas could provide help. 
> But a large-scale burnout caused by a broad EMP attack would create a 
> much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby 
> to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment.
>
> Transformers for regional substations, for example, are massive pieces 
> of equipment that are no longer manufactured in the United States and 
> typically take more than a year to build. In the words of another 
> witness at the hearing, "The longer the basic outage, the more 
> problematic and uncertain the recovery of any [infrastructure system] 
> will be. It is possible --  indeed, seemingly likely -- for 
> sufficiently severe functional outages to become mutually reinforcing, 
> until a point at which the degradation . . . could have irreversible 
> effects on the country's ability to support any large fraction of its 
> present human population." Those who survived, he said, would find 
> themselves transported back to the United States of the 1880s.
>
> This threat may sound straight out of Hollywood, but it is very real. 
> CIA Director Porter Goss recently testified before Congress about 
> nuclear material missing from storage sites in Russia that may have 
> found its way into terrorist hands, and FBI Director Robert Mueller 
> has confirmed new intelligence that suggests al Qaeda is trying to 
> acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. Iran has surprised 
> intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of 
> missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as "successful" tests. 
> North Korea exports missile technology around the world; Scuds can 
> easily be purchased on the open market for about $100,000 apiece.
>
> A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead 
> "on target" with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch 
> and detonate in the atmosphere. No need for the risk and difficulty of 
> trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular 
> city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international 
> waters -- al Qaeda is believed to own about 80 such vessels -- and 
> make sure to get it a few miles in the air.
>
> Fortunately, hardening key infrastructure systems and procuring vital 
> backup equipment such as transformers is both feasible and -- compared 
> with the threat -- relatively inexpensive, according to a 
> comprehensive report on the EMP threat by a commission of prominent 
> experts. But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland 
> Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along 
> with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize.
>
> The Sept. 11 commission report stated that our biggest failure was one 
> of "imagination." No one imagined that terrorists would do what they 
> did on Sept. 11. Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility 
> that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying 
> everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we've 
> been warned, and we'd better be prepared to respond.
>
> The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona and chairman of the 
> Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland 
> security.
> © 2005 The Washington Post Company
>
It would destroy just about every piece of semiconductor electronics 
from car ignition systems to computers to domestic TVs, radios and 
telephones.

The good news is that it takes more than a small terrorist nuke to cause 
that much damage. You need a megaton yield fusion weapon.

-- 
Dirk

The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org



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