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Who's down with EMP, yeah you know me...

Jim Mac

Jim Mac

MAKE ENDURO GREAT AGAIN
May 21, 2004
6,352
282
the middle east of NY
Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful, wants you to know that as commander in chief he is ready to confront one of the most nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the nation into a dark age.

In debates and speeches, interviews and a popular book, he is ringing alarm bells over what experts call the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP — a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age.

The idea is that if a nuclear weapon, lofted by a missile, were detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, it would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States. A number of scientists say they consider Mr. Gingrich’s alarms far-fetched.

As Mr. Gingrich starts to surge in Republican primary states, voters are likely to get to know some of his many passions. He is an outspoken advocate for zoos. He has suggested overhauling child labor laws so that students can take jobs and learn good work habits. He also has a long interest in the space program, which Mitt Romney all but mocked at the Republican debate in Iowa on Saturday night.

Challenged to say where he and Mr. Gingrich differed, Mr. Romney replied, “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon.”

But it is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.

The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.

“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”

Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/us/politics/gingrichs-electromagnetic-pulse-warning-has-skeptics.html?_r=1&ref=politics

demotivational-posters-mr-t-facepalm.jpg
 
dante

dante

Unabomber
Feb 13, 2004
8,807
9
looking for classic NE singletrack
I can see the terrorist's conversation now:

"Ok, here's the plan. We have a nuclear weapon, and we are going to detonate it in NYC and kill millions of people!!!! It will destroy one of the largest cities in the US, make what is not destroyed completely uninhabitable, destroy 20% of the world's financial institutions and cause untold misery to hundreds of millions of people!!!!"
"No no no, Achmed, we have a new plan now. We're going to explode that nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, killing no one but affecting all of their unshielded appliances like toasters and microwave ovens!! People will stumble out of bed in the morning, put a piece of toast in the toaster and NOTHING WILL HAPPEN!!! Victory will be ours!!!! Mwuahahahahahahaha."
 
Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
56,395
22,474
Sleazattle
Wouldn't it be easier to create a foreign policy that wouldn't make someone capable of launching an ICBM at us want to launch an ICBM at us?

Silly talk, I know.
 
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