Antimulticulture
2005-12-08 11:10:24 UTC
Nuke over U.S. could unleash electromagnetic tsunami
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/front2453711.9284722223.html
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
The following excerpt from the new book "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must
Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World" by Frank J. Gaffney and
Colleagues.
If Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda - or the dictators of North Korea or Iran -
had the ability to destroy America as a superpower, would they be tempted to
try?
Wouldn't that temptation be even greater if that result could be achieved
with a single attack, involving just one nuclear weapon, perhaps even one of
modest power and relatively unsophisticated design?
And, what if the attacker could be reasonably sure that the United States
would not know who was responsible for such a devastating blow?
Unfortunately, that scenario is not far fetched. It is the conclusion of a
report issued in 2004 by a blue ribbon commission created by Congress. The
commission found that a single nuclear weapon, delivered by a ballistic
missile to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States, would
be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation."
How is that possible? By precipitating a lethal electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
attack.
In 2000, concerned about EMP technology, Congress created the "Commission to
Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack"
(the EMP Threat Commission, for short). In its final report, presented in
summer 2004, the panel warned that terrorists could indeed execute such an
attack by launching a small nuclear armed missile from a freighter off the
coast of the United States.
The ingredients for an EMP attack may be already within reach.
Al-Qaeda is known to have a fleet of freighters.
One of those freighters could easily be outfitted with a short- range
ballistic missile capable of getting a nuclear weapon to almost any point in
the airspace above our country.
Thousands of Scud missiles exist around the world, and they are said to
cost less than $100,000 to purchase from willing suppliers like North Korea.
(In December 2002, a North Korean ship was intercepted, temporarily, as it
prepared to deliver twelve Scud missiles to Yemen.)
North Korea has also declared its willingness to sell nuclear weapons to
terrorists.
Iran has demonstrated it has the capability to launch a Scud missile from a
vessel at sea.
Ship-launched ballistic missiles have a special advantage. The "return
address" of the attacker may be difficult to determine, especially if the
missile is a generic Scud type weapon, found in many countries' arsenals.
But even though all the tools needed for this nightmare scenario could be in
the hands of terrorists already, and even though a high altitude EMP attack
could be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction," little has
changed in our level of preparedness or even our policy debates. EMP is
still rarely mentioned in discussions of the WMDs we need to worry about.
We need to start worrying.
An Atmospheric Tsunami
A nuclear weapon produces several different effects. The best known are the
intense heat and hyperpressures associated with the fireball and the
accompanying blast.
But a nuclear explosion also generates massive outputs of other kinds of
energy. These include the creation of intense streams of x-rays and
gamma-rays. If those are unleashed outside the earth's atmosphere, some of
them will interact with the air molecules of the upper atmosphere.
The result is an enormous pulsed current of high energy electrons that will
interact, in turn, with the earth's magnetic field.
In an instant, an invisible radio frequency wave is produced - a wave of
almost unimaginably immense intensity, approximately a million times as
strong as the most powerful radio signals on the earth. The energy of this
pulse would reach everything in line of sight of the detonation. And it
would do so at the speed of light.
The higher the altitude of the weapon's detonation, the larger the affected
area would be. At a height of three hundred miles, for example, the entire
continental United States would be exposed, along with parts of Canada and
Mexico.
As the fireball expands in space, it would also generate electrical currents
on earth - ultra high-speed electromagnetic "shock waves" that would
endanger much of our technological infrastructure. Such high speed currents
would disable, temporarily or permanently,
extended electrical conductors, such as the electricity transmission lines
that make up our power grid.
any unprotected computers and microchips.
all the systems that depend on electricity and electronics, from medical
instruments to military communications.
As the EMP Threat Commission put it: The electromagnetic fields produced by
weapons designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high
likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and
information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on
dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as
catastrophic to the nation. [Emphasis added.]
The systems at risk from EMP include:
electronic control, sensor, and protective systems of all kinds
computers and cell phones
cars, boats, airplanes, and trains
the infrastructures for handling electric power, telecommunications,
transportation, fuel and energy, banking and finance, emergency services,
and even food and water.
A One Two Three Punch
Following rapidly on this electromagnetic tsunami, there would be a "medium
speed component" of EMP. It would cover roughly the same geographic area as
the first, "high- speed" component, though its peak power level would be
much less.
This medium-speed component follows the high speed component by merely a
fraction of a second. It further damages the electric systems that are
already impaired and exposed by the initial electromagnetic impact.
And finally, there is a third wave of EMP attack, the "slow component"
produced by the continuing expansion of the fireball in the earth's magnetic
field. This slow component - a pulse that may last just seconds or minutes -
creates disruptive currents in electricity transmission lines, damaging the
surviving electrical supply and distribution systems.
Unpredicted Test Effects
The destructive power of EMP effects was first glimpsed in the atmospheric
nuclear tests of the Cold War era. The United States and the Soviet Union
independently discovered the same phenomenon: a high-altitude nuclear
explosion could damage or destroy electronic systems on the earth, with
potentially devastating consequences for the targeted society.
In 1962, the United States conducted a test called "Starfish," detonating a
nuclear weapon about 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean.
The resulting EMP reached all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, a little over
700 miles away. There, on the far edge of the EMP field, the explosion
extinguished streetlights in Honolulu, tripped circuit breakers, triggered
burglar alarms, and damaged a telecommunications relay facility.
The Soviet tests included a series of high altitude nuclear detonations
over South Central Asia. EMP from these tests damaged overhead (and even
underground) electrical cables at a range of 375 miles, causing surge
arrestor burnout, blown fuses, and blackouts.
The consequences of an EMP attack would of course be far more significant
today, with so much of our infrastructure (civilian as well as military)
dependent on electricity and electronics. The EMP Threat Commission
estimated that it could take "months to years" to fully restore critical
infrastructures after an EMP attack:
Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented
cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event,
a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would
seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation. The
primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the nation are through our
electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications,
energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact
other important aspects of our nation's life, including the financial
system; means of getting food, water, and medical care to the citizenry;
trade; and production of goods and services.
The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent on
the recovery of others. The longer the outage, the more problematic and
uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to
become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of
infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to
support its population. [Emphasis added.]
What Is Being Done to Address the Danger?
An EMP attack potentially represents a high tech means for terrorists to
kill millions of Americans the old fashioned way, through starvation and
disease. Although the direct physical effects of EMP are harmless to people,
a well designed and well-executed EMP attack could kill - indirectly - far
more Americans than a nuclear weapon detonated in our most populous city.
Dr. Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a member of the EMP Threat
Commission, has warned in testimony before Congress that an EMP attack could
reduce the United States to a pre-Industrial Age capacity, in terms of its
ability to provide vital food and water to its population.
In 1900, prior to widespread electrification of the United States, our
country's population was less than one-third of its size today. An attack
that destroyed our technological infrastructure would certainly decimate the
population.
But if EMP is such a big threat, why have we not heard more about it? Why do
we not hear discussions of how to reduce its potential impact on this
country? In fact, the EMP Threat Commission was the outcome of four years of
hearings and briefings, as a frustrated Congress tried to alert the
executive branch to the danger of EMP attack.
Their efforts seemed futile. In 1997, Gen. Robert Marsh (then-chairman of
the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection) told the House Armed
Services Committee:
[W]e consider a terrorist acquiring a nuclear weapon, and positioning it at
the high altitude necessary for generation of an EMP burst that would
debilitate our infrastructures, to be a very remote possibility. . . . Such
an event is so unlikely and difficult to achieve that I do not believe it
warrants serious concern at this time. [Emphasis added.]
In contrast, the testimony Congress received from other sources strongly
suggested that such a devastating attack was neither unlikely nor difficult
to achieve. It seemed that there was, in fact, reason to be concerned that
terrorists and rogue states might present an EMP threat to the United
States.
Concerned members of congress received help from an unlikely quarter in May
1999, when Russia explicitly invoked the specter of an EMP attack on the
United States.
Vladimir Lukin (the chairman of the Duma International Affairs Committee)
assured a delegation of American legislators that Russia was not helpless in
the face of U.S. led interventions:
Hypothetically, if Russia really wanted to hurt the United States in
retaliation for NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia could fire a submarine
launched ballistic missile and detonate a single nuclear warhead at high
altitude over the United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulse would
massively disrupt U.S. communications and computer systems, shutting down
everything.
This blunt statement succeeded in getting the attention of both parties in
Congress. A second opinion was clearly needed. And on October 30, 2000, the
EMP Threat Commission was established by law.
The EMP Threat Today
The EMP Threat Commission conducted a worldwide survey of foreign scientific
and military literature to assess the knowledge and intentions of foreign
states regarding an EMP attack. The survey confirmed that both the physics
and the military potential of EMP are indeed widely understood in the
international community.
The commission survey found that the following nations were knowledgeable
about EMP: China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North
Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.
The commission also learned that some foreign military experts regard EMP
attack as a form of electronic or information warfare, not primarily as a
form of nuclear war. One of China's leading military theorists has written:
Information war and traditional war have one thing in common, namely that
the country which possesses the critical weapons such as atomic bombs will
have "first strike" and "second strike retaliation" capabilities . . . .
As soon as its computer networks come under attack and are destroyed, the
country will slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people will
grind to a halt. (Su Tzu Yun, World War: The Third World War - Total
Information Warfare, 2001.)
In Iran - the most unabashed state sponsor of international terrorism
today - some theorists have argued that the key to defeating the United
States lies in attacking its electronics. This is from an Iranian political
military policy journal:
Once you confuse the enemy communication network, you can also disrupt the
work of the enemy command and decision making center.
Even worse, today when you disable a country's military high command through
disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of
that country. . . . If the world's industrial countries fail to devise
effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults,
then they will disintegrate within a few years. . . . American soldiers
would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a
single shot. ("Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars," Nashriyeh e
Siasi Nezami, 1999.)
And this implied threat may not be empty words. In addition to their
successful ship launched Scud missile test, the Iranian military has
reportedly performed tests of its Shahab 3 medium range ballistic missile in
a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above excerpt is from Chapter Six, "Counter the Mega-Threat: EMP Attack"
of the book "War Footing " by Frank J. Gaffney (Naval Institute Press) and
included contributions from U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon and U.S. Rep. Roscoe
Bartlett.
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/front2453711.9284722223.html
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
The following excerpt from the new book "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must
Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World" by Frank J. Gaffney and
Colleagues.
If Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda - or the dictators of North Korea or Iran -
had the ability to destroy America as a superpower, would they be tempted to
try?
Wouldn't that temptation be even greater if that result could be achieved
with a single attack, involving just one nuclear weapon, perhaps even one of
modest power and relatively unsophisticated design?
And, what if the attacker could be reasonably sure that the United States
would not know who was responsible for such a devastating blow?
Unfortunately, that scenario is not far fetched. It is the conclusion of a
report issued in 2004 by a blue ribbon commission created by Congress. The
commission found that a single nuclear weapon, delivered by a ballistic
missile to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States, would
be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation."
How is that possible? By precipitating a lethal electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
attack.
In 2000, concerned about EMP technology, Congress created the "Commission to
Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack"
(the EMP Threat Commission, for short). In its final report, presented in
summer 2004, the panel warned that terrorists could indeed execute such an
attack by launching a small nuclear armed missile from a freighter off the
coast of the United States.
The ingredients for an EMP attack may be already within reach.
Al-Qaeda is known to have a fleet of freighters.
One of those freighters could easily be outfitted with a short- range
ballistic missile capable of getting a nuclear weapon to almost any point in
the airspace above our country.
Thousands of Scud missiles exist around the world, and they are said to
cost less than $100,000 to purchase from willing suppliers like North Korea.
(In December 2002, a North Korean ship was intercepted, temporarily, as it
prepared to deliver twelve Scud missiles to Yemen.)
North Korea has also declared its willingness to sell nuclear weapons to
terrorists.
Iran has demonstrated it has the capability to launch a Scud missile from a
vessel at sea.
Ship-launched ballistic missiles have a special advantage. The "return
address" of the attacker may be difficult to determine, especially if the
missile is a generic Scud type weapon, found in many countries' arsenals.
But even though all the tools needed for this nightmare scenario could be in
the hands of terrorists already, and even though a high altitude EMP attack
could be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction," little has
changed in our level of preparedness or even our policy debates. EMP is
still rarely mentioned in discussions of the WMDs we need to worry about.
We need to start worrying.
An Atmospheric Tsunami
A nuclear weapon produces several different effects. The best known are the
intense heat and hyperpressures associated with the fireball and the
accompanying blast.
But a nuclear explosion also generates massive outputs of other kinds of
energy. These include the creation of intense streams of x-rays and
gamma-rays. If those are unleashed outside the earth's atmosphere, some of
them will interact with the air molecules of the upper atmosphere.
The result is an enormous pulsed current of high energy electrons that will
interact, in turn, with the earth's magnetic field.
In an instant, an invisible radio frequency wave is produced - a wave of
almost unimaginably immense intensity, approximately a million times as
strong as the most powerful radio signals on the earth. The energy of this
pulse would reach everything in line of sight of the detonation. And it
would do so at the speed of light.
The higher the altitude of the weapon's detonation, the larger the affected
area would be. At a height of three hundred miles, for example, the entire
continental United States would be exposed, along with parts of Canada and
Mexico.
As the fireball expands in space, it would also generate electrical currents
on earth - ultra high-speed electromagnetic "shock waves" that would
endanger much of our technological infrastructure. Such high speed currents
would disable, temporarily or permanently,
extended electrical conductors, such as the electricity transmission lines
that make up our power grid.
any unprotected computers and microchips.
all the systems that depend on electricity and electronics, from medical
instruments to military communications.
As the EMP Threat Commission put it: The electromagnetic fields produced by
weapons designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high
likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and
information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on
dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as
catastrophic to the nation. [Emphasis added.]
The systems at risk from EMP include:
electronic control, sensor, and protective systems of all kinds
computers and cell phones
cars, boats, airplanes, and trains
the infrastructures for handling electric power, telecommunications,
transportation, fuel and energy, banking and finance, emergency services,
and even food and water.
A One Two Three Punch
Following rapidly on this electromagnetic tsunami, there would be a "medium
speed component" of EMP. It would cover roughly the same geographic area as
the first, "high- speed" component, though its peak power level would be
much less.
This medium-speed component follows the high speed component by merely a
fraction of a second. It further damages the electric systems that are
already impaired and exposed by the initial electromagnetic impact.
And finally, there is a third wave of EMP attack, the "slow component"
produced by the continuing expansion of the fireball in the earth's magnetic
field. This slow component - a pulse that may last just seconds or minutes -
creates disruptive currents in electricity transmission lines, damaging the
surviving electrical supply and distribution systems.
Unpredicted Test Effects
The destructive power of EMP effects was first glimpsed in the atmospheric
nuclear tests of the Cold War era. The United States and the Soviet Union
independently discovered the same phenomenon: a high-altitude nuclear
explosion could damage or destroy electronic systems on the earth, with
potentially devastating consequences for the targeted society.
In 1962, the United States conducted a test called "Starfish," detonating a
nuclear weapon about 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean.
The resulting EMP reached all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, a little over
700 miles away. There, on the far edge of the EMP field, the explosion
extinguished streetlights in Honolulu, tripped circuit breakers, triggered
burglar alarms, and damaged a telecommunications relay facility.
The Soviet tests included a series of high altitude nuclear detonations
over South Central Asia. EMP from these tests damaged overhead (and even
underground) electrical cables at a range of 375 miles, causing surge
arrestor burnout, blown fuses, and blackouts.
The consequences of an EMP attack would of course be far more significant
today, with so much of our infrastructure (civilian as well as military)
dependent on electricity and electronics. The EMP Threat Commission
estimated that it could take "months to years" to fully restore critical
infrastructures after an EMP attack:
Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented
cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event,
a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would
seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation. The
primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the nation are through our
electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications,
energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact
other important aspects of our nation's life, including the financial
system; means of getting food, water, and medical care to the citizenry;
trade; and production of goods and services.
The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent on
the recovery of others. The longer the outage, the more problematic and
uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to
become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of
infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to
support its population. [Emphasis added.]
What Is Being Done to Address the Danger?
An EMP attack potentially represents a high tech means for terrorists to
kill millions of Americans the old fashioned way, through starvation and
disease. Although the direct physical effects of EMP are harmless to people,
a well designed and well-executed EMP attack could kill - indirectly - far
more Americans than a nuclear weapon detonated in our most populous city.
Dr. Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a member of the EMP Threat
Commission, has warned in testimony before Congress that an EMP attack could
reduce the United States to a pre-Industrial Age capacity, in terms of its
ability to provide vital food and water to its population.
In 1900, prior to widespread electrification of the United States, our
country's population was less than one-third of its size today. An attack
that destroyed our technological infrastructure would certainly decimate the
population.
But if EMP is such a big threat, why have we not heard more about it? Why do
we not hear discussions of how to reduce its potential impact on this
country? In fact, the EMP Threat Commission was the outcome of four years of
hearings and briefings, as a frustrated Congress tried to alert the
executive branch to the danger of EMP attack.
Their efforts seemed futile. In 1997, Gen. Robert Marsh (then-chairman of
the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection) told the House Armed
Services Committee:
[W]e consider a terrorist acquiring a nuclear weapon, and positioning it at
the high altitude necessary for generation of an EMP burst that would
debilitate our infrastructures, to be a very remote possibility. . . . Such
an event is so unlikely and difficult to achieve that I do not believe it
warrants serious concern at this time. [Emphasis added.]
In contrast, the testimony Congress received from other sources strongly
suggested that such a devastating attack was neither unlikely nor difficult
to achieve. It seemed that there was, in fact, reason to be concerned that
terrorists and rogue states might present an EMP threat to the United
States.
Concerned members of congress received help from an unlikely quarter in May
1999, when Russia explicitly invoked the specter of an EMP attack on the
United States.
Vladimir Lukin (the chairman of the Duma International Affairs Committee)
assured a delegation of American legislators that Russia was not helpless in
the face of U.S. led interventions:
Hypothetically, if Russia really wanted to hurt the United States in
retaliation for NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia could fire a submarine
launched ballistic missile and detonate a single nuclear warhead at high
altitude over the United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulse would
massively disrupt U.S. communications and computer systems, shutting down
everything.
This blunt statement succeeded in getting the attention of both parties in
Congress. A second opinion was clearly needed. And on October 30, 2000, the
EMP Threat Commission was established by law.
The EMP Threat Today
The EMP Threat Commission conducted a worldwide survey of foreign scientific
and military literature to assess the knowledge and intentions of foreign
states regarding an EMP attack. The survey confirmed that both the physics
and the military potential of EMP are indeed widely understood in the
international community.
The commission survey found that the following nations were knowledgeable
about EMP: China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North
Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.
The commission also learned that some foreign military experts regard EMP
attack as a form of electronic or information warfare, not primarily as a
form of nuclear war. One of China's leading military theorists has written:
Information war and traditional war have one thing in common, namely that
the country which possesses the critical weapons such as atomic bombs will
have "first strike" and "second strike retaliation" capabilities . . . .
As soon as its computer networks come under attack and are destroyed, the
country will slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people will
grind to a halt. (Su Tzu Yun, World War: The Third World War - Total
Information Warfare, 2001.)
In Iran - the most unabashed state sponsor of international terrorism
today - some theorists have argued that the key to defeating the United
States lies in attacking its electronics. This is from an Iranian political
military policy journal:
Once you confuse the enemy communication network, you can also disrupt the
work of the enemy command and decision making center.
Even worse, today when you disable a country's military high command through
disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of
that country. . . . If the world's industrial countries fail to devise
effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults,
then they will disintegrate within a few years. . . . American soldiers
would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a
single shot. ("Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars," Nashriyeh e
Siasi Nezami, 1999.)
And this implied threat may not be empty words. In addition to their
successful ship launched Scud missile test, the Iranian military has
reportedly performed tests of its Shahab 3 medium range ballistic missile in
a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above excerpt is from Chapter Six, "Counter the Mega-Threat: EMP Attack"
of the book "War Footing " by Frank J. Gaffney (Naval Institute Press) and
included contributions from U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon and U.S. Rep. Roscoe
Bartlett.
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"