Thinking the unthinkable

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When the 9/11 Commission issued its report, it complained that federal agencies had a colossal “failure of imagination.” Nobody could accuse Newt Gingrich of suffering from that shortfall.

When he delivered a major address on national security last week, the former House speaker went after Defense Secretary Robert Gates for planning for the future the Pentagon wants, rather than dealing with the many serious problems it may actually face.

Gingrich mentioned one challenge that many find too terrible to contemplate — which is why our government should spend a lot more time doing exactly that...[snip]

EMP is not normally addressed when talking about nuclear attack because most strikes are planned as low-air bursts where most of the energy, EMP included, goes straight into the ground. A deliberate EMP attack, however, would be different. If, for example, an enemy detonated a nuclear weapon carried on a ballistic missile 200 miles or so above Earth, people on the ground might never know an attack occurred.

But if the explosion happened high enough over North America, the blossom of EMP might cover the entire United States... [snip]

The entire U.S. electrical grid might be gone and all the instruments of daily life that depend on electrical power useless. Just keeping modern-day America fed would be virtually impossible without working transportation or communications systems. Water-pumping and sewage-treatment plants would be offline. Modern medical care would be virtually nonexistent. Even if the rest of the world mustered the largest humanitarian mission in human history, the suffering would be unprecedented.

EMP attacks are often thought off of as attacks against the U.S. infrastructure. But the truth is a large-scale one would be an instrument of genocide... [snip]

Washington, D.C. is truly out to lunch on this one. Homeland Security doesn’t even include an EMP as one of their disaster-planning scenarios. As for the Pentagon, Gates just cut 10 percent of the missile-defense budget — the best weapons we have to prevent EMP attacks. Congress is equally in la-la land. Having commissioned the EMP report and accepted its findings, last week the Senate joined the House in rubber-stamping Gates’ missile-defense cuts.

The idea that someone would attack the U.S. with jet airliners once seemed unthinkable...

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