July 25, 2005

Turn out the lights, the party's over

Howdy, friends. Were any of you unfortunate enough, as I was, to see the newest incarnation of "War of the Worlds"? Jeeebus, that sucked.

But part of the premise was interesting. To soften up the world's infrastructure, the aliens employ this thing called an EMP blast. Knocks out every piece of electronic equipment for hundreds of miles and fries it. When that happens, of course, chaos ensues and the world is ripe for the plucking. No radio. Even the cars won't start. A flash in the heavens, and we're in 1889.

Maybe y'all weren't aware of this, but the EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) isn't just science fiction. Any nuclear explosion in the atmosphere can make us go Dark Ages, and we're totally not set up to deal with it. Read this piece by Frank Gaffney in Imprimis, it'll get you up to speed.

Think about this: Let's say China wants to invade Taiwan and America has a President with some cojones who says, wait a minute, buster. Well, instead of incinerating an American city and provoking massive retaliation, China just lights off three megaton-range nukes way up in the sky--one over the east coast, one over the west coast, and one dead center to shut down NORAD and such like. Or skip the middle one, and light them off twenty miles from shore in international waters. "Wow, look at those nuclear tests we just launched!"

No American would probably even die as a direct result of the blast. (Fallout, rioting, etc. would cause a load of trouble, of course.) But by the time we get back online, and figure out what hit us, there's a PRC flag flying on Taipei.

Friends, this is one more reason we need to get serious about some sort of missile defense system for America. Land-based, space-based, whatever works. (I'm thinking space-based so we can tag incoming rockets in the boost phase, i.e., on the way up; however a lot of people don't think that a space-based system is practical.) We need to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists, sure, but a lot of bad guys already have missiles that can reach our shores (including North Korea). And according to the article linked above, Iran is test-launching missiles in a manner consistent with EMP deployments.

Okay, back to terrorism.

--See Dubya