NYT = liberals.
Liberals believe in “global warming”.
Nuff said.
They are trying to mislead our public into ignoring the EMP threat. At the same time they are misleading the funny little foreign guys into thinking this is the way to go if they want to hurt the USA.
In the end millions of people will die because of the evil resident at the NYT.
Gingrich is absolutely spot on with this issue.
Thanks for this thread.
“...rendering our nuclear counterstrike abilities utterly moot.”
There’s a lot of uninformed speculation throughout both sides of this article.
EMP is a very real concern...whether it becomes weaponized or comes from the sun. Let the NYT slam and then hide their heads in the sand.
My former Congressman, Curt Weldon, spoke of EMP quite often as a threat we needed to be ready for..
Politics aside, the EMP stuff is largely BS.
They like to use terms like “frie”, etc, but that aint the case.
The threat to the grid is limited to data aquisition and control equipment, not literally the “grid” (wires and poles) itself.
Most such equipment is sufficiently “hardened” already, in order to be able to withstand lightning - a strike of which applies exponentially more nergy to the grid then EMP.
This whole EMP thing is basically AGW’s little sister.
Here’s a good example of BS hype:
“The 1859 Carrington event, were it to happen today, could be even more destructive than a nuclear weapon, frying power grids worldwide.”
Notice the statements here, then go to the link and read about the event.
Sparking, induced current. No mention of the wires being “fried” though. And realize that they didn’t even know about twisting pairs of wires to reject induction yet. They basically hung out a continent wide antennna, and this was all that happened.
The fact that this is science fiction never enters into this guy's mind but in fact Newt is correct at least to a large degree.
The impact that a nuclear explosion would have on the entire country is dependent on where it exploded, how large it was and what kind of warning we had.
No one has the ability to put a missile into orbit without uncle sugar being aware of the launch, now how we react to it, is both a technological question {we have the technology to handle it} as well as a question of political will to make a hard decision to react.
Not because of what was written, but because the NYT, an avowed enemy of the United States, implicitly encourages our enemies to strike in this venue.
Bill Forstchen's book "One Second After" was one of the scariest books I've read in years, because it's ALL possible, and we are doing almost nothing to counter it. (Why bother to fire hundreds of missiles when you can debilitate your enemy with one?)
Thank whatever, that the New York Times knows that there are no threats to the USA except for radical WASPs.
Have been beating that drum a long time.
Derision is still common.
Thanks for posting the truth.
The most infamous thing in the NYT article was the flip assrtion that, hey, we can just shoot down any missile over the United States.
Besides that being completely untrue, the NYT has spent decades ridiculing and impeding missile defense in every way imaginable. One of their favorites is to say there is no way on earth it can be effective.
Next to a full nuclear attack, EMP attacks are at the top of the list. EMP attacks have long been considered to be a key threat (since the 50s) and has always been a major threat factor in strategic nuclear planning. It would severely cripple the general economy and all non-hardened communication nodes, which is most every communication and electronic device we rely on day to day. Hope the journalist does not have a pacemaker because if there were an EMP event he would tach out.
I have a news flash for the NYT. NASA’s number 1 concern is an EMP. My fiancee’s nephew works as a high level consultant for NASA and he told us they are terrified we will experience an EMP.
I guess the guys at NYT didn’t see NCIS-LA last night....
William J. Broad
ON July 9, 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear device in the atmosphere 400 km above Johnston Island. The event produced a plasma whose initial spherical shape striated within a few minutes as the plasma electrons and ions streamed along the Earth’s magnetic field to produce an artificial aurora. Fig. 1 shows a photograph of the artificial aurora three minutes after detonation as recorded from a KC-135 aircraft.
Concomitant with the artificial aurora was a degradation of radio communications over wide areas of the Pacific, lightning discharges, destruction of electronics in monitoring satellites, and an electromagnetic pulse that affected some power circuitry as far away as Hawaii.
The event was recorded worldwide as the plasma formed at least two intense equatorial tubes, artificial Van Allen belts, around the Earth [1], [2]. These tubes, or plasma toroids, contained relativistic electrons bound by magnetic fields; the source of intense amounts of synchrotron radiation. The radiation lasted far longer than expected; the decay constant was of the order of 100 days. (Mankind, unknowing, has viewed synchrotron radiation from the Crab nebula for centuries. The only known mechanism that produces synchrotron radiation are electrons spiraling about a magnetic field at nearly the speed of light).
Thus, the shape of the phenomena as recorded at radio, visible, and high frequencies was that of plasma “donuts” encircling the Earth, which mimicked the Van Allen belts.
The artificial aurora shown in Fig. 1 also shows plasma striations that arise from instabilities. This paper describes characteristic features of laboratory plasma experiments and simulations, especially for high-current Z-pinch conditions, and compares these features with petroglyphs and other ancient writings, which may have been associated with auroral observations.
As in the natural aurorae at the northern and southern magnetic poles, the streaming charged particle electrical currents, Birkeland currents, are of the order of megaamperes [3].
Figure 1 legend:
Fig. 1. Starfish thermonuclear detonation July 9, 1962, 400 km above Johnston Island. The photograph was taken from a Los Alamos KC-135 aircraft three minutes after initiation time. An artificial striated aurora has already formed from the plasma particles, spreading along the earth’s magnetic field. The brightest background object (mark) at the top, left-hand corner, is the star antares, while the right-most object is [theta]-Centauri. The burst point is two-thirds of the way up from the lowest plasma striation.