“”Newt is speaking outside of his area of competence here. The EMP threat is way overstated.””
I respectfully disagree; both about Newt’s area of competence and overstating EMP. He had to understand what it was about long before he wrote the Foreward to Forstchen’s book “One Second After.” Sure, it’s fiction but can anyone honestly say or believe it CAN’T HAPPEN HERE?
I believe Putin is well on his way to having an EMP weapon against the United States in light of his recent blatherings. I don’t believe anyone is prepared for such “widespread outages” as you mentioned. People went nuts a few days ago when their cell phones stopped working..imagine a larger scale of “outages” involving every aspect of our daily lives.
I can live without a cell phone and I do but I don’t want to be without Free Republic.....
And no Newt has not technical understanding of nuclear weapons and their effects.
And you show your own ignorance as well. It's not Putin is on the verge of getting.... We showed the issue 60 years ago.
Like you said, it's fiction.
The bigger threat is the tempation to climb up the escalation ladder in Ukraine. Putin is warning where it leads. In our recent military debacles we have always been able to throw around a few more high tech weapons to stay in the losing hand we dealt ourselves by trying to fix societies in ways their culture will not accept. We are doing it against the Houthis right now. When you are defense and trying to stop the other side from hurting you, it can work. When you are tring to oeverthrow another government, it turns out it doesn't.
We haven't been in this kind of hot war directly with a nuclear armed peer over an issue he has declared as his vital national interest in a long long time, if ever.
We have lots of national security issues and lots of messes. But mutual nuclear annihilation and the possible attendence of EMP weapons is not nearly as pressing as we can't even keep up with the production of artillery shells to support an modernized version of WWI trench warfare.
None of this stuff constitutes have a genuine national secruity strategy dealign with the world as it actually is while avoiding showdowns headed towards mutual annihilation.