Posted on 04/25/2005 6:19:49 AM PDT by DJ Taylor
WASHINGTON -- Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower, say U.S. intelligence sources, top scientists and western missile industry experts.
The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight.
Scientists, including President Reagan's top science adviser, William R. Graham, say there is no other explanation for such tests than preparation for the deployment of Electromagnetic Pulse weapons – even one of which could knock out America's critical electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending the continental U.S. back to the 19th century with a recovery time of months or years.
Iran will have that capability – at least theoretically – as soon as it has one nuclear bomb ready to arm such a missile. North Korea, a strategic ally of Iran, already boasts such capability.
The stunning report was first published over the weekend in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WND's founder.
Just last month, Congress heard testimony about the use of such weapons and the threat they pose from rogue regimes.
Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as "successful" tests. Even primitive Scud missiles could be used for this purpose. And top U.S. intelligence officials reminded members of Congress that there is a glut of these missiles on the world market. They are currently being bought and sold for about $100,000 apiece.
"A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead 'on target' with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere," wrote Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., in the Washington Post a week ago. "No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters – al-Qaida is believed to own about 80 such vessels – and make sure to get it a few miles in the air."
The Iranian missile tests were more sophisticated and capable of detonation at higher elevations – making them more dangerous.
Detonated at a height of 60 to 500 kilometers above the continental U.S., one nuclear warhead could cripple the country – knocking out electrical power and circuit boards and rendering the U.S. domestic communications impotent.
While Iran still insists officially in talks currently underway with the European Union that it is only developing nuclear power for peaceful civilian purposes, the mid-flight detonation missile tests persuade U.S. military planners and intelligence agencies that Tehran can only be planning such an attack, which depends on the availability of at least one nuclear warhead.
Some analysts believe the stage of Iranian missile developments suggests Iranian scientists will move toward the production of weapons-grade nuclear material shortly as soon as its nuclear reactor in Busher is operative.
Jerome Corsi, author of "Atomic Iran," told WorldNetDaily the new findings about Iran's Electromagnetic Pulse experiments significantly raise the stakes of the mullah regime's bid to become a nuclear power.
"Up until now, I believed the nuclear threat to the U.S. from Iran was limited to the ability of terrorists to penetrate the borders or port security to deliver a device to a major city," he said. "While that threat should continue to be a grave concern for every American, these tests by Iran demonstrate just how devious the fanatical mullahs in Tehran are. We are facing a clever and unscrupulous adversary in Iran that could bring America to its knees."
Earlier this week, Iran's top nuclear official said Europe must heed an Iranian proposal on uranium enrichment or risk a collapse of the talks.
The warning by Hassan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, came as diplomats from Britain, France and Germany began talks with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva, ahead of a more senior-level meeting in London set for April 29. Enrichment produces fuel for nuclear reactors, which can also be used in the explosive core of nuclear bombs.
"The Europeans should tell us whether these ideas can work as the basis for continued negotiations or not," Rowhani said, referring to the Iranian proposal put forward last month that would allow some uranium enrichment. "If yes, fine. If not, then the negotiations cannot continue," he said.
Some analysts believe Iran is using the negotiations merely to buy time for further development of the nuclear program.
The U.S. plans, according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to allow the EU talks to continue before deciding this summer to push for United Nations sanctions against Iran.
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security chaired by Kyl, held a hearing on the Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP, threat.
"An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies – terrorist or otherwise," wrote Kyl "And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years."
The purpose of an EMP attack, unlike a nuclear attack on land, is not to kill people, but "to kill electrons," as Graham explained. He serves as chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack and was director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and science adviser to the president during the Reagan administration.
Graham told WorldNetDaily he could think of no other reason for Iran to be experimenting with mid-air detonation of missiles than for the planning of an EMP-style attack.
"EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck," he said. He also suggested such an attack makes a U.S. nuclear response against a suspected enemy less likely than the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city.
A 2004 report by the commission found "several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapons-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication."
"EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences," the report said. "EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power."
The major impact of EMP weapons is on electronics, "so pervasive in all aspects of our society and military, coupled through critical infrastructures," explained the report.
"Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as catastrophic to the nation," Lowell Wood, acting chairman of the commission, told members of Congress.
The commission report went so far as to suggest, in its opening sentence, that an EMP attack "might result in the defeat of our military forces."
"Briefly, a single nuclear weapon exploded at high altitude above the United States will interact with the Earth's atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic field to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) radiation down to the Earth and additionally create electrical currents in the Earth," said the report. "EMP effects are both direct and indirect. The former are due to electrical systems, and the latter arise from the damage that 'shocked' – upset, damaged and destroyed – electronics controls then inflict on the systems in which they are embedded. The indirect effects can be even more severe than the direct effects."
The EMP threat is not a new one considered by U.S. defense planners. The Soviet Union had experimented with the idea as a kind of super-weapon against the U.S.
"What is different now is that some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter – they can be terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety," explains the commission report. "Rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter."
Graham describes the potential "cascading effect" of an EMP attack. If electrical power is knocked out and circuit boards fried, telecommunications are disrupted, energy deliveries are impeded, the financial system breaks down, food, water and gasoline become scarce.
As Kyl put it: "Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order."
"American society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles' heel of vulnerability, ironically much greater than those of other, less developed nations," the senator wrote. "When deprived of power, we are in many ways helpless, as the New York City blackout made clear. In that case, power was restored quickly because adjacent areas could provide help. But a large-scale burnout caused by a broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment."
The commission said hardening key infrastructure systems and procuring vital backup equipment such as transformers is both feasible and – compared with the threat – relatively inexpensive.
"But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize," wrote Kyl, so far the only elected official blowing the whistle this alarming development.
Kyl concluded in his report: "The Sept. 11 commission report stated that our biggest failure was one of 'imagination.' No one imagined that terrorists would do what they did on Sept. 11. Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we've been warned, and we'd better be prepared to respond."
Think of more like a planar source than a point source.
Our response should be that if any nation detonates even one warhead on or above the US, the result will be a total retaliation with everything that we've got.
I have no doubt that the military has more than one device they keep hidden up their sleeves that will take care of a small scale attack. My concern isn't with the military, but with the politicians.
Suppose that Iran was stupid enough to launch a missile this way, and we destroyed it before it could do any damage. Then what? We'd probably launch conventional weapons to destroy their launch facilities and weapons staging depots leaving some big holes in the desert but otherwise leaving the leadership intact. We're spread too thin to mount a full scale invasion right now, and the liberals would whine about holes in the ground being "good enough".
So, what would that type of response tell any other despot who has a nuke or two? That's why we need a standard response to a nuclear threat that would replace the MAD concept.
No it would also blow out transistors on every chip in every civilian electronics system. Cars might have some protection, because the under hood environment is pretty hostile to be with, electromagnetically speaking, although not at the levels of EMP. Ditto for electrical control systems, but less so. It's not just power systems that are affected. If you had line of sight to the blast, there is another effect called "TREE" transient radiation effects on electronics, which has to do with the prompt gamma rays from a nuclear burst causing transient effects in semiconductor materials, but high altitude EMP is more than just line of sight, because the electrons created by the gamma rays (actually knocked out of their parent atoms) move along lines of the earth's magnetic field, and can cause disruption over large (continent wide for a large explosion) areas. Even a "small" blast will cause EMP effects over a large area, just not so large or so severe as with a large bomb.
Smart bunker buster bombs can go after the leadership as well. Not many "leaders" are as good at moving around as Saddam, nor do many of them have so many places to hide.
No major city is more than a few days from starvation. If the trucks and the trains aren't moving, it will get mighty hungry in those cities mighty fast. Even military vehicles would likely be affected, because logistics support equipment is generally not hardened the way weapons systems are. Even Air Force transports aren't as hardened as bombers, fighters and tankers.
Strategic systems, including the command control, are generally designed with EMP in mind, for obvious reasons. However the MAD philosphy, as opposed to war winning, generally meant that only the actual warfighting equipment was hardened, which includes C4I, but not logistics, R&D, etc.
Were the Iranians, or another nation that had greater nuclear and missile capacity (like China or Russia), willing and able to explode an atomic device with the same power as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 kilometers over Kansas City, for example, how widespread would the area affected by EMP be? Is there a formula that would determine what the effect would be in Kansas City, or in cities elsewhere in the United States?
Maybe Iran doesn't want to nuke the us, maybe they don't want war and haven't got any wmd, just like another country currently getting shot to $#!%. Maybe we should stop listening to the media and start thinking for ourselves. Come on seriously just one nuke to cripple the whole country, sounds like bs
"Maybe Iran doesn't want to nuke the us, maybe they don't want war and haven't got any wmd, just like another country currently getting shot to $#!%."
Hmm.. lessee.. 'Death to America!' yeah, the Iranian mullahs don't want war.
That's why they train terrorists, fund terror, hide terrorists, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
Yes, they have WMD.
You missed the Deulfer report obviously on the other country you mention by implication.
And the only people being shot up... are terrorists.
Gee, who'da thunk it!
http://www.foia.cia.gov/duelfer/Iraqs_WMD_Vol3.pdf
Well, you know, it's actually true that a high atmospheric nuclear explosion WILL burn out any unhardened circuits via a surge of power. Anything that can transmit electricity will be affected. A 120-mile high burst centered above Nebraska will create an EMP cone covering the entire continental US, most of the lower half of Canada and most of Mexico. The EMP needs a direct line of sight and travels at the speed of light (IIRC). It will also disrupt the ionosphere for a while, wrecking radar and radio.
The problem Iran, or anyone else faces is most military systems are protected from EMP. The same thing goes for power plants (especially nuclear) and the major fiber-based telecom networks. The redundancy of the internet and it's backbones will allow it to continue, virtually unchanged.
The most serious effect of an EMP will be the civilian population. While our homes will have power within 72 hours tops; we won't have any electrical applicance that will actually work. All our TVs, radios, computers, cars and so forth won't be working and will need new circuits.
The best way to preserve some of our essential electronic equipment would be to wrap certain items in aluminum foil and place them within Faraday Cages. This will reroute the EMP around the exterior of the cage, leaving all items inside, perfectly safe.
I suspect shipping containers would be equally effective in shielding electronic equipment from the effects of an EMP. So, the best place to obtain unaffected electronics would be at the docks or wherever a container was kept closed.
BTTT
ping
EMP would not effect our military who shields everything including the important computers.
There is no way one nuke will have a 3000-5000 mile range.
The "remote control device" in question is an old Zenith Space Command TV remote.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
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