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An American detonation, Starfish, over Johnson Island, had the unpredicted side effect of knocking out street lights, alarms, and power generation facilities in Oahu almost 100 miles distant.

Let's set a few facts straight.

First of all, it is about 1000 miles, not 100, from Oahu to Johnston Island. That's 10 times farther than alleged. Big difference.

Second, I was in Honolulu when the referenced tests took place and they were followed with keen interest in Honolulu. The explosions were well above Honolulu's horizon, and the one I remember was quite spectacular. But, nothing was "knocked out" - not power generation, not streetlights, not telephone service, not anything as far as I know. Alarms did not go off as a result of the burst. Certainly there was no talk of any such thing among the people - and we would have noticed.

What did happen is that the ionosphere was severely affected and long-range radio transmissions that require an effective ionosphere reflection were disrupted for quite some time. Back in those days, there was a heavy reliance on radio communication.

The writer of this article won't be able to make his points effectively by relying on egregious distortions and misstatements of fact.

......permanently cripple the country

........ yeah... right.

this is a load of crap. Have any freepers been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki....

If any want to see "permanent" damage I'd advise you to go there and walk around. This is hyped "sky is falling" for some creation of a "Department of EMP" or tax to develop "EMP Protection" or a fee to protect "vital EMP sensitive infrastructure". It will first need relatives of Congressmen, Senators or other bureacrats and lobbyists (look at Kennedy, Clintons, Powell, etc..)in order to study and come to recommendations on how to protect us from this coming "doomsday".

I think we should study meteors and develop a program to put old astronauts and oil field workers on rockets in order to plant nuclear devices on them to break them up into smaller pieces so we all won't die. ...... as long as the explosion is far enough away not to cause an "EMP"..

..yikes that would be funny... destroy a meteor but produce an EMP..

.. I should write a script, have a meeting and maybe send a "treatment" to a producer at Sundance next year...

Gawd I love the Free Republic... so many job opportunities.

The problem is electronics are far more susceptible to EMP pulses now than they were 40 years ago. Most electronics were of tube design when those tests were conducted, now almost everything has a far more sensitive engineering design to them, remember they never shipped things in anti-static bags that ran off of microvolt power either.
If they conducted those same tests again this year the damage would be exponential to what it was then, I mean how many cars back in the 60's had a computer chip required to start it?