[Joe the Pimpernel]

Any Iranian military or commercial vessel easily could get right outside the U.S. coastline and in less than 60 seconds fire a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear payload and detonate it over U.S. skies in an electromagnetic attack that would plunge America back into the 18th century.

I believe Mr. Khamenei has been watching too much SciFi.

[ArrogantBustard]

EMP due to exoatmospheric nuclear explosion is science fact. Deleterious effect of said EMP on power grids, comm grids, satellites, unshielded electronics, etc are also science fact.

The real question is whether Iran is capable of carrying out such an attack, or merely blowing smoke.

[Future Snake Eater]

They believe in the Mahdi but not physics, apparently.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Actually my fiancee’s nephew works as a fairly high level consultant to NASA and he told us about a year ago that the govt’s worst fear is an EMP. They are very worried about it. If the Iranians run a tramp steamer up the East Coast and fire off a nuke to about 40 miles up and detonate it could take out the whole East Coast grid. If they scuttle the vessel it might be hard to prove who actually did it.