Posted on 07/15/2005 10:29:12 AM PDT by joanie-f
Regarding Lightning:
"You got that right. And all of the people who are claiming that EMP won't cause the damage that it will, and that the informed ones are "chicken littles" "
You lightning guys answered your own argument. We simply don't know what an EMP will do - but we can guess based on lightning damage. Our power grid gets hundreds of lightning strikes a day....lightning strikes buildings, houses, aircraft every day. It burns out some things, but it doesn't burn out everything, or even close.
It's not going to be like "War of the Worlds". Our military deterent will remain quite intact.
It is also important to note that some of the scientists noted in the post work for government labs. They are not entirely impartial when it comes to things like this, and funding trumps science at government labs.......
People should be concerned, but there is no danger of returning to the stone age, at least not for us.
The fact that you made such a statement regarding the article in response to the one post indicates to me that either you did not read the article in whole, or that you are willing to write-off an entire list of very respectable and noted authorities on the issue. Either way, it does not reflect well.
Note how good at digging the Chinese (and a number of other Eurasian peoples) are - and have been for a very long time. A little known fact is that the PRC actually has substantial investment into Civil Defense including many public and private shelters. They LOVE digging!
We were prepared to do a much larger one on Japan itself.
As to China, and everybody else that could join in, what are the individual persons doing for their own survival. A couple hundred nuke detonations of 100 kton each across the country would not kill everybody right away, fallout being not much of a threat to the prepared, but the economy would be out of order for years, maybe decades, maybe 200 years. It is survivable, but only if everyone who is interested in active preparation starts preparing in reality. The Internet can get the word out, but the Internet won't pick up a shovel.
They say Moscow has a second Moscow beneath where the entire city can get out of danger from nukes. Where are our population-saving bunkers? I don't want to hear any more about how Congress can be saved. That won't be much good when Congress emerges and finds their constituency has been deconstituented.
Also need a good water supply. We have our own well, with a double action hand pump backup should the electricity fail.
Finally...be prepared to take the necessary precations in the even of a fall-out patter coming near.
We have no bunker...iof a large one strikes too close, we are probably toast. But here in Idaho, that is less likely.
Almost anyone can take one degree or another of these precautions...and they are good for any emeregency.
Yeah, we know all that, being from the fifties era. A fallout shelter, even a blast shelter needn't be much at all. Some people want a fortified bunker, others are happy with a corner of the basement. Food for a year is very easy to provide, water is more of a problem. We'll probably emerge healthier without having consumed three times the calories that we really need.
For the old lefty who doesn't believe it is real, he should read this Northwestern University Physics Dept. publication. He should note that Hawaii was over 880 miles away, and power went down. And that was with old mechanical and analogue circuits that are more resistent to EMP than fragile VLSI semiconductor circuitry in our chips.
He also needs to read the Executive Summary of the expert EMP Threat Commission, which the unclassified portion of their report can be foundhere.
And I would note the testimony and conclusions stressed by Frank Gaffney, of the Center For Security Policy, FROM JUST TWO DAYS AGO, should be taken seriously:
" Speaking of Energy
No testimony by me before this Committee would be complete without a word of thanks to you, Mr. Chairman and to your colleagues – especially Congressmen Bartlett and Weldon – for your work on the danger posed to our nation and way of life by the threat of electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attacks.
Thanks to your efforts, the expert EMP Threat Commission was established by law and charged with conducting a detailed assessment of the effects of a nuclear attack on the United States involving the detonation high above the Nation of a ballistic missile-delivered, EMP-optimized weapon. As you know, the panel concluded that the EMP effects of a detonation at altitudes between 40 and 400 miles above this country could so severely disrupt, both directly and indirectly, electronics and electrical systems as to create a "damage level…sufficient to be catastrophic to the Nation." Worse yet, the commission concluded that "our current vulnerability invites attack." (You have rendered a real public service by making the executive summary of this classified report available at http://armedservices.house.gov/openingstatementsandpressreleases/108thcongress/04- 07-22emp.pdf)
As China is one of the potential adversaries who understands our nation’s acute vulnerability to such attacks, I urge members of this Committee to ensure that the findings of the blue-ribbon Commission on the EMP Threat, that you did so much to make possible, are presented to the full House with a view to implementing as quickly as possible that Commission’s many important recommendations."
However, I was incorrect to refer to the article as hysterical. It's effect seems to be, but not the actual article itself.
And I certainly agree that an large-scale EMP attack is a potential risk that should be looked into, but the urgency urged here seems excessive.
(Of course, I may be a bit soft on China since I just returned from a 6-week Law School program in Beijing. Except for possibly the .01% of the population in the upper echelons of the Central Communist Party, there is little animus towards America that I could detect.)
One name should make this clear--Mo Tse Tung. His "thought" still enshrined in their "constitution" .
The regime that killed more than 60-to-100 million of their own citizens.
Yes. They have a different take on the value of life. They have, because of that, successfully inculcated across the breadth of their populace from the Party faithful down to their lowest citizens a war-fever to conduct duplicitous econo-warfare, invade and subjugate their enemies that would make Stalin and Hitler proud. As Harry Wu, the famous dissident has said, "Nuclear war with them is inevitable, they are crazy, they will do it."
Of course, the poster speaking of not fitting into the subs has a point that such a devestating response will not fill the holes the intital attack created...just avenge them.
As to the Chinese Communists...they have successfully mutated their economic model into a more fascist capitalistic model that is successfully fueling and funding their economic and military growth. But they are still repressive tyrants and number somewhere between fifty and one hundred million in terms of the members of the party itself. Do not underestimate their ability to:
1) Ruthlessly repress their own people.
2) Use the state owned and run media to propogandize and raise nationalistic furor if they feel it necessary (and clearly, in a battle for Taiwan they will play that card to the max).
The fact is...they are gaining the tools necessary to project their economic and military power and influence and ultimatley that will run headlong into American interests and military. Events of this last week just puntuate that point...and the facts of this article should give us all pause.
...and I speak as one who also spent quite a bit of time over there in the late 1990's.
If you are crazy so am I.
Got preps? (I do....)
The Chinese are the best in the world when it comes to putting on the happy face for certain foreign visitors. Been there done that ... a number of times.
Taken with some dipshit North Carolina academic delegation going their to fawn all over the Peking Duck and Great Wall of China, not realizing they don't know that the Chinese know what naive, altruistic, culturally-blind American saps these North Carolina visitors were.
Be careful about things like municipal utilities. Fortunately for our preparations we don't have much of that to worry about. Electricity is the main thing. No city water anyway. Most of the neighbors are rental cabins. They will go away. I probably should, too, since the fallout plume from Asia will funnel directly through here, but I won't. I have talked to some of the neighbors, although they usually aren't worth talking to. Some of the cabins are oil heat, some electric. The one neighbor said he wasn't worried about thr electricity going out because he has oil heat. Typical lameness. I just hope he has enough gas to get safely away from this neighborhood when he has to leave or freeze to death.
A somewhat related aside: Our son is a high school Physics teacher. About two weeks before the school year ended, he had completed all of his planned subject matter and was thinking about what to introduce to the students for the last two weeks of school (when, more than any other part of the year, high school students are not especially into learning, what with the summer looming just ahead. :)
I suggested doing something on nuclear energy, and maybe even the concept of EMPs (without being too negative or alarmist) -- concentrating more on the Physics aspect than the political.
He presented some of what I presented here (without focusing significantly on the China threat -- he wanted to allow them to draw their own conclusions) ... as well as more technical nuclear science material.
The students were so engrossed by the material that he ended the year by showing the movie, ‘Day One’ (which depicts events leading to the development of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos) -- and they were absolutely spellbound.
I worked in the fuel element development/design department at Westinghouse’s Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in the seventies, and I found that, on the rare occasions that I discussed anything work-related with a ‘non-scientific’ listener, it was amazing how interested they often were and how quickly they picked up on concepts that I would have thought to be not necessarily in their realm of interest.
That past experience, and our son’s recent one, convinces me that, if only we could get some of the information included on this thread to the average citizen, the citizen apathy might not be as pervasive as we might think.
Again, Paul, thank you for the informative link and your own particularly well-conceived insights.
~ joanie
Stop it--you're interfering with a full-blown panic orgy. We've got no use for rational thinking here!
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