It’s not ad hominem when it happens to be true.

I’ve struck the rest. Repetitive. –Me

And if belief in a matter were only determined by the number of trolls who can cut and paste the same scripts (9 out of 10 Americans dead in a year,
it’s back to horse and buggy days after an attack, bomb Iran and North Korea because they can doom us so easily) into comments sections and editorial sections of newspapers over the last five years, things might be different re the EMP story.

But it’s still not quite like that. And you’ve conveniently left out the fact that the only patronage of this comes from the extreme right, GOP politicians famous for being birthers, global warming and evolution deniers, and extreme Islam-o-phobes.

Plus you seem have missed all my jokes, going back two or three years, about EMP attack returning us all to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

You’ll not want to miss this at GlobalSecurity.

You are doing a great disservice by downplaying the achilles heel of the USA and the world. Ive researched this to death and it is a very plausible, and a fairly low tech method of taking out the USA and the rest of the world via financial collapse.

Both iran and north korea have crappy SCUD missiles capable of being used as a delivery system. Even a small low tech nuke, developed or purchased on the black market is capable of taking down our entire infrastructure.

But there is another threat. A solar flare, like the one that just missed us last summer would have the very same effect. The power grid would go down, possibly for years while the population starved to death.

Food items travel an average of 1500 miles before it reaches your dinner plate. With no power, no tractors, no trucks, no cars, no water, it would be impossible to farm and transport food to the metro areas a thousand miles away. Up to 90% of the US population would starve to death from a low tech EMP attack.

Hardening our infrastructure against this is not very expensive. If the republicans were trying to use this as an excuse to spend trillions on a missile defense system, I would be crying chicken little too. But any funds spent on making the power grid EMP/Solar-flare proof is MONEY WELL SPENT. I urge you to go do your homework on EMP. It really is the single greatest threat to this nation and the world.

I would not suggest for those concerned with such attacks to drop their guard, but I think that the most damaging manipulation of the power supply could be conducted in a far more subtle way.

1. Risk, a measure of whether or not our critical infrastructure is in fact vulnerable to this kind of event, and
2. Likelihood, a measure of whether or not those currently holding (or about to hold) this capability will use it.

According to your responses, it appears that you are saying that EMP is low risk, low likelihood. Is that correct?

Here.

Contrary to media reports, it is not true that an EMP attack from a typical strategic weapon would completely shut down the electronics within a country. First, the effect is statistical in nature – some systems will not notice the pulse at all while identical counterparts will be affected. Second, the most likely effect from an EMP attack is “upset” rather than destruction, that is, a temporary scrambling of the memory of a computer or the frequency of a communication device, something that is easily corrected by rebooting or resetting the device. (Upset can, however, have catastrophic consequences if the computer is the flight controller of an aircraft or another time-critical system.) Third, the EMP output from a typical device is degraded by several design isues so that few, if any, weapons currently deployed in military stockpiles will produce the maximum possible effect. Of all the nuclear effects, EMP seems the most prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

With this in mind, another point to be made is how could any country with an atom project, like Iran and North Korea, be assumed to have an EMP capability in absence of the fact that they don’t even have any aboveground testing shots? Or in Iran’s case, any test shots — fizzles included — at all.

Is that correct?