Today (depending on your time zone), our peace-loving friends in Iran test fired another missile. The exact range of this weapon is unclear, but it is believed to be "up to 2,000 km."
But 2,000 km is barely over a thousand miles, and Iran is halfway around the world. How could this possibly affect me?
A nuclear warhead of modest size, secured as the payload of such a missile and fired from the back of a cargo ship (or one disguised to look like a cargo ship) a hundred miles off either US coast, then detonated at sufficiently high altitude, could have the effect of overloading and burning out all electronic circuitry it "sees." Typically such a detonation needs to occur at a height of about fifty miles over the continental US.
The Shahab-3 missile can reach such a height.
But won't the nuke backfire on whoever lights it off?
No. That's the one of the horrors of it. In typical terrorist fashion, it can be used against civilian populations with little or no recourse to the attacker. Since the curvature of the earth shields Iran from direct view of the nuclear blast, they will not experience any of its effects, which will be limited mostly to North America and, perhaps, portions of Central America.
I first read about electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMPs) in Popular Science in the late 1970s. At that time, only the Soviet Union was thought to be interested in such a tactic, and they already were deadlocked with the US in a strategy known as Mutually Assured Destruction -- MAD. Since the Soviets had the capability of going toe-to-toe with America in a massive nuclear exchange, the need for EMP was deemed superfluous, the threat was cast aside, and we pushed it from our collective consciousness as we turned up the volume of the World Series.
Not everyone discarded the fanciful threat posted by riding shock wave of a nuclear blast.
A decade or so later witnessed the dawn of the Information Age and the birth of the cell phone era, creating an insatiable appetite for electrons and all the fragile silicon upon which they ride. Today, an entire generation has been hard-wired and hooked in and wouldn't have the first clue how to survive without the fix provided from an electrical wall outlet. How far we've come in thirty years can only be gauged by the size of the hole we've plugged ourselves into, a hole from which we likely could not emerge without enormous personal sacrifice.
The same dunces who can't seem to build a simple border fence or provide the American public with a bona fide civil defense system couldn't possibly be expected to protect us from the high tech wrath of the turbaned fools of Iran.So, who are the real fools?
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