EMP- Not If, but When

Larry Stirling, a former U.S. Army officer, has been elected to the San Diego City Council, state Assembly and state Senate. He also served as a municipal and superior court judge in San Diego.

by Larry Sterling
I had just read “One Second After,” a New York Times best-seller by William Forstchen, when we suffered our blackout.

The novel is based on the facts and conclusions of the report of The Commission to Assess the Risk of the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack (EMP).

On Sept. 12, after all the smug self congratulating and back slapping at our 9/11 memorial events, Investors Business Daily newspaper joined author Forstchen by announcing their own alarm about an EMP attack.

An EMP pulse occurs as a result of a nuclear explosion.

Launch and then explode a nuke at 300 miles above the U.S. and an EMP wave radiates throughout North America at lightning speed overloading all electrical circuit breakers and thereby destroying our energy distribution network and frying all micro circuitry that has not been protected.

Since we are a nation that has perfected reliance on electrical energy and computer chips, the failure of either or both, as we learned to our sorrow when San Diego lost power just last week, will be massively fatal.

Just for starters, all the financial transactions are frozen. You better have cash to use at the local store to buy up the few remaining supplies of water, ice, and canned food needed to survive for the next few days.

Since refrigeration, as well as air conditioners are off, food immediately spoils.

Equipment that relies on microchip technology fails. Airplanes fall out of the sky. Trucks, busses, cars and trolleys litter the freeways, streets, and railways with immovable, soon-to-be-stripped hulks.

Food cannot be farmed, harvested, or moved to market.

The sick in the hospital die. Same in the senior-citizens' and veterans’ homes. Later everyone starts dying from starvation.

People turn on each other first individually then in civil war.

The novel spools out page after dreary page of America’s retrogression into the dark ages.

Is the threat real?

“Yes” says retired four-star Gen. Eugene Habiger, former commanding officer of the Air Force U.S. Strategic Command responsible for our continental safety.

He says: “It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.”

I was so awstruck by the threat assessment pictured in the novel and described in the commission report that I ordered a dozen extra copies of the novel and downloaded the commission report to send to the emergency preparedness powers of our nation, state, and city in hopes of alerting any and all to the specter we are now facing.

The basic military blunder to always prepare for the last war.

Our enemies do not look for our strong points and attack there. No indeed. We have smart enemies.

They look for our weak points. Our vulnerability to EMP is widely known throughout the world and has been for 40 years.

Would we be surprised that they used EMP? Were we surprised that they hijacked airplanes?

We used to be insulated from such technological assaults by our superior wealth and technical abilities compounded by our enemies’ poverty and weakness.

Now we are the ones deeply in debt and cutting back on our military. Meanwhile the Chinese, taking advantage of the treasonous stupidity of Bill Clinton who, for an illegal campaign contribution, handed key rocketry technology to them, are able to launch rockets into our air space.

While the North Koreans cannot quite do so yet, they are capable of launching intermediate-range missiles from container ships in the Gulf of Mexico or off either our Pacific or Atlantic shores.

And so are the Iranians, who have been recently practicing exactly such launches.

As the novel unfolds, the author, who has a PhD in the history of military technology from Purdue University and is the author of 40 other books on similar subjects, makes a compelling case for several disastrous outcomes.

Fully 80 percent of the American populations dies without the loss of one foreign soldier.

The Chinese army waits for six months and then lands as providers of assistance thereby guaranteeing no resistance.

Once they have landed and set up camps throughout the western United States, they simply stay and annex the West Coast to China.

Mexico reoccupies Atzlan -- I mean the southwest. The plains states become barren … again. And the remaining sliver of East Coast residents gauntly lurk among the ruins of their once great nation with no prospect of reemergence.

Of course we can protect ourselves from this fate.

We need to speed up deployment of the anti-missile technology. Unfortunately, the Democrats vehemently object to strengthening our rocket defenses.

Instead we squander time and talent on the pipedream of sending man into space. For various reasons endemic to our human bodies, man cannot survive in space.

And unless something is done about this looming threat, he won’t survive on Earth.

In addition, America needs to understand Islam and its goals: world domination. We should not be deluded by the apologists who claim radical Islamists are the minority and the rest of are our peace-loving allies. You never hear a “peaceful Muslim” condemn the violent murderous acts of their co-religionist. It is a very old principle: He who fails to object, consents.”

No doubt the next 9/11 will be nuclear, which we will never be able to celebrate again.