...At another FDD/CPD forum in the Capitol building last month, Center for Security Policy's Gaffney warned that Iran's missile program was designed to detonate a nuclear weapon "in space high above the United States, unleashing an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) [that] could reduce the United States to a pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye."
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/4232/ http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8703
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As you probably already know, the most fantastic thing about this claim isn't the part about an orbital nuke detonation producing EMP effects (with possibly debilitating effects for virtually all modern things, dependent as they are on the control of electromagnetic flow); that's been well understood for some time:
see
<http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/emp.htm>
No, it's the rapid march of the, as you say, hallucinatory rhetoric War Plan Iran supporters casually toss into the air. Not long ago, the supposed threat was uranium enrichment (a process necessary for the production of reactor fuel but also, of course, needed for the manufacture of fissile material for atomic ordinance). Now, in the space between one breath and another, we're told of a specific Iranian plot to use the EMP effect to cripple the U.S.
Needless to say, the subtext is that such a sinister plan constitutes the required grounds for "defensive war".
In a way, this is somewhat clever: use a theoretical threat (EMP) which free floats as a tactic any missile and nuclear capable nation could employ and stick it, like a scarlet "A", to the chest of Iran.
Very like the psyops campaign (directed mostly against the US population) to support War Plan Iraq: they *might* do X at some future date, therefore Y is necessary to eliminate even the possibility.
.d.
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