Noah Rothman, on today’s edition of The Editors, says the potential threat of electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) keeps him awake at night.
“I know that this is something that drives liberals nuts,” Noah says, “because they have been arguing for decades that it’s not nearly the threat that the conservative Right in particular has been posing.”
Noah says, “You know who’s a serious person on national security if they’re willing to entertain that as a threat, because everybody who’s a serious national-security observer understands this as a threat; the unserious people dismiss it off hand.”
Rich presses Noah about what an EMP is and does, and Noah answers: “It’s a . . . detonation in the upper atmosphere . . . and depending on where it’s detonated, you only need one or two to knock out, for the foreseeable future, the power grid throughout the continental United States.”
Noah says that some novels entertain ideas of a nuclear apocalypse, and “you can read on this, the worst-case scenarios, and maybe they’re fictionalized. But . . . Congress has had hearings on this, and they essentially back up what is the basic premise here: that it wouldn’t take many nuclear detonations to achieve that effect, to simply knock the United States out as the world’s sole global power.”
“And our capability to knock out an incoming nuclear weapon is really minimal.”
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