Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently attracted much attention by warning about the threat of an EMP attack against the United States. This threat is summed up in 3-minute video on Fox News here. I recently read a book entitled ONE SECOND AFTER. The author is William R. Forstchen, but the foreward is written by Gingrich. The novel is about what would happen to America if a nuclear weapon were to detonate, say 300 miles up, above Kansas. How would this impact our power systems, our computer-based society, our food and medical supplies if an electromagnetic pulse were to hit us from such a device? On the matrix below, the axis term is ELECTRICITY MAGNET. It is touched by PULSE and WAR (both terms are at ELS). ROCKET at skip 2 is there, as is a form of the year of the book’s publication, (5)771/2011. Finally, the open text has a verse cross the axis term which describes a fate that seems close to the book’s answer about our food supply, namely Leviticus 26:29 which states THE FLESH OF YOUR SONS AND THE FLESH OF YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU SHALL EAT. By page 390 (two months after the attack) people had degenerated into cannibalism. The video on the link above indicates that within one year of the attack two-thirds of the U.S. population would be dead. But the video only uses an altitude for detonation of 250 miles. It leaves much of our west and Florida still with power. That slim hope quickly vanishes if the bomb goes off 50 miles higher.
Why Worry About This Threat Now? EMP is not a new threat. Those of you who saw the television film, THE DAY AFTER, remember that just before Kansas City got nuked, the power went off due to a high level nuke designed to cut power - especially to our missile bases in the Mid-West. For the immediate effects of EMP, see the segment of THE DAY AFTER between 2 minutes and 2:42 into this link. The rest of the link just provided shows what we typically think will happen as a city is nuked, but as the book ONE SECOND AFTER makes very clear, it is not necessary to actually hit one of our cities to destroy our country. EMP travels at the speed of light in a line of site. So a sufficiently high blast could reach all of the lower 48 states. It probably would take two more missiles with similar blasts to take out Alaska and Hawaii in terms of electrical power and everything related to it. Why did this threat not lead to the destruction of the U.S. during the Cold War? The answer is that the Soviets were not insane. They knew that we had thousands of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and other nuclear weapon systems pointed at them. By employing M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction/Mutual Annihilation Deterrent), both sides knew that it was certain suicide to attack the other side. More, once ICBMS were fired by one side, the other side had time to fire it. We thought that in our War on Terror, we had Pakistan as our ally. But it turns out that Bin Laden was hiding there (as hinted at in the Torah Code); secure enough with the Pakistani equivalent of their West Point within a short walk of his compound. At a minimum, this was obviously an embarrassment to Pakistan, but more likely Bin Laden was there with the full cooperation of Pakistan. Pakistan not only has nuclear weapons, but it also has Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. If even one of these missiles were to fired from a container ship in the Gulf of Mexico, to the space over the U.S. Mid-West, it would devastate this country. This is what ONE SECOND AFTER is all about. Perhaps, with the death of Bin Laden, this would be a good time to withdraw from Afghanistan, and to cease drone attacks against Pakistan before we inflame the hatred there against us all the more. But if we do withdraw, if we do save money in withdrawing, those savings should go to the U.S. Navy and to the U.S. Coast Guard to ensure that together, our forces can inspect all vessels headed toward our very soft underbelly in the Gulf of Mexico. We now know that it is unwise to place our survival in the hands of the Pakistani military.
The back cover of ONE SECOND AFTER points out that months before publication it was cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read. I wrote war plans for the Navy and Coast Guard until I turned 60. In fact, I served as the Coast Guard's sole representative at the 2nd U.S. Army Contingency Planner's Workshop and Seminar at Fort Gillem, GA in 1987. It dealt with post-nuclear war plans. Some of the horrifying things I learned there (especially with respect to the issue of how to reconstitute Government) are represented all too well in Forstchen's novel. As such, I fully agree with the Congressional citation. We cannot know how much time we have to get ready for a horrific retaliation by those loyal to Bin Laden, but prudence calls for immediate attention to the EMP threat.
HEIGHT OF THE DETONATION AND DISTANCE TO THE HORIZON. Radiation travels in a line of sight, and not over the horizon. EMP is a great threat. However, at 30 km high the horizon is only 387 miles way (774 miles damage diameter) - see the calculator at http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm. This is enough to cause much damage, but not enough to defeat us. At 300 miles over Kansas the horizon is 1,571 miles away ( a damage diameter of 3,560 miles) and the U.S. is toast.
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MATRIX. As is my standard protocol, no significance is assigned the axis term (ELECTRICITY MAGNET) or to the a posteriori phrase that went through it (THE FLESH OF YOUR SONS AND THE FLESH OF YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU SHALL EAT) although it could be argued that I was indeed looking for something about starvation in conjunction with the EMP issue. The key terms that were plainly a priori were PULSE, WAR, ROCKET and the year of the book's publication (5)771/2011 which may or may not turn out to also be the year of such an attempted attack. There was about 1 chance in 20 for PULSE to be on the matrix, the same chance for WAR, about 1 chance in 2.4 for rocket to be there, but for the year (a short form of 5771/2011) it was easier to find this term than to successfully call a coin toss. Overall the matrix is rated at p = 0.00056, meaning that it appeared against odds of about 1,783 to 1.
IMPLICATIONS. We need to take this threat very seriously - not just because of this matrix, but because Al Qaeda is so loved in Pakistan, because Pakistan has nuclear tipped missiles, and because Al Qaeda has expressed its desire to use these weapons against the United States. Al Qaeda has shown itself to be the master of the Force Multiplier. With box cutters knives on 9/11 it destroyed the New York skyline, hit the Pentagon, took out four airliners and 3,000 Americans, and destroyed much of our way of life. The U.S. could survive a nuclear strike against one of its cities. But an EMP attack with the same bomb detonating at a great enough altitude could bring our nation down. Whether by increased antimissile defenses (American Patriot or Israeli Arrow antimissiles) or by a more beefed up Coast Guard for ship inspections, we must direct our defense expenditures to deal with this threat before it's too late.