Word: emp
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...billion Washington has spent preparing to counter incoming enemy missiles even as the Soviet Union disappeared. Then, 9/11 put us in the crosshairs of Islamic terrorists, calling into being a mushrooming homeland-security industrial complex. All very well, warn the sentinels at the Heritage Foundation, but what about the EMP threat? (Watch TIME's video "Homeland Security Tradeshow...
...Despite repeated warnings, Congress has taken virtually no action to prepare or protect against an EMP attack," write the Heritage Foundation's Jena Baker McNeill and James Jay Carafano. "In order to facilitate a national discussion regarding the EMP threat, Congress should establish March 23 as EMP Recognition Day" - not coincidentally, that's the date of Reagan's famous 1983 speech launching his missile-defense initiative. Leaving aside the contradiction of urging Congress to concentrate attention and resources on a threat that most in Washington consider an infinitesimal probability, the whole notion seems rooted in some visceral need for foes...
...contribution to EMP Recognition Day, the Heritage Foundation - sounding more like the Green Party than the conservative think tank that it is - is urging lawmakers to shut down congressional cafeterias, walk to work, shut off their BlackBerries and turn off the lights. "If Congress took these four steps for one day," the Heritage Foundation says, "all members would understand the magnitude of the dangers posed by an EMP attack." (They'll also be slimmer, healthier and more mellow...
...blunt the impact of an EMP strike, those most alarmed by the threat want the U.S. military to shield its key electronics, and want vital elements of civilian society to do the same. Like with taxes and health care, the debate over the EMP threat is polarizing. "More fearmongering to garner more $$$ for The Big War Machine," opines one poster on Wired's Danger Room blog. Another skeptic asks: "Do they have a flying carpet that could go that high?" But EMP-threat true believers won't be deterred. "Detonating a nuke on the ground would leave cities in shambles...
...Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican with a background in engineering, is EMP's Chicken Little. "We're going to be attacked where we are the weakest," the 83-year old lawmaker told the Navy's top officer at a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing. "How much fighting capability would remain if you had an EMP lay down of 100 kilovolts per meter, which is about half of what the Russian generals told the EMP commission [created by Bartlett himself six years ago] the Soviets had developed and the Russians had available?" (The admiral said he'd have...