It’s time to take out Iran

Posted by Bill Hennessy

July 15, 2006

***UPDATE***

Dave Price, blogging for Dean Esmay, provides more good reasons for Israel to take out Iran now.

Israel needs to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders, ungently, that killing Israelis is not in their interest. With sociopaths, you have to set boundaries.

Sociopaths the mullahs, Paul Krugman, and Bill Keller

Also, OTB examines Newt Gingrich’s observation that World War III is underway, and we better stop pretending otherwise.

NEWSWEEK provides a Must Read article on Iran’s role in destablizing the Middle East.� Because of American successes in Iraq, Libya, etc., Iran’s mullahs are threatened.� Therefore, they’re asserting power through Hamas and Hezbollah, which gives Israel justification to kill every last mullah it can find.

***/UPDATE***

According to Arab language newspaper, Al-Hayat, Israel put Damascus on 72 hours notice to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel and turn over two capture soldiers or face the full brunt of Israel’s fury.

The London-based Arabic language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Saturday that “Washington has information according to which Israel gave Damascus 72 hours to stop Hizbullah’s activity along the Lebanon-Israel border and bring about the release the two kidnapped IDF soldiers or it would launch an offensive with disastrous consequences.”

The report said “a senior Pentagon source warned that should the Arab world and international community fail in the efforts to convince

Syria to pressure Hizbullah into releasing the soldiers and halt the current escalation Israel may attack targets in the country. (source)”

Other reports document Iran’s increasing involvement in the terror war against Israel. An Iranian-made missile struck an Israeli warship in the Mediterranean, killing one sailor. (ht MM) According to Captain Ed, though, Israel has denied the claim. Iran leaves no one guessing as to its intents with a nuclear missile, should it get one:

Annihilate Israel
Damage the United States

A nuclear attack on Israel would quickly end the Jewish state’s existence. Doubters, however, may think Iran’s limited arsenal incapable of inflicting serious damage on the US.

Think again.

Iran claims its goal in nuclear weapons technology aims at building a viable electro-magnetic pulse weapon. According to American scientists, that goal is very achievable. It would require the terrorist state to produce but a single warhead.

How does EMP work?

According to the Federation of American Scientists:

A high-altitude nuclear detonation produces an immediate flux of gamma rays from the nuclear reactions within the device. These photons in turn produce high energy free electrons by Compton scattering at altitudes between (roughly) 20 and 40 km. These electrons are then trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field, giving rise to an oscillating electric current. This current is asymmetric in general and gives rise to a rapidly rising radiated electromagnetic field called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Because the electrons are trapped essentially simultaneously, a very large electromagnetic source radiates coherently.

The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii. A large device detonated at 400–500 km over Kansas would affect all of CONUS. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.

How much damage could it do?

Think of the most paranoid, doomsday predictions for Y2K, then multiply them by four. Every micro-circuit system in North America would gone, fried, unrecoverable. Every magnetic storage device—hard drives, tapes—would be erased. (see here)

According to Senator John Kyl, whose committee investigated the dangers of an EMP attack, in WorldNewsDaily:

“Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.”

“American society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles’ heel of vulnerability, ironically much greater than those of other, less developed nations,” the senator wrote. “When deprived of power, we are in many ways helpless, as the New York City blackout made clear. In that case, power was restored quickly because adjacent areas could provide help. But a large-scale burnout caused by a broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment.”

What would we lose in the attack? Here is a partial list of the systems that would be wiped out by an EMP attack:

All modern communications

Telephone
Radio
Television
Wireless telephone
Walkie-talkie
Internet

All computers (except for 1960s-era vacuum tube computers)

Water distribution

All automobiles built after about 1968

Your car and mine
Police cars
Military vehicles
Fire engines
Ambulances

All modern medical technology

MRI
X-Ray systems

All power distribution systems

Natural gas
Electricity
Propane

Does Iran have a delivery system for such a device?

Yes. Because EMP allows a rogue state like Iran or North Korea to cripple the US with a single weapon, they have no need for scores of ICBM. One or two warheads delivered from 1,000 mile missile launched from a ship 100 miles off America’s coast would detonate in skies above the Midwest. As the FAS article shows, that weapon at the right altitude would send a continent-sized pulse over North America.

Why should I care?

Because many Americans don’t care if Irans gets nuclear weapons or if North Korea gets long range delivery systems. Based on the principle of proportionate response, both of these Axis of Evil governments believe that the US would not retaliate. In the first place, our capacity to respond would be severely damaged. Secondly, such an attack would result in very small immediate loss of life. A full-scale nuclear response, which I would launch in a heartbeat, would be viewed as overkill by the anti-American left. Third, an EMP response would be meaningless. Iran and North Korea are already living in 19^th century conditions. The minor disruption to commutations would have little impact on the average Iranian, while the initial attack on America would leave most of us without food, water, or fuel for heating and cooling.

What should we do?

America should do whatever it takes to destroy Iran’s and North Korea’s ability to launch an EMP. For those of you who can’t read between the lines, that means a first strike against their nuclear and missile facilities.

And we should do it now.

Begin by reading Michelle Malkin’s post, I Stand With Israel.