Most of the savvy thinkers in the field of counter-terrorism agree that as time goes on, the threat of nuclear Islamist terror only rises. There are several "rogue" states working on having nuclear weapons, but ALL of the ones working on them will have them in the next five years or so.
What can we expect from a terrorist nuclear attack? It varies, but the worst possible scenario is NOT the one where we lose a whole city or two.
It's the one where we lose our entire modern civilization, and must revert to the Steam Age for a while, perhaps as long as 10-20 years.
That reversion could be caused by the detonation of two or three nuclear devices high above the atmosphere, but close enough to create an EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse. When an EMP is created, it induces a large, momentary current in any wiring, a current which travels through that wiring and causes a failure of most electronic components in the circuit. Small "chips" (integrated circuits) are particularily prone to being destroyed by EMP. This is basically what happens when lightning strikes nearby and fries your electronic gear and most motor-driven gear in your house - the lightning (a pure EMP) induces current directly and indirectly into all wiring within a certain distance.
Scenario: The Iranians finish making their nukes, and they perfect their Shahab-3 missile. The missile doesn't have to have a good guidance system, it just has to get to a roughly 50-mile wide place in the upper atmosphere over the USA. They launch a spread of these missiles from ships at sea, all of which detonate as planned, and fry our power grid, all our communications, and all of the data-transfer and most all the computers in the USA. Bingo! We are back in the Steam age. Some areas will escape total electronic destruction depending on some variables, but by and large, most of the commerce in this country will be killed. Think: no records of current equities trading, no money transfer data flowing, no business records left for 95% of businesses, nothing.
Now think: that every automobile built since 1978 stops running (computer chips fried in them), every airliner, most rail locomotives and every diesel truck built in the last 15 years (almost all of the truck fleet).
Now think: that every robot-controlled process of manufacturing stops, every CNC machine shop stops working. Think of no bills of lading being generated for any transportation which is left. Think of all that fancy electronic health care equipment, all dead, so health care reverts to "physick" and herbs. No radio communications, except for the antique radio freaks, maybe a few hundred of them nationally, who have preserved operating examples of vacuum-tube equipment (vacuum tube circuits are immune to EMP, except at it's very hightest levels).
Think: 300 million hungry mouths to feed, and hand tool farming able to feed no more than a few percent of that. Think famine, starvation on a national scale, think a depopulated country, weakened, indefensible and with famine and disease rampant.
Now, do you agree that we need to study the issue and start to get ready for it?
I call for bloggers in the survival blog community and in the preparation for disaster community and the gunblogging community to put their heads and blogs together to come up with either the data to prove that this threat isn't real (all the data I've read says that it IS real), or come up with the preparations necessary to harden the country's basic services so that they COULD survive an EMP attack.
Some preparations have been made. Some businesses store backup data on hardened servers and pay for the service of doing so. Some people, my good buddy Phil of the Random Nuclear Strikes blog included, have vehicles that are so old that they will run even after an EMP attack (so do I for now, an old '68 VW Bug). But that takes care of only the short run, maybe the first 30 days post-Armageddon, because when the fuel runs out because it isn't being refined or transported or pumped, you're out of business even if your vehicle still runs.
The problem is that most of our modern layers of civilization will be peeled away after such an attack that we will become just another overpopulated third-world country. We will actually be worse off, though. At least the present overpopulated, third-world countries know how to live without these trappings of civilization, and we don't.
Oh, and Mr. Completely, THIS is why you have weapons with good iron sights or NON-ELECTRONIC optical sights on them. There won't be a red-dot working after the EMP, unless you have your weapons stored several floors underground, in heavy vaults (without electronic locks on them).
Anyway, we need a storehouse of knowledge on what is already hardened against EMP, what can be hardened and what can't be hardened. We need home workarounds, we need to look at the whole Armageddon thing, because if we don't, and it happens, the only thing left to us will be to surrender to some other nation that can come in here and feed those among us who might be useful tools for their ambitions.
If we do get hardened, then we take away this weapon from the terrorists, and anyone else, such as a China or a resurgent Communist Russia, who might be eyeing us as a pigeon.
Or, we could size up all those who would likely pull this shit on us, spin up some missiles, and end their ambitions NOW.
Hardening is the middle ground, because we ain't Israel, and we aren't going to do nuke first strikes on the Norks or Iranians or Paks or anybody. Doing nothing is the inertia position, but if we do nothing about either hardening OR premption of the baddies, we may have ten years left unmolested, tops. We might have as little as three, more likely 5-6.
There is going to be a backlash of leftard indignation against all things military and we will quickly back out of the War on Terror after '08, so all we really have is hardening if Bush launches no missiles before he leaves office.
Let's think hardening, and this will be the great achievement of righty bloggers: we nagged the nation into protecting itself.
