Mike Huckabee, Cynicism, and EMP
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Mike Huckabee's got charisma, but he also continues to be dangerously ill-informed about vital policy issues, leaping head first into the deep sees of EMP madness:
The EMPACT conference represents a culmination of sorts for the EMP awareness movement. In his keynote speech, Mike Huckabee warned against complaisance. “We should not minimize the threat of EMP,” he said. “There’s always going to be cynics. There were cynics who didn’t believe the Japanese were a threat (to attack Pearl Harbor) and there were cynics who didn’t believe radical Islam was a threat.” Huckabee said he agreed with Fritz Ermarth, former chair of the National Intelligence Council, who the day before had told conference attendees that an EMP attack would most likely come from Iran, North Korea, or an Al Qaeda-type terrorist network. Huckabee also compared the EMP’s effects on the electric grid to that of a particularly bad ice storm.
Read Robert Farley’s article for a thorough takedown of the EMP hype. But note that Huckabee doesn’t even seem to really understand what cynicism is. I would also note that on the specific case of Peal Harbor, while it’s true that this illustrates that regimes sometimes do completely insane things that lead inevitably to their own destruction that betting on “they probably won’t do that, it’d be insane and lead inevitably to their own destruction” is going to leave you with a much higher batting average than would a Huckabee-style pose of constant hysteria.
The real kicker, however, is this:
Indeed, even the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which seems perpetually on the lookout for ways to plug purported existential threats to the homeland, stayed away from Niagara. One Standard editor said in an interview with the author, “I don’t go for that EMP stuff. Kind of more interested in dangerous scenarios that might actually happen.”
Mike Huckabee—too alarmist and paranoid for The Weekly Standard.
25 Responses to “Mike Huckabee, Cynicism, and EMP”
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October 19th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
“Mike Huckabee—too alarmist and paranoid for The Weekly Standard.”
3 cheers for Huckabee!
Now back to the real world where a Democratic President and Congress continue to piss away $billions in our obligatory AIPAC wars in the mideast.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I hope there’s something to the EMP idea. When its use was predicted against Iraq in 2003 and it didn’t happen, I assumed that was because the Pentagon was saving it for when it might really be needed, e.g. war with Iran or North Korea. For NK it’s the only thing that could overcome their low-tech ability to destroy Seoul with artillery: you could block the order to let loose. But it’s possible that we didn’t see EMP in Iraq because it just doesn’t work against even nominally hardened communications.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
not to be a cynic, but it is now 4:11 Eastern Standard Time and Matt has not given us one single solitary link to an article or blogpost from The New Racist yet. that is going to mean a lot of ground to cover over the next few hours if he wants to meet his daily quota of 2+ links to The New Racist.
does anyone have any suggestions for squibs, large or small, from TNR Matt might comment on? c’mon peoplez, let’s help him out of this quandry.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
EMPs are really powerful but using them is a tricky business. The EMP is the only thing that can kill the Sentinels, but we can’t use it until Keanu Reeves gets out of the Matrix and that won’t happen until he beats Agent Smith, and THAT won’t happen until he sees the Matrix for what it is and proves himself to be the One. Does Huckabee share Morpheus’ faith? Or does Huckabee’s fear of EMPs show that he is actually working with the Machines?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I played Command and Conquer a couple times as a kid too but i tried not to let it set my life’s philosophy.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
FYI, my Norton internet protection software says the site you linked to (for the Farley article, irc-online.org) is unsafe, five threats. Norton gave a big warning the site is unsafe.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
I think by “cynics” he means “skeptics.” I’d hate to hear him attempt to use “ambivalent.”
October 19th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
You gotta be nicer to Mikey… it’s not easy playing
Palin’s b-boy.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
When someone has been on the beat for over a decade, it’s hardly fair not to link to him.
As for the EMP, I hear some inventor has invented “fuses” and “surge protectors” in his garage, but the electricalator industry won’t let you have them.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I think Huckabee is actually worried about EMF, and something about it being “unbelievable”.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Farley’s article is excellent. For those who didn’t RTFA:
1) if someone did attempt to poop a nuke over the US at 300mi up and it did cause widespread damage, the US would know who it was, would be able to respond, and the response would fuck their shit up.
2) the people hyping the EMP threat are grasping at any excuse to continue acting as international douche bags in the GWB mold.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
What’s fascinating to me is that the same pants-wetting right-wingers who are frightened about Iran launching a nuclear first strike with their not-yet-built nuclear weapon and wiping out our entire infrastructure and sea-based second-strike capability with one bomb… are blithely unconcerned about climate change.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
@12
Because “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb climate change” doesn’t scan quite as nicely.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Jeez, Hucky, Michael Faraday was a famously devout Christian. It might be worthwhile to read up about his cages. Then again, why start becoming informed before opening your mouth at this late date? Especially when your non-Mormon competition in ‘12 uses ignorance as her main selling point?
October 19th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
He appears to be using “cynicism” when he means “skepticism”. But I agree that he probably doesn’t know what cynicism is and that’s where a lot of the charisma comes from.
But it doesn’t make EMP sound especially dangerous to say it would have the effects of a bad ice storm. I don’t take Huckabee as paranoid, just extremely un-knowledgeable about most things that wouldn’t be tackled at a state level (like a nicer, less fake Palin). This is a guy who suggested the Israeli-Palestinian problem could be solved just be settling the Palestinians in some other Mideastern country – nobody with any comprehension of the situation regards that as possible, and I don’t sense malice from him, so he just seems to be deeply underinformed.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Re: if someone did attempt to poop a nuke over the US at 300mi up and it did cause widespread damage, the US would know who it was, would be able to respond, and the response would fuck their shit up.
Any old nuke won’t do. You need a really powerful hydrogen bomb. A little old Hiroshima type bomb, whikle it could kill a hundred thousand or more burst in a city, would just bounce it feeble EMP right off the ionosphere*. Only a handful of countries have those or the ability to make them: the US, Russia, China, France, the UK and maybe Israel. Anyone think one of those countries is going to pull that stunt?
* That’s not quite the physics of it, but you get the idea. The upper atmosphere is struck with EMPs all the time from the sun- which is after all a permanent fusion reactor, but fortunately 93 million miles away. Only once in a blue moon is one strong enough to wreak havoc at ground level.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
There’s some good and not-so-good information in the Farley article Matt links to. I think the main objection I have with it is his repeated claim that EMP, in the context of an attack, is poorly understood and not of much strategic significance.
This is false. From the moment the EMP effect was discovered, research began on both how to utilize it and how to defend against it. Almost all critical military electronic is hardened against EMP. And, more to the point, both the US and the former Soviet Union had a number of warheads which were designed to be detonated at high altitudes—where the only militarily significant effect is EMP damage.
Exactly how one or more of those bombs would (or would have) affected the US electrical distribution grid very well may be something poorly understood, though not for lack of trying. There’s too many variables in attempting to predict how it might fail under such an assault.
But you’d better believe that it’s well-known how it would affect military equipment and readiness. And how it would affect, at a given strength, unshielded civilian electronics is no mystery (given the research on how to harden military electronics).
If you’re going to attempt to mock ignorance, it helps to not be ignorant yourself. In fact, while power line surges would be pretty large and problematic for an EMP-specialized thermonuclear detonation, it’s not just they which cause problems. An EMP detonation will create significant electrical currents in all wiring (in fact, in all conductors) and electronic circuits don’t require much wayward current to break them.
EMP bursts from high-altitude thermonuclear EMP-specialized weapons are a key component of the US’s and former USSR’s first (and second) strike plans. I don’t know how many or what kind of nukes would be required, but I’m certain that these plans called for something that would destroy or temporarily disable almost all non-hardened (meaning non-military) electronic devices on the continent. That would cause a lot of economic damage. I do, however, think it would certainly be recoverable, if not the least because we’ve been as prepared as we can be for this for forty years.
All that said, it’s certainly the case that these folks are scare-mongering EMP weapons as a means to justify anti-missile defense. There is no way in which I can see that a nuclear weapon utilized for EMP is equal to or more devastating than as…a nuclear weapon. Worse, an EMP nuke needs to be specially designed and specially deployed (in the atmosphere) for maximum effect—which just adds more burdens on the producer above-and-beyond managing to produce a nuclear weapon in the first place. (And let’s be clear that a truly effective EMP bomb is a fusion weapon, not a mere fission weapon—an order of magnitude more difficult to produce than the simplest fission device.)
A bare-bones gun-type fission weapon (or, even more so, a dirty bomb) is to an EMP weapon as a frigate is to an aircraft carrier. It’s absurd to worry about being targeted by an EMP nuke when a plain ‘ole nuke or dirty bomb is incomparably less expensive and easier to build and pretty damn deadly.
Finally, it should be mentioned that as in Ocean’s 11 and even Matrix, you don’t need a nuclear weapon to produce a localized EMP—something that could knock a city off the grid and destroy electronic circuitry within a few block radius. There is a way to produce EMPs with high-explosives and electromagnets, such that the compressed magnetic field creates one—Google “z pinch” if you’re interested. This really is a terrorism concern, I think.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Oh, come on Matt. Lay off Huckabee. Sure, a Huckabee/Palin presidency would bring about the end times described in Revelation. Still, he seems like a nice guy and, hey – he plays the bass. You’ve got to love a politician who plays bass.
As for EMP’s – you can mess up the electrical grid by driving a truck into a transformer or cutting some tree branches over a power line. Much more effective, and cheaper than using EMP technology which – lets face it – is more useful to science fiction movies than to the military, much less terrorists.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Actually, the reason the Pearl Harbor / Radical Islam analogy doesn’t work is that these attacks used *airplanes*, which have a proven scientific track record. Huckabee’s conflating the threat posed by people with the threat posed by a method.
That, and I find his avuncular over-familiarity which some call “folksiness” highly annoying.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Look, EMP is not fantasy. We’ve know about EMP since the beginning of nuclear testing. Test were specifically designed as early as 1962 to test the effects of EMP. Small, 1.4 megaton warheads were detonated at high altitudes, 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean, to test electrical damage to Hawaii, 900 miles away. The damage was not insignificant.
The Soviets did the same thing in the mid 60’s, over Siberia, testing much smaller weapons than ours -one quarter the size mini-nukes- but at lower elevations. The results were MORE than promising.
The idea is, obviously, any first strike, consisting of say, 3,500 warheads, would include 300 40 megaton warheads that would detonate over enemy territory at about 100 miles up -to take best advantage of the electromagnetic field. These devices need not be fancy specifically designed EMP weapons, they can be just your basic nuke detonated at higher elevations to produce maximum electronic damage. The idea is, again, obviously, to destroy all electronic capability below so as to make it impossible for the enemy to launch his counterstrike. Basic nuclear stuff.
And no, nobody really understands the potential effects of a 40 megaton weapon detonated 100 miles above, say, the United States. In my opinion, there is general agreement among Soviet and US nuclear experts that the EMP effect from such a detonation would prove devastating to electronics, especially delicate modern electronic devices, over a very broad area -hundreds of miles out in all directions.
Personally, I don’t give a shit. The EMP effect means nothing. Americans will not need electronics after 3,200 warheads impact the United States from sea to shining sea.
But I bring this up to point out that a possible catastrophic EMP effect, taken as gospel by the people that matter, altered US thinking on missile defense. Umbrella defense over the homeland, defensive missiles taking out incoming Russian ICBM’s and warheads hundreds of miles up, could prove ineffectual if by stopping these missiles we create an inadvertent EMP effect and knock out electronics coast to coast and send the country back to the stone age.
I don’t know, innocent one and Panda lover, I guess growing up in the Cold War has its advantages. The instant I understood that our plans to take missile defense/attack to the “enemy’s” doorstep, I was like “you motherfuckers are too goddamn smart, you finally figured it out. Now you got what you always wanted -first strike. Brilliant.”
And remember, Matt, for these guys, it is NOT about stopping one or two incoming nukes, it is about stopping thousands of them. Stopping them all. That’s the game. The boys are and always have been -playing to win. Just in case.
The good news, seriously, and it’s a delicate thing to rely on the Mike Fuckelberries of the world, but if enough people are afraid of EMP, the right people, maybe instead of attacking Iran and N.Korea and Russia and China we can convince these stupid cocks to build an EMP resistant grid. That’s what I would pound home. EMP?…. Grid. EMP?. Smart grid! EMP? NATIONAL FUCKING SMART GRID!!
October 20th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Obviously the dbag at the Weekly Standard has never seen GoldenEye. And since he probably hasn’t played GoldenEye either he can safely be ignored when it comes to espionage, counterterrorism, the role of the precious metals/armament industries in shaping our foreign policy and the research on stealth slapping.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Are you serious? I mean, wow. For the past week or so, instead of my usual method of procrastinating at work by reading political blogs, I have been procrastinating at work by reading tvtropes.org. Now I come back to the blogs to see what I’m missing, and I can’t tell the difference.
Just by reading the first two paragraphs of Farley’s article, I can tell that the hype about EMPs is absurdly and probably disingenuously overblown. Where are the ICBMs? For the past 20 years, the credible risk to America itself from nuclear weapons has been terrorists smuggling one into a city in a truck. Even the most alarmist hype about North Korea has them just barely reaching one city with one missile. Obviously, either case would suck for people in those cities, but in either case the US has its second strike capability intact and we would be pissed. MAD worked just fine when it was mutual, and this hypothetical situation would be more like Annoyance Assured Destruction.
So in the EMP situation, by contrast, Huckabee and other Republicans believe that someone with a hypothetical ICBM would use it to deliver a nuclear weapon 300 miles over the geographical center of the US? Which, while admittedly not fully understood, would probably not be directly lethal at all? In this situation the hypothetical EMP user and the actual, real-life Republicans have something in common.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: But note that Huckabee doesn’t even seem to really understand what cynicism is. I would also note that on the specific case of Peal Harbor, while it’s true that this illustrates that regimes sometimes do completely insane things that lead inevitably to their own destruction that betting on “they probably won’t do that, it’d be insane and lead inevitably to their own destruction” is going to leave you with a much higher batting average than would a Huckabee-style pose of constant hysteria. [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Keith Ellis:
A lightning bolt near your house/car will blow up your electronics. But a one megaton bomb (4E15 Joules) does the total work of maybe 10 million lighning bolts.
We actually have considerable experience in this matter. Solar storms, (flux of 10E-4 w/square meter) have a record of knocking out power grids and causing emfs in decimetric wavelengths that damage communnication equipment.
No solar storm yet has knocked out a toaster, and if the reradiation mechanism is as I understand it, your flash drive is completely safe. Your computer, which is hooked up to the power grid, not so much. But, with a fuse/surge protector, you should be safe.
My grades in Physic 400 were crap. (Thanks for passing me, Dr. Howard, hope I’m not embarrassing you!) I can’t preach dipole theory. But I do get the laws of thermodynamics. There’s just not the work at hand. The emf effect from a 1 megaton bomb bursting in orbit over the North American seaboard is kind of like a lightning bolt hitting somewhere in your town, only with less trees falling over.
Now, pave the North American sky with 300 40 megaton bombs and you’re certainly going to accomplish something. Specifically, you’re going to waste more taxpayer dollars then a fifty year arms race plus 20 Apollo programs. I may be wrong here, but I don’t think anyone has ever managed to put a 40 mT device on a rocket, and speaking for Russian taxpayers interested in comparative effectiveness, I would suggest that hitting 300 actual American cities with 100 kiloton bombs would do far more economic damage.
And speaking for the hypothetical citizens of those cities in the hypothetical case where these bombs were 40 megaton warheads instead, and were blown up in space and caused an emf and trashed my computer and my car and my power grid while leaving me alive? I would not be ungrateful. Not that anything in this scenario is plausible.
So the language of crisis here boils down to, “oh no, someday in the distant future the North Koreans might be able to knock Hydro-Quebec out for a few hours.” That doesn’t sound good, so we talk about destroying every car on Earth, instead.
And when that begins to pall, we talk about the alleged emf gun that everyone has been claiming to be able to build in their garage for years. There are very good reasons to think that such a thing will not work, the best of which is that every military on Earth seems to be betting that frequency-hopping radio/radar will be unjammable out past the lifetime of the JTF. 2040? 2050?
But, hey, maybe they’re all just having us on and hiding their super-emf guns, and only some basement dwelling Taliban ham has figured out that the Emperor has no clothes.
October 20th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
It’s a wonder what you can find on the Internet these days. The original assessment of Operation Starfish Prime, for example. Evidently a damp squib. The EMP-boosters talk about effects at Hawaii, 800 miles away, and imply that geography was an issue, when there was an entire mission control right under the blast.