Two words, three letters - Iran and EMP:

Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon that could cripple the United States “in a blink of an eye,” says Frank Gaffney, a leading expert on U.S. national security….

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, Gaffney warned that Iran’s nuclear program has progressed much further than most officials believe. The Islamic republic could attain a nuclear weapon “any day,” he said.

A single nuclear weapon exploded at the proper altitude would create a wave of energy sufficient to wipe out the entire U.S. electrical grid, causing “catastrophic disaster,” Gaffney said.

In September, the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors global nuclear activities provided intelligence to diplomats indicating that Iran is trying to refit a long-distance missile so that it can carry a nuclear warhead.

“The missing piece as far as we know is the nuclear weapon, and they’re busily working to acquire that,” Gaffney told Newsmax. “And I am afraid they could at any day have the ability not only to obtain that nuclear weapon, but to mate it with a ballistic missile, and God forbid, use it.”

Experts agree that a nuclear detonation at a high altitude would generate an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that would destroy most electrical systems. Gaffney predicts it would plunge the entire country into conditions similar to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The resulting social breakdown could ultimately lead to millions of American deaths from various causes, he said.

“Such an attack could really cripple our 21st-century society, and I would suggest sort of push us back into preindustrial society in the blink of an eye,” Gaffney said. “It would translate over time — not immediately but over time — into the deaths of perhaps as many as nine out of ten Americans, because our society simply can’t be sustained without electricity and all of the infrastructure that supports our urban settings.” [emphases added]

I was trying to explain this to my daughter yesterday, not because I thought I’d be able to convey the true horror of the implications, but as a test of a psychology theory I have of the uncommunicability of mortal national security threats. My theory was borne out, not surprisingly. But then it is difficult for even me to imagine the immensity of a successful EMP attack on the United States.

The best I can do is to ask you to imagine all the ways your life would change if there were no electricity. All the applicances in your home, the lights, the heat, would be gone. All the food in your fridge would spoil. You couldn’t go to the grocery store to replace it because your car wouldn’t start, and even if it did, you couldn’t refill the gas tank because the pumps at the local filling station wouldn’t run, and the tanker trucks couldn’t get to the filling station to delivery more gasoline - nor could eighteen wheelers deliver more groceries to the grocery store. You might have a home generator for just such emergencies, except that they run on gas or kerosene or diesel fuel and that would dry up just like the gas for your car.

Freezing to death. Starvation. Chaos. Let your imagination run wild from there.

The end result? America would cease to exist as a coherent continental nation because it is simply too big to remain intact without an interconnected modern infrastructure to sustain it. Civil order would break down. The law of the jungle would return. Most of us, rendered decedantly fat, dumb, and happy as the citizens of the late, great global hegomon, wouldn’t have a clue as to what to do so survive in such dire circumstances. Maybe the “over time” death toll wouldn’t be quite as high as 90%, but it would be staggering nonetheless. And there would be no FEMA to ride to the rescue, competently or otherwise, and certainly no international assistance coming our way.

That, of course, assumes that there wouldn’t be any follow up from our enemies, whether that was via land invasion or simply nuking our crippled, defenseless homeland to irradiated oblivion.

But again, that hasn’t happened - yet. And because it hasn’t happened, it’s difficult to see through the prosperous normalcy of life in these United States to recognize the danger of it happening in the very near future.

It’s base human nature. People don’t want to confront threats if doing so involves a signficant cost, even if the cost of not confronting them will be inestimably worse. Far easier to convince yourself that gambling on the latter is the safer bet. A psychological phenomenon colloquially known as “wishful thinking.”

Wishful thinking dominated the foreign policy of the Western democracies in the 1930s even as Adolph Hitler was following his published blueprint for anti-Semitic genocide and world conquest to the letter. There is arguably no war in human history that was more preventable than World War II, and yet Western leaders refused to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears and instead took comfort in self-generated pacifistic myths and delusions, no more infamously exemplified than the “tough direct diplomacy” that Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier undertook at Munich with Herr Hitler. Until, of course, the German tanks rolled across Poland, and then France and Holland and Belgium, and then German bombers started raining fire down on London, six million Jews perished, and fifty-four million other human lives joined them, all because Western leaders didn’t have the courage to recognize the futility of “diplomacy” and act pre-emptively against Hitler while they had the opportunity.

Happily for the world, the United States was there to (belatedly) intervene and eventually turn the tide against the Nazis. Which, of course, leads inexorably to the question of who is going to bail out America after it has been decimated by a long-proclaimed EMP attack from the Islamist theocrats in Tehran whose enmity against the United States has been proclaimed non-stop for the past thirty years. Once again we face an enemy that has told us they are going to bring us to our knees, told us how they’re going to do it, and that they will not and cannot be talked out of doing it. And once again we - and I mean the bipartisan “we” - are refusing to believe the evidence of our eyes and ears and instead are taking comfort in self-generated pacifistic myths and delusions, so much as that we are about to elect as our next president a man who makes Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill.

I have said throughout this campaign that the reason above all others why I deathly fear a Barack Obama presidency is that he is going to get us all killed. Frank Gaffney says B.O. won’t get ALL of us killed, just “as many as ninety percent” of us. Who’d have thought that the former Reagan Administration official would have become such a wild-eyed optimist?

[cross-posted at ]