Better read this all the way through. If this doesn't scare the
hell out of you, and help you understand how Obama has a
plan for "Change" or rather to leave us helpless, and hand us
over to the likes of Iran, then I can only determine that you
are a fool in the hands of the enemy.
U.S. Intel: Iran Plans Nuclear Strike on U.S.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 9:00 AM
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/iran_nuclear_plan/2008/07/29/117217.html
Iran has carried out missile tests for what could be a
plan for a nuclear strike on the United States, the head
of a national security panel has warned. In testimony
before the House Armed Services Committee and in
remarks to a private conference on missile defense over
the weekend hosted by the Claremont Institute, Dr.
William Graham warned that the U.S. intelligence
community “doesn’t have a story” to explain the recent
Iranian tests. One group of tests that troubled Graham,
the former White House science adviser under President
Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud
missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea. “They’ve got
[test] ranges in Iran which are more than long enough to
handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr.
Graham said. “Why would they be launching from the
surface of the Caspian Sea? They obviously have not
explained that to us.” Another troubling group of tests
involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated
the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where
the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,” Graham
said. “Why would they do that?” Graham chairs the
Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel
established by Congress in 2001. The commission examined
the Iranian tests “and without too much effort connected the
dots,” even though the U.S. intelligence community previously
had failed to do so, Graham said. “The only plausible
explanation we can find is that the Iranians are figuring out
how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to altitude and
then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you would
do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other
missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”
The commission warned in a report issued in April that the
United States was at risk of a sneak nuclear attack by a rogue
nation or a terrorist group designed to take out our nation’s
critical infrastructure. "If even a crude nuclear weapon were
detonated anywhere between 40 kilometers to 400 kilometers
above the earth, in a split-second it would generate an electro-
magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple military and civilian
communications, power, transportation, water, food, and other
infrastructure," the report warned. While not causing
immediate civilian casualties, the near-term impact on U.S.
society would dwarf the damage of a direct nuclear strike on a
U.S. city. “The first indication [of such an attack] would be that
the power would go out, and some, but not all, the
telecommunications would go out. We would not physically feel
anything in our bodies,” Graham said. As electric power, water
and gas delivery systems failed, there would be “truly massive
traffic jams,” Graham added, since modern automobiles and
signaling systems all depend on sophisticated electronics that
would be disabled by the EMP wave. “So you would be
walking. You wouldn’t be driving at that point,” Graham said.
“And it wouldn’t do any good to call the maintenance or repair
people because they wouldn’t be able to get there, even if you
could get through to them.” The food distribution system also
would grind to a halt as cold-storage warehouses stockpiling
perishables went offline. Even warehouses equipped with
backup diesel generators would fail, because “we wouldn’t be
able to pump the fuel into the trucks and get the trucks to the
warehouses,” Graham said. The United States “would quickly
revert to an early 19th century type of country.” except that
we would have 10 times as many people with ten times fewer
resources, he said. “Most of the things we depend upon would
be gone, and we would literally be depending on our own assets
and those we could reach by walking to them,” Graham said.
America would begin to resemble the 2002 TV series,
“Jeremiah,” which depicts a world bereft of law, infrastructure,
and memory. In the TV series, an unspecified virus wipes out
the entire adult population of the planet. In an EMP attack, the
casualties would be caused by our almost total dependence on
technology for everything from food and water, to hospital care.
Within a week or two of the attack, people would start dying,
Graham says. “People in hospitals would be dying faster than
that, because they depend on power to stay alive. But then it
would go to water, food, civil authority, emergency services.
And we would end up with a country with many, many people
not surviving the event.” Asked just how many Americans
would die if Iran were to launch the EMP attack it appears to
be preparing, Graham gave a chilling reply. “You have to go
back into the 1800s to look at the size of population” that could
survive in a nation deprived of mechanized agriculture,
transportation, power, water, and communication. “I’d have
to say that 70 to 90 percent of the population would not be
sustainable after this kind of attack,” he said. America
would be reduced to a core of around 30 million people —
about the number that existed in the decades after America’s
independence from Great Britain. The modern electronic
economy would shut down, and America would most likely
revert to “an earlier economy based on barter,” the EMP
commission’s report on Critical National Infrastructure
concluded earlier this year. In his recent congressional
testimony, Graham revealed that Iranian military journals,
translated by the CIA at his commission’s request, “explicitly
discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the
United States.” Furthermore, if Iran launched its attack from
a cargo ship plying the commercial sea lanes off the East coast
— a scenario that appears to have been tested during the
Caspian Sea tests — U.S. investigators might never determine
who was behind the attack. Because of the limits of nuclear
forensic technology, it could take months. And to disguise
their traces, the Iranians could simply decide to sink the ship
that had been used to launch it, Graham said. Several
participants in last weekend’s conference in Dearborn, Mich.,
hosted by the conservative Claremont Institute argued that
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was thinking about
an EMP attack when he opined that “a world without America
is conceivable.” In May 2007, then Undersecretary of State
John Rood told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community
estimates that Iran could develop an ICBM capable of hitting
the continental United States by 2015. But Iran could put a
Scud missile on board a cargo ship and launch from the
commercial sea lanes off America’s coasts well before then.
The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a
nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when
that will occur. The latest U.S. intelligence estimate states that
Iran could acquire the fissile material for a nuclear weapon
as early as 2009, or as late as 2015, or possibly later. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first detailed the “Scud-in-a-bucket”
threat during a briefing in Huntsville, Ala., on Aug. 18, 2004.
While not explicitly naming Iran, Rumsfeld revealed that “one
of the nations in the Middle East had launched a ballistic
missile from a cargo vessel. They had taken a short-range,
probably Scud missile, put it on a transporter-erector launcher,
lowered it in, taken the vessel out into the water, peeled back the
top, erected it, fired it, lowered it, and covered it up. And the ship
that they used was using a radar and electronic equipment that
was no different than 50, 60, 100 other ships operating in the
immediate area.” Iran’s first test of a ship-launched Scud missile
occurred in spring 1998, and was mentioned several months later
in veiled terms by the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile
Threat to the United States, a blue-ribbon panel also known as
the Rumsfeld Commission. I was the first reporter to mention the
Iran sea-launched missile test in an article appearing in the
Washington Times in May 1999. Intelligence reports on the
launch were “well known to the White House but have not been
disseminated to the appropriate congressional committees,” I
wrote. Such a missile “could be used in a devastating stealth
attack against the United States or Israel for which the United
States has no known or planned defense.” Few experts believe
that Iran can be deterred from launching such an attack by the
threat of massive retaliation against Iran. They point to a
December 2001 statement by former Iranian President Ali
Akbar Hashemi- Rafsanjani, who mulled the possibility of
Israeli retaliation after an Iranian nuclear strike. “The use of
an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely,
while [the same] against the Islamic only would cause damages.
Such a scenario is not inconceivable,” Rafsanjani said at the time.
Rep. Trent Franks, R, Ariz., plans to introduce legislation next
week that would require the Pentagon to lay the groundwork
for an eventual military strike against Iran, to prevent Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons and EMP capability. “An EMP
attack on America would send us back to the horse and buggy
era — without the horse and buggy,” he told the Claremont
Institute conference on Saturday. “If you’re a terrorist, this is
your ultimate goal, your ultimate asymmetric weapon.” Noting
Iran’s recent sea-launched and mid-flight warhead detonation
tests, Rep. Franks concluded, “They could do it — either
directly or anonymously by putting some freighter out there
on the ocean.” The only possible deterrent against Iran
is the prospect of failure, Dr. Graham and other experts
agreed. And the only way the United States could credibly
threaten an Iranian missile strike would be to deploy effective
national missile defenses. “It’s well known that people don’t
go on a diet until they’ve had a heart attack,” said Claremont
Institute president Brian T. Kennedy. “And we as a nation
are having a heart attack” when it comes to the threat of an
EMP attack from Iran. “As of today, we have no defense
against such an attack. We need space -based missile
defenses to protect against an EMP attack,” he told Newsmax.
Rep. Franks said he remains surprised at how partisan
the subject of space-based missile defenses remain. “Nuclear
missiles don’t discriminate on party lines when they land,
” he said. Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, a long-standing
champion of missile defense, told the Claremont conference
on Friday that Sen. Obama has opposed missile defense tooth
and nail and as president would cut funding for these programs
dramatically. “Senator Obama has been quoted as saying, ‘I
don’t agree with a missile defense system,’ and that we can
cut $10 billion of the research out — never mind, as I say,
that the entire budget is $9.6 billion, or $9.3 billion,” Kyl
said. Like Franks, Kyl believes that the only way to
eventually deter Iran from launching an EMP attack on the
United States is to deploy robust missile defense systems,
including space-based interceptors. The United States “needs
a missile defense that is so strong, in all the different phases
we need to defend against . . . that countries will decide it’s not
worth coming up against us,” Kyl said. “That’s one of the things
that defeated the Soviet Union. That’s one of the ways we can
deal with these rogue states . . . and also the way that we can
keep countries that are not enemies today, but are potential
enemies, from developing capabilities to challenge us. “
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