How Iran Could Wreak Havoc in the U.S. with a Single Nuclear Device

For nearly two decades, Iranian military planners have experimented with the possibility of launching an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack that could instantaneously disable electronic systems across the U.S. and lead to nationwide disaster. The nuclear deal, write James Woolsey and Peter Pry, will pave the way to such an attack:

Iran can threaten the existence of the United States by making an EMP attack using a single nuclear weapon. It may obtain one, relatively easily, by cheating in the use of the nuclear infrastructure permitted them under the agreement. U.S. intelligence cannot meet the impossibly high standard of assuring that Iran cannot acquire a single nuclear weapon and, given the regime’s existing nuclear infrastructure, cannot with absolute certainty guarantee that Iran does not already have one.

A single nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude over the United States would generate an EMP that could black out the electric grid and other life-sustaining, critical infrastructures such as communications, transportation, banking and finance, food, and water. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated a nationwide blackout lasting one year could kill anywhere from two of every three Americans (by a low estimate) up to nine of ten Americans by starvation and social disruption.

[A]n Iranian military textbook . . . describes nuclear EMP effects in detail. In more than twenty passages, it advocates an EMP attack to defeat an adversary decisively. The [book also] advocates a revolutionary new way of warfare that combines coordinated attacks by nuclear and non-nuclear EMP weapons [with] physical and cyberattacks against electric grids to black out, and cause the collapse of, entire nations. . . .

The Congressional EMP Commission found that Iran has practiced launching missiles and fusing warheads for high-altitude EMP attack, including off a freighter. Iran has apparently practiced surprise EMP attacks, orbiting satellites on south-polar trajectories to evade U.S. radars and missile defenses. . . . A single nuclear weapon would complete the list of requirements.

Read more at Washington Times

More about: Iran nuclear program, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy, U.S. Security

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society