Envisioning A World Without America

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ibd/20090918/bs_ibd_ibd/20090918issues01

Security: An Iranian mullah once said "a world without America and Zionism" was a real possibility. Our sellout of Eastern Europe and missile defense brings that dream closer to reality. It would take only one warhead.
"Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?" Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a "World Without Zionism" conference in Tehran in 2005. "But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved."
He added that Iran had a strategic "war preparation plan" for what it called "the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization."
A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high above America.
This is where the Airborne Laser aircraft program, canceled by this administration, would come in handy.
Or it could be an upgraded Shahab launch, masked as a satellite attempt and flying over where the European defense sites would have been. It would wreak near total devastation on America's technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure.
The threat is called electromagnetic pulse. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls it the one way we could lose the war on terror. As he notes, a single nuclear warhead, detonated at the right altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating to the surface at the speed of light.
Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world's only superpower and largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology instantaneously regresses almost a century in time.
Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and as rail and air traffic controls collapse. Farmers would be unable to harvest crops, and distributors couldn't get goods to market. Energy production would cease. Computers and PCs would become large paperweights. Telephones, even cell phones, wouldn't work.
Retaliation would be futile and meaningless -- if it were even possible -- since communications with our deployed forces overseas, including ballistic missile submarines, might be cut off. A presidential authorization might be impossible to send, so fried might be our communications infrastructure. , [[[ cont. ]]]