If Nukes Fly, We're All Gonna Die

Or are we? Maybe it depends on the nukes...

If there is one plausible doom engrained in the American psyche over any other, it has to be the post-Hiroshima near-unanimous certainty that any nuclear war between Great Powers will destroy all life on earth, ours included.*

I was born a bit less than eleven months after the bright nuclear flower bloomed over what is today the Peace Memorial near the center of Hiroshima, Japan.

Then:

Today:

*This may have become a generational thing when I wasn’t paying attention, however, given that it happened more than 75 years ago. Gen Zoomer and certainly Gen Alpha likely have little or no visceral feelings at all about those long dead events. “Some people did some things” might be as far as they are able to invest in any fear factor based on ancient history.

This, by the way, is not necessarily a good thing.

There is more to American life than Gin Mill, Gen Zoomer, and the Alphabettors, and the sight of a nuclear explosion can still raise a frisson of dread in the 130 million Boomers and X-ers still hanging around and running the world. Which makes the following (possible) event all the more interesting.

This got a lot of play in that part of the Russosphere that focuses on Russian military endeavors, especially in Ukraine. Escobar reports from a Russophile point of view, (not odd, he lives in Russia) and is, of course, considered a filthy Putin puppet and propagandist by those on the other side of that particular equation, but if so, as propaganda goes, this is a colossal misfire, a wet squib for the ages in the world of state-sponsored political PR.

Consider the unlikelihood of the elements. First, we are informed that Israel sent an American F-35 stealth fighter armed with a nuclear bomb (Undies. Drenched.) across Jordan, intended for detonation over Iran.

I can pretty much guarantee you than upwards of 90% of those who read that scoop immediately thought he was talking about something like this:

Which wasn’t the case at all. Most people think that a Hiroshima-style nuclear detonation is the most damaging possible attack one nation can make on another. But it doesn’t even come close to the potential damage an enhanced High Altitude Nuclear EMP (EHEMP) attack could wreak on a modern industrial/technological/digital culture, an attack which most of the victims would not even be aware of before they began to feel the effects of it. And by that, I am not talking about the threat of nuclear radiation, fallout, or anything similar, because there would not be any of that, either.

Without going into great detail, HEMP (High altitude ElectroMagnetic Pulse) is, in terms of immediate physical results, one of the most benign forms a nuclear attack could take. For one thing, it occurs anywhere from altitudes of 40 to 400 km. up. We’ve never seen a nuclear explosion demonstrate blast effects 40 km. from ground zero, let alone four hundred. For reference, the “sweet spot” altitude for an attack on the entire US using just one bomb is 300 km. From the ground, the only thing an observer might see is a tiny, momentary flash of light, and that only if he happened to be looking in the right direction at the time.

I imagine that some of my readers, at least, are squinching up their foreheads and muttering, “so what is the big effing deal? No blast effects, nothing gets knocked down or burned up, no radiation burns, no fallout, what’s the problem here? It’s 300 miles out in space, fer Chrissakes.”

Yes to all of that, and yet it would come closer to one of those “and then everybody dies” scenarios than anything I can think of beyond somebody getting jumpy on a really bad chunk of plague juju. (That particular doom is for another discussion, though, so we’ll leave it for now).

Escobar’s story never surfaced in the mainstream, and had very little traction in the various substreams concerned with war, Russia, Israel, Iran, military technology, or nuclear doom in general. First off, his tale was pathetically lacking in anything even resembling evidence, let alone proof that it happened. It was so denuded of anything like support that it almost curls around and states, “this lack of evidence is so ludicrous it’s almost a form of evidence itself.”

And there is always the old CYA wheeze which wiser heads are fond of serving up, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Unfortunately, what little “evidence” was offered verged on the nonsensical. To understand just how nonsensical, you’d need more understanding about HEMP, as well as Russian and Israeli military capabilities, plus a few other bits of trivia.

In order:

The mission: cause a high altitude detonation over Iran that would provoke a surge in the high-capacity power lines, crippling Iran's electric grid, as well as a disabling all electronic devices.

An EMP attack.

First question: What is the F-35’s maximum altitude? The Internet informs me that it is 50,000 feet. Ten miles high, in other words. This is not high enough to allow the interaction of the gamma rays produced by the bomb with the upper atmosphere in the ionization process that creates the most potentially damaging of the three waves from a HEMP, the E1 wave, sometimes called the Prompt wave. This is the one that would be the cause of what many call “science fiction scenarios,” in which everything electronic, from tiny hearing aids to gigantic server farms, is destroyed.

Look at this quote again:

The mission: cause a high altitude detonation [1] over Iran that would provoke a surge in the high-capacity power lines [2], crippling Iran's electric grid, as well as a disabling all electronic devices [3].

Number one refers to a HEMP, so we know we are not talking about nuclear bombs in the sense most people understand them Number two refers to the Third, or E3 wave, which has two components: The blast, and the heave. This wave plays havoc with the earth’s magnetic field, and induces the surges referenced in the report, although it should be noted this phenomenon would happen in any long, electrically conductive medium, not just “high-capacity” power lines. Railroad tracks, for instance. 40% of all freight shipped in America, by volume, goes by rail. Imagine all of it sitting behind dead locomotives on tracks all over the US.

A decade or so ago I wrote a dystopian “disaster” novel called Lightning Fall. It was about an Iranian HEMP attack on the US using missiles launched from freighters off shore. It took more than three years to write, mostly because of the enormous amount of research I undertook in my desire to first, make sure the science was as accurate as I could make it, and second, that my projections for the damage caused by such an attack were at least feasible, if not guaranteed. I left about ninety percent of that research out of the book, and it still ran a thousand pages in manuscript.

One thing I discovered back then was that about 98% of Americans, from the highest echelons of our government to the lowest homeless lunatic knew not a damned thing about HEMP. And though I still follow the field, I don’t do so with my original intensity. Hence it was surprising to see HEMP pop up in this particular context, an Israeli attempt to attack Iran with a HEMP weapon, only to be shot down by, of all people, the evil Russians.

I’m a science fiction novelist, and even I wouln’t try to pass off that scenario. Nonetheless, I didn’t find it shocking. Here’s some bulletins from the Armageddon Office. Any nation with nuclear weapons can build a HEMP. You also need a way to get the thing up there above the atmosphere so that the prompt gamma can do its devil dance of atmospheric ionization, but the Houthis (for instance), probably have ballistic missiles that can get that high.

Nor do you need some gigantic thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. Something the size of the Hiroshima bomb, a plain atomic “fission” affair, might be an even better HEMP weapon, in terms of bang for your buck, than the sort of monsters both we and Russia have in our arsenals. Which means North Korea is a threat. Which means that Israel, with its own undeclared but broadly hinted at arsenal of 200 or so nukes, is a HEMP power. That, for me, was the big takeaway from this report.

Now, as to the particulars. While the F-35 can’t itself fly high enough to just kick a HEMP weapon out the door and call it a day, I have no doubts the the IDF has missiles the plane could launch that would go high enough. After all, the US used an F-15 firing an ASM-135 ASAT to shoot down a satellite in an orbit 345 miles up back in 1985. I see no reason the Israelis couldn’t meet or exceed that standard.

Then there is the question of range. The distance between Israel and central Iran, as the jet flies, is about 1,100 miles. The F-35’s range is around 1400 miles, which means, absent in-air refueling, a return to base would be chancy. But this shouldn’t negate the possibility of such an attack. It wouldn’t be the first time IDF pilots have launched on one-way missions.

About those pesky Russians, who keep popping up in the strangest places. If you’re flying out of Israel heading for Iraq, Jordan would be the logical place for a mission like this. Certainly not Syria. But if the F-35 was “shot down” exiting Jordan, it had to have happened over Iraq somewhere. As far as I know, Russia does not maintain a military air presence in Iraq, although, given that Iraq has become essentially a proxy/puppet state for Iran, I’m sure neither state would raise any objections to having a couple of Russkie fast movers ambush an IDF plane carrying a Nuke-o-Gram for their good buddies in Iran.

Oh, and hey - who ended up with the nuke and the wreckage of the F-35?

Sigh.

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at, is that none of this is flat out impossible. But it is flat out improbable, unlikely in the extreme, unsupported by anything factual, and reeks of Escobar being played by one of his “trusted sources.”

And if the tale had included a plain old garden variety nuke, of which Israel has plenty, I would have read this report, yawned, rolled over, and gone back to sleep.

But it didn’t. It had a HEMP playing the role of cockroach on the wedding cake. Which leads one to muse, why a HEMP? And why in this particular scenario? In short, assuming that Escobar didn’t himself make up the entire thing out of whole cloth, somebody fed it to him. He’s already said it wasn’t Russia or China, so who? He won’t say.

I don’t think he made it up. It’s too weird, has too many holes, makes too little sense. Yet somebody wanted it out there, and they shopped it to a journalist who would put it out there. Pepe is an investigative reporter and, like Seymour Hersh, he is both dependent on, and vulnerable to, his sources. Hersh, for instance, has scored some huge hits. He exposed the My Lai massacre and the subsequent coverup. He covered Watergate for the New York Times. He broke the Abu Ghraib story, Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, and the CIA’s domestic spying programs, which continue to this day, and are 100% counter to their charter.

But he’s had his share of enormous goofs as well. It’s just part of the game when one plays in those sorts of sandboxes, as both Hersh and Escobar do. Larry Johnson, former top CIA analyst, in a round table with Escobar after he dropped his story, said he didn’t buy it, and wondered if somebody hadn’t fed it to him in order to set him up and smear his reputation. That seems as reasonable a possibility as any.

What doesn’t seem reasonable is HEMP raising its ugly head. The capability is in Russia’s arsenal. In China’s. In North Korea’s. In Israel’s. In ours, despite our protestations of lily-white innocence. (And we would never supply cluster munitions to our allies…until we did).

Nations don’t have friends, only interests. What I’m trying to do is figure out in whose interest it was to publicly hang the HEMP albatross around Israel’s neck.

If you’ve got an answer, let me know, would you?