War

So, the United States is at war… again. We are attempting regime change… again. Lives will be uselessly lost once more. It seems that when it comes to history and geopolitics, our so-called leaders never learn their lesson. Korean War. Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam War. Gulf War. Iraq War. War in Afghanistan. The list just keeps piling up like empty whiskey bottles after a long night. We haven’t successfully changed a regime since World War II, and even then it was a Herculean effort assisted by the Soviet Union, a nation we would almost immediately spend the next half century locked in a Cold War with once the dust settled.

I hate war. I really do. It gives me nightmares and anxiety, which is kind of weird when you consider that I’m also obsessed with dystopian and apocalyptic imagery. I love the aesthetics of it in music and film, the ruined skylines, the cold synths, the sense that civilization is hanging on by a thread. But there’s a huge difference between imagination and real life. In a movie or a song you can turn it off when it gets too heavy. In real life, people die, cities burn, and whole generations get fucked over for decades. Maybe that’s exactly why I’m drawn to those genres in the first place, because I hope those things never actually happen.

The fear-mongering over Iran is nothing new. I remember when I was embedded with the Republicans years ago and they simply could not shut the hell up about Iran. It was like the boogeyman they dragged out every time they needed to scare people into supporting another war. I remember attending an event in Pasadena where Barry Goldwater Jr. was the keynote speaker. He told the audience that Iran had the capability to launch an electromagnetic pulse, often called an EMP bomb, against the United States. According to him, they could fire one off, knock out the entire electrical grid, and basically send us back to the nineteenth century overnight. This was around 2008, and he said our only choice was to attack Iran before they could do it to us. Do unto others before they do unto you, I guess.

For anyone who doesn’t know, an electromagnetic pulse weapon, usually referred to as an EMP bomb, is a device designed to generate a massive burst of electromagnetic energy. That energy spreads through the atmosphere and fries electronic systems over a wide area. Think power grids, computers, cars, phones, satellites, hospital equipment, and basically anything with delicate circuitry. The most powerful EMPs come from nuclear detonations at very high altitude. When a nuclear warhead explodes dozens or even hundreds of miles above the Earth, it interacts with the planet’s magnetic field and creates a wave of energy that can knock out electronics across an entire continent.

The United States actually demonstrated the effect back in 1962 during a nuclear test called Starfish Prime nuclear test. The explosion occurred hundreds of miles above the Pacific Ocean but still knocked out streetlights and communications equipment in Hawaii nearly a thousand miles away. That test scared the hell out of military planners because it showed just how fragile modern electrical systems really are.

These days, several countries either possess or are suspected of possessing the capability to deploy EMP weapons. The obvious ones are nuclear powers such as the United States, Russia, and China. Any nation that can loft a nuclear warhead into the upper atmosphere technically has the ability to create a high-altitude EMP. Other nuclear-armed states like North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel are also frequently mentioned in strategic discussions. Some analysts speculate that even countries without large nuclear arsenals could theoretically attempt an EMP attack if they acquired a single warhead and a delivery system capable of reaching high altitude.

There are also non-nuclear EMP devices, sometimes called high-power microwave weapons, that can damage electronics in a much smaller radius. Those are believed to exist in several advanced militaries as tactical tools. But the nightmare scenario people talk about is the high-altitude nuclear EMP, because the scale of destruction could be enormous.

If a large EMP were detonated over the continental United States, the immediate blast would not kill people the way a ground-level nuclear explosion would. Instead, it would quietly annihilate infrastructure. Power transformers could burn out. Electrical grids might collapse. Water treatment plants would stop working. Fuel pipelines and refineries could shut down. Hospitals would lose critical equipment. Transportation systems would fail. Within days or weeks you would start seeing cascading humanitarian disasters, including food shortages, medical crises, and mass panic. It is the kind of slow-motion catastrophe that dystopian novels love to imagine, but in real life it would be absolute chaos.

Now, whether Iran actually has that capability is a completely different question. Intelligence agencies have debated it for years, and a lot of what gets said in political speeches is speculation wrapped in worst-case scenarios. Iran has missile technology and an active nuclear program that has worried Western governments for decades. But turning that into a reliable EMP strike against the United States would require several extremely complicated steps. They would need to develop or acquire a nuclear warhead, miniaturize it, and successfully deliver it to high altitude. That is not exactly a weekend science project.

And this is where things start to feel like déjà vu. We have heard these kinds of warnings before. Claims about weapons of mass destruction were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we all know how that turned out. Thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, trillions of dollars burned, and the entire region destabilized for decades. That war was sold to the public with a mix of fear, speculation, and outright bullshit.

So no, I do not pretend to know what the answer to the problem of Iran is. But I do know that every attempt at regime change in the modern era has landed us, and often the rest of the world, in a giant geopolitical quagmire. I do not support the current leadership of Iran. Their government has committed serious abuses against its own people, and that is putting it mildly. But I also do not trust people like Donald Trump and the various warhawks orbiting around him to guide us safely away from the edge of nuclear catastrophe.

I think the current leadership of this country has far too much of a love affair with Israel, and a lot of that relationship is tangled up in theology that I personally do not buy into. It has become such a toxic political environment that even the smallest criticism of Israel or of our foreign policy toward that country is immediately labeled antisemitic. That shuts down honest discussion before it can even start. I think it is absolutely disgusting how people use religion as a shield to deflect from their own misdeeds. When that happens, it starts to look an awful lot like the behavior of the very regimes we claim to oppose.

I do not have neat answers for any of this. My only consistent position is condemnation of violence no matter who it is coming from. I do not know what to do about the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons, assuming they are actually doing that. What I do know is that we have a president who promised no new wars. He is a proven liar, and people voted for him anyway based on that promise.

What I do know is that countries like ours, and Israel for that matter, should be peace-mongers instead of war profiteers. What I do know is that civilian life everywhere is in jeopardy whenever the drums of war start beating. And what I worry about, deep down, is some kind of second September 11 attacks that harms even more innocent people.

It is a rocky road ahead. I have a sinking feeling this is not going to be some quick, tidy, month-long military adventure. Those almost never exist outside of Pentagon press conferences. I hope peace somehow manages to conquer violence. And I hope that one day we are able to go to sleep at night without wondering whether we will be jolted awake by air-raid sirens or, worse yet, a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon.