Gingrich Still Clinging To Fiction Novels As The Basis For His Foreign Policy Ideas

For the past few months, Newt Gingrich has been trying to sound the alarm that the United States is on the cusp of a monumental security threat far greater than the dangers posed by Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 40s — an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Gripped by this fear, Gingrich once argued that the U.S. should take out North Korean missiles, while on their launch pads, with lasers because he believes the reclusive communist state has the ability to carry out such an attack on the U.S.

This morning, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich was at it again. He lamented how the world’s democracies “hid from reality” in the 1920s and 30s and failed to confront the emerging threat in Europe and East Asia. Citing what he had read in “novels,” he then linked that to his perceived EMP threat and deplored the “failure to translate the ability of the imagination into public policy.” “We are living at the edge of a catastrophe,” he said:

GINGRICH: [W]hat we are faced with is not simply a problem, it is potentially catastrophic. … [The] electro-magnetic pulse, from my co-author and good friend Bill Forstchen, has written a remarkable novel called One Second After, in which he takes a town in North Carolina and shows you what would happen with a successful electro-magnetic pulse attack. Electro-magnetic pulse is essentially a peculiarly-sized nuclear device that becomes a giant lightning strike. [...]

[E]xperts in nuclear weaponry, and they came back and said unanimously, “This is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen and North Korea, China and Russia all understand it and are all working on it.” Which is why I adopted the position towards North Korea that I would literally not allow them to fire any intercontinental range missile that we had not inspected. I would just take it out on the site.

And the reason is simple; one weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States. And we are not today hardened against this. It is an enormous catastrophic threat.

Watch it:

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss observed of Gingrich’s “suspense thriller-based” foreign policy:

It’s worth noting as well that the argumentum ad Chamberlinum that Gingrich predictably deploys throughout the speech always involves a sin of omission: Free nations failed to act in the face of a rising threat, resulting in disastrous consequences. I would suggest that, in the wake of the Iraq war, there now exists an effective counter to this heavily overworked rhetorical device. Rather than failing to act, the Bush administration acted — unwisely and incompetently, in response to a largely imaginary threat — resulting in disastrous consequences. Call it argumentum ad neoconservatum.

“As the conservative movement continues to melt down,” Duss adds, “conservatives will return to same issue that conservatives have exploited since before fire: Abject fear of our barbaric, unreasoning enemies, and the imputation of faithlessness on the part of those who don’t perceive the threat in the same way.”

Transcript:

GINGRICH: So, let me start with why I believe national security is about to become a dramatically more important debate and the only question is whether we have the debate before there is a disaster or afterwards. I would argue that we are living at the edge of a catastrophe, and that we need to understand that is exactly where we are. That what we are faced with is not simply a problem, it is potentially catastrophic.

The first potential catastrophe is nuclear, and we reported this in the Hart-Rudman Commission in March of 2001, where we said the greatest threat to the United States is a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, and at the time we called for a serious Homeland Security Department, which we still don’t have, because a serious Homeland Security Department would be sized to be able to deal three nuclear events simultaneously the same week.

That would be a reasonable threat, we are not talking about the size of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but we are talking about circumstances where you could literally be faced with a catastrophic loss of life, and none of this is secret. There are novels about it, there are reports about it, there are various studies about it, there was a RAND study three years ago about the impact of a nuclear event in Long Beach, California and what it would do to the entire Los Angeles basin and what the scale of dislocation would be. So these things are all knowable, but we don’t have the political will to act on it.

The second is electro-magnetic pulse, from my co-author and good friend Bill Forstchen, has written remarkable novel, which I commend to all of you, called One Second After, in which he takes a town in North Carolina and shows you what would happen with a successful electro-magnetic pulse attack.

Electro-magnetic pulse is essentially a peculiarly sized nuclear device that becomes a giant lightning strike, it doesn’t kill by radiation or by the power of the shockwave, but it knocks out all the appliances including the generating system that produces electricity including cars that have traditional electrical devices. All the telephones and if you look at the size of the electrical generating system, it’s not replaceable. The length of time it takes to replace that, particular in a society that has lost electricity, is staggering. And Forstchen accurately describes what would the catastrophic consequences be at a human level if you tried to live in a non-electricity world given the way we’ve built our civilization.

Now he didn’t do this out of whole cloth. He started with Congressman Roscoe Bartlett [R-MD] who commissioned 7 nuclear physicists to study what the effect would be, these are all people who had come out of the Cold War-era, they had all worked for the Defense Department, they were all experts in nuclear weaponry, and they came back and said unanimously, “This is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen and North Korea, China and Russia all understand it and are all working on it.”

Which is why I adopted the position towards North Korea that I would literally not allow them to fire any intercontinental range missile that we had not inspected. I would just take it out on the site. And the reason is simple; one weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States. And we are not today hardened against this. It is an enormous catastrophic threat.