November 8, 2001

Miscellaneous Subjects #114: More Sobering Thoughts


Hello everyone

The following is only a tiny sampling of the hundreds of emails I've received in the last week and of webpages I saw. I know we are all receiving way too much material to read and that our attention span is probably getting smaller with every passing day of unrelenting war news, escalating difficulties on many fronts (growing hunger in Afghanistan and for the 2 billion people on Earth who must survive on less than 2 dollars a day, while the bad economic news in the richer countries means more uncertainty for the overtly affluent ones by world standards), and the possible frustration at the apparent apathy of the people around us, blissfully unaware of the world perspective one can get from reading the material I'm sending you. I sometime wish I could go back to the pre-Internet time (only 5 years ago!) when everything was coming at us at a more manageable pace and in more smaller portions to deal with, but this is not an option.

So let's make the best out of this tool and hope it serves some useful purpose for the Good of All

Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000


"The first responsibility of the press is to use its freedom to protect the rights and liberties of all individuals. The press must speak out, and, if the occasion arises, raise bloody hell."

- Herblock, 1957

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle."

- Alexander Solzhenitzyn

"The key point is kindness. With kindness one will have inner peace. Through inner peace, world peace can one day be a reality."

- H.H. the Dalai Lama.


CONTENTS

1. The Road Ahead: It's Only Going to Get Worse
2. Quotes from "Eating The Sword"
3. A Time to Step Back and Consider
4. This Isn't the Speech I Expected to Give Today
5. E-BOMB


We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education Announces
"Operation Enduring Patriotism" - Please see http://www.givemeliberty.org for details on this important citizens' initiative commencing November 12, 2001.

ATOMIC ANXIETY - A Warning From an Official About an Increased Possibility of Nuclear Terror
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/international/02NUCL.html




1.

From: http://commondreams.org/views01/1027-04.htm

The Road Ahead: It's Only Going to Get Worse
by Doug Ireland
Oct 26, 2001

The political mood in the country has never been more belligerent. Public opinion polls taken even before the full force of anthrax hysteria engulfed the country showed that four-fifths support not only the use of ground troops in Afghanistan, but also military action against other countries in the Middle East and three-quarters of Americansfavor military action against countries outside the Middle East.

These numbers free the Bush administration from any political constraints on widening the war beyond Afghanistan. The "zero casualties" mentality that governed our military brass for the past two decades went up in smoke when the hijacked plane exploded in the Pentagon. It has now evaporated in the country as well. In the wake of the bioterrorism scare, fear and frustration will drive even higher the public frenzy to lash out with bombs and bullets at someone anyone.

The escalation strategy is now clear, particularly after Dubya's October 11 prime-time press conference: We will expand military strikes against other countries ad seriatim. There is no question that Iraq is next on the list. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, let slip on Meet the Press that we are selecting targets in Iraq. And when Dubya went out of his way to publicly praise Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's No. 2 and its most fervent hawk on Iraq, his goal became obvious. The administration is already leaking selected "intelligence" designed to soften up the American people for a new war in Iraq we are being told of meetings between the hijacker's leader, Mohammed Atta, and Iraqi secret service officers in Czechoslovakia, and of the British-educated Iraqi scientist Rihab Tabar (nicknamed "Dr. Germ")as the mastermind behind the anthrax attacks (even though the former head of Russia's chemical and biological warfare program Ken Abilek, now a U.S.-based consultant told Ted Koppel on Nightline that he is convinced al-Qaeda purchased the anthrax and other toxins and technology from Russian scientists left impoverished when their huge chemical and biological weapons establishment of 30,000 technicians was dismantled). But the sanguineous despot Saddam Hussein is easy to hate, and it will take very little to convince Americans that he must be the next target in the long war.

We are plunging down that bloody road with no debate in Congress. Indeed, major figures in both parties likeJoe Lieberman and John McCain are already voicing their support for hitting Iraq. And this even though the Gulf War demonstrated that Saddam cannot be toppled by air power alone it will require investing the entire country with a huge army of occupation to end the Ba'ath regime's sorry history. The use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan is already being called for by congressional Republicans not just hard-right ignoramuses like Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, but also moderate Long Island Rep. Peter King and influential Indiana Rep. Steve Buyer. When an invasion of Iraq confronts our finger-in-the-wind elected representatives with the prospect of thousands of their constituents coming home in body bags, the cry of "nuke Saddam" will be widespread However, Bush will not move with full force against Iraq until the Taliban falls. And those in the punditocracy like the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt who predicted on CNN that the Taliban will collapse "within a week" are dreaming. The air campaign to pave the way for the minority Northern Alliance's entrance into Kabul is only stiffening the resistance among Southern Afghanistan's Pashtun majority, for the fratricidal history of Afghan civil war makes the prospect of ethnic cleansing in the event of an Alliance victory very real.

International politics is rather like chess; one has to be able to think eight to ten moves ahead. That's something American presidents of the past 50 years have not been very good at they cannot see farther than the next election. Bush is no chess player, and the madness of militarizing the campaign against terrorism becomes clearer every day, for war has its own momentum once set in motion, the machine operates on its own inexorable logic, divorced from rational political goals.

U.S. military action in Afghanistan is already outpacing Bush's murky political objectives. American efforts to put together a coalition government under the aegis of the octogenarian King Zahir have stalled amid the squabbling of the heroin-dealing warlords who are our purchased allies. Pakistan, of course, detests the Northern Alliance, and neither has it forgotten that the king tried to annex part of Pakistan in the '60s.

President Pervez Musharraf will face enormous difficulty in keeping the lid on growing opposition in Pakistan if a hastily cobbled-together regime considered hostile to Pakistani interests takes symbolic power in Kabul. Musharraf's limited purge of his military and intelligence chiefs is an admission of weakness, not a demonstration of strength: More than a quarter of Pakistan's military are Pashtun, and, in addition to the ethnic and religious sympathies that bind much of the officer corps and most of the Pakistani intelligence service to the Taliban, the corruption of the Pakistani military by heroin-trafficking links them economically to the Taliban-supporting local Afghan chieftains as well.

In this context, the American bombing has created what the BBC has rightly characterized as a "humanitarian, political and security crisis" on the Afghan-Pakistani border, where tens of thousands of hunger-mad Afghan refugees are massing. The BBC and others have filmed the Taliban rounding up the men, separating them from the women and children, and stocking them in barbed-wire camps for conscription or ethnic cleansing. But whether Pakistan continues to keep them out at gunpoint, or lets them enter (something that this country, which is $140 billion in debt and already hosting some 4 million refugees, cannot afford to do), these refugees constitute a political powder keg whose existence further destabilizes Musharraf and increases his vulnerability to a coup. (If he goes, who controls Pakistan's nukes?)

Add to this volatile mix the mounting civilian casualties from American bombing (including the destruction of a hospital, confirmed by U.N. observers) and one wonders how long Musharraf can hold on, particularly with India using the war as cover to step up its military activity in Kashmir, thus inflaming both the Pakistani military and the masses in the street. Moreover, Seymour Hersh's fine reporting in The New Yorker has underscored just how fragile is the sclerotic Saudi princes' hold on their country. No wonder both Pakistan and the Saudis are pleading for Bush to stop the bombing. If the terrorists think the air campaign in Afghanistan has made the endlessly corrupt Saud family ripe for overthrow, they could strike the highly vulnerable Saudi oil fields, ending the cash flow that allows the 6,000 princes to stay in power (an eventuality which would drive oil to $100 a barrel and send the world economy plummeting rapidly into a Depression).

Yet these gaping flaws in Bush's war policy are not being challenged by congressional Democrats, whose leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt still harbor illusions that they are viable presidential candidates, and so are loath to challenge on any front the conduct of a popular war. Now, in the wake of the anthrax scare that sent the cowardly House skedaddling, the Bushies are floating a proposal to let the president govern by decree for at least 30 days without any congressional approval or restraint if he decides a "national emergency" warrants it. The power of the purse is Congress' only real rein on a president, and abandoning it even temporarily would blow a major hole in our constitutional system of checks and balances that could not easily be repaired.

If you think the country wouldn't sit still for such a measure, think again. Just look at the exaggerated anthrax scare - after all, as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel pointed out on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page, "280 people would have to die of anthrax to equal the risk of driving 50 miles in a car (about one in a million)." Yet Americans are gorging themselves on overpriced Cipro (10 bottles cost $2,100 in New York but only $160 in Mexico), thus leaving the pill-poppers prey to lethal, antibiotic- resistant strains of influenza and other diseases; buying useless gas masks (ineffective without full body suits); and flooding emergency rooms with demands for anthrax tests at the first runny nose.

State and local health systems, the first line of defense against bioterrorism, are already teetering on the edge of collapse, their overworked personnel exhausted to the point of limited competence. If the public has become so deranged at what is, at the moment, a very limited danger, imagine what happens when our citizenry finds out that our country is completely unprepared for the kind of massive deaths the spread of plague or Ebola-type viruses, all airborne, could engender.

The likelihood of Bush being granted sweeping powers will measurably increase when Republicans almost certainly retake both houses of Congress next year during a deepening war with more U.S. casualties. Meanwhile, the rush to shred our civil liberties is unimpeded. The House rejected the compromise anti-terrorism bill that Rep. John Conyers and others managed to engineer in the Judiciary Committee, and substituted for it the much more draconian Senate version, which Tom Daschle helped whip through the Senate with only one dissenting vote Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. (In the House, only 75 Democrats stood up to oppose the unadulterated Ashcroft package.) At this point, it is hard to see a way out of the crisis the long war is creating for our democracy.

One is reminded of the old Russian proverb: An optimist is only a pessimist who has not yet heard the bad news.




2.

From: http://www.americanpolitics.com/20011029Pitt.html

"Eating The Sword"
by William Rivers Pitt
Oct. 29, 2001

(Quotes)

"Bush and his allies in the House have passed a $100 billion "stimulus package" that was wrapped securely in the flag and soaked with patriotic rhetoric. The package is needed, we are told, to bolster a weak economy further damaged by the September 11th attack. The fine print of this bill reveals it to be nothing more than the second half of a financial windfall promised to Bush's corporate campaign backers.

Only 30% of the money earmarked for this bill will go to individuals. The rest of the money is being delivered to General Motors, IBM, and scores of other corporations who were faring well in the new economic climate. The effect of this stimulus plan will be felt most acutely by individual states, who will lose billions of dollars in tax revenue because of it. How this will generate an economic revival is a mystery, and a betrayal of all the states-rights arguments we have heard from the GOP for generations.

In fact, this package is nothing more than compensation to corporations and their lobbyists who supported Bush's enormous and irresponsible $1.35 trillion tax cut bill last winter. That bill did not do for these corporations what they wanted, and they are being rewarded for their patience with this one. This has nothing to do with patriotism, national defense, or the revival of the economy. This is old-school patronage passed under the veil of national mourning, and it is a travesty."

More details in "An Economic Stimulus Bill With Corporations in Mind" at
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/business/27HAND.html

CLIP

"In one wretched way, the terrorists have already won. The anti-terrorism bill that was recently passed under the horribly ironic euphemism of PATRIOT gives unprecedented access to personal phone calls and electronic messages to both the FBI and CIA. Warrants no longer shall require that a person is notified if his home and belongings are searched by Federal investigators. This brazen violation of privacy rights is something called a "sneak and peek" provision, codified in section 213 of the bill, and is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The anti-terrorism bill deserves a close read by every American, for within it lies the death and destruction of so much we hold dear. In many ways, the bill marks the end of freedom and democracy in this country. We are no longer secure in thought, word and deed. Our homes are open to invasion and search without notification. Our email and internet habits are fodder for clandestine tapping."

MANY MORE PROVOCATIVE ARTICLES AT http://www.americanpolitics.com/




3.

From: "Matthew Webb" <visionquest@eoni.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001
Subject: A Time to Step Back and Consider

Dear fellow travelers

We journey together in this physical life to further universal purposes. But to fulfill those purposes we need wisdom. Wisdom is not what you know, or even who you know. It may be defined as "the degree of application of truth in ones' life...the greater the application, the greater the wisdom". Those who willingly sacrifice themselves to the modern condition however, have great difficulty in determining what is true and what is not.

The modern human being often has trouble Seeing Truth, because the official norms of society are inherently contradictory. For instance, it does not take a deep thinker to see that the mass bombings of backward nations in the name of suppressing terror is complete madness. Assassinations and secret payoffs, ("foreign aid") of government leaders all over the world in the name of democracy, is a contradiction that is undeniable. "Protecting our freedoms" through sweeping reductions in civil liberties is no less than a flimsy lie at best. Yet regardless of all this, we see the majority still clamoring for "victories" in the "war on terror", as we terrorize the world, (as well as our own citizens) with the largest and most bloodthirsty war machine ever known in the history of man. We must clearly understand why this is so.

Life has its own agenda, one which goes well beyond the edicts of governments or special interest ideologies. Clearly, the sophistication of form and consciousness which is the human being, is no mere cosmic accident, nor is life in general. So why do most people deny our evolutionary purpose, by glorifying war on the one hand and condemning "terrorism" on the other? How is it that they will not acknowledge the true intentions of power and profit hungry national leaders? Let's look closely at this together.

First of all a blind belief in national honor, when our nation clearly has none, cannot be the result of simple ignorance. Even if this were the year 1000 AD and there were no alternative sources of social information, simple logic would still strongly suggest that killing thousands of people based on hearsay evidence is no less than mass murder. It is not that people are uninformed so much as they are unwilling to acknowledge what they already know.

Why are many people unwilling to acknowledge the truth? Because they have invested their personal self image into that of the status quo. They directly identify with the images supplied to them about patriotism and consumerism, from the time they were small children. Interestingly, every natural, clear headed child knows that the adult world has gone far astray from truth. They need not reason this out...it is a felt certainty, a directly perceived sense of "wrongness". We have all proceeded from childhood and made our choices in life, in each day that passes. Some of us decided to maintain our natural intuitiveness and clear Seeingness. Others decided, (and continue to decide) that they were going to follow the herd so as to avoid both social and psychic peer pressure. Having done this, those who decided to go against their inner feelings, (conscience if you will) have also become those who noisily support the actions of corruption, in an attempt to justify that nagging feeling of "having gone astray" many years previously. In essence this is a defensive measure of the personal ego, trying to make excuses for the collective ego, (nationalism) with which it identifies.

Because of ego we hear a lot of noise about "freedom and democracy" and "defeating great evil", while at the same time all debate on these subjects is either suppressed or avoided. I conclude this from many of my own corrspondences...when it really comes down to it, those who wave their flags and drop their bombs can't really explain their reasoning. They merely reassert their "patriotism" with a righteous air. But never is there any real examination of the whole mess. I have personally asked many people why they support the bombing of Afganistan for instance, and proposed to debate them on the subject. Not one person has even come back and even tried to explain their position on this. It is clear that there is no good reason for the war in Afganistan, just as there was no good reason for Viet Nam or any other "patriotic atrocities" in the world. There can be no real debate on this subject since the conclusions about it are strikingly obvious.

It cannot be said that people genuinely believe everything or nearly everything they are told by the nightly news. The fact is, their "belief" is a convenience just like fast food and shopping malls. It is simply easy to parrot what everyone seems to be saying, than to have the courage to acknowledge what is clearly so. As a people it is not that we were born unintelligent, it is just that our beliefs, which require a certain deep seated faith in total contradiction, have made us so.

It is clear that if we are to evolve as a species and survive our own self-induced unintelligence, we must first clear away those obstacles to personal and collective growth that hinder true progress. In essence, we must start with honesty. Through honesty we can then acknowledge what has gone very wrong in the world, and not continue making the same mistakes it does. This is why a discussion of the inadequacies of government ideologies and religious misconceptions, is at its base a discussion of spiritual progress. Our spiritual enlightenment cannot flourish as a species or as individuals, until we come to grips with the reality of misdirected power.

CLIP



"... somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor."

- Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."

- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda."

- General Douglas MacArthur

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to keep what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished."

- Michael Rivero

"The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!"

- Michael Rivero

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but WHAT WE DECIDE they ought to have."

- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.

"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".

- Former NBC news president Rubin Frank

Matthew Wayne Webb
http://origin.org/ucs/ucs011.cfm?V098=visionQ
United Communities of Spirit
http://origin.org/ucs.cfm




4.

AN EXCELLENT SPEECH - ONLY QUOTED PARTLY BELOW

From: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1030-07.htm

Keynote Address By Bill Moyers
Environmental Grantmakers Association, Brainerd, MN
October 16, 2001

This Isn't the Speech I Expected to Give Today...

by Bill Moyers

This isn't the speech I expected to give today. I intended something else. For the last several years I've been taking every possible opportunity to talk about the soul of democracy. 'Something is deeply wrong with politics today,' I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn't referring to the partisan mudslinging, or the negative TV ads, the excessive polling or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper, something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy-the essence of the word itself-is government of, by, and for the people. And the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government.

CLIP

Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for conservation. Go for clean, home-grown energy. And go for public health. If we reduce emissions from fossil fuel, we will cut the rate of asthma among children. Healthier children and a healthier economy-how about that as a response to terrorism?

As for national security, well, it's time to expose the energy plan before Congress for the dinosaur it is. Everyone knows America needs to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more of the same: more subsidies for the rich, more pollution, more waste, more inefficiency. Let's get the message out.

Start with John Adams' wakeup call. The head of NRDC says the terrorist attacks spell out in frightful terms that America's unchecked consumption of oil has become our Achilles heel. It constrains our military options in the face of terror. It leaves our economy dangerously vulnerable to price shocks. It invites environmental degradation, ecological disasters, and potentially catastrophic climate change. Go to Tompaine.com and you will find the two simple facts we need to get to the American people: first, the money we pay at the gasoline pump helps prop up oil-rich sponsors of terrorism like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Quaddifi. Second, a big reason we spend so much money policing the Middle East-$30 billion every year, by one reckoning-has to do with our dependence on the oil there. So John Adams got it right-the single most important thing environmentalists can do to ensure America's national security is to fight to reduce our nation's dependence on oil, whether imported or domestic.

But don't stop there.

Before the 11th of September the nuclear power industry was salivating at the prospect of the government giving it limited liability for the risks of the meltdown or other nuclear accident. We were told by Vice President Cheney that nuclear power was a "safe technology" that could help alleviate energy shortages and not contribute to greenhouse gases.

But when Dick Cheney invited the energy companies and their lobbyists to write his energy plan, he didn't reckon on terrorism or the advice of Harvey Wassermann. Harvey Wassermann has spent years studying these issues and writing about America's experience with atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily have obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson River. Regulations put out by the nuclear regulatory commission regarding plant safety don't address that sort of event, and neither plant was designed to withstand such crashes. Until now Harvey Wassermann's scenario was unthinkable. Had one or both of those jets hit one or both of the operating reactors at Indian Point, the ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. At the very least the massive impact and hellish jet fuel fire would destroy the human ability to control the plants' functions. Vital cooling systems, back-up power generators and communications networks would crumble. The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based weapons, truck bombs or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at the operating work force. Dozens of US reactors have repeatedly failed even modest security tests over the years. And even heightened wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. The radioactive clouds would then enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England, and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to Europe and around the globe again and again. The immediate damage would render thousands of the world's most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. All real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive throughout the entire region. Who knows how many people would die? As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life have been hopelessly irradiated, natural ecosystems on which human and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed; spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our nation would never recover.

This is what we missed by a mere forty miles near New York City on September 11th. And remember-there are 103 of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now operating in the United States. 103.

I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what we're up against. I know you get it-the work that we must do. It's why you mustn't lose heart. Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: "In the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future." Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us.

CLIP

To read his entire speech, go at http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1030-07.htm




5.

From: tapa-chemtrails@yahoogroups.com

Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2000
From: Jim Torson <j.torson@computer.org>
Subject: E-bomb

E-BOMB
By Jim Wilson
Popular Mechanics

From: http://popularmechanics.com/science/military/2001/9/e-bomb/print.phtml

In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400.

---

The next Pearl Harbor will not announce itself with a searing flash of nuclear light or with the plaintive wails of those dying of Ebola or its genetically engineered twin. You will hear a sharp crack in the distance. By the time you mistakenly identify this sound as an innocent clap of thunder, the civilized world will have become unhinged. Fluorescent lights and television sets will glow eerily bright, despite being turned off. The aroma of ozone mixed with smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Your Palm Pilot and MP3 player will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Your computer, and every bit of data on it, will be toast. And then you will notice that the world sounds different too. The background music of civilization, the whirl of internal-combustion engines, will have stopped. Save a few diesels, engines will never start again. You, however, will remain unharmed, as you find yourself thrust backward 200 years, to a time when electricity meant a lightning bolt fracturing the night sky. This is not a hypothetical, son-of-Y2K scenario. It is a realistic assessment of the damage the Pentagon believes could be inflicted by a new generation of weapons -- E-bombs.

The first major test of an American electromagnetic bomb is scheduled for next year. Ultimately, the Army hopes to use E-bomb technology to explode artillery shells in midflight. The Navy wants to use the E-bomb's high-power microwave pulses to neutralize antiship missiles. And, the Air Force plans to equip its bombers, strike fighters, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles with E-bomb capabilities. When fielded, these will be among the most technologically sophisticated weapons the U.S. military establishment has ever built.

There is, however, another part to the E-bomb story, one that military planners are reluctant to discuss. While American versions of these weapons are based on advanced technologies, terrorists could use a less expensive, low-tech approach to create the same destructive power. "Any nation with even a 1940s technology base could make them," says Carlo Kopp, an Australian-based expert on high-tech warfare. "The threat of E-bomb proliferation is very real." POPULAR MECHANICS estimates a basic weapon could be built for $400. CLIP







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