Newt Gingrich Warns EMP Attack Could End It All

As Washington decides what to do about potential nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, Newt Gingrich returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to point out what he called an equally grave danger: an electromagnetic pulse.

Addressing members of the Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus, the former Republican House speaker from Georgia said the fallout from a high-altitude nuclear blast known as an EMP — which could damage or destroy American power grids and electronics — could deal society a deathblow.

“This could be the kind of catastrophe that ends civilization — and that’s not an exaggeration,” Gingrich said at an event led by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who founded the caucus.

Gingrich has long warned of the threat that an EMP attack could pose to the United States, and he says Americans aren’t taking the threat seriously.

“The reason I began focusing on this a decade ago is there are very few events you can’t recover from. You can recover from 9/11, you can recover from Pearl Harbor. This is really different,” Gingrich said. “This creates such a collapse of our fundamental productive capacity that you could literally see a civilization crash and tear itself apart fighting … internally.”

A science fiction novel called “One Second After” told a cautionary tale of the doomsday scenario that would unfold if such an attack hit the U.S., frying electrical circuits and knocking out power. In the introduction to the book, Gingrich suggested that an EMP attack would “throw all of our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages.”

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