Letters

I have been traveling, and this weekend I caught up on some past issues of The Southampton Press. I took special notice of Karl Grossman’s column concerning Trump’s proposal of adding another military arm, a Space Force [“War In The Heavens,” Suffolk Closeup, Opinion, February 27]. A subsequent letter to the editor by Russell Stein [“End The Madness,” Letters, March 5] declared this proposal “the dumbest and most dangerous move yet by Trump.”

Here are some facts.

The USA has been concerned about an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) since they first created the atomic bomb. An EMP event delivered at a high altitude potentially will destroy the entire electrical grid in the United States, shut down and render all electronic devices and computers useless, and make all modern cars inoperable.

It has long been estimated that only three to five well-placed nuclear bombs exploded high in the atmosphere above our country will send the USA back into the Stone Age.

Government officials have been trying to address this scenario since the early 1970s, with multiple studies, but nothing gets done, because the ramifications are too horrible to think of.

As recently as March 17, the Chinese, notably nervous about their image after the Wuhan virus, employed some saber-rattling and announced on state media that this would be a good time to gather a panel of experts and discuss the possibility of deploying an EMP weapon against American ships entering the South China Sea, a region that Beijing has illegally claimed.

Watching the hoarding that has been going on the last few weeks gives you only a tiny glimpse of what life would be like after a total shutdown of our present civilization after an EMP event. Your local PC Richards will not be selling out of 700 freezers in a week, because there won’t be any electricity to run them. If you’re diabetic, there will be no way to store your insulin, or a means to get resupplied, because all labs will be shut down. People from New York City will run out of food, and pigeons, and start looking at one another as cattle.

Make no mistake, we won the Cold War because we outspent the Russians under Ronald Reagan. As gruesome as MAD may seem, it kept us out of full-scale war and has continued to do so.

A Space Force is the next logical step, and to consider for a moment that Russia, China and North Korea, among other nations, are not looking skyward is the equivalent of believing in unicorns.

I, for one, would consider a Space Force a deterrent and safety mechanism, not a sign of madness. To ignore the imminent and next logical strategic step would be the “dumbest” thing our president could do.

John Porta

Westhampton