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CNN correspondent Kevin Sites has been sharing what amounts to a blogless wartime blog with BoingBoing readers over the past few weeks. An excerpt from the latest in his ongoing series of e- mailed, first-person accounts from Kuwait follows (the rest is here):
“For most of the journalists here in Kuwait, this is the fear and this is the joke; that for all our technology– our videophones and portable dishes, our Thurayas, and Iridiums and Neras, our digital cameras and laptop editing systems–we could end up covering this war with wind up film cameras.
It’s on the grapevine that the U.S. Air Force has developed an electro magnetic pulse weapon at Kirtland Air Force that could be used in war against Iraq. The concept is devastating simple; flying over the target area, the military emits a microwave swath, which basically fries the electronics of any appliance or device in its path.
Like a giant switch, when the EMP weapon is flicked on, the lights go out. People, however, are supposedly spared–unless they happened to be wearing a pacemaker or are hooked up to other life sustaining machinery. The EMP weapon does not apparently differentiate between cell phones and hospital respirators.
Tactically, it could help to end the war more swiftly, by denying Iraq any military communications. The order to fire a chemical weapon may be eliminated along with the chain of command.”
