Nuke strike could plunge US into blackout like Spain at ANY minute – weapon Trump needs now to protect 340million people

AMERICA must install a missile defence shield before the country's electrical grid is wiped out in a nuke strike, an expert has warned.
Donald Trump has signed an executive order to construct a futuristic "Golden Dome" to banish threats from countries including Iran.
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An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic energy produced by a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere
Credit: Department of Homeland Security
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Israel's Iron Dome air defence system intercepts missiles launched from the Gaza Strip
Credit: EPA
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Donald Trump wants to install a Golden Dome to protect the US
Credit: AFP
But with both Tehran and North Korea rapidly accelerating nuclear development, military historian William R. Forstchen has warned the US needs a defence system sooner rather than later.
Trump has long been fascinated by Israel's technological marvel that is the Iron Dome and wants to build something much more complex and expensive.
While the Iron Dome effectively intercepts short-range missiles and rockets, the Golden Dome would need to shoot down much larger and powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Forstchen told The Sun: "Golden dome is designed as a ballistic defense system for intercontinental.
"It is a strategic defence that would prevent any enemy attack from coming across the Pacific Ocean to hit our facilities with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) hit, which would wipe out our electrical infrastructure.
"The big fear I've always held is that North Korea has the capacity to launch an ICBM with a nuclear warhead on top.
"When it's detonated above the continental United States, it sets up something called the Compton effect, which blows out the electrical grid of the United States.
"This is a system designed to defend against that."
But right now, Forstchen warned America will be "screwed" if North Korea or Iran unleashes just three small nuclear on the US - making it more vital than ever that Trump sees through his plan.
It could see the US plunged into darkness like Spain and Portugal last Monday.
Trump says Iran deal is 'well on its way' - as regime builds ring of steel around deeply buried nuclear fortresses
Forstchen said: "I grew up in the 60s and 70s. It was called mutually assured Destruction.
"The big fear back then was the Soviets would launch hundreds of missiles at us.
"We would launch at them. Everybody blows up. Nobody wins the game. Well, it's a different paradigm now.
"Third world players, in particular North Korea and Iran, if it ever achieves nuclear capability, they just have to launch three small warheads about four times the size of a Hiroshima bomb.
"Get it up there 200 miles out. When the weapon blows, it sets up an electrostatic discharge called the Compton effect.
"That shorts our grid off. The grid is not going. It doesn't self-repair. It does not come back online. And basically, to put it in common terminology, we're screwed."
European power outage
by Patrick Harrington, Foreign News Reporter
MILLIONS were left without power when blackouts struck Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France on Monday.
Spain says it is focusing on "overcoming the worst" and identifying the cause of what was the continent's largest power outage.
At the worst point on early Monday afternoon, airports and hospitals shut down and trains screeched to a halt.
Footage showed people queuing outside grocery stores and ATMs to stockpile essentials amid fears the mayhem could last for days.
Roads in Spain, Portugal and parts of France were left snarled up with traffic as lights and signals went blank - with emergency officers drafted in to tackle the bedlam.
Some hospitals cancelled all surgeries for Monday amid fears for patient safety in the region's most severe blackout for years.
Spain's train service came to a complete stop, leaving huge crowds stranded at stations, and Madrid's underground network was evacuated.
Air traffic was slashed to "half capacity" as flights were cancelled from a number of airports - with Lisbon turning away all arrivals for hours.
And a major tennis tournament, the Madrid Open, had to be suspended, with Brit Jacob Fearnley's match interrupted by a huge "bang".
Investigators are still determining the cause of the mass blackout.
Spain's top court has launched a bombshell probe into whether sabotage was behind the sudden power loss after it is revealed that "unusual activity" hit the UK grid hours before Europe.
Forstchen - a leading authority on EMP technology who has given guidance on its potential impact to federal and state governments - warned the Dome would be America's only hope against an EMP attack.
An EMP is a burst of electromagnetic energy produced by a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, that could cause widespread damage to power lines, telecommunications, and electronic equipment.
"EMP distorts the grid off and you lose your electricity," he said.
"The devastation ultimately would be a hundred times worse because the grid is gone. You can't pump water, get food, all the other things we depend upon."
It comes as Trump's Golden Dome hopes gather pace - with his billionaire pal Elon Musk understood to have won the contract to build the incredible missile defence shield.
Musk's rocket and satellite company SpaceX is partnering with software maker Palantir and drone builder Anduril to build key parts.
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Plans include building and launching more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense incoming missiles and track their movement, sources told Reuters.
A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down.
SpaceX is understood to be pitching for the part of the Golden Dome initiative called the "custody layer".
It would work as a constellation of satellites that would detect missiles, track their trajectory, and determine if they are heading toward the US.
However, the rocket company is not expected to be involved in the weaponisation of satellites.
Overall cost for the Dome could hit hundreds of billions of dollars, experts say.
Trump previously warned a missile attack is "the most catastrophic threat facing the United States" - and is in a race to strike a deal with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.
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Scientists work at a uranium processing site in Isfahan, south of Tehran in Iran
Credit: Reuters
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Satellite images reportedly show a secret missile site in Shahrud, Iran
Credit: Google Earth
Iran's accelerates nuclear development
Exclusive by Katie Davis, Chief Foreign Reporter (Digital)
IRAN is believed to have accelerated its nuclear weapons development and is building terrifying nuclear warheads for solid-fuel missiles with a range exceeding 1,800 miles (3,000km).
A powerful blast from Iran could impact on several continents due to the chilling capability of the warheads.
Italy, Ukraine, Sudan, India and even large swaths of Russia would all potentially be in the firing line.
They are being developed at two sites in Shahrud and Semnan, which were previously pinned as rocket or space satellite launch sites.
A third site, Sorkheh Hesar, is also said to be carrying out projects, including research on nuclear power and underground explosions.
Nukes are being quickly created under the watchful eye of the regime's nuclear weaponization entity, the Organization for Advanced Defense Research (SPND).
Bosses are developing nuclear warheads for the solid-fuel Ghaem-100 missiles, which are equipped with mobile launch platforms at the Shahrud site.
Iran's rocket designers have used North Korea's missiles as a guide to develop the Ghaem-100 missile.
When the missile was in a very early testing stage in 2011, dozens of missile experts were killed at the Modarres site in Tehran.
Personnel vehicles are banned from entering the Shahrud site and are forced to park at a checkpoint before people are transported in.
Meanwhile, they are using the liquid fuel missile Simorgh to develop nuclear warheads in Semnan.
Iran has staged three successful Ghaem-100 missile launches over the past two years, enhancing the regime's capability to deploy nuclear weapons.
The US president vowed "there will be bombing" if Tehran's regime fails to negotiate an agreement.
National security adviser Mike Waltz has said that Trump wants the "full dismantlement" of Iran's nuclear programme.
He added: "That's enrichment, that is weaponisation, and that is its strategic missile programme."
But Iran hopes a deal to limit, but not dismantle, its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
Fears of a devastating strike comes as both Iran and North Korea ramp up their nuke schemes.
The Sun previously revealed how Iran's tyrannical regime has been secretly building nuclear warheads for missiles that can fire more than 3,000km.
Satellite pictures uncovered three sites that Iran's leaders claimed were being used as part of a space initiative.
Tehran is building terrifying nuclear warheads for solid-fuel missiles with a range exceeding 1,800 miles (3,000km).
North Korea meanwhile is understood to have around 50 nuclear weapons and sufficient production of fissile material for six to seven nuclear weapons per year.
Tyrant Kim Jong-un has continued arms build-up in response to what Pyongyang claims is threats from the US and its allies in the region.
Trump is said to be planning to kick off fresh talks with Kim over his alarming nuclear advances.
Earlier this month, Kim unveiled North Korea's largest naval destroyer that could house a vertical launchpad capable of firing nuclear missiles.
The extent of North Korea's nuclear and missile programme has long been shrouded in mystery - with stations scattered across the hermit kingdom.
But The Sun last month revealed how scheming Kim had constructed a new missile base disguised as a private golf course.
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The Guardian

2 hours ago

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America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away

Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.