It turns out that the man who will save the world is a dairy farmer from upstate New York. From The New York Times:
Concerns about EMP [electromagnetic pulse] spiked in 2008 after Iran was reported to have amassed a sufficient amount of enriched uranium to build an atomic bomb.
Those fears were supercharged by Henry Schwartz, a dairy entrepreneur in upstate New York whose business gave him the means, and whose pro-Israel politics gave him the motive, to start a movement.
In 2009, he founded EMPact America, an advocacy group that sought to ring EMP alarms. A single Iranian bomb, his team warned, posed an existential threat to both Israel and the United States.
His organization, on which he spent millions of dollars, would go on to play an outsize role in recruiting well-known conservatives to the cause. It would also help popularize the two main tenets of American EMP activists, which top scientists find baseless.
First, the group argued, a crude EMP weapon—that is, a rudimentary atomic bomb made by a rogue state or a terrorist group—would suffice to spark a devastating pulse. Second, the pulse would kill most Americans as the collapse of the nation’s power grid and supply chains led to a hellscape of riots and plagues, famines and vigilantes.
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Julie Senko, a spokeswoman for Mr. Schwartz, 92, said he would be unavailable for comment.
In 2012, as President Obama began negotiations with Tehran to limit Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Schwartz argued that a deal with Iran would further raise the risk of an EMP attack on America.
The United States “must act militarily to stop Iran,” Mr. Schwartz declared at a 2013 EMPact meeting in Washington, warning that an Iranian EMP strike would “end our civilization.”
The EMP threat has been a bogeyman for the do-your-own-research techno-right for so long that it dates back to when Newt Gingrich was considered a political visionary. As NYT points out, it remains a primary vehicle for oogity-boogity by an interesting roster of the Republican undead—not only Gingrich but also national-security fanatics like Frank Gaffney. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, they have found a whole new audience in the officials of the anti-science administration.
For more than a decade, a movement—largely among conservatives—raised awareness of such a threat, culminating in Mr. Trump’s 2019 executive order. Many of the most ardent voices in that movement are now members of the current administration, including Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary; JD Vance, the vice president; John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
And as the piece points out, this connection contributed to the vaporous casus belli for our current adventure in the Persian Gulf, even though the overwhelming scientific consensus was that, whatever Iran was building, it wasn’t going to be powerful enough to fry the entire electric grid and end civilization as we know it. They’d have been better off listening to the cows.