Iran wants Israelis to worry that Hezbollah has a rare and powerful EMP weapon

Iran wants Israelis to worry that Hezbollah has a rare and powerful EMP weapon

Michael Peck

• Iranian operatives recently claimed they given Hezbollah militants an EMP weapon.

• A powerful EMP, as Iran claims, could damage Israel's communications and power grid.

• "It is reasonable to assume that Iran has looked at these types of weapons," a retired general said.

Amid the tit-for-tat shelling and threat-trading across the Israel-Lebanon border, one recently leveled menace stands out — that Hezbollah has a weapon capable of knocking out Israel's electrical grid.

Reports have circulated among Arab media that Iran has given the Lebanese militant group it arms and trains a category of weapons that could damage much more than military bases, a type of weapon known as an electromagnetic pulse weapon or EMP. It could be real, or a bluff to get nuclear-armed Israel to think twice.

Sources in the Quds Force — a part of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — allegedly told Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida that "the Lebanese party now possesses bombs and missiles carrying explosive 'electromagnetic' warheads."

The source said that "the bombs delivered to the party [Hezbollah] could be launched from fixed launchers, and some of them could be carried by drones to reach any point deep inside Israel." These weapons "could destroy all communications systems, including the electrical infrastructure, and thus halt all electronic systems that Israel relies on to coordinate its radars, aircraft, and forces in general."

Nor would Israel's allies be immune should Israel attack Lebanon. The Americans, British and "and everyone who might try to cover up Israel's inability" would be targeted. The story was quickly picked up by Israeli media.

Assessing the credibility of the Iranian EMP threat is difficult. If oil is Iran's top export, then its number two export is bluster to the world about supposedly cutting-edge military capabilities, including a "stealth fighter" unveiled in both 2013 and 2017 that was likely neither stealthy nor flyable. One reason for the posturing is to conceal the fact that Iran's conventional military equipment, such as jets, tanks and anti-aircraft missiles, are decrepit Cold War-era systems that would be hopelessly overmatched by US, Israeli and European weapons.

Or, what kind of EMP weapons they would be. When electromagnetic pulse weapons are mentioned in the news, or in apocalyptic movies and novels, they tend to be of the nuclear kind, generated either as a byproduct of nuclear weapons aimed at targets such as cities, or deliberately detonating nuclear weapons in space to generate EMP effects. Either way, the result would be the total disruption of the modern lifestyle as the spreading pulse fries circuits in the electrical grid, damages communications and other satellites, and disrupts global cell phone and GPS service.

However, there are also non-nuclear EMP weapons (NNEMP), devices that can be carried in a suitcase or a missile's warhead, and that use explosives or high-power microwave emitters to generate a destructive pulse is similar that of a nuclear weapon, "except less energetic and of much shorter radius," explained the US government's EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security in a 2021 report.

"NNEMP weapons can be built relatively inexpensively using commercially available parts and design information available on the internet. EMP simulators that can be carried and operated by one man, and used as an NNEMP weapon, are available commercially." Nuclear EMP pulses can travel hundreds of miles depending on their altitude of detonation, while NNEMP devices only have ranges of about 5 miles.

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