Photo by Gage Skidmore

In the 11 years since the September 11 attacks, D.C. has been victimized more severely by Mother Nature than it has been by terrorists. All the best laid plans for how to evacuate the city have been tested (and failed) by inclement weather and acts of God—see Snowpocalypse, 2011 earthquake—rather than a terrorist attack.

But for Newt Gingrich, it always comes back to the threat of a terrorist attack on the nation’s capital. And according to the Huffington Post, he recently compared the power outages caused by the June 29 derecho to what could happen if terrorist—or the characters of The Matrix—used an EMP on the city:

“Any of you who were in Washington during the recent week-long opportunity to experiment with an electromagnetic pulse attack, just talk to people, we were out of electricity for seven days at our house,” said the moon colonization enthusiast during his speech at the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference, where he was speaking about threats to American security.

An electromagnetic pulse attack is caused—in theory—by a nuclear weapon going off in space and radiating an electromagnetic field down on the earth, knocking out electric grids. (You may remember a variation from Ocean’s 1311.) Gingrich is so concerned about the possibility that the speech wasn’t the first time he mentioned it—he also published an op-ed in the Post on July 12 about it.

Maybe this gives more impetus to Gingrich’s hopes for colonizing the moon, huh?

Correction: This post originally stated that the film Ocean’s 13 featured an EMP device. The electromagnetic pulse appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of Ocean’s 11. The doomsday machine featured in Ocean’s 13 simulated earthquakes.