Tim Murphy asks, “If President Barack Obama wanted to take down Santa Claus, how would he do it?”:
Targeting Santa while he’s on his rounds sounds good in theory. NORAD already purports to track Santa’s progress on its website, owing to a typo in a 1955 Sears advertisement that accidentally broadcasted a secret government phone line to the general public. And the NSA is well-equipped to spy on Santa’s kingdom. Arctic Fiber, a Canadian company, is laying a new fiber-optic cable underneath the North Pole that will link Tokyo and London, to get a leg up on high-frequency stock market trading, but it could also give the US government’s super-secret (until recently) data-collection programs the lowdown on what’s going on at the workshop.
But the United States has never successfully shot down a ballistic missile, which doesn’t inspire confidence in its chances at taking down Santa, whose packed schedule requires him to travel at pace somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed. Norwegian physicist Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaar argues that Claus is equipped with an ion shield, which prevents him from being torn apart by gravitational forces and protects him from being incinerated (by fireplaces, atmospheric reentry, or missiles). Also, he travels between dimensions.
