All one has to do is take out a mere nine substations and it’s lights out for America. As said in another article from 2012 in synch with today’s, up to 90% would perish as a result.
The culture of complacently sitting around and “hoping” things will magically fix themselves has taken the place of meaningful action — and, evidently, it takes possibility of hundreds of millions of Americans to perish in order to learn a lesson.
This makes America all the more ripe for picking by the Chinese, Russians and even the Iranians but isn’t prepared. It also seemingly doesn’t care.
An electromagnetic pulse attack can take down the nation’s electric power grid, plunge the country into darkness and claim 9 out of 10 American lives within a year.
That’s not a prediction coming from doomsdayers or a sci-fi film. It’s from Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, who served on several congressional commissions and on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, and was a CIA intelligence officer from 1985-1995.
An EMP, in short, is a burst of energy that can fry electronics, including computers. If the burst is powerful enough, like a small nuclear weapon exploded above the U.S., it could potentially shut down the nation’s power grid for months, even years.
Within a year after such an attack, 9 out of 10 Americans would die from disease, starvation and civil unrest, Pry said. There would be no food, no clean water, no transportation to bring food in, no cell phones, no computers, no medicine.
The United States is not prepared for an EMP threat, either from the sun or from its enemies like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, Pry said Wednesday during a news conference at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Pry was joined by Ambassador Henry Cooper, former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator of nuclear and space arms control treaties, who agreed.
“Our governmental systems are broken in dealing with these issues, I believe so dysfunctional that people locally have got to learn to deal with the issues,” Cooper said.
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Since 2008, some have tried to get the U.S. House and Senate to pass legislation to seriously address the threat by protecting the nation’s electric grid, to no avail, Pry said. The House in 2009 unanimously passed a bill, but one senator put the bill on hold, he said.
Full article: Electromagnetic attack could claim 9 of 10 American lives (The Advertiser)
Global Geopolitics 