It’s Tuesday. You wake up late. Your alarm didn’t go off. You look closer and see that it’s not even on. You try the light on your nightstand, there’s no power. “Funny, I didn’t hear rain and thunder last night,” you mumble.
You reach for your cell phone only to see it’s not connected to the internet. You want a news update, so you run for the TV or radio only to find darkness and silence. All the clocks in your home, the microwave, internet router, ceiling fans stand in a motionless, quiet blind hush. Surely there was a storm and the power’s out, so you rush to the garage to check your car radio for an update. Nothing. You’re worried about getting to work but – work isn’t open today.
You see your neighbors in the streets wandering, inquiring, worriedly questioning what the hell is going on? Everyone is separated from friends and families, and society. If you’re able to start your car, there’s no radio because there are no stations broadcasting. As you drive the streets you see there are no stores open, no streetlights or traffic signals. No gas being pumped, no neon gods dominating the landscape directing you to SHOP HERE or BURGERS 99₵.
You see the mobs gathering. Crowds of people scared, scavenging about for their next meal, worried about their very existence for imagined reasons unknown. As if some unannounced early Christmas sale, there’s shoving, pushing, yelling, trampling. They’re running from broken storefronts, arms loaded with meats and cans. Fights are rampant as people, unaware of what’s really happened, don’t care – they just want to survive the day, the hour. Those with guns drawn are seen protectively guarding their stash and maneuvering for more.
Yes, it’s finally happened., That event no one wanted to talk about – no one wanted to prepare for has shown up on America’s doorstep; stolen in through an open window of opportunity. Crept through an unlocked door of ignorant exposure.
It’s a subject that many in government are either unaware or illiterate of, afraid of, or simply don’t want to address for some budgetary or political agenda. And yet, this threat can and potentially will destroy America and in the course, help to destroy the world America supports and leads. Part 2 is found HERE.
It’s happened before.
When looking into the potential of America’s trip to the stone age, there’s one expert who stands out with facts, knowledge, and foresight in understanding and preparation of this technological plight. He’s Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, and there aren’t many others that know more about the threat of an EMP attack.
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RB ~ Dr. Pry, can you catch people up on your background?
Dr. Pry ~ “As you know I’ve spent my professional life working in the fields of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear strategy. First at the CIA, on the House Armed Services Committee, and then in various congressional commissions. The last one was the congressional EMP commission, as chief of staff for 17 years. And I’m the executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security.”
RB ~ Simply, for people that don’t have a full understanding, can you put in a few words exactly what is EMP?
Dr. Pry ~ “Probably the greatest threat facing our state, our electronic civilization, an EMP can come from the sun in the form of a magnetic storm and these happen all the time. The sun throws out a chunk of itself, a solar coronal mass ejection, that will strike the Earth’s magnetosphere which is the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth.
It sets the magnetosphere in motion and a moving magnetic field generates an EMP; basically a super-energetic radio wave – it’s got so much energy in it that it can destroy electronics across an enormous area. And magnetic storms as we know, are a real thing.
It’s not theoretical they happen all the time, they happen every year. Fortunately, they’re minor or they affect countries in high northern latitudes like Sweden, Norway, and Russia. We even reroute airline traffic around to avoid the EMP fields. But what we’re worried about is a magnetic super storm like the Carrington event in 1859. That happens we estimate about once a century and this would be a worldwide phenomenon where an electromagnetic pulse would affect the entire world as it did in 1859 destroying the Telegraph systems.”
RB ~ And can you expand on that event?
Dr. Pry ~ “In 1859 we weren’t an electronic civilization and people didn’t need telegraphs to survive but we can tell a lot from the power of that pulse which caused telegraph keys to melt. I mean a telegraph key from 1859 is a billion times less vulnerable than our modern microelectronics and the telegraph systems that were on every continent, except Antarctica, failed all over the world; telegraph offices closed, there were forest fires where telegraph wires burned; And miles deep into the Atlantic Ocean the transatlantic cables that had just been laid by the Great Eastern in 1859 connecting North America fried – it took six years to go back and re-lay that cable.
Civilization went on, we were not electronic civilization, but if something like that happened today, it would put billions of lives at risk all over the world because we can’t survive without electricity anymore. Our food and water depend directly or indirectly on electricity.”
RB ~ And that was a naturally occurring event. What about our nuclear threats?
Dr. Pry ~ “With nuclear, you can do something like that with a single nuclear weapon detonated over North America at an altitude of 300 kilometers – which, by the way, is the same altitude that North Korea has two satellites orbiting over us today. It could put an EMP field down over all of North America and it would be worse than a true magnetic storm. Not in terms of coverage, you can’t cover the whole world with a nuclear EMP, but the characteristics of a nuclear EMP are worse than that of a natural EMP from a superstorm. The field’s strengths are much more powerful and you can destroy smaller electronics in addition to the big electronics.
So individual cars, the personal computer on your desk, airplanes flying in the sky, the damage is much deeper in addition to taking down our electric grids. So our adversaries China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and their military doctrines and planning see EMP, combined with cyber warfare, as the greatest revolution in military affairs in history – it could create a situation where the first time in history that a failed state like Iran or North Korea or even non-state actors armed with a single nuclear weapon, using cyber-attacks and small numbers of physical sabotage, could bring the most advanced societies in the world to their knees; all by taking out the electric grid, causing cascading blackouts that would collapse all the life-sustaining critical infrastructures, and not just temporarily – but perhaps permanently or at least for even for a year.
We calculated that if we had a nationwide blackout that lasted one year we would lose possibly up to 90 percent of our population from starvation, diseases, societal collapse, That’s no exaggeration. That makes perfect sense. If you look at before we built the first electric grid, in 1882, the population of the United States was only 60 million people.
And we don’t have the critical infrastructures of 1882 anymore to fall back on. We don’t have coal-fired locomotives and a horse-drawn agricultural economy. 75 percent of our people are not farmers – pioneers stock – who know how to survive. If we lose our electronic critical infrastructures there’s nothing to fall back on. Nothing to stop a dramatic collapse in the number of people that could survive.
We have almost 330 million people in this country and only in enough food to feed them for 30 days. The food would begin to spoil in 72 hours after that. And one part I didn’t mention is also not nuclear weapons.”
RB ~ Meaning?
Dr. Pry ~ “You don’t really need a nuclear weapon to collapse the grid, although everybody plans on that.
Devices that are not considered weapons, but they’re made by many American manufacturers. And you can actually buy these things and you don’t even need a license.”
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Our power grid, our lifeline, our future. Natural events, a nuclear attack, potential devastation to the country but that’s not the whole story. There are more threats lurking in our past – and future – and we’ll explore those in our next article.
And why isn’t more being done? Politics.
RB ~
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