Vulnerability: Expert testimony before Congress on Thursday warned that an electromagnetic pulse attack on our power grid and electronic infrastructure could leave most Americans dead and the U.S. in another century.
That dire warning came from Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
He testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event could wipe out 90% of America’s population.
Most people’s eyes might glaze over upon mention of the committee name, the title of the hearing — “Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): Threat to Critical Infrastructure” — and the general subject of EMP. But it is a real threat and not the stuff of science fiction.
Some attention has been paid to the potential cataclysmic effects of a natural phenomenon such as a massive solar storm, an event that has occurred in America’s horse-and-buggy era when it did not matter.
Today an electromagnetic pulse event would be devastating. It wouldn’t need a solar storm, just a solitary nuke detonated in the atmosphere above the American heartland. We would envy the horse-and-buggy era.
“Natural EMP from a geomagnetic superstorm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or 1921 Railroad Storm, and nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states, as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013, are both existential threats that could kill 9-of-10 Americans through starvation, disease and societal collapse,” the Washington Free Beacon quoted Pry as saying.
As we reported early last year, Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst, believes that North Korea’s recent seemingly low-yield nuclear tests and launch of a low-orbit satellite may in fact be preparations for a future electromagnetic pulse attack. Continue reading.
In 1859 a solar storm, also known as the Carrington event, was observed by Richard C. Carringtion. A coronal mass ejection hit the magnetosphere and was observed by amateur astronomer Carrington, and Richard Hodgson. The next morning there were auroral events all over the world, even in near tropical latitudes. Telegraph systems worlwide were impacted by this event.
Jumping to Nasa.gov I found this quote:
More than 35 years ago, I began drawing the attention of the space physics community to the 1859 flare and its impact on telecommunications,” says Louis J. Lanzerotti, retired Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and current editor of the journal Space Weather. He became aware of the effects of solar geomagnetic storms on terrestrial communications when a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, “I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes.”
It is an easy leap to see the devastation an intentional and successful attack could have on not only our way of life, but our lives themselves. A few knowledgeable individuals such as Mr. Pry are trying to get some attention, to present the terrible threat to Congress, but it is not an issue that has been given sufficient recognition and planning in view of the threat level.