Chaos

EMP Threats

Chaos is at our Door: Why a dangerous world is closing in. (Part 1 of 5)

Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President, recently wrote, “You won’t hear about this from the mainstream media, and few politicians dare to discuss these things openly”. His comments were not meant to be intentionally alarming or apocalyptic, but the reality is that we may be living in some of the most dangerous times in human history.

Does that sound like some crazy exaggeration to you? Well, consider this: Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, former CIA Director James Woolsey warned that “the most significant threat to the U.S. in the world” is the threat of catastrophe caused by an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. And that danger appears to loom larger every year.

Even if no blast, shock or fallout reaches the ground, the cascading avalanche of infrastructure failures caused by an EMP can create a national catastrophe; because an EMP is designed to destroy the electronic equipment upon which so much of modern life is built.

In the short term, an EMP will drown out radio communications, like radio, TV and cell phones, to air-defense radar systems, to police, fire and EMS frequencies. Over the long term, an EMP blacks out the power grid, plunging much of the continental U.S. into darkness and chaos lasting for months, if not years.

Collapse of the power grid, in turn, would have a domino effect on the infrastructures Americans depend on most for survival. Landline telephone and cell phone systems, the internet and all the vital signals the internet carries, military command and control, banking and financial systems, gas pipeline and gas stations, nuclear power plant safeguards, hospital and emergency room functionality. Public water and sewage services, perhaps our most urgent and immediate life support systems of all.

This isn’t some feverish, paranoid fantasy. It’s not some fabrication from “Doomsday Preppers.” It’s the kind of scenario that the most informed national security experts in the country, including military commanders, emergency response planners and scientists have been warning politicians about with increasing urgency for more than a decade.

China and Russia have considered limited nuclear-attack options that employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack, and in 2004 Russian military officials warned U.S. government investigators that North Korea’s military had recruited Russian scientists to develop nuclear EMP weapons.

Designs for variants of such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter century. Yet, while the media should be alerting the public to this danger, and our nation’s leaders should be setting up systems to protect us, we get adolescent media gossip about the latest celebrity tweet.

If this all sounds inconceivable to you, the government’s own congressional EMP Commission reports that within a year of a national blackout, as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. could die due to starvation, disease and the collapse of civilization as we know it.