One reason the electrical grid in the US hasn’t been protected (it would cost an estimated $2 billion) is that electric utilities don’t want the federal government inspecting their grids, and looking over their shoulder, Pry explained. Stymied by congressional inaction, some states have started pilot programs to look into hardening their electrical infrastructure– countries like Russia and China have done so years ago, he reported. Aside from an EMP attack, the natural threat from a solar flare, according to NASA, is 12% per decade, and we’re overdue to be hit by a big one (the last catastrophic flare was the 1859 Carrington Event), he added.
Peter Pry
Biography:
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyber attack, mass destruction terrorism and other threats to civilian critical infrastructures on an accelerated basis. Dr. Pry also is Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum, an advisory board to Congress on policies to counter Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Websites:
Books:
Past Coast to Coast Shows:
Wednesday January 10, 2018
Host: George Noory
Monday June 8, 2015
The Secure the Grid Coalition is an ad hoc group of policy, energy, and national security experts, legislators, and industry insiders who are dedicated to strengthening America’s electrical grid. Advocates for strengthening the grid,
Peter Pry (first hour),
Michael… More »Host: George Noory
Thursday August 21, 2014
In the first half, advocate for protecting America’s power grid,
Peter Pry, shared updates about preventing damage from EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks and solar flares.
Host: George Noory
Thursday April 24, 2014
Earthfiles investigative reporter
Linda Moulton Howe spoke about her 1998 interview with a CIA agent who claimed to have ET contacts, infrasound that might be linked to strange boom and metallic sounds, as well as the biggest mysteries of the MH370 disappearance.
First hour guest, advocate for protecting America’s power…
More »Host: George Noory
Books:
Electric Armageddon: Civil-Military Preparedness For An Electromagnetic Pulse Catastrophe Paperback – February 15, 2013
Imagine an America in a permanent blackout, without electric power, without communications, without mass transportation, without banking and finance, without food and water. Imagine the machinery of modern civilization stopped–in an instant. Imagine the high-tech EMP threat killing millions of people the old fashioned way, through chaos, starvation, disease, and societal collapse. Sound impossible? The EMP threat is as real as the nuclear weapons programs of Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. More fantastic still, imagine that Mother Nature can make an EMP that would collapse the machinery of modern civilization everywhere on planet Earth.
Imagine that the Sun can make something like an electrical hurricane in space–that we shall call a great geomagnetic storm–that would destroy electronic systems and collapse critical infrastructures everywhere. Imagine that great geomagnetic storms occur about once every century. Imagine that the last great geomagnetic storm was in 1859, before civilization became dependent upon electricity. Imagine that our modern electrified societies are now overdue to experience a natural EMP catastrophe. Incredible? It is all true, and as real as the Sun. Most fantastic of all, imagine that the technology to protect civilization against the nuclear and natural EMP threat is well understood and has been at hand for decades. Imagine that preparedness of the United States to survive and recover from EMP would also mitigate the effects of all other hazards, including cyber attacks, sabotage, hurricanes and earthquakes. Imagine that the cost of protecting the national electric grid from EMP is well within the nation’s means and resources. Imagine that saving our power grid and thus the lives of 200 million Americans, who would perish in an EMP event today, at the cost of about a dollar per life. Now imagine that in the U.S. Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike have been trying to protect the United States from EMP for years. Imagine that this bipartisan, unanimous effort to protect Americans from EMP has been thwarted by lawyers in the government bureaucracies and the electric power industry. A paranoid fantasy? It is all true, as real as Washington bureaucrats and K Street lobbyists. This book tells well the story of the EMP threat and of the struggle to protect our nation from this little known, but most perilous and most imminent of all national security nightmares. However, the greatest value of this book is a bold new vision for a way to rapidly protect America from EMP. Every century or so a seminal book, such as Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War” or Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “Sea Power” revolutionizes the way people think about national security. This could be another such book–if only it is read. But beyond improved national security, this book’s prescriptions hold the promise of an improved America, where national preparedness necessitates renewing in our citizens the fading virtues of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism that made America great, and free.
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Blackout Wars: State Initiatives To Achieve Preparedness Against An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Catastrophe Paperback – November 25, 2015
See all 3 formats and editions
Blackout Wars is about the historically unprecedented threat to our electronic civilization from its dependence on the electric power grid. Most Americans have experienced temporary blackouts, and regard them as merely an inconvenience. Some Americans have experienced more protracted local and regional blackouts, as in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, and may be better able to imagine the consequences of a nationwide blackout lasting months or years, that plunges the entire United States into the dark. In such a nightmare blackout, the entire population of the United States could be at risk. There would be no food. No water. Communications, transportation, industry, business and finance–all of the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization and the lives of the American people would be paralyzed by collapse of the electric power grid. Millions could die. How could a catastrophic blackout happen? Threats to the electric power grid are posed by cyber attack, sabotage, a geomagnetic super-storm, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon. Blackout Wars warns that terrorists and rogue states are developing a revolutionary new military strategy that could exploit all of these threats in combination, including exploiting the opportunity of severe weather or a geo-storm, to collapse the national electric grid and all the critical infrastructures. It would be the fall of American civilization. For the first time in history, the most dysfunctional societies, like North Korea that cannot even feed its own people, or even non-state actors like terrorists, could destroy the most successful societies on Earth–by means of a Blackout War. Attacking the electric grid enables an adversary to strike at the technological and societal Achilles Heel of U.S. military and economic power. Blackout Wars likens this new Revolution in Military Affairs to Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg strategy, secretly developed and tested in low-profile experiments during the 1930s, sprung upon the Allies in 1939-1941 in a series of surprise attacks that nearly enabled the Third Reich to win World War II. Just as the West was asleep to the threat from the Blitzkrieg, so today U.S. and Western elites are blind to the looming threat from a Blackout War.
