EMP Blackout Could Be Closer than You Think
by R. JAMES WOOLSEY, DR. PETER VINCENT PRY
PrepperFortress.com
December 3, 2014
North Korea is prepared, probable target the USA. Iran is not far behind and has already told the world its intentions.
Four days before Halloween, on Sunday morning, October 27, 2013, terrorists in Mexico’s Michoacan state blacked out the electric grid, leaving some 420,000 powerless and thirteen dead. That same Sunday night, National Geographic aired the docudrama American Blackout. This fictionalized account of a cyber attack on the electric grid depicts some of the horrific consequences of a nationwide blackout in the USA lasting 10 days:
People get trapped in elevators and become virtual prisoners in their high-rise apartment buildings. Gasoline is rationed to the military and hospitals, so the average American has no transportation–except for his legs. Food and water become so scarce that there is a life and death struggle over a can of peaches. Before day 10 of the blackout, when the lights come back on, society starts breaking down into anarchy as gangs and vigilante groups run wild.
National Geographic is to be applauded for American Blackout which is essentially a training film to educate the American people about the very real threat posed to their lives by a cyber attack on the electric grid. If there is any fault or unrealism in the docudrama, it is that the blackout lasts only 10 days, and recovery is achieved so quickly.
While Mother Nature can also be a source of EMP disasters, this article deals with the possible threats posed by man. In real life, terrorists or rogue states would probably not limit their attack on the nation’s electric grid to computer viruses or hacking, as implied in the docudrama. They would also use other more destructive means–that could cause a protracted national blackout lasting months or years.
Nuclear EMP–The Ultimate Cyber Threat
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) is a dimension of the cyber threat that is not usually considered a cyber threat in Western doctrine, but is in the playbooks for an Information Warfare Operation of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. These potential adversaries in their military doctrines include as part of cyber warfare a wide spectrum of operations beyond computer viruses, including sabotage and kinetic attacks, up to and including nuclear EMP attack.
It is vitally important that we understand that a nuclear EMP attack is part of cyber and information warfare operations as conceived by our potential adversaries. Our cyber doctrine must be designed to deter and defeat the cyber doctrines of our potential adversaries by anticipating how they plan to attack us–but our doctrine currently does not.
Our cyber and information warfare doctrines are dangerously blind to the likelihood that a potential adversary making an all-out information warfare campaign designed to cripple the U.S. electric grid and other critical infrastructures would include an EMP attack.
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