Power Grid EMP Attack Warnings Issued By Security Experts

An EMP attack on the power grid has security experts concerned and responding to the decision by NORAD to move back into the Cheyenne Mountain complex. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry and Henry F. Cooper believe the North American Aerospace Defense Command has abruptly decided to return to its Cold War era home due to mounting electromagnetic pulse attack concerns.

“Why the return?” Henry F. Cooper and Peter Vincent Pry pondered in a jointly written power grid EMP report. “Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP.”

Cooper was a Strategic Defense Initiative Director. Pry was a CIA staffer and the EMP Task Force on National Homeland Security Executive Director.

Peter Vincent Pry and Henry F. Cooper went on to state that the Obama administration has failed to respond to “urgent recommendations” to protect the American electronic infrastructure on the civilian level.

“An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years.”

If the grid failed due to an EMP attack, life would change drastically within seconds. Sensitive computer equipment, such as life-saving machines used in hospitals, electrical systems in modern vehicles, cell phones, and a multitude of other commonly relied upon gadgets, would cease to function if not properly stored inside a Faraday cage – and possibly still be heap of worthless junk even then.

The United States power grid has more blackouts than any other country in the developed world, according to data compiled by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation – NERC.

The grid is often called America’s glass jaw because of the nation’s reliability on it and also due to its many weaknesses, such as its vulnerability to a domino effect because it is interconnected. There are about 5,800 power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the U.S., many of them decades old and a large portion of them connected to one another.

“The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine,” Pry and Cooper added. The men reportedly consider the most likely culprits of an EMP attack on the power grid t be either Iran or North Korea.

Heritage Foundation defense and strategic analysts have urged Congress to develop, test, and field United States defenses against EMP attacks, including enhanced ballistic missile defenses able to counter short-range missiles, which carry EMP warheads. Detonating a ballistic missile with an EMP head while still at a high altitude would allow energetic particles “released during the explosion” to “disable, damage or destroy all unhardened electronic devices within the line of sight of the detonation,” the analysts said in a report.

When Newt Gingrich addressed members of the House Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus, he warned those in attendance than an EMP attack could “end it all” in America. Gingrich detailed how the fallout from even a high-altitude EMP nuclear blast could destroy the power grid and a multitude of electronics on the ground in the near vicinity.

The power grid EMP warning report by Cooper and Price went on to detail why the nation’s electrical grid needs hardened immediately.

“Iran should be regarded as already having nuclear missiles capable of making an EMP attack against the U.S. Iran and North Korea have successfully orbited satellites on South-Polar trajectories that appear to practice evading U.S. missile defenses, and at optimum altitudes to make a surprise EMP attack. Yet President Obama has not acted on the EMP Commission’s draft executive order to protect national infrastructure that is essential to provide for the common defense. Hardening the national electric grid would cost a few billion dollars, a trivial amount compared with the loss of electricity and lives following an EMP attack.”

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