Posted on 09/25/2011 1:30:34 PM PDT by IbJensen
Most Americans do not know this, but a single EMP attack could potentially wipe out most of the electronics in the United States and instantly send this nation back to the 1800s.
If a nuclear bomb was exploded high enough in the atmosphere over the middle part of the country, the electromagnetic pulse would fry electronic devices from coast to coast. The damage would be millions of times worse than 9/11. Just imagine a world where nobody has power, most cars will not start, the Internet has been fried, the financial system is offline indefinitely, nobody can make any phone calls and virtually all commerce across the entire country is brought to a complete stop. » If you like this article, please subscribe to our daily newsletter
Life-After-An-EMP-Attack-No-Power-No-Food-No-Transportation-No-Banking-And-No-Internet-250x150A nation that does not know how to live without technology would be almost entirely stripped of it at that point. Yes, this could really happen. An EMP attack is America's "Achilles heel", and everyone around the world knows it. It is only a matter of time before someone uses an EMP weapon against us, and at this point we are pretty much completely unprepared.
The sad thing is that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars hunting down "terrorists" in caves on the other side of the globe and we have been told that because of "national security" it is necessary for our private areas to be touched before we are allowed to get on an airplane, but our government is doing essentially nothing to address what is perhaps our biggest security vulnerability.
What would you and your neighbors do if the power went out and it did not ever come back on? What would you do if an EMP attack happened in the middle of the winter and you suddenly were not able to heat your home any longer? What would you do if all the electronics in your car got fried and you simply could not drive anywhere? What would you do if all the supermarkets in your area shut down because food could not be transported across the country anymore? What would you do if you were suddenly unable to call your family and friends for help? What would you do if you were suddenly unable to get the medicine that you needed? What would you do if your debit cards and credit cards simply did not work any longer and you could not get any of your money out of the bank? What would you do if all of these things happened all at once?
A single EMP attack would be the worst disaster that the United States has ever seen by far. An electromagnetic pulse could potentially fry the vast majority of all the microchips in the United States. In an instant, nearly all of our electronic devices would be rendered useless.
Yes, the federal government knows all about this. The following excerpt is from an April 2008 report by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack....
“The consequences of lack of food, heat (or air conditioning), water, waste disposal, medical, police, fire fighting support, and effective civil authority would threaten society itself.”
Most of us have become completely and totally dependent on electricity and technology. Without it, most of us would be in huge trouble.
The following is how an article in the Wall Street Journal described the potential consequences of an EMP attack....
No American would necessarily die in the initial attack, but what comes next is potentially catastrophic. The pulse would wipe out most electronics and telecommunications, including the power grid. Millions could die for want of modern medical care or even of starvation since farmers wouldn't be able to harvest crops and distributors wouldn't be able to get food to supermarkets. Commissioner Lowell Wood calls EMP attack a "giant continental time machine" that would move us back more than a century in technology to the late 1800s.
It wouldn't be so bad if we had the knowledge and the infrastructure to live the way that they did back in the 1800s, but today that is simply not the case.
Dr. William Graham was Ronald Reagan’s science adviser and the chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. Dr. Graham believes that in the event of a large scale EMP attack, the vast majority of Americans would either freeze, starve or die from disease.
Food Storage SystemAccording to Graham, in the aftermath of an EMP attack life in America "would probably be something that you might imagine life to be like around the late 1800s but with several times the population we had in those days, and without the ability of the country to support and sustain all those people."
Would you be able to survive?
All of those big bank accounts may never be able to be recovered after an EMP attack. Your money might be instantly fried out of existence.
The following is what Graham believes would happen to the financial system in the event of an EMP attack....
“Most financial records are stored electronically. ATMs, which depend upon both power and telecommunications, would not be available; banks, which try to back up records but in general aren’t strongly aware of the EMP problem, would face the problem of unprotected storage and computer systems”
This is the danger of having a financial system that is so dependent on technology. We may wake up one day and find that all the money is gone.
But if an EMP attack actually happened, the biggest concern for most of us would be trying to figure out how to survive.
The president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, is convinced that a single EMP attack could result in the deaths of the vast majority of the population of the United States....
"Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can't support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity"
Are you starting to get a feel for the scope of the problem?
The sad thing is that so much could be done to protect this country from an EMP attack.
Right now, most vital U.S. military infrastructure has at least some protection from an EMP attack.
But the general population has been left completely and totally vulnerable.
It has been estimated that the entire power grid could potentially be protected for about 20 billion dollars. Considering the fact that we have spent over 400 billion dollars in Afghanistan, I think that we could afford it.
We have spent our national security dollars very, very badly and someday it is going to come back to bite us in the rear end.
Right now, other nations around the world are working feverishly to develop EMP weapons. The following is from a statement by Dr. Peter Vincent Pry to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on March 8th, 2005....
Russian and Chinese military scientists in open source writings describe the basic principles of nuclear weapons designed specifically to generate an enhanced-EMP effect, that they term "Super-EMP" weapons. "Super-EMP" weapons, according to these foreign open source writings, can destroy even the best protected U.S. military and civilian electronic systems.
But it is not just Russia and China that have been developing "Super-EMP" weapons. According to Newsmax, it is believed that North Korea may have tested a "Super-EMP" weapon back in 2009....
North Korea’s last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states
Remember, all it would take is one strategically placed EMP attack to wipe out this nation.
But an EMP weapon is not the only danger that can produce this type of effect. The truth is that a really bad geomagnetic storm could also potentially produce almost as much damage.
This is something that everyone knows is one of our biggest vulnerabilities and it is something that we can make preparations for.
Yet the Bush administration and the Obama administration have just stood there and have done nothing.
Our idiocy is astounding.
General Eugene Habiger, the former head of U. S. Strategic Command, has said the following about the possibility of an EMP attack in the future....
“It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.”
Remember, this is something that could cause millions times more damage than 9/11 did.
Instead of molesting old ladies at airports and chasing goat herders around the mountains of Afghanistan, perhaps we should be addressing our largest security vulnerabilities.
But that would require using some common sense. Sadly, common sense seems to be in very short supply in Washington D.C. these days.
So if the government is not going to do anything about it, that means that it is up to you to prepare yourself and your family. This world is becoming very unstable and disasters can strike at any time.
We all saw what happened after Hurricane Katrina. The government response was a nightmare. An EMP attack would be millions of times worse and the federal government probably would not even be able to get you and your family any assistance.
You would truly be on your own.
So are you ready?
This is yet another reason why the number of preppers in the United States is exploding. A lot of people can see how the world is changing and they understand that the federal government is not going to come through for them when the chips are down.
An EMP attack could end life as we know it at any time.
It is a glaring security vulnerability and the entire world knows that it is there.
I hope that you are getting ready, because the government certainly is not.
See End of the American Dream Website
If you rely on certain meds—forget about it. I’d rather go fast then slow.
When you’re a certain age starting a family, you want to live close to a school. When your 70+ you want to live close to a hospital.
Government “help” should be very limited at least to the individual.
My great grandmother told me about a late spring blizzard and ice storm that hit about a century ago. Roofs and barns were collapsed all over the place. All the roads were closed with 6 feet of snow and trees down due to the ice. She said her father built a temporary lean to for the surviving animals. Mules and pulling ponies from the community were stabled together while they cleared the roads. She said every house had more than one family living in them for months.
She said there was some “state militia” help for big jobs but nothing in the small farming communities. They survived and rebuilt.
There’s some Amish about 10 miles up the road that do ok.
You hit our societal crisis on the head!
The riots and serious looting by the gimmes would devastate America as the ‘authorities’ would stand dumbly by watching and video taping the carnage.
America’s large problem is that we have a huge underclass of population who have never heard of the Ten Commandments and are, therefore, incapable of proper behavior. They are simply welfare whores and crooks!
I’m sure our government worthies will take care of us. After all, we pay their fat salaries... /s/
I’ve worked in the utility industry for 25 years. I started as a power plant electrician and moved into instrument & controls and now I work with SCADA systems. Over that quarter century, we have automated everything we can to reduce labor costs. We have switched from analog controls to digital controls to reduce labor costs. We have moved from heavy-duty electronics to micro-electronics to cut costs and again to reduce labor costs.
We can run a utility with 10% of the people we needed 25 years ago. The risk is that an EMP or cyber attack can knock us back to the 1800s because we don’t even have the people trained to get us back online without the easily programmed and replaced digital control systems.
When we faced the mega-hoax of Y2K, we were barely ready. We used every person we had to be standing by when the clocks rolled over, and if the worst-case scenario had happened (which no one believed it would, but the FedGov made us “prepare” anyway), we could have operated the utility without computers.
But that was 11 years ago. We have half the people working in the power plants, electric grids, and water/wastewater systems now as we did then and the reliance on cheap, digital controls is about 10x what it was in 1999.
The key to the EMP scare is that it requires detonating a large thermonucler warhead high over the USA and our Ohio-class SSBNs are hardened against EMP. Using that weapon is an act of nuclear war and we have procedures in place for that and those procedures involve the Ohio-class SSBNs. A towelhead with a suitcase nuke is not going to be able to make this attack a reality. Only a few nations could pull this off and they’ve had nukes for many years, but we’ve stared each other down for a long time without any mushroom clouds.
As long as they don't canx the Nascar races, I'm good.
:)
Thanks. Interesting read.
Practice with your shooting irons, maybe buy a few night vision devices, and ally yourself with enough other adults that you completely trust so that you can guard and defend yourselves 24/7. Zombies will be headed your way.
Ping
This is merely giving our multitudinous enemies some clever ideas.
North Korea and Iran are chomping at the bit with this one... the time to fix the grid is now...
Iran has placed satellites in orbit.
Neither does this old 6x6 that a relative of mine has sitting around. I drove it a little recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIbRlsBH0Qk
More than half of the US population would be wiped-out after more than 12 hours without news about the Kardasians.
Well, come to think of it, that might actually be a good thing.
“Seems highly unlikely. EMP would not destroy the entire infrastructure, just the local area”
Yeah, I think the threat from EMP is sometimes overblown.
Long haul internet lines are generally fiber optic, and immune to EMP.
On the other hand, not many vehicles will start today without their ECU. Even diesels.
Does anyone here (other than doomsday scare type people) have any real data on the threat radius from the best EMP burst thus far?
Seems highly unlikely. EMP would not destroy the entire infrastructure, just the local area.With a decent-sized nuclear warhead, it would effect everything in line-of-sight of the explosion. The Starfish Prime test over the Pacific, did considerable damage in Hawaii, 800 miles away from the spot under the explosion (and that was before microelectronics came in to common use).
A 100KT bomb about 200 miles above Kansas would cover the entire continental United States.
Here is a good summary of the EMP effects from nuclear bombs.
We discovered the phenomenon during our weapons testing in the Pacific 60 years ago.
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