Another question for techies (I used to be one many years ago but am sadly not up on the latest in telecommunication routing architectures) . Short of several worldwide EMP’s, is our communications network really that vulnerable to being taken down nationwide? (I mean without any EMPs. Just local attacks?) I thought there was a lot of redundancy, parrellism, and capability of rerouting network traffic among multiple nodes on the fly in the event of a hit in a certain location.
I can definitely see the economic devastation if our monetary system crashed, can totally imagine the EBT zombie rampages happening, but just wondering if it necessarily implies that our entire communication, Internet etc could be taken down so easily...
Maybe a bit more explanation of what scenario could cause the worldwide communications networks to go down would be helpful. Even just a few added sentences. I’d like to pass on to some family members who are engineers and they will probably ask about that.
One of my goals with this piece was to keep it pretty short, and the cause of the blackout is intentionally left ambiguous. My understanding is that so much of the world now runs on networked data, that a major cyber attack could leave our infrastructure unable to respond to the correct commands. Trains derail, water treatment plants run incorrectly, etc. Anything that causes the EBT system to collapse can lead very rapidly to massive urban riots following store looting.
The urban centers that will be the focus of these massive riots are also critical distribution nodes, so the food shortages will not be contained to the cities. In that scenario, violence spikes to unprecedented levels and the police and military are overwhelmed. Many will desert, including critical infrastructure workers who also have families living in dangerous conditions.
Once the infrastructure is untended, due to urban riots plus deserting infrastructure workers, the food and fuel distribution machinery will stop entirely. Some of the lost infrastructure will seal the deal, so to speak, such as the communication satellites that will lose their ground links in a few weeks, and become unrecoverable in many cases. It becomes a reinforcing cascade of disasters, both on the human and machine sides. It all works perfectly, when it’s working. But if the machine stops, even for a week, it may all be FUBAR once the cities explode, and they will.
My point is you cannot look at one system in isolation and say, “Well, if that element broke, here is the solution.” Take the nuke plants as an example. All of those cooling ponds full of hot rods require electricity to run the water pumps. What happens when the workers depart to protect their families, and don’t return? How long can our 100 nuke plants remain safe in a grid-down situation, after the workers start slipping away?
Another flawed “one element” view would be to say, well, X thousand trucks can restock X thousand looted supermarkets in X days. Wrong, and you can by now list the reasons why it won’t happen according to plan. Lack of security, out-of-fuel trucks stranded everywhere and looted, drivers who took off on foot, city highways that are much too dangerous for resupply trucks while the remaining LE and military is overwhelmed, etc.
“is our communications network really that vulnerable to being taken down nationwide?”
Infrastructure only works insofar as there is excess capacity on a regular basis. If critical demand exceeds supply, access prices reach “gouging” levels until supply catches up...which is a problem if the shortage is pervasive and resonates with other shortages.