[MamaDearest]

Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.

Excellent link Selene.

[Myrddin]

The impact of a prolonged electricity loss would be enormous. While I was out of town in Alabama last week, the Pocatello area had winds of 35 MPH with gusts to 55 MPH. The consequence was loss of electrical power to the city water pumps. The city has 5 underground pumps. Very little above ground storage. Water pressure is entirely dependent on having the pumps running.

Those outages underscore the need to have emergency water supplies in places. All the scary stuff we worried about for Y2K could come to pass with a successful strike on our power grid.

[Selene]

This part caught my eye also:

...Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as "successful" tests. North Korea exports missile technology around the world; Scuds can easily be purchased on the open market for about $100,000 apiece.

A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead "on target" with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere. No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters -- al Qaeda is believed to own about 80 such vessels -- and make sure to get it a few miles in the air.