Posted on 05/12/2014 9:26:01 AM PDT by raptor22
Vulnerability: Expert testimony before Congress on Thursday warned that an electromagnetic pulse attack on our power grid and electronic infrastructure could leave most Americans dead and the U.S. in another century.
That dire warning came from Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
He testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee's Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event could wipe out 90% of America's population.
Most people's eyes might glaze over upon mention of the committee name, the title of the hearing — "Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): Threat to Critical Infrastructure" — and the general subject of EMP. But it is a real threat and not the stuff of science fiction.
Some attention has been paid to the potential cataclysmic effects of a natural phenomenon such as a massive solar storm, an event that has occurred in America's horse-and-buggy era when it did not matter.
Today an electromagnetic pulse event would be devastating. It wouldn't need a solar storm, just a solitary nuke detonated in the atmosphere above the American heartland. We would envy the horse-and-buggy era.
"Natural EMP from a geomagnetic superstorm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or 1921 Railroad Storm, and nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states, as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013, are both existential threats that could kill 9-of-10 Americans through starvation, disease and societal collapse," the Washington Free Beacon quoted Pry as saying.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
I agree with your take on it.
No, the Federal Russian Nuclear center in Snezhinsk IIRC.
OK, Iraq was a fairly modern country in 2003 when we went to war. We essentially took out their entire electric grid. And it does not appear that a significant number of people died from the attack.
55 miles is about 290,000 feet, which is around a “few hundred thousand feet”.
Blazing Saddles has the answer to everything!
Such an attack would take out much of Southern Canada and Northern Mexico and even some South American countries might be affected. That is if one trusts the numbers being bandied about....the thing is the effects would be uneven...some places badly damaged ,other places not even scratched due to varied geological and manmade features. The attack would have to be done at night to maximize the effect as the magnetic field is thicker on the night side due to the influence of the solar particles on the day side which thins out the field on the day side while thickening it on the night side. The solar particle effects themselves might dampen an emp effect on the day side due to phase cancellations...ect.
The number of people alive today dwarfs the total number of people who have ever lived before in history.
If 9 out of 10 people were to die suddenly there is no way that the bodies could ever be disposed of by the survivors.
Doesn’t really matter if they have any number of caskets if you can’t get the bodies to the caskets.
With an EMP attack no truck or car will work unless that car has been stored inside a Faraday cage during the EMP attack.
An EMP attack will burn out every computer board, every motor, every generator, every cell phone. Any electronic device in the EMP blast radius that was not EMP harden (which is almost exclusively DOD special purpose equipment) will become instantly useless.
Without truck to hall the dead or excavators to dig the graves the dead will pretty much rot where they died. Nineteenth century tech will become highly sought after.
Even if they could transport the dead I don’t think they have the facilities to handle 300 million dead.
I’m just glad we own a horse.
Unfortunately this is not something on which I can comment further. FWIW.
You know, however difficult it would be to refine gasoline after this EMP to end all EMP’s, I betcha I could distill ethanol.
There seems to be this theory tha if someone is being successful, someone else needs to be unsuccessful to even things out.
A busy economy sparks activity in other economies. If a large economy disappears, it reduces activity in other economies.
It does not all of a sudden creat greater opportunity.
EMP PING
Remember the day the EBT cards died last year?
Nature would dispose of the bodies. Bacteria are the most dominant life form on the planet.
Serenity ... just sayin’
HOWEVER.
Last week this planet experienced an M-Class flare that seriously disrupted our ionosphere. I mean seriously disrupted --- pretty much all the HF bands in Amateur Radio were completely DEAD and VHF communications was limited to under 20 miles and even then it was iffy.
And that was just a major M-Class solar flare.
A bigger flare or an EMP? Yeah, I'm getting concerned.
You must have missed my post #20
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