Posted on 08/18/2003 11:21:54 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
PONTEFICATIONS
WAS LAST THURSDAY’S ELECTRICAL BLACKOUT that cut off power to millions from Michigan to Massachusetts an act of terrorism?
“No,” announced the White House less than an hour after it began. This reassurance came even before the point of origin of the cascading shutdown in the Northeastern power grid had been narrowed to Canada or the U.S. or, as experts now suspect, to Ohio.
It did not help that Canada said that the first circuit-breakers clicked off at Niagara Falls, or that Canada initially said a lightning strike was the cause, or that satellite imagery showed no lightning strikes had occurred anywhere near this area.
If this was terrorism, the cynics snorted, should we be surprised if governments denied the truth to prevent public terror and panic?
On the other hand, if terrorists had the power to de-power the Northeast, why not use it instead to demonstrate their power on the fast-approaching nightmare anniversary of September 11? Or on a pitch-dark night instead of August 14th’s near-full moon that lit city streets? Or on a winter night when a loss of electrical heating could cause deaths? As of this writing, no terrorists have claimed responsibility for the outage.
Whether a technology mishap or sabotage, this blackout, which hit just past 4 p.m. Eastern Time at the start of evening rush hour when its potential to cause chaos was greatest, is the sort of thing terrorists doubtless would like to use as a weapon of fear.
In coming weeks planners and pundits will propose many ideas to “modernize” our power grids by spending lots of money, up to $50 billion. Some of these approaches indeed could reduce our vulnerability to terrorist-caused power outages.
But others of these recommendations could actually give terrorists the potential to cause not only regional but also nationwide and even continent-wide blackouts. If implemented, these bad ideas could leave us more at risk than we are today.
The Achilles heel of our modern civilization is centralization and our dependence upon – indeed, addiction to – centralized technologies. Our Department of Defense analyzed this long ago, back when I was in the think tank community, in computerized targeting games called NES, the National Entity Survival studies.
NES aimed to find the cultural glue that created each society’s cohesion. Target and destroy that glue, the theory went, and an attacker could dissolve a nation into groups of roving gangs and marauders that preyed on the survivors and one another. If the people of Lower Slobovia all believed that their nation would survive as long as the statue of the national hero stood in the capital, NES pondered, then the destruction of that statue can do much to demoralize, dispirit and unravel the morale and patriotism of Lower Slobovia.
When NES methodology was used to examine the United States, the conclusion was frightening. The typical American living in a big city or near suburb had never known drinking water not to be there when he turned on the tap. Many grown-ups even slept with a nightlight.
The typical American, this research concluded, does not even know the neighbor who lives four doors away. What can be assumed, however, is that many of those strangers living nearby possess guns – guns they might use if frightened or if their children run out of food.
The neighborhood supermarket contains only four days’ worth of food under normal circumstances. When years ago “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson joked about a potential national toilet paper shortage, the rush to purchase and hoard the stuff actually caused such a shortage for weeks. A public panic could empty all supermarket food shelves within minutes and keep them empty.
Police, the analysis found, in a city such as Los Angeles with only about one cop for every thousand people would quickly become almost powerless. They rely now on communications and mobility to mass their firepower at single points. But when the Rodney King riots broke out a few years ago, the police were ordered to back off. Now imagine the entire 2,400 square miles of Greater Los Angeles under riot and blackout conditions and you begin to see what NES saw.
Los Angeles depends for its survival on only four aqueducts, four main electrical power ties, one indigenous source of gasoline, and a highly centralized freeway system that in crisis would quickly become clogged and impassible.
A team of 30 skilled terrorists could easily -- more easily than you can imagine, using simple weapons and methods I shall not describe here – shut down Los Angeles and keep it shut down as its people are driven to devour one another. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Oddly enough, Americans in the era of our founders were immune to such danger. They lived in a largely decentralized society. They were, or lived close to, frontier folk who still grew and hunted their own food, cut their own firewood, had their own wells and horses, and were armed and knew how to protect themselves. Terrorists could attack them one family at a time, risking death themselves with each attack. But our pioneer ancestors were not easily terrorized.
Today we live in cities where millions crowd together, breathe the same air, ride the same subways, and drink from what they assume is the same secure watering hole. We depend on others for our power, fuel, transportation, water, food and safety. At their peak occupancy the late World Trade Center towers could hold 50,000 people at once, nearly the entire population of some tiny nations.
When that many potential victims are squeezed into a small target area and made dependent on others for their survival, this creates a tempting target for lunatic terrorists.
What can be done to reduce this vulnerability? Immediate steps you can take include – yes, that still-valid insurance many took out for the turn of the Millennium – having a few weeks’ worth of drinking water, food, batteries, toilet paper, garbage bags, and other necessities in your home at all times.
Steps society should take include a total rejection of the Democratic Party’s irrational propaganda campaign against “urban sprawl.” By “sprawl,” Democrats and socialists mean the trend of Americans moving out of cities to escape high taxes imposed by Democrat politicians.
“But ‘sprawl,’” as I wrote here at FrontPageMagazine.com in a September 13, 2001, column, “turns out to be a prime defense against terrorism. The more spread out and decentralized a society is, the fewer prime targets it offers to attackers, as the British learned during America’s War for Independence. ‘Sprawl’ and individual self-reliance, in other words, may be among our best forms of national defense.”
Among the ideas you will hear for “modernizing” our power grids will be ways to link more and more of them together. A Northeast blackout might have been prevented, the argument will go, if it could have drawn electricity from the Southeast, or Midwest, or Southwest, or someday soon even from energy-rich Iceland or nighttime Europe.
The potential terrorist devil here may be in the details. The Internet began as Darpanet, the Defense Department’s effort to develop a communications network so decentralized and with so many ways instantly to re-route a signal that it could not be knocked out if an enemy attack destroyed part of it.
Could we build a national, continental or even global power grid that can instantly re-route billions of watts of electricity around malfunctioning high voltage lines, transformers or power plants? Or would such grids merely open us to terrorist sabotage (from the French “sabots,” wooden shoes that early industrial workers would throw into machinery to jam its gears) that could black out entire nations or even continents?
Other technologies could move us towards the safety of decentralization. Much development has been done, e.g., on individual power plants fuelled by decaying isotopes that could free your home or neighborhood from dependence on any larger power company or grid. Your city in the near future could build a superconducting underground ring able to store power, like a giant battery, that could not only prevent power plant overloads but also supply all electricity needs during days or weeks of grid blackout.
Such social decentralization should reach beyond electricity. We need to spread out our population, letting more people work from home via computer and more companies move to smaller communities. We need to channel more now-vulnerable telephone traffic via an expanded, even freer Internet.
We need more decentralization in our sources of water, fuel and food. We in recent days have seen terrorists in Iraq blow up both oil and water pipelines. Those who want to see how easily terrorists could create billions of dollars in extra oil profits for various Muslim nations by attacking a little-known vulnerability of our Alaska Pipeline can go to the local library and look up my long analysis that ran July 4, 1977, in the National Observer, at the time a sister Dow Jones publication of the Wall Street Journal.
As my friend James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, proposed in his book Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel, we need fewer big airlines at giant hub cities and more air taxies flying between small community airports.
And, as the founders wanted, we need armed citizens able to defend themselves against criminals, foreign and domestic. I shall never forget years ago watching the Sheriff of Los Angeles County call for disarming the citizenry, saying that people no longer needed guns because his officers would protect them. Less than two months later the deputy sheriffs in his department went on a “blue flu” strike, leaving those who depended on them to arrive 20 minutes or more after a call unprotected and at the mercy of criminals.
For additional insights along these lines, see the fine article by Oliver Morton that appeared months after my own. It was published in the December 2001 issue of Wired.
Implicit in all such decentralization, of course, is that we must reverse the drift towards socialism and move back towards the libertarian conservative individualism of America’s founders. We need less centralized government power, less dependency on government, more self reliance and vastly lower taxes so that people can afford to provide more of their own needs.
Government is the ultimate centralized system. And if you are among those who believe socialism makes people more serene, how do you explain that during this latest blackout the one place “serious looting” took place was Ottawa, the federal capital of socialist Canada?
Under Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, by contrast, New York City exhibited the same courage and honesty it had on September 11, 2001 – and not the widespread looting and arrest of more than 4,000 people it had under a Democratic Mayor during the 25-hour blackout of July 13, 1977.
America’s security and survival, in other words, requires that we reverse almost everything done or desired by the dominant left-wing of the Democratic Party. The safety and well-being of every American family, every soccer mom, and every child depends on winning the War on Terror by using decentralization to make it more difficult for terrorists to attack us.
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