Amid Threats from Iran and North Korea, Pentagon Begins Plans to Protect America’s Achilles’ Heel

We take for granted that when we flip switches that things will happen. When we are without power, life gets inconvenient for a while. If it goes out for weeks, people die. If it went out for a year, lots of people would die.

There’s a lot to be said in favor of the prepper community. But unless they have no need of medical attention beyond first-aid and require no pharmaceuticals, they are still at risk, just a much lower one than the rest of us. And the Amish do buy and use products that are made by firms dependent on electricity.

So threats to our power-grid should be a concern for everyone, especially in the light of threats made by North Korea. As it turns out, the Pentagon is taking man-made threats seriously.

Amid warnings that North Korea and Iran have plans to take out parts of the U.S. electric grid through a cyber attack or atmospheric nuclear blast, the Pentagon is taking steps to both protect the nation’s communications and power lifeline.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] has charged BAE Systems to map a system that can detect a cyber attack and gin up an alternative communications network for military and civilian use if the grid is fried, according to Defense Systems, the online newsletter.

DARPA is known for creating some incredible, almost unbelievable technology, and that just includes the things the top-secret agency has been able to reveal to the public. So their participation on this project is welcome news.

DARPA’s focus is on thwarting a cyber attack, but Pry and Woolsey have also warned that North Korea or Iran could attack the grid with an atmospheric nuclear explosion over the East Coast that will disable the grid and that could end up leading to the death of 90 percent of those in the East.

The DARPA plan presented in Defense Systems has several elements react to attack.

First, it would include ways to sense an imminent attack that would trigger protections. And if damaged, it would have an alternative way for communications killed in the attack to continue in a backup system — key for the military and presumably the financial system.

It won’t be ready until 2020.

So we are dealing with two different, but related threats. One is a cyber threat that DARPA is working on. The other is the nuclear burst over the nation that would create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry virtually all electronic devices including those that make cars run. It would also take down the electric grid such that things that were not destroyed by the pulse wouldn’t have any power to operate on.

That second threat falls to the military to prevent, such as by knocking down any missile carrying such a weapon before it can reach its destination and be detonated. Also a creditable threat of retaliation is helpful.

For example, while Kim Jong-un of North Korea is obviously a tyrant and a threat to peace, he also no doubt likes having a country to govern. Even he must understand that were he to launch any sort of nuclear attack on the US that he would cease to have such a nation — and that’s assuming he survived the inevitable retaliation.

While this is not a reason to panic, it is a reason for aggressive work on both the military and technological aspects to reduce the chances of such a devastating event.

If North Korea or Iran did decide to carry out such an attack and it was successful, how damaging would it be? Devastating. Estimates are that ninety-percent of the American population would not survive. This from the Washington Times:

Four years ago in December 2012, when North Korea orbited its KMS-3 satellite over the U.S., I warned they could conduct an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack by satellite.
An EMP that blacks out the national electric grid would be a far greater catastrophe than blasting a city. A North Korean 10-kiloton warhead blasting a city might cause about 200,000 casualties.
However, the same warhead making a high-altitude EMP attack — though there would be no blast, thermal or fallout effects on the ground — could knock out the electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for more than a year, killing 90 percent of the population through starvation.
Why blast a city when EMP attack can destroy the whole nation? North Korea wants to be able to do both. They can launch an EMP attack already.
Another advantage of EMP attack by satellite is anonymity, to escape retaliation, whereas an intercontinental ballistic missile destroying a city would have North Korea’s fingerprints all over it.

North Korea’s KMS-3 satellite is in low-Earth orbit, along with hundreds of other satellites. KMS-3’s south polar trajectory approaches the United States from the south, where there are no ballistic missile early warning radars or national missile defenses. The U.S. is blind and defenseless from that direction.
An EMP attack would damage radars, satellites, ground stations and other national technical means necessary to ascertain who attacked. A super-EMP weapon could paralyze even hardened command, control, communications and intelligence assets and strategic forces, rendering them unable to retaliate, even if the aggressor could be identified.

Here is Judge Pirro covering this threat in depth:

Sources: Washington Examiner, Washington Times