Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
What Else Can Be Done?
According to Dr. Peter Vincent Pry (see quotes in Part I), for starters some 100 to 200 large transformers used in electrical transmission should be protected against EMP attack. He says:
The key for our electric power grid are these big transformers. All together, there are about 300 of them. They are absolutely indispensable to the operation of the power grid. If you fry those things, there are only a couple of countries in the world that sell them for export, and it takes a year, at least, to make one of them.
Equally important are myriad small computers that regulate the power grid. Pry surmises:
This country can’t survive for six months without electricity, let alone a year. Everything else would go down after losing electric power. To harden these critical transformers against an attack would cost $200 to $400 million.
By comparison, the 2008 federal financial bailout cost $800 billion. Yet without electricity, no one would have a job, nor a bank account.
Pry adds that the Department of Homeland Security has plans for 15 kinds of disasters, but none of the scenarios deals with an EMP attack. Nor, he says, are there any plans afoot at present to harden the power grid.