By Dr. Peter Vincent
Pry Thursday,
26 March 2020 11:52 AM
If you think the coronavirus is frightening,
wait until a solar superstorm or electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) attack blacks-out the national
electric grid, collapses the economy and
critical infrastructures for food and water, and
9-of-10 Americans die of starvation.
One year ago, President
Trump issued his excellent "Executive Order on
Coordinating National Resilience to
Electromagnetic Pulses" (March 26, 2019)
responding to 20 years of warnings by the EMP
Commission that solar superstorms, or manmade
EMP from nuclear or non-nuclear weapons, poses
an existential threat to the U.S. and to global
electronic civilization.
Mandated by the EMP
Executive Order is a progress report to
President Trump from the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), Department of Energy (DOE), and
other relevant parts of the U.S. Government due
to the White House on March 26, 2020.
My newly published book
"The Power and the Light: The Congressional EMP
Commission’s War To Save America 2001-2020" (www.amazon.com)
is my progress report to the American people on
implementation of EMP national preparedness:
—Obama-holdovers and
Deep State bureaucrats who are EMP non-experts
and have long opposed national EMP preparedness
for reasons ideological, political, and
personal, not least stupidity, are largely in
charge of “implementing” President Trump’s EMP
Executive Order.
—The Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Standard
for natural EMP/GMD is merely 8 volts/kilometer,
far too low, and should be at least three times
higher (24-30 volts/kilometer).
—The EMP Commission
recommended EMP/GMD Standard is over ten times
higher: 85 volts/kilometer, so the national grid
would survive a worst-case solar storm or the
long-wavelength threat (E3 EMP) from nuclear EMP
attack.
—There is still no
FERC approved Standard for E1 EMP, the
short-wavelength electromagnetic “shockwave”
from a nuclear EMP attack that would do the most
damage to most electronics. Protection against
E1 EMP (50-100 kilovolts/meter) would also
mitigate lesser threats from non-nuclear EMP
weapons and system-generated over-voltages from
cyber-attacks, physical sabotage, and severe
weather like hurricanes.
—The deeply erroneous
Obama-era EMP report by the Joint Atomic Energy
Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) and the more
recent so-called “Tri-Labs EMP Report”, both
written by a small number of non-experts
parroting each other, continue to circulate
misinforming U.S. officials and damaging
national security. Both reports are highly
classified, apparently to protect them from
scrutiny and criticism from real EMP experts,
while being invoked to prevent mid-level
officials (who lack the clearances) from
protecting their assets from EMP.
The EMP Commission wrote
a classified rebuttal and recommended the recall
of these reports, including in letters to
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan
Coates and DNI Joseph Maguire, which
recommendations have been ignored, to the grave
harm of our nation.
—The DHS “National EMP
Strategy” drafted at the direction of Senator
Ron Johnson’s excellent Critical Infrastructure
Protection Act underestimates the EMP threat and
is deeply flawed.
—Bogus analysis that
grossly underestimates natural and nuclear EMP
threats by the Electric Power Research
Institute, a lobby for the electric power
industry masquerading as a think tank, is being
funded by DOE and wrongly treated by DHS as
analytically sound, even though the EPRI Reports
have been critiqued and proven erroneous by the
EMP Commission and the USAF Electromagnetic
Defense Task Force.
—The rampant
incompetence of DHS and DOE is manifest in that
they give greater credibility to EPRI
non-experts than to the EMP Commission and its
Chairman, Dr. William Graham—the foremost EMP
expert in the Free World. Chairman Graham also
served as President Reagan’s White House Science
Advisor, ran NASA, was on the defense science
team that discovered the EMP phenomenon, and has
been protecting U.S. military systems from EMP
since 1963.
—President Trump’s EMP
Executive Order responds to the work and
recommendations of the EMP Commission, yet U.S.
Government implementation of the EMP Executive
Order proceeds with almost no involvement or
consultation with former EMP Commissioners and
staff.
We have seen this movie before, and are living
through it now.
20 years ago, in 2001,
Operation Dark Winter by the Johns Hopkins
Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and
Center for Strategic and International Studies
simulated a biological attack on the United
States, producing an excellent documentary "Dark
Winter" about the wargame, that shocked and
galvanized Congress to act.
Legislation and
resources were invested, recommendations were
supposed to have been implemented, to protect
U.S. citizens from catastrophic Biological
Warfare (BW).
Yet today, the
coronavirus, which is chiefly a psychological
threat, is having disastrous economic and
societal consequences. What happened to BW
preparedness?
For the $2 trillion that
will be spent on the coronavirus, we could
harden all critical infrastructures against EMP;
deploy space-based missile defense Brilliant
Pebbles before the end of a second term in
office by President Trump; modernize the entire
U.S. nuclear deterrent from top to bottom
(including new missiles, bombers and submarines;
new nuclear weapons; and a completely renovated
nuclear scientific-industrial base) and have
over $1 trillion to spare.
The strategy of
pretending to do something, but really doing
nothing, and then throwing money at the threat
when it happens, will get millions of Americans
killed when there is an EMP.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry
is executive director of the Task Force on
National and Homeland Security. He served on the
Congressional EMP Commission as chief of staff,
the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission,
the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.
He is author of “The Power And The Light: The
Congressional EMP Commission’s War To Save
America 2001-2020”.
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