Anyone who is paying attention knows that our nations electrical grid is susceptible to a wide variety of threats. This is especially true of an EMP style event. William R. Forstchen wrote a pretty comprehensive fictional piece called One Second After where he utilized the information he'd gleaned from the Critical National Infrastructures Report (and Executive Report) regarding research that had been conducted by the U.S. Government and the aftermath of an EMP style event. More recently, Ted Koppel has even written a piece exploring this vulnerability in his book Lights Out. Heck, in Chapter 2 of of my book, By the Dawn's Early Light, I broke down exactly how an EMP works:
Scott proceeded to walk over to the easel and pick up a marker. He drew multiple columns and labeled each ‘E1’, ‘E2’, and ‘E3’ respectively.
Chester nodded his agreement.
“Okay. Regardless of altitude at detonation or magnitude contained within the warhead, an EMP from an atmospheric blast is basically comprised of three components,” he began and pointed to the labels.
“The E1 phase is very fast and extremely intense. This is the part that causes electrical surges and begins to fry everything. The gamma radiation travels at almost 90% the speed of light and it does this by using something called the ‘Compton Effect’. That gets kind of technical so we’ll just write ‘surge’ for E1.
“E2 is like lightning,” he continued and paused to write the term under the ‘E2’ heading. “Most everything is shrouded against common weather related power surges and electrical storms through USB’s and surge protectors, but E2 adds insult to injury because it immediately follows E1. The E1 phase provides a gateway through the protection because, as I said, it fries everything. To be clear, by ‘fries everything’ I mean the amount of energy coursing through the lines amps up so quickly and intensely that the blast of electricity pushes the insulators and diodes beyond their maximum thresholds. Once the E1 component takes out the initial defense of the system, E2 comes along and hits everything as if it were never protected to begin with.
“E3 is the big brother sucker punch that keeps on giving. The first two components only take seconds or milliseconds, but this piece, on the other hand, can last a few minutes. Once E1 and E2 are done, part three shows up like a solar flare, or geomagnetic storm. This is commonly referred to as the Carrington Event.”
Scott paused and turned to the board once more. He wrote ‘solar flare’ under the appropriate heading and then chose a different color and jotted down ‘milliseconds’ under ‘E1’, ‘seconds’ under ‘E2’, and ‘minutes’ under ‘E3’.
“The EMP aspect of this phase takes out the high voltage lines and low orbiting satellites. You’ll know it when you see it because it will appear similar to an aurora borealis.” The student then paused and turned to Chester and asked, “How’d I do?”
The mentor smiled and began clapping. “Bravo, Scott. Bravo! I do have one correction though. The blast needs to occur above thirty thousand feet in order to induce ionization, but that takes us well in to the realm of the technical.”
An EMP is a very real threat to this country especially by actors like North Korea, Iran, and any group of highly skilled and funded terrorism elements. For example, Forstchen's fictional attack was launched from a cargo container ship sitting off the coast of the United States. I had extremists infiltrate Minot AFB.
I bring all of this up because, as I was working my way through a weekend's worth of emails, I clicked on an email from My Patriot Supply. Granted, they were using the topic as a means to offer their long term food options as well as their heirloom non-GMO seeds, but the subject matter caught my attention enough to post something in my blog. Here's the link to what they had to say on the matter: Special Report - When the Lights Go Out for Good.
