Because we often focus on the visible, visceral threats to our existence, such as nuclear war or debilitating diseases, we often miss the subtle yet deadly threats staring us in the face.
In a recent podcast interview with Financial Sense, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Congressional EMP Commission, discusses one well-known but widely ignored threat: an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
Heading Toward an EMP Catastrophe?
To understand the threat an EMP represents, we have to understand just how reliant we are on a constant supply of electricity.
“The very technological revolution that is feeding our prosperity is also making us more vulnerable,” Pry said. “As electronics get smaller and faster, and operate on lower energy levels, they also become proportionally more vulnerable to EMPs.”
Basically, an EMP is caused by a moving magnetic field. When the field is in motion, it generates a current in a wire, which can cause problems for the functioning of an electronic system, Pry noted.
What this means is, any moving magnetic field has the potential to produce an EMP effect, and we could face both man-made and natural forms that pose different risks.
Natural EMPs
A natural EMP is caused when a coronal mass ejection from the Sun distorts our planet’s magnetic field. This type of EMP is inevitable, Pry noted.
“The magnetosphere gets distorted and...as a consequence, you have a natural EMP that’s called a geomagnetic storm,” he said. “And these happen all the time.”
We had a significant event in 1989 during the Hydro-Quebec Storm, which caused a blackout across half of Canada for about a day. It also caused billions of dollars in losses, Pry noted, and a few lives were probably lost as a result.
But this is only a small fraction of what a significant event could bring, Pry said. What he’s concerned about is a once-in-a-century super geomagnetic storm, such as the 1859 Carrington Event, which is the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record, about 100 times more powerful than the 1989 storm.
“What happens here is you get a coronal mass ejection that has so much energy in it, it’s so big and it’s moving so fast … [that] when one of those things comes slamming into the Earth, you’ve scaled things up … to a planetary level,” said Pry.
A Profound Challenge
When it comes to the threat of system-wide failure that an EMP could bring, Dr. Pry doesn’t mince words: he feels it represents an “existential threat″ to our society.
“You’re talking about a protracted blackout from which you might never recover,” he said. “We are electronic civilizations, and everything—business, finance, moving water, communications, transportation, all the things that sustain life—rely either directly or indirectly on the electric grid.”
Billions of lives would be put at risk, he said. The commission estimated that if we had a nationwide blackout that lasted 12 months … up to 90 percent of the population in the United States would probably perish from starvation, disease and societal collapse.
“If you lose 90 percent of your population, there’s probably no coming back from that,” Pry said. “That kind of scale of catastrophe is what we call an existential threat.”
We’re overdue for such a storm, Pry noted. Events of the magnitude similar to the one that occurred in 1859 happen about once a century, on average. On July 25, 2012, a Carrington-level event passed just three days behind Earth, Pry noted.
Man-Made Stone Age
It’s also possible for an EMP to be generated artificially, either by a nuclear weapon or through other means. In some ways, a nuclear EMP is even worse than a natural EMP, Pry said. While a nuclear EMP would not cover the whole planet, it would be potentially more destructive.
“A nuclear EMP attack, in addition to doing what the geomagnetic super storm does, produces another kind of EMP,” Pry said. “That’s called an E1 EMP, which is a very high-frequency electromagnetic pulse that can go up to, in the case of a super- EMP weapon, up to 200,000 volts, and it can penetrate and enter small electronics.”
If our enemies decide to use an EMP against the United States, they wouldn’t even necessarily have to use a nuclear device, Pry noted.
“There’s a third threat that I described in my testimony that often gets overlooked,” he said. “There are non-nuclear EMP weapons that are called radio frequency weapons. You can actually build these out of parts that you can buy from an electronics store.”
These devices aren’t meant to be weapons, but they can be used as such, Pry said. And they don’t require a license to buy and are otherwise unregulated.
“A terrorist who got his hand on an EMP suitcase, for example, could topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area,” Pry noted. “If you did have a terrorist team and they had nine of these … and if the bad guys knew which nine [transformer substations] to attack, they could … black out the country for 18 months.”
Preparing for Catastrophe
Though there is actually strong bipartisan support in Congress for action, a lobbying group, the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation or NERC, has worked with one anonymous lawmaker to thwart efforts for years. However, Pry said 2015 actually saw much progress on the Federal level to deal with the problem, and he encourages voters to get involved and push for legislation to protect themselves.
“There’s really no excuse to be vulnerable,” he said. “It’s not the money. The commission estimated it would cost $2 billion … to protect the North American electric grid. If you did nothing else, if you just protected the electric grid, that alone would be an enormous safety margin.”
Individual families can also take precautions, and would benefit from the same preparations they would make for any natural disaster, Pry said. Individuals can also use electronic shielding such as Faraday cages and similar methods to protect their equipment, but basic measures such has having a water filter and a food supply are also useful.
“Historically, it is a great failing of democracies, that they are usually too late to act,” Pry said. “We have been fortunate in our history that God has looked after us, though we have failed to react in time. Only [after] the thing itself has befallen us … do we react.”
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