by Michael Snyder
April 06, 2015
from
TheEconomicCollapseBlog Website
Related report in Spanish
Our entire way of life can be ended in a single day.
And it wouldn't even take a nuclear war to do it.
All it would take for a rogue nation or terror
organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of a couple
well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting
electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast.
Of course this could also be accomplished without any
attack.
Scientists tell us that massive solar storms have hit
our planet before, and that it is inevitable that there will be more
in the future. As you will read about below, the most recent example
of this was "the Carrington Event" in 1859.
If a similar burst from the sun hit us today, experts
tell us that life in America could suddenly resemble life in the
1800s, and the economic damage caused could potentially be in the
trillions of dollars. This is one of the greatest potential threats
that we are facing as a nation, and yet
Barack Obama
has essentially
done nothing to get us prepared.
The technology necessary to conduct such an
electromagnetic pulse attack against the United States has become
much more accessible in recent years.
According to an article in
the Wall Street Journal, even rogue nations such as North Korea
and Iran either already have or will soon have the capability to
hurt us in this way…
Rogue nations such as North Korea (and possibly
Iran) will soon match Russia and China and have the primary
ingredients for an EMP attack:
-
simple ballistic missiles such as Scuds
that could be launched from a freighter near our shores
-
space-launch vehicles able to loft
low-earth-orbit satellites
-
simple low-yield nuclear weapons that can
generate gamma rays and fireballs
If a successful, large scale EMP attack ever did take
place, it would be a catastrophe beyond anything that the United
States has ever seen before.
The
EMP Commission, which was established by Congress, says that it
is likely that most of us would end up dead…
What would a successful EMP attack look like?
The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that
within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S.
population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and
societal breakdown.
In 2009 the congressional Commission on the
Strategic Posture of the United States, whose co-chairmen were
former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James
Schlesinger, concurred with the findings of the EMP Commission
and urged immediate action to protect the electric grid.
Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the
Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
and the National Intelligence Council reached similar
conclusions.
If you are a terrorist, a dictator or a fanatic that
is looking for a "killshot" for the United States, those kinds of
numbers would certainly get your attention.
And it was recently reported by
WND that the Iranian military has already been playing around
with such a scenario…
Peter Vincent Pry, who is executive director
of a congressional advisory group called the Task Force on
National and Homeland Security, raised the alarm as the
agreement is about to be finalized.
He said U.S. military officials have
confirmed such an Iranian plan.
"Iranian military documents describe such
a scenario - including a recently translated Iranian
military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack
against the United States," Pry wrote in a recent column
in Israel's main online media network, Aruz Sheva.
"Iran with a small number of nuclear
missiles can by EMP attack threaten the existence of
modernity and be the death knell of Western principles
of international law, humanism and freedom," he said.
Very chilling stuff.
And of course there are many, many others out there
that would love to see the U.S. taken down other than just the
Iranians. Meanwhile, our power grid is far more vulnerable than most
Americans would dare to imagine.
In previous articles, I discussed a recent Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission report which stated the following…
"Destroy nine interconnection substations and
a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid
would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer."
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our entire way of life depends upon electricity. If
you take away that electricity, our society is transformed literally
overnight. A successful EMP would be an utter nightmare for this
nation.
Just consider what U.S. Representative Scott Perry
had to say about a potential attack
last year…
"The
consequences of such an attack could be catastrophic; all
electronics, power systems, and information systems could be
shut down," Rep. Scott Perry said in prepared remarks
during an
EMP hearing in
May held by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security.
"This could then
cascade into interdependent infrastructures such as water, gas,
and telecommunications. While we understand this is an
extreme case, we must always be prepared in case a rogue state
decides to utilize this technology."
In essence, suddenly nothing would work and just
about everything that we take for granted would suddenly be gone.
In a previous
article (What
Are You Going to Do When a Massive EMP Blast Fries the U.S.
Electrical Grid?), I spelled out some of the implications of such an
event…
-
There would be no heat for your home.
-
Water would no longer be pumped into most
homes.
-
Your computer would not work.
-
There would be no Internet.
-
Your phones would not work.
-
There would be no television.
-
There would be no radio.
-
ATM machines would be shut down.
-
There would be no banking.
-
Your debit cards and credit cards would not
work.
-
Without electricity, most gas stations would
not be functioning.
-
Most people would be unable to do their jobs
without electricity and employment would collapse.
-
Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
-
Hospitals would not be able to function
normally.
-
You would quickly start running out of
medicine.
-
All refrigeration would shut down and frozen
foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
And as I mentioned above, all of this can happen even
without an attack. A direct hit from a
major solar storm can cause
the exact same thing.
In fact, NASA says that there
is a 12 percent chance that such a storm will hit us during the
next ten years…
NASA is warning that there's a 12 percent chance
an extreme solar storm will hit Earth in the next decade,
sending out massive shock waves that would knock out grids
across the world.
The economic impact of this doomsday scenario
could exceed $2 trillion - or 20 times the cost of Hurricane
Katrina, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, we have been really lucky.
There was a close call in 2012 and another one in
2013.
The following is an excerpt from an upcoming book
that I have co-authored with Barbara Fix that will soon be
published entitled "Get Prepared Now"…
Most people have absolutely no idea that the
Earth barely missed being fried by a massive EMP burst from the
sun in 2012 and in 2013. And earlier in 2014 there was another
huge solar storm which would have caused tremendous damage if it
had been directed at our planet.
If any of those storms would have directly hit
us, the result would have been catastrophic. Electrical
transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would
have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried.
In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist - at
least for a time.
These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth
many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable
that it will happen again.
The most famous one happened in 1859, and was
known as the
Carrington Event.
But other than the telegraph, humanity had very
little dependence on technology at the time. If another
Carrington Event happened today, it would be a complete and
utter nightmare.
A study by Lloyd's of London has concluded that
it would have taken a $2,600,000,000,000 chunk out of the global
economy, and it would take up to a decade to repair the damage.
Unfortunately, scientists insist that it is going to happen at
some point.
The only question is when...
So keep an eye
on the sun.
The giant ball of fire that we revolve around has
started to behave very erratically, and it has the power to end our
way of life at any time.
In fact, 'scientists' tell us that we are about to get
hit with a "glancing
blow" on April 7th…
A filament of magnetism stretching halfway across
the sun erupted during the late hours of April 4th
(22:00-23:00 UT).
The eruption split the sun's atmosphere, hurling
a CME into space and creating a "canyon of fire," shown in a
movie recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory: The glowing
walls of the canyon trace the original channel where the
filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the sun's
surface.
From end to end, the structure stretches more than
300,000 km - a real Grand Canyon.
Fragments of the exploding filament formed the
core of a CME that raced away from the sun at approximately 900
km/s (2 million mph): image. Most of the CME will miss Earth,
but not all.
The cloud is expected to deliver a a glancing
blow to our planet's magnetic field could on April 7th.
High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
The event of April 7th is not going
to cause us major problems. But someday there will be a solar storm
that will.
Personally, I cannot even imagine what life would be
like without electricity. Because we have become so deeply dependent
on technology, most of us would have absolutely no idea how to live
without it.
An electromagnetic pulse attack would be one of the
fastest ways to cripple America and end the dominance of the United
States in world affairs. And in this day and age, there are hundreds
of millions of people around the planet that would love to see that
happen.
So to not take steps to protect our power grid from
such an attack is very foolish.
But that is precisely what Barack Obama (and
presidents before him) have chosen to do. We have technology which
would mitigate the damage from an electromagnetic pulse, but rather
than spend the money Obama has decided to just hope that it
will never happen.
Up to this point, we have been fortunate.
But someday, our luck may run out...
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