This is No Drill – Secure the Grid Now

Twelve years ago last May, I warned a Hillsdale College audience about America’s Achilles Heel – our nation’s acute vulnerability to a phenomenon known as electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.  On Sunday, North Korea’s dictator explicitly threatened to exploit that vulnerability to destroy our country and people by using an EMP attack to take out the U.S. electric grid.

Such a scenario was forecast by a congressionally empaneled blue-ribbon group that inspired my lecture.  In 2004, and repeatedly thereafter, the EMP Threat Commission has assessed the grid could suffer widespread and protracted blackouts as a result of electromagnetic attacks – or, for that matter, sabotage, cyberwarfare or intense solar storms.  The Commission has long recommended practical and cost-effective measures to protect our grid.

Tragically, very few of such steps have been taken to date. Today, nothing, nothing is more important than securing the grid now.